Mary Elizabeth Basile Chopas. Searching for Subversives: The Story of Italian Internment in Wartime America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. xvi + 232 pp. $27.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4696-3434-0; $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-3433-3.
Reviewed by Lawrence DiStasi (Independent Scholar)
Published on H-FedHist (August, 2018)
Commissioned by Caryn E. Neumann (Miami University of Ohio Regionals)
Searching for Subversives by Mary Elizabeth Basile Chopas has one main intention, and that is to clarify the process employed by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) in the hearings it afforded enemy aliens—ostensibly to sort out the immigrants of Italian descent apprehended as “potentially dangerous” and therefore liable to internment during World War II. With regard to that intention, Chopas does a creditable job of uncovering materials that have previously been unexamined, and that is a significant contribution to the scholarship of the home-front internment process. Chopas finds DOJ files containing letters and other documents; she discovers the papers of several citizens who chaired the three-man hearing boards, such as Professor Erwin Griswold of Harvard Law; and she attends to the debates within the government over how to bring the enemy alien hearings into some kind of conformity with constitutional due process.
But internment is only one aspect of the wartime measures employed against enemy aliens. With regard to the others—the restrictions imposed on travel and possessions, the evacuation of enemy aliens from prohibited zones on the West Coast, the attempt to expand those evacuations to the Eastern and Southern Defense Commands, the individual exclusion program for naturalized citizens, and the relation of all these to the harsher internment program against the Japanese—Chopas is less successful. This may be due to the fact that she is trying to summarize complex programs in single chapters or sometimes single paragraphs. Any reader not intimately familiar with all these distinctions would be forgiven for emerging with a somewhat foggy notion of exactly what had happened to which individuals or groups, why it had happened, and how it had happened. The impression she leaves is one of confusion.
This is particularly noticeable in her second chapter, “The Face of Selective Internment and the Impact of Other Wartime Restrictions.” In her first summary, for example, Chopas correctly refers to the attorney general’s initial late January order “establishing prohibited zones on the West Coast that all enemy aliens had to evacuate by February 24,” but then shifts to April 26, 1942, noting that General Hugh Aloysius Drum, head of the Eastern Defense Command, “proposed the classification of prohibited and restricted areas for the Eastern Defense Command ... but no mass evacuation” (p. 44). The question this raises is simple: a “prohibited zone” is, in fact, a zone in which whole classes of people, in this case enemy aliens, are not allowed to remain, and must vacate. Drum’s move was clearly interpreted by the attorney general’s office at the time as exactly this, an attempt by the military to extend to the East Coast the zones prohibited to enemy aliens already in place on the West Coast. That it was interpreted as preparation for a “mass evacuation” is clear from the attorney general’s April 9, 1942, memo to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he warned of precisely this action, saying it had the possibility of “disaffecting 17 million people.” Memos from Attorney General Francis Biddle to the president and from Assistant Attorney General James Rowe to John McCloy, assistant secretary of war, then made the same point after Drum’s military-zone proposal. Both objected to the clear implication of Drum’s announcement: “The military order does, however, expressly apply to ‘Segregation and evacuation of enemy aliens.’”[1] But Chopas does not reference or reflect on this; instead she moves immediately to the military’s institution of its “individual exclusion” program for “suspicious Italian aliens and naturalized citizens from military areas” (p. 44). This begins the confusion that continues over the difference between programs instituted by the military and those instituted by the DOJ and the resultant confusion over terminology. Readers might not be clear whether “evacuation” is a military program or the same as “exclusion,” or whether the exclusion of the Japanese Americans is the same as the individual exclusion of the Italian-born naturalized Americans from military zones, or whether the proposed exclusion (or evacuation) of Italian enemy aliens from the entire Pacific Slope by General John L. DeWitt was to be the same as the earlier exclusions (or evacuations) by the DOJ. Previous scholarship has established that the evacuation from West Coast prohibited zones was instituted as a DOJ program. Though the Western Defense Command took over its implementation on March 2, 1942, very little changed save for the expansion of a few zones (in Stockton, California, for example) and the extension of curfew hours from the 9 p.m. curfew ordered by the DOJ to the 8 p.m. curfew ordered by DeWitt. But Chopas’s discussion seems to forget about the DOJ and focuses on “military zones” both with respect to this evacuation and the larger Japanese internment. She writes, “Although the Western Defense Command imposed evacuation orders from military zones only on aliens in the Italian and German populations, family members who were citizens often accompanied them. In contrast, both Japanese aliens and Japanese American citizens were forced to leave their homes” (p. 53). It is not clear whether this means to contrast the experience of European and Japanese enemy aliens in the initial evacuation from prohibited zones, or whether the contrast is between the initial mass evacuation of only enemy aliens and the later mass internment of all Japanese, aliens and citizens alike. Whatever the intention, the confusion in terms and the focus exclusively on the military leaves the reader uncertain, both here and in subsequent sections.
