Enemies Within: Italian and Other Internees in Canada and Abroad 9781442674462

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction. Italians and Wartime Internment: Comparative Perspectives on Public Policy, Historical Memory, and Daily Life
Part One. Italian Canadians, Fascism, and Internment: Black Shirts or Sheep?
1. A Tangled Knot: Prelude to 10 June 1940
2. Exporting Fascism to Canada: Toronto's Little Italy
3. The Internment of Italian Canadians
4. 'Uneasy Neighbours': Internment and Hamilton's Italians
Part Two. Other Canadian Internees: Drawing Distinctions
5. A War on Ethnicity? The RCMP and Internment
6. The Curious Case of Female Internees
7. The 'Camp Boys7: Interned Refugees from Nazism
8. Political Prisoners: The Communist Internees
Part Three. Italians Interned Abroad: Three Case Studies
9. The Internment of Italians in Australia
10. The Internment of Italians in Britain
11. When Italian Americans Were 'Enemy Aliens'
Part Four. Memory and Redress: The Uses of the Past
12. Actor or Victim? Mario Duliani and His Internment Narrative
13. Images of Internment
14. The Politics of Redress: The Contemporary Ukrainian-Canadian Campaign
15. Redress, Collective Memory, and the Politics of History
Contributors
Illustration Credits
Index

Citation preview

ENEMIES WITHIN Italian and Other Internees in Canada and Abroad

In the recent campaign led by the National Congress of Italian Canadians to gain redress for compatriots interned during the Second World War, leaders claimed that the Canadian state had waged a 'war against ethnicity/ The Congress's version of history, argue the editors, drew on selective evidence and glossed over the fascist past of some Italian Canadians. The editors have assembled scholars with diverse views who seek to stimulate informed debate. Enemies Within is the first study to examine not only the formulation and uneven implementation of internment policy, but the social and gender history of internment. The book offers differing interpretations of Italian internment in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. It invites comparisons between Italian Canadians and Canada's other internees, including Communists, German Canadians, Ukrainian Canadians, and Jewish refugees. It examines contemporary campaigns for redress. Masculinity, female internees, campaigns for releases, and memory culture are some of the little-studied subjects that also receive attention. A general introduction and four section introductions provide valuable background to the issues being discussed. Never-before-seen photographs raise troubling questions about some Italian Canadians' interpretations of their internments. FRANCA IACOVETTA is a professor of history at the University of Toronto. ROBERTO PERIN is a professor of history at York University. ANGELO PRINCIPE teaches part time at York University and the University of Toronto.

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ENEMIES WITHIN Italian and Other Internees in Canada and Abroad

Edited by Franca lacovetta, Roberto Perin, and Angelo Principe

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2000 Toronto Buffalo London

Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-4446-8 (cloth) ISBN 0-8020-8235-1 (paper)

Printed acid-free paper Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Enemies within: Italian and other internees in Canada and abroad Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-4446-8 (bound) ISBN 0-8020-8235-1 (pbk.) 1. World War, 1939-1945 - Prisoners and prisons, Canadian. 2. Prisoners of war - Canada. 3. Prisoners of war - Italy. 4. Italian Canadians - History.* 5. Italians - Canada - History. 6. Concentration camps - Canada. I. lacovetta, Franca, 1957- . II. Perin, Roberto. III. Principe, Angelo, 1930D805.C3E63 2000

940.547271

C99-931427-0

The publication of this book was made possible through the financial help of the Mariano A. Elia Chair in Italian Canadian Studies at York University. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Canada

Contents

Preface

vii

Introduction - Italians and Wartime Internment: Comparative Perspectives on Public Policy, Historical Memory, and Daily Life 3 F R A N C A I A C O V E T T A and R O B E R T O PERIN

Part One - Italian Canadians, Fascism, and Internment: Black Shirts or Sheep? 23 1 A Tangled Knot: Prelude to 10 June 1940 27 ANGELO PRINCIPE

2 Exporting Fascism to Canada: Toronto's Little Italy 52 LUIGI G. PENNACCHIO

3 The Internment of Italian Canadians 76 LUIGI BRUTI LIBERATI

4 'Uneasy Neighbours': Internment and Hamilton's Italians 9 ENRICO CARLSON CUMBO

Part Two - Other Canadian Internees: Drawing Distinctions 121 5 A War on Ethnicity? The RCMP and Internment REG WHITAKER and G R E G O R Y S. K E A L E Y

6 The Curious Case of Female Internees 148 MICHELLE MeBRIDE

128

vi Contents 7 The 'Camp Boys': Interned Refugees from Nazism 171 PAULA J. D R A P E R

8 Political Prisoners: The Communist Internees 194 IAN R A D F O R T H

Part Three - Italians Interned Abroad: Three Case Studies 225 9 The Internment of Italians in Australia 227 R . J . B . BOSWORTH

10 The Internment of Italians in Britain 256 LUCIO SPONZA 11 When Italian Americans Were 'Enemy Aliens' 280 ROSE D. S C H E R I N I

Part Four - Memory and Redress: The Uses of the Past 307 12 Actor or Victim? Mario Duliani and His Internment Narrative 312 ROBERTO PERIN

13 Images of Internment 335 GABRIELE SCARDELLATO

14 The Politics of Redress: The Contemporary Ukrainian-Canadian Campaign 355 F R A N C E S SWYRIPA

15 Redress, Collective Memory, and the Politics of History 379 F R A N C A I A C O V E T T A and R O B E R T V E N T R E S C A

Contributors

413

Illustration Credits Index

419

417

Preface

The idea for this book came in the wake of a 1995 conference that the three of us hosted on the internment during the Second World War of Italian Canadians for their alleged association with fascism. As historians and Italian-Canadian specialists, we wanted to inject more historical context into current debates about the subject of internment, which have been emotionally charged but not always well informed. In our view, the efforts of community leaders to focus public attention on the wartime mistreatment of Italians (and extract some form of redress), and Prime Minister Mulroney's 1990 blanket apology to Italian Canadians for the 'wrongs' committed against them, endorsed a simplified version of history. According to this interpretation, Italian Canadians were victims of a government's war against its minorities and, like the Japanese Canadians, were imprisoned simply because of their ethnic origin. All the internees were political innocents whose lives, and community, were irreparably damaged by a vindictive government. We sympathize with those falsely accused or victimized by wartime hysteria against 'enemy aliens.' We also have no interest in becoming apologists for state repression. As historians, however, we are concerned about the lack of public knowledge about and perspective on these controversial events. The version of history endorsed by the Italian-Canadian redress campaign simply left too much out. Since that conference, we have been involved in the public debates that continue to stir up much passion and controversy. They convinced us of the need for more concerted efforts to create a meaningful context for informed discussion. This book is our contribution to furthering that aim. It offers original essays on aspects of the Italian-Canadian case, new essays on several of the other groups interned in Canada, and

viii Preface three studies of the internment of people of Italian background in other countries. There are also contributions that focus on the politics of redress. The authors develop various points of comparison and contrast, map important new terrain, and suggest topics for further research. We hope that readers will be provoked into debating the approaches, controversies, and assessments contained in these pages. We want to thank those who made the original conference a stimulating experience. Annamarie Castrilli and Emilio Bisceglia of the National Congress of Italian Canadians, and writer Antonino Mazza, graciously agreed to participate in a conference organized by people who disagree with them. Our colleague and friend, Bruno Ramirez, with whom we have also done intellectual battle over the issue, reminded us of the dangers of oversimplification. Contributions by U.S. historians Gary Mormino and Rudolph Vecoli (no strangers to similar debates among Italian Americans) underscored the value of comparative contexts for assessing the Italian-Canadian case. In order to broaden the comparative context we invited contributions to the book from several Canadian colleagues - Reg Whitaker and Gregory Kealey, Michelle McBride, Paula Draper, and Ian Radforth - who produced fine essays on, respectively, RCMP activities among Canada's ethnic communities, women internees, Jews from Europe placed in Canadian internment camps, and interned Communists. We also invited foreign colleagues to join our collaborative project: Rose Scherini, Lucio Sponza, and Richard Bosworth; each contributed a substantial and informative essay on Italians in the United States, Britain, and Australia, respectively. Both at the conference and in this book, Frances Swyripa has provided a comparative context for the Italian-Canadian campaign for redress by her scholarly examination of the contemporary politics of the Ukrainian-Canadian redress lobby. For its financial support we gratefully acknowledge York University's Mariano A. Elia Chair in Italian Canadian Studies, Gabriella ColussiArthur and Elio Costa, former and current directors, respectively, of its academic advisory committee, as well as Erindale College, University of Toronto. We are especially grateful to Gabriele Scardellato for his generous contribution of time and effort to the project. Warm thanks also to Gerry Hallowell of University of Toronto Press for his support. For their assistance in the revision process and final production of the book, we thank Emily Andrew, now with UBC Press, and Jill McConkey and Frances Mundy.

ENEMIES WITHIN Italian and Other Internees in Canada and Abroad

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Introduction Italians and Wartime Internment: Comparative Perspectives on Public Policy, Historical Memory, and Daily Life FRANCA IACOVETTA and ROBERTO PERIN

This book is concerned with a crucial issue confronting modern liberal democracies: how to achieve a balance between the civil liberties of minorities and the needs of majorities. Such a balance is imperfect at the best of times. The ability to maintain its essence, however, is tested to the breaking point by crises such as wars and economic, social, or political breakdowns. We focus our attention here on the Second World War, when, in the interests of national security, democratic governments enacted measures against particular groups within their borders. As a result, certain racial, ethnic, and political minorities earned a notorious reputation as 'enemies within/ Our concern is not with abstract principles per se, although they have certainly guided our analysis, but with their application in a specific historical context. As a discipline, history has the advantage of showing that situations are often far more complex than considerations based on purely abstract principles allow. Because of its concreteness, history can refine our understanding and, for that reason, it makes poor dogma. Can history then lead only to agnosticism, to the conclusion that knowledge is impossible? On the contrary, although few historians today lay claim to a single 'truth/ the craft compels us to assess all the available evidence on a subject, to scrutinize detail, contradiction, and context, and to confront unflattering aspects of the past. In Canada the legislation governing, among other things, the state's handling of minority groups in times of crisis is the Emergencies Act the recently amended War Measures Act. Copied from British law, it was implemented at the start of the First World War. It suspended habeas corpus, as well as freedom of speech and assembly, through orders-in-council drafted by the government in Ottawa as the need arose. Given the state of national emergency, such a law may in princi-

4 Franca lacovetta and Roberto Perin pie be a reasonable restriction on civil liberties. Yet those who most suffered its effects were unemployed sojourners labelled by the government 'enemy aliens' because they originated from Britain's belligerents and were not naturalized at the outbreak of hostilities. Over 8,500 people, most of them ethnic Ukrainians from the Austro-Hungarian empire, were sent to internment camps.1 In 1917 the ruling Conservatives widened the definition of 'enemy alien' in order to minimize the expression of dissent by voters in the election of that year, thus ensuring their victory. They disenfranchised all subjects originating from enemy states who had been naturalized after 1902, while extending the vote to a limited category of women. The ploy worked, and with the support of English-Canadian voters, the government introduced military conscription.2 Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Conservatives once again used the War Measures Act to suppress left-wing movements of protest, which they associated with 'foreign elements/ During the First World War therefore the majority in Canada, through its elected officials, vented its ethnic and social anxieties on a 'visible minority' tarred as disloyal. Those hardest hit were the most vulnerable within this group, the socially marginal or politically activist. The First World War, trumpeted by some historians as Canada's moment, in fact created a sense of alienation for a number of new Canadians.3 When the Second World War broke out, the War Measures Act was once again invoked, this time by a Liberal government. While hindsight had taught the cabinet some lessons about implementing the act, it learned little about managing war hysteria and xenophobia. In the climate of panic that gripped Canadians following Italy's entry into the war and the fall of France in June 1940, the Liberals expanded the category of enemy alien to include all nationals of belligerent states naturalized after 1922. At the time such action was sharply criticized by some, including Tracy Philips, a wartime bureaucrat, who felt that no measure was better designed to alienate ethnic groups such as the Italians from the war effort. This assessment is supported by several contributors to this book, including Angelo Principe, who argues that in this highly charged atmosphere, pointing the finger of suspicion at an entire ethnic group was ultimately more damaging to the group's self-perception than the interning of a tiny fraction of its members. According to official statistics reproduced by historian Robert Keyserlingk, 2,500 Canadian civilians were interned during the Second World War, far fewer than in the previous conflict.4 Around 600 intern-

Introduction: Italians and Wartime Internment 5 ees were of Italian origin, many more than the government had intended to arrest prior to Hitler's invasion of Poland.5 It is with internment that this book deals mainly, in part because some ethnic organizations have made it central to their political agenda, but also because it raises some critical questions regarding minority rights and the majority's needs (including those of the state). Are there, for example, limits to the expression of political dissent? Should the state in wartime tolerate the existence on its soil of anti-democratic movements directly linked to belligerents? Can it arrest the leaders of such movements as a preventive measure, and if so what should the grounds of arrest be? In Canada we may also ask if there was in the Second World War, as in the First, a discrepancy between the stated objectives of the War Measures Act and its application. Method, Outline, Themes This book addresses such questions through a comparative study of the wartime treatment and internment of Italians in Canada. It brings together recent scholarship on Italians and other civilians interned in Canada and on Italians interned in other English-speaking countries during the Second World War. It also combines historical studies of the war years with analyses of present-day campaigns for redress (and related efforts). In contrast to the first, and still important, Canadian collection on internment during the Second World War, On Guard for Thee: War, Ethnicity and the Canadian State, 1939-1945, where most contributors shared the same perspective, this volume includes scholars who do not always agree with each other. It also offers a challenge to the central thesis of On Guard for Thee, which was that the internment of Canada's ethnic minorities constituted a 'war against ethnicity.' According to this view, the Canadian government caved in to wartime hysteria and xenophobia by arbitrarily incarcerating people on the basis of incomplete information hastily scraped together.6 By contrast, the authors here present differing assessments of government officials and security forces inside and outside Canada. While criticism of state authorities is much in evidence, as is a certain sympathy for the innocent victims of internment, many authors argue for the reasonableness of wartime policy intended to suppress suspected Nazi and Fascist activists. Finally, in contrast to On Guard for Thee, which dealt chiefly with policy-making and wartime bureaucracies,7 this book provides greater attention to the social and gender history of internment.

6 Franca lacovetta and Roberto Perin Since current debates on internment generate much emotion but are often woefully uninformed by history, a study of this topic is both timely and valuable. Our interest in producing such a volume sprang from present-day circumstances. As historians of, among others, Italian Canadians, we watched with concern the campaign of the Italian Canadian Redress Committee. In our view, its leaders were guided by a simplified version of events. According to the committee, Italian Canadians were the victims pure and simple of a 'war against ethnicity/ To a man,8 they insisted, internees were politically unsophisticated people from 'all walks of life/ whose lives, and communities, were irreparably damaged by the 'shameful' misconduct of a vindictive state. Prime Minister Mulroney's apology to Italian Canadians in 1990 publicly confirmed the validity of this laundered version of history.9 The redress campaign raised the curtain on an episode about which few Italian Canadians (or Canadians in general) knew anything, and, as Franca lacovetta and Robert Ventresca show, it struck a chord with them. However, as we feared, this simple history - drawing on selective evidence, ignoring contrary views, and glossing over the fascist history of the Italian immigrant communities - has become the orthodox position. Efforts to revise it have provoked anger or silence, as the recent conference that we organized on internment showed.10 Italian-Canadian writers and literary scholars continue to ignore the evidence that Quebec journalist and dramatist Mario Duliani was a Fascist.11 Some Italian Canadians are still lobbying for financial compensation. Their campaign provides some disturbing features: the equating of JapaneseCanadian and Italian-Canadian wartime mistreatment and the illegitimate use of Holocaust imagery and comparisons to describe the Italian-Canadian internees' experiences of internment.12 If the absence of public controversy over the recent airing of the National Film Board's 1997 film Barbed Wires and Mandolins (which adhered to this simple plotline) is any indication, many Canadians have absorbed this version of history.13 Our intention here is not to close the debate by imposing a counternarrative of internment. Rather, we want to faciliate more informed discussion. To that end, we have assembled a roster of scholars who shed much light on the details, contexts, and complexities that have been largely ignored. The essays in Part I address from varying perspectives the nature of interwar fascism in Italian immigrant communities, the Canadian government's shifting position on Italy, and its

Introduction: Italians and Wartime Internment

7

handling of internment. Part II considers other internees confined in Canada, while Part III examines the treatment of Italians in the United States, Britain, and Australia. The former begins with an examination of RCMP activities in Canada and is followed by essays on groups of internees - women, Jews, and Communists - who have not been studied in detail by historians and whose situation underscores the differing internment experiences. The latter section draws out key international comparisons by looking at Italians in three English-speaking countries that developed similar responses to the 'enemy aliens' in their midst. Finally, Part IV deals with memory and the politics of contemporary efforts at redress. Within the general comparative approach, two themes shape the book's framework: the making of internment policy and its uneven implementation; and daily life inside and outside the camps. While differing in their emphasis on politics or social experience, many essays deal with both topics. This is particularly true of Enrico Cumbo's analysis of Hamilton's Italians; of Paula Draper's article on Jewish refugees and Ian Radforth's on the interned Communists; and of the three essays on Italians outside Canada by Rose Scherini (United States), Lucio Sponza (United Kingdom), and Richard Bosworth (Australia). More important the essays taken together, tell us a great deal about the political machinations behind internment and its social consequences for the inmates and for their wives, children, kinfolk, and community. In making our choices we intended neither to be comprehensive in the groups and topics covered nor definitive in our conclusions. In order to facilitate comparative assessments, where appropriate, section introductions briefly cover groups not featured in the essays. We have not included a separate essay on the Japanese Canadians, although several articles and section introductions discuss them in a comparative context. Our decision reflects the fact that we, like most other scholars, see the Japanese as a case apart.14 As for the effects of wartime policies on Italian Canadians, we suggest that it is too early to draw conclusions. The Canadian government dropped the 'enemy alien' category for Italian Canadians in 1943 and adopted more inclusive programs for the war effort. As well, while internment had devastating consequences for the families involved, it was not part of many Italian Canadians' everyday reality. For most Italian Canadians, the war provided a material security unknown since the advent of the Depression. Clearly, more in-depth analyses of gov-

8 Franca lacovetta and Roberto Perin ernment policy and of how Italian Canadians experienced the war are required before conclusions can be drawn. As each part's introduction provides background material, situates the essays within their context, and explains their relation to others in the volume, in this introduction we discuss the major themes and findings that link together all the contributions and compare and contrast the varying approaches adopted. Attitudes and Policy Levels of Xenophobia in Canada and Beyond Historian Robert Harney once asked whether Italophobia was not an English-speaking malady.15 Our contributors certainly suggest that it was a prevelant condition in the English-speaking world, although they differ in their assessment of its influence over wartime internment polices in English-speaking countries. Still, it seems clear that unflattering stereotypes shaped the views of even the more sympathetic wartime officials who counselled selective internment of committed fascists. Such views were rooted in the past. Because Italian immigrants often occupied the lowest rungs of the occupational ladder in countries such as the United States, Britain, and Australia, they were treated at best with condescension and at worst with hostility. This reflected an ageold and deep-seated ambivalence towards Italy itself - praised for its past contribution to Western civilization, dismissed in modern times as decadent and backward. Although the Catholic Church was held principally responsible for the country's intellectual, social, and economic decline, the character of its people was also found wanting. Just before the war Canadian government officials reflected a state of mind that depicted all Italians as militarily inept, if not outright cowards.16 Italians certainly encountered widespread xenophobia in Canada, but we should bear in mind that they were never victims of its worst excesses. They were not targets of mass violence as were the Japanese and other East Asians in Vancouver's 'anti-Oriental' riots in 1907 and Jews in Toronto's Christie Pits riot in 1933. They did not face civil disabilities as did East and South Asians, who were denied the right to vote until after the Second World War. There is no evidence that restrictive covenants conditioned their acquisition of property, as was the case with Blacks and Jews until the 1950s. Unlike Jews and East Asians, their children's access to professional studies was not subject to quotas or

Introduction: Italians and Wartime Internment 9 outright bans. And unlike East Asians and Blacks, they freely served in Canada's armed forces in wartime. All such discriminatory measures, whether legislated or commonly practised, hampered, in some cases severely, the ability of specific groups to participate in Canadian life. For their part, Italians encountered serious discrimination in the workplace and in the patronizing attitudes of professionals, both Canadian and Italian, on whom at times they had to rely.17 Fascist Support in Canada

As several authors note, below, it is not surprising that Benito Mussolini's regime filled many Italian immigrants with pride, given that it countered or at least allowed them to counter the negative stereotypes they faced in everyday life. Long aware of their inferior status as 'dirty foreigners/ 'blackhanders/ and 'wetbacks/ they welcomed Italy's growing stature on the international stage and its leaders' new interest in them. Moreover, political, social, and church leaders in English-speaking countries had nothing but fulsome praise for Fascist Italy, its regime and dictator, at least before the Ethiopian war of 1935-6. Both hostsociety observers and immigrants concluded that one could be both fascist and loyal to one's adopted country. Things changed after 1935. The essays in Part I cover in greatest detail the radical change of opinion that occurred in Canada on that fatal day when Italy challenged Britain's interest in Africa by invading Ethiopia. Contributors note the irony of this shift of opinion, guided less by principle than by those types of tribal instinct (English Canadians' ties to the mother country) thought by some Canadian historians to be the sole possession of French Canadians in this period. English Canadians' honeymoon with Mussolini came to an abrupt end, and, as Reg Whitaker and Gregory S. Kealey indicate, the RCMP began a systematic surveillance of Italian-Canadian Fascists. French Canadians who had essentially held 'il Duce' in high esteem as a Catholic leader began to distance themselves from him as Italy aligned itself increasingly with Nazi Germany through the Anti-Comintern Pact (1937), the Racial Laws (1938), and the Pact of Steel (1939).18 A major issue in this study concerns the nature of fascism in the immigrant communities. How solid, for example, was support for the ideology? A sociology student at McGill University writing in the 1930s on the Italians of Montreal quoted estimates putting such support at 'fully ninety per cent.' Charles Bayley also provided some evocative,

10 Franca lacovetta and Roberto Perin and gendered, images of fascism in the city, as the following description of the Catholic priests' propaganda work among Italian women suggests: Sixteen Blackshirts marched down the aisle behind flag bearers and faced the altar. Two girls dressed in Red-Cross uniforms and four in Fascist costume of black tarn, white waist, and black shirt, were present to assist. The priests blessed the new steel rings. A picture was taken of the group assembled in front of the altar in order that a visual reproduction might be had for the parent church and government. Father Manfraine [sic], in an appeal filled with emotion and pleading, addressed the mothers. The ceremony, he told them, had been performed everywhere in Italy. This sacrifice was to be an expression of faith not only to the mother country but also to their husbands. Italy was fighting in Africa, he pleaded, not because she was cruel, but she was attempting to spread civilization and Christianity among barbarous natives. Those mothers, he ended, who would stand up and give their rings at the moment, would receive the first, steel wedding rings engraved 'II18 November 1935; Aro [sic] per la Patria.'19

In her study of fascist movements in Canada during the Great Depression, Lita-Rose Betcherman reiterated Bayley's figure of 90 per cent and went further, asserting that Montreal's Italians gave Canada's Fascist leader, Adrien Arcand of Quebec, one of his most durable constituencies.20 In this volume, Pennacchio, Principe, and other Italian-Canadian specialists highlight the efforts of Italy's consular officials in a number of Canadian cities to take control of local community organizations. So successful were attempts at equating patriotism with fascism, they argue, that anti-fascists, both liberals and leftists, constantly had to repudiate accusations of being renegades, subversives, and anti-Italian. Radical anti-fascists, among them political exiles from Mussolini's Italy, especially bore the brunt of the Fascist consuls' intimidation techniques and vitriolic attacks. Articles in this volume on Australia, Britain, and the United States also reveal the existence of 'consular Fascism' in English-speaking countries with a sizeable Italian immigrant presence, as well as a common response by governments to this perceived security threat. However, as all these essays demonstrate, enthusiasm for ssolini on the international stage was not sustained. II Duce's popularity began to falter seriously among Italian Canadians, for example, as he moved

Introduction: Italians and Wartime Internment

11

closer to Germany. As a result, his propagandists in Canada found themselves increasingly isolated. In any event, using associational life to gauge support for Fascism may well be misconceived. As several authors document, the government of the day was aware that only a minority of organizations were overtly Fascist, and these were declared illegal following Italy's entry into the war. The Politics of Internment The essays below demonstrate that only a small minority of Italian immigrants were directly involved in fascist organizations. Even fewer could be described as 'fanatical Fascists/ to use Bosworth's phrase. Fewer still were interned by the governments involved. Yet, as Whitaker and Kealey, McBride, and the authors in Part III make clear, scholarly assessments of state responses vary. Certainly, Italian diplomats in Canada believed that by dominating community associations they controlled the hearts and minds of Italian Canadians - or at least they made such self-serving claims in their correspondence with superiors. But in this they deluded themselves. The relevant essays suggest that Canadian mandarin Norman Robertson was closer to the truth when he predicted that Italian Canadians would remain loyal to their adopted country. Through their work, their enlistments, and their contribution to Victory Bonds, they proved him correct. After all, observes Principe, it was one thing to go to picnics, sing the Fascist anthem at patriotic events, and generally take pride in Mussolini when he was the toast of capital cities on both sides of the Atlantic; quite another when il Duce identified himself more and more with Hitler and eventually declared war on the Allies. Britain's and Canada's declaration of war against Italy in June 1940 unleashed a wave of hostility against Italians, who became branded as 'enemy aliens/ Italian Americans too faced a backlash when the United States, responding to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, joined the allied forces, although by the time Washington entered the war in December 1941, the hysteria caused by the fall of France had dissipated. To what extent did internment decisions reflect a popular ethnic backlash or genuine national security concerns? How best do we judge the Canadian case? A comparative approach can help us to grapple better with these difficult questions. In Canada, where the population of those of Italian origin stood at 112,000 in the 1941 census, many more Italian Canadians, as we have seen, were confined than had originally

12 Franca lacovetta and Roberto Perin been planned. Nevertheless, there were more Germans (847) and Japanese (782) placed in Canadian camps than Italians, who constituted about one-quarter of the total. As well, there were fewer civilian internees of Italian origin in Canada than in Britain or Australia. Fully half a world away from Italy, Australia managed to confine nearly 5,000 Italians (out of a total of 35,000). With an Italian population roughly the same size, the United Kingdom arrested slightly fewer Italians, even though it faced the more immediate military threat. As for the United States, which in 1941 had the largest Italian population in the Englishspeaking world, a scarce 250 were interned. However, internment was not the only measure the U.S. government took against Italians: some 10,000 of them were forced to relocate from their west coast homes. An assessment of Italian-Canadian internments can also benefit from comparisons with other groups deemed dangerous by Canadian authorities. The articles below dealing with the internment of women, Jewish refugees, and Communists document the uneven and contradictory nature of internment decisions and the serious mistakes made in the implementation of internment policy. Known Fascists remained free during the war, for example, while individuals with no connection or the most tenous ones to fascism were compelled to spend months and even years in confinement. As in the American, British, and Australian cases, a few anti-fascists, radicals, and informants (maintaining their cover) in Canada also got caught in the security forces' net. Must we conclude from such findings that the entire policy of internment was a mistake? By providing much-needed context and analysis, the contributions to this study shed light on this difficult issue and thereby allow for more informed judgments on the part of readers. History and Redress Redress Movements: Where Historians Disagree The fact that the effects of internment and enemy-alien status have yet to be studied in depth has not impeded ethnic organizations from demanding redress. This volume details two contemporary Canadian examples of such lobbying: the Ukrainian effort, examined by Frances Swyripa, and the Italian one, considered by lacovetta and Ventresca. Although case studies, the essays emphasize that such present-day lobbies are best understood in the broadly comparative context of ethnic politics, where 'multicultural' issues have gained legitimacy. In

Introduction: Italians and Wartime Internment 13 this regard, the success of the Japanese-American and JapaneseCanadian redress campaigns have been critical, spurring other groups, particularly in North America, to seek an official acknowledgment of past wrongs.21 In those countries where formal campaigns for redress have not yet gained momentum, as in Britain and Australia, former internees have broken the long silence on the issue through exhibits, oral testimonies, and published memoirs. The two Canadian campaigns featured here share striking similarities and differences. Although elite-initiated and influenced by the political ambitions of minority Canadians in national politics, both the Ukrainian and Italian lobbies quickly became popular movements. They also reveal a great deal about the therapeutic role that history can play for even established 'white' ethnic communities still harbouring a collective 'inferiority complex.'22 In contrast to the Ukrainian campaign (where internal squabbles and left-right splits occurred), the Italian one has enjoyed more unified support from mainstream Italian associations. The differences may reflect the less politicized nature of the Italian-Canadian community, although not all the conflicts in the Ukrainian lobby can be attributed to political dissension. The subject of redress raises a central political question - whether a current government or generation should apologize and provide reparations for past actions. A related issue concerns the uses of history and specifically whether it should be made to serve present-day community goals, however well-intentioned the proponents. Redress also highlights the relationship between scholarly reconstructions and popular memories of past events. What happens when these interpretations differ, or indeed clash? In studying these questions, the volume provides fine examples of engaged scholarship, while at the same time revealing the divergent roles that historians have played in redress lobbies. The various positions captured below reflect the wider scene, where scholars figure both as leaders and as critics of redress campaigns. Those in favour of redress stress the positive role of history in progressive movements in teaching people about past wrongs and empowering aggrieved ordinary citizens to make demands of their government. Historians have also criticized redress campaigns and related efforts. In addition to Swyripa and lacovetta and Ventresca, Roberto Perm's article on Duliani and Gabriele Scardellato's photo essay ask whether efforts at redress have distorted history for contemporary purposes. Such studies illuminate the role of the historian as 'expert' in current legal cases or political lobbies.

