Welcome to the American Story. This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

This story is one in a series about an immigrant boy who became my good friend

and holds a special place in the history of the

Claremont Institute.

He was born American but in the wrong place.

I call this one the crisis of man.

In the spring of 1946, Alberkamu was in New York City on the only visit he would ever make to America.

The famous, handsome, French intellectual and freedom fighter gave a lecture to some 1500 people packed into Columbia University's Macmillan Academic Theater.

He was telling these generally young and naive Americans about the experience of Europe and Europeans over the past generation.

From the great war and the rise of communism and fascism, through the Great Depression,

the terrible Spanish Civil War, to the Second World War, which had just ended.

This experience, which of course included the Holocaust, he called La Chriz du Lame, the Christ. the crisis of man. The

of man. The experience of such terrifying evil

could only mean that life was absurd.

New Yorkers don't give directions, but if they did,

they would tell you that while the celebrated French freedom fighter

was lecturing at Columbia.

Just down the street at the New School for Social Research, another European, an unknown,

diminutive cigarette smoking Jewish immigrant from Nazi Germany was teaching very different

lessons to a Jewish student from Long Island via Yale University who in his spare time was

a golden gloves boxer and a violinist.

The immigrant teacher was teaching the American student that the doctrines of Albert Camus

...