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Una Storia Segreta review:

The Providence Sunday Journal
October 7, 2001

UNA STORIA SEGRETA: Immigrants spent months in jail for their opinions.

People lost their honor, because of their last names.

This is what happened once before, when Americans, in fear and at war, turned on their own.

By Jennifer Levitz
Journal Staff Writer

The FBI swept through Federal Hill, knocking on doors: Give us your radios, your cameras, your flashlights. Your "contraband."

In one house, a mother cried, her 4-foot-10 frame shaking. She needed her radio to hear news of the war. Her four boys were in the U.S. armed forces, she said, pointing to silver stars in the window, one for each son.

On the north side of the city, Frank D'Allesandro, almost 9 and nicknamed "dottore" for his dreams of becoming a doctor, was home alone when the knocks came.

The FBI agent used big words. The little boy looked them up in the dictionary, after he handed over his BB gun.

It was December 1941. Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. The United States declared war on Japan. Benito Mussolini, the histrionic Italian dictator who promised he would create an empire, stood with Germany and Japan.

Italy was now the enemy. So were Italian-Americans.

UNA STORIA SEGRETA , some call it—the secret history of what befell Italian immigrants when the land they adopted looked on them with mistrust. Now, 60 years later, the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating possible violations of the civil rights of these Americans.

There is support among German-Americans for a similar study of the treatment of their immigrants.

But the Italians will learn of the scope of the injustices against them next month, when the Justice Department is scheduled to present the findings of the year-long study.

Explained Justice Department investigater Joanne Chiedi: "The only thing wrong was that they were Italian."

The little-known slice of wartime history is preserved in documents at the National Archives. Several boxes of papers were only recently declassified, at the request of The Journal.

These Justice Department and FBI memos, proclamations, and telephone transcripts show that the United States, fearing sabotage and shielded from constitutional laws by the executive orders of President Franklin Roosevelt, seized radios, flashlights, and other "contraband" from Italian-Americans. The government restricted their travel, and ordered 10,000 Italian residents of the West Coast and some 400 of the East Coast to leave their homes because they lived too close to waterways, where they might, the government feared, signal enemy ships.

Some 600,000 noncitizen Italian immigrants—more than 11,000 in Rhode Island—had to register as card-carrying "enemy aliens."

As many as 300 Italian-Americans across the country were interned, often based on little more than gossip. Of a Providence shoeshine man, the U.S. Department of Justice wrote:

"Subject's persistent talk in praising and boasting of the greatness of the Italian people and Italian army while employed in a shoeshining shop constitutes downright subversive activity."

The chaos of war, time, and shame have hidden the story.

But for many Italian-Americans, memories remain.

"They came for our radio," says the elderly woman sitting at a long table at Federal Hill House, where she goes for the company and the two-dollar lunch. Her name is Concetta Dell Fave Fagan.

The day the FBI knocked at the door, her mother, just 74 pounds, begged the agent not to take the family's radio. She pointed to the stars in the window. Her sons were fighting for the United States, she said; why would she do anything to hurt this country?

The agent said he had orders.

At the turn of the last century, Italian immigrants left a country torn by joblessness and social unrest. They came to the United States for a better life. By 1920, there were 60,000 of them living in Rhode Island.

Many were laborers who had settled in triple-deckers on Providence's Federal Hill, where they walked to the Holy Ghost Church for baptisms, weddings, and Mass in Italian.

The United States was your wife, the saying went; Italy, your mother. You honored both.

But in time, it grew risky to speak with passion about Italy, where Il Duce was showing himself to be a dictator. Then he signed the "Pact of Steel" with Hitler.

Embarrassment replaced the gushing tributes to Mussolini.

As Germany toppled country after country, with Italy as its ally, the U.S. entry into war against the Axis powers seemed imminent. And in America, people started looking at fellow Americans of German or Italian descent in a new way.

Ethnic ties could be seen as a sign of disloyalty to America. Rhode Island's Italian-Americans canceled their Columbus Day parade. Then, they became enemy aliens.

"All natives, citizens, denizens, and subjects of a hostile nation are alien enemies," stated Roosevelt's1940 Alien Enemy Act.

U.S. Attorney General Biddle said the phrase "enemy alien" was a legal definition, not a charge of disloyalty.