14 Franca lacovetta and Roberto Perin Memory Sources While the essays on redress politics highlight the gaps between scholarly and popular histories, most articles dealing with historical recovery provide a different perspective and method from traditional historical writing. Many authors combine memory sources with government records, newspapers, and other written records. Some rely on interviews, while others blend such material with letters, private family papers, and memoirs. Together they illustrate how the use of oral history sources can shed light on aspects of the past not easily revealed by archival records, even documents extracted from the confidential security files of the RCMP, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Britain's MI5. In recent years, scholars have been more attentive to the silences and narrative structures that characterize the 'scripts' that this material represents.23 Both Radforth's discussion of the published accounts of Canadian Communist internees and Perm's analysis of Duliani's internment novel, La ville sans femmes, assess the narrative form and (political) intent of published memory sources, while also mining the contents for depictions of camp life. Sensitive to internal consistencies and incongruities, both authors avoid an entirely insular reading of texts, demonstrating instead the social historian's penchant for integrating contextualizing and corroborating evidence. Draper uses oral testimony to reconstruct the camp routines and responses of the 'camp boys/ as the interned Jews called themselves. Weaving interviews with security documents and newspapers, Cumbo documents a neglected (silenced?) aspect of Italian-Canadian internment - the internal conflicts arising from rumours of Italians informing on their compatriots. If the silences in oral testimonies speak volumes, so do pictorial images. Those in Scardellato's essay on Italians in the Petawawa and Fredericton internment camps speak powerfully to the silence still surrounding the question of whether some internees were committed Fascists. Daily Life Towards a tory of Internment This book contributes to an emerging social history of internment and wartime measures by considering the experiences of those affected by

Introduction: Italians and Wartime Internment 15 such decisions. It highlights as well the remarkable mix of men (and some women and children) who constituted the internee populations during the Second World War. Canada's internment camps were peopled by a wide range of men whom the authorities variously labelled dangerous, deviant, foolish, and innocent. The Italian civilian internees alone included businessmen, professionals, and workers accused of fascist sympathies; mobsters; a few trade union organizers; and antiFascists. They in turn belonged to a much larger group of civilian and military prisoners, including German Canadians, Canadian Communists and left-wing 'ethnics' (most of them Ukrainians), and homegrown Fascists such as Adrien Arcand, leader of Quebec's National Unity party. From outside Canada came others, among them Britain's 'deportees/ who included Italian, German, and Austrian residents categorized as 'dangerous aliens'; Jewish refugees, German POWS, German and Italian merchant seaman; and pro-communist members of the International Brigades who had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Outside the camps were the Japanese Canadians forcibly relocated to special camps and the handful of women interned at Kingston Penetentiary. Similar mixes obtained in the camps in Britain, the United States, and Australia. This jumble of people made for potentially dramatic encounters between 'enemies' and for tense relations among camp inmates and between inmates and guards. Sometimes, the mutual hostility was expressed in humorous forms, as in sporting competitions that pitted 'right' against 'left.' Other times, it took on more sinister, even violent tones. Contributors also underscore Bosworth's observation that internment, though commonplace in wartime, elicited a variety of responses on the part of internees. Their quality of life was also much affected by camp conditions and ruling commandants. The relevant Canadian essays, for example, document the presence both of democratic forms of self-governance among the inmates and clear class distinctions, as well as a system of special privileges for well-placed internees. Gendering Male Subjects This book illustrates the value of 'gendering' male subjects, probing 'masculinities,' and studying the differential impact of state policies on men and women. The relevant essays also offer analyses of the varied and sometimes contradictory responses and identities that took shape inside the confined spaces. In the bigger and mixed camps, for exam-

16 Franca lacovetta and Roberto Perin pie, the rough-and-tumble culture of the merchant seaman, or showy parades of pro-fascist Italians, co-existed with homosexual seduction rituals and the anguished cries of lonely men. A central question is how men gave meaning to the challenges that internment, relocation, or other restrictions posed for their self- and collective identities. The answer requires a 'textured analysis/24 which considers the age, marital status, politics, and even health of the men and their differing support networks inside and outside the camps or relocation zones. If some teenagers enjoyed the camp's recreational life, and its more colourful characters, many married men worried about wives struggling on the outside and felt frustrated by their evident failure as chief breadwinner. The essays on Italians unfairly interned as Fascists highlight the vulnerability of 'foreign' men whose self-identity as husbands and fathers was undermined by fears of losing a family business or job or their children's respect. That men could exhibit various forms of gender identity simultaneously is suggested by evidence on the leftist internees, whose masculinity was shaped both by a political communist discourse and by private relationships with family. Two consistent responses emerge, however: the internees' indignation over their treatment and their determination to meet the challenges of confinement. How they did so is amply illustrated below in ong and poetry writing, sports, workers' co-ops, and other activities. The articles dealing with masculinity also raise topics for further research. Did the masculinities of pro-fascist and pro-Nazi internees differ from those of civilian internees who were or felt themselves falsely accused? The intriguing references to how men resumed their personal, family, and political lives or careers after internment also suggest further study. Taking R.W. Connell's notion of a hierarchy of masculinities, we might also scrutinize how differences in class backgrounds, status, and power among and between men in the camps (both inmates and guards) produced different forms of male identities and shaped male relations. We also need to know more about how internment affected relations between men who stood on either side of the barbed wire. Finally, we might ask a broader theoretical question of interest to historians of masculinity: if, as Radforth notes, internment marked an extraordinary event in these men's lives, did it provoke 'a crisis of masculinity'?25 Women Internees, Family Strategies, and Protest

Any serious social and gender history of wartime restrictions must

Introduction: Italians and Wartime Internment 17 tackle the experiences and responses of the women involved. As this volume illustrates, a focus on women (even their absence) can deepen our understanding of historical events. The relevant articles also caution against adopting a monolithic view of women, who, depending on nationality, citizenship, and politics, acted differently. In Canada, for instance, many Anglo-Canadian women boycotted Italian- and German-Canadian businesses; French-Canadian female fascists supported anti-Semitic programs; and both Anglo- and non-Anglo-Canadian women could be found in right-wing parties. The essays dealing with women particularly shed light on four themes: female internment, family relocation, survival strategies, and release campaigns. Comparatively few women in North America, Britain, and Australia were interned in the Second World War - a pattern that probably reflected sexist assumptions about the less threatening nature of female subversives. But significant numbers were arrested and detained or targeted by surveillance authorities for suspected left- or right-wing sympathies. As noted above, the evidence shows that inaccuracies and selective imprisonment also marked female detention. Further, the contexts of female internment could differ remarkably from those of men. For instance, Canada's women internees were confined in a formal prison, which offered better accommodation and privileges but precluded the kinds of collaborative projects or political camaraderie that developed in some of the male camps. Among women internees, political rivalries and other tensions also prevented bonding across gender lines. The most sustained analysis of female internment is McBride's article on the English- and French-Canadian and ethnic women detained for their pro-fascist or Nazi loyalties. Drawing on government and security sources, especially RCMP surveillance files, she integrates political, social, and gender themes. Her essay also joins a small but critical feminist historical literature on women and right-wing movements and thus illustrates as well how women's historians can write effectively about 'unsympathetic' female subjects.26 McBride's evidence illuminates the largely middle-class family backgrounds of these 'troublesome' women and enables her to evaluate the character of women's activism in right-wing parties that both idealized women's domesticity and recruited women as political 'helpmates.' Only a small minority of women were highly active fascists or internees. Far more women (and children) were adversely affected by other kinds of wartime regulations. The largest and most notorious evacuation programs in the allied countries covered in this book involved

18 Franca lacovetta and Roberto Perin Japanese Americans and Canadians. Italian and German aliens in countries such as Britain (after June 1940) and the United States (after Pearl Harbor) were also subject to evacuation programs designed to remove populations from prohibited coastal and other sensitive areas. Here, several essays on Italians highlight the predicaments of women who vacated homes, sold household belongings or store inventory, and found new accommodation while financially hard-pressed and anxious about absent husbands and sons. The differential impact of relocation on women and men is captured in Scherini's essay, which also raises key questions about immigrant men's and women's differing rates of naturalization and gendered differences in the acquisition of national identities of immigrants abroad.27 It would be misleading, however, to view these women as passive victims, for, as Bosworth observes, women left alone by internment 'took responsibility or "agency" for their own and their children's lives with alacrity and competence.' Once again, the evidence suggests women's enormous capacity for resourcefulness and their critical role in family survival strategies. (It would be interesting to know, however, whether engagements or marriages were broken by internment or if other changes resulted.) Women found ways to make ends meet and proved ingenious in giving support and comfort to imprisoned husbands. Sponza's descriptions of Italian women in Britain who smuggled in food and other prohibited items, and outsmarted censors, applies to all the internees' wives in the countries studied here. So do the references to older children who played critical support roles - a topic that deserves more study. The wives of the Communist internees distinguished themselves by initiating a political lobby for the release of their husbands. Like their men inside, politically committed leftist women responded to their situation by developing collective and political as well as family strategies of survival. Conclusion The present volume is intended to launch an informed debate on an issue that has generated much passion, but little critical analysis. We hope that our perspectives and findings will guide reflections on an important episode in the past. In particular, we would like readers to draw lessons regarding the state's obligation not only to protect its citizenry in times of crisis, but also the rights of vulnerable groups in society, no matter how different from the mainstream they may be.

Introduction: Italians and Wartime Internment

19

Notes 1 See Frances Swyripa and John Herd Thompson, eds., Loyalties in Conflict: Ukrainians in Canada during the Great War (Edmonton, 1983), and Swyripa's essay in this volume. 2 Swyripa and Thompson, Loyalties in Conflict; J.L. Granatstein and J.M. Hitsman, Broken Promises: A History of Conscription in Canada (Toronto, 1969); Alison Prentice et al., Canadian Women: A History (Toronto, 1988), chap. 8. 3 Valuable discussions of these themes include Donald Avery, 'Dangerous Foreigners': European Immigrant Workers and Labour Radicalism in Canada, 1896-1932 (Toronto, 1979); his Reluctant Host: Canada's Response to Immigrant Workers, 1896-1994 (Toronto, 1995); and Gregory S. Kealey, 'State Repression of Labour and the Left in Canada, 1914-1920: The Impact of the First World War/ Canadian Historical Review 73, no. 3 (1992), 281-314. 4 His figures are 847 Germans, 632 Italians, 782 Japanese, and 133 Communists. See his 'Breaking the Nazi Plot: Canadian Government Attitudes towards German Canadians, 1939-1945,' in Norman Hillmer, Bohdan Kordan, and Lubomyr Luciuk, eds., On Guard for Thee: War, Ethnicity and the Canadian State, 1939-1945 (Ottawa, 1988), 63^. 5 The estimates range from 563 to 700. We use the figure suggested by Luigi Bruti Liberati, who has worked diligently to determine the precise number of internees. See his article in this volume. 6 The one exception was J.L. Granatstein and Gregory A. Johnson's 'The Evacuation of the Japanese Canadians, 1942: A Realist Critique of the Received Version/ in Hillmer, Kordan, and Luciuk, eds., On Guard for Thee, 101-29, although they too stressed the RCMP's incompetence. Granatstein has reiterated his argument justifying the state's actions against Japanese Canadians elsewhere, including in Patricia Roy, J.L. Granatstein, Masako lino, and Hiroko Takamura, Mutual Hostages: Canadians and Japanese during the Second world War (Toronto, 1990), and most recently in Who Killed Canadian History? (Toronto, 1998). We disagree totally with his treatment of the Japanese-Canadian issue and his blanket condemnation of what he calls 'multiculturalism mania.' We are not interested in defending state action in wartime, and we feel that his approach rides roughshod over the complexities of multiculturalism, past and present. For a critique of this thesis, see also the essays by Bruti Liberati and by Whitaker and Kealey in this volume. 7 See also Harold Troper's afterword to On Guard for Thee. 8 They did not discuss the few Italian women interned; for details, see McBride's essay in this volume.

20 Franca lacovetta and Roberto Perin 9 The campaign and Mulroney's apology are covered in detail by lacovetta and Ventresca in this volume. 10 'The Internment of Italian Canadians in World War Two: A Conference/ Columbus Centre, Toronto, Oct. 1995. 11 For details, see the essays by Perin and by lacovetta and Ventresca in this volume. 12 See also Richard Bosworth's essay in this volume and his study, Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War, 1945-1990 (London, 1993). 13 For further details on this film, see the article by lacovetta and Ventresca in this volume. 14 For a fuller explanation of this decision, see the introductory essay to Part II. On the redress campaign, see the introduction to Part IV. There is a large and useful literature available on this topic, including Ken Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was (Toronto, 1991), and Ann Gomer Sunahara, Th Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War (Toronto, 1981). For an opposing view, see Roy et al., Mutual Hostages, as well as Granatstein and Johnson, 'Evacuation of the Japanese Canadians.' 15 Robert Harney, 'Italophobia: An English Speaking Malady?' Studi emigrazione/Etudes migrations 22, no. 77 (1985), 6-42. 16 See, for example, Antonio Gramsci, La questione meridionale (Rome 1966); Michael La Sorte, La Merica: Images of Italian Greenhorn Experience (Philadelphia, 1985); Donna Gabaccia 'The "Yellow Peril" and the "Chinese of Europe": Global Perspectives on Race and Labor, 1815-1930,' in Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, eds., Migrations, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (Hamburg, 1998), 123-47; James Barrett and David Roediger, 'In Between Peoples: Race, Nationality, and the "New , Immigrant" Working Class/ Journal of American Ethnic History 16 (spring 1997), 34-48; Franca lacovetta, Michael Quinlan, and Ian Radforth, 'Immigration and Labour: Australia and Canada Compared/ Labour/Le Travail 38 (fall 1996), 90-115; Roberto Perin, 'Making Good Fascists and Good Canad-ians: Consular Propaganda and the Italian Community in Montreal in the 1930s,' in G. Gold, ed., Minorities and Mother Country Imagery (St John's, 1984), 136-58. 17 A useful overview is Avery's Reluctant Host. Specialized works include Patricia Roy, A White Man's Province: British Columbia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants, 1858-1914 (Vancouver, 1989); Norman Buchignani and Doreen M. Indra, Continuous Journey: A Social History of South Asians in Canada (Toronto, 1985); Hugh Johnston, The Voyage of the Komagata Maru

Introduction: Italians and Wartime Internment

18

19

20 21 22 23

24 25 26

27

21

(Vancouver, 1989); James Walker, Blacks in Canada (Ottawa, 1974); Peter Li, The Chinese in Canada (Don Mills, 1988); Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948 (Toronto, 1982). In the non-aggression, or Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, Germany and the Soviet Union promised to refrain from any aggressive acts against each other. Hitler broke its terms in June 1941 when he invaded the Soviet Union, which then entered the war on the allied side against Germany. For more details on international affairs see Principe's contribution to this volume. The Racial Laws targeted Jews and marked a turning point in Italian public policy, which until then had not discriminated against Jews. The Pact of Steel was a formal alliance between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy signed on 22 May 1939. Charles Bayley, 'The Social Structure of the Italian and Ukrainian Immigrant Communities in Montreal, 1935-1937,' (MA thesis, McGill University, 1939), 82,161. Lita-Rose Betcherman, The Swastika and the Maple Leaf: Fascist Movements in Canada in the Thirties (Toronto, 1975), 7. For details see the introduction and citations in Part IV. From Robert Harney 'Caboto and Other Parentella: The Uses of the Italian-Canadian Past,' in Roberto Perin and Franc Sturino, eds., Arrangiarsi: The Italian Immigrant Experience in Canada (Montreal, 1989), 37-61. For further treatment of these themes, see, for example, Annemarie Troeger, 'German Women's Memories of World War II,' in Margaret Randolph Higonnet et al., eds. Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, Conn., 1987); Marlene Epp, Women without Men: Mennonite Refugees of the Second World War (Toronto, 2000); James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Cambridge, 1992); and the essays by Radforth and by Perin in this volume. From Bos worth's essay in this volume. R.W. Connell, 'The Big Picture: Masculinities in Recent World History/ Theory and Society 22 (1993), 161-81. For example, Victoria De Grazi, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley, Calif., 1992); and, for Canada, Karen Dubinsky, Lament for a 'Patriarchy Lost'? Anti-feminism, Anti-abortion and R.E.A.L. Women in Canada (Ottawa, 1985); Frances Swyripa, Wedded to the Cause: Ukrainian-Canadian Women and Ethnic Identity, 1891-1981 (Toronto, 1993). For further discussion of this theme, see Donna Gabaccia and Franca lacovetta, 'Women, Work and Protest in the Italian Diaspora: An International Research Agenda,' Labour/Le Travail 42 (fall 1998), 161-81.

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Part One Italian Canadians, Fascism, and Internment: Black Shirts or Sheep?

Earlier histories of Canada in the Second World War focused on what historians considered to be the key national issues of the day: FrenchEnglish relations, military matters, the political crisis surrounding conscription, and the country's 'coming of age' on the world stage. In more recent years, women's and social histories have enlarged our wartime lens by considering the equally important changes that war brought to the daily lives of ordinary Canadians both on the homefront and in the battlefields. Such studies have highlighted, for example, the impact of war production on job opportunities, trade unions, and labour protest; the massive entry of women into the military bureaucracy and munitions plants; and soldiers' readjustment to civilian life.1 The evacuation of the Japanese Canadians has long received serious attention, although earlier studies generally dealt with the political machinations and, to a lesser extent, military efforts involved in carrying out the relocation, leaving largely unexplored the social experience or responses of the uprooted. It was not until later that full-length histories of the episode told from the Japanese-Canadian vantage point began to appear.2 More recently, ethnic historians and security specialists have turned to writing what Donald Avery aptly calls 'the security dimension' of the Second World War by considering the plight of the foreign-born ethnic minorities that hailed from nations with which Canada was at war. Access to previously restricted security intelligence records, combined with a more sophisticated understanding of the immigrant communities, has enabled historians and other scholars to explore how majority and minority Canadians endured the crisis.3 A central issue of this book concerns the origins and character of

24 Part One: Italian Canadians, Fascism, and Internment fascism in Italian-Canadian communities - specifically whether fascist activists in some way posed a threat to the country at war. In addressing this controversial topic, the specialists featured below combine an interest in security issues with a social history of the Italian-Canadian community. The history of fascism in Canada's Italian immigrant communities rightly begins in the interwar years, when Mussolini's consular officials encouraged fascism in Canada's 'Little Italics.' Angelo Principe's essay (chapter 1) sets the stage by discussing the shifting fortunes of Italian Canadians in English Canada and Quebec against the backdrop of Canada's changing interwar foreign policy and dramatic developments on the international stage. His sources include newspapers, security intelligence files, and 'foreign-language' sources within Italian-Canadian communities. Principe scrutinizes the 'carrot-and-stick' approach of pro-fascist leaders in the immigrant enclaves and draws distinctions between the 'black shirts' genuinely committed to Fascism and the ordinary, apolitical 'sheep' whose support was largely emotional.4 He stresses the distinctions among the pro-fascists and explores as well the role of anti-fascists in the events under review. Luigi G. Pennacchio (chapter 2) affirms Principe's main arguments, offering us a detailed case study of how Mussolini's consuls infiltrated Toronto's Italian community. Pennacchio concentrates on internal developments within the immigrant community. In researching the activities of the institutions, fraternal orders, newspapers, sports and cultural clubs, and language schools, he grapples with the problematic relationship between the rights of the Italian minority and the wartime needs of the majority. Luigi Bruti Liberati (chapter 3) addresses the issues of majorityversus-minority rights in wartime through a study of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's (RCMP's) monitoring and internment of Italian Canadians. Like Kealey and Whitaker (in Part II), Bruti Liberati refutes the argument, forcefully made by the authors of On Guard for Thee, that the RCMP's indiscriminate round-up of 'enemy aliens' during the war is best explained by the poor quality of intelligence information gathered before the war and the overall weakness of Canada's security force. In response, Bruti Liberati looks at the pre-war and wartime intelligence work of the RCMP, particularly in the largest Italian communities of Toronto and Montreal, assesses the reliability of their information (while also agreeing that mistakes occurred), and then develops a collective portrait of the Italian-Canadian internees.

Black Shirts or Sheep? 25 If the first three essays can be read as challenges to the 'war against ethnicity' thesis featured in On Guard for Thee and in the Italian-Canadian redress campaign, Enrico Gumbo's contribution (chapter 4) on Hamilton's Italians might be seen to share aspects of both schools of thought. At the same time, Gumbo's approach to internment is innovative because of the attention that he pays to the social impact that internment had on the lives of the internees' wives, kinf oik, and community members outside the barbed wire. In taking us back to where Pennacchio began - inside an Italian-Canadian community - Gumbo contributes significantly to the writing of the social and community history of internment. Notes 1 See, for example C.P. Stacey, Six Years of War: The Army in Canada, Britain, and the Pacific (Ottawa, 1955); James Eayrs, In Defence of Canada: Appeasement and Rearmament (Toronto, 1965); J.L. Granatstein, Canada's War: The Politics of the Mackenzie King Government, 1939-1945 (Toronto, 1975); Ruth Pierson, 'They're Still Women after All': The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood (Toronto, 1986); and J.L. Granatstein and Desmond Morton, A Nation Forged in Fire: Canadians and the Second World War (Toronto, 1989). 2 See, for example, Ken Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians (Toronto, 1987; revised 1991); Barry Broadfoot, Years of Sorrow, Years of Shame (Toronto, 1977); Ann Corner Sunahara, The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War (Toronto, 1981); Muriel Kitagawa, This Is My Own: Letters to Wes and Other Writings on Japanese Canadians 1941-1949, ed. Roy Miki (Vancouver, 1985); Patricia Roy et al., Mutual Hostages: Canadians and Japanese during the Second World War (Toronto, 1990); and Roy Miki and Cassandra Kobayashi, Justice in the Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement (Vancouver, 1991). We would also include Joy Kogawa's historical novel, Obasan (Markham, 1983). 3 Donald Avery Reluctant Host: Canada's Response to Immigrant Workers, 1896-1994 (Toronto, 1995) especially chap. 6; Norman Hillmer, Bohdan Kordan, and Lubomyr Luciuk, eds., On Guards for Thee: War, Ethnicity, and the Canadian State, 1939-1945 (Ottawa, 1988); Thomas Prymak, Maple Leaf and Trident: The Ukrainian Canadians during the Second World War (Toronto, 1988); and Johnathan F. Wagner, Brothers beyond the Sea: National Socialism in Canada (Waterloo, 1981).

26 Part One: Italian Canadians, Fascism, and Internmen 4 'Black shirts' refers to the colour of Fascist uniforms worn by Mussolini's supporters. As Principe and as Whitaker and Kealey explain, when civil servant Norman Robertson described the vast majority of Italians as 'sheep/ he meant that they were merely unsophisticated followers of pro-fascist leaders in their community and thus did not constitute a security threat.

1 A Tangled Knot: Prelude to 10 June 1940 ANGELO PRINCIPE

We are only what we have been - more exactly, what we remember we were. Franco Ferrarotti

The events of June 1940 are the most tangled in Italian-Canadian experience. Because of its complex political and ideological undertones however, the tangle is ignored and the struggle leading to it is forgotten. This paper presents a different interpretation from the one put forward by the Italian Canadian Redress Committee - an interpretation too hastily embraced in 1990 by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.1 It attempts to untangle the knot formed by those sad events, which still trigger extreme emotions among elderly Italian Canadians. The decision in the summer of 1940 to intern Italian Canadians, I argue below, was the result of several related factors: first, years of Italian-Canadian fascist propaganda and reckless activities inspired by it, and second, the 'fifth column crisis/ both factors compounded by a third, an ambiguous Canadian policy towards Fascism and local Italian Fascists. When Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940, Canadians from coast to coast were in the grips of panic and hysteria about the 'fifth column/ In the two short months of April and May 1940, the Nazis had conquered all the democratic countries of continental Europe. In Canada those extraordinary military successes made ominously real the words that Francisco Franco's general Emilio Mola Vidal (1887-1937), uttered early in the Spanish Civil War in the course of his 1936 offensive against Madrid. When asked which of his four columns would take the city, the general responded that it would be his fifth, made up of supporters

28 Angelo Principe inside the city.2 Obsessed by the 'enemy within' in the wake of Nazi victories in Europe, Canadians across the country provided the Mounties with a mass of information about saboteurs, spies, and enemy agents.3 As a result, on 13 June, the dominion minister of justice, Ernest Lapointe, announced in the House of Commons: 'The very minute that news was received that Italy had declared war on Great Britain and France I signed an order for the internment of many hundreds of men whose names were on the list of RCMP as suspects. I cannot provide the House with the exact number; the RCMP has asked me not to divulge this information because it might create an obstacle to their work/4 Among those arrested were several hundred Italian Canadians. Questions soon arose about the basis on which the arrests were made. Some people argued that Fascists were left free while innocent individuals were apprehended.5 Leading Fascists such as A.D. Sebastiani and A.S. Biffi of Montreal had not been interned. The first was a friend of Italy's highest Fascist leaders such as Giacomo Acerbo and Giuseppe Volpi.6 The second had been one of the founders of the fascio Luperini in Montreal and a member of its first executive, or 'direttorio,' in 19257 Norman Robertson, chairman of the 'Inter-ministerial Committee' advising the government on Canadians of European origin, argued against interning Biffi, who was, in Robertson's words, 'a very important business figure ... married to a French-Canadian woman [who] has many political contacts [and would be] more trouble if picked up than if left alone.'8 By contrast, among those interned were about twenty suspected mafiosi who had nothing to do with fascism.9 Their leader was Rocco Perri of Hamilton, 'the founder of a bootleg empire that stretched from Ontario to New York, Buffalo, Chicago, the Maritimes and beyond.'10 A small number of men were probably erroneously apprehended, including at least one 'fervent antifascist/ Carlo Roggiani, a 'railway worker from Saskatchewan/11 The rest of the internees were members of the Italian/ascf in Canada or officers of other satellite fascist organizations.12 Some, such as James Franceschini of Toronto, were prominent businessmen and professionals who had been involved only moderately in fascist activities. Others were more active and militant. Local Fascists were not a homogeneous group; they differed in the degree of their involvement in fascist ideology and activities. We should also believe the internees' claim that they meant no harm against Canada. This sentiment was forcefully expressed by Ruggero B., secretary of the Fascio Principe Umberto for 1939-40, in a letter to the deputy minister of justice: 'That I have been active in the Fascio, I did not deny it nor do

A Tangled Knot: Prelude to 10 June 1940 29

Guests at a reception held by James Franceschini (middle, back row) in honour of a visiting dignitary from Mussolini's Fascist government, Piero Parini. II Bollettino italo-canadese, 9 Feb. 1934.

