Searching for Subversives: The Story of Italian Internment in Wartime America by Mary Elizabeth Basile Chopas (review)

In Searching for Subversives Mary Elizabeth Basile Chopas masterfully untangles the American government’s process for interning 343 Italian American enemy aliens during World War II. Though internees represented only five hundredths of one percent of the total Italian alien population at the time, Chopas uses their experience to develop key insights into the government’s process of identifying, screening, and interning enemy aliens during the war. The lessons derived raise timely questions about how democracies can and should protect civil liberties when experiencing threats to national security.

Oral historians in the late 1990s were the first to break Italian Americans’ silence over the arrests, forced relocations, curfews, travel restrictions and confiscations that tens of thousands of Italian aliens endured during World War II. Chopas significantly advances this discourse by approaching the topic from a legal and administrative viewpoint to understand how the United States government conceived of and then managed a selective internment operation that screened approximately 16,000 suspected German, Japanese, and Italian nationals. In doing so she finds substantial inconsistencies across the country in the treatment of aliens; tensions between government entities over the proper course of action; and an important precedent set about the rights of aliens in times of war. As such, her work is not only important for Italian American and immigration history, but also for scholarship on civil rights, law, and the wartime home front.

Searching for Subversives begins with background on the legal and political status of Italian Americans before World War II. As other scholars have noted, Italian Americans became more engaged in American politics as they increased their support of the newly Fascist homeland. In chapter one Chopas rightly notes that Italian Americans who supported Mussolini “believed they could be ardent Fascists and good Americans” (26). The Federal government disagreed, and began compiling a list of suspected aliens in the 1930s that the FBI used the night of Pearl Harbor to arrest thousands of immigrants nationwide.

Unlike the 120,000 Japanese Americans indiscriminately interned regardless of loyalty or citizenship status, the FBI arrested only 3,567 of America’s 700,000 Italian aliens, and only interned 343 of those. In chapter two Chopas gives a much-needed profile of the internee population and suggests key areas for further study. Her findings that the average internee was a 43-year old man who was somewhat established in America opens questions about why the FBI ignored younger men and why alien enemy hearing boards interned so many unskilled laborers.

The review boards are the focus of chapter three, where Chopas examines the theoretical and practical differences between the internees’ and Americans’ perceptions of justice. The government did not consider enemy aliens to be protected under the Geneva Convention and thus created the civilian enemy alien hearing boards as a courtesy rather than a right. Aliens did not know the charges before them or enjoy the counsel of an attorney. Because of this, Chopas found a stronger connection to deportation cases run by the INS rather than the War Department’s handling of prisoners of war, who had far more rights. She draws from several archival sources to construct case studies showing how boards considered issues like immigration status, personal morality, and political connections in making their decisions to parole, release, or intern individuals. Chopas posits that board members who were familiar with Italian Americans and their organizations were better able to contextualize the immigrants’ association in Fascist clubs and see past a presumption of guilt. This could explain why West Coast boards disproportionately interned Italians more than those in the Italian centers on the East Coast.

Camp conditions also varied by geography. In chapter four Chopas reads between the lines of official reports, contemporary accounts, oral histories and prison letters to offer a robust depiction of internment life. In it, she briefly mentions the tense relationships between Germans...