A Nation of Nations E-Book

Louis Adamic

• Herausgeber: Classica Libris
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Remember our long talk when we first met in 1938? Somehow it took us no time at all to get acquainted. Soon you were telling me about the diaries and letters recently come into your possession after lying for a century or more in a trunk in the attic of your family home in western Massachusetts. They gave a vivid picture of life in a New England town before the Revolution, and I liked the warmth and excitement with which that picture filled you.
I asked if you had heard of the “America letters” written by Scandinavian, Dutch, Polish and other immigrants to relatives in their old countries. You said you had not, and I described them. You were interested, which was all I needed. Presently I went on to say that the whole of American history could stand rethinking, rewriting… that the Negroes’ American tradition of fighting for liberty dates from 1526; that a handful of Polish, German and Armenian workers at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 staged one of the first rebellions in the New World; that John Peter Zenger, a German printer in the 1730s whom the governor of New York jailed for publishing attacks on his regime, fathered the American ideal of freedom of the press; that Philip Mazzei, the Italian friend and neighbor of Thomas Jefferson, influenced the Revolution of 1776; that the Irish were the backbone of the political-military movement that won American Independence…

Leseprobe

Copyright

First published in 1944

Copyright © 2023 Classica Libris

Author’s Note

This publication was made possible in part by funds granted during 1939-41 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. That Corporation is not, however, the author, owner, publisher or proprietor of this publication, and is not to be understood as approving by virtue of its grant any of the statements made or views expressed herein.

I owe special thanks to Don Hanson, publisher, and Mabel Souvaine, editor of Woman’s Day, for allowing me to use the material (some 50,000 words) which appeared in their magazine during 1944-45, and for making me write those articles for them—but for that A Nation of Nations might not have been completed before 1946 or ’47.

L. A.

§

… Here [in these States] at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of day and night. Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations…

—Walt Whitman, Preface to 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass

Dedication

To

Merritt H. Perkins

Dear Merritt,

I dedicate A Nation of Nations to you first because your interest in the “project” of which it is a part has meant a great deal to me during the past half-dozen years, and second because you are a New Englander whose Puritan ancestors came to America in the seventeenth century and helped to shape the beginnings of the civilization and culture of the Colonies which became the first thirteen United States. And with your permission I dedicate it through you to other Americans of Anglo-Saxon stock, whether the story of their background in the New World begins with Jamestown or Plymouth Rock, with the Protestants of the Massachusetts Bay Colony or the Catholics who settled in Maryland, with Roger Williams in Rhode Island or Thomas Hooker in Connecticut or William Penn in Pennsylvania. I offer it also, if I may, to those who—unlike you—occasionally remark, “Why don’t you go back where you came from?”

Remember our long talk when we first met in 1938? Somehow it took us no time at all to get acquainted. Soon you were telling me about the diaries and letters recently come into your possession after lying for a century or more in a trunk in the attic of your family home in western Massachusetts. They gave a vivid picture of life in a New England town before the Revolution, and I liked the warmth and excitement with which that picture filled you.

I asked if you had heard of the “America letters” written by Scandinavian, Dutch, Polish and other immigrants to relatives in their old countries. You said you had not, and I described them. You were interested, which was all I needed. Presently I went on to say that the whole of American history could stand rethinking, rewriting… that the Negroes’ American tradition of fighting for liberty dates from 1526; that a handful of Polish, German and Armenian workers at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 staged one of the first rebellions in the New World; that John Peter Zenger, a German printer in the 1730s whom the governor of New York jailed for publishing attacks on his regime, fathered the American ideal of freedom of the press; that Philip Mazzei, the Italian friend and neighbor of Thomas Jefferson, influenced the Revolution of 1776; that the Irish were the backbone of the political-military movement that won American Independence…

Just then I was coming upon many neglected bits of Americana and I guess I was trying them out on you. I had an idea that I might write some such book as this, for which I needed not only facts buried in obscure prints and manuscripts but also contact with contemporary Americans of as many backgrounds as possible. I was traveling over the country checking up on my feelings and notions, and you and I chanced to meet in Denver.

You mentioned your family papers again. And I told you of a recent experience in your New England when, walking through the elm-shaded cemetery of a lovely old town, reading the names and dates and epitaphs on the stones leaning this way and that, I had suddenly felt a wonderful sensation of intimacy with early Anglo-Saxon America. I was unable to analyze the feeling verbally. It wasn’t necessary. Your face lighted up.

You got me to talk about the people I had been meeting, and I told you of the two days I had spent at a farmhouse north of Bemidji in Minnesota listening to an old immigrant from Norway. He had known O. E. Rölvaag, the author of Giants in the Earth, and as he spoke about him his own being seemed to shine. His English had an accent but the meaning of his words came clear. In and around and through what he said I got a feeling of the churning inside of America.

He told me of an “Americanization” campaign in that part of Minnesota around 1905. A poster appeared on walls in little towns and on tree-trunks by the roadsides. It was a picture of an elegant Uncle Sam and an outlandish yokel. In a loop coming out of Uncle Sam’s handsome mouth was the word Yes, the loop from the yokel’s wide-open mouth read Ya, and across the top in big letters was the admonition: “Don’t say ‘Ya’—say ‘Yes’!”

“That placard,” said the old man, “it was as though pasted on a wall in our home and I couldn’t pull it down. My oldest boy ran away. The children could not forgive their mother and me that we were ‘foreigners.’ They would not let us say anything in Norwegian to them—anything intimate. They held us away. It was years before that placard wore off enough for the runaway to come back.”

You nodded slowly—a shadow on your face—as you did when I told you about a Negro friend of mine in Washington whose words and personality, encompassing a big part of the American Story, had repeatedly impressed me, but with whom I could not lunch anywhere outside the Negro section of the National Capital except at the Union Depot.

We talked of other things—a bit about ourselves, getting the range of each other’s experience and interests. Given to understatement, you spoke quietly, slowly; from me words sometimes tumble out too fast for precise articulation or meaning. You were born in Massachusetts during the Great Blizzard in 1888; I was born eleven years later at a place that became part of Yugoslavia. You had moved to the Rockies as a young man; I came to the United States at fifteen. You were a businessman with a deep, natural interest in the humanities, in painting and writing, in manners and good taste. You were, I judged, a man of quick perception; outwardly calm, inwardly perturbed about some things in the United States. Focused on the Anglo-Saxon-Protestant phase of America, you were wide-open to other phases as well.

