Biography of the early years of A. Bartlett Giamatti, who would become Yale University’s first non-Anglo-Saxon Protestant president and commissioner of Major League Baseball.

In 1977, a thirty-nine-year-old Italian American professor of Renaissance literature, A. Bartlett Giamatti, was chosen as the next president of Yale University, a radical act that was immediately perceived as a threat to the university’s embedded, eugenics-driven, Anglo-Saxon mentality. Eugenics, as practiced in America, and especially at Yale, locked into place those who were deemed “unfit” due to beliefs about their ethnicity, class, and racial character, beliefs that had endured for decades and to which Giamatti’s selection, as an Italian American and therefore, to some, one of the “unfit,” was an open rebuke.

In Fearless, Neil Thomas Proto explores the origins of Giamatti’s ethical convictions, including his insistence on fairness, his respect for the duty of responsible citizenship, and his advocacy for people on the margins. Proto argues that these convictions, which would inform Giamatti’s time at Yale as well as his brief tenure as commissioner of Major League Baseball, can be understood only in the context of Giamatti’s family and the deeply entwined and conflicted histories of Yale and New Haven itself—a history that Giamatti, who had been both a student and a professor at Yale and who had Italian American relatives in New Haven, knew very well.

Historian Sean Wilentz wrote that “Bart Giamatti was a phenomenon who lived the lives of several men even though his own ended tragically early.” Giamatti confirmed his underlying imperative through to the end of his life: “Rest,” he wrote, “will come by never resting.” Fearless is a story about persistence against forces ugly, embedded, and more pernicious than simply racial and ethnic discrimination, and about the principled embrace of civic duty passed on generationally and used fully as the ethical sword and shield necessary to challenge them.

About the Author:

Neil Thomas Proto’s public service and private practice in law includes environmental, Native Hawaiian, urban, nuclear power, Native American, and constitutional litigation in the U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. courts of appeals. He served as an appellate lawyer in the U.S. Department of Justice (1972–1977), as general counsel to the President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee (1980–1982), and as a partner in Washington, D.C. law firms. He has taught at Yale University and at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, and has written two books—To a High Court: The Tumult and Choices That Led to United States of America v. SCRAP (2006) and The Rights of My People: Liliuokalani’s Enduring Battle with the United States, 1890–1917 (2009)—and numerous articles on athletics (including “Preservation of Baseball Tradition is at Stake in Rose Debate”), space exploration, and the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti, T. E. Lawrence, and Ernest Shackleton. Proto’s play, The Reckoning: Pecora for the Public, on the causes of the 1929 stock market crash, premiered in Seattle (2016). Aspects of his life’s work and experience are held in collections at The George Washington University, the University of Hawaii Law School, and Southern Connecticut State University. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Proto currently resides in Washington, D.C. He also chaired two New Haven mayoral inaugurations that, at president Giamatti’s invitation, were held at Yale’s Woolsey Hall.