Image from article, with caption: A train carrying cars full of coal cuts through Gillette, Wyo., which calls itself “the energy capital of the nation.”
Excerpt:
The resurrected feeling of American possibility came not from pontificating TV pundits or a radio host in a studio miles away. Optimism arrived here [Gillette, Wyo.] because of what people were seeing: the unemployment lines getting shorter and their daily commutes getting longer. ...
In Gillette and surrounding Campbell County, people were beginning to feel the comeback they voted for. Unemployment has dropped by more than a third since March 2016, from 8.9 percent to 5.1 percent. Coal companies are rehiring workers, if only on contract or for temporary jobs. More people are splurging for birthday parties at the Prime Rib and buying a second scoop at the Ice Cream Cafe.
In a divided nation, optimism had bloomed here in a part of the country united in purpose and in support of the president. Close to 90 percent voted for the same presidential candidate, and 94 percent of the population is the same race. And everyone has some connection to the same industry. [JB emphasis] They felt optimistic about the tangible effects of the Trump economy, which favors fossil fuels, and the theoretical ones, which favor how they see themselves. Once on the fringes, their jobs had become the centerpiece of Trump’s American mythology. Maybe it was President Trump. Much was surely because of the market, after a colder winter led to increases in coal use and production. But in times when corporate profits are mixed with politics, it was difficult for people here to see the difference. ...
“I happen to love the coal miners,” Trump said Thursday, when he announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. The president said he backed out of the global agreement, in part, because it “doesn’t eliminate coal jobs. It just transfers those jobs . . . to foreign countries.”
Even so, Trump’s decision on Paris wasn’t what many here wanted; they felt it was better for the United States to be part of an agreement that so directly affects their livelihoods. ...
At least, though, they had a president who was trying to protect their jobs.
When the mines laid off workers in March 2016, the city spiraled down into a period of job- and soul-searching. Environmentalists on the coasts had long derided their type of work as toxic. Democrats, led by presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, declared their jobs passe. Gillette had coal, oil and gas, but so much attention was placed on wind and solar and turning miners into computer programmers. In an increasingly interwoven country, residents grappled with whether there was still a place in America for their kind of community — even if it kept the lights on. ...
In January 2016, President Barack Obama issued a moratorium on leasing federal lands for coal exploration that was a direct hit to Gillette, where most mining was done on federal land. The environmental regulations that had helped propel the industry were now stifling it.
Then came a warm 2015 winter, which led to less demand for fuel. “I’ve never seen low oil and gas prices and low coal prices all at once,” she said. “And then we had a president who didn’t want to help us. It was a perfect storm for things to get downright depressing.”
By all accounts, it did. After the warm winter, Arch Coal and Peabody Energy laid off close to 500 people in two of the area’s 12 mines in March 2016. Coal production dropped by 34 percent during the first half of 2016, according to state data and news reports, and the state lost nearly $300 million in tax revenue.
This downturn didn’t seem like the ones people here once knew. It felt intentional, political, personal — caused by people who residents thought didn’t understand them. Many seethed at “the environmentalists.” ...
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS JUNE 2, 2017, New York Times [original article contains links]; see also.
Image from article, with caption: At Harvard's first commencement for black graduate students, a speaker declared, “We have endured the constant questioning of our legitimacy and our capacity, and yet here we are.”
[JB note: Below in the article: "The alternative ceremonies at Harvard had printed programs, and incorporated the pageantry, ritual and solemnity of traditional commencements, though without the diplomas, which were reserved for the official university commencement."]
***
Looking out over a sea of people in Harvard Yard last week, Mark Zuckerberg Facebook’s chief executive and one of Harvard’s most famous dropouts, told this year’s graduating class that it was living in an unstable time, when the defining struggle was “against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism and nationalism.”
Two days earlier, another end-of-year ceremony had taken place, just a short walk away on a field outside the law school library. It was Harvard’s first commencement for black graduate students, and many of the speakers talked about a different, more personal kind of struggle, the struggle to be black at Harvard.
“We have endured the constant questioning of our legitimacy and our capacity,
and yet here we are,” Duwain Pinder, a master’s degree candidate in business and
public policy, told the cheering crowd of several hundred people in a keynote speech. From events once cobbled together on shoestring budgets and hidden in back rooms, alternative commencements like the one held at Harvard have become more mainstream, more openly embraced by universities and more common than ever before.
This spring, tiny Emory and Henry College in Virginia held its first “Inclusion and
Diversity Year-End Ceremonies.” The University of Delaware joined a growing list of colleges with “Lavender” graduations for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students. At Columbia, students who were the first in their families to graduate from college attended the inaugural “First-Generation Graduation,” with inspirational speeches, a procession and the awarding of torch pins.
