The Fifty Year Tradition of the International Center of the Capital Region

A talk on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the ICCR

by

the Honorable Jack McEneny

Assemblyperson, NYS Assembly

November 30, 2006

When it was founded in 1956 in a brownstone on Willett Street in Albany’s historical Center Square, the International Center of the Capital Region (ICCR) was a very different kind of organization.   It was a type of genteel International Geographic Society, a wonderful place for people that were interested in travel and in cultural exchange, people who wanted to learn about other people, people who, even in those days,  who considered themselves citizens of the world.  Many of them were the children or grandchildren of immigrants, and they wanted to ease the experience for other people, they wanted a connection with their heritage.  

Then, in the 1960s, something different happened in this country, and that was the Vietnam War.  The war produced a great number of refugees, people who were under extreme stress.  By edict of the Federal government, when these people were accepted as refugees, they were deliberately spread across the country.  A great many of them came here, and a great many of these also left.  And one good reason to leave was the cold; the winter was difficult for people who’d had generations of much thinner blood and in a much warmer climate.

What the ICCR essentially did was drop everything to resettle refugees.   A lot of things were put on hold.  We went from welcoming Ph.D.s from their studies in Paris to welcoming rural people from isolated areas and trying to settle them in America.  This dominated everybody’s time.  It absorbed the volunteers, and we never got back into the role that we had played in the late 50’s and early 60’s.  We were in an office on Russell Road in uninspiring space, taking money from the Federal government for political refugees, for language classes and for citizenship classes.  The same idealism was there, but we had moved into a totally different and somewhat of a bureaucratic role in the community.  We were at the mercy of outside funding, of volunteer funding.  While the same basic goal was still there – to be part of the global community -- everything that had gone on in a cultural mode began to disappear and the academic interest started to wane.  [because] We looked like a government agency.  

Within the past year, there has been a total revamping of what the ICCR should do, keeping to our mission to assist those who have had a hard time resettling in this country but at the same time going back to recapture that extremely valuable cultural exchange that only the ICCR was there to offer people.

When I was growing up in Albany, if you lived in, say, Cohoes, forget it:  you were almost an hour away through several towns on city streets with many stop lights, no arterials to connect us.  People who talked about regionalization in the 1960s were not  necessarily on the cutting edge:  they were ahead of their time.  A generation later, we have the Internet, the superhighway system, all kinds of means of communication.  Eventually, even people my age are being drawn kicking and screaming into the 21st century, thanks to the tutoring of their children.  We are in a totally different world.  

I  traveled as a Peace Corps volunteer in South America back in the 60s, I’ve traveled to Central Europe, I was over in Scotland last summer, and you keep running into different people who really care about the world.  Now, I think that the national administration has not had that international feeling and that’s cost us a lot of problems.  After 9/11, we had the empathy of the entire world and all that seems to have fallen apart.

But it’s still there.  People know average Americans because they know them, because they can get into our homes, thanks to the ICCR.  Our world is getting smaller and smaller, and there are people of good will out there who are involved in cultural exchanges.  As some of you may know, I serve as acting Speaker when the Speaker is not there, and I get to meet with all the foreign visitors to the Assembly.  We’ve had any number of visitors.  Thanks to the ICCR, the U.S. State Department’s International Visitor Program has introduced Albany to journalists, teachers, government professionals and many others from across the globe who are selected by our Embassies to come meet Americans.  The University of New York (SUNY) central administration also has an international aid program for parliaments and growing democracies.  We have had groups from Jordan, from Kyrgyzstan, from South America, Asia, Africa.  They come here to study our system.  I have found that people are intensely interested in what’s going on in America.  And people like yourselves are intensely interested in what’s going on abroad.  

There are academic and cultural reasons for this.  We are very fortunate that SUNY has a number of universities abroad, in Turkey, in Jordan, where classes are taught in English.  In the middle ages, there were many more languages spoken in Europe than there are today.  But of course you could go to the university in Paris or in Salamanca because everybody spoke Latin; that was the academic language.  We here in America are very fortunate that, whether it’s in  Korea or Turkey, English is becoming the international language.  This means that we have an international advantage.  But we also have an international responsibility.  People are looking to us for leadership.

The other thing we’ve seen in recent years is that our businesses are becoming international.  Years ago, Albany International was the only business we thought of as international but we weren’t sure why; then they explained that they were in Australia, in Scandanavia and so on.   We had no idea how international our businesses were, and we certainly had no idea how international they could become.  Today, all our our industries are international, and it is very important for simple economic survival that we understand that we are part of a global community.  If you go out to the State University at Albany today, you see Sematech and Tokyo Electron, part of a computer technology business consortium that has invested about $1 billion at the University.  There will be much more than that invested up in Malta in Saratoga County.

