For preternaturally anxious Italians, their worst fears vividly unfolded before them. Reading the newspaper meant learning they had to leave homes often built with their own hands. With scant information, people didn’t know if they would ever return. Some families stayed with relatives, but others futilely searched for places to live because many landlords wouldn’t rent to enemy aliens. Being old and poor meant moving to ramshackle houses and waiting for further news of one’s fate.
Fishermen suffered terribly. Since the late 1900s, when they had begun supplying food for the California coast, these men, many illiterate, had tested their command of choppy waters, not the English language. Having secured steady work, they never imagined learning to read and write in English to prepare for a citizenship test (in the era before Social Security and Medicare, there were few benefits to being a citizen). Enemy aliens could not step onto wharves, piers, or their beloved fishing vessels.
Many Italian-American fishermen were unnaturalized citizens, now deemed enemy aliens. Because of this status, they could not step onto wharves, piers, or their own vessels.
Giuseppe DiMaggio, the father of Joe DiMaggio, was a Sicilian immigrant who had come to America in 1898 and brought his wife Rosalie several years later. Like so many Californians of Sicilian origin, he worked as a crab fisherman while Rosalie raised their nine children. Neither could read or write. Their home on a hill above Fisherman’s Wharf didn’t fall in the restricted zone, but because of Giuseppe’s enemy alien status, he could no longer work on the wharf or enter his son Joe’s restaurant. Giuseppe’s specialty, spicy crab cioppino—a fish stew invented in San Francisco—which he liked to prepare for Joe’s friends, was now officially off the menu.
Yet just the year before these restrictions, Joe DiMaggio had given the nation its summer pastime as they watched “Joltin’ Joe” pop home run after home run in a remarkable fifty-six-game hitting streak for the Yankees. While his panicky government declared his parents enemy aliens, Joe left the Yankees to fight in the war (along with three of his brothers who also played major league baseball).
No one on the West Coast escaped suspicion. The mayor of San Francisco, Angelo J. Rossi, was subpoenaed by his own chief of police and questioned about his loyalty before a state senate fact-finding committee on un-American activities. Although there was no evidence that Rossi had any Fascist connections, the committee’s accusations were among the factors that contributed to his defeat in 1943.
Joe DiMaggio and first wife, Dorothy Arnold, with his parents, Rosalie and Giuseppe. Both of DiMaggio’s parents were deemed enemy aliens during World War II.
On the East Coast, where a much larger Italian-American population had achieved substantial political power, it proved harder to isolate and target individuals. Ettore Patrizi, the editor and publisher of San Francisco’s L’Italia, had been forced to move from his home; but Generoso Pope, the publisher of New York’s pro-Fascist and more widely circulated Il Progresso, never faced any government sanctions or restrictions, no doubt because of his political clout and personal relationship with Roosevelt.
No one on the West Coast escaped suspicion. A state senate committee questioned the mayor of San Francisco, Angelo J. Rossi (standing on the right with his siblings), about his loyalty.
Roosevelt’s attorney general, Francis Biddle, favored selective rather than mass internment and disagreed with many of DeWitt’s plans. But he didn’t have enough clout to veto the demands of the War Department in the middle of a war. Biddle and the Justice Department knew, however, the political, social, and economic nightmare that would ensue if the East Coast Italian-American enemy aliens—over 50 percent of the Italian population in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut—had to be relocated or interned. Such a policy would affect millions of people and disrupt the nation’s economy and wartime production.
As months passed, Roosevelt recognized that the military’s plans for West Coast Italians were also out of the question. He couldn’t afford to further alienate a huge voting bloc of over five million people, with higher enlistments in the military than any other ethnic group, from the Democratic Party.
Having made Columbus Day a national holiday eight years earlier, the Roosevelt administration reached for its symbolism to announce the reversal of the government’s policy. On October 12, 1942, Attorney General Biddle, introduced by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in Carnegie Hall, declared that Italian Americans had proved their loyalty and would no longer be under restrictions. Their enemy alien status had been lifted.