Some of the ceremonies have also taken on a sharper edge, with speakers
adding an activist overlay to the more traditional sentiments about proud families
and bright futures.
After Columbia’s ceremony, Lizzette Delgadillo said she spoke about the pain of “impostor syndrome — feeling alone when it feels like everybody else on campus just knows what to do and you don’t,” and of how important it was to have the support of other first-generation students.
Ms. Delgadillo, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering, had lobbied for the event for three years, as a member of a group called the First-Generation Low-Income Partnership.
“The current political climate definitely pushed this initiative to come to fruition,” [JB emphasis] said Ms. Delgadillo, the daughter of Mexican immigrants living
in Los Angeles.
Participants say the ceremonies are a way of celebrating their shared experience as a group, and not a rejection of official college graduations, which they also attend. Depending on one’s point of view, the ceremonies may also be reinforcing an image of the 21st-century campus as an incubator for identity politics.
“It’s not easy being a student, being a student anywhere, but especially at a place like Harvard,” Ward Connerly, president of the American Civil Rights Institute and a former University of California regent who campaigned against racial preference in admissions, said sympathetically.
But events like black commencements, he continued, serve only to “amplify” racial differences.“College is the place where we should be teaching and preaching the view that you’re an individual, and choose your associates to be based on other factors rather than skin color,” he said.
“Think about it,” Mr. Connerly added. “These kids went to Harvard, and they
less than anyone in our society should worry about feeling welcome and finding
comfort zones. They don’t need that.”
The alternative ceremonies at Harvard had printed programs, and incorporated the pageantry, ritual and solemnity of traditional commencements, though without the diplomas, which were reserved for the official university commencement.
A few hours after the new “Harvard University Black Commencement” for the
graduate schools, including the prestigious law, divinity, business, government and
medical schools, about 120 students attended the third annual “Latinx”
commencement. In the cavernous basement of a science building, where an animal
skeleton dangled overhead and Latin music played, students received stoles with the
words “Clase Del 2017” woven into them, while siblings devoured chocolate
cupcakes.
Black undergraduates held a separate event that night amid the polished pews and Greek columns of Memorial Church, Harvard’s spiritual center and the backdrop for Mr. Zuckerberg’s address.
While Mr. Zuckerberg’s speech was broadcast live and received thousands of
complimentary comments on Facebook, the black ceremony was relatively small and more intimate, and seemed invisible to scores of classmates noshing on sliders and beer at a white tent nearby, part of the broader commencement week revelry.
The ceremony was open to all students, though virtually everyone who attended was black, and not all black students attended.
About 80 black graduates formed a procession to organ music, received kente-cloth
stoles, listened to a classmate play Bach on cello and sang “Lift Every Voice and
Sing.”
“For me, the black community is a home away from home,” Olivia Castor, a
student speaker from Spring Valley, N.Y., who earned a bachelor’s degree in social
studies and African-American studies, said exuberantly.
“It’s where I spent most of my time, where I found my closest friends and, more
importantly, where I’ve learned the most important lessons during my time here,”
she went on. “So thank you, thank you for being beautiful, brilliant and blackety-black-black.”
Brandon M. Terry, the faculty speaker, joked that Harvard College’s black
graduation had become more mainstream since he graduated in 2005.
“This setup already has us beat,” he said. “We were in one of the old Harvard
buildings across campus. We had no air-conditioning, and some folding chairs on
the stage.”
Professor Terry suggested that the mood was different as well.
“You began college just weeks after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the
callous killing of Trayvon Martin,” Professor Terry, an assistant professor of African
and African-American studies and social studies, said in his address.
“You were teenagers, like Michael Brown when he was subjected to the
Sophoclean indignity of being shot dead and left in the blazing sun. Your world was
shaped in indelible ways by these deaths and others like them, and many of you
courageously took to join one of the largest protest movements in decades to try to
wrest some semblance of justice from these tragedies.”
But like all the speakers, he spoke reverently of Harvard as an institution,
saying: “The dramatic privileges that you have and will continue to benefit from in
virtue of your association with this university are only worth the social cost if they
are to benefit people worse off than you.”
Bhekinkosi Sibanda, a first-generation Harvard student from Zimbabwe, said he
had been ambivalent at first about participating in the black graduation.
“In an attempt at inclusivity, we don’t want to end up introducing exclusivity,”
he said. “You don’t want to end up where this black commencement overshadows
the entire commencement of the school. You don’t want to blow away the glory.”
Then Mr. Sibanda remembered how a professor had asked if he wanted to drop
a class, when all he wanted was help. “It’s good to be able to take this time for
solidarity and identity,” he said, “to celebrate what we’ve achieved.” Susan C. Beachy contributed research
Image from article, with caption: Louis M. Soltis, the owner of a company that manufactures control panels in Toledo, Ohio, said he was frustrated that President Trump's policies have faced so much opposition.