But it was. And stigma of suspicion spread even to people not classified as enemy aliens.

In Rhode Island, the FBI designated 2,147 Italian-Americans, including U.S. citizens, as "potential and active hostile individuals." Even the church, the heart of the Italian community, was suspect.

The U.S. Naval Intelligence Service reported on "alleged fascism" at 13 Rhode Island Roman Catholic churches. The report said that priests in these churches had been brought over from Italy, and that even after extended stays in the United States, they spoke little English. The Italian government, said the report, awarded the clergymen with medals and other honors, in order to keep them "sold."

The pledges of loyalty made little difference. Italians were marked.

In early 1942 , after a Senate committee reported that Japanese-Americans had aided Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government stepped up its scrutiny of enemy aliens. The report later proved false, but the damage was done, according to Larry DiStasi, who has written Una Storia Segreta, a book documenting the "secret history" of the treatment of Italian-Americans during World War II.

Most affected were Italians on the West Coast.

Attorney General Biddle ordered Japanese, Italian, and German aliens— including fishermen—away from the waterfront of San Francisco.

Guiseppe DiMaggio could not fish for a living, despite the fact that his son Joe DiMaggio, the baseball star for the Yankees, had enlisted in the Army, according to another son (a professional ball player for the Red Sox), Dominic DiMaggio. He was testifying in 1999 before a congressional committee in favor of the Wartime Violations of Italian American Civil Liberties Act.

The act, which was adopted that year, was sponsored by U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel, a Democrat from New York City, after hearing about DiStasi's book and traveling exhibit, about the "secret history."

The legislation required the government to formally acknowledge that there had been a fundamental injustice against Italian-Americans. It directed the justice department to report to Congress about immigrants who were affected.

The justice department's report, according to the act, will allow federal agencies, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, to offer such things as lectures and exhibits about that chapter of war.

The report is also expected to examine how apparent xenophobia became government policy, and how to prevent it from happening again.

During wartime, the harshest directive against the immigrants came on Feb. 19, 1942, when President Roosevelt signed infamous Executive Order 9066. It allowed the War Department to declare entire sections of the Western states off limits to immigrants from enemy nations.

The order first forced the relocation of 100,000 people of Japanese descent. Then, more than 10,000 people of Italian descent were forced out of their homes.

Seeing that the West Coast evacuations were politically toxic, Roosevelt stopped plans for evacuations on the East Coast, Fox said.

But Gen. Hugh A. Drum, head of the Eastern Defense Command, had an alternate plan for the East Coast: "exclusions," or evictions, of people who had not committed overt acts, but who participated in subversive associations or activities.

What were these associations and activities?

Some officials, including Attorney General Biddle, questioned the "reasonableness" of exclusions. He wrote: "Most cases simply involved uninfluential people who in opinions, exhibited sympathy for . . . the countries of their birth."

Along the East Coast, Italians had to turn in short-wave radios, so they could not pick up Italian news. Cameras and flashlights were contraband; being caught with invisible ink was a crime.

Frank D'Allesandro is not sure why the FBI picked his family's house to raid. The doctor, now 68, recalls his story as he sits at home, on Providence's Smith Hill. The fragrance of basil flows in from his garden; mementos from his grandfather's and father's voyage to Ellis Island rest on a shelf in his study. D'Allesandro was almost 9 years old and home alone, in the family's North End house. His father, who had a job at a shipyard, was at work. So was his grandfather, a stone mason. His mother had died.

"There were two big fellows," he begins, "and they had two or three sheets of paper. They said, 'We have the right to come in your house.' "

Little Frank—also called Dottore, for his dream of becoming a doctor—knew there would be hell to pay from his father if he let the strangers in. So he took the papers upstairs to a neighbor; they have the authority, said the neighbor.

So the two men entered the house, where they rummaged through drawers and cupboards. They took a camera, and gun parts that D'Allesandro's father had collected to build a target pistol. The men grabbed the family's flashlight. They found Frank's BB gun -- the best one on the street. He could hit pear stems, knocking pears, intact, out of the tree.

"Wait!" said Frank. "You can't take my BB gun. It's expensive—it's mine. It's my gun."

The men tried to take the short-wave radio, but they couldn't carry the clunky floor model out on their own. They'd be back.