If a pattern exists to the immigrant experience—an isolated first generation dedicates itself to finding work and raising a family; a more secure second generation, recognizing the chasm between its parents and the culture, seeks to eliminate ethnic traits; and the third and fourth generations set about reclaiming ancestral roots to better define the self—World War II added a much darker dimension to this universal passage of American selfhood.
The government’s imposition of an enemy alien status went far beyond the standard humiliations of eating unrecognizable food or uttering a foreign word in place of an English one. The profound stigma of the enemy alien designation and the humiliation of restrictions and relocations kept most Italian Americans silent about the experience. When drawn out in oral histories of the time, Italian Americans typically described themselves or family members as “aliens” not “enemy aliens,” as if combining each loaded term was too much to bear—better an extraterrestrial association than that of the traitor.
With Mussolini now the enemy, being Italian-American carried a new stigma.
Joe DiMaggio’s astounding fifty-six-game hitting streak taught Americans not to take their eyes off the lithe batter at the plate or risk missing his athletic grace, yet the predicament of his parents taught Italian Americans to keep their heads down.
DOCUMENTI
ENEMY ALIEN RESTRICTIONS
Tens of thousands of teenage fans swooned over Frank Sinatra.
At the end of World War II, life in America held astounding promise. As the liberator of Europe from Nazism and Fascism, the United States had won the admiration of the world; war production lifted the country from its Depression woes, boosting confidence beyond imagination. With the outlook sunny and the step light, America was eager for a new tune—sung by a slightly built, dreamy, blue-eyed singer named Frank Sinatra.
In the early 1940s, tens of thousands of teenagers ran screaming “FRANKIEE!” through Times Square when the young Sinatra played at the Paramount Theatre. Inside, they swooned with such intensity that the owner worried the building would collapse from the fervor. By mixing street swagger with stylish vocal lilts and the graceful phrasing of the bel canto tradition of Italian singing, Sinatra created an entirely new brand of urban cool.
Sinatra’s astounding musical success helped pave the way for a group of Italian-American crooners who would dominate the pop charts for the next decade. Between the years of 1947 and 1954, twenty-five Italian-American singers had major hits; and between 1956 and 1959, more Italian Americans were on the Billboard charts than ever before or since, their upbeat tempo and easygoing style perfectly matching the mood of the country. Until the Beatles redefined music in the early sixties, these soothing voices filled the airwaves.
Not all of these crooners could be recognized as Italian-American, because show business called for changing one’s name or tightening mellifluous vowels: Vic Damone was born Vito Farinola; Frankie Laine, Franceso Paolo LoVecchio; Perry Como, Pierino Como; Tony Bennett, Anthony Dominick Benedetto; Dean Martin, Dino Crocetti; Jerry Vale, Genaro Louis Vitaliano; and Connie Francis, Concetta Franconero. Each of these singers transcended their immigrant roots to become national stars with hits such as Martin’s “Volare,” Bennett’s “Because of You,” and Como’s “Prisoner of Love.”
Perry Como racked up an astounding seventy-three chart-topping songs in the 1950s. One of thirteen children born to immigrant parents in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, Como ha
d a pleasant face, low-key manner, and cardigan sweater that defined laid-back style. Como was a barber who liked to sing and play guitar, and he would have contentedly stayed that way, but for a chance occurrence: a musician heard him sing when he was on vacation with a mutual friend and asked him to join his band. He almost quit his newfound career because he disliked the travel, but he decided to continue after he was offered a steady contract at the Copacabana nightclub. By the 1950s, his easy voice and style had garnered him a fifteen-minute television program, The Perry Como Show.