Excerpt:
While multinational corporations such as Disney, Goldman Sachs and IBM have opposed the president’s decision to walk away from the international climate agreement, many small companies around the country were cheering him on, embracing the choice as a tough-minded business move that made good on Mr.Trump’s commitment to put America’s commercial interests first. ...
“There is a new sheriff in town,” said Louis M. Soltis, the owner of a company in
Toledo that manufactures control panels for large factories. “But the biggest
frustration that I have is that there is so much resistance that is keeping him from
moving forward.”
But the move to pull the United States out of an agreement it had previously signed with 195 countries has opened up a fissure between smaller companies and some of the biggest names in business. [JB emphasis] In the hours after the president’s
announcement, dozens of companies including General Electric, Facebook and
Microsoft voiced their opposition to the decision, and two prominent chief
executives resigned from the president’s business advisory council.
Many small-business leaders in the Midwest, on the other hand, were largely
unfazed.
For those more concerned with their local economies than global greenhouse
gas emissions, walking away from the Paris agreement was just another example of a
bottomline business decision made by a president who knows a good deal from a
bad one. ...
“This just heightens the divide between big business and small business,” said Jeffrey Korzenik, an investment strategist for Fifth Third Bank in Cincinnati who spends much of his time talking to small businesses in the Midwest. “They really have different worldviews.”
At the root of this disconnect is a sense that companies that employ up to a few hundred workers — such companies make up 99 percent of businesses in the United States and account for half of its private sector employment — are held to a more onerous standard than their larger peers when it comes to complying with regulations. ...
[JB note: A must-read for those interested in the often not so glorious complexity and diversity of the United States of America; thank you MP for sharing.]
Migration, race, a charismatic priest and lots of cannelloni
THE cellar is flooded and Chris Ranalli worries about snakes. From the safety of the back door, he points out the sturdy walls—two feet thick, as if to withstand Mediterranean earthquakes—and the elegantly vaulted ceilings. “They lived in the top two storeys and made wine in the basement,” explains Mr Ranalli, who now tends the 100-year-old vineyard adjacent to the house. The view from the road is anomalous: framed by Catawba trees, the façade combines northern Italian architecture and Ozark stone, seeming to belong as much to the Apennines as Arkansas.
This house tells a story that is both familiar and extraordinary, as the exploits of immigrants to America tend to be. It is a tale of struggle and success, of awful but commonplace suffering, villainy and heroes, including a dauntless priest who, like a latter-day Moses, led his flock to a new life in the mountains. It epitomises the variety behind the strip-mall, fast-food sameness of small-town America, but also the loss that can be a bittersweet corollary of progress. And, like the house itself—standing but decrepit—it is only half-remembered, the sort of amnesia that helps to explain attitudes to immigration today.
Today the fields enclosed by the Mississippi and the horseshoe of Lake Chicot are punctuated by grain bins, plus a few labourers’ dwellings guarded by bored dogs. The lakeshore is lined with idyllic homes with pretty jetties and private boats. A hundred years ago, when this was still the Sunnyside plantation, the villas had not been built; nor had the suspension bridge that, near one of the narrow openings between lake and river, now links Arkansas with Mississippi. The water that almost encircles the fantastically fertile, sandy-loam soil made it a natural prison camp.The house was built a century ago by Adriano Morsani, a stonemason from central Italy. He is captured in old photos as a moustachioed patriarch, beside a wife in a smart hat and children squinting into the sun. But the story is quintessentially American. It begins on the floodplain of the Mississippi, close to Arkansas’s border with Louisiana, in the turmoil after the civil war.
In 1861 Sunnyside was among the largest, richest plantations in Arkansas. It was owned by Elisha Worthington, who scandalised white society by recognising two children he fathered by a slave. After the war, as cotton prices plunged, it belonged to John Calhoun, namesake and descendant of the southern ideologue, and then to Austin Corbin: a robber-baron financier and railroad speculator, who, as a founding member of the American Society for the Suppression of the Jews, barred them from the hotel he built on Coney Island. Corbin installed a steamboat and a small railway, but, like many southern landowners, struggled to find labour. He experimented with convicts, then hit on an alternative: Italians.
The levee wasn’t dry
Like many people-traffickers, then and now, Corbin had a man on the inside. His was Don Emanuele Ruspoli, the mayor of Rome, who recruited workers from Le Marche, Emilia-Romagna and the Veneto. The first batch—98 families—sailed from Genoa on the Chateau Yquem, a reputedly rancid steamship that arrived in New Orleans in November 1895. The families clutched contracts showing that each had bought a tract of land, on credit to be repaid in cotton crops. After a four-day journey up the river to Sunnyside, they quickly realised that they had been misled.
