Fearless

Neil Thomas Proto

Description

Finalist for the 2021 The Next Generation Indie Book Award in the Autobiography/Biography Category presented by the Independent Book Publishing Professionals Group

Finalist for the 2020 ForeWord INDIE Book of the Year in the Biography Category

In 1977, a thirty-nine-year-old Italian American professor of Renaissance literature, A. Bartlett Giamatti, was chosen as the next president of Yale University, a radical act that was immediately perceived as a threat to the university's embedded, eugenics-driven, Anglo-Saxon mentality. Eugenics, as practiced in America, and especially at Yale, locked into place those who were deemed "unfit" due to beliefs about their ethnicity, class, and racial character, beliefs that had endured for decades and to which Giamatti's selection, as an Italian American and therefore, to some, one of the "unfit," was an open rebuke.

In Fearless, Neil Thomas Proto explores the origins of Giamatti's ethical convictions, including his insistence on fairness, his respect for the duty of responsible citizenship, and his advocacy for people on the margins. Proto argues that these convictions, which would inform Giamatti's time at Yale as well as his brief tenure as commissioner of Major League Baseball, can be understood only in the context of Giamatti's family and the deeply entwined and conflicted histories of Yale and New Haven itself—a history that Giamatti, who had been both a student and a professor at Yale and who had Italian American relatives in New Haven, knew very well.

Historian Sean Wilentz wrote that "Bart Giamatti was a phenomenon who lived the lives of several men even though his own ended tragically early." Giamatti confirmed his underlying imperative through to the end of his life: "Rest," he wrote, "will come by never resting." Fearless is a story about persistence against forces ugly, embedded, and more pernicious than simply racial and ethnic discrimination, and about the principled embrace of civic duty passed on generationally and used fully as the ethical sword and shield necessary to challenge them.

Sujets

• Migration
• History of the Americas
• Ethnic studies
• Local history

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438479644
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

FEARLESS
FEARLESS

A. B ARTLETT G IAMATTI
AND THE B ATTLE FOR F AIRNESS IN A MERICA
N EIL T HOMAS P ROTO
Cover: Angelo Bartlett Giamatti, Yale president-designate, 1978. Copyright 2010 Yale Daily News Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Published by
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
E XCELSIOR E DITIONS IS AN IMPRINT OF S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Proto, Neil Thomas, author.
Title: Fearless : A. Bartlett Giamatti and the battle for fairness in America / Neil Thomas Proto.
Description: Albany : Excelsior Editions, an imprint of State University of New York Press, 2020. | | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019040336 (print) | LCCN 2019040337 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438479637 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781438479644 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Giamatti, A. Bartlett. | Yale University—Presidents—Biography. | Baseball commissioners—United States—Biography. | Italian Americans—Biography.
Classification: LCC LD6330 1978 .P76 2020 (print) | LCC LD6330 1978 (ebook) | DDC 796.357092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040336
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040337
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C ONTENTS
Author’s Note
Prologue
Part I America: The Waltons and Giammatteis
Chapter 1 From England to America
Chapter 2 New England
Chapter 3 From Southern Italy to America
Chapter 4 The Choice
Part II Valentine Giamatti
Chapter 5 The New Haven They Entered
Chapter 6 The Darkest Aura and Its Reach
Chapter 7 Forming the Intellectual Life
Chapter 8 The Yale He Entered
Chapter 9 Fascism and Race at Yale
Part III Family
Chapter 10 Romance of the Heart and the Liberal Mind
Chapter 11 Melding the Past into the Future
Part IV Angelo Bartlett Giamatti
Chapter 12 Finding Home
Chapter 13 Witness in War
Chapter 14 Family Life in South Hadley
Chapter 15 Maturity from Experience
Chapter 16 The Duty of Citizenship: Mount Holyoke as Prism
Part V Principles
Chapter 17 The Connections Form
Chapter 18 The Fateful Visit
Chapter 19 The City
Chapter 20 An Education
Chapter 21 Yale
Chapter 22 The Loss of Civic Duty
Chapter 23 Understanding Yale
Chapter 24 Learning Griswold and Brewster
Chapter 25 Neither Griswold nor Brewster
Chapter 26 The Purposeful Man
Chapter 27 Refinement, Expansion, and Perspective
Chapter 28 Fate
Chapter 29 Fearless
Epilogue: Yale—In Epic Battle
Acknowledgments and Reflections
Notes
Works Cited
Index
About the Author
A UTHOR’S N OTE
I met Bart Giamatti for the first time in his small, high-ceilinged office in Woodbridge Hall on the Yale campus. It was December 1979. I recall stacks of aged and ordered books on the surrounding shelves, not mere ornaments to memory or accoutrements to the pretense of power but reflective of an intellectual rather than an academic culture, books read and still relevant to a life in purposeful and vigorous movement. They mattered to Giamatti in some practical yet enduring way as much as the papers and ledgers on his desk. He was handsome, slender, approachable, and friendly. Comfortable with who he was and who he had become, and comfortable with me. He shook my hand and offered me the chair opposite the desk. He moved to a seat closer to me.
I had been asked by Mayor-elect Biagio DiLieto—whose campaign I aided from my return to New Haven in June 1979 through DiLieto’s victory in the Democratic primary against the incumbent mayor and through his successful defeat of the Republican candidate in November—to be general chair of the inauguration scheduled for January 1, 1980. In Woolsey Hall on the Yale campus. It was to be the first such mayoral inauguration in the city’s history. At the time I appreciated the grand symbolism that Giamatti and DiLieto sought, and I understood, in part, what that meant for my duty as inauguration chair and what it meant for the citizens of New Haven to be in Woolsey Hall for that civic purpose. Giamatti, of course, knew that even better than I did. His own history of family and culture in New Haven, deeply embedded, was closer to the surface in a manner that I did not understand fully until the preparation of Fearless . He had been versed sufficiently on who I was by DiLieto. I did not learn until almost six years later, when I introduced my parents to Giamatti during a civic event shortly before his departure from Yale, that my father had known his father in childhood, in the street and in playground games commonplace in their Fair Haven neighborhood. They had lived only a few blocks from each other, two Italian American kids, sons of immigrants. My mother was born in Italy; I was one as well.
Giamatti welcomed my proposal that he sit on stage in a seating arrangement that would include Mayor-elect DiLieto, outgoing Mayor Frank Logue, and Governor Ella Grasso. He said he did not want to speak, which was a relief to me. We both, in our discussion—buttressed by a long history he understood with deeper appreciation than I knew at the time—recognized DiLieto’s role in vindicating the harm and hard-fought aspirations of generations of New Haven immigrants and migrants from elsewhere in America. Unknown to me at that time, Giamatti had met privately with DiLieto a year or so before his victory in the Democratic primary.