Dean Martin, born in Steubenville, Ohio, epitomized the rakish 1950s man with a cigarette in one hand and scotch on the rocks in the other. When he sang “That’s Amore,” America readily shared the love. Tony Bennett began his singing career as “Joe Bari,” thinking the two-syllable name of an Italian region might be easier on the ear than his family name. Bob Hope disliked the choice and urged him to change Benedetto to Bennett instead of Bari. Growing up in Astoria, Queens, Bennett acquired his earliest musical memories listening with his family to the great tenor Enrico Caruso and performing in front of cousins who stopped by every Sunday. After serving in World War II, he turned to the sounds of jazz and bebop—Charlie Parker, Count Basie, and Billie Holiday. Like many of the fifties crooners, Bennett’s singing idol was Frank Sinatra. As a young man, Bennett would stay all day at the Paramount Theatre to watch the singer known simply as “The Voice” perform each of his seven shows.
Dean Martin (Dino Crocetti) epitomized the rakish 1950s man.
Tony Bennett (Anthony Dominick Benedetto) dominated the pop charts in the 1950s.
Francis Albert Sinatra was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, on December 12, 1915, in a breech delivery so difficult that he was first taken for dead. The women birthing his mother were preoccupied trying to save her life, but luckily someone had the presence of mind to grab the baby and run cold tap water on his head. His shrieks announced survival. The doctor’s forceps, however, had left permanent scarring along the left side of his face, neck, and ear, prompting Sinatra to avoid being filmed from the left and to wear pancake makeup throughout his adult life to cover the disfigurement.
Sinatra spent his childhood gazing across the Hudson River and imagining himself on its glittering New York side. It wasn’t until 1939 that talent, ambition, and sheer will led him to New York City’s nightlife and fame. He took a job as a singing waiter in a New Jersey restaurant called the Rustic Cabin because it had a hookup with the radio station WNEW that broadcast in New York City. The wife of the famous bandleader and trumpet player Harry James heard Sinatra on the radio and told her husband to go see him in person. Sinatra wasn’t supposed to sing the night James came by, but good fortune befell him in the last-minute cancellation of a peer. After Harry James had heard the singer handle the challenging note variation of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” he offered Sinatra a contract on the spot. But James’s next words fell flat: he told Sinatra to change his name to “Frankie Satin.” Sinatra famously replied that if he wanted the singer, he had to take the name.
Decades later, Sinatra told the writer Pete Hamill that the exchange with Harry James had stirred up memories of the prejudice he had encountered as a child. “Of course, it meant something to me to be the son of immigrants. How could it not? How the hell could it not? I grew up for a few years thinking I was just another American kid. Then I discovered at—what? five? six?—I discovered that some people thought I was a dago. A wop. A guinea. You know, like I didn’t have a fucking name.” Besides, Sinatra added, a name as oily as Frankie Satin would have doomed him to playing cruise ships.
The fortuitous meeting with James changed Sinatra’s life. Soon the young man was trying hard to mask his lack of education (Sinatra had dropped out of school before he reached sixteen) and his New Jersey accent. Diction lessons bolstered his confidence, and he began to create his own style. After six months with Harry James, an even bigger swing bandleader, Tommy Dorsey, offered Sinatra a contract.
In a few short years, the voice of Frank Sinatra had become a mega-phenomenon, and on October 11, 1944, the commotion around him grew so great that, as the press dubbed it, a “Columbus Day Riot” erupted. This riot, far from the earlier Columbus Day political melees when Fascists and anti-Fascists had faced off, was strictly about entertainment. Sinatra had been playing all day at the Paramount, and the overly packed theater held five thousand fans, far more than its maximum capacity of thirty-five hundred. Many of the fans wouldn’t leave after the first show, intensifying the craziness. By the end of the day, thirty thousand hysterical girls waited outside—screaming, crying, pushing—and causing a commotion over a celebrity the likes of which had never before been seen in America.
Not everyone appreciated the young man who made girls swoon, particularly servicemen. Sinatra had received a 4-F classification for a perforated eardrum, excusing him from military service. Many soldiers didn’t like this singer making love to their girlfriends with his microphone. They labeled him a draft dodger and threw tomatoes at him when they could. While few people questioned the 4-F status of famous Americans like John Wayne, many resented this son of Italian immigrants who had made it so big.
Frank Sinatra would redefine urban cool.
