Madeleine Albright

Identification: Czechoslovakian-born American who became U.S. secretary of state

Born: May 15, 1937; Prague, Czechoslovakia

Significance: A scholar who became the first woman to serve as a U.S. secretary of state, Albright drew on her life experience and extensive knowledge of world affairs to champion human rights and gender equality around the world.

Madeleine Albright in 1997. (U.S. Department of State)

Madeleine Albright was born Marie Jana Körbel, a member of an established Jewish family in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1937. Had German expansionism and the events of World War II not intervened, she might have known a comfortable, urbane existence in her native land. However, Nazi-ruled Germany advanced into Czechoslovakia the year after she was born, and her native country was forever transformed. Because the Körbels were Jewish, three of Albright’s grandparents would later die in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. However, she herself would not learn her full family history until many years later, after she became U.S. secretary of state. When she was five, she and her immediate family members were baptized into the Roman Catholic Church. The family also dropped the umlaut from the name "Körbel”; the resulting "Korbel” had a less Jewish and more Czech sound. From that time, Marie Jana became known as Madeleine and was the only member of the family who attended Catholic mass regularly.

During the war years, as German armies advanced across eastern Europe, Albright’s family fled to England. After the war ended in 1945, they returned briefly to Czechoslovakia, where her father, a noted scholar in international relations, entered the Czech diplomatic service as ambassador to Yugoslavia and Albania. However, after it became evident that her father was not in harmony with the communist regime that assumed rule in Czechoslovakia during the late 1940’s, her family became refugees a second time. In 1949, they immigrated to the United States and settled in Denver, Colorado. Madeleine’s father accepted a professorship at the University of Colorado in nearby Boulder. There he developed a distinguished international relations program and mentored two future U.S. secretaries of state—his own daughter and, later, Condoleezza Rice, who would served as President George W. Bush’s secretary of state. 

Life in the United States

As a teenager, Madeleine adapted easily to American life, pleasing her father with her academic accomplishments. In the private girls school she attended in Denver, she was described as neither the brightest nor the prettiest but always the most highly motivated. It was thus not surprising when she matriculated on scholarship toWellesley College in 1955. Active in campus organizations, she made lasting friends from different backgrounds. She also acquired the ultimate mark of acceptance for an immigrant woman of modest means when, a few days after her graduation from Wellesley. she married into one of America’s most prominent and wealthy families. Her journalist husband, Joseph Patterson Albright, was heir to a newspaper empire that included the Chicago Tribune. Demonstrating again the Korbel family flexibility in religious affiliation, Madeleine complied with her new mother-in-law’s request that she become an Episcopalian. However, she explained to the Episcopal bishop who instructed her that she could not renounce her Catholic devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Throughout her marriage years, Albright suppressed her own ambitions while promoting the career of her husband. Meanwhile, she earned master’s and doctoral degrees from Columbia University, specializing, like her father, in international relations. She also acquired a second mentor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, another eastern European immigrant professor, who would later become national security advisor to U.S. president Jimmy Carter. 

Diplomatic Career

In 1982, after twenty-two years of marriage, Joseph Albright left Madeleine for another woman. Traumatic as the divorce was for Madeleine, it enabled her for the first time to follow her own career path. Now firmly identified as "Albright,” she taught at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in the District of Columbia and advised Democrat politicians such as Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and Geraldine Ferraro, the first female vice presidential candidate. Ferraro became a friend with whom Albright attended mass, when she briefly reverted to the Roman Catholicism of her childhood.

The election of Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992 catapulted Albright into national prominence. After taking office, Clinton appointed Albrightambassador to the United Nations. Albright’s facility in European languages and her wide acquaintance with eastern European diplomats gave her an advantage over most American officials. At the United Nations she dealt with problems in Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, and Rwanda and closely monitored events in the Middle East. The plight of women, particularly in underdeveloped countries was a concern she shared with the president’s wife, Hillary Clinton, a fellow Wellesley graduate who became her close friend.

