Brokers of Culture: Italian Jesuits in the American West, 1848-1919 (review)

In 1848, when members of the Society of Jesus were expelled from Italy by revolutionary forces, a number of the émigrés sought refuge in the United States. That was the beginning of apostolic work by Italian Jesuits in America that lasted for more than seventy years. Nearly four hundred Jesuits were involved, and their presence in the United States had many ramifications that historians have largely ignored. Now the Jesuit historian Gerald McKevitt, professor of history at Santa Clara University, has brilliantly filled that gap.

The Italian Jesuits, largely from Naples and Turin, made several major contributions. As well-educated clerics, they first developed the Jesuit educational apostolates in the East, chiefly at Georgetown University and at a seminary in Woodstock, Maryland. This work they considered preparation for missionary activity in the West, where the Turin Jesuits took over the Rocky Mountain Mission to the American Indians, started by earlier missionaries, and built mission stations and schools for Indians scattered across the present states of Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Meanwhile, the Neapolitan Jesuits concentrated their missionary work in the Southwest (New Mexico and Colorado), caring for the Hispanic population. Finally—and most important—the Jesuits built colleges (now universities) in the West: Santa Clara and St. Ignatius (San Francisco) in California, Gonzaga (in Spokane) and Seattle in the state of Washington, and Regis in Denver. In all these enterprises the foreign Jesuits were warmly embraced, because, as McKevitt points out, they offered a supranational outlook that transcended the "restrictive confines of ethnicity" (p. xv).

McKevitt sees the Italian Jesuits as bridge builders—or brokers of culture—in propelling outsiders such as Indians, Hispanics, and European immigrants into the mainstream of American society. There was a lot of culture brokerage to do, too, within the Italian Jesuit communities, which endured a troublesome division between those who supported traditional European and Roman elements in the Church and those whose goal was the rapid Americanization of the immigrant clergy and the people to whom they ministered.

By the early years of the twentieth century, the work for which the missionary-minded priests had come to America changed radically. The heavy influx into the West of white settlers inevitably drew the Jesuits away from Indians and Hispanics and toward the religious needs of the new settlers. As a result the "missions" ended, and the Italian Jesuits in America cut their ties to the Italian Jesuit provinces of Turin (in 1909) and Naples (in 1919). They became embedded in American society as American Jesuit provinces.

McKevitt recounts this complex history with considerable verve. In this he is helped by the sources from which he builds his narrative. The Italian missionaries were highly literate men and sharp observers of the milieu in which they operated. And, as Jesuits, they were used to writing letters and sending detailed reports to their religious superiors. So the book is based on the many personal experiences—some good, some unfortunate—that the Italians had in America. McKevitt skillfully uses and develops these rich sources (from both American and Italian archives); he keeps the reader's interest because he is writing about real people, not anonymous actors or generalized groups. While the story told is largely positive—the contributions and influence of the immigrant Jesuits are hard to miss—the problems the Italians encountered in a new and active American society in the West brought both failures and successes. Struggling has about as big a place in the picture as accomplishment, but it is this fact that makes McKevitt's narrative so convincing.

McKevitt argues throughout that the Italian Jesuits' lives reflected the developing American West. He is exaggerating only a little when he declares in his preface, "This book about Jesuits is also a book about America" (p. xiv).