When she gets to chapter 3, “The Struggle for Justice in the Internment Process,” Chopas gets to the heart of her study and is on firmer ground. As noted above, her research uncovers valuable sources regarding the internal “struggle” at the DOJ to find some accord with constitutional due process in a program in which enemy aliens essentially had no due process rights at all. Chopas attributes at least some of this problem to the fact that the wartime hearing process resembled not a legal trial but more nearly “the informality of the preliminary hearings in deportation proceedings” (p. 76). The lack of “adherence to the rules of evidence” was similar in both cases, especially since “the alien was not acquainted with the charges in his case because the purpose of the hearing was to discover evidence to be used against him” (p. 75). Indeed, the US government made it clear that enemy aliens were not owed the hearings at all. Biddle, in his Instructions to Alien Enemy Hearing Board, Supplement #1, January 7, 1942, said specifically that “all alien enemies are subject to detention and internment for the duration of the war without hearing, which hearing has however been provided, not as a matter of right, but in order to permit them to present facts in their behalf.”[2] Equally surprising is the fact that the attorney general was under no obligation to heed the recommendations of his own hearing boards. In many cases where the hearing board found that the enemy alien constituted no threat to public safety and should be paroled, the attorney general countered the recommendation and ordered the person interned. For instance, Cesare Pasqua’s Order for Internment signed by Biddle says quite openly: “WHEREAS, the Alien Enemy Hearing Board has recommended that said alien enemy be paroled; and it appearing from the evidence before me that said alien enemy should be interned; NOW, THEREFORE, IT IS ORDERED that said alien enemy be interned.”[3]
Chopas addresses this situation from several angles. She points out that the government in effect prejudged aliens, operating on the principle that the enemy alien was presumed guilty until he could prove his innocence. She terms this “presumptive guilt” and rightly maintains that this was one of the major defects in the government’s process. She then terms this the “tension between legal guarantees for enemy aliens and what internees felt would be a just process for deciding whether they posed a danger to society” (p. 74). But, of course, it is more than “tension.” A rather large gulf existed between due-process rights guaranteed to all persons under the US Constitution and the “rights” of enemy aliens apprehended for possible internment. Chopas rightly focuses on the single most common complaint of internees themselves: that they were unable to know the charges against them, and hence unable to mount a cogent defense. Chopas also points out that, though the 1929 Geneva Convention was supposed to be the standard to which the internment program conformed, its provisions regarding “procedural protections” were “not interpreted to have any applicability to the alien enemy hearings.” That is, the “provisions of Article 60, paragraph (c), requiring that prisoners of war receive a ‘statement of the charges,’ ... were not construed to apply to interned enemy aliens who had not been charged with any criminal offenses” (p. 75). This gets to the real Catch-22 in the entire internment process. Suspect enemy aliens were apprehended based on secret FBI reports and the legal authority of the Enemy Alien Act of 1798. This latter made aliens of nations with whom the US was at war “enemy aliens” and so, automatically subject to apprehension, confinement, and deportation. The question that naturally arises, of course, is: what purpose did the so-called hearings serve? The hearings were called variously a “courtesy” and an attempt at “fairness.” Instructions to the hearing boards cited by Chopas outline some guidelines to follow: “internment was for those of ‘dangerous character’; those ‘considered not so dangerous’ were granted parole ...; and those ‘found to be harmless to the public safety’ were released from government custody” (p. 81). Chopas is very keen about the “tension” here, and so posits the relevant and often-made conclusion: “barring evidence of specific acts of disloyalty or threats to the public’s safety, the board’s determination of loyalty through interrogation of the alien enemies was necessarily flawed” (p. 84).
But again, the same question continues to arise. If the detained enemy alien was not allowed to know the charges alleged against him or her, and if guilt was presumed, obviating charges to begin with, what could the hearings determine? Despite her awareness of this, Chopas nonetheless uncovers specifics about the valiant attempts of some hearing boards to make solid judgments. She finds in Griswold’s papers evidence of an attempt to uphold “the spirit of due process standards in the hearings” (p. 85). Chopas notes, in the hearing for Ubaldo Guidi-Buttrini, a radio announcer in Boston, that even though he was seen as an “ardent advocate of Fascism” who posed a threat because of his radio influence, the board recommended parole with supervision. This was because “Griswold appreciated the difference between having associations with the enemy and actively participating in initiatives against the United States” (p. 84). In other words, Griswold, a professor at Harvard Law, understood the guarantees of due process. Unfortunately for Guidi-Buttrini, as an enemy alien he was up against other rules, and Biddle overruled his Boston hearing board and ordered him interned. In his second hearing, on December 14, 1942, Guidi-Buttrini did no better: the Boston board again “expected the government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Guidi-Buttrini was engaged in seditious activity against the United States,” and again recommended parole but again was overruled by the attorney general (p. 86).
