Frank DiCara is 90 years old, but he still remembers what it felt like to wake up an enemy in his hometown. It was 1941, and he was a 14-year-old kid in Highlandtown, an Italian-American neighborhood in Baltimore, when news broke that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, bringing the U.S. into war with the Axis Powers of Japan, Germany and Italy.
For people like Frank, whose parents had come from Sicily three decades before, the news was doubly horrifying. Along with the anger and amazement that America had been attacked came the unbelievable news that Italy—their homeland—was suddenly the enemy. Overnight, the land his parents remembered fondly from their youth—and where they still had family—couldn’t be talked about without risking treason.
DiCara, now 90, remembers vividly the stigma of those days. “We took a lot of slur from people,” he says; Italian-Americans were called “guineas,” “dagos” and “wops.”
The incarceration of Japanese-Americans is the best-known effect of Executive Order 9066, the rule signed by President Franklin Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. And for good reason. The suffering and punishment placed upon innocent Japanese-Americans was a dark chapter in American history. But the full extent of the government order is largely unknown.
In addition to forcibly evacuating 120,000 Americans of Japanese background from their homes on the West Coast to barbed-wire-encircled camps, EO 9066 called for the compulsory relocation of more than 10,000 Italian-Americans and restricted the movements of more than 600,000 Italian-Americans nationwide. Now, the order has resurfaced in the public conversation about immigration.
Says Tom Guglielmo, a history professor at George Washington University: “It’s as relevant as ever, sadly.”
Italian-Americans had faced prejudice for decades by the time the order was drafted, says Guglielmo. Italians were the biggest group of immigrants to the United States who passed through Ellis Island for much of the late 19th and early 20th century; between 1876 and 1930, 5 million Italians moved to the U.S. Not without backlash: By the 1920s, pseudo-scientists and polemicists in the 1920s popularized the notion that Italians were a separate race from Anglo-Americans.
“There’s no doubt those ideas were still around in 1942,” notes Guglielmo. They were part of the air that young Italian-Americans grew up breathing.
In Highlandtown, life changed overnight. Federal agents across the country immediately arrested 98 Italian “aliens,” including ten in Baltimore. The agents identified their targets with the help of the Census Bureau.