I don’t know what was in the back of your mind as we talked; in mine was: “We’re both Americans.” This had been my unspoken thought many times in the previous months. It had been there while the old Norwegian immigrant was telling me of his life in Minnesota. You and he were as different superficially as two men could well be, yet you had much in common. And you and I had things in common, different as we were.

You were asking me to amplify my remark that our history could stand rethinking and revision.

I wasn’t any too clear. There was an enormous mass of American history, I said, that had been “suppressed” (the word wasn’t quite what I meant), that did not appear in the standard books; what did appear was fallacious in its emphases. And the trouble was not just with the books; the fallacy diffused throughout our national life and thought. It was like a fog rolling about, spreading everywhere in the American atmosphere, and without a palpable center. The nearest thing I could see to a center was history as written and taught. For to most people, history textbooks are authoritative, the information disseminated by the written word and by teachers is relatively final.

You recalled that Emerson had been dissatisfied with written American history, branding it “a shallow village tale.” Malthus had described history as “a chronicle of the upper classes,” somebody else had said it was “a tired old man with a long beard.” I had a friend, a Missourian, who, agreeing with Henry Ford that “history is bunk,” maintained that it was not intelligent to traffic with the past. He was impatient with my question: “But does that make for any sort of continuous communal intelligence?” and with my reminder that Ford in his Greenfield Village had started what was nothing if not a historical museum.

You and I wondered why so many Americans, highly educated or not, took no interest in the history of their country; why some actually had a resistance to it. Were many people untouched by it because it was about somebody else, leaving them out completely? Were they bored with it, feeling somehow that as a record of what really happened it was very inadequate?

But we were not primarily concerned with books, rather with the effect that the information—and the lack of information—in the books had upon American currents of thought, feeling and behavior.

For a long time, I went on, this country had been the scene of a psychological civil war. Once upon a time that had had at least the practical good result of furthering pioneering. When groups faced antagonism, they were likely to pull up stakes and move on, breaking new ground, founding new colonies, opening up new territories. But now the physical frontier had disappeared, distances had shortened, communications spread. Nowadays our psychological civil war was in most respects part of the psychological civil war raging the world over, moving toward a new climax in another military war. (Franklin Roosevelt had delivered his “quarantine” speech at Chicago. Munich was happening.) But it was possible to think of it as an American phenomenon. There were several overlapping fronts: the privileged versus the underprivileged, isolationism versus internationalism, Catholic versus Protestant, Gentile versus Jew, White versus Negro, the old-stock Americans versus the “foreigners,” and the “foreigners” one against the other.

I was driving over the continent—some twelve thousand miles that summer and autumn; all that was required of me was my driver’s license and money for gasoline and oil, and I was moving about with a physical freedom unimaginable in the Old World. At the same time, however, I saw that this vast and free land was crisscrossed with cultural walls sheltering snipers, bearing ill-considered posters, casting shadows, keeping men from the light, preventing the full flowering of life.

Some of these walls, I thought, might be weakened and eventually tumbled and some of the fronts in our psychological civil war might be eliminated by giving the history books new emphases, by putting into them facts hitherto ignored. Not that I thought accurate history books constituted the whole remedy, or that I knew how accurate, inclusive history books might be brought about—the historians were as much in the fog as other people.

How to get at this “shallow village tale” fog dominating our cultural atmosphere? How did fundamental changes take place in a culture? Where was one to begin? We tossed these questions at each other without expecting answers.

What was desired ultimately, you and I thought, was a reorientation of the American state of mind, or rather states of mind, merging them on some levels without suppressing their special qualities and contents; a revaluation of facts in the American Story so that Immigration might cease to be a footnote on page 317 and become a main subject in the text, so that each group in our population would be seen as a necessary and integral thread and would receive its proper stress in books, in revised attitudes and relationships. But which would come first—rewritten history or a change in the cultural atmosphere? Probably a bit of one and then a bit of the other, each acting upon and reacting to the other, so that widening circles of revision and reorientation would alter both the history books and the American atmosphere. And this could not be brought about from the outside. The American people themselves would have to tear down the walls, dissipate the fog. Many were at it already in the course of their daily living…

This is as far as we got in 1938.

The psychological civil war still goes on. That during 1939-1945 it seldom spilled over into active violence was largely due to F. D. R.’s political wizardry in postponing, smoothing, compromising, adjusting issues between opposing groups. But the psychological civil war was not transformed by his leadership or by the military war into national unity except in appearance and for the duration. On some fronts a kind of armistice was effected. The issues went underground, there to seethe and gain in force like a teakettle with a plugged spout. They are almost certain to break out with increased pressure now the military war is over. One hears: “Wait—we’ll fix them,” meaning the groups disliked (feared) by those making the remark. Indeed in many departments of our national life, including sections of the Army and Navy, “they” are being “fixed” or put or kept “in their place” during the war. The groups in the most vulnerable positions are trying to forestall what they see is coming by forcing anti-discrimination laws through legislatures. Such laws are probably steps in the right direction, but their observance depends on the weight and spread of intelligent public opinion behind them.

At the same time there is more getting-together among Americans than ever before, more acceptance of people on the basis of their personal qualities regardless of background. This is especially true of the men in the services. There is nothing like being together in a foxhole, a bomber or a submarine.

A good many Americans know that a perplexing, infinitely complicated future is rushing upon us. A few here and there feel that if the issues of the psychological civil war are not weakened or supplanted, if they break out again with fresh vigor, by themselves or in connection with our domestic economic troubles and our foreign policy, they will hamstring our ability to cope with the future. I am one of those who feel this way.

On the other hand, I see more and more clearly that the American Story as it actually happened has within it a tremendous unifying and constructive power. It is an immense story—larger than the sum of its parts, and a good deal larger than most of us realize—so large that the share any element in the population has had in its making does not cast a shadow over the work of any other element—so large that when one sees it, many elements in the psychological civil war become appalling absurdities.

Now in 1945 my ideas shape up as follows.

There are two ways of looking at our history.

One is this: that the United States is an Anglo-Saxon country with a White-Protestant-Anglo-Saxon civilization struggling to preserve itself against infiltration and adulteration by other civilizations brought here by Negroes and hordes of “foreigners.”

The second is this: that the pattern of the United States is not essentially Anglo-Saxon although her language is English. Nor is the pattern Anglo-Saxon with a motley addition of darns and patches. The pattern of America is all of a piece; it is a blend of cultures from many lands, woven of threads from many corners of the world. Diversity itself is the pattern, is the stuff and color of the fabric. Or to put it in another way: The United States is a new civilization, owing a great deal to the Anglo-Saxon strain, owing much to the other elements in its heritage and growth, owing much to the unique qualities and strong impetuses which stem from this continent, from the sweep of its land between two oceans, the mixture and interplay of its peoples, the plenitude of its resources, and the skills which we all of us have brought here or developed here in the past three centuries.

