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America’s Forgotten WWII Internment Camps
Tremoglie: America’s Forgotten WWII Internment Camps - Broad + Liberty
March 5, 2020 ~~ By Chris Tremoglie
The Philadelphia metropolitan area has a rather large Italian population. Yet despite this, the majority appear unfamiliar with the history of their ancestors in the United States. Such is the case of the forgotten internment camps of Italians during World War II.
Years ago, while working on a history project in middle school, my grandfather (long since deceased) told me a story about events that occurred during World War II that the majority are not familiar with. His father, who worked at a Stetson Hat factory that was once located in Kensington, had immigrated to the country from Sicily. After Pearl Harbor was bombed, his status in the United States changed; in the blink of an eye, he went from hard-working Italian immigrant to “enemy alien” to an internment camp.
February 19, 1942 is a date that many think should live in infamy. It is the date President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. It is this Executive Order that established internment camps during World War II – a phenomenon that many today retroactively cite as an example of the government’s racism.
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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.” As such, by January 1942, at least 600,000 Italians and Italian Americans, among them who were legal residents and American citizens, were classified as “enemy aliens.”
Moreover, about 1,600 Italian citizens — among them my great-grandfather — were put into internment camps in Missoula, Montana and Ellis Island. Many of them were American-born children. In addition to Germans, people of Czech, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian descent were also interned.
Comment:
Rather than point to singular horror stories perpetrated by Democrat president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we'll discuss the racism of the time... Whether it was segregation of Afro-Americans, or the internment of ethic groups like Japanese, Italians etc... Democrats perpetrated these racist acts without blinking of eyes.
BTW, what happened in 1942 wasn't done because someone just thought it up, Woodrow Wilson also interned up to a quarter million of German and Austro-Hungarian descent.
Strangely this is never taught as part of American history to High School and even College students. You have to wonder why? Could it be to hide the sins of the Democrats just as they hide their roll in the Civil War, the creation of the KKK and their racist past of lynching blacks, Catholics and Jews.