After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, more than 600,000 Italian Americans and Italian immigrants found themselves caught in a xenophobic dragnet that involved mass surveillance, unprecedented harassment and, in some cases, secret internment.
After years of isolationism, America was suddenly thrust into World War II, and at the time, the federal government felt it needed to neutralize what proved to be an imaginary threat.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt deemed many of our ancestors as “enemy aliens,” and hundreds of thousands of Japanese and German immigrants were also targeted.
They were instructed to only speak English;.they lost their jobs, they were relocated and they weren’t allowed to own everyday items, like flashlights and radios, as the government feared such things could be used to signal and communicate with Nazi sympathizers.
All the while, more than one million Italian American soldiers — far more than any other U.S. ethnic group — were fighting the real enemy overseas.
Italian fishermen along the West Coast were stripped of their boats and livelihoods; one such fisherman was Joe DiMaggio’s father, Giuseppe.
In 1942, Giuseppe was banned from working in San Francisco’s coastal wharves, despite living in the U.S. for 40 years. This decision came just six months after his son set the still-unbroken 56-game hitting streak, according to PBS.
The irony was galling, and Giuseppe would pass away seven years later in 1949. Joe’s mother, Rosalie, would die from a long battle with cancer in 1951.
The extent of the persecution of Italian immigrants and Italian Americans during World War II was only revealed in 2001, when Congress was presented with a report on their treatment in response to the Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties Act of 2000, according to HISTORY.com.
Today, the persecution and internment of our ancestors is a relatively unknown episode in the history of World War II, in part because of the humiliation and silence of the Italian Americans forced to live through it.
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