In 1997, President Clinton named Albright to the highest government office ever held by an American woman: U.S. secretary of state. The drama of her personal story, her charm, and even the jewelry she wore attracted wide press attention. More than most diplomatic officials, she was able to interest the general public in international issues. She traveled tirelessly, addressing a variety of pressing problems: ethnic conflicts in countries recently liberated from communism, the growth of religion-based terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the ever-present Middle Eastern tensions. Perhaps because she had herself escaped the prime European tyrants of the twentieth century, Germany’s Adolf Hitler and the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, she reacted forcefully to "ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans and genocide in Africa.

Lasting Achievements

Albright was much admired in Europe. As a patriotic American, she rejected Václav Havel’s extraordinary suggestion that she might succeed him as president of the Czech Republic. Her legacy was already impressive. She made the highest levels of U.S. government secure for talented women and worked to improve the lot of women everywhere. While acknowledging the dangers of a new world order, she maintained cordial relations with post- Soviet Russia and the People’s Republic of China. Even in difficult peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, she could claim modest gains. Because she had become an American citizen by choice rather than through birth, she unceasingly promoted American ideals of justice and freedom. Although she did not employ the phrase "manifest destiny” of an earlier era, she spoke and wrote of her conviction that her adopted country did have the special task of spreading its ideals.

Allene Phy-Olsen

Further Reading

Albright, Madeleine. Madame Secretary: A Memoir. New York: Miramax, 2003. Revealing memoir in which Albright covers both her personal life and her professional career after she completed her term as U.S. secretary of state.

_______. The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Accessible study of religious movements throughout the world and their political ramifications.

Blackman, Ann. Seasons of Her Life: A Biography of Madeleine Korbel Albright. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1998. Straightforward biography of Albright by an admirer. 

Dobbs, Michael. Madeleine Albright: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey. New York: Henry Holt, 1999. Critical examination of Albright’s career by the journalist who uncovered the Korbel family’s Jewish past while Albright was secretary of state. 

Lippman, Thomas W. Madeleine Albright: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000. Balanced account of Albright’s relations with both world figures and journalists. 

See also: Anti-Semitism; Czech and Slovakian immigrants; Higher education; Holocaust; Jewish immigrants; Marriage; Refugees; Religions of immigrants.

Julia Alvarez

Alvarez came to prominence as a novelist with the publication of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991)...

Mary Antin

One of the most prominent voices of the early twentieth century wave of immigration to the United States...

John Jacob Astor

John Jacob Astor established the first American monopoly with his American Fur Company (1808-1834)...

Charles Atlas

Arguably the best-known physical fitness advocate of the first half of the twentieth century...

Alexander Graham Bell

Entering the United States at the invitation of a Boston institution and speaking excellent English, Bell may not have thought himself an immigrant until his first attempt to patent his telephone was rejected on the grounds that he was an alien.

Sergey Brin

Brin teamed up with Stanford University classmate Larry Page to found the Internet company Google, based on its search engine that uses backlinks for ranking.

Liz Claiborne

One of the most successful female entrepreneurs in American business history, Belgian-born Claiborne founded Liz Claiborne, Inc., in 1976.

Edwidge Danticat

The leading writer of the Haitian diaspora, Danticat memorably conveys the struggles and identity crises of Haitian immigrants, the grim poverty and political oppression of their homeland, their mistreatment in the United States, and their vibrant language and popular culture.

James John Davis

As the secretary of labor under three U.S. presidents, Davis helped to enforce the national origins quotas of 1920’s immigration law and advocated additional restrictions on immigration.

Albert Einstein

Edward J. Flanagan

Father Flanagan was an early and vocal advocate of child-care reform whose experiences as a Roman Catholic parish priest among the impoverished immigrants in Omaha, Nebraska, convinced him that addressing such catastrophic social conditions could only begin with taking in homeless boys and educating them.

Felix Frankfurter

As a professor at Harvard, Frankfurter got involved in a number of causes. He became a close adviser of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Marcus Garvey

The first person of African descent to galvanize black people throughout the world with the idea of returning to Africa, Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which sought to deliver African Americans from injustice, encourage racial self-improvement, and promote a back-to-Africa movement.

Emma Goldman

A forceful voice for the nascent anarchist movement in the United States, Goldman founded the magazine Mother Earth and crisscrossed the United States lecturing about anarchy and supporting anarchists, immigrant and labor groups, women, and others oppressed by the government and institutionalized capitalism.