A. Bartlett Giamatti at the inauguration of the New Haven mayor, Woolsey Hall, 1980. NTProto Collection.

To know Bart Giamatti, you needed to know his parents, Valentine and Peggy, and his grandparents on both sides. Especially, you needed to know the history of New Haven and of Yale’s relationship to its residents and neighborhoods. Giamatti was acutely knowledgeable of that history. In a manner more revelatory and disquieting than I had anticipated, Yale’s roughly exercised parochialism and deeply embedded prejudices and insurmountable eugenics mentality emerged repeatedly. Their effect spread well beyond Yale’s halls and New Haven, with a continuity and evolving form that hardly diminished through the moment of Giamatti’s selection as president. The Yale corporation’s choice in 1977 was more radical and enduringly explosive than perhaps some among them had anticipated at the time, including in the way that, over time, the composition of the student body changed, the selection of subsequent non–Anglo-Saxon presidents was readily accepted, and the university’s relationship to New Haven became more candidly understood. Gone was the pretense that former Yale presidents A. Whitney Griswold, Kingman Brewster, and their predecessors had relied upon to New Haven’s and the student body’s detriment.

John Wilkinson, who had been secretary of the university under Giamatti and his classmate (Yale 1960), encouraged me to write the book, a serious look at Giamatti’s experience as the first non–Anglo-Saxon president of Yale. My respect for Giamatti and the imperative for thorough documentation were enhanced by frequent and substantively candid meetings with his sister, Elria Giamatti Ewing, and her husband, David; his brother, Dino Walton Giamatti, and Dino’s wife, Barbara; and his cousin Helen Ogden and relative by marriage Kim Formica.
Judge and former Yale Law School dean Guido Calabresi was especially forthcoming in his insight about his friend Bart and his own experience, and that of his parents, especially their values and the anti-Fascist imperatives they shared with Bart’s parents, as Italian immigrants at Yale and in New Haven. His range of knowledge was broad and deep, predated his friendship with Giamatti, and periodically yielded questions that my research or first-hand knowledge was able to answer. There were painful as well as joyful moments in our effort to recollect and discern facts that, now, inform critical threads in telling Fearless .

Guido Calabresi in July 1985, when he was appointed Dean of the Yale Law School by then-Yale President Giamatti. T. Charles Erickson/Yale University.

Giamatti’s presidential papers (exclusive of his speeches) and the papers of those in his administration are not yet available for public examination—a fact of defining consequence to thorough and accurate research and the foundational reason that Fearless stops where it does. That limitation had two unexpected benefits. First, the powerful relevance of Giamatti’s relationship with his parents—especially his acute knowledge of his grandparents and of his father’s experience in New Haven and at Yale, through the intensity and solidification of Yale’s overt eugenic beliefs and conduct, which transformed into a persistent mentality—received the thorough research and explication it warranted in understanding how Giamatti’s values were formed. Giamatti’s well-known ascendency to the presidency of Yale and his subsequent selection as president of the National Baseball League and Commissioner of Baseball would, I believed, only enha