Pages from the History of the New York Swiss

Authors

Dr. Heinz K. Meier, Professor of History at the Old Dominion College, Norfolk, Va.

Keywords

Swiss American Historical Society, lecture

Abstract

In the course of my work on U.S.-Swiss relations I often comes across the name of New York and the activities of the Swiss living in that city or its neighborhood. New York was the place where the earliest permanent official contact was established between the two countries when a consulate was opened under Henri Casimer de Rham of Ynerdon in the summer of 1822. New York was the first consular district in the U.S. to become a permanent consulate general in 1933. New York was the place that received first the majority of Swiss immigrants to the United States and always retained a large number of them. It has the oldest type of private self-help organization, the Swiss immigrants to the United States and always retained a large number of them. It has the oldest type of private self-help organization, the Swiss Benevolent Society, founded in 1832. Today it has the perhaps largest agglomoration of Swiss capital and industrial and scientific know how anywhere outside of Switzerland. Certainly to write a history of the New York Swiss would be a vast and worthwhile undertaking. yet I am not engaged in such an undertaking. All I am trying to do today is to give you a few glimpses of some periods of this history, special events I encountered in researching among the diplomatic records in the National Archives in Washington and in the Bundesarchiv in Bern. New York usually appears prominently in these records during politically critical times. There were a number of such times in our century.

Recommended Citation

Meier, Dr. Heinz K. (1968) "Pages from the History of the New York Swiss," Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter: Vol. 4: Iss. 1, Article 6.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/sahs_newsletter/vol4/iss1/6