The first view prevails in American thinking. We have absorbed the idea, the picture, from the atmosphere; in school, in church, in politics and business; over the radio, in the movies, in books, magazines and newspapers; from each other. It is taken for granted. It is the conceptual core of our uneasy, unformed culture. It furnishes the imaginary American norm, whose hold is strong on the minds of many people, preventing them from seeing that the actual American norm is not only not exclusively Anglo-Saxon, but that it is not yet formed, that it is still in process.

With few exceptions our historians, essayists, novelists, short-story writers, and our editors—geared to the prevailing view, constituting a kind of unconscious working committee to maintain it—minimize or ignore as incidental or irrelevant all but the tough and great Anglo-Saxon thread, and thus—in most cases unwittingly—encourage the psychological civil war. In 1945 the Writers’ War Board (proving itself an exception) issued a report concerning popular writing, of which Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research had made a study. The report declared that “constant repetition… was exaggerating and perpetuating the false and mischievous notion that ours is a White, Protestant Anglo-Saxon country in which all other racial stocks and religious faiths are of lesser dignity.”

The Bureau analyzed 185 short stories published in 1937 and 1943 in eight magazines whose circulation totals about twenty million. “Of 889 identifiable characters 90.8 percent were Anglo-Saxon, whereas only 9.2 percent… were drawn from all other population stocks in the United States. Only sixteen Negroes and ten Jews were counted. And where the authors brought in menials, racketeers, thieves, gamblers, shady night club proprietors, crooked prize fight managers, such non-sympathetic characters were seldom Anglo-Saxon.

“To quote the Bureau: ‘The overwhelming attention is given to the Anglo-Saxons. The stage and the spotlight belong to them.’ They were habitually pictured as the salt of the earth. Their superiority, wealth, and prestige were usually taken for granted, whereas in a few instances where a non-Anglo-Saxon character was represented as rich or important the author offered an elaborate explanation… Again quoting the Bureau: ‘The behavior of these fictional characters could easily be used to “prove” that the Negroes are lazy, the Jews wily, the Irish superstitious and the Italians criminal.’”

Advertising copy during 1937-1943 showed “the general acceptance of the whole White-Protestant-Anglo-Saxon myth.” Novels, the stage, the movies (including news reels), comic cartoons and the radio are somewhat more pioneering and less prejudiced, though they still have a long way to go.

The important point here is that most of this is done unconsciously. Writers, whether of history or fiction, editors, artists and producers do not intentionally sidestep the truth any more than do the rest of us. They simply inhale the fallacious cultural atmosphere—and exhale it back again.

The writers and commentators, teachers, preachers and publicists in the United States are in a sense like the European cartographers whose maps were perfectly all right until somebody discovered the world was round, not flat. Then the maps had to be thrown away and new ones made. The new ones gradually discarded the misconceptions and errors of the old, kept what was still true, and rearranged the whole in the light of the new perspective. The cartographers began to draw the world round, and by and by they gave us the globe we can twirl with a forefinger.

Even before scientists said the world was round and navigators set out to prove it, all sorts of people had begun to wonder, to suspect it was not flat. But it took quite a while for the idea of its roundness, struggling against uncertainty and fear of the new, to get into practically everybody’s head. When it did, the general current of thinking and feeling changed immeasurably. It led to the discovery of the New World, to the great Atlantic Migration. It gave new thrills, new vistas to human life. Observed facts which had not jibed with the old idea fell into place in the reorientation. Acceptance of this new way of seeing profoundly affected life, released its dammed-up energies, gave it new impetus.

Perhaps we in the United States are today in somewhat the same state of being, of thinking and feeling, that existed before the world’s roundness altered the flat, cramped horizons of men’s minds. Millions of Americans, all sorts of them, sense the inadequacy of the first way of looking at America. It does not explain enough, take in enough. I have no doubt that we are reaching toward something new, reaching forward, hanging back, struggling betwixt and between, but slowly changing.

With over one-third of our population first-, second- and third-generation non-Anglo-Saxon Americans, with about a tenth of it Negroes, many an old-line American feels a certain despair when he surveys the present and ponders the future. To him the Negroes migrating at will and the “hordes of foreigners” with such names as Krzycki and Ramaganti and Katz seem to threaten rack and ruin to the nature of the country as he conceives it to be. This feeling is not restricted to the fascistic demagogue; it appears in many people who are kindly, sensible and intelligent in other directions, but who still cling to the White-Protestant-Anglo-Saxon-country concept as the fact and the ideal.

On the other hand, the immigrant and his children and grandchildren find their continuity cut off not only from the land of his origin and their descent, but from their heritage here, bequeathed them through the share their forebears—people of their special background—had in building America. Like the Negroes who too have a rich American heritage which few of them know, the so-called new-immigrant groups have little means of learning what their forebears did here; at best they do not learn it as part of the American Story.

Generations have grown up unable to visualize, to know about, to feel attachment to or kinship with the beginnings or growth of their country, unable or hesitant or virtually forbidden to share fully in its life. The American Story as written in standard books, as it pervades our ideas, does not touch any vital chord in many people of Negro, French, Irish, Norwegian, Polish, Russian or Oriental descent, in many people whose names are Schmidt and Ziegler, Basilone and De Capite, Huot and du Vigncaud, McCleary and O’Sheel, Rosenberg and Sulzberger, Havlichek and Markovich, Varnos and Bakjian, Ling-hoy and Kikuchi. Comparatively few succeed in linking themselves to the whole great current of the American experience. To many their name, color or cast of countenance is a prison wall because other Americans, living in the atmosphere of the first view, make it so.

Nothing could be more unfortunate.

The coming of peoples to this continent, voluntary or in chains, is at the very center of our historical process. It is a main constituent of America. A gigantic potential strength, overwhelmingly complex, tremendously alive, it remains “the Immigrant Problem” or “the Negro Problem” only so long as our historical process is considered primarily an Anglo-Saxon process. The potentiality of production, construction, creation will be released only after it is fully realized that what sociologists now call “the Immigrant Problem” and “the Negro Problem” belongs more to the country than to the particular groups which now suffer under it. Widen the view, widen the perception of historical facts about the different elements, and many of the so-called problems which now mark them off will disappear through having merged into a single situation—less problematical than promising.