I deny it/ He added: 'In any case I categorically denied that I and the members of the Fascio have done any work which might be construed as being detrimental to this country/13 But since Italians and Italian Canadians freely participated in fascist activities in Canada, all of those who did so share in the responsibility

30 Angelo Principe

An ad for a picnic commemorating Toronto's centennial, organized by Toronto's leading fascist club, Fascio Principe Umberto, and the Italian War Veterans Association. II Bollettino italo-canadese, 13 July 1934.

for creating the fear, suspicion, and mistrust in the Italian-Canadian communities and the resentment against Italians that began to develop in the host society with the Ethiopian crisis of 1935-6. Unconcerned about antagonizing other groups, Fascists followed Mussolini's slogans to the letter: 'Molti nemici, molto onore!' (Many enemies, much honour); 'Noi tireremo diritto' (We will forge ahead); and 'Credere! Obedire Combattere!' (Believe! Obey! Fight!). From 1935 on, their political behaviour created resentment among Canadians of British origin, Blacks, Jews, and, finally, immigrants who hailed from European countries conquered by Hitler. When Mussolini declared war on Britain and France, Italian-Canadian Fascists had very few friends left. Unfortunately, 'they [had] also managed to leave the impression with society at large that most Italian-Canadians were involved with Fascism.'14

A Tangled Knot: Prelude to 10 June 1940 31 Fascist Activity before and after Ethiopia Before 1935, Italian and Italian-Canadian fascists benefited from official Canada's general approval of Fascism. In these years, members of Canada's elite travelling to Italy, including Lady Eaton, Bishop J.T. MacNally of Hamilton, and Canon Henry John Cody, president of the University of Toronto, praised the disciplined, patriotic, and ordered country where the 'trains arrived on time.'15 Italian aristocrats such as Duke Mario Colonna and Contessa Maria Lorschi, Fascist leaders such as Piero Parini, clerics such as Father Giacomo Salza, and writers such as Mussolini's Jewish lover and biographer, Margherita Sarfatti, travelled to Canada and reinforced these reports.16 With equal enthusiasm, Italian-Canadian intellectuals such as Frank Molinaro, Professor Emilio Goggio of the University of Toronto, the Protestant minister Liborio Lattoni in Montreal, and Frank Tenisci in Vancouver promoted Fascism with articles, conferences, speeches, and letters to the national newspapers. Liberal-minded Canadians, such as J.E. Atkinson of the Toronto Daily Star, J.W. Dafoe of the Winnipeg Free Press, and later, the young Andre Laurendeau in Quebec, certainly expressed ideological opposition to Italian Fascism. But, in contrast to the United States, they paid no attention to fascist activities among Italians in their own land.17 In this political climate, Fascists, whom many praised for their anti-communist stance, could carry on their questionable activities undisturbed. Within the various Italian-Canadian communities, Fascists and consuls intimidated, persecuted, blackmailed, and spied on those Italians who resisted their dictatorial methods. The decline in support for Fascism in Canada was instigated by two events: the dominion election of October 1935 and the Ethiopian question. Harry H. Stevens, minister of trade and commerce in R.B. Bennett's government, broke with his leader and contested the election of that year with his newly founded Reconstruction party. Fascists in urban Ontario solidly supported the populist Stevens. They boasted that some 50,000 Italian Canadians could be expected to follow suit. 'Mussolini in Italy - Stevens in Canada' was their slogan.18 They saw in his party the revolt of the middle class, considered 'the most active, the most diligent, and even the most intelligent in the country.'19 They argued that in Italy the middle classes had largely created Fascism and brought Mussolini to power. In contrast to the Conservative and Liberal parties, which upheld, to differing degrees, a pro-imperial position and supported the League of

Angelo Principe Nations's decisions against Italy after its invasion of Ethiopia, Stevens and his Reconstruction party were against Canadian involvement abroad.20 During a rally in Montreal, Stevens clearly stated his position: 'I think it is an unthinkable thing that Canada be dragged into a war involving obscure things in Europe or Africa/21 Stevens's policy on this matter coincided with that pursued by the Italian consuls in Montreal and Ottawa - namely, 'inhibiting imperial unity in case of war/ This position was clearly expressed by the weekly L'ltalia, the mouthpiece of the consul in Montreal. Its editorial stated, 'Canada should openly tell Great Britain that she should not send troops to fight in Europe. This would undoubtedly influence the British Government and English public opinion, contributing a great deal to the cause of peace/22 To boost Stevens's campaign, Jacopo Massimo Magi, leader of the Toronto Fascio Principe Umberto in the years 1934-8, became national organizer of the Reconstruction party for Italians. 'His position with the Prince Humbert Fascist Organization/ wrote the Toronto Evening Telegram on 27 September 1935, 'has made him perhaps, the most influential Fascist leader in Canada/23 In Toronto, another prominent Fascist working for the Reconstruction party was Dr Donato Sansone.24 The electoral fiasco of the Reconstruction party across the country, and in Toronto's Trinity riding in particular (where Italians were numerous), points to the lack of support for Fascism among Italian Canadians and the vacuity of Fascists' claims.25 Fascist propaganda, however, had succeeded in presenting the sanctions against Italy as aggression, and this awakened patriotism even among those Italian Canadians who were indifferent to Fascism. The Ethiopian campaign was, in fact, the Fascists' most intense period of activity and accomplishment across Canada. The active help of Italian priests and the support of Catholic clergy in general and of at least one bishop, MacNally of Hamilton, very much enhanced their efforts.26 In the long run, however, Italy's victory over Ethiopia was more harmful than beneficial to Fascists in Canada. Except for the FrenchCanadian Catholic press and extreme right-wing publications, the newspapers of the country from Nova Scotia to British Columbia, and in particular Toronto's Star, Telegram, and Globe and Mail, conducted a campaign against the Fascist aggression in East Africa that turned English-Canadian public opinion and the liberal-minded minority of Quebec decisively against Fascism. People of different political and ideological orientations found themselves supporting the League of Nations against Italy. For example, the socialist mayor of Toronto, Jimm Simpson, and the ultra-conservative Orange Order stood on the same

A Tangled Knot: Prelude to 10 June 1940 33 side condemning Italy, as did the Liberal Winnipeg free Press and Toronto Star and Toronto's Conservative Globe and Telegram. The New Outlook, the organ of the United Church, which used to view Mussolini and Fascism with indulgence, came out decisively against Fascist aggression. In an article titled 'The Italian Outrage/ the Protestant paper referred to Mussolini as the 'criminal of Rome' and charged that the nations of Europe and America were guilty for not stopping with every means 'this outrage against Africa and every civilized sentiment/27 Some African Canadians became militant and together with the Canadian League for Peace (later the League against War and Fascism) increased activities against fascism. In October 1935 the League and the Italian-Canadian CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) Club denounced the Fascist aggression during a large rally held on the grounds of Queen's Park. They intended to demonstrate in front of the Italian consulate, but the police barred their way.28 In Montreal the Black community forcefully denounced Fascist Italy in its newspaper the Free Lance. The Italian consul Giuseppe Brigidi reported that the Free Lance quickly 'obtained the support of people of different races and political views, but all happy to manifest their aversion to Fascist Italy ... Even the small group of Italian anti-fascists joined in. To show their opposition to the Regime, they would even join the devil,' concluded the consul.29 In the Italian community, the long-standing confrontation between Fascists and radical anti-fascists turned into a violent street battle in Toronto.30 More ominously, the RCMP began to watch attentively fascist associations and to monitor their activities. More damaging to their own cause were the Fascists themselves. Elated by Mussolini's victory in Ethiopia, they amused themselves with dreams of the reborn glory of imperial Rome and of Italy as supreme in every human endeavour. 'There are only few people,' wrote the Italian consul general Luigi Petrucci, 'who would not admit that Italy is one of the great military powers of the world.'31 Thus they became rude, arrogant, and more impudent than ever. In Montreal Fascists paraded singing 'se non ci basta questa terra [Ethiopia] ci pigliamo 1'Inghilterra' (If Ethiopia is not enough we will also take England).32 In Toronto, willing but unable to do what their comrades had done to anti-fascists in Italy, they acted symbolically. They sent a bottle of castor oil to the Telegram and Star.33 According to // Bollettino, 'the entire press spits venom more pestilential than the smell of a skunk ... The Telegram is the worst of them all... showing that it was not able to swallow the castor oil we sent.'34 Fascists were particularly vitriolic against the Toronto Star. An edito-

34 Angelo Principe rial titled 'A Gentlemen's Agreement' was very critical of Britain for abandoning the collective security of the League of Nations for a bilateral treaty with Italy and concluded with an ominous warning that the 'gangster' militaristic states (Italy Germany, and Japan) were dictating world policy. The Italian consul Giorgio Tiberi protested against the editorial with an open letter that denounced the Star as 'a sheet of Communist propaganda.'35 // Bollettino, in the best 'squadrista' (fascist hooligan) style, went so far as to state, 'You [the Star editors] deserve a sound cudgelling which would fix your brain.'36 This was not the first fascist attack in this vein, nor was it to be the last. The Ethiopian war was followed by the Spanish Civil War, Mussolini's alliance with Hitler, and the Fascist anti-Semitic policy. If the Ethiopian war dashed Mussolini's popularity in Canada, the antiSemitic policy isolated Fascists in the Italian-Canadian community. The Jews and the Italians had a long-standing friendship, particularly in Toronto, where both communities suffered continuing discrimination and had lived side by side.37 Mussolini's anti-Semitism caught ItalianCanadian Fascists by surprise. They had continuously pointed out how the position of the Jews marked one of the more significant differences between Italian Fascism and German Nazism. Under Fascism, Jews were treated as they had always been in Italy, as citizens. In fact, they had occupied the highest offices in the land: Luigi Luzzati had briefly been prime minister; even under Mussolini, Guido Jung had been minister of finance. Italian-Canadian Fascists kept indigenous antiSemitic fascist groups at a distance for fear of triggering, as they put it, 'reactions from the powerful Jewish communities of Montreal and Toronto and their Protestant and "Masonic" allies.'38 In February 1938, the Canadian Jewish Chronicle of Montreal published a dispatch from Europe expressing fear that some type of anti-Semitic legislation might soon be in place in Italy.39 Fascists dismissed the item as slanderous and blamed the anti-fascists, who, they charged, 'would do anything to be able to show that anti-Semitism and lack of religious freedom exist in Italy.'40 A few months later, however, fascist newspapers in Canada unleashed anti-Semitic attacks, some of which were presented as the result of objective scientific research. The following passage taken from // Bollettino italo-canadese is an example: 'New research revealed that no nation could become great and powerful if it loses the divine sense of its origin. No people could have a higher spiritual mission in the world when its will to keep untarnished all those traits that distinguish and determine it as a nation becomes weak

A Tangled Knot: Prelude to 10 June 1940 35 ... From this supreme necessity derives directly that of not allowing ... the Jewish "forma mentis" to infiltrate our spiritual substance through the book and the school/41 To dispel moral and religious concerns, L'ltalia nuova published an article titled 'The Saints of the Church and the Jews/ It read in part, '... Saint Stephen, the first great Hungarian king, who was known for his noble liberality towards foreigners living in Hungary ... never allowed Jews to become citizens, or hold property ... It is clear that the Saints of that Church practise and have practised "vero e propio razzismo" (true racism)/42 In Toronto, // Bollettino published, in several weekly instalments, the apocryphal 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion/ Jewish organizations reacted promptly, protesting against the antiSemitic policy and initiating demonstrations and agitation against fascism. The Canadian Jewish Congress launched a boycott of Italian products, and its Toronto branch was successful in having its friends refrain from placing advertisements in II Bollettino.*3 Alarmed, Italian diplomats informed Rome about the effective anti-fascist campaign undertaken by the Jewish English-language press: 'The recent measures adopted in Italy for the defence of the race have created unrest in Canada ... Newspapers and periodicals controlled by Israelites have treated extensively the Jews' situation in Italy. They present it with criticism and ideological commentaries. They appeal for a boycott of Italy's commercial interests/44 The reaction in the Italian communities across the country was the opposite of what Fascists had hoped for. Pope Pius XI's firm condemnation of the anti-Semitic legislation cooled off some Catholics' enthusiasm for fascism.45 Many Italians who had resisted imposing sanctions on Italy (mainly business people, professional, merchants, and unionized workers) immediately deserted the fascist camp. As well, some liberal-minded Italians in Toronto, Montreal, Hamilton, and smaller cities sided with the radical left and together created the anti-fascist newspaper La Voce degli italo-canadesi in September 1938.46 Against the obliging silence of the grand officers of the Order Sons of Italy in Ontario and Quebec, the rebellious Ontario Lodge of Toronto raised its voice, passing a motion to condemn Italy's anti-Semitic policy. Sensing the mood of the Canadian population, the lodge prophetically called on the supreme venerables of Ontario and Quebec, Drs Vittorio Sabetta and Ferdinando Mancuso, and all the officers of the order to dissociate themselves from fascism and its policy. Part of the motion read:

36 Angelo Principe WHEREAS the anti-Semitic policy of the fascist government is approved neither by the Italian people nor by the Italians abroad and is particularly despised by the Italians in Canada ... the 'Ontario Lodge' protests in the most energetic manner against such a policy of persecution and condemns a certain Italian press in Canada that sustains and expresses anti-Semitic sentiments. The 'Ontario Lodge' also condemns the principle on which religious and racial hatred is based. Being aware that Italians in Canada are themselves a national minority and some day might become victims of such principles, the 'Ontario Lodge' REAFFIRMS its will and purpose to live in harmony and peace with all the nationalities which make up the Canadian population, regardless of race, religion, and language ... 47

A stream of defections in the rank and file weakened Quebec and Ontario orders. At the same time, the anti-fascist Order Italo-Canadese expanded rapidly all over the country. In 1938 and 1939, the Order Sons of Italy in Ontario created seven new lodges,48 and the Order ItaloCanadese fourteen: four in Toronto, two each in Hamilton, London, and Niagara Falls, and one lodge each in Thorold, Fort Erie, Port Colborne, and Timmins.49 When Italy entered the war, Fascists became definitely marginalized even in the Italian community. Though still displaying the usual bombastic rhetoric, their newspapers were shadows of what they had been in 1935-8: fewer pages, very little advertising (only ads of the party's affiliates appeared), and falling circulation. From today's perspective, these papers revealed the Fascists' isolation in the community. Their much boasted 'solid' unity was cracking. On the eve of Italy's entry into the war, the Italian-Canadian Fascists were in disarray. Some of them sent Mussolini a telegram, pleading with him 'not to link the fortune of Italy with that of Germany, but to remain a friend of England.'50 The 'Fifth Column Crisis' and Internment The democratic state, like the individual, surely has the right to selfdefence, but the force that it uses to defend itself should not exceed the threat that it is facing. Canada's internment of Italian-Canadian Fascists was politically sound and necessary. In the ideologically charged clash of the Second World War, allowing self-declared Fascists to move freely about the country would have been a security risk. The militaristic rhetoric that had deluged the Italian community and spilled into

A Tangled Knot: Prelude to 10 June 1940 37 the community at large for ten long years alarmed the RCMP and the government. Particularly alarming were intelligence reports noting the existence of a Fascist 'squadra d'azione' (action squad) ready to sabotage Canadian industry. In a letter to Pierrepont J. Moffat, U.S. minister in Ottawa, Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs O.D. Skelton pleaded with him not to allow the 'attachment' of Giuseppe Sabino, Tommaso Mari, and Arnaldo Miclet of the Italian consulate in Toronto 'to Italian consulates in the United States from which they could continue to direct the execution of the plans they have made for sabotage in Canada/ Skelton continued: 'Evidence in our possession which seemed to us conclusive, indicated that the three persons in this category attached to the Toronto Consulate were certainly privy to and probably principals in plans for sabotaging Canadian industry in the event of war with Italy/51 Internment should have been selective, however, and aimed at Fascist leaders. It should also have been presented in such terms to the public in general and Italian Canadians in particular. The Canadian authorities should have made it clear that some Italian Canadians had been interned precisely because they were Fascists and therefore security risks, just like German Nazis,52 Communists,53 the Fascist Adrien Arcand and his colleagues, and Jehovah's Witnesses.54 The severity of the government's measures against 'enemy aliens' unfortunately sent the country and Italian Canadians the wrong message - that Italian Canadians had been interned simply because they were Italians. This also succeeded in giving Fascists what they always wanted but never had - namely, the solidarity of the majority of Italian Canadians. Lacking a policy regarding fascism in general and local Italian Fascists in particular, Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King gave in to the hysterical populace's demand for decisive action against the enemy within.55 Behind the government's show of decisive action was a sense of confusion. Tracy Philipps, a member of the Nationalities Branch in the Wartime Information Board, was quite right in pointing out that 'when Mussolini came into the war and the internments of Italian Canadians began, what was most conspicuously lacking was an unerring interpretation by skilled observers of the background and of the hollowness of Fascism, not only in Canada but in Italy itself/56 The ambiguous Canadian policy towards fascism was determined by two converging elements - namely, the anti-communist ideological affinity between Fascist Italy and Western democracies and official Quebec's staunch support for Mussolini and his regime. Because of this affinity,

38 Angelo Principe Canadian authorities failed to see local Fascists and their activities in their true light. Although the RCMP was watching them, there was no political will to deal with them. Nothing was done or said to warn Italian Canadians that being a member of the Italian Fascist party and swearing allegiance to Mussolini were incompatible with being Canadian citizens.57 Rather, they were encouraged to believe what the Italian consuls said unchallenged - 'A good fascist makes a good Canadian as well/58 Quebec's strong support for Mussolini, however, added another and new element of instability to the precarious equilibrium between French Canada and English Canada. The sanctions against Italy were a case in point. At its first meeting, Mackenzie King's Liberal cabinet, elected in the midst of the Ethiopian crisis of 1935, had to face the issue of Dr Walter A. Riddell's unauthorized proposal to extend sanctions against Italy to include petroleum products. Riddell was the Canadian representative at the League of Nations. The cabinet was divided along religious and ethnic lines, mirroring the situation in the country: Catholics and Quebecers essentially supported the Duce's mission in East Africa; the rest of Canada - Protestants and English Canadians - was for aiding Britain against Mussolini's aggression in Ethiopia. Led by the powerful Catholic clergy, which looked to the Vatican as its mother country and the pope as its leader, the majority of French Canadians respected the Fascist regime, as did the Vatican until the anti-Semitic legislation of 1938. Before and after the Ethiopian crisis, 'the work of Mussolini and of the Fascist Party finds among a certain number of my compatriots admirers,' wrote Paul Gouin.59 During the Ethiopian crisis, the mayor of Montreal, Camillien Houde, spoke for the majority of his fellow Quebecers when he said 'that in the event of war between Britain and Fascist Italy, French-Canadian sympathies would be with Italy.'60 Regarding the Quebec press, political scientist Gerard Bergeron wrote: 'A 1'epoque des sanctions contre 1'Italie, a peu pres tous les journaux canadiens~franc.ais s'y opposerent, suspectant la purete d'intention des responsables de la decision, en particulier de 1'Angleterre.'61 The lone voices such as Andre Laurendeau, who warned his readers not too readily to accept the view 'that God belongs to the Right,'62 were not heard. Fearing for the unity of the country and in view of the opposing positions of his French-Canadian and English-Canadian ministers, Mackenzie King wrote in his diary: 'Our own domestic situation must be considered first, and what will serve to keep Canada united.'63 This

A Tangled Knot: Prelude to 10 June 1940 39 consideration was important, but it was by no means the only one in the cabinet's disavowing Riddell's proposal to extend sanctions against Italy.64 Isolationism and Mackenzie King's awareness of the minor role that Canada could and should play internationally were also strong factors. The Italian consul general in Ottawa, Luigi Petrucci, however, used this peculiar Canadian situation to make Rome believe that it had been his personal intervention with Lapointe and the other Quebec ministers that led the Canadian government to repudiate Riddell's proposal. In a report to Rome, he wrote: 'There was no need for the FrenchCanadian public in general and above all the clergy to "radically change their position," which has constantly been in favour of Italy. This is recently demonstrated by the success of my intervention with the French-Canadian Ministers and in particular with the most authoritative among them, the Minister of Justice, Hon. Lapointe, to persuade this government to disavow Mr Riddell on the question of a petroleum embargo. The French-Canadian Ministers acted in the manner we wished.'65 The division in King's cabinet, in the Liberal party, and in the country did not change in the years following the Ethiopian crisis. The Spanish Civil War perpetuated the situation. French-Canadian Catholics reinforced their link with Fascist Italy, which was lending its support to General Francisco Franco, whose rebellious troops were, according to the papal delegate in Canada, Ildebrando Antoniutti, an 'army of heroes, justly called Christ's militia.'66 Furthermore, Consul Paolo De Simone reported that Antoniutti's speeches in Montreal combined condemnation of Communism with praise for Fascism.67 It is not surprising then that Catholic Quebecers strongly favoured Franco. Delegates from the Spanish republican government were in fact not allowed to speak in Montreal but were welcomed at the English and Protestant McGill University. While the civil war was going on in Spain, Western democracies led by Britain's Neville Chamberlain, fully supported by Mackenzie King and President Franklin Roosevelt, tried to avoid a European war with the 'appeasement' policy. During this period, Mussolini had the undeserved role of peacemaker of Europe. In allied government circles, it was believed that he could check Hitler's aggressive attitude.68 It was believed that Mussolini's intervention led Hitler to refrain from invading Czechoslovakia and to the Munich conference. The capitulation to Hitler's demands by Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier in that con-

40 Angelo Principe ference was seen throughout the world as a victory for peace, and Mussolini was hailed as a saviour.69 On 30 September, Prime Minister King went to see the Italian consul general, Alberto Rossi-Longhi, and asked him /to convey to il Duce his admiration for his decision to intervene "which saved world civilization." He added that he had always supported Chamberlain's conciliatory policy, and he hoped that the Munich agreement is the beginning of a general accord to secure peace in Europe.'70 Overlooking the ideological affinity and aim of the Fascist and Nazi dictators, Western leaders believed that economic accommodation would make Hitler realize that he could look after German interests without resorting to war. After all, after visiting Hitler in 1937, Mackenzie King came away with a very positive opinion of the German dictator: 'What he said was a relief to my mind because of the very positive manner in which he spoke of the determination of himself and his colleagues not to permit any resort to war.'71 Furthermore in 1938, Mackenzie King told Rossi-Longhi that he still had a fond memory of his 1928 encounter with Mussolini in Rome.72 Against the evidence of hard facts, ephemeral words were enough to sustain Mackenzie King's and the other Western leaders' hope for peace. Nazi-Fascist intervention in Spain was explained away as an anti-communist cause. Austria was taken over by Hitler, and, it seems, no one had noticed it; Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland was offered to Hitler on a silver platter in Munich in September 1938, and Hitler swallowed the rest in March 1939. Finally, his invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 drew Britain and France into the war. For his part, Mussolini, speaking words of peace, ordered Fascist troops to march into Albania in 1939. But Western leaders still believed that Mussolini wanted peace. Even in September 1939, when the war was already on, Mussolini's declaration of non-intervention was taken at face value. Thus, when on 10 June 1940 Mussolini declared war, the truth that had been staring Western leaders in the face for at least the past six years appeared an act of treachery and betrayal that roused disdain. This feeling was clearly expressed by Franklin Roosevelt with the famous phrase 'Mussolini stabbed France in the back.'73 Mackenzie King was no less emphatic: 'With a callousness and treachery second only to that of Hitler... the dictator who holds the Italian people in thrall has chosen ... to strike ... to satiate his lust for conquest, and ... for such glory as calculated duplicity and treachery can bear.'74 How ironically absurd

A Tangled Knot: Prelude to 10 June 1940 41 these words sound when compared to what King wrote in his diary on 27 September 1928 on his way from Rome to Paris: 'All morning and afternoon on the train I continued reading Mussolini's life - a fascinating story. He has won his way deservedly to his present position, a truly remarkable man of force of genius, fine purpose, a great patriot. It seems to me the people are truly governing themselves under his direction.' On 10 June 1940, lacking a plan, the Canadian government followed the mood dominating Parliament and the entire country: indignation, fear, and a desire to strike back at Mussolini and Fascist Italy focused not only on Italian-Canadian Fascist leaders, as it should have, but on Italian Canadians in general. Even French-Canadian supporters of Mussolini were shocked to learn that Italy had attacked moribund France: 'Kinship with the motherland proved to be an unexpectedly poignant factor, and the French Canadians were themselves surprised at the depth and extent of their sympathies for the defeated and humiliated France.'75 That act had created in Quebec the favourable 'circumstances' for Canada to get more involved in the war.76 Even before Italy's attack on France, the changing mood in Quebec had been revealed by the electoral defeat of the right-wing Union Nationale party of Premier Maurice Duplessis in the autumn of 1939. It was also revealed in the anger that French Canadians felt towards Italian-Canadian Fascists as they were being rounded up by the police on 10 June 1940.77 It was asserted even by the Quebec members of Parliament, who voted 56 to 13 for the resolution calling for conscription for service within the country. The venom against Fascist Italy was turned on the local Italian population because Canadians believed, as local fascists had been claiming for years, that the Italian community in Canada was an extension of Fascist Italy.78 The minister of justice, Lapointe, who firmly repudiated Riddell's decision during the Ethiopian crisis, went along with the RCMP's ill-advised plan and hastily signed the order for the internment of suspected potential saboteurs. This move, rather than calming the situation, excited the xenophobia and the old anti-Italian feeling embedded in the culture of Canadian nativists and drove some sectors of the population to hysterical or violent actions: 'The small Italian businessmen, whose groceries and fruit stores were within easy reach of the public, became the targets of verbal, physical and property abuse/79 Even the open-minded top civil servant Norman Robertson revealed his anti-Italian prejudice when he said that Italians in general 'can perform most effectively, in the case of war, when working from

42 Angelo Principe the sidelines. That is to say, they seem to be cut out for bomb-throwers, saboteurs, etc/80 This convoluted statement conceals and reveals at the same time Anglo-Saxons prejudice towards Italians as fighters. In their view, Italians were not able to face their enemies in a manly fashion and therefore resorted to throwing bombs and running. Government measures were so broad and their parameters so wide that they obliterated the many differences existing in the Italian communities. Fascists and anti-fascists, naturalized or Canadian-born persons and newcomers, professionals and illiterates, wealthy business people and the unemployed were equally perceived as 'enemy aliens': one was an 'enemy alien' if his or her country of origin was at war with Britain and thus with Canada as well. The tens of thousands of Italians affected by such a traumatic experience felt, and rightly so, that they were being unjustly victimized. Even after more than half a century, that experience remains a painful scar for the entire community - even those not alive then. Wanting to erase it from their minds, many elderly Italians refuse to speak of those events; and those few who do speak say emphatically and with a trace of bitterness that they had nothing against Canada. Even ex-Fascist leaders claim that they meant no evil against Canada, although they do admit to strong negative feelings against Britain.81 (Such a traumatic experience was on the mind of Conservative member of Parliament Quinto Martini when, years later, the first Canadian Bill of Pvights was introduced in Parliament. Martini, himself an exinternee, intended to censure the bill because it would not prevent Canadian citizens from being illegally interned in the event of a new war. Even though Prime Minister John Diefenbaker then invited him to help write the preamble to that bill,82 Martini was quite right in his intended criticism of that symbolic pice of legislation, which did not prevent Pierre Trudeau from invoking the War Measures Act in 1970.) The government's measures in 1940 created an anachronistic situation. Many Italian Canadians had left Italy because of Fascism and had been active anti-fascists in Canada, but the government treated them as fascist supporters by having them report to the police on a monthly basis. This made them feel frustrated. One of these people was Dante Colussi, editor of // Messaggero (Toronto, 1932-4), perhaps the most articulate Italian anti-fascist newspaper published in Canada. Frustration was probably the reason that led him to burn his collection of // Messaggero on 10 June 1940.83 Further, long-time emigrants and natural ized Canadians were considered enemy aliens while their sons were

A Tangled Knot: Prelude to 10 June 1940 43 serving in the Canadian army. One such case involved Mrs Capozzi of Montreal. Two officers went to her home after she had failed to report to the police. She showed them photographs of her three sons in the Canadian army and asked rhetorically what better proof there was of her family's loyalty.84 Unlike the irrational behaviour of the government and some sectors of Canadian nativist population,85 some level-headed Canadian business people who knew and trusted their Italian workers vouched for their employees' loyalty to Canada. They intervened personally, sparing several Italians from being interned or losing their jobs.86 This is what the president of the Consolidated Mining & Smelting Co., in Trail, B.C., Selwyn Gwillim Blaylock did. On 30 May 1940, he called a meeting attended by more than 500 Italian workers and told them that soon Italy would probably enter the war on Hitler's side but assured them that no one would lose his job. He warned them, however, that if a single act of sabotage should occur, they would all be fired. Blaylock understood well the feelings of his Italian workers and the delicate situation in which, independent of their own will, they found themselves if Italy entered the war against Britain. He expressed it using the following feminine analogy: 'You all have a family and possess a home in this country. You would find yourselves in the same situation of a young woman who, being just married, leaves her parents to live with her husband's family. It is natural that the young spouse loves her parents; and no one pretends that she gives it up, but she could quite well have all the love for her parents as long as she loves her new family and obeys the rules of the house.' Blaylock concluded his speech by letting his staff know that Fascists were probably going to be sent to an internment camp: 'Some Italians have been involved in [fascist] politics. For these people there is a good possibility that they are going to be interned as soon as Italy enters the conflict!'87 Blinded by anti-communism, the government did not realize the true ideological essence of the Second World War, which was being tested and rehearsed in the Spanish Civil War. Italy and Germany rushed to support a group of seditious generals against a freely elected government, while anti-fascists of every stripe volunteered to defend it. Unable to grasp the fact that two ideologically opposed conceptions of the state - dictatorship and democracy - were in contest for domination of the world, the Canadian government applied, against enemy aliens, the same methods in the same crude and ruthless manner it had done twenty-five years before in the Great War. That shortsighted policy

44 Angelo Principe lumped together fanatical Fascists and anti-fascists, and honest men and women and mafiosi under one heading: Italian enemy aliens. Unfortunately, fifty years later, in a similarly shameful generalization, Brian Mulroney, with his blanket apology to Italian Canadians for internment, in effect denied the nasty manifestations of fascism among Italians in Canada. And the Redress Committee, with its campaign, is unintentionally stirring up the still-inebriating brew of 'them against us' on which the Italian-Canadian leaders were 'drunk' throughout the 1930s. Notes 1 For details, see the essay by lacovetta and Ventresca in this volume. 2 James W. Gertodo, ed., Historical Dictionary of the Spanish Civil War, 19361939 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), 340-1. 3 See Ramsay Cook, 'Canadian Freedom in Wartime 1935-1945/ in W.H. Heick and Roger Graham, eds., His Own Man: Essays in Honour of Arthur Reginald Marsden Lower (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1974), 45; for a synthesis of the hysteria sweeping the country in the spring and summer of 1940, see Larry Hannant, 'Fifth-Column Crisis/ Beaver 73 no. 6 (Dec. 1993-Jan. 1994), 24-8; Joseph Anthony Ciccocelli, 'The Innocuous Enemy Alien: Italians in Canada during World War Two/ MA thesis, University of Western Ontario, 1977, 34-47. 4 Canada, House of Commons Debates, 1940, 744-5. 5 Vittorio V. Restaldi, 'Sul trattamento degli italiani al Canada dopo la dichiarazione di guerra/ 19 Oct. 1942, Archivio Storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri (ASMAE), Rome, serie affari politici 1931-1945: Canada), 34.R/10411. Restaldi was an Italian honorary vice-consul in Montreal who repatriated after two years of internment in the Petawawa camp. 6 See Italia illustrata (a monthly supplement of the fascist newspaper L'ltalia nuova of Montreal), 1 Oct. 1938. 7 See the New York fascist monthly II Carroccio (Sept. 1925), 282. 8 Quoted by John Stanton, 'Government Internment Policy, 1939-1945/ Labour/Le Travail, 31 (spring 1993), 218. This kind of privileged treatment was not given to James Franceschini. Like Biffi and Sebastiani, Franceschini was a well-known and respected businessman, married to an Anglo-Saxon woman, Annie Pinkham, and certainly he had many political contacts. Though Franceschini was released from Petawawa camp on 19 June 1941, his detention was debated in the House of Commons on 4 May

A Tangled Knot: Prelude to 10 June 1940 45

9

10 11 12 13 14

15 16

17 18

1942. In the sparing of Biffi and Sebastian! from internment, was there something more going on than what Robertson said? Besides interning Rocco Perri, under the power of the War Measures Act, the government rounded up Domenico Belcastro, Frank Corde, Giovanni ('John') Durso, Domenico Longo, Antonio (Tony) Papalia, Raimondo Parisi, Michele Perri, Tommaso Rasso, Anthony Ratiliano, Vincenzo Romano, John Saccone, and Frank Silvestro (alias 'Frank Ross'), all of Hamilton; Peter Sacco, Vincenzo ('James') Sacco, John (alias 'Archie' or 'Czat') Saccone of Niagara Falls; and Domenico Belcastro and Domenico Longo of Guelph. These names are drawn from James Dubro and Robin F. Rowland, King of the Mob: Rocco Perri and the Women Who Ran His Rackets (Markham, Ont: Penguin Books, 1988), 131-4. See also Peter Edwards and Antonio Nicaso, Deadly Silence: Canadian Mafia Murders (Toronto: Macmillan, 1993), 27-39. See the back cover of King of the Mob by Dubro and Rowland. See Peter Krawchuk, Interned without Cause: The Internment of Canadian Anti-Fascists during World War Two (Toronto: Kobzar Publishing, 1985), 63. For more details on fascist organizations, see Pennachio's essay in this volume. Ruggero B. to the Deputy Minister of Justice, Ottawa, dated 25 May 1942 (private collection). See Robert F. Harney, 'Toronto's Little Italy 1885-1945' in Robert F. Harney and J. Vincenza Scarpaci, eds., Little Holies in North America (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1981), 55, reprinted in Pierre Anctil and Bruno Ramierez, eds., If One Were to Write a History... Selected Writings by Robert F. Harney (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1991); also in Robert F. Harney, Dalla frontiera alle Little Italies. Gli italiani in Canada 1800-1945, trans, and introduced by Luigi Bruti Liberati (Rome: Bonacci editore, 1984). See II Cittadino (Montreal), 30 Nov. 1933; II Bollettino italo-canadese, 8 March 1935. They illustrated the achievements of the regime and the moral enlightenment of the new fascist order with lectures, speeches, and writings. On the metamorphosis of Margherita Sarfatti, a fine Jewish intellectual, see Nicolo Zapponi, 'L'oracolo azzittito: Margherita G. Sarfatti/ Storia contemporanea 27 no. 5 (Oct. 1996), 759-77. See Philip V. Cannistraro, 'Per una storia dei Fasci negli Stati Uniti (19211929),' in Storia contemporanea 26 (Dec. 1995), 1118-44. See 'Fascists Seek Stevens for "Duce" of Canada,' Evening Telegram, Friday, 27 Sept. 1935.