“The first year, 125 people died,” says Libby Borgognoni, a magnetic 81-year-old whose in-laws came over on the Chateau Yquem (her grandfather arrived later, after drawing the shortest straw of his family’s six sons). Hot, humid and swarming with mosquitoes, Sunnyside was fecund but deadly. Today you can drive on a gravel road on top of the levee between the fields and the Mississippi, the wide, eddying river and glacial tugboats on one side, cotton on the other, red-winged blackbirds darting between them. When the Italians arrived, the barrier was lower, and floods were common. The drinking water was filthy; yellow fever and malaria were rife. Climbing into his hunting truck, Tom Fava, another local Italian-American, helps to find the disused cemetery where the victims lie. It is hard by Whiskey Chute, a stream named after a cargo of whiskey scuttled by brigands during a fire-fight.
Many of the millions of Italians who moved to America in that period, mostly to industrial cities in the north, suffered. But rarely like this. Heat and disease were the worst of it, but Corbin’s terms were onerous too. The Italians spoke little English; many were illiterate. But they could see that the land had been wildly overpriced. And while many were farmers, Mrs Borgognoni admits “they knew zip about cotton”. Anti-Italian and anti-Catholic prejudice swirled: 11 Italians had been lynched in New Orleans in 1891. Mrs Borgognoni recalls that, well into the 1930s, locals would roll the car windows down and holler “Dago!” at Italian children.
In 1896, six months after the first Italians landed, Corbin died in a buggy accident near his exotic hunting lodge in New Hampshire (he was said to have startled the horses by opening a parasol). Still, a second boatload left Genoa for Ellis Island in December. Another Italian also made the trip from New York that year. Pietro Bandini grew up in Forli, joined the Jesuits and was sent as a missionary to Montana’s Native Americans. Later he moved to New York to minister to put-upon Italians. For those at Sunnyside, he was a redeemer.
Bandini protested against the conditions. Legend tells that, when he was rebuffed, he told his acolytes to wait while he scouted a better environment. During his absence he arranged to buy land in the prairies west of Springdale, near what was then Indian Territory and is now Oklahoma. In early 1898, 40 families junked their contracts and followed him northwards.
Precisely how they got from the Delta to the Ozarks, then a more arduous journey than it is today, is a matter of dispute. “They walked,” insists Charlotte Piazza, whose Italian-born father-in-law was in the original caravan. Some brought livestock, paying their way by doing odd jobs at Catholic churches along the route and hunting for food. Rebecca Howard, a historian at Lone Star College in Texas, thinks some travelled part of the way by train. Ms Howard’s great-great grandmother, Rosa Pianalto, buried a child at sea during the crossing on the Chateau Yquem and her husband shortly afterwards. She was remarried and pregnant for the Sunnyside exodus.
Towards the promised land
They would have set out, initially, across the big-skied plain of southern Arkansas. The road that crosses it today runs through Dermott, a hamlet with giant pecan and fireworks stores and an outsize “Gospel Singing Shed”, then skirts the site of an internment camp for Japanese-Americans and the state’s death-row prison. They would have crossed the brown Arkansas river at still-skyscraperless Little Rock, before turning west into its valley, where the land begins to undulate. Some Cherokee, Chickasaw and Choctaw Indians had followed that route on the “Trail of Tears”; it passes through forests and pastures and beside timber yards, lakes and creeks. They might have gulped as they approached Fort Smith, now a picturesque tourist town, then a frontier outpost renowned for a subterranean prison known as “hell on the border”.
The railway from Van Buren to Springdale, which some probably rode on, is now used for tourist excursions, plunging into the Ozarks through mountain villages that grew up around what was formerly a commercial line. The chug across the Boston Mountains, the most rugged section of the Ozarks, with sheer cliffs and elevated trestles, must have seemed a dizzying lunge into another unknown future. At the same time, says Mr Ranalli, the winemaker, the cooler, higher landscape and temperate plateaus “felt like coming home”.
A list of the pioneers is etched on a monument outside the town hall of Tontitown, the name they chose in honour of Henri de Tonti, a 17th-century Italian explorer. There were fewer mosquitoes but, to begin with, life remained hard. They lived in abandoned log cabins while they cleared the land, stuffing the cracks with linen to keep out drafts; Morsani, the stonemason, his brother and their five children shared a barn with several other families. They survived on pasta, polenta and wild rabbits. The men went to work on railways or in mines until the crops came in. Women took jobs as housekeepers in Eureka Springs. The locals were hostile: the Italians’ first church was set alight, reportedly with Bandini inside. He survived to warn the barrackers that his compatriots were handy with firearms. (The second church was lost to a tornado.)
