Il Progresso found its new mission in promoting Italian-American war efforts and regularly ran features of newsworthy men and women. The newspaper introduced readers to Margaret Ferrone, inventor of a machine that accelerated the production of fuses used to detonate bombs; Teresa Daniello, who wrote not only to her five sons in service but to their fellow servicemen as well, penning thirty-two hundred letters; and Carmela Zarillo, a senior citizen who repaired asbestos gloves for factory workers.
Italian Americans even gave the country a “Rosie the Riveter.” As the song of the same name played on the radio and the “We Can Do It!” poster—whose iconic face later became known as Rosie the Riveter—inspired women to join the war production effort while the men fought overseas, Rosina (“Rosie”) Bonavita was working at a GM plant in Tarrytown, New York. Her future husband had joined the navy, three of her brothers were in combat zones, and Rosie saw it as her duty as a riveter to assemble war equipment at record-breaking speed. Morale in the plant had been terribly low, and, according to her son, Rosie decided to “perk everyone up” with some assembly-line wizardry. She and her partner set a national record in 1943 for building the wing of a Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber. Between the hours of midnight and 6:00 a.m., Rosie and her partner Jennie Fiorito, bandannas tied around their heads like the determined woman in the famous poster, drilled over nine hundred holes and drove in 3,345 rivets to assemble the bomber’s wing. Another pair of riveters eventually broke this record, but Rosie was not one to give up her title. She set a new speed standard, assembling a wing in a mere four hours and ten minutes with another partner, Susan Esposito. Bonavita, however, always disliked the iconic image of Rosie the Riveter that was depicted in the “We Can Do It!” poster, designed to inspire women to join the war production effort. She said that she never had those kinds of muscles.
Rosina (“Rosie”) Bonavita, Italian Americans’ own “Rosie the Riveter” (right), saw it as her duty to assemble war equipment at record-breaking speed.
A few prominent Italian Americans aided the war effort by trying to coax Italians to join the Allies. The Roman-born journalist Natalia Danesi Murray worked at NBC studios and broadcast The Italian Hour via shortwave radio to Italy. Murray began her broadcasts earlier in the dictator’s regime to expose Mussolini’s oppression and to introduce an American voice to Italy (conductor Arturo Toscanini was a frequent guest on her radio show). After Italy declared war on the United States, Murray reminded Italians of their close ties to America and their many relatives here, trying to win their support for the Allies. Mussolini’s team branded Murray “the voice of Italo-American anti-Fascism.” Her son, the writer William Murray, nicknamed his mother “Tokyo Rosa.”
Italian Americans showed their patriotism at World War II parades.
Similarly, New York’s indefatigable mayor began a shortwave radio program, Mayor La Guardia Calling Rome, in which he roused Italians to free themselves from the Fascist yoke of Mussolini. Beginning and concluding each broadcast with the words “Patience and Fortitude,” La Guardia spoke enthusiastically about American advances while encouraging the Resistance by telling Italians that Hitler intended for their country to fall so that he could assume control of its machinery, ships, and industry. La Guardia’s exhortations were extraordinarily popular among Italians yearning for a voice from America.
The filmmaker Frank Capra joined American propaganda efforts, putting together a series of films for servicemen called Why We Fight. Capra’s films were careful to exclude traditional stereotypes and took the point of view that Mussolini, not the Italian people, was the enemy to be stopped.
There were also many Italian-American war heroes, and the pages of Il Progresso well documented their deeds: the ace pilot Don Gentile from Ohio; the Minnesotan Willibald C. Bianchi, among the first servicemen to win the congressional Medal of Honor fighting in the Pacific; New Jersey war hero John Basilone, who plowed through Japanese enemy fire to rescue two other marines; and Californian Allen V. Martini, a World War II pilot who dubbed his plane the “Dry Martini” and was credited with shooting down twenty-two Nazi warplanes in only fifteen minutes.