46 Angelo Principe 19 See Tacifica Rivoluzione Fascista in Canada/ II Bollettino, 12 April 1935. 20 For an overview of Canadian foreign policy in that period, see James Eayrs, '"A Low Dishonest Decade": Aspects of Canadian External Policy, 1931-1939/ in Hugh L. Keenleyside, ed., The Growth of Canadian Policies in External Affairs (Durham, NC:, Duke University Press, 1960), 59-80; for a synthesis of Canada's role during the Ethiopian crisis, see Robert Bothwell and John English, '"Dirty Work at the Crossroads": New Perspectives on the Riddell Incident/ CHA Historical Papers (1972), 263-86, for a lucid synthesis of the Ethiopian crisis, see C.P. Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, vol. II (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 179-90. 21 Quoted by J.R. Wilbur, H.H. Stevens, 1878-1973 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 94. It is incomprehensible that Wilbur makes no mention at all of the Italian Fascists' involvement in the Reconstruction party in this book or in 'H.H. Stevens and R.B. Bennett, 1930-1934,' Canadian Historical Review 43 (March 1962), 1-16. 22 L'ltalia (Montreal), 21 March 1936. 23 The paper continued, 'Voices in the community, who refused to be named, because to do so would mean that they would never again be able to return to Italy in safety, "declared, however, that Francesco Zaffiro [secretary of the fascio in Hamilton, following the order given by Magi] had announced that Canadian Fascist! [sic] and Reconstructionals would work together/" 24 II Bollettino (23 Aug. 1935) published the following announcement: The Reconstruction Party Italian Division 57 Bloor St. W, M I - 9841 Toronto. Italians; The federal election will take place on the next 14th October. It is the duty of every one who has become a Canadian citizen to participate in the country's political life. A group of our friends wishes to state their ideas on local politics and to express their view on how our colony should vote in this elections. All our countrymen are asked to attend a meeting which will be held on August 28, at 8 p.m. in the St Agnese Hall, 15 Grace St. There will be several-speakers among whom are, Dr. Donato Sansone, Miss L. Edwards, Miss Rose Brifrene, Mr. Austin Lewis. Come and bring your friends.

A Tangled Knot: Prelude to 10 June 1940 47 For the Comity [sic] M. J. Maji [sic] General Organizer of the Italian Division 25 The Reconstruction party placed seventy-four candidates, but only Harry Stevens managed to be elected, in British Columbia. In Toronto's Trinity riding, the Reconstruction candidate, Gunn, came a distant third, followed by the CCF candidate, Carlo Lamberti, the first Italian to run for a dominion seat for any party in Toronto. The results were as follows: Flaxton, Lib., 19,231; Geary, Cons., 9,273; Gunn, R., 3,343; Lamberti, CCF, 1,777. The fact that in the Trinity riding fascists supported the Reconstruction candidate instead of the Italian Carlo Lamberti proves that they supported not the advancement of all Italians as they claimed, but rather the interests of the Fascist party. 26 See Telegram, 10 Oct. 1935, 3; for a detailed account of fascist activities in Canada during the Ethiopian crisis, see Angelo Principe, The Darkest Side of the Fascist Years: The Italian Canadian Press, 1920-1942 (Toronto: Guernica, 1999), 113-22. 27 See New Outlook, 27 Nov. 1935. 28 The leader of the Italian CCF Club was Nicola Giancotti, an employee of Tip Top Tailor, a very active anti-fascist, and a founder of the biweekly La Voce operaia. For further details see Angelo Principe, 'The Italo-Canadian Anti-Fascist Press in Toronto: 1922-1940,' NEMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association) 4 (1980), 119-37; for a detailed account of an antifascist Italian-Canadian association, see Angelo Principe and Olga Zorzi Pugliese, Rekindling Faded Memories: The Founding of the Famee Furlane of Toronto and Its First Years (Toronto: Famee Furlane, 1996). 29 ASMAE, Canada, b. 3, f. 4, Brigidi to MAE, 14 Aug. 1935. For this entire paragraph, I am indebted to Luigi Bruti Liberati, II Canada, I'Italia e il fascismo (Rome: Bonacci editore, 1984), 109-10. 30 See Toronto Daily Star, 13 Aug. 1935; for a detailed account of that event, see Angelo Principe, 'The Concept of Italy in Canada and in Italian Canadian Writings from the Eve of Confederation to the Second World War' (PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1989), 297-300. 31 II Bollettino, 29 May 1936. 32 See Spada, The Italians in Canada, 127. 33 See the editorial Tt Looks Very Nice,' in Toronto Daily Star, 7 May 1936. 34 II Bollettino, 15 May 1936. 35 Consul Tiberi's open letter to the Toronto Daily Star appeared in // Bollettino, 8 Jan. 1937.

48 Angelo Principe 36 Ibid: 'Un sacco di legnate, che vi rimettessero [sic] il cervello a posto.' 37 The friendship between Jews and Italians was so strong that during the riot at Christie Pits in 1933 - a fight between Jewish young men and members of Swastika Club of Toronto - truckloads of Italian youths went. to fight alongside their Jewish friends. See Cyril Levitt and William Shaffir, The Riot of Christie Pits (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1987), 185. 38 See Roberto Perin, 'Making Good Fascists and Good Canadians: Consular Propaganda and the Italian Community in Montreal in 1930s/ in G. Gold, ed., Minorities and Mother Country Imagery (St John's, Nfld: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University, 1984), 151. 39 Canadian Jewish Chronicle, 18 and 25 Feb. 1938. 40 See Le Canada Latin, 5 March 1938: Le Canada Latin was a section of Montreal's L'ltalia nuova. 41 II Bollettino, 6 Oct. 1938. 42 L'ltalia nuova, 3 Sept. 1938. 43 The Ontario Jewish Archives, Toronto, Joint Community Relations Committee Collection, file PR 142. 44 See Bruti Liberati, II Canada, I'ltalia e ilfascismo, 142., 45 See 'Al "Catholic Register/" in II Bollettino, 2 March 1939. 46 See Principe, 'The Italo-Canadian Anti-Fascist Press/ 131-2. 47 See La Voce degli Italo-canadesi, 31 Dec. 1938. 48 See Gabriele Scardellato, Within Our Temple: A History of the Order Sons of Italy of Ontario (Toronto: Order Sons of Italy of Canada, 1995), 16. 49 Spada, The Italians in Canada, writes: 'Four lodges were formed in Toronto - Lodges Liberta No. 31 and the Lodge Pisticci, No. 34. In Hamilton, through agreement with an anti-fascist group, two lodges were formed. A hall owned by Dr. Agro was put at the disposal of the Italians to counteract Fascist propaganda. In Thorold, a lodge was formed. In Windsor the cooperation of the Caboto Club was of long date, so no lodge was established. In Niagara Falls, Lodges Liberte No. 27 and Anita Garibaldi No. 29 were formed with the help of Rev. R.D. Gualtieri, minister of the United Church/ In considering the expansion of the Order Italo-Canadese in Ontario, it has to be kept in mind that, in contrast to Quebec, where the Order Sons of Italy split into two organizations in 1926, in Ontario the schism was avoided, but after introduction of the anti-Semitic legislation in Italy the order to all intents and purposes divided, although there was no formal separation. Moreover, many brothers remained in the order to retain the benefits for which they had paid. 50 Restaldi, 'Sul tratamento/ 6; Luigi Pautasso published Restaldi's memo in Quaderni canadesi (Jan.-Feb. 1976), 5-8.

A Tangled Knot: Prelude to 10 June 1940 49 51 Skelton to Moffat, 29 June 1940 from Documents on Canadian External Relations, vol. 7 (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1974), 158. 52 See Robert H. Keyserlingk, 'The Canadian Government's Attitude toward Germans and German Canadians in World War II,' Canadian Ethnic Studies 16 (1984), 16-28; 'Breaking the Nazi Plot: Canadian Government Attitudes towards German Canadians, 1939-1945,' in Norman Hillmer, Bohdan Kordan, and Lubomyr Luciuk, eds., On Guard for Thee: War, Ethnicity, and the Canadian State, 1939-1945 (Ottawa: Department of Supply and Services, 1988), 53-70. 53 Regarding the internment of the communists, see Ian Radforth's article in this volume; Reg Whitaker, 'Official Repression of Communism during World War II,' Labour/Le travail 17 (spring 1986), 135-66; Krawchuk, Interned without Cause. 54 See William Kaplan, State and Salvation: The Jehovah's Witnesses and Their Fight for Civil Rights (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989). 55 On the political machinations behind this decision, see the essay by Whitaker and Kealey in this volume. 56 See Tracy Philipps's memorandum 'Canadian Communities of Recent European Origin. Canadians of Italian Descent/ National Archives of Canada (NA), RG 25, G-2, file 773, J40, 9 May 1942, 3. 57 According to Watson Kirkconnell, 'The Canadian government... had done nothing to counter these subversive [fascist propaganda] efforts until after Italy entered the war in 1940.' See 'Chauvinism and Canadianism: Canadian Ethnic Groups and the Failure of Wartime Information/ in Hillmer, Kordan, and Luciuk, eds., On Guard for Thee, 26; Tracy Philipps, 'Canadian Communities of Recent European Origin, NA, RG 25, G2, file 773, J40, 3. 58 See Perin, 'Making Good Fascists and Good Canadians.' 59 Quoted by James Eayrs, '"A Low Dishonest Decade/" 69. 60 Walter Riddell, World Security by Conference, 128-9, quoted by Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, 2:186. 61 Gerard Bergeron, 'Du provincialisme a I'lnternationalisme/ in H.L. Keenleyside, ed., The Growth of Canadian Policies in External Affairs, 113. 62 Ramsay Cook and Michael Behiels, eds., The Essential Laurendeau (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1976), 50. 63 King, Diary, 29 Oct. 1935, quoted by Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, 189. 64 Undoubtedly 'isolationism' and the awareness of being a minor player in the international sphere were of fundamental importance. For an overview of this intricate problem, see Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, 179-90.

50 Angelo Principe 65 ASMAE, Canada, Petrucci to Ministero Affari Esteri, 23 Dec. 1935. 66 James Eayrs, '"A Low Dishonest Decade/" 69. 67 ASMAE, Canada, b. 8, f. 9, De Simone to Rossi-Longhi, 1 Dec. 1938; quoted by Bruti Liberati, II Canada, I'ltalia e ilfascismo, 166. 68 'Roosevelt believed that Italy held the key to peace in Europe during this period [September 1938 to September 1939], and that Mussolini could deter Hitler/ Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 191. 69 A jubilant Mackenzie King sent Chamberlain a telegram of enthusiastic praise: 'The heart of Canada is rejoicing tonight at the success which has crowned your unremitting efforts for peace. May I convey to you the warm congratulations of the Canadian people and with them, an expression of their gratitude, which is felt from one end of the Dominion to the other/ Quoted by Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, 216. Sharing the same sentiments, Roosevelt wrote to Mackenzie King: 'The United States rejoice[s] with you ... that the outbreak of war was averted'; Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 195. 70 AMSAE, Canada, b.7, f. 21, Rossi-Longhi to MAE, 30 Sept. 1938. 71 NA, MG 26, J13, vol. 77, 27,28, 30 June 1937, King, Diary; for a comment on King's relations with Hitler, see 'The Divine Mission: Mackenzie King and Hitler/ Canadian Historical Review 61, no. 4 (1980), 502-12. It appears that even Chamberlain trusted Hitler: 'Notwithstanding the hard and ruthless light emanating from his eyes,... I had the impression that he could be trusted'; K. Feiling, Life of Neville Chamberlain (London: Macmillan, 1947), 279; Alfassio Crimaldi and G. Bozzetti, Dieci.giugno 1940, il giorno dellafollia (Bari: Laterza, 1974), 163. 72 AMSAE, Canada, b. 7, f. 8, Rossi-Longhi to 'Ministero Affari Esteri/ 5 March 1938; Bruti Liberati, II Canada, I'ltalia e ilfascismo, 146. 73 See Toronto Daily Star, 11 June 1940; Ennio Di Nolfo, 'The Italian-Americans and American Foreign Policy from World War II to the Cold War (1940-1948),' in Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference of the American Italian Historical Association (New York: American Italian Historical Association, 1977), 93. 74 'Italy Enters the War/ in W.L.M. King, Canada at Britain's Side (Toronto: Macmillan, 1941), 123-4, quoted by William R. Young, 'Chauvinism and Canadianism: Canadian Ethnic Groups and the Failure of Wartime Information/ in Hillmer, Kordan, and Luciuk, eds., On Guard for Thee, 36. 75 See Robert MacGregor Dawson, Canada in World Affairs: Two Years of War, 1939-1941 (Toronto, 1943), 30, quoted by Bergeron, 'Le Canada francais/ 117.

A Tangled Knot: Prelude to 10 June 1940 51 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85

86 87

See Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, 206. See Restaldi, 'Sul trattamento/ 1. See note 13 above. See Ciccocelli, 'The Innocuous Enemy Alien/ 38; interview with Giuseppina Gatto Mari. Her father, Antonio Gatto, had a fruit store on Bloor Street West, near Bathurst Street. Stanton, 'Government Internment Policy/ 218. Taped interview with Ruggero B. and Frank R, author's collection. Taped interview with Quinto Martini, author's collection. John E. Zucchi, Italians in Toronto (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1988), 192. Filippo Salvatore, Lefascisme et les Italiens a Montreal: une histoire orale (Montreal: Guernica, 1995), 131. For example, 'the coal miners of Cape Breton, members of Local 26 of the United Mine Workers of America, had decided to refuse to work alongside any Italian-born miners.' Kenneth Bagnell, Canadese: A Portrait of the Italian Canadians (Toronto: Macmillan, 1989), 76. Bagnell, however, does not report that not too far away, in another mine, another group of miners refused to work for the opposite reasons: they wanted their Italian coworkers with them. 'The labour situation in the Nova Scotia coal fields is notoriously difficult. The Coal administrator, J. McG. Stewart, told me last night that while men were going on strike in our mine in protest against going down the mines with men of enemy or other alien origin, they were threatening to strike at the next mine because such persons had been interned.' NA, RG 18, vol. 3563, Cll-19-2-3, vol. 1, report from Robertson to Supt. E.W. Bavin, dated 19 June 1940. In a conversation with Bruno Vatri of Toronto, I learned that his father was taken to the Exhibition Grounds in Toronto and then released because his employer interceded in his favour. See L'Eco italo-canadese (Vancouver), 8 June 1940.

2

Exporting Fascism to Canada: Toronto's Little Italy LUIGI G. PENNACCHIO

Throughout the 1920s, fascism was as foreign to Toronto's Italians as it was to the city's non-Italians. But from 1929 to 1940, the ideology developed an intimate relationship with the city's residents of Italian origin. Such an association evolved because Benito Mussolini decided that all Italians were to be members of Fascist Italy. Working through diplomatic representatives from vice-consuls to ambassadors, he exported fascism to the Italians residing abroad. Diplomats carried out their task by, first, supporting fascist organizations; second, seizing control - though not without opposition - of the social and political life of the Italian communities in which they were stationed; and, third, training young fascists. Toronto's Italians were served by four diligent Fascist vice-consuls throughout the 1930s: namely, Gianni Battista Ambrosi, 1 April 1929-24 May 1934; Giorgio Tiberi, 28 May 1934-May 1937; Guido Colonna di Paliano, 24 May 1937-June 1939; and Francesco Barboglio, 1 October 1939-June 1940. And by hook or by crook, they succeeded in implanting fascism among the city's Italians. If the early years of this period saw the heights of fascist influence in Toronto, the crash in June 1940 was swift and devastating. With the coming to power of Benito Mussolini and his right-wing Partito nazionale fascista (National Fascist party) in October 1922, Toronto's Italians were made to feel a part of the country that they or their ancestors had left behind.1 After the arrival of Fascist diplomats in 1929 and throughout the 1930s circumstances changed. Italians witnessed a vice-consular display of overwhelming exaltation of all things Italian in fanatical devotion to Mussolini and Fascist Italy and in the idea that one could be an Italian and a Canadian.2 This relationship between immigrants and Italy and Canada, as embodied in Fascist

Exporting Fascism to Canada: Toronto's Little Italy 53 consular officials, was articulated by Consul General Dr Luigi Petrucci at a 1933 Toronto banquet celebrating the twelfth year of Fascism: Today the Italian Consuls abroad have been, through the work of the Fascist Government, transformed into the active organs of representation of the Fascist idea ... Before being notaries public, officials of civil government, protectors of your private interests and channels of your relations with the Mother Country, we are Fascist officials, and Fascism is dynamism, and active exaltation of Italian values, the sum of all forces required to reaffirm the greatness of Italy in the world ... Our work aims at educating the mass of our fellow Italians according to Fascist moral principles, at keeping alive in them the flame of love for their country of origin, at maintaining the use of the Italian language, at preventing the loss of the ideal bond between Italians abroad and the Homeland. In short, we want to make Italians abroad good citizens, respecting local laws, loyal to their country of adoption, but ideally united to their country of origin.3

Fascist Italy therefore was willing to come to terms with its emigrants: they could be loyal to both their home and adopted lands. In time of peace there was no chance of divided loyalties or danger to the Italians who practised this dual allegiance. Fascist Italy's offer, as made through its diplomats, was very attractive to immigrants who had been accustomed to being ignored by Italy and who had been made to feel like foreigners in Toronto. Here, finally, was recognition of their worth as Italians and Canadians. Fascist Organizational Life Consular officials hoped to achieve their goal by controlling all aspects of life in the Italian communities.4 Toronto's first Fascist - or for that matter career diplomat - Cavaliere (Sir) Gianni Battista Ambrosi, sought to promote fascism among the city's Italians by following the same tactics that the Fascists had used in Italy: he appealed to the middle class to join him in seizing control, overtly and covertly, of the social and political life of the community. Vice-Consul Ambrosi's first objective was to make Toronto's fascists subservient to him. In Canada, Italians who admired Benito Mussolini and Fascism began to organize associations known as fasti just after the Fascists came to power in Italy.5 Once they were governing Italy, the Fascists wanted to control the Fasci abroad as a means of reaching out

54 Luigi G. Pennacchio to emigrants. Thus, in 1927, the Direzione Generale degli Italian! All'Estero (General Bureau of Italians Abroad) of the Ministry of External Affairs became the administrative body of the Fasci All'Estero. The direzione, however, was designed primarily to help the ministry's diplomats accomplish their tasks. Only through Ambrosi, for example, could its correspondence, orders, and instructions reach the fascio.6 Moreover, the direzione ordered that Ambrosi be present at all important functions of the fascio, that he have the final say in its governing structure, and that he approve its novice members and leaders before their nominations were sent to Rome for final approval.7 By making use of the powers granted him by the direzione, Ambrosi had absolute control of the fascio by 1931.8 Once the fascio was subservient to him, Ambrosi set about actively to recruit new members. In Toronto, the fascio called itself Principe Umberto (Prince Umberto Fascist Club). During Ambrosi's tenure it grew to three branches, one of which, the Fascio Femminile, catered exclusively to women. Many members of the fascio were drawn from the Italian community's business elite, professional class, and social leadership. They were willing to join the fascio in the hope of obtaining financial and social rewards. Ambrosi, for example, offered them such inducements as knighthoods and other titles, and he championed their businesses in Canada and Italy.9 (Many who joined the fascio resembled the members of the middle class who had helped Fascism gain power in Italy.) But membership in the fascio was not without obligation. One had to demonstrate loyalty to the cause. In its simplest form this meant taking the following oath: 'I swear to execute without discussion the orders of the Duce and to serve with all my strength and if necessary my blood the cause of the Fascist Revolution.'10 This oath was also sworn by the children and young adults who joined organizations controlled by the fascio. (Remarkably, the Fascists saw no contradiction between the oath and their desire that Italians also be good Canadian citizens!) In any case, Ambrosi, and his successor Giorgio Tiberi, met with some success: by 1937 the Toronto Star reported that the fascio had 700 members.11 And in winning over to fascism the business and social leaders of Toronto's Italian community, Ambrosi set in motion and Tiberi continued the process of disseminating fascism from the top down. If the community's business and social leaders became fascists, the consuls believed, so too would their employees and followers. To fur ther ensure this result, social clubs from Fascist Italy were brought to

Exporting Fascism to Canada: Toronto's Little Italy 55 Toronto and the consuls exerted total control over them. A step below the fascio in the Toronto Fascist hierarchy was one such organization, the dopolavoro. As in Italy, the dopolavoro was dedicated to structuring the leisure time of Italians while propagating fascism. In Toronto, members were able to participate in the dopolavoro's baseball, basketball, bocce (the Italian version of lawn bowling), card, and hockey house leagues. The results of league games and standings were extensively reported in the city's fascist newspaper, // Bollettino italo-canadese. And at the end of each sporting season a banquet would be held at which the consul would distribute prizes and trophies. Through such activities, the diplomat and his Fascist colleagues hoped to show the populace that fascism was an integral part of their communal lives. For those in the dopolavoro who enjoyed cerebral pursuits, a library, stocked by the Italian Ministry for Propaganda, offered books on fascism and fascism's interpretation of Italy's past, present, and future. The main goal of the dopolavoro, however, was to act as a recruiting ground for future members of the fascio. The dopolavoro served as a one-way mirror through which consuls could evaluate the personality, moral character, and receptiveness to fascism of someone wishing to join the fascio. The dopolavoro also met with some success: by 1937 it had 546 members.12 Another import from Italy that helped Vice-Consul Ambrosi reach adult Italians was the Associazione degli ex-Combattenti (War Veterans' Association). Strictly speaking, the organization was not an association foreign to Toronto. It had existed during the pre-fascist era, but in the 1930s it had been totally reorganized by the Fascist government. Like the fasci, its members came under Rome's direct influence: the government controlled pensions and decorations.13 Thus the Combattenti quickly fell under Ambrosi's influence. But even if they had been unaffected by Rome, the veterans for the most part would still have supported fascism because of their love of their native land. And at community events the ex-soldiers could be seen proudly strutting in the Fascist uniforms sent to them from Italy.14 Organizations specific to Fascist Italy were successfully transplanted to Toronto to help the viceconsul make the city's adult Italians good fascists. Control of Community Organizations In their efforts to direct adults towards fascism, Vice-Consul Ambrosi and his fascio underlings also ursurped indigenous social organizations. The largest such entity was the Order Sons of Italy of Ontario,

56 Luigi G. Pennacchio which was a part of the larger Order Sons of Italy of America (that is, the United States of America). The order was organized into a number of lodges, which provided members with social activities ranging from banquets to ball games. But the order's true attraction was its role as a mutual benefit society that, in return for initiation fees and monthly dues, provided sick benefits, funeral services, and life insurance.15 In the United States, the Order had come under fascist influence already in the early 1920s, but in Ontario this did not occur until the 'Grand Convention' of 1934, when Fascists and their sympathizers were elected as governing officers.16 The takeover of the order by the Fascists was so complete that Consul General Petrucci boasted: 'The Grand Order of the "Sons of Italy" is today the unshakable guard of Italian and fascist idealities in all of North America.'17 Under fascist tutelage the order expanded throughout Toronto and Ontario. By 1939, the order had 1,600 members in Ontario and assets for its social assistance programs totalling $15,993.64.18 Slowly but surely, Ambrosi and his Fascist friends were taking over the Italian community's native institutions. Another such organization was the Societa di Mutuo Soccorso la Trinacria di Toronto (La Trinacria), which catered only to the social and economic needs of the city's Sicilian population. La Trinacria was one of the oldest Italian associations in the city, and Vice-Consul Giorgio Tiberi, Ambrosi's successor, knew that it would be a public relations triumph if La Trinacria came out in support of the Fascists. Thus Tiberi actively courted La Trinacria's president, the 'wealthy' grocer Antonio G. To win Antonio G.'s support, Tiberi arranged parties in his honour, appealed to his Italian patriotism, and indulged his love of hunting. But Tiberi had another motive for wanting Antonio G. in the fascist camp: Antonio G. published one of the city's anti-fascist newspapers, the Messaggero, and Tiberi wanted it to cease publication. With the help of Consul-General Petrucci, Tiberi finally won over Antonio G., who agreed to close the paper. Moreover, he began an alliance between La Trinacria and the fascio.19 Even religion became a tool of the Fascists. The Roman Catholic Church was able to reach a much-hoped-for accommodation with Fascist Italy. Pre-fascist governments had significantly reduced church properties, power, and influence. In 1929 Benito Mussolini, in need of the church's support, signed the Lateran Pact recognizing the Vatican as an independent city state, compensating the church for lost holdings, and restoring Catholicism as the official national religion. As a result,

Exporting Fascism to Canada: Toronto's Little Italy 57 the church was quite willing to help the Fascists. In Toronto, the viceconsuls were aided by the pope's representative in Canada, Archbishop A. Cassulo, the apostolic delegate.20 Cassulo implored the archbishops and their priests to do everything possible in favour of the fascist cause, an exhortation made all the more relevant by the fact that the church and fascism shared the same mortal enemy - atheistic communism. The apostolic delegate succeeded: Toronto's bishops attended fascist social functions, and one even secretly ordered his Italian parish priests to aid the Fascists.21 The Italian priests needed no such encouragement. They were convinced that their parishioners were losing their Italian identity as they acculturated into Toronto's predominantly 'Irish' Catholic Church.22 Consequently, the clerics were quite prepared to support the Fascists in their efforts to keep an Italian nationality alive through fascism. They too attended fascist festivals; they opened their church halls to the Fascists free of charge; they inspired their parishioners to join the fascio and related organizations; and during Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 they encouraged their congregations to make donations of gold jewellery to help Italy pay for the war.23 In Toronto, the Catholic Church in general and the Italian parish priests in particular were very effective propagandists of fascism. Propaganda

Propaganda was one of the most useful instruments for the viceconsuls to strengthen their clout over Toronto's Italians. Much of the material was provided by the Ministero della Cultura Popolare (Ministry of Popular Culture, hereafter ministero). The ministero supplied the consular officials with political and patriotic articles for insertion into the city's fascist newspaper, // Bollettino italo-canadese.24 The newspaper was a creation of the Fascists who had realized that a medium was needed for the transmission of their goals and opinions. With help from the Italian government, they secured the personnel and money needed to establish and publish II Bollettino.25 At its peak, the newspaper had a circulation of 3,863 subscribers.26 In addition to providing articles for it, the ministero also provided Fascists with films that extolled the grandeur of Fascist Italy; the films were shown in club premises, church halls, and theatres within the Italian community.27 Toronto's Italians therefore could not help but be influenced by the fascism espoused by the vice-consuls and their helpers.