Tontitown prospered, largely through his ingenuity. “It was almost like he was a saint,” says Mr Ranalli of Bandini’s reputation. He was the new town’s teacher, bandleader and first mayor, as well as its priest. He negotiated to bring in a railway spur. He imported vines: the soil is poorer than in the Delta, Mr Ranalli says, but the drainage better suited to grapes. He was honoured by the pope and Italy’s queen mother.
When Edmondo Mayor des Planches, the Italian ambassador, visited in 1905, Tontitown was thriving. Its residents were “happy, contented, prosperous”, des Planches wrote. “Italy, the place of their birth, was their mother, while America was their wife. They have reverence for the former, but love for the latter.” Photos in Tontitown’s historical museum capture his welcome, Stars-and-Stripes and Italian tricolours waving as he is escorted along dirt roads by locals dressed to the nines.
Bandini died in 1917, but Tontitown’s success outlived him. During prohibition, says Mrs Piazza, one of the museum’s founders, people hid wine barrels in basements and vineyards. The bars on the windows of the Morsanis’ cellar were added to comply with post-repeal rules, Mr Ranalli says. When he was a child, in the 1960s, there were still a few old-timers who spoke only Italian. They had realised the American dream, and their own: from poverty in Italy, via devastation in the Delta, to a life in which many families lived on streets that bore their names—Morsani and Ranalli Avenues, Piazza and Pianalto Roads.
That, for its citizens, is the moral of Tontitown’s story. Their pride is justified. But the travails of the Italians in Arkansas resonate in darker ways, too.
Ambassador des Planches also visited Sunnyside on his southern jaunt. The scene was much less salubrious. Three cotton factors from Mississippi leased the plantation from Corbin’s heirs, using illegal methods to import more Italians. These transplants found themselves trapped by debts: for the cost of travel (their own to America and their cotton’s to market); for ginning fees and doctor’s fees; for the necessities they were obliged to buy at exorbitant prices from the company store, all accruing interest at 10%. Some fled; some who were caught, says Mrs Borgognoni, “were taken back by the sheriff in chains”.
Over the river, across the lake
The ambassador complained, and in 1907 the Department of Justice dispatched Mary Grace Quackenbos, an intrepid investigator. Leroy Percy, one of the proprietors, tried to subdue her with both southern gallantry and bullying. Her papers were stolen from her hotel room. An assistant was given three months on a chain gang for trespassing. Nevertheless Quackenbos recommended charges of peonage, or illegal debt servitude. They were never pursued: it helped that Percy had joined Theodore Roosevelt for the famous hunt on which the president inspired the Teddy Bear by declining to kill one. (Percy wound up in the Senate, where he served on an immigration commission.)
Italian migration to the region dried up, and many of the Sunnyside families dispersed across the Delta, joining small Italian communities that had sprung up on either side of the river, along the Gulf coast, down in Louisiana’s sugar-cane territory and up to Tennessee. Clarksdale, Friars Point, Indianola: their destinations evoke a better-known Delta culture, the blues lore of Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson and B.B. King. Across the river from the plantation, in the part of Greenville known as Little Italy, there is still an Italian club, where members gather to play bocce in pits overlooked by miniature bleachers. On the Arkansas side, at what was once New Gascony, an overgrown Catholic cemetery lies at the end of a dusty track, surrounded by soyabean and cornfields (see picture). All that is left of the flood-ravaged settlement, says a farmer, are a few houses beyond the bayou. The fading Fratesi and Mancini headstones stand like hieroglyphs of a lost civilisation.
A lost civilisation
Some Sunnysiders, however, simply hopped across the water to Lake Village—today a seemingly typical Delta town, wedged between the nondescript highway and Lake Chicot and bisected by a railway track, beside which squats a cotton gin. Our Lady of the Lake church, and the museum Mrs Borgognoni oversees in its old rectory, reveal its nuances. All the Italian locals once made prosciutto, lonza and salsiccia, she remembers; “church was the biggest thing in the world.” As a child she picked possum grapes in the sloughs and levees to make wine in the cellar of her double-shotgun house. Squirrels were cooked in fornos, or brick ovens. There was a hog roast on the fourth of July and a celebratory spaghetti dinner in March. People played accordions and mandolins, which some think contributed to the blues.
If the cultures of Italians and blacks in the Delta overlap, so did their experiences. “We ate together, we played together, we worked in the field together, we sang together,” says Mrs Borgognoni. “It was a different world.” Paul Canonici, a former priest and author of “Delta Italians”, a charming collage of family histories, remembers, as a child, peering through the windows of a black church at ecstatic worshippers, and watching black baptisms in the bayou. (In the mid-1920s Klansmen besieged his family home in Boyle, Mississippi, shooting the dog.) Italians, after all, were a marginal solution to the problem of labour in the inhumane conditions of the Deep South. Not just during slavery, but in the brutal ruses deployed after emancipation, from convict-leasing to the debt-trap of sharecropping, most victims were black.