To say as some politician does every once in a while “Immigrants all—Americans all” is merely gesturing. It changes nothing. We go right on feeling “We—and the immigrants”… “We—and the Negroes”… “We—and they.” By “they” the Negroes mean the Whites, the immigrants and some of their American-born children mean “the Americans,” the Gentiles the Jews, the Catholics the Protestants, and vice versa. And the various “we’s” crawl into themselves to fret and fear, some to plot and act against their “they’s.”

More and more of us are beginning to wonder at this, to worry about it. Some of it is dangerous.

More and more of us are perceiving that something fundamental is wrong with our stock of historical facts and ideas. Increasingly we sense the distortions, the omissions, the departure from reality, the chasm between what we think America is and what it actually is. Many Americans, with a growing suspicion that the White-Protestant-Anglo-Saxon-country idea is not adequate, is not true, are on the brink of discovering and adopting the other view.

We are seizing on parts of the puzzle, coming up with fascinating details. Of the hit plays on Broadway in the first half of 1945, five touched on the question of what is America: Anna Lucasta, A Bell for Adano, The Late George Apley, I Remember Mama and Life with Father. The radio and recorded versions of “Ballad for Americans” stirred many people, as have other occasional radio programs and some of the more imaginative “I Am An American Day” celebrations.

Some details we are so used to that we overlook their significance. Take our place names: Dundee, Schuylkill Haven, Prairie du Chien, Warsaw, Los Angeles, Dublin, Wichita, Lyndhurst, Scandia, Berlin, Traunik, Athens. Our food: roast beef, smörgåsbord, gefüllte fish, pasta, corn, potatoes, consommé, borscht, knedliki, goulash, strudel, wienies, hamburger. People: Lincoln, Roosevelt, Toscanini, Steinmetz, Brandeis, Chavez, Tesla, Kaiser, Benét, Paul Robeson, Ingrid Bergman, Maurice Rose. Where did many of our objects, customs, forms come from? To most of us the Christmas tree is as “purely American” (i. e., Anglo-Saxon slightly modified) as the Thanksgiving turkey, yet the Christmas tree is a German contribution to our way of life and the turkey came from the Indians.

When one mentions facts like these, some people say, “Really?” or “You don’t say!” or “Propaganda!” They are interesting (like Ripley’s “Believe It or Not” cartoons) or irritating as the case may be, but not so deeply that they effect a change. Most of them slide off the crust of the habitual attitude like water off a duck’s back. For in themselves, out of context, like a bit of color out of a spectrum, a theme out of a symphony, they have only a specific, local, thin, flat meaning.

The crust, however, is not invulnerable either within or without. The prevalent view omits so many things around us that most people have a sense of frustration, of dissatisfaction, which in the end—as the crisis about us mounts—will impel us to take a fresh look, to let ourselves see whatever pattern is actually formed by the sum-total of the facts.

To help this process along, the facts have to be available. One purpose of this book is to make some of them easily available. I do not think it is the straw that will break the back of the first view of American history. One does what one can; one makes a beginning. There are many other beginnings at the same time in the same general direction.

In my opinion and in that of a good many others, the facts about America add up to the second view. But the statement Diversity itself is the pattern of America will remain a rather chilly formula until we become aware of the abundant details which give it life, until we know more about the experiences and qualities, hopes and achievements of the many kinds of people who have made America. Not until wave after wave of these facts sweeps over us, startles us, rouses our interest, will the second view, or something very like it, ring in the American atmosphere, the American consciousness.

Then the American Story will no longer be shadowy, no longer dominated by a huge image cast upon a screen with trick lighting arranged to fall fully upon one figure alone among the participants on the stage. The lighting will fall impartially upon all the actors, who will assume the proportions they have in our history. The audience will feel their identity with the actors in the past and with each other in the present, drawn together, knit together by a common stake in America.

Then all over the country, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Canadian to the Mexican border, Swedish Americans, Russian, German, Italian, Irish, Negro, French, Spanish, Oriental, Czech and double-check Americans will feel the same warmth and pride in their old, yellowing letters and documents which you felt in yours. They will feel themselves at home in the history of America.

Now the dominating shadow dwarfs the substance, tricking us into misbeliefs. Sometimes the misbeliefs are so grotesque that in rebutting them we approach the reality.

The Negro newspaper Chicago Defender said on April 4, 1942, that the New York editorial writers “who refer to the United States as ‘We Anglo-Saxons’ should sec some of the Anglo-Saxons at Forty-seventh and South Parkway.”

The January 22, 1945, issue of Time, in reviewing Professor Ralph Barton Perry’s book Puritanism and Democracy, said: “The essential faith of America came into being in the cold, clear-headed, spacious world of Puritan New England.” This produced a protest from George Guion Williams of Rice Institute in Houston:

“Can you really believe that? I myself have always believed that Washington, Jefferson, Patrick Henry and James Monroe (Virginians all) had some small part in establishing ‘the essential faith of America.’ And the Jamaica-born Alexander Hamilton of New York, the illiterate pirate Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, the ribald Abraham Lincoln of Kentucky and Illinois, the uncouth Walt Whitman of Brooklyn—did these have no part in the work…?

“And are you aware that self-government by means of popularly chosen representatives had its beginnings in Virginia under Governor Yeardley in 1619, nearly two years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth and eleven years before the Puritans arrived?

“The essential faith of America? There are a dozen essential faiths. From New England may have come our faith in good morals; but New York gave us our tolerance, Pennsylvania our faith in justice, the South our proud independence, the Middle West our practical realism, the Far West our belief in the impossible. Spice all this with a flavor of cynicism and humanitarianism from the Jews, sex and sophistication from the French and sentimentality and love of comfort from the old-fashioned Germans, and you have a rough outline of essential Americanism. It is a lot bigger—”

It is indeed. There is “essential faith of America” also in the labor of the Irish and Chinese railroad builders, the mixed-strain Paul Bunyan work gangs in the North Woods, the Cornish and Montenegrin copper miners of Keewenaw and Butte, the Finnish iron miners of Ishpeming, the men of many immigrant stocks who have shoveled the ore of the Messabi Range into the boats on Lake Superior, the Slavic and Lithuanian steel workers of Pittsburgh and Gary, the Jewish and Italian garment people of Manhattan, the Russian and Italian sandhogs under the Hudson River, the Scandinavian and German farm-pioneers in the Middle West, the dark cotton pickers of the South…

Whatever the particular “essential faith” to which each of us adheres, most of us know the United States is great, though we do not always know why. To me, its fundamental meaning, the deepest well-spring of its greatness, consists of two elements: the idea it brought into government—that all men are created equal and have a voice in how they are governed—and the variegated texture of its makeup.