58 Luigi G. Pennacchio The vice-consuls targeted not only Toronto's Italians, but the AngloCeltic population as well. They specifically wanted to increase trade between Italy and Canada. Vice-Consul Ambosi set up a booth at the annual Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, where he advertised fascism, Italian products, and Italy as a holiday location.28 In later years, James Franceschini, an Italian contractor who had become one of •the wealthiest men in Ontario, made a substantial financial contribution for the organization of an 'Italian Week' at the exhibition.29 This week-long celebration was very successful on two fronts: the AngloCelts marvelled at the traditions and modernity of Italy, and the Italians gained a sense of national pride. Other methods were also employed. The ministero attempted to furnish Toronto's newspapers with articles and photographs depicting life in Fascist Italy. But newspapers showed little interest in such materials; Vice-Consul Tiberi attributed the lack of enthusiasm to the 'provincial outlook' of the local press and its readers.30 Tiberi also attempted to cultivate prominent Anglo-Celtic business and social leaders by inviting them to parties at the Casa d'ltalia (House of Italy or Italian Centre), by giving speeches at their clubs, and by offering them subsidized trips to Italy.31 And until the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Anglo-Celtic To consuls' efforts.32 Opposition to Fascism Nevertheless, there were people in Toronto who opposed the viceconsuls and their Fascist policies. Some were political exiles from Italy who had emigrated to escape Fascist repression.33 But Toronto was not very hospitable to these anti-fascists. The city was consumed by a fear of bolshevism, and its Anglo-Celtic inhabitants did not take kindly to political refugees maligning that great anti-bolshevist, Benito Mussolini.34 In such a milieu, the vice-consuls and agents of the Italian intelligence agency, the Opera Vigilanza Repressione Antifascismo (OVRA), felt free to compile dossiers on the dissidents, which they transmitted to Canadian and Italian government officials. In Italy, police officers visited the relatives of Toronto dissidents, and strongly suggested that they urge their kin abroad to stop their anti-fascist activities.35 In Toronto, OVRA operatives were not above making threatening visits to the anti-fascists.36 The vice-consuls and the OVRA agents also sought out the help of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the

Exporting Fascism to Canada: Toronto's Little Italy 59 Canadian Department of External Affairs, supplying them with files on 'dangerous communists.' From the RCMP, they wanted help in locating and monitoring these dangerous persons; and once they were located, they wanted the department to deport them to Italy.37 Although the Canadian government was annoyed by such requests, it took no steps to stop the vice-consuls and the OVRA operatives. After all, there was always the possibility that someone named by them could pose a threat to Canada. Thus, with the tacit approval of the Canadian state, the viceconsuls and the OVRA agents were free to harass political emigres. Aside from the political exiles, other Italian immigrants were antifascists. These were newcomers who felt sympathy for the left or wanted to assimilate into Anglo-Celtic Torontonian society. The Methodist/ United Church, because of its strong proselytizing, was the Protestant denomination that most Italians intent on abandoning their 'ethnic religion' (Catholicism) joined.38 Moreover, the anti-fascists turned to the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) because the two leading poltical parties in Canada, the Liberals and Conservatives, admired and openly praised Mussolini and Fascism's strong-arm tactics.39 For the most part, Italian anti-fascist immigrants and their AngloCeltic allies did not succeed in convincing either the Italians or nonItalians that the fascists posed a danger to Italian-Canadian or Canadian society. This failure was not the result of a lack of effort. Throughout the 1930s, Italian anti-fascists closely monitored the activities of the viceconsuls, the fascio, and fascist-related organizations. From their observations, the anti-fascists compiled detailed reports, which they submitted to the United Church, the CCF, and the CPC.40 This information in turn was made public in the CPC'S organ, the Daily Clarion, in sermons from the pulpit, and by CCF and CPC politicians in municipal councils and the dominion Parliament. But on the whole, few Anglo-Celtic Torontonians paid any attention to what they perceived to be socialist or even worse - communist rantings. Furthermore, they believed that the anti-fascists were attempting to drag them into a foreign political dispute.41 Thanks to the counter-measures taken by the vice-consuls, Italians too ignored the warnings of the anti-fascists and their allies. The vice-consuls portrayed the anti-fascists as weaklings who, unlike most immigrants, could adapt to Canada only by abandoning their Italian and Catholic identity.42 This characterization was also propagated by Italian priests who emphasized to parishioners that Italian

60 Luigi G. Pennacchio anti-fascists were nothing more than 'evil Protestants' who should be ostracized.43 Throughout most of the 1930s, the anti-fascist clarion call went unanswered in Italian and in Anglo-Celtic Toronto. The Making of Fascist Youths Lack of popular concern over fascism in Toronto provided the viceconsuls and Fascists with virtual free rein in the Italian community. Nowhere was this more evident than in their efforts to teach Italian children to become obedient fascists. Since the early 1900s, literate Italian immigrants had supplemented their incomes by teaching formal Italian to their community's children.44 However, it was not a wellstructured learning environment: curriculum materials such as textbooks were virtually non-existent; few if any instructors had been trained as teachers; classes were sporadic, held after the normal school day, and took place in the teachers' homes; children of all ages studied together; and enrolment was limited because few parents could afford to pay the moderate tuition fees.45 All this changed with Fascism. The government of Benito Mussolini firmly believed that the future of Fascism rested with the children. Any and all means, including schooling, were to be used to make them good fascists.46 Italian children residing abroad too were taught to be loyal fascists. To promote this pedagogy, the Direzione Generale degli Italiani all'Estero created a world-wide school system, which supplied overseas language schools with a curriculum specifically designed for immigrant students, with teachers trained to meet their needs and funding to establish schools and pay teachers. In Toronto a 'Pro-School Committee/ made up of leading members of the community and f ascio,47 set up a network of Italian fascist language schools.48 As a result, the language schools were very effective: in the peak academic year of 1938-9, over 600 children were attending classes in six locations scattered throughout the Italian neighbourhoods.49 The fascist textbooks specifically designed for immigrant students demonstrate just how the children were to be made into loyal and obedient fascists. The textbooks used in Toronto, for example, offered lessons in Italian grammar, literature, history, geography, and religion. But each and every textbook also contained patriotic illustrations, stories, and slogans that instructed the readers that they were simply Italians who resided abroad. As such, they were to 'obey, believe and fight' for Mussolini, Italy, and Fascism. In one book, for example, pupils

Exporting Fascism to Canada: Toronto's Little Italy 61 Two excerpts from an Italian grammar text used in language classes for immigrant children. Letture: Scuole italiane all'estero classe prima (Italian Schools Abroad, First Reader) was intended for six-year-old pupils. A Balilla (youth member) embracing a map of Italy, accompanied by the text: 'Italia, terra mia, ti amo, molto! Tutti ti amiamo!' (Italy, My land, I love you so much! We all love you!) (p. 21) II Duce 'Tutti i bambini italiani amano Mussolini, il Duce che guida la nuova Italia e che senza riposo lavora per il bene della Patria. II volto austero del Duce si illumina di dolcezza quando Egli guarda i bambini. Sanno i bimbi italiani perche il Duce li ama tanto? Li ama perche i bimbi sono le pui belle speranze, perche se essi cresceranno f orti, laboriosi, buoni, ITtalia anche sara forte, potente, felice.' (All Italian children love Mussolini. His austere countenance is illuminated by kindness when he looks at children. Do the children of Italy know why the Duce loves them? He loves them because they are the beautiful essence of Italy, because they will grow up to be strong, and as a result Italy will be powerful and happy.) (p. 18)

read that Mussolini 'demands that all Italians should work and fight for him. You little Italians far away from the Fatherland who are close to his heart should also work and fight. You must grow strong, honest, tireless, for all Italians must contribute to the grandeur of the Fatherland/ Students also read that they could honour Mussolini if they respected and obeyed the vice-consul.50 Recreational activities were also employed. Here again the direzione was involved, founding, funding, and operating the global Gioventu Italiana del Littorio all'Estero (Italian Youths of the Lictor Abroad, hereafter Gioventu), which offered juveniles and young adults the opportunity to participate in organized athletic events. As with its twin in Italy, the Gioventu was structured in a manner which reinforced the concept that its members were a part of militaristic, Fascist Italy. To begin with, members were mustered by age and gender. Boys aged six and seven belonged to the Figli della Lupa (Sons of the She-Wolf); eight- to twelve-year-olds to the Balilla; and thirteen- to eighteen-year-

62 Luigi G. Pennacchio

An Italian-Canadian pro-fascist youth band (Gioventu del Littorio all'Estero). On the right is Arnaldo Miclet, a language teacher and Fascist agent who returned to Italy on diplomatic immunity after Canada declared war against Italy.

olds to the Avanguardisti. Girls between the ages of six and twelve were Piccole Italiane (Little Italians), thirteen- to eighteen-year-olds were Giovanne Italiane (Young Italians).51 To stress the military nature of the Gioventu, the children were provided with Fascist uniforms in which they paraded, they were divided into squadrons led by an officer corps drawn from their age cohort, and they were overseen by adult officers who were the language teachers imported from Italy. Of course, the overall commander of the Gioventu was the man who brought it to Toronto, Vice-Consul Ambrosi (and his successors). In the city, the members of the Figli della Lupa, the Balilla, and the Avanguardisti participated in a variety of sports: gymnastics, track and field, wrestling, fencing, boxing, baseball, basketball, and hockey.52 Before a sporting event began, the athletes sang Fascist songs. And at

Exporting Fascism to Canada: Toronto's Little Italy 63

A Toronto boy meets Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Galeazzo Ciano and Piero Parini, now a general, at a gathering of immigrant youths attending Mussolini's summer camp program in Italy. II Bollettino italo-canadese, 2 Feb. 1934.

the end of each sporting season, a banquet was held at which the viceconsul presented participants with medals stamped with an effigy of Mussolini.53 At the same time, medallions were awarded to those young people who had excelled in their militaristic training.54 In Toronto, the Gioventu was composed primarily of Avanguardisti, and throughout the 1930s membership did not exceed 200 teenagers.55 Nevertheless,

64 Luigi G. Pennacchio those who did belong were committed to the organization, no doubt because they were the sons and daughters of members of the f ascio and the dopolavoro.56 The best students of the fascist language schools and superior athletes of the Gioventu (usually one and the same) attended Fascist summer camps in Italy, where they were to be given a bagno d'ltalianita (an immersion in Italianness).57 Some of the expenses associated with the camps were assumed by the direzione; the camps too were a part of the direzione's outreach program aimed at Italian children abroad. Most of the camps were located near mountain villages or by seaside towns. Within the camps, the participants lived in tents, wore their Fascist youth uniforms, paraded daily, and generally conducted themselves as soldiers in the field. The camp experience ended on a high note: the children were transported to Rome/where they were blessed by Pope Pius XI, and then to the Olympic Stadium, where il Duce welcomed them.58 After this ceremony, they were permitted to visit their relatives. For those who participated in this immersion, Fascist Italy became a real part of their lives. A limited number of Toronto's Italian children, for the most part the Avanguardisti, took the bagno d'ltalianita. Throughout the 1930s, about twenty teenagers per year attended the camps; from 1934 to 1939, approximately 500 young people throughout Canada did so.59 The vice-consuls and the direzione, however, also hoped that Italians who remained in Toronto would feel the effects of the bagno. As part of their camping experience, the campers were required to keep a diary so that they could read aloud from it while attending fascist events in Toronto. At one fascist picnic, for instance, an Avanguardista, with tears of joy rolling down his cheeks, described how at the Olympic Stadium he had led the city's delegation before Mussolini to receive the Fascist salute.60 The persons with the best diaries received a special commendation from the vice-consul.61 The Zenith of Fascism Fascism's influence among Toronto's Italians was greatest between 1934 and 1936. During this period, for example, Vice-Consul Tiberi and the Direzione convinced Italians of the need for a Casa d'ltalia. To reinforce Fascist diplomatic authority, the direzione called for establishment of such institutions in every immigrant community. In 1934 Piero Parini, the chief of the direzione, visited Toronto and launched the idea, even promising his government's financial assistance.62 The campaign

Exporting Fascism to Canada: Toronto's Little Italy 65 was directed by Tiberi and fascio members. Remarkably, in the middle of the Depression they convinced many Italians to make donations of money goods, or services.63 Even more remarkable was their success at persuading donors that title over the Casa d'ltalia was to be held by the Italian government through the vice-consul.64 After a two-year fund-raising drive that was sidetracked by the need to raise monies for the Ethiopian war of 1935-6, Tiberi was able to purchase the former Chudleigh mansion at 136 Beverley Street in Toronto, in July 1936.65 The new centre housed the offices of the viceconsul, the fascio Principe Umberto, the dopolavoro, the Associazione Combattenti, the fascist language schools, and the Gioventu. In addition, the centre served as a meeting place for social and mutual benefit societies. Lastly, at the Casa d'ltalia Tiberi and his successor, Guido Colonna di Paliano, staged dances, dinners, and garden parties designed to impress his Italian and Anglo-Celtic guests.66 But for Guido Colonna and his successor, the centre was a truly valuable tool for monitoring or controlling the organizations that met or resided there. At no time was the tie between Toronto's Italians and their Fascist homeland more evident than during Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. The fact that Britain and Canada did not support Italy's aggression67 put Vice-Consul Tiberi, Toronto's Fascists, and Italians in general on the defensive. Tiberi, however, decided that the best defence was a good offence: he had elements of the Italian community write to the Toronto dailies explaining Italy's need for colonial expansion in order to meet the needs of its 'surplus' population; others wrote asking why Italy, like Britain, was not entitled to an empire.68 Tiberi also used the Italian newspaper to his advantage. He had // Bollettino publish English-language pamphlets outlining Italy's reasons for attacking Ethiopia. Aside from summarizing the Italian position, the pamphlets stressed that Italy was on a moral crusade: to put an end to both slavery and the slave trade, which were sanctioned by the Ethiopian government.69 Through the print media, Tiberi worked hard to impress on AngloCeltic Torontonians that the Italian community endorsed Italy's conquest of Ethiopia. To further demonstrate the Italians' solidarity with the homeland on the Ethiopian issue, Tiberi made use of community umbrella organizations that he and his predecessor had helped create. One such body was the 'Italian Colonial Committee,' composed of the leading members of the fascio, the dopolavoro, and the Combattenti (usually the same people). The role of the committee was to speak to governments on

66 Luigi G. Pennacchio behalf of all loyal Italians. Thanks to Tiberi's ability to manipulate the communal leadership, it appeared to other Torontonians that the community supported Italy's position on Ethiopia.70 The actions of 'ordinary' Italians during the Ethiopian war further reinforced the Anglo-Celtic citizenry's belief that Italo-Torontonians had chosen Italy over Canada. Spurred on by patriotic speeches made by Vice-Consul Tiberi, his Fascist colleagues, and Italian Catholic priests, hundreds of Italians donated their gold jewellery for the war effort.71 In March 1936 // Bollettino, in a story reprinted in the Toronto Star, reported that 557 individuals had contributed at least one item of jewellery. In exchange, the Italian government gave donors elaborately designed certificates of acknowledgment, suitable for framing; women who gave their wedding rings received steel bands, which they wore with pride.72 Retribution When Canada and Italy went to war on 10 June 1940, the Canadian government quickly moved to crush Italian Fascism in Toronto. On that fateful day, the Casa d'ltalia and the organizations housed within it collapsed like a house of cards: the fascio Principe Umberto, the dopolavoro, the Gioventu, the Associazione Combattenti, the OVRA, associated fascist organizations, and // Bollettino were declared illegal. The Casa d'ltalia was seized by the Custodian of Enemy Alien Property, who sold it to the RCMP, with the proceeds being used to pay back taxes and outstanding mortgage payments.73 As for the official representatives of Fascist Italy; protected by diplomatic immunity, the viceconsul, Francesco Barboglio, and his staff were simply expelled from Canada.74 Fascist diplomats paid a very small price for importing fascism to the city. It was Toronto's Italians who had to answer for the actions of the Fascist vice-consuls and Italy's eventual belligerence. During the reign of the vice-consuls, the Italians, willingly or unwillingly, surrendered their community leadership and primary institutions to the fascists. And as a result, the question begs to be asked: how influential was fascism among the Italians? Without doubt, the vice-consuls did manage to 'co-opt' the economic, political, and social leaders of Toronto Italia. Moreover, fascist institutions from the dopolavoro to the language schools, with membership in the hundreds, drew large numbers of 'ordinary' Italo-Torontonians into fascism's web;75 during the Fascist

Exporting Fascism to Canada: Toronto's Little Italy 67 era, approximately 2,500 Italians had enrolled in fascist organizations; unfortunately, this total cannot be analysed to extract only Toronto residents.76 None the less, it is clear that fascism did have a noticeable impact on the community. And the Canadian government had no option but to respond to this potential fascist threat. Notes 1 For a good general account of the Fascist government's aims regarding the immigrants, see Philip V. Cannistraro and Gianfausto Rosoli, 'Fascist Emigration Policy in the 1920s: An Interpretive Framework/ International Migration Review 13, no. 4 (winter 1979), 673-92; and Piero Parini, 'I Fasci Italiani AlTEstero/ in II decennale (Florence: n.p., 1929), 411 and 414-15. For Toronto: National Archives of Canada (hereafter NA), Norman A. Robertson Papers (NAR), MG 30, E 163, 'The Consul-General of Italy in Canada Visits the Colony of Toronto: Consul's Address at the Colonial Banquet,' II Bollettino italo-canadese, Toronto, 6 Nov. 1933,1-4. On Canada, see Luigi Bruti Liberati, II Canada, I'ltalia e ilfascismo, 1919-1945 (Rome: Bonacci, 1984); Roberto Perin, 'Making Good Fascists and Good Canadians: Consular Propaganda and the Italian Community in Montreal in the 1930s,' in Gerry Gold, ed., Minorities and Mother Country Imagery (St lohn's: Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1984). 2 Throughout 1928 and 1929 Benito Mussolini appointed 120 fascist consuls. See Fabiano di Domenico, T Fasci Italiani AU'Estero/ in Gli Italiani Fuori d'ltalia, ed. Franco Angeli (Milan: Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini, 1983), 232. 3 NAR, MG 30, E 163, vol. 12, file 124, 'Consul's Address at the Colonial Banquet/ 1-3. 4 To help its diplomats gain control of Italian communities, in 1928 the Fascist government issued the Statute dei Fasci All'Estero (Constitution of Fascists Abroad), which explained the dominance of the diplomats within Italian communities and outlined the relationship between consular officials and the Italians in their jurisdictions. A copy of the Statute is found in Parini, T Fasci Italiani All'Estero/ 416-18. For a discussion of the impact of the Statuto on immigrants, see Gianfranco Cresciani, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Italians in Australia, 1922-1945 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1980), 24-5; and Monte S. Finkelstein, 'The lohnson Act, Mussolini and Fascist Emigration Policy: 1921-1930,' Journal of American Ethnic History 8, no. 1 (fall 1988), 49-50. For its effect on Toronto's Italians, see Maddalena Kuitunen, 'Dal "Decalogo dellTtaliano

68 Luigi G. Pennacchio

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12

13

all'estero" a GH Italiani nel mondo: la colonia Italiana di Toronto nel 193132,' Italian Canadiana 5 (1989), 26-38. Italian Canadians were not unique in establishing fasci before Fascists came to power in Italy. Italian immigrants throughout the world were doing the same. On the Canadian situation see NAR, MG 30, E 163, vol. 12, file 124, G.L. Jennings, Asst. Commissioner, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Dept. of Criminal Investigations, to O.D. Skelton, Under Secretary of State, External Affairs, Memorandum: Fascism (Italian) in Canada, 23 March 1936,1; and Canadian Security Intelligence Service (hereafter CSIS), Access to Information Request (hereafter AIR), File No. 87-A-95, The Organization and Activities of the Italian Fascist Party in Canada (Ottawa: RCMP Nov. 1937), 07. Di Domenico, T Fasci Italiani All'Estero/ 232; Parini, Gli italiani nel Mondo, 35; and CSIS, Organization and Activities, 03. CSIS, Organization and Activities, 010, 015, and 027. NA, Marco Missori Papers, MG 30, C99, 'Riordinamento del Fascio/ // Bollettino italo-canadese, 23 Oct. 1931; and 'Cronaca Cittadina: Nel Fascio Principe Umberto,' II Bollettino, 28 Jan. 1932, 28. NA, Department of External Affairs (hereafter DBA), RG 25 G-l, vol. 1964, file 855-E Part 1, Plans for the Detention of Enemy Aliens and Certain Naturalized Canadians in the Event of War, 2 Sept. 1939,5; and NA, DBA, RG 25 G-l, vol. 1964, file 855-E Part 1, Minutes of the Interdepartmental Committee re: treatment of enemy aliens and others of seditious or treasonable intents, 31 Aug. 1939,4. CSIS, Organization and Activities, 09. NAR, MG 30, E 136, vol. 12, file 124: Communist-Nazi-Fascist Propaganda, 1933-36, 'Fascist Salute Is Taught in Toronto/ Toronto Daily Star, 6 March 1936. Figures on the total number of fascists in Toronto differ significantly, no doubt depending on which type of membership is intended. The figure of 700 may have been quoted as the membership of the fascist dopolavoro. Elsewhere in this volume, Bruti Liberati claims a membership of 500 for Toronto fascists. On the activities of the dopolavoro as described here, see National Archives of the United States of America (hereafter NAUS), Department of State, Central Files, decimal file 865.2024/1, Italian Activities in Canada, Interned Italians - General and Confidential Report of the Examining Officer - Montreal, 4-5. CSIS, Organization and Activities, 9. However, even for a group as patriotic as the Combattenti, divisions could and did occur (in both Toronto and Montreal) over whether to adhere to Italian Fascism.

Exporting Fascism to Canada: Toronto's Little Italy 69 14 Archivio storico-diplomatico del ministero degli affari esteri (hereafter ASMAE), Busta 9, Miscellanea Fasc. 9, Associazione Combattenti di Toronto. These papers are on microfilm at the Multicultural History Society of Ontario, Toronto. 15 CSIS, AIR, File No. 87-A-51, Intelligence Branch Toronto, Order of Sons of Italy Canada - Generally, 29 October 1990, 091-092. 16 CSIS, AIR, File 87-A-51, V.A.M. Kemp, Supt. Comdg. 'O' Div. RCMP, to Commissioner, RCMP, re: Order of the Sons of Italy of Ontario, 26 Aug. 1940, 067-073. 17 CSIS, AIR, File No. 87-A-51, Exhibit 40-257, 047. 18 Archives of Ontario (hereafter AO), Ministry of Consumer and Commercial Relations, RG 31, Series 31-23, Insurance Branch, Director General's Correspondence, 1912-61, box 6, file 6.5 MT 48, Custodian of Enemy Property, Secretary of State, 1940, re: Italian Mutual Benefit Societies. 19 On Antonio G., the fascists, and La Trinacria see: CSIS, AIR, File No. 87-A51, Brief History of the Fascist Schools of Toronto and the Province of Ontario, 16 October 1939,145-6; and Antonino Spada interview, July and Aug. 1988. 20 Archives of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto (ARCAT), Neil McNeil Papers, MN DS 34.06A, A. Cassulo, Apostolic Delegate, to Ordinaries of Canada, 11 May 1932; and Gianfausto Rosoli, 'Santa Sede e propaganda fascista all'estero fra figli emigranti,' Storia contemporanea 17 (April 1986), 303. 21 ARCAT, James McGuigan Papers, MG 5014.02 (b), Daniel Ehman to Rev. Archbishop McGuigan, 10 June 1938; and ibid., MG 5014.02(1), Archbishop McGuigan to Fr Sansone, 11 June 1938. 22 Luigi G. Pennacchio, 'The Torrid Trinity: Toronto's Fascists, Italian Priests and Archbishops during the Fascist Era, 1929-1940,' in Mark George McGowan and Brian P. Clarke, eds., Catholics at the 'Gathering Place': Historical Essays on the Archdiocese of Toronto, 1841-1991 (Toronto: Canadian Catholic Historical Association, 1993), 236-7. 23 NA, RCMP, RG 18 F3, vol. 3563, file Cll-19-2-3, Part 1 - RCMP, Memorandum to the Interdepartmental Committee re: Rev. Settimio Balo, 29 Aug. 1940; and ARCAT, McGuigan Papers, box: Education 1935^2, Envelope: Education-1939, Passages from II Bollettino, 1-15. 24 ASMAE, Italian Consular Papers, Articoli di propaganda, 16 Nov. 1937, 1-3. 25 CSIS, Organization and Activities, 036. 26 McKim's Directory of Canadian Publications for 1940 (Toronto: A. McKim, 1940), 478.

70 Luigi G. Pennacchio 27 ASMAE, Italian Consular Papers, Pellicole cinematografiche, 19 July 1938, 1-3. 28 Ibid., Esposizione di Toronto, 17 June 1937, 2 and 4. 29 ASMAE, microfilm 862, reel 1, busta 18, fasc. 18, Propaganda culturale, la settimana italiana al Canada, 1933,1 and 2. 30 Archivio centrale dello stato (Italian National Archives, or ACS), Ministero della Cultura Populare (MCP), Sottosegretariato di Stato per la Stampa e la Propaganda, Direzione General per i Servizi della Propaganda, 1935, busta 285, portafoglio 1/11/4, G. Tiberi, Regie V. Console Toronto, to R. Consolato generale d'ltalia, Ottawa, 28 Feb. 1935. 31 ACS, MCP, Sottosegretariato di Stato per la Stampa e la Propaganda Direzione Generale per i servizi della Propaganda, 1935, busta 285, portafoglio 1/11/4, Letter 29 March 1936, Sottosegretariato di Stato per la Stampa e la Propaganda, to R, Consolato Generale d'ltalia, Ottawa. 32 On 6, 8,10,11, and 12 Jan. of 1927, the Toronto Daily Star published a series of articles that glorified Mussolini. On Canadians' support for Mussolini before the Ethiopian crisis generally, see Principe's contribution in this volume. 33 Shortly after the Fascists came to power in Italy in 1922, anti-fascists began to emigrate. Paris, Moscow, London, New York, and Mexico City were their primary destinations, but so too was Toronto. It was the responsibility of the vice-consuls and OVRA agents to monitor the activities of these exiles, and they did so with great relish. ASMAE, Italian Consular Papers, are replete with examples of this surveillance activity; for example, Sequestra del periodico anti-fascista 'La Voce Operia' edito nel Canada, 17 Feb. 1934, notes referring to Pasquale C, 1-3. 34 Lita-Rose Betcherman, The Swastika and the Maple Leaf: Fascist Movements in Canada in the Thirties (Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1975), 81-2. 35 ASMAE, Italian Consular Papers, P. Margotti, Royal Consul of Italy, to O.D. Skelton, Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, re: Armando B., communist, 20 May 1927. 36 CSIS, Organization and Activities, 037-038. 37 For an example, see ASMAE, Italian Consular Papers, Cortland Starnes, Commissioner RCMP, to P. Margotti, Royal Consul of Italy, 20 May 1929. 38 On the Methodist church's conversion program, see Luigi G. Pennacchio, 'Italian Heritage Language Classes in Pre-Second World War Toronto/ Polyphony 11 (1989), 36-9; and Enrico Carlson Cumbo, '"Impediments to the Harvest": The Limitations of Methodist Proselytization of Toronto's Italian Immigrants, 1905-1925,' in McGowan and Clarke, eds., Catholics at the 'Gathering Place/ 155-76.

Exporting Fascism to Canada: Toronto's Little Italy 71 39 ASMAE, microfilm 862, reel 1, Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Rapporti politic!, 1934, Fascismo canadese, 31 Oct. 1933,1-19 passim. 40 Ibid., busta 3, fasc. 1-5, Rapporti politici, Figli d'ltalia, Dr L. Petrucci e sua confernenza, 1-12 passim. 41 In the late 1930s the Daily Clarion reported extensively on fascist activities in Toronto, especially as regards the fascist Italian language schools. Much of this activity was also made public by Stewart Smith, a communist alderman in Toronto; and by MP J.S. Woodsworth, leader of the CCF. See CSIS, AIR, File No. 87-A-51, Daily Clarion, 'Aid. Smith Exposes Children, Schools Financed by Duce/ 28 March 1939,112-15. 42 NAR, MG 30, E 163, vol. 12, file 124, 'The Consul-General of Italy Visits the Colony of Toronto: Consuls Address at the Colonial Banquet/ l-4t passim; and ARCAT, McGuigan Papers, box Education 1935-42, envelope: Education -1939, Passages from II Bollettino, 1-15 passim. 43 ASMAE, microfilm 862, reel 1, busta 3,1935, fasc. 1-5, Rapporti politici, Figli d'ltalia: Dr L. Petrucci e sua conferenza/ 1-12 passim. 44 Pennacchio, 'Italian Heritage Language Classes/ 36-44 passim. 45 CSIS, Brief History of the Fascist Schools, 137-46. 46 Tracy H. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight: Political Socialization of Youth in Fascist Italy, 1922-1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 33-4. 47 By 1938-9 the Pro-School Committee had eighty members, who were the professional, business, and social leaders of Toronto's Italian community. Although it operated as an independent body, it answered to the viceconsul. Its activities included raising additional funds for the Italianlanguage classes, usually through picnics, dinners, and the soliciting of outright contributions from the Italian public. See CSIS, Brief History of the Fascist Schools, 144-5. 48 The fascist language schools were very well organized and thus were most attractive to parents within the Italian community: they were offered free of charge; the teachers were well trained; students were organized into grades according to their ages; pupils studied from textbooks and other curriculum materials supplied from Italy; classes took place after dayschool hours or on weekends; classrooms were located in church halls, separate schools, and the Italian consulate building (Casa d'ltalia); and there was a defined school year that stretched from Sept. to June. See CSIS, Brief History of the Fascist Schools, 137-46; and Roy Davis, Maclean's Magazine, I Sept. 1940, 'Primers of Treachery/ 30. 49 CSIS, Brief History of the Fascist Schools, 136^6; and Davis, 'Primers of Treachery/ 30.

72 Luigi G. Pennacchio 50 Extracts from the fascist textbooks used in Toronto, including the one above, can be found in CSIS, Organization and Activities, 047-057; and Davis, 'Primers of Treachery/ 8 and 30. 51 The names of the various age groups reinforced themes in Italian history and in Italy's future. She-Wolf harked back to Imperial Rome: legend has it that Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were suckled by a shewolf. The Balilla was named after the fourteen-year-old Genoese boy, Gian Battista Perasso, who was nicknamed Balilla. In 1746, Perasso, by throwing a stone at Austrian troops marching through Genoa, sparked a popular uprising against Austrian rule of the city. Finally, the Avanguardisti represented the future: they were the vanguards of fascism. See Italy Today, special issue: Youth Movement 2, no. 7 (July 1939), 4-5; and CSIS, AIR, File No. 87-A-51, Intelligence Branch, RCMP, Toronto, re: Italian Youth Organization Abroad, 248. 52 CSIS, re: Italian Youth Organization Abroad, 248. 53 Ibid., 242. One of these songs was the Fascist 'national anthem/ Giovinezza (literally 'Youth'). The first stanza: Giovinezza, giovinezza, Primavera di bellezza, Nel Fascismo e' la salvezza della nostra liberta. (Youth, youth Springtime of beauty In fascism lies the salvation of our liberty.) 54 Ibid., 246. 55 Ibid., 242. 56 Conclusion drawn from names of Avanguardisti members listed in CSIS, re: Italian Youth Organization Abroad, 236-49 passim. 57 CSIS, Brief History of the Fascist Schools, 143. 58 Luigi Bottazi, 'Italia nuova: Per i figli degli italiani all'estero/ La Lettura 13, no. 7 (July 1933), 578-85 passim. 59 Davis, 'Primers of Treachery/ 30; and CSIS, re: Italian Youth Organization Abroad, 236-49. 60 NA, RCMP, RG 18 F3, vol. 3563, file Cll-19-2-3, part 2, Memorandum to: The Interdepartmental Committee re: Frank C, 25 Nov. 1940,1. 61 CSIS, re: Italian Youth Organization Abroad, 242. 62 'La Casa d'ltalia si fara/ II Bollettino, 2 Nov. 1934,1. There is no evidence to

Exporting Fascism to Canada: Toronto's Little Italy 73

63

64 65

66

67

suggest that the Italian government ever made a contribution to help establish a Casa d'ltalia in Toronto. TI a. lista di sottoscrizione pro Casa d'ltalia/ II Bollettino, 21 Dec. 1934,1. Chudleigh Mansion, the Casa d'ltalia, was located at the northwest corner of Dundas and Beverley streets. It still stands today and is once again in the hands of the Italian state: it serves as the Italian consulate. 'La Casa d'ltalia si fara/ 1. Chudleigh Mansion was purchased for $25,000. Tiberi made a downpayment of just over $5,000, and he obtained a $20,000 first mortgage. The centre was administered by the Casa D'ltalia Co., which issued stocks held by the vice-consul and his consular employees. Of course, the vice-consul would always be the major shareholder and president of the company. See AIR, Custodian of Enemy Alien Property, Minutes of the Casa d'ltalia Company, July 1936. During the Ethiopian war Italians made donations to help Italy pay the expenses of the war. Although these contributions were solicited by vice-consul Tiberi, they did reduce the amount of money that he could raise for the centre. For the organizations housed at the Casa d'ltalia, for all the activities that took place there, and for the vice-consul's use of the centre, consult the back page of II Bollettino for its 'Le attivita' della colonia nella Casa d'ltalia' feature. Canada responded to Italy's invasion of Ethiopia by initiating League of Nations sanctions, especially an oil embargo, against Italy. The League attempted to deprive Italy of the 'raw materials' needed to feed its war machine. The sanctions failed because in the long run both Britain and France, two key members of the League, were willing to appease Italy by giving it Ethiopia's fertile northern plain; the Ethiopians were to be left with unfertile land in the south. A global outcry prevented Britain and France from so carving up Ethiopia. Nevertheless, the British and French plan gravely weakened the moral authority of the League, and Italy was thus able to conquer Ethiopia. Britain therefore was not too pleased at the Canadian action designed to punish rather than appease Italy. For that matter, neither was the Canadian government. Canada had been committed to advocating sanctions by the leader of its delegation to the League, who had acted on his own at the request of other League representatives, who did not want to take the initiative. See Gwendolen M. Carter, 'Canada and Sanctions in the Italo-Ethiopian Conflict,' Canadian Historical Association Historical Papers (May 1940), 74-84; and James C. Robertson, 'The Hoare-Laval Plan,' Journal of Contemporary History 10, no. 3 (July 1975), 433-64.

