Excerpt from Enduring Courage by John F. Ross, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Growing wilder, the gang spent an evening breaking the gaslamp globes on every block from Livingston to Main and Miller streets. So brazen was Eddie that he stole the catcher’s mitt of an African American player in the midst of a Sunday game against a white team. Racing away from the field, he stuffed his prize under a bridge and went home, only to meet members of both teams and an angry father, who forced him to confess and then beat him badly.

Years later, Eddie would recall one fight after another, not always brought on by his pugnacity but often by his poverty and heavy Swiss-German accent. Among his classmates at East Main Street Public School, he stood out as one of the poorest—no small feat in that town jammed with struggling recent immigrants. In the depths of winter, Eddie and his siblings couldn’t go to school for lack of winter clothing. During one particularly bad time, his father sent him there wearing mismatched shoes, one brown, the other light tan, the right pointed, the left blunt-nosed. His fellow students cruelly ribbed “Dutchy” about that and practically everything else, which often ended in another fistfight. One punch broke his nose, but anything was better than passively enduring the sharp sting of shame. The thin, gangly youth didn’t sit back but seemed regularly to push things just a little bit too far. His rebelliousness never seemed fueled by malice or mean-spiritedness—rather by a fierce will to survive, and to do so by standing out and never letting others define who he was.

At school Eddie drank in the new, strong, and rising nationalism sweeping the United States. Earlier immigrant generations had brought great waves of patriotism, but this was different: America was repitching its identity in the classroom as a nation defined by its technological prowess, innovation, and limitless possibility. The Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892, “America the Beautiful” in 1895, and Memorial Day celebrations had become common. Soon-to-be-president Teddy Roosevelt rode to a victor’s glory over the Spaniards in Cuba in 1898 when Eddie was seven. Although the U.S. annexation of the Philippines from defeated Spain would set off a bloody insurrection that might have put Americans on notice of the dangers of imperialism, the country stood confidently braced for its manifest destiny. Emerging, too, were marching orders for America’s young sons, new codes of conduct articulated in such books as the humorous “Peck’s Bad Boy” series about a lovable troublemaker by journalist-politician George Wilbur Peck. In the preface to one volume, he wrote an ode to the typical American boy, who “does not cry when he gets hurt, and goes into all the dangerous games there are going, and goes in to win … who takes the hard knocks of work and play until he becomes hardened to anything that may come to him in after life.”

While Peck could imagine how the school of hard knocks would build character in middle-class children, he knew little of the extreme poverty of immigrant families in the new American cities. When Eddie and his older brother prowled the Toledo & Ohio Central (T&OC) railroad tracks with a wheelbarrow and sack, they understood that failure to return home with pieces of coal that had fallen from passing locomotives would mean a cold kitchen; even these slim pickings would leave the scrawny young brothers clutching each other at night for warmth, made the more difficult by empty bellies. Eddie worked not long after he could stand up, delivering newspapers at five years old. He kept goats to sell the thick milk to neighbors, sold rags, cadged cigarettes for himself, and hustled anything he could.

William’s inability to adapt to the New World didn’t help matters. The mounting series of reverses to his father’s pride heaped ever higher, and he took it out on his children, Eddie in particular. The big, heavy laborer hit his boy hard; Eddie later recalled him as always trying to “lick the old nick out of me with switches.” At one point, a mutt named Trixie that Eddie had adopted went furiously for William’s ankle, so aroused was she by William’s brutality toward her master. A moment that could have turned ugly suddenly broke up in laughter. Perhaps it was Lizzie who set off the giggling. She often provided the only safe port after her husband’s frequent storms ripped the household. Lizzie could remember all too well the anger of her own father against her own small defiant acts. Eddie, it seems, had inherited her proud, scrappy toughness: Like many mothers’ favorite sons, he would become the “conquistador” that Freud describes. The battered but enduring boy learned how to take his father’s bone-rattling punches without crying, to stand up to a formidable presence.

Excerpted from Enduring Courage by John F Ross. Copyright © 2014 by John F Ross. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.