To my mind, the combination of the democratic-government idea and the diversity of peoples has created a situation in human society that, in spite of depletion by war, in spite of many lapses and lags in our perceptions, is bounding and seething with strength and vitality. It is a new situation; the civilization evolving from it is a young civilization, not yet formed, still in process, still being generated and shaped by the interflow among its multiple streams.

As a matter of fact the interflow takes place daily, has taken place since the very beginning. Nothing could have prevented it, no fallacy, no preconceived idea. Propelled by world forces, which are rivers of impulses, hopes, urges, ideas in millions and millions of people, such an interplay was in line with the major direction in which the world has been moving—from the clan through the tribe, through the nation and race toward denationalization, Americanism (democracy), internationalism, humanity. The most any contradictory belief could do was to hamper its movement, check the freedom of its interchange, slow it down temporarily, poison a stream here and there.

The interplay, the diversity, is America; all that lacks is to transplant the fact from obscurity into the American imagination. The rest will pretty much take care of itself, for the readjustment in thinking and feeling will reach into very nearly every phase of American activity.

The reoriented cultural atmosphere of the United States will mean new, freer, broader ways of seeing and reacting, new and freer relationships. It will mean new integrations irrespective of background, integrations which let people remain themselves. It will bring into full view and play the healthy simultaneous tension and fusion of stubborn creative differences. It will enable us to cope more successfully with the future here and abroad.

Yours,

Louis

Milford, New Jersey

August 15, 1945

Dear Louis,

It is natural that I should feel a sense of pride in your dedication of A Nation of Nations to me and through me to others of my background. But as I read again the pages of your prefatory letter and think of your other writings in the project of which this is a part, I am conscious, too, of a sense of humility—I am conscious of the justness in your protest at the popular misconception of our story as a people.

May I quote to you one sentence from your letter: “The United States is a new civilization, owing a great deal to the Anglo-Saxon strain, owing much to the other elements in its heritage and growth, owing much to the unique qualities and strong impetuses which stem from this continent, from the sweep of its land between two oceans, the mixture and interplay of its peoples, the plenitude of its resources and the skills which we all of us have brought here or developed here in the past three centuries.” I subscribe to your suggestion for a rewriting of our history on a foundation of this premise.

Mine is a Puritan ancestry, as you say, all of it dating back in this country to the period before 1670; and in this ancestry may be found the farmers, country merchants, innkeepers, ministers and members of the “general court” who are to be found in every family which lived for generations in the New England of Colonial times. I shall not attempt here to measure the contribution of these and later generations to the building of the early America but I do remember that those who in their old age were known to me as a boy were deep-rooted in the land—with something in their traditions that is reminiscent of the churchyard yew in an older England. May I refer, rather, to the family letters which you mention, some of which I have now read again to recall their story.

One or two of these letters picture something of the closing days of the Revolution; another mentions an ancestor who kept an inn on an old coach road between Boston and New York at which Washington stopped on a journey through New England in the fall of 1789; and when the President had reached Hartford he wrote to the innkeeper that he was “very much pleased with the modest and innocent looks of your two daughters, Patty and Polly. I do for these reasons send each of these girls a piece of chintz.”

In another letter, written in the spring of 1812, a minister, writing to his “honoured father” to tell him that his little family has come safely through a hard winter, observes in a casual way: “We are like to have war, it seems—& the taxes about which there was so much complaint in Adams’ reign.” In still another, dated a few years later, a naval officer, writing to his young nephew, describes his voyage into South American waters on a United States man-of-war.

One letter written in February of 1828 is the reply of a woman signing herself “Deborah” who lived in a little village in western Massachusetts to her sister near Hartford. “… The day I received your kind letter,” it reads, “was the day I was called to follow my dear and affectionate son Dexter to the grave and my feelings were such and my health so poor that I could not answer it.

“After my health returned I thought I should visit you in the fall, and this winter I have had the day fixed to set out but now I give up all hopes of seeing you this winter as the snow is all gone off and it is not likely there will be sleighing to set out on so long a journey. Therefore I resort to writing to converse with you.”

The paragraph that follows is no longer legible in its entirety, but it is a statement of the religious faith that helped her son to endure his sickness with fortitude and helped her to accept the loss. Then:

“Horace is in Boston at the assembly, this is the second year he has been in. Omar’s family are well. Merrill’s wife is very poorly; they have five children, the oldest 6 years last May.” (This child was my maternal grandmother.) “Chapin was down in Decm’r. He is doing very well and enjoys himself much better than he used to.

“We have taken out our apples and about half are rotten.

“This town is all in confusion— The opposite party has quarreled away our minister and now we are destitute…”

This yellowed letter, the postage payment endorsed in ink with the address on its outer fold, reveals the simple piety and abiding faith of those people who, a century ago, lived in the smaller towns and villages and on the farms of New England; and it suggests a way of life that had not wholly passed when I first knew some of those same towns and villages and farms—a life that was concerned much with elemental things, with birth and death and faith, with seed time and harvest and the recurrent change of seasons, with distance and the slow movement of time—a way of life marked with a certain reticence in expressing the joys and sorrows and natural intimacies of home and family.

This is the life that I first knew—a life reserved in its social contacts but keenly alive with human sympathy. A way of life which, had it been more articulate, would have been better understood and would better have understood itself. I like to think of the service done to these people of a passing generation by Sarah Orne Jewett in her stories of the fishing villages of Maine. Seated at her mahogany writing desk, with the lights from two silver candlesticks flickering on the figured wallpaper and on a quotation from Flaubert that she kept always before her: “Écrire la vie ordinaire comme on écrit l’historie,” I think she really sought to write history in her lives of common people. She hoped that her Deephaven might “help people to look at ‘commonplace’ lives from the inside instead of the outside, to see that there is so deep and true a sentiment and loyalty and tenderness and courtesy and patience where at first sight there is only roughness and coarseness and something to be ridiculed.”

