Shaping the Future by Remembering the Past
Adolph Sutro, the Frontier Thesis, and America 250
“You! Asser Levy, you, and those other Jews. Get down from the stockade wall. We Christians defend New Amsterdam (New York). Jews must pay a tax, stand aside,” ordered the Sergeant.
Levy looked at the Sergeant with quiet fury. He did not budge. He said, “We Jews stand shoulder to shoulder with you against any danger. This piece of land is your home. It is ours too. We will defend it with our blood.”
Governor Peter Stuyvesant of New Amsterdam hated Jews. The Jews stayed. They never paid the tax. It was 1654, the first Frontier Experience, where the Jews of the New World met the antisemitic hatred of the Old World. No one would ever again demand, when danger threatened, “Give everyone a gun, except the Jew.”
The American Frontier was transformative.
Many years later, as a student at the University of Maryland, I was introduced to the Frontier Thesis. The Frontier Thesis, first presented by the great American historian Frederick Jackson Turner, explained, “As each generation of pioneers relocated 50 to 100 miles west, they abandoned useless European practices, institutions and ideas, and instead found new solutions to new problems created by their new environment.”
Academics continue to argue the legitimacy of Turner’s Frontier Thesis. When he presented it in 1893, he was not P.C. He did not account for women, the environment, or whatever. I can only say, from my experience running the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation (JASHP) and having completed hundreds of historical marker projects, Turner was more right than wrong.
The American experience was unique. It is unique. It and the Frontier shaped something new in the world’s human condition. The Frontier did not ask what a person was. It asked what they could bring to the table for the benefit of all.
JASHP is supporting an incredible volunteer historical preservation effort in Dayton, Nevada. It is the restoration of a world engineering marvel, the key to the famous Comstock Silver Lode, the Sutro Tunnel. Some argue the Tunnel is what “saved the Silver State” of Nevada.
The Tunnel is named after Adolph Heinrich Joseph Sutro (April 29, 1830 – August 8, 1898). He was a German-Jewish American engineer. Sutro emigrated with his family to America after the failed 1848 liberal revolutions in Europe. Being a Jew was not “opportune” after the revolution. Sutro arrived in San Francisco in the early 1850s. He made his living selling cigars.
In 1859, Sutro read the exciting news about the massive silver discovery near Virginia City, Nevada. It was only 250 miles away. Fortune and opportunity awaited.
For Sutro, it was more than a simple opportunity. Sutro had studied mining engineering in Germany. He knew mining was hard, dangerous work. The Comstock Lode was far more difficult and dangerous than people imagined.
Comstock mines sat atop other horizontal mines rammed across the lode into the mountain. The mines began flooding. The air was bad. Incredible heat, up to 130 degrees, made life and mining intolerable. It soon became clear the Comstock Lode was too dangerous to mine.
Sutro arrived in Virginia City. Assessing the situation, he asked himself, What if he could build a four-mile drainage tunnel under the Comstock Lode mine shafts? He could drain the tunnels above from rising flood waters. The economic viability of the rich mines could continue. His tunnel would charge the mine shaft operators a fee/gallon of water removed. His tunnel would provide ventilation, emergency escape routes, supply lines, and extraction of mined ore.
No one critiqued him for being a Jew. Sutro came up with a better idea. It worked.
It took nearly ten years to dig the tunnel. It was a wild success. At the height of the Comstock mining era, Sutro sold out and moved back to San Francisco, immensely wealthy.
In his later years, Sutro became a major San Francisco philanthropist and, eventually, in 1895-1897, the first Jewish Mayor of the City.
Virginia City today is a major tourist center. It looks much like it did in its colorful days of the late 19th century. Two million tourists come to Virginia City annually. Few know much about the city’s Jewish past.
Virginia City was the boyhood home of the first Jewish American Nobel Prize winner, Albert Michaelson, in physics in 1907. The city had a Jewish sheriff and the largest kosher meatpacking/processing operation in Nevada.
In recent years, to the distress of the Virginia Citizenry, the Jewish cemetery was antisemitically vandalized. JASHP worked closely with the Comstock Cemetery Foundation, restoring it to honored pride and dignity.
When the opportunity to support the Friends of the Sutro Tunnel arose, https://thesutrotunnel.org/, there was no question about doing so. I had only one condition. Sutro’s Jewish ethnicity was to be recognized.
I thought it was a strong question for them. It actually meant nothing that Sutro was Jewish. They all knew it and were actually proud of it. Sutro came to Virginia City with an American’s hope for opportunity. He was received and succeeded because he came not as a Jew looking to get, but to give something that would benefit all.
JASHP is donating the project’s interpretive signage. JASHP is funding a 9’ bronze sculpture of Sutro swinging the symbolic first pick to begin the Tunnel. The giant sculpture is being fabricated by Sam Philipe in Jerusalem. Sam, a fifth-generation Jerusalemite, is an internationally noted sculptor and painter. It will be sited outside the restored portico of the Sutro Tunnel.
America is celebrating its 250th birthday on July 4. There is much to celebrate. And yes, there were left turns that needed correcting along the way. Freedom is not automatic. It is a continuing process of work, development, and nurturing.
For the Jewish American, a quixotic development has occurred in the past few decades, especially the past decade. Millions of immigrants, legal and illegal, have come here. Some, far too many, have come looking for what they can get, not what they can bring to the table for all. Some have brought their Old World hate, antisemitism. It is metastasizing; it could cloud America’s next two hundred and fifty years.
Americans shape the future by remembering the past. Past is prologue. Much good has come from America’s first 250 years.
As Theodor Herzl observed, if you believe it, (the future), it need not be a dream.
Jerry Klinger is president of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation.