Article
Enemy Aliens: The Forgotten Wartime Story of Italian America
In 1942, while their sons fought for the United States, some 600,000 Italian immigrants were branded enemy aliens — placed under curfew, forced from their homes and, in some cases, locked away. For decades, almost no one talked about it. In the spring of 1942, Giuseppe DiMaggio could no longer go to work. The Sicilian-born fisherman had spent decades hauling crab out of San Francisco Bay, and his son Joe was the most famous baseball player in America. But Giuseppe had never become a citizen, and the waterfront at Fisherman’s Wharf had been declared off limits to people like him. He was, in the language of the federal government, an enemy alien. He was far from alone. After Pearl Harbor, more than 600,000 Italian nationals living in the United States — the largest group of foreign-born residents in the country — were classified as enemy aliens. Most had lived here for decades. Many had children and grandchildren in American uniforms. The story of Japanese American incarceration is, rightly, better known. The story of what happened to Italian Americans was, for half a century, barely told at all. Booklets, Curfews and Idle Boats The rules arrived quickly. Italian noncitizens were required to register at their local post office, be fingerprinted and photographed, and carry identification booklets at all times. They had to surrender shortwave radios, cameras, flashlights and firearms. They could not travel more than a few miles from home without permission. On the West Coast, the restrictions went further. Some 52,000 Italian nationals in California were placed under a curfew that kept them indoors from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. More than 10,000 were forced to leave homes in zones near the coast, military bases and power plants — grandmothers who had lived in the same Monterey or Pittsburg, California, house for 30 years, packing up and moving inland. Fishing boats owned by Italian families were seized for Navy use or left idle, and whole fleets went quiet. For some, it went further still. Using lists compiled before the war, federal agents arrested Italian community leaders, newspaper editors, language-school teachers and members of social clubs. Several thousand were taken into custody, and roughly 250 were held for months or years in internment camps in Montana, Texas, Oklahoma and elsewhere. Among them was Ezio Pinza, the celebrated bass of the Metropolitan Opera, who was arrested in 1942 and held on Ellis Island for nearly three months before he was cleared. “Don’t speak the enemy’s language. Speak American.” — Wartime poster in Italian neighborhoods Silencing a Language The damage was not measured only in arrests. Posters in Italian neighborhoods warned residents not to speak “the enemy’s language.” Families who had spoken Italian at the dinner table for generations switched to English, or to silence. Children were told to stop answering their grandparents in dialect. Social clubs closed, Italian-language papers lost readers, and parents gave their American-born kids names that would not draw attention. Many historians and descendants point to this moment as the point when Italian as a household language began to disappear from much of Italian America. It was a kind of assimilation, but not an entirely voluntary one. The lesson many families absorbed was that being visibly Italian was a risk, and they passed that lesson down by what they no longer said. A Columbus Day Reprieve The policy did not last as long as it might have. Italian Americans were too numerous, too woven into the war effort and too important a voting bloc to keep under suspicion indefinitely. On October 12, 1942 — Columbus Day — Attorney General Francis Biddle announced at Carnegie Hall that Italian nationals would no longer be classified as enemy aliens. Curfews were lifted and travel limits eased. A year later, Italy surrendered and joined the Allies. The timing was political, and the relief was real. But some internees remained in custody well after the announcement, and the families who had been uprooted did not get their months back. Fishermen who lost a season, shopkeepers who lost customers and parents who lost the habit of speaking their own language were simply expected to move on. Most did, quietly. Breaking the Silence For decades, the episode lived mostly in family stories. That began to change in the 1990s, when researchers, oral historians and descendants started collecting testimony and pressing Washington for an accounting. In 2000, Congress passed the Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties Act, which acknowledged the restrictions and directed the Justice Department to prepare a report on them. In 2010, California’s legislature formally apologized for the treatment of Italian Americans in the state during the war. There was no reparations program, and the episode still rarely appears in textbooks. But the acknowledgment mattered to the shrinking number of people who remembered it — the children who watched their fathers lose their boats, or who learned not to speak Italian in public. Italian American Heritage Month tends to celebrate arrival and achievement, and there is plenty of both to celebrate. But the wartime story belongs in the record too. It is a reminder of how quickly a community can be recast as a threat, how a language can vanish within a single generation, and how much was asked of people who had already given their sons to the fight. Giuseppe DiMaggio got back on the water eventually. Many families never got back what they lost.