The singer Tony Bennett, who served in World War II, with his mother.
The government, reaching out to Italian-American anti-Fascist organizations, also recruited Italian Americans for secret intelligence missions. One of the largest operations took place in Sicily, where Italian-American soldiers used their knowledge of the language, customs, and local dialect to gather information. The Sicilians, much more comfortable with the presence of Italian Americans than that of German troops, provided the men with invaluable information as the Allies ultimately liberated Sicily.
Italian-American wives waited patiently while their husbands served in the US military. In this photo, an Italian-American mother celebrating the second birthday of her son placed a picture of her husband stationed in the South Pacific on the table.
The Battle of the Bulge and the Battle of Normandy in Europe, Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima in the Pacific—in all the major battles of World War II, Italian Americans played vital roles. When, on September 2, 1945, the Allies declared the war officially over, Italian Americans, overwhelmed with joy and finally seeing an end to years of oppressive anxiety, welcomed back their fiancés, husbands, and sons.
The war broadened the lives of servicemen in ways previously unimagined. Sent across the world, they learned foreign customs and saw exotic lands, perhaps for the only time in their lives. Some married European and Asian women; others took advantage of securing an education or a coveted home through the GI Bill. Italian Americans would also need to put behind them the jeers they had heard and marginalization they had experienced during the lowest point in their New World history, but now their American identity felt more tangible than ever.
With Italy’s surrender, Italian Americans were joyful, welcoming back their fiancés, husbands, and sons.
Hector Boiardi
Second-generation Italian-American mothers, accustomed to their mammas rolling dough for the pasta, usually harrumphed at their children’s request for Chef Boy-Ar-Dee canned ravioli, America’s version of Italian food. Did they realize that beneath the white toque on the label was a talented immigrant Italian chef who had begun his career making a sauce that used only imported olive oil and Parmesan cheese?
Ettore Boiardi was a fifteen-year-old orphan in 1914 when he came to America from Piacenza in Emilia-Romagna, today considered Italy’s leading food region. His older brother Paul had found a job as a waiter at New York’s Plaza Hotel and soon became maître d’ of the hotel’s stylish Persian Room restaurant. He sent for his brothers, Ettore (who would anglicize his name to Hector) and Mario, both eager for a fresh start in the New World. Paul found Ettore work in the hotel kitchen, which started him up a ladder of jobs that included sous-chef at a New York Italian restaurant called Barbetta; a stint at the Greenbrier hotel in West Virginia, where he catered the large wedding for President Woodrow Wilson’s second marriage; and head chef at a hotel restaurant in Cleveland, the city he would make his permanent home.
In 1924, Hector opened his own restaurant on the side, Il Giardino d’Italia. The customers loved the fresh ingredients in his sauce, and Hector began making them take-home packages: he poured the tomato sauce into glass milk bottles, wrapped up some dried spaghetti, and threw in a container of Parmesan cheese. Soon he realized the potential market for the jarred sauce, and with his two brothers he formed the Chef Boiardi Food Company. The triple vowel combination proved too difficult for Americans, so they changed the name to its phonetic spelling, Boy-Ar-Dee (Americans emphasize the last syllable, while Italians stress the penultimate).
In 1936 they moved the plant to Milton, Pennsylvania, the home of an abandoned silk mill. The brothers chose the predominantly German town to be near acres of farmland, space to grow enough tomatoes to process twenty thousand tons of sauce a season. At the company’s height, it produced 250,000 cases a day, sold exclusively through the A&P
super-market chain.
After the war, the Boiardi brothers sold the company to the American Home Foods Company. The market had already demanded that the Boairdis use less expensive ingredients than imported olive oil and cheese, but with increasing mass production, the Chef Boy-Ar-Dee brand came to mean the goopy canned goods lamented by Italian-American mothers, stunned that anyone would consider this Italian food. No wonder kids in the 1980s taunted Anna Boiardi, Hector’s great niece, for her “weird” lunches when she brought mozzarella, prosciutto, and tomato sandwiches to school, made by her Italian-born mother.
