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“WARTIME VIOLATION OF ITALIAN-AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES ACT” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E1350-E1351 on June 27, 1997.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
WARTIME VIOLATION OF ITALIAN-AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES ACT
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HON. ELIOT L. ENGEL
of new york
in the house of representatives
Thursday, June 26, 1997
Mr. ENGEL. Mr. Speaker, I rise today with my colleague from New York, Congressman Lazio, to introduce a bill that calls on the President, on behalf of the United States Government, to formally acknowledge that the civil liberties of Italian-Americans were violated during World War II.
In 1994, the American Italian Historical Association released a historical document entitled ``Una Storia Segreta,'' (A Secret History) that recounts the lives of Italian-Americans from 1939 to 1945. Many of its findings are disturbing. For example, on December 7, 1941, Federal agents, without regard for the basic constitutional right of due process, detained hundreds of Italian-Americans, classified them as
``dangerous aliens'' and shipped them to internment camps. By 1942, all Italian-Americans were forbidden to travel beyond a 5-mile radius of home and required to carry a photo ID. What was their crime? Suspicion that they might be dangerous in time of war because they were of Italian ancestry.
Our Government owes it to the Italian-American community to heighten public awareness of this unfortunate chapter in our Nation's history. This story needs to be told in order to acknowledge that these events happened, to remember those whose lives were unjustly disrupted and whose freedoms were violated, and to help repair the damage to the Italian-American community. This legislation calls for the formation of an advisory committee to assist in the compilation of relevant information and urges the President and Congress to provide direct financial support for the education of the American public through such initiatives as the production of a film documentary.
Most importantly, this bill requests the Department of Justice to prepare and publish a report detailing the United States Government's role in this tragic episode. The purpose of this report would be to compile facts and figures associated with the Italian-American community during the early 1940's including names of all Italian-
Americans who were forced into custodial detention, prevented from working or arrested for curfew or other minor violations, and those prevented from working. Furthermore, the report would illustrate our Government's unfortunate policies and practices during this period, including an examination of the Government's apparent denial and disregard of due process and adequate legal protection to a large segment of its citizenry.
Mr. Speaker, our legislation calls upon the President to formally acknowledge our Government's systemic denial of basic human rights and freedoms to Italian-Americans. By bringing to light this unfortunate episode we help to ensure that similar injustices and violations of civil liberties do not occur in the future.
Mr. Speaker, I have attached the opening remarks by Hon. Dominic R. Massaro, Justice of the Supreme Court of New York, during the opening ceremony of the Storia Segreta exhibit in New York. His remarks accurately portray the injustices done to the Italian-Americans during World War II. I ask you to read the Honorable Massaro's statement and urge you to cosponsor this important piece of legislation.
November 6, 1995: Opening Remarks by Hon. Dominic R. Massaro, Justice of the Supreme Court of New York, Opening Ceremony, ``Una Storia Segreta: When Italian Americans Were `Enemy Aliens,' '' Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York [CUNY], New York,
N.Y.
Dr. Scelsa, director of the Calandra Institute, our distinguished Consul General in New York, Minister Mistretta, the Governor's representative, Ms. Massimo-Berns, President Horowitz and Provost Zadorian of CUNY, our Curator Ms. Scherini, friends.
We are gathered to pay tribute to those who have suffered injustice, and to recognize that our community, in many ways, continues to suffer because of their plight. To Martini Battistessa, age 65, who threw himself in front of a passing railroad train. To Giuseppe Micheli, age 57, who cut his throat with a butcher knife. To Giovanni Sanguenetti, age 62, who hanged himself. To Stefano Terranova, age 65, who leaped to his death from a three story building. Terranova left a chilling note: ``I believe myself to be good, but find myself deceived. I don't know why.'' The
``why?'' reverberates even today. Each man, by Executive Order of the President of the United States, had been declared an ``enemy alien''; and directed by the Department of Justice to evacuate his California home.
Few readers of morning newspapers that February in 1942 probably paid much attention to the scant reportage of these last desperate acts, dwarfed as they were by news of global warfare. But these four deaths--in Richmond, Vallejo, Stockton and San Francisco--incidental as they might have seemed in the rush of momentous events in the early months of World War II, were nonetheless important pieces in a larger mosaic of an American tragedy.
``Una Storia Segreta: When Italian Americans Were `Enemy Aliens' '' memorializes that tragedy. I first viewed this exhibit in Sacramento with the lawyer, Bill Cerruti, who has done so much to make these long-buried events find their rightful place as historical reality. It is a bold exhibit, as well as a strong refusal by Americans of Italian descent to keep silent about a largely unknown story of arrest, relocation and internment during World War II. It is a story that has remained hidden for a half century because of the silence first imposed by Government, then adopted as a protective cover of shame by those scarred. The exhibit documents and records a painful episode of the Italian experience in America. It is a moving portrayal of the enormity of human deprivation and suffering brought about by Government efforts that violated basic civil rights, efforts motivated largely by ethnic bias, wartime hysteria and a failure of political leadership.
