Itt-Ott, 1974 (7. évfolyam, 1-6. szám)
1974 / 4. szám
Pupin invented the radiotelephone among others and even won a Pulitzer Prize with his autobiography, From Immigrant to Inventor. 10) The Hungarian American János von Neumann, the greatest mathematician of our age, is considered the father of the electric computer. Among his compatriots George Kármán helped the American aircraft industry to predominance through his theory on aerodynamics. The Hungarian "Big Three"; Edward Teller, Eugen Wignar and Leo Szilárd along with the Pole Konopinski have made the U.S. an atomic power by developing the A and H bombs. 11) The rockets designed by Werner von Braun have made possible for the United States to become the leading power in space exploration. One of the moon-astronauts, Gene Gernan is a third generation Slovak. The launch director at NASA is the Pole Walter Kapryan. 12) The Ukrainian Professor Lev Dobriansky and the Pole ^ Oscar Halecki (who died just recently) are among the best known political scientists of this era. Silent Treatment After this brief review the question arises; to what degree does American society know and appreciate the role of the ethnics in our history? Regrettably, the answer to this question is negative; although literature on this subject is almost inexhaustible, the average A- merican has barely an inkling of ethnic accomplishments._ Just check our own children's knowledge —or rather ignorance — in this field. Our schoolbooks just slip over the subject. As to what extent this "silent treatment" is prevalent in textbooks, let us quote here an authority, Reader's Digest writer Albert Q. Maiséi. In the 1950s he wrote a series of articles about the American ethnics, which he later expanded into a book titled They All Chose America. The following are excerpts from the preface; Unfortunately, the work of researchers has yet found but little reflection in the standard histories used in our schools and colleges. On the 500 pages of one of our most widely used high school texts, for example, there appears not one single reference to the contribution that immigrants have made to our public or political life, to science or education, to arts or letters, to invention or social welfare .... Another textbook, for grade school use, finds space on its 627 pages only to observe that "many immigrants have become leaders in special fields." . . . Still another American history book -- required reading for thousands of college students — utilizes but a single short paragraph of its more than l600 pages to describe the contributions, other than their labor, that immigrants have made to American life .... Dr. Maiséi thereafter points out that the student texts do deal extensively with the problems created by the immigrants' arrival. It is characteristic, however, that even in his well-intentioned book, which discusses fifteen ethnic groups, no mention is made of 25
