Pete, a retired Baltimore, Md., contractor, WWII veteran, and my great uncle, turns 100 today, February 7.
Upon graduation from high school in Baltimore City in 1943, Pete was drafted into the 9th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army ("the Notorious Ninth"). He served in Europe for four years, remaining for several months after VE Day. He was awarded a Silver Star and Purple Heart and discharged as a second lieutenant.
Before Pete came home from Europe, he was able to visit family in Italy. About four decades later, he joined me for a trip to visit our cousins there again. In the electronic age, I've served as go-between for trans-Atlantic updates.
Pete came home from the war to marry my great aunt, Velma, and to build a construction business in Baltimore. They started a family. Throughout their active years, Pete and Velma volunteered vigorously in Baltimore's Italian-American community, raising money for scholarships.
Pete retired to a quiet life of golf, reading, and doting grand-parenting in Baltimore County. We celebrated Sunday.
Well maybe there's not much to confess. Searching this blog, I've ill disguised my affection for the Governor of the smallest American state, Rhode Island, my home of nine and a half years. So I was thrilled to see Raimondo named as President-Elect Joe Biden's nominee to be the Secretary of Commerce.
A lot of Rhode Islanders are irritated that Raimondo previously denied that she would take the job, issuing the usual politician's disclaimer that her only focus was on Rhode Island. But I get it. You have to play these things cool, so if Pop-pop Joe doesn't pick you, you act like you didn't really want it anyway.
The same libertarianism that unites most Americans at the corner of conservative economics and social liberalism, yet seems an intersection where no Democrat or Republican dares to tread, characterizes Rhode Islanders and explains Raimondo's two-term appeal. She is a social liberal only as much as we need her to be. Her "Knock It Off" missive during the lockdown (I mentioned at the time) garnered national attention and is said to be one of the reasons she caught the eye of the Biden campaign. On the civil rights front, she vetoed the first draft of a state "revenge porn" bill that tread too heavily on free speech.
At the same time, she's a fiscal conservative. A finance aficionado by trade, she founded a venture capital firm and then entered public service as Rhode Island's General Treasurer. The powers-that-were saddled her with an unfunded pension liability of more than $7bn, no less in the wake of a recession. That was probably supposed to be a scapegoating when the problem proved intractable; Raimondo turned it into a pathway to the Governorship. In the aftermath of Rhode Island's massive squandering of economic development funds on a software development firm, Raimondo championed fiscal accountability in seeking public disclosure of the grand jury investigation.
Raimondo is super smart: high school valedictorian, top economics honors at Harvard, a Rhodes Scholarship and Oxford doctorate, and, why not, a Yale law degree for good measure. Some of those qualifications might smack of lefty elitism, but they come also with solid working-class bona fides and an Italian-immigrant heritage that complements Rhode Island's Federal Hill—the best "little Italy" on the East Coast by quality, if not size, and I've seen, and tasted, them all. According to Raimondo's official biography (link as long it's still there), her grandfather immigrated from Italy at age 14 with no English; her father, a U.S. Navy veteran and butcher's son, went to college on the GI Bill; and her family suffered loss of livelihood when Bulova outsourced factory jobs and the Rust Belt was born.
For my immediate family, it meant a lot to have had Raimondo leading Rhode Island while our daughter was in grade school. From the perspective of a parent, desirable role models seemed harder and harder to come by in our dawning age of social-media stars and normalized divisiveness. I don't know whether the Commerce Department will be where Raimondo makes the most difference. Certainly I have grave reservations about what President Biden will achieve, even aims to achieve, as talk of bringing back union jobs resonates to my ear as tone deafness to our crisis in American education. But wherever the chips fall, I'll be in Gina Raimondo's corner.
It was painful and offensive to me to see the Columbus statue in Baltimore ripped down and thrown into the harbor on the Fourth of July.
I appreciated Trevor Noah's Daily Show commentary on Columbus Day, aired last week, because he recognized the meaning of the holiday to the Italian-American community.
Noah excerpted a Vox video (story), from 2018, which gave a good concise summary of how the Columbus holiday came to be.
The video describes "the legend of Columbus," and it is a legend. Italian-American immigrants, such as my grandparents, came to embrace a legendary Columbus who bore little resemblance to the real historical figure. Which is not to say that the legend lacked real meaning for real people. There was a time when Italian-Americans were a "non-white" minority in America, Noah acknowledged. The community reached out to adopt, and partly to create, a galvanizing icon.
I studied Columbus quite a bit as an undergrad majoring in Spanish-language literature during the quincentenary of "the Discovery." As best as we can know Columbus, which is not much, given a paucity of surviving and conflicting accounts, the truth must be that he was complicated. People are. He had a multiplicity of motives, some more morally laudable than others. And probably he wasn't the sweetest sort of guy. Crossing the Atlantic Ocean with a potentially mutinous crew of adventurers in 1492 was a rugged business, if not recklessly suicidal. But Columbus did not invent Euro-centrism, Caucasian supremacy, or slavery. The cultural arrogances and inhumane institutions of the 15th century were certain to encircle the globe aboard every ship that departed the continent.
So my family, arriving in America in the 20th century, embraced a legend. It wasn't a terrible choice of legend. The first Italians to populate Baltimore sailed from Genoa, which is where Columbus probably was from. My grandparents, who also came to America by boat, from Tuscany, revered Columbus well before the dedication of his Little Italy statue in 1984. Through their Italian-American organizations, they contributed to the creation of the statue, which was made of marble and crafted by an Italian sculptor. President Reagan and the mayor of Baltimore dedicated the statue in Baltimore's Little Italy, where my family first lived after immigrating. When I was a kid, I was taken to Little Italy when my family volunteered and participated in religious rites and Italian-American festivals. Later, and for many years, my uncle played the character of Columbus in Baltimore's Columbus Day parade, which started and ended at the Columbus statue. I remember him decked out in cartoonish royal robes, standing atop a float mock-up of the Santa Maria, waving to smiling people, of all colors, who lined the streets.
He stopped when it became dangerous to be Columbus. Dangerous to celebrate our history in America, however reimagined and romanticized.
I'm not opposed to taking down statues of Columbus. I've advocated for "fallen monument" parks, as abound in former Soviet states, Hungary's being the most well known. They're immeasurably valuable to teach history. They proffer powerful evidence that, try as we might to be good and to do right, morality has proven a stubbornly mutable ambition in the human experience.
But taking down Columbus in Little Italy should have been a decision made by a cross-section of community stakeholders, not by a mob. An effort had been under way in the Italian-American community already to raise money to move Columbus elsewhere. The mayor of Baltimore promised prosecution of the vandals on July 9, but I've found no report of any arrest or charge to date. The Italian-Americans who contribute still, vitally, to Baltimore's identity deserve better. They deserve respect, right alongside every other community that has built Baltimore as a vibrant and diverse city.
As Noah observed, American history is now populated by many Italian-Americans who don't need aggrandizing legends to demonstrate greatness. It's not too late to create the commission that should have been and to start talking about how to honor immigrant history and the City of Baltimore at the intersection of Eastern Avenue and President Street. I don't know who, or what, might, or should, stand in "Columbus" square. I do believe that if we work at it, we can find, or make, an icon that my grandparents would have appreciated, and at the same time raise a testament to a new story.