People from other lands had come into our valley at the time of my boyhood—the Poles already taking over some of the farms, and men of French descent, particularly, coming down from Canada to find places in the mills and factories. My more distinct recollection is of two Swedish families whose children were with me in school, and of a Christmas eve at the home of one. It was a winter of much snow, a perfect northland setting, and “old country” customs spiced the holiday fun. There was gay color in the embroidered vests and freshly laundered aprons, striped in bright green and red and yellow, with an edging of black; figures and designs graced many of the cakes and cookies, but the color was not wholly visual. There was the hour of the story-teller whose tales were set in an atmosphere of folklore and tradition. I think my liking for the white birch may reflect an impression one story made on me that evening. There was an overtone of sadness in a few of the legends, and some years later I was reminded of one when I read in the Atlantic the story of “When Hannah Var Eight Yar Old,” the story of the little Swedish girl who cared for the body of her dead mother in the closing weeks of a long winter and took her mother’s place in caring for the younger children, because she “var eight yar old.”

I have already told you the story of Tony and Aunt Susan—of Tony, the young Italian lad, and his violin with which he brought new happiness into the life of one in whom there lived the New England of an earlier day; and of the light which burned in her window after he died in World War I.

You have remembered a walk through an elm-shaded cemetery in an old New England town in which the stones, ancient for this land, carry in their epitaphs and inscriptions something of the churchyard traditions of an older generation. I am thinking today of another cemetery, a few miles west of Denver, near an early mining camp which once was known as “the richest square mile on earth.” The ground slopes upwards toward the rising front range of the Rockies and is almost treeless. Cold winds sweep across the area through much of the year; and many of the gravestones are very small. Often the larger ones reflect the ending of a life before thirty-five years had been lived; and often those same stones bear a name, two dates and the simple inscription: “Born in Cornwall.” A few years ago our Colorado State Historical Society, in tribute to these Cornish people, undertook a project to preserve the story and the memory of those hard-rock miners who contributed so much to the development of this section of the west—a generous, spirited, witty, imaginative and superstitious people whose strange dress and gay musical folk ways did much to color the life in the early camps. On Saturday nights the deep harmonies of “Trafalgar’s Boy” were blended in many a saloon; and on Sundays the Methodist choir swelled with rich Cornish voices. They were an industrious people, quickly accepted as an integral part of the society into which they came and ethnic conflicts were rare until the later coming of the Irish miners and the Tyrolese.

I have written this letter partly as a note of appreciation to you and partly to recall a few of the incidents of experience and observation—bits of understanding—which support my accord with you that our history as a people should be written as that of a new civilization. Let it be written in recognition of the worth of the man, whoever he may be, to the end that all may learn “to look at ‘commonplace’ lives from the inside instead of the outside, to see that there is so deep and true a sentiment and loyalty and tenderness and courtesy and patience where at first sight there is only roughness and coarseness and something to be ridiculed.”

I now recall that day in October 1944 when Mildred and I stopped at Milford for a visit with you and Stella. There was the afternoon of good talk, with the “surprise muffins” for tea, and then, towards evening, the drive through the beautiful countryside of western New Jersey and the eastern edge of Pennsylvania to catch the train at Easton. An autumn haze was settling over the Delaware when we reached the station, and across the river the buildings of the city took on in this light the blended shape of an Old World town. Something in the picture suggested to me then the thought that America is really a fusion of the old and the new, although fog and haze do not always leave the picture clear; but the rush and noise of the arriving train checked my audible expression of that thought.

As ever,

Merritt

Denver

August 27, 1945

§§

The lists of outstanding people which appear in most of the chapters are not meant to be complete—only suggestive.

To reduce footnotes to a minimum, references are collected in the back of the book, with suggestions for further reading.

Chapter 1

AMERICANS FROM ITALY

“When he started out he didn’t know where he was going, when he got there he didn’t know where he was, and when he got back he didn’t know where he had been.”

This attempt to compress Christopher Columbus into a nutshell may be found in books of quotations, which credit it to “An Unknown Author.” True enough as far as it goes, it is a little too pat, too clever.

There is no doubt that even though the New World was discovered before him (by Leif Erikson in the year 1000) and even though it would have been rediscovered eventually, Columbus—generally believed to have been a Genoese—is the Discoverer. As such he is the first consequential figure in American history. His Discovery took. “Every ship that comes to America,” wrote Emerson in 1850, “got its chart from Columbus.”

One can speculate on whether Columbus, urged by his uncertain and frightened crew, might or might not have turned back but a day’s sailing from San Salvador had he not chanced to see some pieces of wood carved by the hand of man bobbing on the waves by his ship’s side. But the adventure of 1492 was no mere accident. It was the massive result of a strong imagination and instinct within this very obstinate pathfinder backed by Marranos, converted Jews who were high in the counsels of the Spanish Court, and intent on thrusting aside the limitations of his time and place.

It has often been argued that by rights the new continent should have been called Columbia instead of America for the later comer, the Florentine traveler Amerigo Vespucci. According to the most recent book about him—Amerigo Vespucci, Pilot Major by Frederick J. Pohl (1944)—the vivid descriptions of the New World attributed to him were forgeries based on a letter he had written to his friend and patron Lorenzo Francesco di Pier de’ Medici. However, the German cosmographer Martin Waldseemueller did not know this when for the first time he applied the term “America” (the feminine form of Amerigo or Americus) to the Western Hemisphere. But perhaps the error was not very serious. Columbus never knew that what he had discovered was not the eastern shore of Asia, as his brother Bartholomew’s map published in 1503 showed, but a new continent. That it was the latter, Vespucci—another unique Italian—determined in 1502; and the name “America” is all right on that basis. It takes nothing away from Columbus.

But if it was a mistake and an injustice, America has tried to make amends. Columbus’ statue stands in hundreds of cities, many of which are named for him, as are the District of Columbia, the Knights of Columbus, Columbia University, Columbus Circle in New York City, and the Republic of Colombia. He is indirectly celebrated in the songs “Hail, Columbia” and “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” American library shelves bulge with books about him. And pictures of him and his flagship the Santa Maria decorate many American homes, especially those of the approximately six million people who came, or whose forebears came, from Italy.

Other early Italian explorers touched America: Giovanni Da Verransano, who preceded Henry Hudson to the Hudson River; the brothers Tonti—Enrico and Alfonso, assistants of LaSalle; the brothers Caboto—Giovanni and Sebastiano (John and Sebastian Cabot), Venetian navigators who in the service of King Henry VII of England discovered Nova Scotia; and Constantino Beltrami, who found the sources of the Mississippi. But Columbus overshadows them. Modern American history begins with him. So does the Italian chapter thereof.