We are a very, very international people, and all that we’ve been needing is people to people exchange.  The International Visitor Program relies on organizations like the ICCR to not only link foreign professionals with their American counterparts but to open our homes to our visitors.   Rotary International has also always been invaluable in bringing people together.  There are many fine service organizations, but Rotary International has always been on the cutting edge, even in their name.  People need to get to know people.  

Most of the insurmountable problems in the world can be solved if people get to know each other, face to face.  It is very easy to hate a person you’ve never seen because you have some negative stereotypes; they become cardboard people and you make a lot of wrong decisions.  It’s harder to hate a person that you get to know, a human being with a family and the same needs, aspirations and goals that you have.  When you put a human face on the world, you create the brotherhood in a person’s mind that he might not otherwise see.

Most of you know me wearing other hats -- Albany County historian, writer, and all that  --- but years ago I ran the State Urban Cultural Parks system.  I was the first full-time director of the Urban Cultural Parks, also known as Heritage Parks.  Urban Cultural Parks had to have themes – defense, industry, and so on -- and we brought in a consultant to help us pick one.   This is another reason that international visitors are so important.  You sometimes need to see the world through other eyes, without the roots and ties and built-in biases, someone who looks at your community through new eyes.  So, we hired a consultant to help us choose a theme for the City of Albany which was being added to the Urban Parks system.  She didn’t like any of the approved themes from which we were supposed to choose, so I asked her what theme she would make up, if she could.  She said:  “I like:  crossroads and community.”

Some cities, they’re all community.  Maybe it’s like that in Peoria.  I’ve never been there, so I don’t know.

Some cities, they have a port on a river.  But in Albany, we don’t have a river, have an estuary, a tidal estuary that goes up and down four feet or more every day.  People look at their lovely beach and after a few hours it’s gone.  The tide comes in and out here just as it does in New York harbor.  We don’t have a port, we have a window to the world.  People from all over the world come here through international commerce, a tradition that goes back some 300 or 400 years.  The number of flags of different nations in the Port of Albany is always remarked on; It was not unusual in the mid 1850s to see flags of a dozen or dozen and a half nations.

We have a window on the world.

Most communities, they have a community hospital.  We have Albany Medical College that was doing open heart surgery before it became more common; whose experts are sent off  to testify in court about the OJ Simpson case; where Medgar Evers’ body was sent for an autopsy after he was killed in Mississippi.  It’s more than just a hospital.  It’s a medical college, one of the oldest in the country, with students from all over.

A lot of places have a state college, what used to be the state teachers college.  We have one of the four State University centers here in Albany, where over 200 Chinese students are enrolled here from China, where a satellite dish keeps us up to date with what’s happening in Bosnia, where we have a Latin American studies program.  Because of the university system, I’ve had lunch with the Vice President of Bolivia, the first indigenous leader of that country.  That was about 14 years ago. That doesn’t normally happen in every American city: it does here as a result of our excellent academic system.

We also have the Writers Institute, founded by Bill Kennedy with this Pulitzer Prize, Book Circle Award and McArthur Foundation grant monies, that brings in some of the finest literary minds in the world.  It’s not unusual for someone from Latin America or elsewhere in the developing world bring their thoughts to Albany.

Albany has that crossroads and community quality, that so-called “Smallbany,” where people ask you where you went to eighth grade, what your mother’s maiden name was, who’s your second cousin.  That is a very warm and familiar part of the community.  At the same time, you have the constant friction of new people arriving, people from the outside.  Whoever occupies the Governor’s Mansion on Eagle Street is immediately assumed to be a potential vice president or president of the United States.  

We are so much more than a city of under 100,000.  And how appropriate is it that, here of all places, because of our many international interests, that the ICCR, with its proud roots and its changing role for over half a century, should continue to thrive and prosper, because Albany above all should be part of this global community.  There’s nothing but positive out there, people of good will who see people as human beings with goals and aspirations.  We have so much more in common than we have differences.  

And Albany is also an interesting community because people have come from all over.  America is a country that doesn’t make you give up your indentity. I’m here for generations, but I’m still Irish, don’t worry.   We maintain our heritage.  Particulary since the Roots series was on TV, we know that people have come from all backgrounds, coming from the worst and most stressful conditions, receiving the worst possible greeting from this country, nevertheless struggled, persevered and survived with their families and still are who they are, very much Americans but with proud roots and proud heritage.  

Only in America can we maintain our heritage -- however unique, however different – and still be very proudly American.  We bridge this gap between the people who were already here, people who have been here for generations, and those who have been here for a little while, and new people who continue to enrich the blood of America.  This is an extremely important thing.  

A year ago, it looked like we might lose the ICCR, and there was a great void out there, a threatening void that we wanted to stop from ever occurring.  Judging from the turnout here tonight, the enthusiastic quality of the citizens, new citizens and old, who have come forward to rally around the ICCR, I think we have a very good chance.