Chopas goes on to carefully examine the hearings of seven interned individuals, and the allegations against them, most of whom were eventually given second hearings and paroled or released. In most cases, the individual was not informed of the charges against him. Chopas provides the likely basis of the government’s suspicions in these cases, noting that most often it was associations with Italian government offices; membership in suspect organizations, such as the Fascist Party when in Italy or the Ex-Combattenti when in the US, or even, in the case of former prostitute Pauline Tedesco, “underworld associations”; or comments denigrating democracy or exalting Fascism or both. Along the way, Chopas informs us of the numbers of Italian enemy aliens interned (343, including 46 from Latin America) and the very small percentage of the enemy alien population they represented (five-hundredths of 1 percent). She also gives us the important figures for the number of cases heard by the one hundred hearing boards across the US, at least as of Columbus Day 1942: of 635 hearings, 232 Italian enemy aliens were interned (p. 71). She then gives us a percentage, as of May 1942, of 42 percent interned (p. 81). Despite the slight difference between 36.5 percent in October and 42 percent in May, these are valuable figures to have, especially if we can assume the percentage remained at this level throughout.
What Chopas does not emphasize quite enough, for me, is the blatant contradiction at the heart of the entire process. This is best signified by something Chopas does not reference—the serious problem noted by the DOJ itself with its category of “potentially dangerous.” This phrase is found not only in each Order for Internment from the attorney general as the “cause” of the internee’s apprehension—in other words, being “potentially dangerous to the public peace and safety of the United States”—but also in correspondence from Edward Ennis, head of the Alien Enemy Control Unit in the DOJ when he tried to explain her husband’s internment to Olga Trento of San Francisco. He wrote to Trento on June 4, 1942: “[Name blanked out] was apprehended as a potentially dangerous alien enemy.... The power of internment of aliens of Italian nationality ... is exercised whenever it is believed that such person ... may possibly be disloyal to the United States. It is not necessary that he be guilty of any specific acts of a subversive nature” (emphasis added).[4] Moreover, the attorney general himself permanently cashiered the entire idea in a 1943 memo to J. Edgar Hoover, ordering the FBI director to dispense completely with the concept of potential “dangerousness,” writing that “this classification is inherently unreliable.”[5] This devaluation of so central a category would seem to be crucial to any discussion about why or through what process Italian enemy aliens were interned.
One would also like to know what, in the hearing process, led some enemy aliens to be paroled or outright released, and how many of these there were. Chopas gives us ample information on internees who were paroled or released after re-hearings. We also know that the opera star Ezio Pinza, apprehended in March 1942, succeeded in reversing his board’s recommendation to intern when he got a second hearing and was paroled. But it would help the analysis immeasurably if one knew exactly what impressed the hearing board enough to get it to recommend parole or release, and in what number of cases this recommendation was actually accepted by the attorney general.
Still, the information Chopas has provided adds a good deal to our understanding of the internment process for Italian enemy aliens, and for that she deserves ample credit.
Notes
[1]. Francis Biddle to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, April 9, 1942, and James Rowe to John McCloy, April 28, 1942, James Rowe Papers, Container 33, FDR Library, Hyde Park, New York.
[2]. Francis Biddle, Instructions to Alien Enemy Hearing Board, Supplement #1, January 7, 1942, RG 85, General files 1942-45, Fort Missoula, Montana, WWII Internment files, INS, NARA I, cited in Lawrence DiStasi, Branded: How Italian Immigrants Became ‘Enemies’ during World War II (Bolinas, CA: Sanniti Publications, 2016), 87.
[3]. Cesare Pasqua Order for Internment, cited in DiStasi, Branded, 88-89.
[4]. Edward Ennis to Olga Trento, June 4, 1942, cited in DiStasi, Branded, 117.
[5]. Francis Biddle to J. Edgar Hoover, July 16, 1943, Guttadauro FBI file, 100-5901, cited in Lawrence DiStasi, Una Storia Segreta (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2001), 26.
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Citation:
Lawrence DiStasi. Review of Chopas, Mary Elizabeth Basile, Searching for Subversives: The Story of Italian Internment in Wartime America.
H-FedHist, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=51844
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