What It Means to Be an American: the Irving Brown Story

What it Means to be an American: The Irving Brown Story Authored by Philip W. Travis It was a beautiful spring day in Florida. The sky was blue on the quiet small roads of Anna Maria Island. The temperature was a pleasant eighty degrees as I pulled my car into the driveway of a home overlooking the beach and the Gulf of Mexico. Jane saw me as I pulled in, she was taking the dog for a walk. “Just go on up he is expecting you,” she instructed me. I walked up the twenty or so steps to the front door and rang the bell. I greeted him as he invited me into the main room of their home. We walked down a short corridor. There were stairs and an elevator to my right as we entered a living room that looked out on the Gulf of Mexico. It was the kind of sight one sees in travel magazines about the dream location; a view of a tropical sea with waves crashing over a sandbar a few hundred yards out. We sat down at a large rectangular wooden table in a room with fine paintings adorning the walls. “We will stay 6 feet apart” he stated. This was the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic and he wished to follow the guidelines that the Centers for Disease Control had recommended to Americans. He exclaimed, “Things are pretty bad for a lot of small businesses and families right now; restaurants are closed, and it will be very difficult on many of them. What I think I will do is, for the ones who need it,” he said earnestly, “I am just going to not worry about the rents until all this stuff passes.” This was Irving Brown and this first statement at a time of such need for so many was a microcosm of his personal philosophy of giving back to society. For Irving Brown, being an American means using one’s personal success as an opportunity to contribute to the greater good of society, to give back. When it comes to being rich in America there exists an almost universal social debate: Captains of Industry or Robber Barons? This question took hold during the Gilded Age; the height of the Industrial Revolution, particularly the late 19th century. It was a period of huge social inequities in which the masses lived in destitute poverty with little chance of education or advancement while a handful of individuals controlled powerful monopolistic trusts and made millions on the labor of poorly paid workers. This reality beckoned the question: were these huge corporate bosses Robber Barons that made their millions exploiting workers and pursuing their own self-interest at the expense of the people and of the country; or were these millionaires Captains of Industry that led the country in a new age of innovation and production and that understood the importance of contributing to the greater good of society through philanthropy? As such a dichotomous question suggests the answer is more likely neither or both. Throughout American history, many wealthy individuals have done more than their part in contributing to the betterment of the United States while many others have not done enough to contribute to their society in philanthropic endeavors. Where does Irving Brown stand in this debate on wealth and society? Operating the Irving and Jane Brown Foundation, which provides millions of dollars of educational aid to college students in the United States and becoming the State College of Florida’s single most generous donor in the history of the college places Brown clearly in the camp of the Captains of Industry. He used ingenuity and opportunity to find success, but was committed to using that success to make the United States a better place for those that make it their home. Why does Irving Brown make giving back such a cornerstone of his citizenship? Simply put, Irving Brown is a product of his experiences. Brown’s life represents a rags to riches immigrant story and Irving Brown’s business career represents the realization of the American Dream. His success, however, was built on a national and global community of support as well as his ingenuity. Brown’s American Dream is not simply a story of a person that made hard choices and did it all by themselves as some like to imagine, but rather it is a success story of the global connectedness of the United States to the world and of the Jewish community. For these reasons, Brown’s story tells the reader a powerful lesson about America, immigration, the world, and society. Irving Brown was born in Manchester, England on May 19, 1938. His father survived the Dunkirk evacuation from France during the Nazi invasion of 1940. As a child Irving did not have a close relationship with his father who suffered from the stresses of combat. His mother, Sarah, was left to raise Irving on her own. Sarah worked her hands to the bone in a textile factory. It was hard work and the two had few comforts. Irving remembered his mother as a loving woman, but sadly, his memories are vague because adding to the tragedy of his father difficulties following his combat experience his mother died suddenly of heart attack in 1946; Irving was only 8 years old. At the age of 8 Irving was left an orphan in working class England bleak postwar period. Irving Brown was, however, Jewish and the Jewish people had a tight knit community. Brown considered himself fortunate to be in England at the time of the Holocaust on the European continent. However, even in England he experienced significant Anti-Semitism in the working- class English row-house neighborhoods that were separated along lines of class, race, ethnicity and religion. The Jewish community in England was strong and Irving’s local synagogue was able to place him in a comfortable and well-funded Jewish orphanage called Finnart House School located to the Southeast of London in the small town of Weybridge Surrey. “Nobody should feel sorry for me [for being an orphan],” Irving Brown exclaimed, because Finnart House School was “a mansion” and “the pet charity of Lord Samuels…the first Jewish member of the House of Lords.” As a result of Lord Samuels support Finnart House School offered comfortable accommodations for an orphanage. The house was three stories high with four large chimneys and big windows adorning the front. At the time, the house was home to only 19 Jewish boys. Meals were cooked by three nice Irish girls and the food was good. It offered quite comfortable accommodations compared to what others might expect as wards of the state in Great Britain at the time, and for this reason Finnart House School remains a fond memory for Irving Brown’s difficult early years. In 1949 Irving Brown’s Aunt, who lived in New York City and knew of Irving’s situation, sought to help her nephew out of this difficult situation. She went to the Hebrew Immigration Society to see if they could help. After some discussion, the Hebrew Immigration Society agreed to pay for Irving Brown’s passage to the United States and his Aunt sponsored him. Communication was sent to Finnart House and they agreed as well, and, so, Irving was taken to the American embassy. At the Embassy the immigration officer asked young Irving a simple question, “Why do you want to go to America?” Brown replied with a simple, but profound, answer, “Because of all the possibilities.” Brown’s answer spoke deeply to the promise that America offered to people throughout the world. The embassy booked his passage to the United States on the MV Georgic. Irving Brown, only eight years old, was taken to the passenger ship the MV Georgic. Irving starred, his mouth agape at the enormous ship. The vessel was a fairly large ship with two stacks and masts on the bow and stern of the ship. Though Irving was not aware of it at the time, the vessel was a troopship during the Second World War and was sunk and then rebuilt and returned to service. At the time of Irving’s voyage, the vessel was operated by British Ministry of Transportation. Unknown to Brown at the time his voyage across the Atlantic was the first of an entire life of world travels and experiences. These global connections made Brown’s ultimate business success possible and shaped his outlook on the world, government, and philanthropy. Brown’s ship took him to New York City. Unlike the stories of migrants coming into Ellis Island half a century prior, Brown’s departure was rather straightforward, a walk down the plank and his uncle greeted him with his car to drive him into Brooklyn. Irving suffered from terrible car sickness and his uncle drove him an agonizing twenty-minute ride from the ship dock into Brooklyn. Upon his arrival he was greeted by Alan Maltzman, the son of a friend of his aunt Sarah, and stumbling out of the car, sick from the ride, he met Alan and threw up all over him. The two became life-long friends. While a young student Brown found school boring and not always relevant. He got into trouble fairly frequently; nothing major, but the kinds of small scraps that one might expect of a young person bored with school in a big city. Brown recalled “I never had much use for mathematics and these other things. I just didn’t understand the point. History, though, I loved history.

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