On February 14, 1493, returning from her first westward journey, the Santa Maria was buffeted by a fierce storm. Fearing the ship would go down, Columbus wrote out as full an account of the voyage as he could, wrapped the parchment in waterproof cloth, jammed it into a stout iron-bound barrel, and threw it into the churning, roaring ocean. “If I thought there was one chance in a million of finding it,” the famous collector of rare books and manuscripts Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach once said, “I would take my power boat and cruise in the neighborhood of the Azores forever.”

I myself would like to find another lost manuscript by another Italian. It was written in 1774 by Philip Mazzei (Matt-sá-ĕ), whose story, almost unknown, is an integral part of the chronicle of the United States’ beginnings as a Republic.

Born in 1730 near Florence, Tuscany, Mazzei studied and for a time practiced medicine. Then in his mid-twenties he went to London, where for seventeen years he lived by importing wine and olive oil. At first he liked England very much because, as he put it, a lord could be hanged there. He was by nature a democrat, a passionate believer in the rights of man.

Business occasionally took him to Italy, where in 1765 he ran into the tail end of the Inquisition. Charged with bringing in forbidden books dealing with dangerous—democratic—ideas, he was saved from banishment by the intercession of his many powerful friends; and he spent the next year helping to organize an anti-Inquisition campaign. Shortly afterwards the Tribunal of the Inquisition was abolished in his native Tuscany.

In 1767 the Grand Duke of Tuscany asked Mazzei to get him a couple of Franklin stoves. Benjamin Franklin, the stove’s inventor, was then in London representing the Pennsylvania Colony. The Italian looked him up and they became friends.

Some visiting Virginians to whom Franklin introduced Mazzei talked him into organizing a company to promote the culture of silkworms, olives and wine grapes in Virginia. By then certain political aspects of life in England had begun to jar on him; so in 1773, after a trip to Italy for men and materials, Mazzei led his horticultural outfit to America.

The project got off to a good start. Thomas Jefferson, with whom Mazzei formed a devoted, lifelong friendship, bought shares in the company and placed extensive acreage at his disposal for experimentation. The farm, a few miles from Charlottesville, adjoining Monticello, was called “Colle” (the Hill). But it wasn’t long before Mazzei, meeting other foremost men of the day like George Washington, Peyton Randolph, George Mason, James Madison and Patrick Henry, was giving more time and energy to the political aims of the approaching American Revolution than to silkworms, olives and grapes.

At that time, 1773-1775, the remarkable men who were to become the Founding Fathers of the United States of America had no intention of breaking with Britain. Indeed, as late as July 6, 1775, the “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms,” drafted by a committee including Franklin and Jefferson, announced to “our friends and fellow-subjects in any part of the Empire” that the aim was “not to dissolve the union which has so long and so happily subsisted between us, and which we sincerely wish to see it restored… We have not raised armies with ambitious designs of separating from Great Britain, and establishing independent states.” As Professor Charles Edward Merriam has pointed out with particular clarity in his book American Political Theories, the leaders during the years immediately preceding the Revolution felt no sharp antagonism to the basic British system in the Colonies; both John and Samuel Adams, for example, had only praise for the British system and for many of its institutions.

Mazzei felt differently. Having been a victim of the Inquisition, he had some very definite ideas about religious freedom. His general experience in Europe had matured his naturally liberal political views. He had no blood ties with England to retard his perception of the issues, and his disillusionment with the British form of government, as he had observed it in practice, went deep. He had been in London when the ruling class clamped down on John Wilkes, the audacious agitator and reformer, and his popular movement.

When he reached America, Philip Mazzei believed more strongly than ever in the equality of men and peoples; he was all-out for democracy, which he did not believe Americans could attain while under British domination. And with his quick Italian temperament, he got impatient at times with his American friends who were slow to see that a break with the Motherland was essential. “Jefferson,” he later commented in his Memoirs, “was greatly surprised at this,” but the squire of Monticello eagerly listened to his Italian friend, who was politically about two years ahead of him.

Sometime early in 1774 the two agreed that Mazzei would state his views in a series of articles to be written in Italian and translated by Jefferson into English. Mazzei scholars are certain that the articles, signed “Furioso,” appeared in John Pinckney’s Virginia Gazette during 1774-1775, although no copies containing them are extant. And it is the manuscript of these articles that I would like to find, for in them the Italian who became an American patriot wrote some of the words that his translator, Jefferson, subsequently incorporated in the Declaration of Independence.

Fortunately Mazzei’s Memoirs—available since 1942 in English translation by Professor Howard R. Marraro of Columbia University—contain some extracts of these pieces which apparently were written in a highly polemical style, and in which the author identified himself with America:

“To attain our goal it is necessary, my dear fellow citizens, to discuss the natural rights of man and the foundations of a free government… All men are by nature equally free and independent. This equality is essential to the establishment of a liberal government. Every individual must be equal to every other in his natural rights. The division of society into ranks has always been and will always continue to be a serious obstacle to the attainment of this end… I repeat that a truly republican form of government cannot exist except where all men—from the very rich to the very poor—are perfectly equal in their natural rights. Fortunately, we are now free on this continent… Now when certain privileges are exercised by a portion of the inhabitants and denied to others, it is vain to hope for the establishment of a liberal and permanent government, unless the favored citizens are willing to relinquish their privileges and stand on a footing of perfect equality with the rest of the inhabitants. Discrimination inevitably arouses envy and ill-feeling… Therefore, liberty will always be insecure and finally doomed to collapse… Democracy, I mean representative democracy, which embraces all individuals in one simple body, without any distinction whatsoever, is certainly the only form of government under which a true and enduring liberty may be enjoyed. Unfortunately for mankind, this form of government has never existed. The sacred name of democracy has been abused by tumultuous governments built on false and unstable principles…”

Almost from the moment he arrived, Mazzei felt at home in America, “spiritually naturalized.” Perceiving immense possibilities in an independent country with a society based on human rights, he stressed the necessity of a separation from Britain at every opportunity—in endless discussions with Jefferson, in frequent conversation with other influential men who used to come as much as a hundred and fifty miles to see him, and at non-official gatherings to which members of the Virginia Assembly invited him.

It is unknown if Thomas Paine was influenced by Mazzei; but Mazzei certainly helped to clear the track for Paine’s revolutionary views so that when his famous pamphlet “Common Sense” appeared in January 1776. it did not drive such essentially conservative leaders as the Adamses, Madison, Mason, Franklin and Washington into opposition to what now looks like the will of history. Instead, as Washington said, it “worked a powerful change in the minds of many men.” The importance of Mazzei’s influence upon Jefferson, through whose mind, working with those of the other Founding Fathers, the American revolutionary aims were finally distilled, is almost beyond exaggeration.

