Una Storia

Our Calabrian Magazine

Una Storia Segreta
By Larry DiStasi
[IMAGE]

Not long after I joined the American Italian Historical Association's Western Chapter in the mid-seventies, I began to run across occasional references to the terrible things endured by Italian Americans during World War II. Having grown up in Connecticut without even a glimmer of this, I was intrigued, and eager to find out more. The trouble was, the more I asked, the less people would tell me. When I proposed a program to shed some light on what had happened, I was assured by members of the association that none of those involved would talk about it:

"There are still bad feelings in San Francisco about those years." Eventually, I managed to pick up a few tidbits. My friend Gian Banchero showed me a radio he said had been hidden under his bed during the war. "We couldn't have short wave radios at the time, and my grandfather didn't want to turn ours in," he laughed, "so he hid it." I also heard stories about curfews, about Italian Americans forced to move, about some being interned, about one of our officers, an Italian teacher at UC Berkeley, who had done some sort of clandestine work for the government that made her a reviled figure in San Francisco. All this amazed me. Why was this unknown? Why had I, an Italian American studying our history, been completely ignorant about this, arguably the most powerful episode affecting more people than any event in the hundred-year saga of Italians in America?
Why indeed. For what I, like hundreds, thousands of others, would find out in the next few years, was that my ignorance was not due to the fact that nothing like this had happened in the East, or that my family had somehow escaped unscathed. No. What I would find out was that this was a secret that my family, and my government, were perfectly content, though for vastly different reasons, to keep hidden. And what I have to say now is what Allen Ginsberg said a few years after the wartime when he wrote his poem, America:
America this is quite serious.
I mean that my own uncle, my father's older brother living blocks away from us in Bridgeport, Connecticut, had his home entered and his short wave radio dismantled. And even after I had been working for two years on the exhibit, Una Storia Segreta, to make this story known, I never knew.
I mean that Bill Cerruti, even after he had been writing about this story for three years, and sponsored two appearances of Una Storia Segreta in Sacramento, never knew his own grandfather had been affected, had even lost his business as a result.
I mean that Marylou Harris, until she saw a newspaper report on our exhibit, had always considered her uncle's imprisonment during the wartime an isolated event; guessing that perhaps he was siezed and held at Tanforan because as a single Italian male he was somehow suspect; all of which speculation her son dismissed with contempt, telling his mother to stop imagining things which he, a high school student, knew to be untrue because "I study American history at school and none of this is in the books."
I mean that even now, Italian America at large is so uncertain about these events that a bill, HR 2090, introduced in the U.S. Congress in 1997 merely to get official acknowledgment (not reparations; not an apology; just an acknowledgment) that injustices took place, and that the Justice Department should issue a report about them, has languished in Congress for lack of visible support.
About which more later. For now, let us simply look at the known facts (and I emphasize "known" not because the facts are in doubt, but because we are aware of only those events and people which we have so far managed to bring to light; hundreds of variations on the known facts no doubt exist, but are still being kept "secret" in Italian American homes everywhere). Still, what we do know is this:
In the years leading up to World War II, the U.S. Government began making plans to control those Americans with roots in the nations it might soon be at war with. Immediately suspect were those who were unnaturalized, those who when war broke out would be designated "enemy aliens." There were over 600,000 such residents with roots in Italy, and as a first step, all had to register as aliens in 1940 to comply with the Smith Act. Then the FBI began keeping dossiers on hundreds of those who it thought might be "dangerous." Newspaper editors. Radio broadcasters. Members of a group called the Ex-Combattenti, veterans who had served Italy in WWI. Officers of Italian American organizations like the Sons of Italy. Actors, poets, singers. Those whose names appeared in Italian American newspapers.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, these preparations came to fruition. Even before the United States declared war on Italy, the FBI went into action. Agents surrounded the homes of people like Filippo Molinari of San Jose. Without allowing him to put on jacket or shoes, they took Molinari into custody. After a perfunctory hearing at which no lawyer was allowed him, Molinari-suspect because he was an ex-combattenti who sold subscriptions to the Italian American newspaper L'Italia-found himself debarking from a train at the internment camp in Missoula, Montana, still wearing his slippers in subzero temperature. His wife had no idea where he was.
Hundreds of others were similarly interned. Most would spend the next two years at a series of internment camps, being moved around for unknown reasons, separated from their families, many of whom had no other means of support. The irony in all this is that several such internees, including Angelo Bacoccina of San Francisco, would be asked, upon their release, to teach Italian to OSS agents preparing for the invasion of Italy. So "dangerous" one day that they had to live behind barbed wire, the internees were entrusted with teaching secret agents the next.
Bad as it was, this internment phase affected less than three hundred people of Italian descent. The next phase, registration and restriction, took its toll on more than half a million. Beginning in late December and continuing into January of 1942, all Italian Americans without citizenship (most were older immigrants, the majority of them women with little incentive to learn English) were ordered to go to nearby post offices and re-register as 'enemy aliens.' This meant they had to be photographed, fingerprinted, and questioned about their relatives in Italy, their personal habits, and more; ordered to carry at all times the pink booklets identifying them as 'enemy aliens;' told they could not travel more than 5 miles without a permit, and could not visit army bases where many had sons in the service; informed that any home with an 'enemy alien' had to surrender all "contraband"-cameras, flashlights, banners and flags from Italy, weapons of any kind, and shortwave radios-and warned that those who did not turn in such items were subject to immediate incarceration.
