Neil Proto on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”
Author Neil Proto went to Yale’s library to start researching the life of A. Bartlett Giamatti, the 39-year-old Italian-American with New Haven roots who became the Ivy League university’s first non-Anglo-Saxon president.
He came across a statement that stunned him — and steered him in an unpredictable direction.
The quote came from one of Giamatti’s predecessors as Yale president, James Rowland Angell. Angell wrote the statement in 1933 as he “surveyed the Italian and Jewish immigrant and African American population that surrounded the university,” Proto would later write.
“It seems quite clear,” Angell wrote at the time, “that if we could have an Armenian massacre confined to the New Haven District, with occasional incursion into Bridgeport and Hartford, we might protect our Nordic stock almost completely.”
The deeper Proto dug into the archives, the more he discovered that Angell wasn’t making an offhand remark. He was describing Yale’s deliberate attempts to preserve its identity as a white Anglo-Saxon institution, barring the door of entry to the American elite. Proto read up on Yale’s promotion of eugenics throughout its curriculum and through an Institute of Human Relations launched in partnership with Old Blue Gov. Wilbur Cross. He traced the underlying philosophy to New Haven’s Yale-backed urban renewal of the 1950s and 1960s.
Years later, Proto has produced a far different book about Giamatti than he originally set out to write.
The new book — Fearless: A Bartlett Giamatti and the Battle for Fairness in America — comes out May 1.
It’s not a conventional biography. It doesn’t cover Giamatti’s years as Yale’s president. Nor does it cover his tenure as commissioner of Major League Baseball, when he famously disciplined Pete Rose for gambling.
Instead, it tells the story, as publisher SUNY Press’s Excelsior Edition puts it in a release, of “Yale’s dark embrace and global advocacy of facism and racism and the storied emergence of the president who challenged it.”
The story of Bart Giamatti also became a story about the fight against eugenics and racial/ethnic discrimination in America.
In one sense, it’s still very much a story about Giamatti’s life. A fascinating story. About how he got to the presidency.
“He never lost his identity as an Italian-American,” Proto said in a discussion about his book on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
But it’s also a story about New Haven, about race and ethnicity and American elite education.
It begins with the meeting of Giamatti’s Italian-American father from New Haven and Mayflower-descended mother on board the SS Rex ocean liner bound for Italy in August 1933. It takes us back to the struggles of Southern Italians for independence, and the violence and cruelty they experienced both at home and then in America. The story weaves through New Haven’s development in the 20th century, as well as through the hoary bastions of prejudice within Yale’s ivy walls.
The footnotes alone — 43 pages of references mixed with commentary — are worth the price of this book.
The revelations in his years of research were personal for Proto. And Giamatti’s story resonated with him. He grew up in Fair Haven on Houston Street, a block or two from where Giamatti’s father Valentine was raised. Proto’s family, too, hailed from southern Italy. Proto, too, had a keen sense of anti-Italian prejudice as he ascended to professional success, as an attorney (now based in Washington, D.C.), author of numerous books, and lecturer at Yale and Georgetown universities.
Until his discoveries in Yale’s library, “I had no idea Yale was as harsh and ugly as it was in the 1930s,” Proto recalled on “Dateline.” “It’s not just that it was harsh. It was bold and up front.”
Click on the video for the full interview with Neil Proto on “Dateline New Haven.” And click here to purchase a copy of Fearless.