Samuel Gompers

Undeniably one of the leading figures in labor history, Gompers was already an ardent unionist prior to leaving London for New York City in 1863. The giant union he cofounded in 1881, the American Federation of Labor, was based on the pragmatic principles he had learned in England.

Andrew Grove

The third person hired by the cofounders of the Intel Corporation, the Hungarian-bornGrove rose relatively quickly to the company’s top management position.

Meyer Guggenheim

Originally an impoverished Jewish peddler from Switzerland, Guggenheim built a worldwide mining conglomerate after immigrating to the United States.

S. I. Hayakawa

A notable scholar of semantics, Hayakawa also had a political career. He represented California in the U.S. Senate, where he launched a movement to establish English as the official language of the United States by introducing the English Language Amendment in 1981.

Arianna Huffington

One of the most politically influential immigrants of the early twenty-first century, Huffington has established herself as a centrist within a variety of media, including the World Wide Web, and named one of Time magazine’s one hundred most influential people in 2006.

Henry Kissinger

Jhumpa Lahiri

Identification: British-born American author of Asian Indian descent

Born: July 11, 1967; London, England

Significance: Lahiri’s focus on cultural displacement highlights the Asian Indian immigrant experience from an intergenerational perspective. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning shortstory collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), concentrates on Indian immigrants searching for cultural connections and love. At a personal level, Lahiri considers herself American, but feels somewhat displaced herself, having been raised with a keen sense of her Indian heritage.

Born Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri in London, England, to parents fromBengal, India, Jhumpa Lahiri moved to the United States at the age of three and grew up in Rhode Island. She became an American citizen at the age of eighteen. Immersed in immigrant culture, she also spent a great deal of time in India, where her family made frequent visits to relatives in Calcutta (now called Kolkata).

Lahiri began writing in childhood to stave off the loneliness of feeling like an outsider because she looked different from her classmates. She wrote fiction throughout college. After graduating from Barnard College in 1989 with a bachelor’s degree in English literature, she went on to earn three master’s degrees and a doctorate from Boston University. Her fiction won both accolades and awards after she finished her doctoral degree.

While Lahiri was still in school, she began consciously examining the immigrant experience, though she was initially seeking to understand her own identity. She used fiction to illustrate the Asian Indian immigrant experience, ranging from conflicts between Hindu and Christian lifestyles to an Indian immigrant’s loneliness and longing for "home.” She collected her stories into a book, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. The title story is about an interpreter for an Indian physician who literally interprets the doctor’s diagnoses for patients. Three of the nine stories are set in India, and the other six are set in the United States and feature Indian immigrants. Her work concentrates on cultural displacement, Hindu family structures, and theWesternization of second- and third-generation immigrants.

American reviewers have almost universally praised Lahiri’s work for its depictions of the Indian American experience. Her work also had an immediate popular appeal in the United States, where the literature of other Indian Americans such as Bharati Mukherjee appealed more to academics and intellectuals. Critics in India, by contrast, have given her work a mixed reception, and some have criticized her for writing flat Indian characters, saying that she writes better about the general Indian immigrant experience.

Lahiri followed Interpreter of Maladies with a novel, The Namesake, in 2003, and again drew widespread critical acclaim. The novel concentrates on the issues faced by second-generation Indian immigrants and the importance of names to identity. Her second short-story collection, Unaccustomed Earth (2008), also focuses on Indian immigrants, concluding with three linked short stories focusing on both American and Indian customs regarding love, including arranged marriages.

Lahiri has proved to be one of the strongest voices for Indian American immigrants of several generations, capturing their unique struggles to achieve an American identity without surrendering their Indian culture.

Jessie Bishop Powell

Further Reading

George, Sheba Mariam. When Women Come First: Gender and Class in Transnational Migration. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Kafka, Phillipa. On the Outside Looking In(dian): Indian Women Writers at Home and Abroad. New York: Peter Lang, 2003.

See also: Anglo-conformity; Asian American literature; Asian Indian immigrants; Association of Indians in America; Families; History of immigration after 1891; Intermarriage; Lim, Shirley Geok-lin; Literature; Mukherjee, Bharati; Sidhwa, Bapsi.