Hector continued to advertise Chef Boy-Ar-Dee to millions of Americans up until the 1960s. In a 1953 commercial, he peers through an open door to announce, “Hello, may I come in?” part of the intimate approach that made the brand a household name.
I NOSTRI PAESANI
Gay Talese
Gay Talese, who was born in 1932, is the best-selling author of eleven books. His book Unto the Sons traces the origins of his family, who emigrated from the town of Maida in southern Italy. Talese recounts the stigma of an Italian-American childhood during World War II and the dilemma of dual loyalties that his father, who worked as a tailor in Ocean City, New Jersey, experienced during those years.
Q: You had relatives in Italy fighting the war?
Talese: I had Italian uncles who were in Mussolini’s army, and the only reason I knew that was because on my father’s bureau in his bedroom, there were pictures of these two brothers. In 1942 and 1943, they were fighting the Americans who were invading at that time the southern part of Italy by way of North Africa.
Q: How did your father feel about all of this?
Talese: Well, he spoke to my mother, not to me, not to my younger sister, but to my mother. He would express a certain misgiving about what his mother and other female relatives must be under-going, the sisters or wives of those people who were in the army. He would then reveal his affiliation and his concerns about his native country, as he would not during the daytime in the presence of anyone in the store, including the two employees they had. In the privacy of their apartment, they were more candid and more revealing of their place in society and their fears about where their ancestral traces were.
Q: He was concerned about revealing these feelings to others who weren’t Italian?
Talese: He became a citizen in 1928, but he didn’t feel that he was a citizen. He’d felt maybe before the war he was, but during the war, he felt he was on trial. He felt he was a marginal American citizen, a half American citizen, and he had to behave himself, and he did.
Six hundred thousand Italian Americans were registered as enemy aliens, 1,500 were arrested, and over 250 were kept in internment camps like this one in Missoula, Montana, for the duration of the war.
Italian-American servicemen fought in record numbers for America abroad, but at home the US government deemed the parents of many of these soldiers “enemy aliens” and restricted their parents’ civil liberties. The servicemen considered the government’s decision nonsensical at best, destructive and demoralizing at worst.
More than a year before Pearl Harbor, the government, fearing war might be imminent, created the Alien Registration Division to register and fingerprint Americans who had never gone through the process of becoming citizens. Not wanting to alarm millions of aliens in the country (with Italian Americans representing the largest number of them), the government tried to soft-pedal the process, urging celebrities who were noncitizens to register and changing registration centers to post offices rather than the originally designated police stations.
The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Proclamation 2527, which rendered the country’s six hundred thousand unnaturalized Italians enemy aliens, subjecting them to restrictions, apprehension, and detention (another proclamation was similarly issued against German nationals), and requiring them to carry pink identification cards.
The War and Justice departments decided that any Italian who lived here for decades but did not seek citizenship performed an inherent act of disloyalty. Yet the majority of immigrants in that category were illiterate, and many still lived in isolated ethnic conclaves where they never learned English, the essential prerequisite for passing a citizenship test. Hundreds of thousands of these enemy aliens were mothers and grandmothers, women who saw the purpose of their lives as cooking, cleaning, and caring for their children to help them live the promise of this new land.
Deemed an enemy alien because she never applied for citizenship, Celestina Stagnaro Loero was forced to move from her home for the duration of the war.
Restricted from traveling more than five miles from their homes without permission, enemy aliens had to report to the police a move in residence or change in job. They needed to surrender to the local police office shortwave radios and cameras, two items on a list of contraband. Their homes were subject to spot searches, and violation of any of these restrictions carried the risk of arrest. Nearly three thousand spot searches took place (mostly in New York, Pennsylvania, California, and Louisiana), over 1,500 Italian Americans were arrested, and more than 250 were kept in internment camps for the duration of the war.
