Honoring Forgotten Victims of WWII

“ENEMY EARS ARE LISTENING!” The posters, with caricatures of the eavesdropping trio of Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini, hung in public places throughout America.

It was World War II. Japanese, Germans and Italians were the enemy. On the West Coast, which was gripped by a fear of Japanese invasion, Japanese Americans were rounded up and sent off to internment camps.

Their story is well known, as is their successful fight to win reparations and an apology.

But largely untold is the story of Italian Americans and Italian immigrants who were interned or relocated, a story documented in a touring exhibit, “Una Storia Segreta” (A Secret Story), at Central Library through March 4:

* In February, 1942, in Los Angeles, Italian immigrants respond to a federal order to register, lining up at 22nd and San Pedro streets. As non-citizens, they were among 400,000 Italian immigrants nationwide branded as “enemy aliens,” required to carry IDs and forbidden from visiting docks, airports or rail stations. A curfew would soon be imposed, restricting the “aliens” to their homes between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m.

* February, 1942, “enemy aliens” living in sensitive coastal zones are ordered to move inland, leaving their jobs and their homes. The Italian fishing fleet at Monterey is decimated--just as the government was urging patriotic Americans to eat more fish.

For more than 50 years, the Italian American community chose not to speak out. Lawrence DiStasi, exhibit organizer for the Western Region, American Italian Historical Assn., explains:

“A lot of people were simply ashamed. And nobody was quite sure what would come out of something like this.”

He estimates between 250 and 300 Italian immigrants were interned, many of them at Fort Missoula, Mont. An additional 10,000 were relocated away from coastal areas.

The Italian internees were mostly older, first-generation immigrants who had never applied for citizenship as they could neither read nor write English. “To our knowledge, they’re all dead now,” DiStasi says.

They kept their silence, but their children are now speaking out. “This has to be brought to closure,” says Gloria Ricci Lothrop of Pomona, a Cal State Northridge history professor.

Lothrop, the daughter of Leo and Maria Ricci, immigrants from Tuscany, was 7 years old when America declared war. Leo, a veteran of the Italian and U.S. armies, was a bookkeeper who had become an American citizen in the 1920s. Maria, a journalist, had just taken out citizenship papers late in 1941.

Leo was a deputy sheriff. Maria, though anti-Fascist, was considered threatening. An outspoken columnist for the Italian-language newspaper La Parola, she was designated a B on the Justice Department’s ABC list of “enemy aliens.” Says Lothrop, “My mother was guilty of being acerbic, witty, critical.”

She recalls, “We were visited every two weeks for 10 months” by FBI agents who searched the family home near Elysian Park. “It was a climate of fear and tension.”

Her father’s revolvers were confiscated and the shortwave band removed from the family’s Philco console radio.

“Any organization that consisted mainly of Italians immediately became suspect,” recalls Velma Franceschini Pagliassotti, who was a 15-year-old living in East Los Angeles with her immigrant parents, both U.S. citizens. Her father was president of an organization of Italian Army veterans of World War I.

Armed with a Justice Department search warrant, “the FBI came repeatedly and searched the house from top to bottom,” confiscating flashlights and other items, she says. Pagliassotti’s Italian-language textbooks were still stored in the house. “My mother and dad rushed to the basement and burned every bit.”

Her father was on the B list. Only A’s were interned, but, she says, “there was always the fear that they would come in the night and take him away. It was very scary.”

On Dec. 7, 1941, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, 45 Italian Americans living in Los Angeles were taken into custodial detention at Terminal Island, among them radio broadcaster Felippo Fordelone.

Lothrop remembers visiting Fordelone’s wife. She had three children and no idea how long her husband might be gone. She was canning tomatoes and sobbing so violently that “half the tomatoes were missing the jar,” Lothrop says.

Organizers dedicated the exhibit to “those who endured the confusions and losses of the wartime largely in silence.”

Among them were Pagliassotti’s parents, Luigi and Mabel Franceschini. She says, “I never heard a word in our family about, ‘they shouldn’t have done it.’ Their attitude was: ‘This country is at war and they have to do what they have to do.’ ”

A window washer who ended up owning a janitorial service, her father had become a citizen in the ‘30s. He told her, he “loved Italy like a man loves his mother, but he loved America like a man loves his bride.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrestled with the Italian-American problem. They were then America’s largest ethnic group, with about 100,000 Italian-born immigrants and their families in California.

New York City and San Francisco, both Democratic strongholds, had Italian-American mayors--Fiorello La Guardia and Angelo Rossi. Large numbers of men and women of Italian heritage were in America’s military.

Rosina Trovato of Monterey lost a son and a nephew on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor. “The day after she found out about their deaths,” says DiStasi, “she was told she had to leave her home.”

Among the Italian Americans at Fort Missoula was Dr. Giovanni Falasca, editor of La Parola, and later Gloria Lothrop’s stepfather who, she says, had been wrongly fingered as pro-Fascist.

He had never become a citizen, not wanting to lose his Italian veteran’s pension, which he sent home. Lothrop says he was embittered by the internment: “His career was ruined, his newspaper destroyed.” After the war, he opened a restaurant on Figueroa Street, where he was killed in a holdup in 1975.

The ironies were many. Pagliassotti remembers that for the war’s duration a national guard searchlight battalion was encamped across from her family’s hilltop home. “They took their showers in our house, we cooked their food. They called my mother ‘Mom.’ ”

On Oct. 12, 1942--Columbus Day--the government suddenly decided Italian immigrants were no longer “enemy aliens.” Those who had been relocated returned home. Most of the internees were released when Italy surrendered to the allies in September, 1943.

Those involved in “A Secret Story” are quick to say Italian Americans do not equate their experience with that of Japanese Americans--110,000 of whom, including naturalized citizens, were interned and their property confiscated.

Nor do the Italian Americans seek reparations. Their wish, says DiStasi, is “that these long-buried events will take their rightful place in the true history of the home front.”

And, they would like an apology.

*

Lothrop and Pagliassotti will take part in an open forum on the Italian-American experience at 2 p.m. Feb. 19 in Mark Taper Auditorium, Central Library. The date marks the 50th anniversary of the death at Iwo Jima of Italian American John Basilone, the only U.S. soldier ever to win both the Navy Cross and the Congressional Medal of Honor.

* This weekly column chronicles the people and small moments that define life in Southern California. Reader suggestions are welcome.