Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe, 1930-41

Laura Fermi

Oct 2021 · Plunkett Lake Press

About this ebook

“Migration from Europe has occurred without interruption since the time America was discovered. There have always been some intellectuals, educated abroad, whose presence and work enriched our culture. Laura Fermi, however, analyzes a new and unique phenomenon in the history of immigration, the wave of intellectuals from continental Europe that from 1930 to 1941 brought to these shores well over 20,000 professional refugees. Most immigrant intellectuals were pushed out of the European continent by the dictatorships of that period; they were ‘the men and women who came to America fully made, with their Ph.D.’s or diplomas from art academies or music conservatories in their pocket, and who continue to engage in intellectual pursuits in this country.’ Among them we find Franz Alexander, Bruno Bettelheim, Enrico Fermi, Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein, Igor Stravinsky, John von Neumann, Paul Tillich and a long sequence of Nobel Prize winners and exceptional scholars. Their contribution to American life continues to the present. Working with a sample of about 1,900 names and relying on personal contacts, interviews, memoirs, newspaper accounts, obituaries, and similar sources, Mrs. Fermi succeeds in conveying the significance of the intellectual immigration and the areas of its impact on America. She describes the personal trials and the successes of these persons caught up in the web of persecution and peregrinations leading to higher institutions of learning in the United States... the delightful style of the book, the new light it throws on the period studied from a participant observer’s position, and the insight it brings forth concerning the mutual enrichment of American and European intellectual communities make it enjoyable and instructive reading.” — Silvano M. Tomasi, The International Migration Review

“Illustrious Immigrants is an honest and informative book; it is well-organized, well-informed, well-balanced... crammed with information, with illuminating anecdotes, often moving incidents and revealing statistics.” — Peter Gay, The New York Times

“[R]ich in personal anecdote and communication which make delightful reading... in so many ways a splendid and useful book, tackling with imagination, industry, and a rare combination of personal concern and emotional detachment a subject that would frighten — indeed thus far has frightened — professional social historians by its magnitude and complexity.” — Alice Kimball Smith, Science

“[Laura Fermi has] made an effort to bring together materials that exist nowhere else and to juxtapose them so as to reveal patterns that would otherwise be invisible. For this, we should be grateful... Mrs Fermi’s work is earnest and responsible.” — Harriet Zuckerman, Physics Today

“[Laura Fermi is] an immensely knowledgeable, discerning, and unpretentious guide to the influx [of the intellectual migration from Fascist Europe], as well as a personal example of its lustrous quality... this engaging book... will prove to be indispensable to all students of transatlantic interactions.” — Cushing Strout, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

“This is an optimistic book, a contribution to a singular chapter in the history of American science and learning.” — Philip Morrison, Scientific American

About the author

Born in Rome, Italy, Laura Capon Fermi (1907-1977) was an Italian-American writer, historian and activist who authored over half a dozen books in both English and Italian. Laura’s family were Jewish and her father was a career Italian naval officer. She studied general science at the University of Rome where she met Enrico Fermi, whom she married in 1928.

In Atoms in the Family (1954), Laura Fermi’s best-selling memoir of life with her famous husband, she recounts how in 1938 with their two young children, she and Enrico fled Fascist Italy and its increasingly draconian anti-Jewish laws; how they adjusted to their lives as immigrants in the United States; and how their lives changed again when Enrico was recruited by the US military to work on the first atomic weapons, in a secret location in the New Mexican desert, during World War II. The family settled in Chicago after the War.

After her husband’s death in 1954, Laura attended the first International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in 1955, in her role as the historian for the US delegation. Laura then wrote a book about the proceedings, Atoms for the World in 1957.

Also in 1957, Fermi won a Guggenheim Fellowship for her writing. In 1961, she published Mussolini, a biography of the Italian dictator and a book for young readers, The Story of Atomic Energy. Her last book, Illustrious Immigrants, was originally published in 1968. Since 1959, she was at the leading edge of raising awareness of air pollution control in Chicago and nationally. In 1971, she and her colleagues initiated the US’s first ever lobby for stricter gun control both locally and nationally.

In her later years, Laura lived with a lung condition, which limited her ability to walk more than a couple of blocks. She continued to raise awareness about, and promote solutions for significant social issues until the end of her life.