Along the Pacific Coast, the War Department forced an estimated ten thousand Italian Americans to move from their homes near strategic waterfront areas and subjected another fifty thousand to a strict 8:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. curfew. The government’s actions, especially the forced relocation of elderly residents, treated grandmas as if they were spies sautéing bombs for the gravy or packing pistols in Sunday purses, alongside the rosary beads. Terrified families feared what the next step might be. In the weeks preceding the relocation program, four Italian men committed suicide. Italian Americans only narrowly escaped the plight of the Japanese in internment camps—also originally planned for Italians and Germans. A 2001 report to Congress admitted that much of the information about the treatment of Italian Americans during World War II remains classified and “never acknowledged in any official capacity by the United States government.”
At the time, many believed that a fifth column existed in the United States that was taking its orders from “Roberto”—that is, Rome, Berlin, and Tokyo. Since 1936, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had been compiling a “Custodial Detention List,” which categorized potential security threats. Roosevelt gave the FBI permission to arrest anyone on Hoover’s list without the protection of the Bill of Rights. When the police came knocking on doors, they stated simply that it was “by order of President Roosevelt.”
Teachers at schools that taught Italian (once supported by Mussolini) and World War I veterans, known as ex combattenti, were marked as dangerous subversives, some sent to internment camps or forced to relocate hundreds of miles from their homes. Filippo Molinari, who sold subscriptions for San Francisco’s pro-Fascist newspaper L’Italia and was a World War I veteran, was taken from his home on the same night of the Pearl Harbor attack. Wearing only slippers and a thin garment, Molinari was put on a train to Missoula, Montana, isolated, unable to contact anyone, and freezing as the midwestern temperature dipped far below zero.
For West Coast Italian Americans, this government treatment must have come as a particular shock. California Italians had been a great immigrant success story earlier in the twentieth century; many had secured a place in the American power structure. But the man placed in charge of the War Department’s Western Defense Command, Lieutenant General John DeWitt, was a militaristic bureaucrat determined to treat Italian and German Americans as badly as the Japanese. Convinced that a large number of fifth columnists existed in each community that could sabotage key military areas and bridges, he vetoed the more moderate plans of the Justice Department. DeWitt persuaded Roosevelt to relocate Italian Americans who were living in what he considered “restricted” zones of the West Coast.
The Western Defense Command announced in January 1942 that it had created eighty-six prohibited zones affecting almost the entire Pacific Coast—f
rom the Pacific Ocean to the Sierra Nevada. The next month, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the army to exclude anyone it chose from these restricted areas. In the counties of Monterey and Santa Cruz, thousands of Italians west of Highway One had to move. In Pittsburg, California, a third of the residents, nearly three thousand people, were forced to leave their property. In San Francisco, Fisherman’s Wharf and other areas near the water were off limits to aliens.
Italian-, Japanese-, and German-American internees stand with officers in Missoula, Montana. Without the protection of the Bill of Rights, police could haul enemy aliens away to internment camps following a mere knock on the door.
The government moved Italian-American noncitizens a few blocks from waterfronts, steel companies, and other production facilities. DeWitt’s initial plan went well beyond this relocation, which took place two months before the internment of the Japanese. He intended to put the Italians and Germans in camps as soon as the Japanese had been cleared from the area.
Many ludicrous elements defined this quickly implemented policy, beginning with the premise that moving nearly ten thousand Italian Americans a few blocks from where they lived would be in the interest of national security. In addition, if one parent was a citizen and the other an enemy alien, the citizen could stay in the home but the alien had to move. In one case, a man could no longer enter his business—a pool hall and soda fountain located in a restricted area of Eureka in northern California—so he stood across the street (which wasn’t restricted) and yelled instructions to his son on how to keep things running. If a doctor’s office was located on the restricted side of the street, a permit from the local police office had to be obtained before an enemy alien could get medical attention.
The Italian Americans Page 15
