"From Many Nations and of Many Tongues"

In 1936 the National Institute of Immigrant Welfare began making three awards annually to Americans of foreign birth who have made noteworthy contributions to our national life. The first awards went to Alexis Carrel, Walter Damrosch and Jonas Lie; the second to Dr. Leo Baekeland, Dr. Ales Hrdlicka and Henry Morgenthau Sr. This year’s choice is equally commendable. At the institute’s annual dinner Wednesday night the awards were conferred on Felix Frankfurter, Giovanni Martinelli and Nikola Tesla.

In their respective fields of the law, music and invention these three have so long been a part of the American scene that it is hard to realize that the first came here as a boy from Austria, the second from Italy, the third from Yugoslavia. Professor Frankfurter spoke for all three and for several million first-generation Americans when he said: “I can express with very limited adequacy the passionate devotion to this land that possesses millions of people born, like myself, under other skies, for the privilege that this country has bestowed in allowing them to partake of its fellowship.”

Professor Frankfurter’s address was a memorable one. “If one faith can be said to unite a great people,” he said, “surely the ideal that holds us together beyond any other is the belief in the moral worth of the common man, whatever his race or religion. In this faith America was founded, to this faith have her poets and seers and statesmen and the unknown millions, generation after generation, devoted their lives. Nothing is more uniquely American than this hospitality to the human spirit, whatever its source. The very Constitution of the United States was made, in the classic language of the Supreme Court, ‘for an undefined and expanding future, and for a people gathered from many nations and of many tongues.’”