The Italians’ story, in fact, is a sort of shadow version of African-Americans’, the hardship milder and the ending sweeter. That they escaped the prejudice they first aroused was in part because their skin was acceptably white. As Ms Howard, the historian with Tontitown roots, notes, they could enlist external allies—the Catholic church, even the Italian government—that their black neighbours lacked. The Italians, in truth, are a blip in the grim saga of plantation agriculture, if an enlightening one.
If the story of the Morsani house shows that aspects of slavery lingered on, it is also a reminder that what is often thought of as a modern-day kind—based on debt and intimidation—is far from new. And it discloses the mechanism by which some such ordeals come, selectively and misleadingly, to be redescribed as triumphs.
Consider that church-burning in Tontitown. In early accounts it seems that bigoted white locals were responsible. Later, after the Italians were embraced, the culprits changed; now they were Native Americans, who had ridden over from Indian Territory. Through such collective editing, a small part of America’s jagged prehistory is sealed and separated from the trials of immigrants today. Always known to be patriotic and thrifty, the Italians, in this retelling, were different. It isn’t only them. Along with corn bins, cotton gins and Baptist churches, the Arkansas plains, like much of rural America, are littered with places that hint at a hazy cosmopolitan past: Moscow, Dumas, Hamburg.
Forgive and forget
“Have they forgotten how we got here?” asks Paul Colvin, Tontitown’s mayor, of today’s xenophobes. Some people have. Mr Colvin, the first mayor with no Italian connection, himself personifies a wider change, at once routine in immigrant communities and poignant. Even as they cooked the old recipes, the settlers hurried to assimilate, learning English and signing up for military duty. Their descendants married americanos and moved away. Each generation remembers less. Meanwhile, says Mr Colvin, “small towns are getting swallowed by the big towns”, as Walmart and other large employers turn places like Tontitown into dormitory suburbs. Land prices are rising; people are selling up, outsiders replacing them.
Tontitown still holds an annual grape festival, which once marked the grape harvest and by tradition includes a feast of the signature dish, spaghetti and fried chicken. But Mr Ranalli’s is the only commercial vineyard left. “There’s very few full-blooded Italians that still live in this town,” he says. Not many people care about their heritage any more, agrees his daughter Heather, who runs a winery that sells his fine wine. “It’s dying out, and that’s the truth,” says Mrs Piazza, glumly.
Cannelloni on the shore of Lake Chicot
Down in Lake Village, says Mr Fava, the good Samaritan with the hunting truck, “the guys who were slaves are now the farmers.” Much of what was once Sunnyside is now owned by Italian-Americans, as are many of the posh homes on the lake, with their fleet of ride-on lawnmowers, as families return to the land from which their forebears fled. As often happened in distant enclaves in pre-internet days, the Italianness ossified—the dialect baffling actual Italians when they interacted with Lake Villagers—then withered, like Tontitown’s. The brick ovens and wine cellars are gone. Much of the old cemetery was ploughed over, the gravestones and crosses allegedly tossed into Whiskey Chute among the half-submerged cypress trees and nesting egrets. The priest at Our Lady of the Lake is a genial Nigerian missionary, Theo Okpara. Does he speak the language? “Nada,” replies Father Okpara, who ministers to more Hispanics than Italians.
Like the shell of the Morsani house, though, some traces remain. Regina’s lakeside pasta shop continues to sell old-style muffalettas, cannelloni and parmigiana, as well as homemade pasta—“real thin, the way you like ’em”, says a non-Italian customer. And Mrs Borgognoni still recalls the songs she learned, aged six, picking cotton beside her grandmother. Her life had been hard, but, says her granddaughter, “when she was happy she would lift her skirt and dance the saltarello.”
One of the songs, Mrs Borgognoni says, is about a young Italian soldier whose wife dies when he is away on duty; he returns to kiss her for a final time. The tune is sad but beautiful. She closes her eyes and sings.
This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "Moses in the Ozarks"
Bari Weiss, ON CAMPUS, JUNE 1, 2017, New York Times [original article contains links]
Image from article, with caption: Hundreds of students at Evergreen State College protested against the administration and demanded change
Bret Weinstein is a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.,
who supported Bernie Sanders, admiringly retweets Glenn Greenwald and was an
outspoken supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
You could be forgiven for thinking that Mr. Weinstein, who identifies himself as “deeply progressive,” is just the kind of teacher that students at one of the most left-wing colleges in the country would admire. Instead, he has become a victim of an increasingly widespread campaign by leftist students against anyone who dares challenge ideological orthodoxy on campus.
This professor’s crime? He had the gall to challenge a day of racial segregation.