74 Luigi G. Pennacchio 68 ASMAE, busta 4,1936, fasc. 1-6, Confilitto italo-etopico. All documents in this busta deal with the pro-Italy activity of Toronto's Italians during the Ethiopian war. 69 T. Mari, What Do You Know about Ethiopia? (Toronto: Issued by a Committee Representative of the Italian Community of Toronto, Canada, Oct. 1935), 9-11. 70 For further details, see Principe's essay in this volume. 71 NA, RCMP, RG 18 F3, vol. 3563, file Cll-19-2-3, part 1, RCMP Memorandum to the Interdepartmental Committee re: Rev. Settimio Balo, 29 Aug. 1940,1. 72 NAR, MG 30, E163, vol. 12, file 124: Communist-Nazi-Fascist Propaganda, 1933-36, 'Fascist Salute Is Taught In Toronto/ Toronto Daily Star, 6 March 1936. The collected gold jewellery was to be melted down and sold, and the money sent to Italy - specifically to the Italian Red Cross. In 1936 it was claimed that 421 ounces of gold had been collected in Ontario. However, some observers have asserted that the jewellery was never melted down and that after the war it was found intact in California. It had apparently been meant to become a revenue source for Fascist diplomats abroad should things go badly for them. See A.V. Spada, The Italians in Canada (Montreal: Riviera, 1969), 125-6. 73 In 1954, a new generation of Italian-Canadian leaders purchased the Casa d'ltalia from the RCMP with monies raised in part from the community. But administrative problems prevented the Italian-Canadian leadership from putting the building to its intended use, as a community centre. Therefore in 1960 they turned it over to the Italian government for a nominal fee. Today, as in the 1930s, it serves as the Italian consulate. See NA, Senator Arnold David Croll Papers, MG 32-C49, vol. 33, file 33-5, re: Casa d'ltalia, 1-3; and Franca lacovetta, Such Hardworking People: Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992), 146-7. 74 Vice-Consul Barboglio and his consular employees went, under police escort, to the United States when they were ordered out of Canada. Presumably they found their way thence back to Italy. NA, DBA, RG 25, Dl, vol. 805, file 568, microfilm T 1809, O.D. Skelton to Hon. Pierrepont Moffat, 20 June 1940,1 and 2. 75 A comparison of the individual memberships of Italian mutual benefit societies in Toronto shows that none exceeded the membership of fascist organizations or fascist-associated groups such as the Order Sons of Ital in Ontario. See AO, Ministry of Consumer and Commercial Relations, RG 31, series 31-23, Insurance Branch, Director's General Correspondence,

Exporting Fascism to Canada: Toronto's Little Italy 75 1912-61, box 6, file 6.5 MT 48, Custodian of Enemy Property, Secretary of State, 1940, re: Italian Mutual Benefit Societies. 76 The total is derived from those listed throughout the body of the preceding study: 700 fascists, 546 dopolavoro members, 1,600 members of Order Sons of Italy in Ontario, and 600 students in language schools, for a total of 2,446. It is not clear how many of these were resident in Toronto. The vast majority of the 1,600 Order Sons of Italy members, for example, were resident mainly in smaller centres outside the city.

3

The Internment of Italian Canadians LUIGI BRUTI LIBERATI TRANSLATED BY GABRIELE SCARDELLATO

In a recent volume on the history of ethnic groups in Canada during the Second World War, On Guard for Thee: War, Ethnicity, and the Canadian State, 1939-1945,1 some of Canada's experts on ethnic minorities and wartime devoted their attention to the central problem of this period the relation between the internal security of the state and the treatment meted out to residents whose origins were with enemy nations, whether they had become naturalized Canadian citizens or had retained their original citizenship. Except for the article by J.L. Granatstein and G.A. Johnson,2 the authors' views in On Guard for Thee can be summarized as follows. Archival sources clearly show that there was no threat posed to national security by 'enemy' ethnic groups in Canada. In fact, there is no evidence for a single case of espionage carried out by these groups. At the time Canada had not put in place any means for conducting investigations of ethnic groups and, in particular, of German, Italian, and Japanese Canadians. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in particular, as the organization responsible for internal security, was completely unprepared for this task - it lacked manpower, had been concerned exclusively with the 'red scare,' and lacked even rudimentary resources such as a translation service to evaluate foreign-language printed materials gathered during its investigations. Consequently, when Canadian authorities had to decide in 1939, in 1940, and in 1942 how to uncover and then detain dangerous elements among Canadian residents of 'enemy' origin or ancestry, the criteria adopted, according to On Guard for Thee, were completely arbitrary and based largely on incomplete information. In deciding to intern many hundreds of so-called enemies and Canadian citizens, the government acted more to placate public opinion, aroused by recurring rumours of a 'fifth column/ than on the basis of objectively established facts.

The Internment of Italian Canadians 77 Even the revisionist piece by Granatstein and Johnson in On Guard for Thee on the Japanese Canadians underlines the weakness of the RCMP's investigatory machinery, and the military's equally weak counter-espionage capacity contributed significantly to the indiscriminate nature of the internments. I have already addressed the internment of Italian Canadians in a study of Italian-Canadian relations from 1919 to 1945.3 New research findings permit a more comprehensive overview of the treatment accorded Italian Canadians during the Second World War. In the interest of historical accuracy we must answer a number of primary questions about the internments. Accordingly I describe below the means available to the Canadian government for obtaining information about Italian-Canadian fascists, how the names of individuals to be interned were determined, and the procedures and the process of internment, and on the basis of that material, I seek to determine whether internment was an arbitrary measure. RCMP Surveillance of Fascists The RCMP had been accustomed to monitoring the Communist party as a potential threat to internal security. Archival sources show that it was only in 1936 that a first official step was taken to approve and implement an effective surveillance and information-gathering initiative on the subversive activities of the right. In March of that year a committee was formed, with members drawn from the RCMP and the Department of External Affairs, to investigate Fascist and Nazi organizations, and Norman Robertson was appointed as his department's representative to this committee.4 By this time, however, the RCMP already had relatively detailed information on Italian Fascism in Canada. This is revealed in a summary memorandum titledvFascism (Italian) in Canada,' which the RCMP submitted to External Affairs in March 1926.5 Beginning in 1927, when P. Margotti became Italian consul general in Montreal, the document described the highlights of the spread of fascism in Canada.6 Concrete proof of the existence of Italian fasci in Canada had been collected in 1931, when the RCMP had been informed that a certain L.T., manager of the Cascade Hotel in Banff, Alta, had received from Rome a quantity of membership cards for the Italian Fascist party. After this date, the propaganda activities of Italian consuls in Canada had increased and had reached a peak with the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. According to the RCMP, anti-fascism had only a faint presence among Italian Canadians: 'Communist and other antifascist attempts to counteract fascist influence among the Italian popu-

78 Luigi Bruti Liberati lation have been of little avail. It may safely be said that only a minor portion of the Italians in Canada have aligned themselves with the antifascist block/7 This conclusion was essentially correct, even though a number of Italian-Canadian organizations were either non-fascist or had emerged from schisms produced by the fascist takeover of existing organizations. During the 1930s there existed in Canada (more precisely in Blairmore, Edmonton, Montreal, Niagara Falls, Port Arthur, Toronto, Vancouver, and Windsor) several non-fascist workers' clubs, which were united together in the Alleanza Operaia Italo-Canadese (ItaloCanadian Workers' Alliance).8 Large Canadian unions also had Italian locals - most notably, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, which included hundreds of Italian Canadians, both men and women. Additionally, many veterans left the Italian War Veterans Association and regrouped under the banner of its Canadian counterpart, even if this meant the cancellation of both their Italian veteran's pension and any military honours that might have been due to them.9 Among mutual benefit societies, the Ordine Fior d'ltalia (Order of the Flower of Italy), which was at least neutral if not overtly anti-fascist, was widespread in both Alberta and British Columbia. Similarly, the Independent Order Sons of Italy (later the Order Italo-Canadese), which, according to the RCMP, had some 1,600 members in Ontario and Quebec in 1939, the majority of whom were workers, had been founded in 1927 as a reaction to the support for fascism exhibited by the Order Sons of Italy in both provinces.10 As for support for fascism by Italians in Canada, there was a significant difference from that in Italy. Numerous studies have shown that internal Italian support for the Fascist regime declined as Mussolini's policies became more war-like. In contrast, it was during the very years from 1936 to 1939 that Canada experienced the greatest organizational and propagandizing effort on the part of the consulates and a subsequent increase in the influence of fascist ideology on Italian Canadians. The RCMP had been in contact for some time with non-communist anti-fascists in order to procure information about fascist organizations. From a report compiled in September 1926, for example, it is clear that even at that relatively early date the RCMP had retained one of the antifascist leaders of Montreal as a secret informer to report to it regularly on the membership and activities of the fascist club of that city.11 Beginning in 1936, however, the RCMP began to compile a vast

The Internment of Italian Canadians 79 amount of material on the activities of Fascists in Canada and as part of this effort commissioned a review of newspapers to examine and translate articles that described the actions of Italian consuls andfasci. Local detachments of the RCMP were instructed to watch Italian 'colonies'; Italian-Canadian informers were hired in ever greater numbers and charged with reporting to RCMP offices any subversive fascist activities; and investigations of suspected agents of the Opera Vigilanza Repressione Antifascismo (OVRA) were carried out, as well as of propagandists who arrived from the United States. A special effort was devoted to the surveillance of schools for teaching Italian. The books used in these schools were subjected to intense study by officials of the RCMP, who were concerned that Canadian youths were being educated according to principles that were foreign to the British democrati tradition. In short, the fundamental problem was political, rather than one in which the police ought to have been involved - the potential existence of a 'fifth column' made up either of Canadian citizens or of residents who nurtured a double loyalty - a fictitious one towards their country of adoption and a real one towards their country of origin. Police attention focused on the two most important urban centres, Montreal and Toronto, which had the country's largest Italian 'colonies/ Thus, at the beginning of 1937, RCMP Commissioner F.J. Mead in Montreal was able to forward to Ottawa a long memorandum that described in accurate detail the situation in the city and included precise references to key fascist leaders as well as information about the numerous financial scandals that had been a part of the life of the/asczo of Montreal. The document had been compiled two years earlier by an informer with the assistance of other anti-fascists, and it was based in part on articles from the pro-fascist city newspaper L'Italia, but above all on information obtained from within the community. The report emphasized in particular, under the title 'Persecution/ actions against those Italians who did not align themselves with the fascist position: 'The Fascists have provided us with ample proof of the enormous consequences to Italo-Canadians of ignoring fascist requests. The incident which befell X is worthy of note; although he is a British subject, he was arrested in Italy during a pleasure trip in 1932, and after several days of imprisonment, he was expelled from Italy. This was due to the work of the Secretary of the Fascio and member of the OVRA, who notified the Italian OVRA that X was an active anti-Fascist in Canada ... From this incident, one can readily realize what might happen to every impartial Italo-Canadian ... There is only one word to define the ways

80 Luigi Bruti Liberati and means of Fascism - medieval inquisition/12 This and other examples were cited to demonstrate the methods of coercion and blackmail used against those Italian Canadians who did not support fascism. It is not difficult to understand why actions of this type would have provoked a strong reaction on the part of those who had suffered various types of difficulties over the previous twenty years. Also in 1937, the RCMP directed one of its agents to compile a report on the situation in Toronto. According to this document, the fascio in Toronto had rapidly expanded over the previous two years and had 500 members in a local Italian-Canadian population of some 14,000.13 Italian consular authorities had directed their efforts above all towards intellectuals and professionals - the so-called prominenti - the majority of whom had joined the Fascists. The report included a list naming all those in the city who were the most active in the fascist party. The same document also recorded in great detail all the institutions used by local Fascists for their indoctrination work.14 Although its information-gathering focused primarily on Montreal and Toronto, the RCMP did not forget the rest of the country. In fact for 1938, its archives contain many reports from smaller centres in Quebec and Ontario, as well as from even remote locales in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, and Nova Scotia. In almost all cases the reports were extremely detailed, containing lists of individuals associated in various ways with fascism, and they thus provided RCMP headquarters in Ottawa with a detailed picture of fascist activity in Canada, from the largest urban centres to the most distant mining camps. In addition, by the end of 1937 the RCMP was already able to compile a dossier of some sixty pages, which provided a precise summary of what fascist organizations had accomplished in Canada.15 From this remarkable documentation there emerged a number of possibilities that caused particular concern for the police. Even though a large part of fascist activity was legal and openly practised, the dominion authorities were disquieted by pressures exerted on residents who had already become Canadian citizens to force them to side with fascist directives. Officials rightly felt that these acts constituted unwarranted meddling on the part of a foreign power in the dominion's affairs, and a particularly serious example occurred in Toronto in 1935. In this incident a young man who was a Canadian citizen protested in the course of a meeting of the Garibaldi Juvenile Orange Lodge against the use of Italian-language schools to spread fascist ideology under the guise of teaching children the Italian language.

The Internment of Italian Canadians 81 According to the RCMP, 'the resolution so provoked the indignation of the leading executives of the fascio that X [the young man] was forced to retire from the lodge and to sign a statement in which he retracted the resolution and apologized for having proposed it. The father of X was approached and menaced by members of the Italian community for the action of the son, the employment of another son being threatened and also the persecution of this man's relatives in Italy.'16 The persecution of this family of anti-fascists, however, did not end at this point. In April 1938 an attempt was made to dynamite its house, and RCMP Superintendent R.E. Mercer noted: 'While this may be a mere coincidence, the description of the manner in which the dynamite was placed would tend to give the impression that this was an attempt to intimidate the occupants of the house, without causing them extreme injury, and may be a sequence to the incident reported to have taken place in March 1935.'17 Jewish-Canadian organizations had begun to follow the activities of Italian Fascists from 1938.18 As a result of this work, the RCMP in Toronto in January 1938 received a memorandum titled 'Mussolini's Demands in Canada,' prepared by the Canadian Jewish Congress and duly forwarded to RCMP headquarters in Ottawa.19 On the basis of these various observations, we might reasonably argue that on the eve of the outbreak of war the RCMP was not entirely unaware of the fascist phenomenon in Canada and had amassed copious documentation well suited to defining potentially dangerous elements among Italian Canadians. It was also obvious, however, that there was considerable potential for disinformation in this informationgathering. The greater part of the RCMP's information about fascists, with the exception of that derived from Italian-Canadian newspapers, came through reports from Italians who were retained as paid police informers. This fact led to concerns about the accuracy and veracity of information, particularly in instances where it was not possible to cross-check an informant's claims. It was because of this situation that in the summer of 1940, when the internment plan was carried out, difficulties immediately arose about the manner in which the lists of those to be interned had been compiled and about the reliability of those people whose information helped to produce those lists. Finally, we should also address the claim made by historian Robert H. Keyserlingk, about RCMP staffing levels. According to him, at the

82 Luigi Brati Liberati outbreak of the war the RCMP was poorly equipped to carry out internal security work, in part because it consisted only of 2,541 men, of whom only 100 and 160 were deployed in Ontario and Quebec respectively.20 Keyserlingk also claims that the force, in the face of an enormous increase in its workload caused by the war itself, suffered a corresponding decrease in the number of available officers in the early 1940s. In reality, according to available sources, as of 31 March 1940 the CMP consisted of a total of 4,299 men, deployed as follows: ninetynine commanding officers, 2,832 officers, 128 special officers, and 1,240 special guards (war veterans employed specifically to protect state property). For Ontario and Quebec, the figures for officers and commanding officers were 191 and 565 respectively, excluding special guards. Further, in the following year the force was augmented by a further 10 per cent to reach a total of 4,743 operatives.21 The same sources show that with the outbreak of the war the RCMP began to employ a large number of women for office work, which in turn released regular officers, who could be moved into the field. In this way the number of active agents was increased indirectly. Of course, this does not mean that growth in the number of RCMP officers also increased the force's effectiveness for internal security. It does challenge, however, the suggestion that during the war the force suffered from staffing cuts that diminished its effectiveness for this part of its work. Enemy Aliens and Internees We must consider the steps taken against Italians and fascists after the outbreak of war under the provisions of the Defence of Canada Regulations (DOCR). Only those organizations that were clearly fascist in nature were declared illegal (Fasci Italiani all'Estero, Dopolavoro, Gioventu Italiana del Littorio, Associazione Ex-Combattenti Italiani, and in Montreal the associations that were part of the United Moral Front), and their properties were confiscated, but their members were not arrested en masse. Rather, provisions were enacted requiring Italian citizens ('enemy aliens') resident in Canada to register and to report periodically to designated offices; prohibiting them from leaving Canada without permission from the central registrar's office; requiring them to agree not to assemble in groups of five or more; and prohibiting them from engaging in activities against Canada and its political stand in the war. These prohibitions were extended to include all Italians naturalized

The Internment of Italian Canadians

83

after September 1922, but in December 1942 the authorities agreed to issue exemption certificates that waived the need to register. At the same time in 1942, those who had been naturalized or who had asked for naturalization were included within the regulations for military conscription. Italians who were not residents of Canada - more precisely, seamen from ships of the Italian merchant marine that were in Canadian ports at the declaration of war - were interned outright. Italian enemy aliens therefore could continue their lives (with the obvious exception of commerce with Italy and/or any exceptions imposed by the minister responsible) unless the RCMP or those in charge of registrations had suspicions that they would engage in acts or propaganda that was hostile to Canada. Suspects in these cases could be arrested, detained, and eventually conditionally released by the same authorities that had interned them or by the minister of justice, or they might be interned as prisoners of war. In contrast to Britain, where in 1940 all Italians were rounded up and either interned or deported, regardless of whether or not they were Fascists, anti-fascists, or apolitical, in Canada the only individuals who were automatically interned were those who were not Canadian residents.22 Internment moreover was understood and intended as a precaution to guard against possible actions against the country's security, not a punishment; thus the internments were not adjudicated according to the normal legal process, and habeas corpus was suspended. Whether they were Canadians or Italian citizens, those arrested and interned were classified as second-class prisoners of war. This classification meant that they were not treated as common criminals; rather, they received treatment similar to that reserved for prisoners of war according to the Geneva Convention. This treatment was not accorded to them as a right but rather as a concession made by the governor-in-council. Furthermore, the review of internments or re-internments was not conducted by a judicial tribunal but rather by the minister of justice, who was assisted by the Inter-Departmental Committee on Internment (IDC), which had solely consultative powers.23 The committee that worked directly with Minister of Justice Lapointe consisted of RCMP Superintendent E.W. Bavin and two officials of the departments of Justice and External Affairs - J.F. MacNeill and Norman Robertson, respectively.24 In this group, the RCMP played a prominent role in as much as it carried out the investigations and put forward the names of those to be interned. The two civilian officials on the committee, however, clearly were aware that the RCMP was inclined to use

84 Luigi Bruti Liberati draconian measures, and they frequently intervened to moderate any excessively severe proposals. Thus a certain level of conflict quickly became apparent between Robertson and MacNeill on one side and Bavin on the other, which hinged primarily on the means used to ascertain the names of those Fascists who were felt to be dangerous. The issue that divided IDC members revolved around the reliability of RCMP informants and the veracity of the information that they provided. This was true, for example, in the case of a well-known antifascist of Montreal, A.S., whose actions after June 1940 were very unpopular in certain Italian-Canadian quarters - a fact that was confirmed by an inquiry conducted by MacNeill among various Roman Catholic priests and other personalities in Ottawa and Montreal. MacNeill was convinced that ecclesiastical authorities were very suspicious of this Italian Protestant; in fact, resentment in Montreal towards S. and two other notable Italian Protestants was such that the Catholics of the city's Italian parishes had requested their internment as enemies of the Catholic Church. According to MacNeill it was difficult, in an atmosphere that was so poisoned with controversies, to establish which side was right and which was wrong, and he concluded that, given this situation, little trust should be placed in the positions of either side.25 It would appear, however, that MacNeill was convinced that the accusations against S. had some truth in them, as he indicated in an answer to a letter from Robertson that had touched on S/s protest against the release of a number of internees: 'The persons named by S. were all very carefully investigated and were recommended for release by the judges ... S., in my opinion is not any more reliable than other Italians who are imbued with the spirit of vendetta/26 Evidence derived from archival documents suggests that Robertson placed himself midway between the almost complete faith shown by Bavin in his informers and the deep distrust expressed by MacNeill. The attitude that he expressed in his response to a communication from Bavin is typical in this respect. Robertson referred to an enclosed memorandum from the informant X that called for increased severity in internment procedures, to which he replied that, although the man's information usually had proved accurate, it was nevertheless unwise to 'delegate to him the power to bind and loose ... [without] an independent check.'27 Robertson exhibited the same cautious approach in the case of A.B., a Protestant minister of Montreal.28 This was a complex affair, which was the subject of a detailed government inquiry in 1941. In short, B., who

The Internment of Italian Canadians 85 had been an RCMP informant from 1937, had been the subject of violent protests and accusations by some of his fellow Italian Protestants. Because he was well known to the authorities and his information about the Montreal fascio had been highly valued, the government decided to conduct the inquiry, which was entrusted to an official of the Department of Justice, P.P. Varcoe. After a careful analysis of the facts, Varcoe concluded that, notwithstanding a judge's opinion to the contrary, B/s recommendations for the internment of a number of Italians were well founded. There was, however, a strange relation between B. and a certain C.V., a suspicious individual who had contributed to a number of Italian-Canadian newspapers, and who was an ardent Fascist, a representative of the Fascio Abroad, President of the Italian War Veterans Association of Montreal, and an agent of the RCMP. C.V. was unaware that he was in the company of a fellow RCMP informant; instead, he was convinced that B. was actually an OVRA agent. C.V. therefore provided B. with information about fascist activities, which B. duly passed on to the RCMP and which then formed the basis for a number of internments. This suspicious relationship between these two individuals made the information that they provided suspect. But after a careful review, Varcoe concluded that, with everything taken into account, both B. and C.V. had proven reliable.29 When informed of the results of the enquiry, Robertson remarked: 'As a member of the Advisory Committee I may say that I am very glad to learn that Mr. Varcoe has had an opportunity of going into some cases much more fully than the Committee could do. He is, in general, satisfied of B.'s good faith and reliability. I must confess that I have had, from time to time, very worrying doubts ... Some of these doubts have been removed by Mr. Varcoe's report. I must, however, confess that I am still baffled by the role of V. in this investigation and I am unable to comprehend his relationship with B.'30 Obviously Robertson, while acknowledging the importance of informers from within the Italian community, was also reluctant to accept without verification their information as sufficient grounds for the internment of any given individual. Indeed, in a number of cases either the civil servants on the committee or the judges ruled against the recommendations of secret agents, and many releases were allowed. Thus the documents at our disposal strongly suggest that in general the actions of the authorities against Italian Canadians were not arbitrary. Instead, the civil servants carefully verified the information provided by the police.

86 Luigi Bruti Liberati Internment Procedures In September 1940 an examining officer from the Department of Justice, Gerald Fauteux, prepared a report after conducting, in July and August of that year, a series of examinations in Bordeaux Jail on the outskirts of Montreal.31 This is a valuable document not only because of the quantitative information it provides but because the official recounts in detail the motives that guided his decisions. At that time Montreal was the city most densely settled by Italians. Fauteux began his report with a number of figures: in the period under investigation a total of fifty-three individuals had been examined, every examination lasted on average for two and one-half hours, and each was conducted without the presence of legal counsel, although those interviewed were informed that they were not obliged to answer the questions put to them. Each examination was guided by a questionnaire that had been prepared by the Department of Justice32 and other materials, such as information from reports by police informants, extracts from Italian-Canadian newspapers, and photographs. Clearly Fauteux, like his colleagues, was reluctant to accept the evidence provided by informants, wanting first to compare carefully their information with what emerged in the interview. Following these examinations, however, he declared himself basically satisfied with the credibility of the sources provided by the RCMP. His report also drew some important conclusions. According to it, of a total of some 115,000 individuals of Italian origin resident in Canada at the time, the Fascists numbered roughly 3,500, of whom 600 had been interned.33 With regard to Montreal, in a population of about 30,000 residents of Italian origin, the Fascists numbered 800, and of these 198 had been interned. In the same region there were some 200 ItalianCanadian organizations, including mutual benefit societies, recreational clubs, religious groups, and political and regional associations. Of these, a total of thirty-seven were Fascist, and in 1934 they had joined together in the Fronte Unico Morale Italiano (United Italian Moral Front) through the effort of the then Italian consul, Giuseppe Brigidi. The core of the report was a detailed study of the activities and makeup of the fascist movement in Montreal, which concluded with justification that not all Italian-Canadian organizations were Fascist. Of those that were, Fauteux noted as particularly important the Order Sons of Italy and the Italian War Veterans Association. He then went on to analyse carefully the propagandizing and organizing efforts under-

The Internment of Italian Canadians 87 taken by the Italian consul of Montreal and the indoctrination of youths carried out through fascist schools. He did not hesitate to reveal the close ties between the consulate and the two Italian Catholic churches of the city, the Madonna della Difesa and the Madonna del Carmine, noting that the priests Benedetto Maltempi and Zanobi Manfriani were very active Fascists, the first of whom had been interned, while the second had avoided this fate only because he happened to be in Italy in June 1940.34 Fauteux ended his long report with a description of the legal and political basis for the internments in Montreal. He recognized that preventive actions had been carried out under the DOCK 'to stop any person from acting in any manner prejudicial to the public safety or the state.' Further, in order to avoid the arbitrary use of the minister of justice's discretionary powers, the decision had been made to act only on the basis of exact information concerning individuals and their past activities. As a result, Fauteux affirmed, action had been taken only against Fascist leaders, active propagandists, possible saboteurs, and individuals who were closely associated with any of these. The report concluded: It is clear that the objectives of the fascio and Dopo Lavoro [sic] and the other associations, which were federated in the Fronte Unico Morale Italiano ... can only be against the interest of this country in wartime. The executive members of these Italian patriotic associations were too active and too fully aware of the international situation, particularly since the Ethiopian war in 1936, to be ignorant of the conflict between their fascist activities and their loyalty to this country. The comparison of the figures of the population of Italians in Canada and the number of Italians who joined the fascio shows, fortunately, that disloyalty has been the exception among the Italians.35

Fauteux's report emphasized two points: those Italians interned were only a small proportion of the Italian-Canadian population and the internments were directed solely against those who were genuinely compromised by their support for fascism and were thus vulnerable to arrest in time of war. Internment: The Process Having ascertained that Canadian authorities had at their disposal a voluminous amount of documentation on fascist activities, we must

88 Luigi Bruti Liberati substantiate as accurately as possible the two major points of Fauteux's report. The first challenge is to establish the number of those interned and, with the information at our disposal, to identify these individuals and their involvement with fascism. We also need to ascertain the length of the Italian-Canadian internments and to compare them with the internments of all those subjected to this measure. To answer these questions, I created a database of 521 records, the information for which was derived from archival collections, contemporary published records, and secondary studies. I consulted the National Archives of Canada, the RCMP, and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.361 reviewed two volumes on the history of Italian Canadians, a contemporary memoir,37 and relevant works by Canadian historians.38 Finally, I extracted data from contemporary newspapers. Each record in the database describes an individual internee and is made up of fields that contain the following information: the internee's name, year and terms (conditional or unconditional) of release, place of residence, occupation or profession, responsibilities or positions in fascist organizations in Canada, year of naturalization (if relevant), year of birth, marital status, and sources of information. In many cases, only the surname was known, which created a problem, as many Italian surnames were common in Canada. Therefore I accepted the data for an individual only if I could cross-reference it through citations derived from a variety of sources or when the first name (or the first-name initial) and surname coincided. Still, this procedure may have failed to distinguish individuals in the case of persons with the same last name. In a very few other cases, there was a duplication of records probably because the same person appeared differently in different sources. In some instances, an association with a possible 'alias' was recorded, and where it was clear that an internee was known by another name or by other spellings of the surname (sometimes indicated in the anglicized version), I noted this observation in the database. To allow for possible overlappings of the records, I discarded doubtful cases from the calculations and hence retained only 503 names as valid. The compilation of a database allows one to group together information from a variety of sources, thereby making possible a more complete description of a particular individual, and to organize the list of internees variously alphabetically (by surname and first name), chronologically (according to the year of release from internment), by age or occupation, and according to record sources. An analysis of the data recorded in the database, especially when cross-referenced with rel-

The Internment of Italian Canadians 89 evant information from other sources, allows us finally to draw a reasonably accurate portrait of each internee. First of all, we must attempt to determine the actual number of individuals interned. Figures provided by Canadian sources vary, but in general they suggest that approximately 600 were detained at the end of 1940, the height of the internments. An examination of sources, however, reveals that this figure includes ninety-nine seamen from Italian merchant ships surprised in Canadian ports by the declaration of war. Since the names of these seamen are known,391 could eliminate them from the various lists compiled by Canadian authorities and by so doing ascertain that the roughly 500 names recorded in the database correspond with some precision to the actual number of Italian Canadians interned. This figure represented 0.44 per cent of the total ItalianCanadian population of 112,625, as reported in the 1941 census.40 The information in the Fauteux report discussed above allows us to be more precise about the situation in Montreal. First in an ItalianCanadian population of some 30,000, the figure of 198 internees is very close (0.66 per cent) to the proportion for the entire country. By adding together the number of members of the local fascio (800) and of the dopolavoro (2,000), we can see that the total of 198 internees represents 7.07 per cent of these two figures. This proportion appears high, especially because many individuals became members of the fascio more for opportunistic than for ideological reasons. As well, the dopolavoro was only indirectly a political organization. However, the government had declared both organizations illegal and their members liable to internment simply because of their membership. The evidence for Montreal at least reveals that the authorities had evaluated case by case the names of those recommended for internment and did not carry out an indiscriminate series of arrests. If we move from Montreal to the entire country, we can see from the database that the police had detailed dossiers - which clearly showed active involvement in fascist organizations - for at least 100 of 500 internees. Of the 3,500 individuals who were members of the fascio, however, the figure of 500 internees represents only 14.29 per cent of the total. Further, the progress of releases from the camps shows that, after a period of relatively severe action against Fascists, the authorities proceeded to review doubtful cases with considerable speed. Thus, there were 56 releases during 1940 (within some seven months of the original internments), followed by another 80 the following year. Finally, in the summer of 1942 a total of 162 internees were transferred to

90 Luigi Bruti Liberati TABLE 3.1 Province of residence of 362 internees

Province of residence

No. interned

Province's share of total Italian-Canadian population in 1 931 census (percentage)

Quebec Ontario British Columbia Nova Scotia Alberta

222(61.33%) 121 (33.43%) 11 (03.04%) 5(01.38%) 3 (00.83%)

25.31 51.48 12.48 01.93 04.85

Total

362(100%)

96.05 (n = 98,173)

the Fredericton camp, from which we can legitimately conclude that, with few exceptions, the other 338 had already been released. The database also contains useful information about the place of residence for 362 internees as indicated in Table 3.1. Information about professions and occupations is available for 159 of those in the database: 36 labourers, 33 merchants, 30 professionals, 20 employees, 16 industrialists, 8 artisans, 6 professors, 5 clergymen, 4 journalists, and 1 farmer. An Arbitrary Measure? Beyond the internments themselves and the ability of the RCMP to select objectively those to be interned, there are the objections raised by the internees about their internments and the issue of whether these were well founded. Clearly, the first and most important objection raised by those interned concerned the fact that they were not treated according to due legal process and that the length of the internments was not fixed. This complaint, however, could cut both ways. The very absence of due process meant that those who were interned, once they were released, were not automatically deported or stripped of their citizenship and that their internment did not become the basis for a criminal record or adding to an existing one. Additionally, their treatment as prisoners of war allowed them a level of freedom which was far greater than that of a person incarcerated in a regular prison. They were able to engage in communal recreational activities and to cultivate gardens, while any work outside the camps was remunerated, even if the wages were well below the market standard.