Over the next months, police and FBI agents raided thousands of homes in Italian neighborhoods searching for contraband. Suspicion grew of neighbors informing on each other. Even speaking Italian might be suspect, so signs sprouted in stores: "No Italian spoken for the duration." Some people were so unnerved by all this that they burned books written in Italian for fear that these could get them in trouble as well.
By this time, things were going badly in the war against Japan, and the government, particularly in California, was looking for still more control. The commander of the Western Defense Zone, General DeWitt, raised fears about sabotage by 'enemy aliens' and by February succeeded in convincing the federal government to impose the severest restrictions of all on enemy aliens in the west. First, a prohibited zone of roughly five miles along the California coast, and including 'sensitive' installations like railroads, was declared off limits to all enemy aliens. They could neither live nor work in such zones. This meant that some 10,000 resident aliens of cities like Pittsburg, Monterey, Alameda, Los Angeles, and other towns up and down the coast had to leave their homes and move to inland areas. Mothers who were aliens had to leave their families. Their children under fourteen had to go with them, but those over fourteen did not. In Pittsburg, some 2,000 Italian Americans had to evacuate. The oldest was 97-year-old Placido Abono, evacuated on a stretcher. Bettina Troia had so much trouble finding a place to rent that she ended up living in a chicken coop. Sons in the service, like Nicky Buccellato, came home on leave to find their houses empty.
Those who were lucky enough to live outside the prohibited zone appeared safe for a time, but it was not to last. In early March the government subjected them to virtual house arrest: it imposed a curfew requiring all enemy aliens to be in their homes by 8PM and to remain there until 6AM next morning. Some 50,000 Italian Americans in California were allowed to travel to and from work, but that was about it. Bakers, restaurant workers, garbage collectors, and farmers all found themselves severely handicapped. To be caught out during curfew hours (Aristide Bertolini of Santa Rosa tried to deliver some tomatoes to a customer and was imprisoned for two months) was to be apprehended and detained.
Fishermen were also hard hit. Those without citizenship-and they made up a large part of the crews in Boston, Monterey, Pittsburg, San Francisco and San Diego-could not fish at all. Joe DiMaggio's father was one of them. Many boat owners, necessarily citizens, had their boats confiscated by the Navy. In Monterey, several owners were summarily ordered to deliver their boats to the Coast Guard in San Francisco; upon arrival, they were told to make their way home as best they could. Often, the boats were returned in unusable condition.
The restrictions lasted until October 12, 1942. On that date, the Attorney General of the United States, Francis Biddle, announced that since Italian Americans had proven their loyalty, the restrictions were off. Except for those interned-who would have to await their release until Fall of 1943 when Italy surrendered; and the few dozen naturalized citizens, also on the 'dangerous' list, who had been excluded from cities like San Francisco only weeks before-Italian Americans were no longer under suspicion.
What followed was widespread rejoicing. And then the attempt to get on with the business of living normally. And finally, in almost every case, the determined attempt to forget. The time of suspicion and fear was over. Don't speak about it. Don't think about it. Don't tell anyone about it. Let it slip quietly into the past unnoticed, where it can cause no trouble. Which collective amnesia historians, the U.S. Government, journalists, and most of America has been quite content with.
The result is that for fifty years, almost no one outside the families of those directly affected, and in some cases not even they, knew anything about this, one of the most significant and painful episodes in the long history of Italians in America. It may not be too much to say that until that fact and the reasons for it are understood, there will exist in the Italian American cultural body an ever-unhealed scar.
That is why HR 2090, the Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties Act, is important. Initiated by John Calvelli of NIAF's Public Policy Institute, and introduced in August 1997 by Congressmen Eliot Engel and Rick Lazio, both of New York (with a companion bill introduced by Senators D'Amato and Chafee in the Senate), HR 2090 calls on the President to publicly acknowledge that Italian Americans on the homefront suffered injustices as a result of the restrictions. It also asks the Justice Department to issue a report so that historians may finally discover all that happened during those years. This would allow for a full airing of this episode via books and documentaries, and would finally make it an official part of the historical record, one that can no longer be routinely denied.
The issue is crucial. The issue is a people uniting. The issue is a people finding its voice. The issue is Italian Americans making it known that it is no longer acceptable to deny them their rightful place in the institutional fabric of the country they have done so much to create.
copyright © Jan. 1999
Lawrence DiStasi

Lawrence DiStasi is the President of the American Italian Historical Association's Western Regional Chapter, and project director of Una Storia Segreta, a traveling exhibit about the WWII restrictions on Italian Americans.

For More Information.
Una Storia Segreta: When Italian-Americans we...
NB: HR 2090 was introduced in the last congress and will have to be reintroduced in the new one. Once the number of the new bill is known, we will provide that information to readers so they may write or call their representatives to demand that they support the Wartime Violation of Italian

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