A bit of background: The “Day of Absence” is an Evergreen tradition that
stretches back to the 1970s. As Mr. Weinstein explained on Wednesday in The Wall
Street Journal, “in previous years students and faculty of color organized a day on
which they met off campus — a symbolic act based on the Douglas Turner Ward play
in which all the black residents of a Southern town fail to show up one morning.”
This year, the script was flipped: “White students, staff and faculty will be invited to leave campus for the day’s activities,” reported the student newspaper on the change.
The decision was made after students of color “voiced concern over feeling as if they
are unwelcome on campus, following the 2016 election.”
Mr. Weinstein thought this was wrong. The biology professor said as much in a
letter to Rashida Love, the school’s Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services. “There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to
voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital
and under-appreciated roles,” he wrote, “and a group or coalition encouraging
another group to go away.” The first instance, he argued, “is a forceful call to
consciousness.” The second “is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of
itself.” In other words, what purported to be a request for white students and
professors to leave campus was something more than that. It was an act of moral
bullying — to stay on campus as a white person would mean to be tarred as a racist.
Reasonable people can debate whether or not social experiments like a Day of
Absence are enlightening. Perhaps there’s a case to be made that a white-free day could be a useful way to highlight the lack of racial diversity, particularly at a proudly progressive school like Evergreen. Yet reasonable debate has made itself absent at Evergreen.
For expressing his view, Mr. Weinstein was confronted outside his classroom last week by a group of some 50 students insisting he was a racist. The video of that
exchange — “You’re supporting white supremacy” is one of the more milquetoast
quotes — must be seen to be believed. It will make anyone who believes in the
liberalizing promise of higher education quickly lose heart. When a calm Mr.
Weinstein tries to explain that his only agenda is “the truth,” the students chortle. Following the protest, college police, ordered by Evergreen’s president to stand down, told Mr. Weinstein they couldn’t guarantee his safety on campus. In the end, Mr. Weinstein held his biology class in a public park. Meantime, photographs and names of his students were circulated online. “Fire Bret” graffiti showed up on campus buildings. What was that about safe spaces?
Watching the way George Bridges, the president of Evergreen, has handled this situation put me in mind of a line from Allan Bloom’s book “The Closing of the American Mind.” Mr. Bloom was writing about administrators’ reaction to student
radicals in the 1960s, but he might as well be writing about Evergreen: “A few
students discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic
freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.”
At a town hall meeting, Mr. Bridges described the protestors as “courageous” and expressed his gratitude for “this catalyst to expedite the work to which we are jointly committed.” Of course, there was also pablum about how “free speech must
be fostered and encouraged.” But if that’s what Mr. Bridges really believes, why isn’t
he doing everything in his power to protect a professor who exercised it and
condemn the mob that tried to stifle him? The Weinstein saga is just the latest installment in a series of similar instances of illiberalism on American campuses. In March, a planned speech by Charles
Murray at Middlebury ended with the political scientists escorted off campus by
police and his interviewer, Professor Allison Stanger, in a neck brace. In April, a
speech at Claremont McKenna by the conservative writer Heather Mac Donald had
to be livestreamed when protestors blocked access to the auditorium.
Shutting down conservatives has become de rigueur. But now anti-free-speech
activists are increasingly turning their ire on free-thinking progressives. Liberals
shouldn’t cede the responsibility to defend free speech on college campuses to
conservatives. After all, without free speech, what’s liberalism about?
Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) is a staff editor in The Times opinion section
Twelve years ago, I began researching a family murder that happened in Southern
Italy in the 19th century. It took a decade to find the details of the crime, but the
facts I uncovered about the daily life of my ancestors and the racism they faced —
even from their own countrymen — were more shocking than the killing. In today’s
climate of refugee bans and xenophobia, the facts have taken on a new urgency and
are even more disturbing to me, as they should be to anyone whose family traces its
roots to Southern Italy.
Women like my great-great grandmother Vita Gallitelli came to America for
more than simply a better job. Subject to the whims of their padroni — the men who
owned the feudal land upon which they toiled — Italian women were commonly the
victims of institutionalized, systematic rape. There was a practice known as “prima
notte” that allowed the landowner to sleep with the virgin bride of his worker, which
extended into the 20th century.
The husbands couldn’t protest, since they would be barred from working the
farm and their families left to starve. As it was, they were barely staying alive. In the
1800s, half the children born in Basilicata — the instep of Italy’s boot — died before
age 5. It’s the reason Italian-American families hold big bashes for their 1-year-olds
even today.
The itinerant workers were considered subhuman and made 40 cents a day if
they were chosen by the overseer, doing backbreaking work on land that was not
theirs, walking several hours back and forth to the farm each day. They were
expected to offer the padrone a “tribute” to thank him for the work — crops, or if
they had it, meat they butchered themselves. This was the basis for the shape-up on
the American docks on which many of my relatives toiled when they came to this
country and the kickbacks they were expected to give to the union bosses and even
the mayor.