The draft-dodging charge hounded Sinatra throughout his career, and by the late 1940s a series of missteps seemed to doom the once invincible singer. Sinatra had a few too many run-ins with the press and even punched a newspaper columnist. He took a trip to Havana, Cuba, where he was photographed with the mobster Charlie (“Lucky”) Luciano—a decision that would forever link him with the Mafia in the public’s mind. He also began an affair with the sultry movie star Ava Gardner while he was still married to his wife, Nancy, the mother of his three children. The teenagers who once had been crazy for Sinatra had grown to be wives disgusted by infidelities that were particularly shocking for an Italian-American Catholic.
Only five foot seven and, at 130 pounds, already a slight man, Sinatra was rapidly shedding weight from the stress of the public’s ire. He even lost his voice for a while: one night in 1950 simply no sounds came out. The Italian-American singers for whom Sinatra had paved the way were now entertaining the country and topping the charts, while Sinatra was without a hit in both 1952 and 1953.
Yet, as everyone who remembers Frank Sinatra from the latter part of the twentieth century knows, the “Chairman of the Board” returned to have the world on a string. If the Sinatra story has a happy Hollywood ending, it also contains a pervasive myth that remains in the public’s imagination, no matter how many biographers have tried to debunk it. The myth centers on Sinatra’s longing for a comeback role in the movie From Here to Eternity and the belief that the Mafia told the studio it had to hire Sinatra—or else.
Sinatra was desperate to play army private Angelo Maggio for the movie version of the James Jones novel because he felt he understood, and perhaps shared a few character traits with, this troubled but charismatic Italian-American man. He even sent Harry Cohn, the founder of Columbia Pictures, who had bought the rights to the film, telegrams signed “Maggio.” But it was the glamorous A-list movie star Ava Gardner, by then his second wife, who most likely secured the role for him. She visited Harry Cohn’s wife and begged her to let Sinatra have a screen test. Gardner went even further, telling Cohn that if he agreed to the screen test, she would do a picture for him for free. Cohn eventually called Sinatra, and the screen test went so well that a part of it ended up in the final cut of the film.
Rat Pack members Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, and Frank Sinatra—the ultimate bad boys having fun.
In his novel and later screenplay The Godfather, Mario Puzo decided to embellish the highly publicized story of how Sinatra got the part. One of America’s most famous movie lines—“I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse”—is from a scene in which Don Corleone reassures Johnny Fontane, the Sinatra-inspired character, that a movie role he desperately wants will be his. After the studio head, resembling Ha
rry Cohn, insists the singer will never get the part, he wakes up to bloodied sheets and the severed head of his prized racehorse. The arresting psychic power of the horse’s head used as warning and revenge has been emblazoned on the American imagination, even if this narrative had no bearing on reality.
The singer Madonna performing on stage during her Confessions Tour in 2006.
Luckily, Sinatra’s instinct that Maggio was the right role for him panned out: his portrait won him an Academy Award for best supporting actor in 1953, and his comeback began. A contract with Capitol Records put his singing career back on track, and the mature voice of Frank Sinatra, combined with the lush orchestration of Nelson Riddle, created hits like “I’ve Got the World on a String.”
Over the next twenty-five years, Sinatra would record more than three hundred songs. The middle-aged Sinatra with the tilted fedora (to hide thinning hair), slightly wrinkled white shirt, and skinny tie personified an urban style that hipsters imitate today. He became the ultimate bad boy having fun, cavorting with his Rat Pack friends: Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop. The appealing and lasting cool of the Rat Pack’s Ocean’s Eleven film capers convinced Steven Soderbergh to direct a remake and two sequels in the new millennium, starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt. One hundred years after his birth, Frank Sinatra’s elegant vocals continue to be admired by superstar singers: Jay-Z declares in “Empire State of Mind” that he is the new Frank Sinatra, ready to make it anywhere. Sinatra remains the first Italian-American singer to have given millions of immigrants a taste of what it meant, with its impossible highs and feverish lows, to live the American dream.
The Italian Americans Page 16