The Internment of Italian Canadians 91 In general, Italian-Canadian internees were not subjected to physical violence or other types of abuse. One deplorable case involved a Montreal restaurateur, Ernesto Alovisi, who was interned while still recovering from a serious operation. He died shortly after his release. An incident of physical violence occurred in Sydney, NS, where a number of the inmates were beaten by drunks who had been detained in the same prison. The explanation offered by Canadian authorities rang hollow: 'The situation after Italy's declaration of war was tense/ they claimed, 'and the reaction by these [drunken] civilians was a natural outcome [of that tension].'41 Nevertheless, the camps did witness a number of riots and brawls and similar disturbances. For example, in Petawawa, Ont, Salvatore Mancuso, a doctor, director of the Montreal f ascio, and president of that city's Italian War Veterans Association, was attacked by Gentile Dieni, also of Montreal, who subsequently was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.42 In this instance, Dieni, an ardent Fascist, appears to have vented his anger for the internments against a Fascist leader, Mancuso, whom he accused of having betrayed the cause. Mancuso was released shortly after the attack. Other problems emerged among the internees of Petawawa. According to the testimony of a Montreal union activist, Muni Taub, German internees accused the Italians of profiting from their work in the camp kitchens by stealing food with the connivance of the guards. This accusation caused a violent brawl, in the course of which several Italians sustained injuries.43 In the internment camps prominent Italian Canadians reproduced the social hierarchies and power relations that existed in contemporary Little Italics: entrepreneurs and professionals emerged as barracks bosses, intervened as spokesmen with camp authorities, and used their influence and connections on the outside to have cases reviewed or financial assistance for families increased. They also wrote letters, organized work gangs, protested against forced labour, and demanded higher wages and work exemptions for the weakest. Among the complaints aired by the spokesmen for the internees was that of being interned with common criminals, including members of the mafia. In reality, the latter were there not as racketeers and mafiosi, but because of RCMP suspicions about their connections to Italian consular officials in Canada, who regarded them as potentially useful. The forced cohabitation of Italian Fascists and criminals had its origins in the Fascists' modus operandi, not in the desire of the authorities to place suspected Fascists on the same level as common criminals.44

92 Luigi Bruti Liberati

At right, a censored letter on the officially authorized form, written by an inmate at the Petawawa internment camp to his wife. (On left is a sample of the form's front page.)

Another complaint concerned the prohibition against the families of internees' accompanying them into the camps. A provision in the Defence of Canada Regulations allowed in principle internees to be united with their families in the camps. The provision, however, was in practice never applied, except in the case of Japanese Canadians, who had the dubious privilege of being removed en masse and relocated. The internees also protested the inadequate financial assistance provided by municipal authorities to their families. Their reasoning reflected a male breadwinner's perspective. Inadequate income forced the children and wives of some of those interned to work for their survival. This situation, one Italian-Canadian spokesman in Petawawa explained, upset the internees, who did not want their wives to work 'because this destroys the foundations of family life and causes moral and social breakdown/45 A serious problem that was not publicly acknowledged concerned incidents of extortion in the camps that involved both Italians and camp officials.46 For example, there was the case of a French-Canadian sergeant major who was a censor first at

The Internment of Italian Canadians 93 Petawawa and then at Fredericton.47 This official was well placed to intercept internees' requests for money or packages of gifts coming from their families, which served to compensate him for supposed services rendered. The fact that a person of this type was able to continue for years in this position suggests that the camps were not administered as well as they might have been. The examination of documents and of the data derived from them makes possible a well-balanced reappraisal of the internments and of their impact on Italian Canadians, and we are thus able to evaluate more accurately testimonies produced usually years after the war by some of the principals involved. For the current study I did not feel it necessary or worthwhile to describe individuals who are mentioned in the documents consulted, but the sources clearly show that many who later professed their loyalty to Canada in fact had been fervent Fascists and had maintained their positions even during their internment.48 We can make a critical evaluation of the internments only on the basis of the archival documents used extensively in the pages above. Viewed quantitatively, the number of those interned is relatively small (0.44 per cent of Canadians of Italian origin), and this figure alone suggests that Canadian authorities did not act in an indiscriminate manner. As well, the RCMP had at its disposal a sizeable amount of information on which it could base its arrests, and those arrested were individuals known to have had positions of authority in fascist organizations and in the Order Sons of Italy, which at the time was considered an extension of the fascio. Certainly, there can be no doubt that in an operation as extensive as the one discussed here various types of mistakes occurred. Without doubt these took place because of the speed with which the RCMP acted in June 1940, at a time when the force was influenced both by the shock of the fall of France and the recurrent rumours of a supposed fifth column. We must add, however, that a procedure to conduct careful reviews of individual internments was begun almost immediately, often because of protests or objections raised from within the ItalianCanadian community, by members of Parliament, or by journalists, clerics, and politicians. In certain instances the investigations were particularly accurate and occasionally resulted in the reinternment of individuals who had been released after an initially brief incarceration. I do not want to undervalue here the serious consequences that internment had on people later shown to be innocent. Historian Bruno

94 Luigi Bruti Liberati Ramirez has described with justification the trauma caused by internment, as well as the uncertainty about the future that it produced for an internee and his family. He has also written about the legacy of deep fractures within the community that the internments and the war created for Italian Canadians and that were overcome only by the arrival of a large number of new immigrants in the 1950s. In view of the facts presented here, however, it is clearly excessive for Ramirez to describe the actions of the Canadian government as being those of a 'police state/ This judgment seems to ignore the fact that fascism was well founded in Canada and that a certain number of Italian Canadians had supported it actively, not hesitating on occasion to resort to acts of violence against co-national anti-fascists. Those who behaved in this manner, especially after 1936, could not be ignorant of the fact that their political convictions and activities were not appropriate in their adopted country and that, in the event of war, they would have to endure the consequences of their beliefs. The figures reproduced above showing the occupations of those interned confirms these observations. It is no accident that by far the largest part of those who were interned consisted of professionals, merchants, employees, industrialists, and intellectuals; they were the so-called notables, those who had collaborated most closely with the consuls and who could not make excuses based on ignorance or illiteracy. The internments clearly devastated the elites of Canada's Little Italics and provoked unrest and quarrels in their midst, but this occurred above all because those same elites had compromised themselves to varying degrees through their support of fascism. However, we cannot ignore the fact that in the 1930s there was already a fracture within the Italian-Canadian community between Fascists and anti-fascists; the latter conducted a lively resistance against the powerful propaganda machine supported by the consuls. The figures recorded above thus show clearly that in June 1940 the repressive actions taken by Canadian authorities were not addressed tout court against all Italian Canadians and their organizations. Rather, reports indicated that by far the greater part of the community was loyal to Canada. If there was an Italian 'witch hunt/ it was expressed first and foremost in a vehement press campaign conducted by Englishlanguage Canadian newspapers, in incidents of vandalism against Italian shops, and through discrimination that was exhibited against Italians in the workplace. Thus it is sadly ironic that Italian anti-fascists may have been dismissed from their employment at precisely the moment

The Internment of Italian Canadians 95 when Canada entered the war against fascism. On this point, we should note the events that transpired in Glace Bay, NS, where miners working for the Dominion Coal Co. staged wildcat strikes because they did not want to work alongside Italian colleagues. This situation was resolved only with the adoption of a plan to hire an unemployed worker for every naturalized Italian who was rehired to work in the mines. Did Canadian authorities undertake their actions against Italian Canadians because of nativism and racism and because of a need to strike out against the 'other' in time of war? Without doubt their actions were motivated in part by sentiments of this type, and this was true also for a large proportion of Canadian public opinion. This generalization, however, does not stand up to an analysis of the facts, which suggest instead that most Italian Canadians were not subjected to arbitrary arrests and internments. It is obviously futile to negate the facts that Italian-Canadian fascism existed and that those who subscribed to it paid the price. These people, however, represented only a small, if influential proportion of all Italian Canadians, and this is why it has been possible to overcome, however gradually, the painful war experience, without the creation of an irreparable fracture between citizens of Italian origin and their adopted country. Notes 1 Cf. Norman Hillmer, Bohdan Kordan, and Lubomyr Luciuk, eds., On Guard for Thee: War, Ethnicity and the Canadian State, 1939-1945 (Ottawa: Canadian Committee for the History of the Second World War, 1988). 2 The Evacuation of the Japanese Canadians, 1942: A Realist Critique of the Received Version/ in ibid., 101-29. 3 Cf. L. Bruti Liberati, II Canada, I'ltalia e ilfascismo, 1919-1945 (Rome: Bonacci editore, 1984). 4 Cf. National Archives of Canada (NA), Norman A. Robertson Papers (NAR), vol. 12, f. 124, Skelton to Jennings, 21 March 1936. In this archival collection, as in the RCMP Security Services Archives (see below, note 10), the names of individuals who acted as informants for the RCMP have been obliterated. These deleted names are indicated by an X in the present study. 5 Ibid., Jennings to Skelton, 23 March 1936. 6 For more information on these activities, see the essays by Pennacchio and Principe in this volume.

96 Luigi Bruti Liberati 7 NA, NAR, vol. 12, f. 124, Jennings to Skelton, 23 March 1936. 8 Cf. II Lavoratore, 10 July 1936. 9 Cf. for example, 'A 1'Ordre independent des Fils de ITtalie,' Le Canada, 24 Jan. 1936. 10 RCMP Security Services Archives, H.A.R. Gagnon to RCMP Commissioner, 3 June 1939. These documents, which are closed to the public, were kindly placed at the author's disposal in 1982 by Commissioner R.H. Simmonds. In all this documentation the names of individuals who appear as informants or who were investigated as fascist supporters have been obliterated; cf. note 6 above. On the Independent Order Sons of Italy, see Bruti Liberati, II Canada, 98,130,175, 200, and the essays in this book by Principe and Pennacchio. 11 Cf., RCMP Security Services Archives, Ottawa, J.W. Philipps to C. Starnes, RCMP Commissioner, 20 Sept. 1926. 12 Ibid., F.J. Mead to RCMP Commissioner, 15 Feb. 1937 (enclosed memorandum). 13 The sources for the RCMP figure are not available, and we cannot know whether the RCMP inflated the figure quoted - for example, by conflating members of the fascist-sponsored dopolavoro with members of the local fascio. See Pennacchio's essay in this book for similar difficulties. 14 RCMP Security Services Archives, memorandum dated 29 Sept. 1937. For more details on the dopolavoro, the Order Sons of Italy, and other groups, see the articles in this volume by Pennacchio and by Principe. 15 Cf. ibid., 'The Organization and Activities of the Italian Fascist Party in Canada,' 30 Nov. 1937. 16 Ibid., 36-7. 17 RCMP Security Services Archives, R.E. Mercer to RCMP Commissioner, 7 April 1938. Cf. also 'Lawyer's Veranda Wrecked,' Globe and Mail, 5 April 1938, copy enclosed with this report. 18 Cf. Bruti Liberati, // Canada, 147. 19 Cf. RCMP Security Services Archives, H.R.A. Gagnon to RCMP Commissioner, 31 Jan. 1939 (enclosed memorandum). 20 Cf. Keyserlingk, 'Breaking the Nazi Plot,' 56. 21 Cf. Royale Gendarmerie a Cheyal, 'Rapport pour 1'annee terminee le 31 mars 1941,' Ottawa, 1941,16-17; RCMP, 'Report for the year ended March 31,1942' (Ottawa 1942), 14-15. 22 See the essay by Sponza in this book. 23 For a study of the problem of prisoners of war in Canada, cf. J.J. Kelly, 'The Prisoner of War Camps in Canada, 1939-1947,' MA thesis, University of Windsor, 1976.

The Internment of Italian Canadians 97 24 On this affair, cf. J.L. Granatstein, A Man of Influence (Toronto, 1981), 82ff., and Bruti Liberati, II Canada, 185-7. 25 NA, NAR, vol. 13, f. 153, MacNeill to Bavin, 29 Oct. 1940. 26 Ibid., MacNeill to Robertson, 5 Dec. 1940. 27 Ibid., Bavin to Robertson, 25 Sept. 1940 (with an enclosed memorandum by X dated 20 Sept.); Robertson to Bavin, 26 Sept. 1940. 28 For more information about this affair, cf. Bruti Liberati, II Canada, 198200. 29 NA, NAR, vol. 14, f. 168, P.P. Varcoe, 'Interim Report on Complaints Arising out of Internment of Italians/ 28 April 1941, forwarded to Robertson on 13 May 1941. 30 Ibid., Robertson to J.M. Bernier, Office of the Minister of Justice, 20 May 1940. 31 NAR, vol. 14, f. 174, G. Fauteux, 'Re: Interned Italians. General and Confidential Report of the Examining Officer-Montreal/ 5 Sept. 1940. 32 For a substantial extract from the questionnaire, see Bruti Liberati, II Canada, 193-5. 33 According to the census of the following year, the report overestimated the total of Italian-origin residents of Canada. The census of 1941 reported only some 112,625 Italian-origin residents. 34 On this affair, see G. Vangelisti, Gli Italiani in Canada (Montreal: Chiesa italiana di N.S. della Difesa, 1956), 134-6, 201. 35 Fauteux, 'Re: Interned Italians/ 36 Apart from the RCMP Security Archives, I consulted the following collections of the National Archives: NAR (MG 30E 163); Files of the Director of Internment Operations, Department of National Defence (RG 24); Department of National War Services (RG 44); Tracy Philipps Papers (MG 30E 350); and CCF Records (MG 28). In the archives of the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs I consulted the series Affari Politici Canada 1931-1945 (ASMAE, Canada). 37 Cf. Vangelisti, Gli Italiani in Canada, and G. Mingarelli, Gli Italiani di Montreal (Montreal: Centre italiano attivita commercial-artistiche, 1957), provide partial lists of Italian internees. Also useful is Mario Duliani's La ville sansfemmes (Montreal: Societe des editions Pascal, 1945). 38 See R. Perin, 'Conflits d'identite et d'allegeance: la propagande du consulat italien B Montreal dans les annees 1930,' Questions de culture 2 (1982), 81-102; B. Ramirez, 'Ethnicity on Trial: The Italians of Montreal and the Second World War/ in Hillmer, Kordan, and Luciuk, eds., On Guard for Thee, 71-82; J.A. Ciccocelli, 'The Innocuous Enemy Aliens: Italians in Canada during World War II,' MA thesis, University of Western Ontario,

98 Luigi Bruti Liberati

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48

1977; W. Repka and K. Repka, Dangerous Patriots: Canada's Unknown Prisoners of War (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1982); and E. Cumbo, 'Sports and Ethnic Relations at Camp Petawawa/ Polyphony: The Bulletin of the Multicultural History Society of Ontario (1985), 83-4. ASMAE, Canada, b. 12, f. 3, Argentine Legation, Ottawa, 'Nominal Roll of Italian Merchant Seamen Interned in Camp "70", Nominal Roll of Italian Merchant Seamen Interned in Camp "43",' May 1943. Canada, Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Eighth Census of Canada, 1941, vol. IV (Ottawa, 1946), Table 1, 'Population by Racial Origin and Sex, for Provinces and Territories, 1941,' 2-3. NA, Department of National Defence Papers, vol. 11248, 9-2-3, Stetham to the Commander, Petawawa, 17 Sept. 1940. See ASMAE, Canada, b. 12, f. 2, Vittorio Restaldi, 'Sul trattamento degli italiani al Canada dopo la dichiarazione di guerra/ dated 19 Oct. 1942. Restaldi was repatriated after having spent two years in Petawawa. Repka and Repka, Dangerous Patriots, 137. See NA, NAR, vol. 13, f. 151. NA, Files of the Director of Internment Operations (RG 6L), vol. 12, f. 5-14, letter to the camp commander dated 16 Nov. 1940. On extortion, see the pieces by Cumbo (Hamilton) and Sponza (Britain) in this volume. NA, Files of the Director of Internment Operations, Department of National Defence (RG 24), vol. 11249, f. 10-1-1, 'Intelligence Report Pertaining to Canadian Internees/ 3 Nov. 1942. See also Cumbo in this volume. See, for example, for confirmation of this point, a document from a reliable source - the memorandum 'Sul trattamento degli italiani al Canada dopo la dichiarazione di guerra,' presented to the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs by Dr Vittorio Restaldi in 1942. Restaldi had only recently been repatriated after having spent two years in an internment camp and, in a confidential memoir appended to his report, provided precise information about other internees who, while in the camp, had either shown true loyalty to fascism or, on the contrary, betrayed the cause. ASMAE, Canada, b. 12, f. 2, memoir dated 19 Oct. 1942.

4 'Uneasy Neighbours7:

Internment and Hamilton's Italians ENRICO CARLSON CUMBO

It is not the wish of those in charge of the Defense Corps to stampede our citizens at a time like this, but there is definitely a very serious danger. Our local and federal authorities are fully aware of the existence of Fifth Column elements in our midst. In times of peace democratic people will not stand for the strict police surveillance and curtailment of civil liberty that become necessary in crises such as the present. Hamilton Spectator, front-page editorial, 11 June 1940

The discussion of the Canadian internment of civilians during the Second World War has focused primarily on wartime bureaucracies and formal policy-making. As Harold Troper writes, the 'internal history of [the] ethnic communities' affected has been largely neglected.1 In Hamilton, Ont, the enactment of the Defence of Canada Regulations (DOCK)2 and the subsequent internment of Italians had a profound impact of the city's Italian-Canadian enclaves. The social and economic repercussions affected the communities' relationship with the host society and their very sense of identity as 'ethnic communities.' The Italian Canadians' integrity as 'loyal Canadians' came under attack, as we see in the first part of this chapter, resulting in tensions and misunderstandings between them and the host society. The gravity of Mussolini's 'stab in the back' in June 1940 was made clear in W.L. Mackenzie King's declaration of war.3 No less serious for Hamilton's Little Italics were the repercussions, examined in the second and third parts, stemming from the actual and presumed 'backstabbing' by Italian informants within the communities

100 Enrico Carlson Cumbo themselves. A highly sensitive subject, the uncertain and often confused role played by informants during the war resulted in intra-group tensions and recriminations lasting to this day. The combination of heightened anti-Italian feelings and internal ethnic suspicions comprise the sad tale of what one oral source referred to as 'the lowest point' in Italian-Canadian history.4 Addressing Troper's critique, this paper examines the developments of this 'lowest point' from an ethnic, 'internal' perspective. Because o the paucity of internal records - some destroyed in the wake of the war itself -1 broach the subject through a variety of sources. These include personal and family papers, internees' redress files, ethnic press and organizational literature, and oral testimony, in addition to Canadian press coverage and quant formal government records. Fascism's War in Hamilton Partly because of its manufacturing and industrial growth in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hamilton attracted a large immigrant population, including a substantial Italian influx. According to census figures, the number of Italians in the city grew from about 1,400 in 1911 to well over 3,000 a decade later.5 This population was concentrated in two distinct 'Little Italics': an 'east end' enclave, centred on Sherman and Barton streets, consisting largely of central and southern Italians (Abruzzesi, Marchigiani, and Pugliesi); and a larger western 'north end' enclave, centred on Barton and James streets, comprised chiefly of Sicilians - by far the largest number from the town of Racalmuto in south-central Sicily. Each of these Little Italies had its own social, religious, and cultural ambiente. The only sustained effort to unify the two enclaves came in the midto late 1930s. In Hamilton, as elsewhere in Canada, the local fascio, in conjunction with three lodges of the Sons of Italy, organized a Dopolavoro Society, Italian language classes, a theatre group, an in-house baseball league, youth activities, and Fascist summer camps in Italy, in an effort to define a common italianita (Italianness) across colonia and paese lines. The centre of these activities was Canada's first Casa d'ltalia, located in the east-end enclave. In addition to the fascio and the Sons of Italy, two musical bands - the Italo-Canadian Band and 'La Fanfara' - and an organization of Italian Great War veterans used the Casa as a meeting place and social centre.6 The building itself proudly proclaimed its fascist origins. The cornerstone was emblazoned with the year of foun-

'Uneasy Neighbours': Internment and Hamilton's Italians 101

The young women from Hamilton and elsewhere learn songs in praise of Mussolini from nuns and teachers at Italian Fascist summer camps. Shown here is the dining-room of a resort in Sestri Levante, Genoa.

dation, '1936 - [Year] XIV/ and the Fascist eagle prominently displayed in the front of the building, with four columns carved in the form of the fasces, the Italian Fascist emblem. The columns still stand.7 While prominent, the role and the influence of the Casa d'ltalia was contested. Anglo-Saxon suspicion of 'fascist activities,' for example, manifested itself during a controversy over Italian-language instruction in November 1937. The controversy centred on the alleged 'promulagation ... of Fascist doctrines' in night classes.8 Italian opposition to the fascio-sponsored activities of the Casa was promoted by two lodges of the fledgling, anti-fascist Order of Italo-Canadians and the largely Sicilian Italo-Canadian Club in the west-end enclave.9 According to Antonino Spada's history of Italian-Canadian communities, a hall owned by Dr Vincent Agro, a self-professed monarchist, antifascist, and sometime head of the Racalmutese Mutual Aid Society, was 'utilized to counteract Fascist propaganda.'10 Based only partly on ideology, Italian opposition to fascism and to the Casa was also driven by social and economic concerns, as well as territorial rivalry. Because of their multi-purpose functions, the west-end hall and the east-end

102 Enrico Carlson Cumbo

The Casa d'ltalia in Hamilton (with columns evoking the Fascist emblem) was inspired by Rome's Palazzo della Rivoluzione (Fascist Revolution Building) commemorating Mussolini's march on Rome in 1922. II Bollettino italo-canadese, 10 April 1936.

Casa were in competition with each other as social centres of Italian' activity.11 By 1940 Hamilton's Little Italics had become vibrant, flourishing communities, comprising some 6,300 people, twice the number twenty years earlier and nearly 4 per cent of the city's total population. By contrast, Toronto's Italians, at just over 14,000, made up 2 per cent of that city's population (see Tables 4.1 and 4.2). The Hamilton Spectator referred to the city's Italians as 'by far the largest foreign minority in a city essentially populated by Europeans of varying nationalities/12 Given the Italians' high profile, the application of the DOCK had a devastating effect on the communities. According to the regulations,

'Uneasy Neighbours': Internment and Hamilton's Italians 103 TABLE 4.1 Italian population in Hamilton, 1941 Hamilton population

Total no. of Italian origin*

Italian-born

Naturalizedt

Alien

Male Female

82,814 83,523

3,370 2,924

1,335 1,012

1,183 903

152 109

No. %

166,337 100

6,294 3.8

2,347(100%) 1.4

2,086 (89%) 1.3

261 (11%) 0.2

*2,347 Italian-born (37.3%), 3,844 British-born (61.1%); 87 American-born (1.4%); 16 other (0.2%) tNaturalized British subjects (includes those whose parents were British subjects) Source: Canada Census, 1941, vols. II and IV. TABLE 4.2 Italian immigration to Hamilton and Canadian naturalization rates, 1941 Year of Immigration

% of total (2,347)

Naturalization (1941 figures)

% of total (2,086)

823 68 38 2

24.2 36.1 35.1 2.9 1.6 0.1

122 226 1,222 273 132 35 29

5.8 10.8 58.6 13.1 6.3 1.7 1.4

-

-

47

2.2

100

2,086

100

No.

Before 1911 1911-20 1921-30 1931-5 1936-9 1940-1* Unknown Parents British subjects

569 847

Totals

2,347

*First five months of 1941 only Source: Canada Census, 1941, vols. II and IV.

unnaturalized Italians and those naturalized after 1 September 1929 were now considered 'enemy aliens.' This affected some 35 per cent of the city's Italian-born immigrants, or about 800 people. Although spouse and family members are not included in this figure, they were also directly affected. A revised DOCK regulation extended the 'enemy aliens' status to Italians and Germans naturalized after September 1922; theoretically, about three-quarters of Hamilton's Italian-born population was affected. The possibility of exemption, however, did not apply to fascio members and leaders associated with the Casa d'ltalia.13

104 Enrico Carlson Cumbo On 10 June 1940, eighteen of these leaders were arrested and detained, all of them 'marked for police investigation ... months before/ The event was described in the local press as the 'largest round up in Hamilton's history/ Depicted as a model of 'professionalism' and 'quiet efficiency/ the police 'blitzraids' involved the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), and Hamilton police forces. The authorities, according to the Spectator, swarmed out of the city's police headquarters in seventeen squad cars with four men per car.14 Between June 1940 and the spring of 1941, eighty men and one woman were arrested and/or detained. Of these, at least seventy men were interned at Petawawa - about a tenth of the total Italian-Canadian population interned.15 In a typical expression of the fear of 'fifth-column' activity, an editorial of 12 June 1940 in the Hamilton Spectator announced: 'The people of Canada... realize that their destiny for generations to come is at stake in the present struggle and that a false move or a betrayal now might spell disaster for us all/16 This fear was heightened by the dominion government's designation of the city as a 'vulnerable area' because of its steel and heavy industrial production and its proximity to the U.S. border.17 The city's presumed vulnerability was brought to the fore on 12 June, when Ontario Premier Mitchell Hepburn announced to the press that 'secret operatives' of the OPP had learned of an impending invasion of Ontario by 'hundreds of thousands... of Nazi and Fascist sympathizers' from the United States.18 Pointing to 'the magnitude of the danger,' Hamilton's city council met on 11 June and, in a show of unanimity, passed a resolution favouring the immediate formation of civilian Home Guard units to 'restrain subversive activities'; by mid-June, the Hamilton Home Guard units comprised about 1,500 volunteers. Two weeks earlier, on 28 May, the council had also agreed to post a $50 reward to anyone supplying police information resulting in the arrest and conviction of saboteurs.19 The public's fear of 'subversives' was exacerbated by long-standing feelings of Italophobia. In Hamilton this found expression in the stereotype of Italians as 'blackhanders' and bootleggers because of the activities of the infamous Rocco Perri and his associates. Reporting on Perri's career in the interwar years, the English-language press assumed that Hamilton's Italians were sympathetic to, if not complicitous in, the mobster's activities. A Spectator reporter in 1924, for example, thought of Rocco Perri as the 'leader and head ... of the Italians living in

'Uneasy Neighbours': Internment and Hamilton's Italians 105 Hamilton'!20 Italians tended to be viewed as a 'hard working' but conspiratorial, 'vengeance-driven' people, bound to an exotic code of 'silence' (omerta).21 Following Bessie (Starkman) Perri's murder in 1930, the Hamilton Herald pronounced: 'Murder and arson and terrorism are the weapons of savages and uncivilized people, and such barbarous practices in Hamilton only shame the races who countenance them by their refusal to give information as to the real criminals. The situation is one that affects the national commmunity to which the criminals belong, and if the community has any self-respect it will hasten to purge itself of its present silent complicity with these crimes/22 The cumulative impact of misinformation, wartime hysteria, and Italophobia resulted in severe socio-economic dislocation for the city's Italians, alien and naturalized alike. While there were no reports of property damage or physical violence against Italians in Hamilton, respondents recalled fearing for their safety and livelihood.23 Many lost their jobs or saw them threatened on account of their Italian names and ethnic associations. In the east-end enclave, 'several hundred' Italian workers at Stelco and Dofasco - the vital centre of the city's war production - were laid off as potential saboteurs.24 Those retaining their jobs remained under a cloud of suspicion. Placards in the city's industries gave notice that 'the English language only was to be spoken,' with German and Italian explicitely banned.25 Italian small businesses and grocers throughout the city lost customers or faced economic boycotts 'as angry housewives transferred their patronage to Canadian dealers.'26 Italian nationals on public assistance - about one-quarter of the 350 or so Italian-Canadian families on city relief - were taken off the rolls as burdens on the public purse. Throughout Ontario, more than 3,000 Italian families were denied provincial relief.27 The economic effects on the families of internees was even more pronounced. Many of those arrested were interned without their families knowing where they were or how long they would be away. The absence of a chief breadwinner resulted in economic hardship. This was compounded by the family's inability to retrieve its savings, as all assets were legally frozen and held by the dominion Custodian of Enemy Property. Internee households had to make do as best they could.28 Under these circumstances, livelihoods were lost and businesses sold off. The extent of the economic loss is detailed in a series of postwar reparation claims to the federal government. The amounts in lost wages, property loss, and legal and other costs put forward by the

106 Enrico Carlson Cumbo Hamilton internees ranged from $2,500 to $66,500 per family, averaging, between $4,000 and $6,000. The legal suit began in 1947 and ended unsuccessfully two years later.29 Perhaps more significant than the ecomonic losses were the social and psychological repercussions on the families of the internees. Italians faced the crisis with a range of conflicting emotions, in which fear predominated. Fernanda Colangelo, an assistant in the Italian-language classes at the Casa d'ltalia, recalled 'that on the day the arrests started, frightened parents piled the Italian schoolbooks - history, grammar, spelling texts - into fireplaces and burned them/30 The fear of arrest was pervasive. Reporting on the arrest of two Italian men on the same street, a Hamilton journalist observed: 'There was considerable gloom on the faces of younger Italians on the sidewalk and a marked amount of English being spoken. Even old fellows/ he added, 'who probably only speak four or five words of English a day, became quite fluent speaking [English] among themselves.'31 Such suspicion proved galling to people used to 'minding their own business/ The war made them endure constant ethnic slurs and accusations, as well as the frequent denigration of Italy as a backward and cowardly third-rate power. As the Hamilton Spectator commented in a typical vignette: '"People of Italy, run to your arms!" thundered Mussolini [in his declaration of war]. Remembering what happened at [the battle of] Caporetto, that word "run" must have made Hitler finger his moustache a bit nervously/32 While Hamilton's Italians recognized that English Canadians were in no mood for tolerance, many were confused by the indiscriminate labelling of Italian Canadians as 'disloyal' and potential saboteurs. Believing that the public affirmation of italianita did not compromise their loyalty to Canada, members of Italian organizations were surprised at the level of public hostility. As one man noted poignantly of the Casa d'ltalia, 'the mayors, the chief of police, the member of Parliament used to go there [before the war]. They were mixing with Italians [then]/33 There was also anger and bitterness. Charles Agro, a Hamilton doctor, and his brother John, one of the city's first Italian lawyers, both served as officers in the Canadian army in Europe at the same time as their parents and eighty-year-old grandmother were registering monthly.34 Whatever the range of feelings, there was little that Italians could do but 'lay low' and assert their loyalty to the allied cause whenever the opportunity arose. From Glace Bay to Vancouver, Italian 'representa-