When would he get his gun back?, asked young Frank. The gun was gone, said the men, "for the duration."

"I looked up 'duration' in the dictionary," says D'Allesandro. "I didn't understand."

The FBI agents returned for the radio on a Saturday, when Frank's father and grandfather were home. Neither of them was a U.S. citizen. The agents ordered the D'Allesandro men to carry their own radio out of the house.

Barber Amleto Cafaro was deemed a dangerous man too. Cafaro, 35, had lived in the United States since he was 11. One of nine children, he quit school in Providence in the fifth grade and shined shoes and cut hair. Filled with wanderlust, he had enlisted in Italy's Ethiopian campaign when he was in his 20s so he could see the world. He returned to try to register for the U.S. Army, which rejected him because he was not yet a U.S. citizen.His brother, however, was a citizen, and joined the Army.

One day, in August 1942, he arrived at his place of work, Menard's Barber Shop, in Warwick. He snapped open his newspaper and declared that the United States was only in the war because Wall Street and the rich manufacturers wanted to make big profits. He said he would have no part of it. Then he teased the owner's son, a G.I. on home leave, making fun of the stripes on his uniform and saying that he was going to take his girl dancing while he was away. Someone called the FBI, who began building a case.

Cafaro's 73-year-old neighbor told agents that she "frequently heard him state that Roosevelt had broken his promise not to send American boys to fight on foreign soil," shows the FBI file on Cafaro. Third-hand tales went into the FBI file as well.

"Mr. Menard also recalled arguments Cafaro had with customers in the barber shop and one in particular when he told Jerry the bartender at the Log Cabin in West Warwick that Italy was a better country than the United States. Mr. Menard said he remembered this argument because Jerry became so angry that he left the shop while Cafaro had only half finished cutting his hair," the FBI report states.

Agents arrested Cafaro at home in Silver Lake on Sept. 10, 1942. He pledged his loyalty to the United States before Providence's Alien Enemy Hearing Board. He told them he was opposed to the war only because he had relatives in the Italian Army and a brother in the U.S. service. He did not want to see them die. The board found him harmless: "The impression that he made upon the board was that he was an Italian prone to indulge in loose talk and imbued with a real love for his native land."

Again, FBI Director Hoover suggested internment. Attorney General Biddle wrote up the final order:

"Whereas, Amleto Cafaro, of Providence, Rhode Island . . . has heretofore been apprehended as being potentially dangerous to the public peace and safety of the United States.

"Whereas, the Alien Enemy Hearing Board had recommended that said alien enemy be paroled; and it appearing from the evidence before me that said alien enemy should be interned; NOW, THEREFORE, IT IS ORDERED that said alien enemy be interned.

WHILE THE BARBER and the shoeshine man sat in jail, most enemy aliens, as they were called, felt their stigma lift.

With Mussolini's fascist regime crumbling, Biddle lifted the enemy alien label from Italian

Americans before a cheering crowd at Carnegie Hall, on Columbus Day 1942.

His office had "investigated thoroughly all Italians in the nation in an unprecedented exercise of wartime vigilance," he said, in an announcement, broadcast throughout the United States and Europe.

"We found that 600,000 enemy aliens were in fact not enemies," he said.

Biddle also said that Italians were abundantly represented among the soldiers decorated for heroism after Pearl Harbor.

Mussolini was ousted from power the following September; Biddle began releasing Italian-American captives at internment camps.

THE WARTIME Violations of Italian American Civil Liberties Act, which resulted in the year-long study that will be considered by Congress next month, does not call for a formal apology or reparations, such as those given to Japanese-Americans who suffered on a much greater scale during the war.

It calls for adding the history to textbooks.

"I think this report is going to do a lot for the Italian community," said Chiedi, the Justice Department investigator who has traveled the country to collect stories. "There is still an anger, not at the government, but inside. Others say, 'If I didn't know about this, what else didn't I know?' "

DiStasi, author of Una Storia Segreta, says that even if Italians did not know what happened to their ancestors during World War II, they felt it.

Their stigma, he said, froze Italian-American culture. Immigrants felt pressure to improve their situations and become more "Americanized."

"The effects—culture loss, a sense that many Italian-Americans don't know who they are—are with us still," he says.