In Italy, our ancestors were given meat twice a year — on Christmas and Easter by
that same stingy landlord — but most days they subsisted on bread stretched with
chestnuts or saw dust to feed the whole family.
So our desperate great- and great-great grandparents came in droves from Italy,
spurred on by industrial barons in need of cheap labor who welcomed them with
open arms to America. They would scrape together the 300 lire — the cost of three
houses at the time — to book passage here, to the land of dreams, where menial,
often dangerous jobs no one else wanted awaited them. Some, like my relatives,
came here illegally, under false names. Or as stowaways. On one ship alone, 200
stowaways were found.
From 1906 to 1915, the year Vita died, Basilicata lost nearly 40 percent of its
population to emigration. The Italian landowners — the same ones who raped and
starved my relatives and maybe yours — were devastated by American emigration,
left with too few hands to work their land.
The Italian government, initially happy to see its poorest and most troublesome
people leave the country, realized that the best and strongest were now leaving as
well, looking for a better life and higher wages. Before a United States congressional commission, a politician from Calabria testified that emigration from the South had gone too far, adding that he was sorry Columbus had ever discovered America.
The United States government used the theories of Cesare Lombroso, a 19th-century Northern Italian doctor, to stop more of his suffering, starving countrymen and women from immigrating.
Lombroso, a traitor to his own people, was convinced that there was such a thing as a “natural born criminal.” He measured the heads and body parts of thousands of fellow Italians — particularly Southerners — and came up with a description that matched the description of most of the immigrants coming over at the time: short, dark, hairy, big noses and ears.
He compared them to lower primates and said they were more likely to commit
violent crimes when they arrived in the United States than immigrants from
Germany, Norway, Austria, Sweden, England and every other European country.
Lombroso — and a growing sea of American nativists — branded the Southern Italians savages and rapists, blaming them for the crime that was on the rise in the United States. The United States Immigration Commission concluded in the infamous 1911 Dillingham report: “Certain kinds of criminality are inherent in the Italian race. In the popular mind, crimes of personal violence, robbery, blackmail and extortion are peculiar to the people of Italy.”
The Immigration Act of 1924 barred most Italians from coming into the country — causing immigration from Italy to fall 90 percent. Even though the vast majority
of those coming to America were good, honest working people and not criminals.
Italian-Americans who today support the president’s efforts to keep Muslims
and Mexicans out of the country need to look into their own histories — and deep
into their hearts. After all, they’re just a couple of generations removed from that
same racism, hatred and abuse. Had our ancestors tried to come days, weeks or
months after the 1924 ban, we may not have even been born. Helene Stapinski is a journalist and the author of “Murder in Matera: A True Story of Passion, Family and Forgiveness in Southern Italy.”
The state where college students graduate isn’t always the state where they take their first job.
In fact, some states are “simply terrible at holding onto their grads” according to a recent study by Zippia, a career analytics and information website. They looked at 127,403 resumes to determine the percentage of graduates who left the state where they graduated for their first jobs after college. The results? Smaller, northern states tend to lose the most graduates while more populous states retain theirs. But why?
The cause of these departures can be attributed to many factors, the study found. Some of the states with the greatest college graduate “brain drain” have some of the lowest unemployment rates, with only two being above the U.S. average of 4.5%. Also, the same states that lose their graduates at the highest rates tend to take in more out-of-state students. There also was a strong correlation between the number of graduates who stay in the state where they graduated and how much those states spend on public universities. Those that spend more see more students remain after graduation.
Whether you’re planning on ditching the state where you went to college or staying for your first job, it’s good to know where you stand financially. Your credit can play a big role in landing your first apartment, and even your first job. You can keep track of your credit scores by viewing two of your credit scores for free on Credit.com.
Here are the 10 states students ditch the most, plus the 10 where they stay put.
A Princeton PhD, was a U.S. diplomat for over 20 years, mostly in Central/Eastern Europe, and was promoted to the Senior Foreign Service in 1997. After leaving the State Department in 2003 to express strong reservations about the planned U.S. invasion of Iraq, he shared ideas with Georgetown University students on the tension between propaganda and public diplomacy. He has given talks on "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United" to participants in the "Open World" program. Among Brown’s many articles is his latest piece, “Janus-Faced Public Diplomacy: Creel and Lippmann During the Great War,” now online. He is the compiler (with S. Grant) of The Russian Empire and the USSR: A Guide to Manuscripts and Archival Materials in the United States (also online). In the past century, he served as an editor/translator of a joint U.S.-Soviet publication of archival materials, The United States and Russia: The Beginning of Relations,1765-1815. His approach to "scholarly" aspirations is poetically summarized by Goethe: "Gray, my friend, is every theory, but green is the tree of life."