When the Revolution began, Mazzei and some of Mazzei’s Italian employees joined (he Independence Company of Albemarle County as private soldiers and marched to the coast to fight the British. By the time they got there the British had left. But in thanking the volunteers, Patrick Henry made a special reference to Mazzei and his Italians.

Some of the Italians subsequently re-enlisted in American armies, and in 1777 Mazzei was about to raise a volunteer force of his own when Jefferson, Henry and a few others persuaded him to go to Europe as an agent of the state of Virginia. This, as it turned out, was a mistake. Mazzei became the center of a long controversy between Virginia and the brand-new U. S. A., the latter maintaining that relations between individual states and foreign countries must be conducted through the Federal government.

The controversy dragged on for years, leaving Mazzei pretty well out in the cold. He returned to Virginia. Meantime his agricultural project had been destroyed; he had rented the farm to General Riedesel, whose horses had in a few days trampled the results of four years’ experimentation. Also his personal life was very unhappy.

Finally in 1784 Mazzei thought it best to return to Europe permanently. Sad but not bitter, he wrote to Madison: “I am leaving but my heart remains. America is my Jupiter, Virginia my Venus.”

A few years later, all but starving in Paris, he wrote a book on the United States in reply to attacks by French writers on what Mazzei called “my adopted country.” To the end of his life, he corresponded regularly with his friends in America, particularly with Jefferson.

After Mazzei’s death in 1816, Jefferson hoped someone would write a biography of his late friend, but nobody did—not till 1933, and then the book (Philip Mazzei, Friend of Jefferson: His Life and Letters by R. C. Garlick Jr.) received very little notice. Mazzei’s own Memoirs did not appear in Italy until 1845, nearly thirty years after his death. By now, many papers containing details of his contributions to American political thought have been irretrievably lost. And so his story is at best sketchy.

It is, as I say, largely unknown—even among Italian Americans. If they and other Americans were aware of Mazzei’s part in the formation of the United States, many would probably hasten to hang his picture beside that of Columbus. Although he had no official position in the creation of the United States of America, he might very well be called an assistant Founding Father. His contemporaries recognized his contribution. When in 1774 he was elected to a local office in Virginia, he was called “after Mr. Jefferson the best leader in the country.” In a letter Jefferson referred to Mazzei’s “early and zealous cooperation in the establishment of our Independence.”

Philip Mazzei was not the only Italian to render the United States a signal service in the Revolutionary period. There was at least one other—Giuseppe Maria Francesco Vigo, a native of Mondovi, Piedmont, a soldier of fortune and fur trader who had entered the service of Spain in the New World and who, in his job as confidential agent to Governor de Leyle of St. Louis, traveled over the whole of the Mississippi watershed and remained on good terms with the French settlers and the Indians in that territory. Spain was then nominal owner of the area west of the Mississippi.

One cold day in January 1779 Vigo came by chance upon hard-pressed Colonel George Rogers Clark of the Revolutionary Army, who thought him a “Spanish gentleman.” Clark’s task was to clear the British from the “Northwest Territory” (now Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota), particularly to destroy their garrison at Vincennes; but his resources were next to nothing. His Virginia currency was not recognized by the French inhabitants. Vigo—reflecting Spain’s traditional distaste for Britain—put at his disposal men and money, equipment and information. This led to the British surrender, bringing the vast region under United States’ control; making possible the subsequent Louisiana Purchase, the opening of the West, and the establishment of the United States as a Pacific power.

After the Revolution, Vigo settled on a farm near Vincennes, married the daughter of Colonel Clark’s quartermaster, and became an American citizen. He tried to get the government to repay what he had given Clark, but the Federal Administration rejected his claim on the grounds that Clark had then been acting for Virginia, not the United States.

Like Mazzei, Vigo died in poverty. “When an old man he sold his family silver to buy food,” says Stella M. Drumm in the brief sketch in the Dictionary of American Biography. “Nearly one hundred years passed before the federal Supreme Court ordered his claims paid, and his heirs received about fifty thousand dollars.”

And again like Mazzei, Vigo is mentioned in few American history books. But in 1839, when the rush to the West was under way, Congressman John Law of Vincennes declared in the House of Representatives that except for Vigo the future of the United States might have been profoundly different, certainly more difficult.

In Revolutionary times there were in America only a few hundred Italians. Several were street musicians in the larger cities, precursors of the later organ grinders with their monkeys. Others introduced opera to New York; one started the Marine Band. There were several sculptors who hawked their statuettes on Boston and New York street corners, and were sometimes employed to decorate homes.

Between the Revolution and the Civil War not many Italians came over. In 1820, the first year the United States kept immigration statistics, all of thirty people entered from Italy; sixty-two the following year. In 1833 the figure rose to 1,699; then it declined until 1854, when it bounced back to 1,263.

A large proportion of those who arrived during the early decades of the nineteenth century, when Italy was in turmoil, were educated men—political exiles, leaders of causes still to be won, would-be leaders of uprisings, people of the Risorgimento: scholars, painters, adventurous businessmen, idealistic missionaries. Among them were: Philip Traetta, composer and music teacher in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, a friend of Presidents Madison and Monroe; Constantino Brumidi, who painted the well-known frescoes in the National Capitol, finishing the job when he was past seventy; Luigi Palma di Cesnola, soldier, archeologist and secretary and director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, generally credited with putting the museum on a solid foundation; Benedict Sestini, priest, mathematician, astronomer, architect and founder and editor of the Messenger of the Sacred Heart, long the most widely circulated Catholic publication in the world; Eduardo Ferrero, a major-general in the Union Army who distinguished himself in the battles of Smith Mountain and Antietam; and Antonio Meucci, the inventor whom the New York World on the occasion of his death in 1889 called “one of the most important figures in the scientific world of the time.” His work ran almost parallel to that of Alexander Graham Bell.

The missionaries were Catholic fathers, a few of whom scattered through the West as early as the 1830s. In the ensuing decade a handful, under the orders of Bishop Rosati of St. Louis, and intent on converting the Indians, penetrated into what now are the states of Idaho, Oregon and Washington. The last of these priests, Father Joseph Cataldo, died in 1928 in Spokane at the age of ninety-two, after helping that city grow from a tiny trading post to a municipality of over 100,000.

In 1880 Italian immigration exceeded 12,000; the vast America-ward movement from Italy was getting under way. Before long ten, twelve, even fifteen thousand Italians were passing through Ellis Island in a single day.