Volume 29, Number 18 · November 18, 1982
Save the Wales?
By Graham Hughes
Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880-1980
by Kenneth O. Morgan
Oxford University Press/University of Wales Press, 463 pp., $25.00
Outside Wales the Welsh are so inconspicuous that people don't even know when they are insulting us. A friend of mine once told me that someone had 'welshed' on a promise to him. He was stricken with remorse when I pointed out that this was about the same as my saying to him that someone had 'jewed' me. The world knows us only by the Saxon word 'Welsh,' which means foreigner or enemy.[1] Centuries ago the English lost patience with our (to them) unpronounceable names and made us give them up for pallid English ones. This obscured the ethnic identity so effectively that the large Welsh part in American history has gone unnoticed, though several signers of the Declaration of Independence were Welsh, as were several presidents (including Jefferson and, on his mother's side, Lincoln), one chief justice (Charles Evans Hughes), and a high lieutenant of Al Capone's (Murray 'The Camel' Humphries).
Review, 2772 words
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