Eighty years ago, on Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, establishing internment camps during World War II. Many today retroactively cite this as an example of government racism. Yet, while many know of the internment of the Japanese, the plight of interned people of German and Italian descent — people from countries that, unlike Japan, did not attack U.S. soil before the war — is often ignored.
Slightly over two months after the country suffered the most devastating attack in its history at the time at Pearl Harbor, the government and the voting public were focused on security. People of Italian descent in the United States had their civil liberties crushed in the name of threat mitigation. As Salvatore LaGumina described in In Search of Heroes: Italian Americans in World War II, Italians were viewed as “a potentially subversive population in the United States.”
By January 1942, at least 600,000 Italians and Italian Americans, some of them legal residents or even U.S. citizens, were classified as “enemy aliens.” About 1,600 Italian citizens, among them my great-grandfather, were put into internment camps in Missoula, Montana, and Ellis Island. As a result of security concerns in coastal areas, about 10,000 Italian-Americans were forced to relocate from their homes along the California coast and move inland.
Also, 11,000 people of German ancestry were put into internment camps, many of them American-born children. In addition to Germans, people of Czech, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian descent were also interned.
And even though the number of interned people of European descent was considerably less than the nearly 110,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans interned, it should not be overlooked the way it is. Consider, for example, that the New York Times stated in 1995 the country “was at war with Germany and Italy, of course, but there were no moves to lock up any European Americans.”
Additionally, in 2004, the “Treatment of Japanese-American Internment During World War II in U.S. History Textbooks,” a study by Masato Ogawa, was published. Ogawa writes that history textbooks “exclude the information that nationals of Germany and Italy were interned.”
When discussing the basis of internment in the U.S., it is prudent to acknowledge the different acts of war committed against the U.S. by Japan (which attacked U.S. soil) and by Germany and Italy, which declared war on the U.S. after that attack.
Additionally, the Japanese seized U.S. territory during World War II. In June 1942, they attacked and captured parts of the Aleutian Islands and established military bases there. Japan also launched attacks along the Pacific coast of the U.S., including against the Ellwood Oil Field, located near Santa Barbara, Fort Stevens in Oregon, and the Lookout Air Raids near Brookings, Oregon.
The Japanese military also used high-altitude balloon bombs known as “Fu-go balloons” to attack the U.S. Deployed in Japan, they were intended to ride the jet stream across the Pacific Ocean and explode in the U.S. During the last eight months of World War II, the Empire of Japan deployed nearly 9,000 of these. Only about 300 made it to the mainland. Six people were killed.
Moreover, a cryptoanalysis project during World War II known as MAGIC revealed Japan successfully obtained sensitive information through espionage efforts by “second generation” Japanese Americans in the U.S. These events also tend to be omitted from our history textbooks, which succumb to the easy temptation of characterizing internment as a simplistic question of racism, not the complicated problem it actually was.
There have been efforts to right the historic wrongs of internment. In 1988, for example, the U.S. government officially apologized for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II blaming “race, prejudice, war hysteria, and failure of political leadership.” Survivors were paid $20,000 each in reparations.
In 2000, the 106th Congress passed the Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties Act. It urged the “President, on behalf of the Government, to formally acknowledge that these events during World War II represented a fundamental injustice against Italian Americans.” It was signed by President Bill Clinton on Nov. 7, 2000, although no reparations were offered.
In November 2003, then-U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer submitted a resolution to support the goals of “the Japanese American, German American, and Italian American communities in recognizing a National Day of Remembrance to increase public awareness of the events surrounding the restriction, exclusion, and internment of individuals and families during World War II.”
As of February 2022, the interned people of German, Czech, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian descent have yet to receive any apology or acknowledgment from the U.S. government.