Most Americans know about the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, but few, even in our community, are aware that the Federal Government, also without adequate security reasons, restricted the freedom of 600,000 Italians, legal residents of the United States for decades, many of whom had lived here since the turn of the century and, in fact, were also American citizens.
At the time World War II broke out in 1941, Americans of Italian descent were the largest immigrant group residing in the United States. In addition to the 600,000 foreign-born, millions more were American born. They resided thoughout the country. That more Italian Americans were affected by wartime restrictions than Japanese Americans is not of the moment, for injustice can never be quantified; each instance is absolute.
I am pleased to see that the Order Sons of Italy in America's Commission for Social Justice is a co-sponsor of this noteworthy effort. For it was late in the night of December 7, 1941, a day that will indeed live in infamy, and only hours after the bombing at Pearl Harbor, that Filippo Molinari, a founding member of the Order in San Francisco, was confronted at home by three policemen. He was arrested on unspecified charges, detained at the Santa Clara County jail, and thereafter shipped to a detention center in far off Fort Missoula, Montana.
And while it was the Order that later was to galvanize Italian American opposition and political clout, first on the East Coast and then throughout the nation that eventually would end the hateful ``enemy alien'' status on Columbus Day, 1942, Molinari was not alone on that fateful night. Within 72 hours of war, thousands of community leaders, newspaper editors and teachers of the language were similarly arrested; and during the course of the year, Government edicts would be directed nationwide at all those of Italian ancestry. Italian language schools were closed; Italian American organizations were harrassed; Italian American meetings became suspect. Curfews, residence restrictions and travel curtailments were put in place; searches and seizures of personal property were conducted without the color of law--not to speak of the paranoia, bigotry and military policy that conspired on the West Coast to arrest, relocate and intern some 10,000 of our people. And in community after community across the nation, Italian immigrants were required to register and carry identification cards.
Archibald McLeisch, the poet, tells us that ``America was promise.'' ``America'' is imprecise as a descriptive geographical term, standing neither for a particular country nor a clearly defined land mass. But it perfectly defines a state of expectation. And this expectation, this promise has always equated with fundamental rights. We were the first people to found a nation on the basis of rights, and individual rights are the foundation of the American identity. No society recognizes a greater range of individual rights entitled to fulfillment under its laws than the United States. Even our failures as a nation are measured in terms of rights. The Declaration of Independence offered the promise of a Government based on rights, and the Constitution not only enumerated them, but guaranteed them as
``inalienable,'' pre-existing rights anterior to and superior to the state.
Yet these inalienable rights were violated with impunity in the early days of World War II, on the flimsiest of accusation, without any finding of wrongdoing or basis in fact. It would be correct to say that the crime was merely being of Italian ancestry. This on the heels of a zenophobic, then existing national origins quota system that had discriminatorily sought to exclude our grandparents as immigrants for two previous decades.
A powerful message was sent and received in Italian American communities nationwide: Italian language and culture, and those who prompted either or both, were not desirable, and represented an inimical danger to the American way. The language was silenced; the culture was suppressed. And the effects remain: the decimation of great national organizations, the loss of Italian language facility by succeeding generations, the cultural amnesia of many Italian Americans, the super-patriotism of many others.
Thousands were forced from their homes, denied the opportunity to pursue their livelihoods, their businesses closed, their assets dissipated, their lives disrupted. And the arrests, the relocations, the internments--these were accomplished without due process of law, notwithstanding the fact that not a single instance was ever documented of an individual of Italian ancestry aiding the enemy, committing an act of espionage, sabotage or fifth column activity. On the contrary, upwards of one half million Italian American men-at-arms, the greatest number of any American ethnic group, were at that moment battling on two war fronts to preserve liberty and justice for all. Clearly, Government claims of military necessity at the time have since been demolished by a generation of scholars; indeed, by the graphic illustrations presented by this exhibit.
The conduct of the Federal Government toward persons who had done no wrong is unquestionably one of the most shameful in the history of our Republic. This grave and fundamental injustice of treatment of those of Italian ancestry has yet to be acknowledged; in point of fact, it is truly unknown or purposely ignored, or even worse, flatly denied. The exhibit informs the public about this wartime tragedy. Not only does it pay tribute to those who were victimized and stigmatized, but it testifies in significant respects to the contemporary state of Italian Americana. Most important, perhaps, it contributes to a better understanding of how the venom of intolerance can give rise to the maelstrom of persecution to make for such events; and how respect for the rule of law can prevent such occurrences vis-a-vis any minority group, regardless of race, creed, color or national origin.
The American Italian Historical Society is to be commended for organizing a presentation that sheds new light on an historically and socially relevant experience, as is the Calandra Institute of this great University for bringing it to the spiritual capital of the Italian in America--the City of New York. I thank both these distinguished academic entities for having invited me to open it here today.
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