'Uneasy Neighbours': Internment and Hamilton's Italians 107 tives' denounced Mussolini's 'cowardly act' and affirmed their '100% loyalty to Canada and the British Empire.'35 Hamilton was no exception. In a formal cable to the Canadian government, Hamilton's ItaloCanadian Liberal Club ('on behalf of the city's Italians) pledged 'undying loyalty to the crown in any capacity that the maximum of supreme effort may require.'36 Similarly, officials of the Italo-Canadian Club in the north end announced at a 'mass rally' that the building would be made available for whatever 'purposes needed.' As early as September 1939, Quinto Martini, a textile-union organizer in Hamilton and later member of Parliament, 'brought a meeting [at the Casa d'ltalia] to its feet by proposing a resolution of total support to the British Crown and Canada.'37 Martini was interned ten months later (as much for his union activism as for his alleged fascist associations).38 The only known denunciation of the 'war effort' was confined to the outbursts of an eighteen-year-old Hamilton boy in nearby Crystal Beach. After being taunted by Canadian youths in the presence of a police officer, the youth is alleged to have said (twice): 'I hope Mussolini gets here and shoots you dirty rotten bastards.' He was immediately arrested.39 Intra-Community Relations The DOCK and internments affected not only the Italians' relations with the host society but their relationships within the enclaves as well. Some internee families worked together in an effort to survive the ordeal and secure 'contacts' and lawyers for the release of their loved ones. This was the case with the Pataracchia and Zaffiro families. Extended families pooled their resources and tried to salvage what they could. In one case, an internees' shoe-repair shop was leased to a trusted associate and placed under the guardianship of the internee's father-in-law. In most instances, the internees' wives took on additional responsibilities and gained familial respect as the effective heads of household. More commonly, however, the effects of the DOCK resulted in a breakdown of the institutional infrastructure and ambiente. As one respondent noted, Italians were 'too terrified' to speak to or trust anyone; 'say the wrong thing to the wrong person and you could be next.' Another recalled obliquely, 'It was wartime ... and in wartime anything can happen.'40 While ready to proclaim the loyalty of Italian Canadians, few spoke in defence of those interned. As one man observed, 'The Italian community did not come together in this time of crisis.' Associa-

108 Enrico Carlson Cumbo tions were strained, and friendships l ternees, imprisonment resulted in the social ostracism of their families within and outside the enclaves. One man complained that 'ill-informed' neighbours -Anglo-Saxons and Italians alike - continued to suspect internees of 'disloyalty' and 'criminality' even after their release.41 Among the very few defenders of the Italian Canadians was a doctor of British origin, Oscar Cannon, who had Italian patients. Cannon went out of his way to defend their loyalty to 'King and Country' and to decry the absence of due process in their arrest and detention. Unlike most Italians, however, he could well afford to do so.42 While communal silence was disconcerting, the role played by anonymous Italian informants in the internment of their co-nationals had greater impact in the long term.43 At the time, few people really understood how the RCMP had gathered information through secret agents, anonymous letters, and other informal means.44 As soon as people were detained and interned, rumours spread in the community as to who these informants were and how and why they informed. In the absence of hard facts, hearsay took on a life of its own. At Petawawa, rumours were rampant regarding the possible 'fingering' of internees. Several respondents recalled that the RCMP was alleged to be paying $20 or $25 for people to inform. There is no evidence that the RCMP publicly offered money for the arrest of subversives; the reference is probably to the Hamilton city council resolution of 28 May 1940.45 Information of this sort, however, circulated in the internment camps and ethnic communities, accentuating mutual suspicions. Within the enclaves, speculation on the identity of possible informants was founded partly on known personality conflicts and on a range of social and economic tensions and factional disputes dating back to the pre-war years. It was based also on who was and who was not interned. A1981 retrospective noted obliquely: 'There has always been a lingering, bitter feeling in Hamilton's older Italian community that people were fingered not for national security reasons but for revenge or to get rid of a competitor.'46 In Hamilton at least, the choice of those targeted for internment fostered suspicions. Not all of the known fascist or pro-fascist 'leaders' in the fascio and dopolavoro were incarcerated. Of the thirty-eight officials active between 1922 and 1940 and alive in 1940 in the Hamilton Order Sons of Italy, only thirteen were actually sent to Petawawa.47 This is not to say that any of these individuals ought to have been interned or that those not interned were in fact informants.48 Still, the continued freedom and release of known or

'Uneasy Neighbours': Internment and Hamilton's Italians 109 presumed 'Fascist sympathizers' served, predictably, to feed rumours. Similarly, the early release of one and not another fostered suspicions as to 'contacts' and unsavoury dealings.49 Such sentiments were exacerbated by the detention and internment of apolitical or minor associates of the Casa d'ltalia. Of the eighty-one detained, fifty-five were associated with the fascio or the Casa d'ltalia in some capacity, including such individuals as Alfonso Borsellino and the Ferri brothers, who were responsible for organizing and booking the Italian bands forfeste (saint's feast days), banquets, and concerts at the Casa. Sixteen were well-known criminals, big-time bootleggers and racketeers with no connection to the Casa or membership in any of its organizations. At least eight had nothing whatever to do with fascist activities. One internee did not even know that Italy was at war at the time of his arrest. This confirms Antonino Mazza's observation that some of the internees 'showed little political sophistication.' A plumber from Hamilton reacted with amazement at the news of his detention: 'A prisoner of war? Me!,' he exclaimed. 'I have never wanted to fight in a war in my entire life, I even defected in the last war!' One man, Osvaldo Giacomelli, a youth of nineteen, had left Italy in July 1939 on his father's advice because of 'the talk of war.' He was arrested a year later because the RCMP 'suspected [him] as a Fascist agent.'50 Of the eightyone arraigned, the remaining two were wrongly interned - presumably cases of mistaken identities.51 Communal suspicions were aroused concerning the motivation of the RCMP and the Italian informants. The police were privately condemned for their readiness to act on informants' intelligence. The informants themselves were blamed (and later ostracized in Italian circles) for their misguided sense of patriotism; their fear of or ingratiation with the authorities; or their settling of old accounts. RCMP officials, for their part, explained in wartime memos that they were 'pressured [by government] ... to take strong action ... owing to the unsettled state of the public mind.'52 One respondent vividly recalled an RCMP official in Hamilton who asserted unequivocally that 'in times of war, we act first and ask questions later.' As to the arrest of criminals, the police made little effort to hide the fact that the DOCR was used chiefly as a means of locking them up for the duration of the war. Almost as an afterthought, the police dossiers conclude that the criminals' mindset, their total disregard for the law, and their knowledge of firearms, ammunition, and explosives could be used by the enemy to its advantage. Secret government memos point

110 Enrico Carlson Gumbo this out explicitly. A dossier on one criminal, for example, details his 'Mafia' connections and associations 'with racketeers and convicted criminals/ Though also described as a 'Fascist supporter/ the man's presumed 'Mafia connections' appear to have been the primary reason for his arrest. The police agenda becomes even more obvious in the case of another Hamiltonian. The man's dossier lists his criminal activities without making the least reference to fascist sympathies. The file concludes: 'It is felt that his position in the underworld could be considered a potential source of danger to the State/ In these and other cases, as James Dubro observes, 'lip-service is given to possible fascist or "anti-British" feelings for which there is little or, in most cases, no evidence given/53 Informants played a role not only in the incarceration of Italian Canadians but in their release as well. Rumour had it that there were individuals - possibly informants and so in a position of 'influence' capable of effecting their release. Influential intermediaries were sought out by the internees' families from the very beginning. Individuals such as Oscar Cannon, Hamilton Mayor Jim Morrison, and Ellis Corman, a Liberal member of Parliament from Hamilton, were approached and in some cases gave representations on behalf of internees. These cases did not entail financial transactions.54 However, there were other cases involving Italian 'brokers' where money did change hands. In a position to exploit Old World notions of clientelism, these brokers approached the internees' families with an offer of early release for a fee. Such claims were unfounded and calculated to take advantage of the confused state of affairs and of the families' vulnerability and desperation. A variety of scams were intitiated in Hamilton, as elsewhere in Canada and in the internment camps themselves.55 One surfaced in October 1940. According to RCMP files, three well-placed men in the community had originated and are operating a scheme calculated to obtain money from the relatives of Italian internees on the pretext that releases from internment could thus be effected. In one instance, the sum of $10,000.00 was requested and in the course of the negotiations aspersions were cast on the 'Minister,' presumably the Minister of Justice, in that it was stated that the money was required to 'fix it with the Minister' ... [These individuals] have made it known to the Italian community in Hamilton that they are in a position to have influence in Ottawa, enabling them to effect the release from internment of any of their countrymen. They also made it

'Uneasy Neighbours': Internment and Hamilton's Italians 111 appear that they have sufficient influence with the authorities to have people interned.56

According to oral sources, at least five other parties were approached with offers of 'release' on payment of several thousand dollars; the actual sums ranged between $4,000 and $7,000, depending on the level of affluence of the internee. Two refused to have anything to do with these schemes. In one case, apparently, the 'fixer' was unceremoniously removed from the house, the internee's wife threatening him with violence. Three parties accepted the offer, believing that it was genuine. One of them, however, a well-known mobster, made it known by the end of the war that he 'got it all back' - and more.57 The link made at the time between informants and fixers, known locally by the end of 1940, anticipated an opinion commonly expressed after the war that placed greater blame for internment on 'all the [Italian] spies [working for the government]' than on the government itself.58 The fixers' bravado and their pretensions resulted in a police recommendation of their arrest and internment. As an RCMP memo explained, 'Their activities exercise a most unwholesome influence on the Italians of the Hamilton area and is most embarrassing to the efforts of constituted authority. It is considered that their continued liberty is a menace to the welfare of the State.'59 An earlier memo specified the 'unwholesome' consequences of their continued liberty in the Italian communities. '[These men] wield a great amount of influence among the local Italians who live in fear of reprisals from them/ The group's leader - 'the subject of numerous complaints' - was investigated by the RCMP. The memo concludes: 'All persons interviewed during the investigation would only give information regarding the [subject] and his henchmen after they were assured that their names would be kept in strict confidence. They all appear to feel that [he is] a dangerous man who would organize a vendetta against them or their family if he or his henchmen learned that they had informed the police of his activities.'60 While probably chastised, fixers were not interned in the end. The dossier on the men is marked and underlined, 'cancelled,' with no explanations provided.61 The Legacy of Internment Italy's declaration of war in June 1940 resulted in catastrophe for Ham-

112 Enrico Carlson Gumbo ilton's Italians. Not only were they distrusted as enemy aliens by Canadians, but their enclaves were riven with suspicion and dissension. By 1942, it had become evident in government circles that the strict application of the DOCK was causing bitter resentment in Canada's Little Italics. As Tracy Phillips of the Department of National War Services confided in a memo in October of that year: 'The situation and disposition of the Italian Canadian community, which was on the whole good when Mussolini declared war, has been and is generally deteriorating.' He went on: '[Italian Canadians] are being told that "Canadian citizenship purports on paper to offer equality and security. But when that equality and security is inconvenient to the Anglosaxons [sic], they invalidate its value not to individual citizens but to a whole generation (since 1922), so that when a citizen needs it most, it only lets him down. Therefore those who try to become good citizens and who rely on Canada's^ citizenship need not in the future expect anything but to be betrayed. When "they" in effect regard you as aliens and enemies, how can you feel that you are their fellow citizens and their friends? It is pressing that we should take friendly and constructive action to counter the effect of this poisonous propaganda.'62 Neither the RCMP nor the local police and Home Guard units shared this view. They emphasized the importance of surveillance of enemy aliens as strongly in 1943 as they had in 1940. An RCMP report, however, commented, 'The effectiveness of our anti-sabotage work cannot be gauged by the number of individuals prosecuted or convicted; the only test is the absence of sabotage [!]/63 As long as Italy was part of the Axis, many of the internees remained incarcerated and many Italian Canadians retained their stigma as enemy aliens. Among the very last of the Italian-Canadian internees released in 1945 was a Hamilton resident, Osvaldo Giacomelli, then twenty-four years old.64 Born in Hamilton, he had left for Italy as a child with his parents - only to return to Canada on the eve of the war. Though never a member of the fascio or a leader in the Casa d'ltalia, Giacomelli remained in prison because, as he saw it, be lacked appropriate legal counsel but, more important, because he refused to serve in the Canadian army overseas. His intransigence had nothing to do with Mussolini or with fascism. 'I didn't know anything about that,' he explained. 'I had a brother in the Italian army and my parents were over there [in Italy]. Now, if Canada had been invaded, I would have fought for my country, but I didn't want to fight for the English ... [neither] in Europe [nor] in the Pacific. I was born in Canada ... I didn't

'Uneasy Neighbours': Internment and Hamilton's Italians 113 have to join the army to prove how Canadian I was. And besides, after what they did to me in the camps - taking my freedom away - why should I go and please them?'65 Giacomelli's feelings are particular to his experience. The mixed emotions conveyed, however, were not far removed from those shared by the majority of Italian Canadians. Conclusion The current debate on Italian-Canadian internment in the Second World War has centred on the 'justice' of the Canadian government's actions in the early years of the war. Its policy can be understood, given the official suspicion of the fascio's leadership and public anxiety of the time.66 The internments, however, resulted in social and economic hardship affecting not only the internees and their families, but the Italian enclaves as a whole. In Hamilton, the incarceration of Italians with little if any involvement in the Casa d'ltalia or the fascio was unfortunate and harmful, even by the standards of the day (as implied in Phillips's commentary). If recognition of this fact came late in the war, the larger question of government responsibility and compensation remains today a volatile issue. Whatever one's views on these questions, the current debate ought to involve more than a contest between those who feel that Italians were unjustly interned on one side and those who maintain that Canadian officials acted 'responsibly' on the other. The issue is far more complex, involving grave developments within the community barely addressed in the ongoing debate. The suspicions and the role of Italian informants in the incarceration of their co-nationals remain a bitter memory to this day. As one man stated: 'I will forgive but I will never forget.'67 The reference was not only to the initiatives of the Canadian government, but to the attitudes and actions of certain of his paesani as well. The deeply felt, life-long effects of this legacy are clearly illustrated in an anecdote concerning a Hamilton internee. Two years prior to his death, the man, then in his eighties, went to Hamilton's Holy Sepulchre Cemetery with his family to inquire about the purchase of a plot for himself and his wife. As his wife and daughter looked for the 'best possible sight with shady trees and a lovely view,' the man walked through the grounds alone examining the tombstones. When asked what he was looking for, he replied with the bitterness of many years: 'I don't care where I rest as long as it's not near those carogne (swine).' He

114 Enrico Carlson Cumbo was referring to the men he believed had informed on him nearly half a century before. Notes 1 Harold Troper, 'Comment/ in Norman Hillmer, Bohdan Kordan, and Lubomyr Luciuk, eds., On Guard for Thee: War, Ethnicity and the Canadian State, 1939-1945 (Ottawa, 1988), 241. 2 Canada Gazette, Orders in Council, PC 2483 and 3042 (3 and 11 Oct. 1939); and amendments, PC 3751 (15 June 1940). 3 Canada, House of Commons, Debates, 10 June 1940, 652-3. The contemporary reference to Mussolini's 'stab in the back' is an allusion to his 'ignoble' declaration of war against a clearly defeated France and a British nation seemingly at the point of defeat. 4 Because of the sensitivity of the subject, the majority of the oral informants in this study are not named. The study entailed taped interviews with twelve oral sources contacted specifically for this study and eighty other respondents (part of the oral testimony source in the author's dissertation), who spoke at length about the internment period. The tapes are in the author's possession. See also Enrico Carlson Cumbo, 'As the Twig Is Bent, the Tree's Inclined/ PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1996, Appendix. 5 The 1911 figure probably too low, given the high number of Italian seasonal workers and sojourners at the time. See Table 4.2. 6 Panfilo Ferri, private papers, F. Zaffire affidavit 'In the Matter of the Internment of Hamilton Italian Canadians/ 18 April 1991. On the Sons of Italy in Hamilton, see Gabrielle Scardellato, Within Our Temple: A History of the Order Sons of Italy of Ontario (Toronto, 1995), 159-71. 7 Multicultural History Society of Ontario (MHSO), Toronto, Programme: Second Annual Festival, Hamilton Dopolavaro Society (10 Oct 1938), n. p.; photograph with inscription, 'Inauguration of the main hall and facade of the Casa d'ltalia, Hamilton, 1937,' Nicholas Zaffiro, Hamilton, private papers. The building was confiscated by the government in February 1941 and eight months later sold to the Polish Alliance Friendly Society of Canada for a quarter of its original value. 8 'Questions Are Asked of Italian Club Here/ Hamilton Spectator, 16 Nov. 1937. The fascio-sponsored Italian-language classes were a cause of controversy elsewhere in Ontario and in Montreal. See, for example, MHSO, II Lavoratore, 20 March 1937; 28 May, 6 Aug., 17 Sept. 1938; Toronto

'Uneasy Neighbours': Internment and Hamilton's Italians 115

9

10

11 12

13

14

15

16

17

Star, 6 March 1936,14 May 1938; National Archives (NA), Norman A. Robertson Papers (NAR), MG 30, E 163, vol. 12, files 133,137; vol. 14, file 156. For a discussion of the issue, see especially Luigi Pennacchio, 'Italian Heritage Language Classes in Pre-Second World War Toronto/ Polyphony 11 (1989), 36-44, and his essay in this volume. The Vernon Directory lists two Italian 'clubs' adjacent to each other in the west end: a Columbus Recreation Club at 239 Bay Street North and an Italian Auditorium at 249 Bay Street North. Hamilton Vernon Directory (1940), 1271. See also Hamilton City Assessment Rolls, Ward 4,1939-41, for property ownership. A.V. Spada, The Italians in Canada (Ottawa, 1969), 100-1. The membership and activities of the Order of Italo-Canadians in Hamilton are detailed in the La Voce degli Italo-Canadesi, 'cronache,' 1 Oct. 1938-30 April 1940. Though the smaller of the two enclaves, the east-end colonia, as a respondent commented, had a greater sense of 'pan-Italianism' than the west end, with its predominantly Racalmutese population. NAC, RCMP Records, RG 18, vol. 3563, Minister's Orders (RCMP, MO), C11-19-2-3, vol. 2, memos, Oct. 1940. Interviews in the author's possession. Hamilton Spectator, 12 lune 1940. See also 'Tribute to Thrifty Italians of Hamilton/ Hamilton Herald, 23 May 1931; Enrico Cumbo, 'Italians in Hamilton/ Polyphony 7 (fall/winter 1985), 28-36. Canada; Privy Council, Defence of Canada Regulations (DOCR) (consolidation), (Ottawa, 1940), PC 4750, Part II, Regulation 26b. On the resulting confusion, see Archives of Ontario (OA), RG 29,135-1-15, Department of Labour, E.A. Horton memos. Hamilton Spectator, 12 June 1940; Hamilton Public Library, Special Collections (HPL, SC), Hamilton Police, Annual Report for the Year 1940, 23; Canada, Sessional Reports, RCMP, Annual Report for the Year Ending March 31,1941, 'Commissioner's Report/ 13,57-8, 68; House of Commons, Debates, 10-11 June 1940, 653, 658. The number of Hamilton internees is derived from a combination of the RCMP internment lists and individual dossiers; the 1947-9 Italian Internees Redress files located at the MHSO, Sons of Italy Records (unorganized), and the interviews conducted for this study. 'Since Italy "plunged the dagger into the back of its neighbour"/ the Spectator comments elsewhere, '[it] may be disclosed that some in authority are more fearing of Canadian fascists than Nazis.' Spectator, 12 June 1940. On the fear of 'fifth column' activities, see also House of Commons Debates, 11 June 1940, 657ff. Minutes of the Municipal Council of the City of Hamilton, Report of the Board

116 Enrico Carlson Cumbo

18 19

20 21

22

23 24 25 26 27

28

29 30 31

of Control (RBC), 27 May 1940. Hamilton Police, Annual Report for 1940, 2; AO, RG 712-0-712, Ministry of Labour, 'Sabotage Prevention/ War Emergency Bulletins; DOCK, PC 4750, Part II, Regulations 27-31. Hamilton Spectator, 12-13 June 1940; Toronto Daily Star, 14 June 1940; House of Commons Debates, 12 June 1940, 711-12. Hamilton City Council Minutes, 28 May 1940; Spectator, 11,14 June 1940. On the Home Guard units, see RBC (Hamilton), 14 and 27 May, 11 and 25 June 1940; Hamilton Spectator, 4 June and especially 8 June 1940. House of Commons Debates, 13 June 1940, 735. Quoted in James Dubro and R.F. Rowland, King of the Mob: Rocco Perri and the Women Who Ran His Rackets (Markham, Ont, 1988), 144. For an overview of Italian 'mob activities' in Hamilton, see especially Dubro and Rowland, King of the Mob, 14-15, 26-7, 71-2, 266-9, 285, and passim; James Dubro and Robin Rowland, Undercover: Cases of the RCMP's Most Secretive Operative (Markham, Ont., 1991), chaps. 5-7; Diana Brandino, 'The Italians of Hamilton, 1921 to 1945,' MA thesis, University of Western Ontario, 1977, chap. 4. Bessie Starkman, Rocco Perri's first wife, was murdered by gangland rivals in front of her home on 13 August 1930. Hamilton Herald, 8 Sept. 1930; Dubro and Rowland, King of the Mob, chaps. 14-15. Interviews. Hamilton Spectator, 11-13 June 1940; HPL, SC, 'Italians in Hamilton/ Scrapbook, 58ff. Hamilton Spectator, 11 June 1940; interviews. Because of wartime needs, however, many of those released were eventually rehired 'after investigation.' Hamilton Spectator, 11-13 June 1940; RCMP, MO, vol. 3563, C-ll-19-2-3, vol. 5,12 March 1942; interviews. Spectator, 11 June 1940; 'Canada's Forgotten Italian Wartime Prisoners/ HPL, SC, Scrapbook, 67-9; Brandino, 'Italians of Hamilton/ 143; interviews. AO, RG 29-135-1-15; Community and Social Services, 'Department of Labour - Enemy Aliens/ E.A. Horton memos; Hamilton Spectator, 11 June 1940; Toronto Star, 11 June 1940. The government provided the families with a meagre monthly allowance of $12. In some families, children had to leave school to find work. Interviews. The suit involved at least thirty-four Hamilton internees. MHSO, Italian Internee Redress files, 1947-9. 'Canada's Forgotten Italian Wartime Prisoners/ 68. Joseph A. Ciccocelli, 'The Innocuous Enemy Alien: Italians in Canada during World War II,' MA thesis, University of Western Ontario, 1977, 48-50. Hamilton Spectator, 12 June 1940; interviews.

'Uneasy Neighbours': Internment and Hamilton's Italians 117 32 Hamilton Spectator, 12 June 1940. See also Toronto Star, 11 June 1940; Mario Duliani, The City without Women, trans. A. Mazza, first pub. 1945 (Oakville, 1994), 26; Kenneth Bagnell, Canadese: A Portrait of the Italian Canadians (Toronto, 1989), 81-2. 33 'Italian Canadians Seek Apology/ HPL, SC, Scrapbook, 77-8. See also MHSO, Programme, Second Annual Festival Hamilton Dopolavoro Society, Hamilton East Liberal Association 'regards/ 10 Oct. 1938; Naturalization rates, Tables 4.1 and 4.2. 34 Interviews; 'Canada's Forgotten Italian Wartime Prisoners/ 69. See also NA, Department of National War Services (DNWS), RG 44, vol. 36, Tracy Phillips 'Circular/ 24 Feb. 1942, file 63. There was a similar response among the Italians of Montreal, as Principe's paper in this volume shows. 35 From an Antique Land, Canadian Cultural Series No. 6 (Vancouver, 1976), 35^11; Toronto Star, 15 June 1940; House of Commons Debates, 11 June 1940, 677-8; 22 Feb. 1943, 627-8. 36 Hamilton Spectator, 11 June 1940. 37 Ibid., The Day They Came for the Italians/ HPL, SC, Scrapbook, 58. 38 Interviews. In announcing the arrest of 'a considerable number of communists and fascists' in Montreal on 18 June, a CP reporter commented: 'An RCMP official emphasized that the detention of the communists was of more importance than that of the fascists ... The arrests [are] a continuation of the drive against subversive elements/ Spectator, 18 June 1940. See also RCMP, Annual Report for the "Year Ending March 31,1941, 'Commissioner's Report/ 14-15, and the essay by Whitaker and Kealey in this volume. 39 AO, Office of the Attorney General, Authorization under Defence of Canada Regulations, 'Subversive Activities/ 25 June 1940, RG 4 4-32-1940 no. 508 (A); also no. 508 (1). Similarly, according to a respondent, one Hamilton internee may have been arrested largely for 'stupid remarks' made about the British royal family during the royal visit in 1939. Interviews. See also RCMP, MO, vol. 3563, C-ll-19-2-3, vol. 1, L. Cianciolo file; vol. 4, A. DeLuca file. 40 Interviews. 41 Italian Internee Redress files: R.P. (22 Nov. 1947); A.G., (25 Nov. 1947); D.M. (6 Jan. 1948). See also RCMP, MO, vol. 3563, C-11-9-4-, vol. 2, internee complaint files; 'Memories Alive/ 91; interviews. 42 Hamilton Spectator, 11-15 June 1940; 'The Day They Came for the Italians/ 58-9. Interviews. On contemporary oppositon to the arbitrary measures taken in the internment, see, for instance: Toronto Star, 15 June 1940 (Op. Ed.); G.M. Grube, 'Civil Liberties in Wartime/ Canadian Forum (July 1940), 107-8. 43 According to oral sources, there were at least three 'informants' in the east

118 Enrico Carlson Cumbo

44

45 46 47

48 49 50 51

52 53

54 55

56 57

end and four in the west - an allegation partly con rmed in the RCMP records. See, for example: AO, RG 4 32-1940, no. 508 (2), Office of the Attorney General, OFF, 'Report re. Subversive Activities/ C.I.B. file 101,13 July 1940; NRP, vol. 14, file 173. The RCMP dossiers on internees are replete with references to numbered secret agents (SA). See also MHSO, A. Bersani Papers, intelligence data (unorganized). See note 19 above. 'The Day They Came for the Italians,' 58; Brandino, 'Italians of Hamilton/ 131-3. See also NRP, vol. 14, 'Interim Report on Complaints Arising Out of the Internment of Italians/ 28 April 1941, file 168. The figure is derived from a list compiled by Gabriele Scardellato in Within Our Temple (167-71) and conjoined to the extant RCMP list of Hamilton internees. See also Zaffiro, 'In the Matter of the Internment/ affidavit. There was a strong suspicion, however, that one highly placed individual in the Fascio may have become an 'informant.' Interviews. Interviews. Duliani, City without Women, 53; interviews. Hamilton City Council Minutes, 14 Aug., 1940; RCMP, MO, C-ll-19-2-3, vol. 1, 8 July, 6 Aug. 1940, memos re E.S. ('erroneously' implicated by S.A. 203), and AO, and see also Index name list, 8,17, 23. Interviews. The breakdown is based on biographical data derived from the RCMP files; data in Hamilton Vernon Directory and city assessment rolls; the Hamilton Casa d'ltalia program literature (especially a 'Hamilton Dopolavoro Society' membership list printed in the 'Second Annual Festival' program, Oct. 1938); and oral interviews. RCMP, MO, C-ll-19-2-3, vols. 4-5, various; DNWS, vol. 36, files 59, 63; House of Commons Debates, 13 June 1940, 747. Interviews. RCMP, MO, C-ll-19-2-3, vols. 1-3, cases dated 1 Aug. 1940, 5 Sept. 1940, 21 Feb. 1941 and 12 March 1941; Dubro and Rowland, King of the Mob, 32934; James Dubro, Toronto, private papers, Italian civilian internment files (1940-3). Interviews. Sina Ferri, Hamilton, private papers, Frank Ferri internment correspondence. At least two internment camp guards apparently were involved in 'extortion' attempts at both Petawawa and Fredericton. See Bruti Liberati's essay in this book. RCMP, MO, C-ll-19-2-3, vol. 2, 8/9 Oct. 1940. In another context, one informant recalled, only half in jest: 'A lot of people thought that when Rocco Perri came out that, one way or the other,

'Uneasy Neighbours': Internment and Hamilton's Italians 119

58

59 60

61

62 63

64

65 66

67

he'd have [the informants] taken care of. But instead, he disappeared.' According to Dubro, Perri's unsolved murder - itself the consequence of his long internment - ushered in a new era in the history of Canadian organized crime. Dubro, King of the Mob, 343-51. Interviews. An RCMP memo on one of these 'brokers' points out that 'the sole purpose underlying [the individual's] doings was to collect sums of money from relatives of interned persons or people likely to be be interned' (emphasis added). RCMP, vol. 3563, c-11-19-2-3, vol. 2,1 Aug. 1940. RCMP, MO, C-11-19-2-3, vol. 2, 8/9 Oct. 1940. RCMP, vol. 3563, c-11-19-2-3, vol. 2,1 Aug. 1940. The reference to the brokers' 'henchmen' is important, pointing to the broader colonial circles associating with the informants. Interviews. This is not surprising perhaps in view of the services that they had rendered as informants or the potential damage that they could have caused the government. Whatever their individual fate, the purported schemes are in keeping with the experiences recounted by contemporaries. DNWS, vol. 36, Tracy Phillips to F.J. Mead, 8 Oct. 1942, file 63. RCMP, Annual Report for the Year Ending March 31,1944, 'Commissioner's Report,' 33. See also RCMP, MO, vol. 3563, C-11-19-2-3, vol. 5, S.T. Wood memo to Louis St Laurent, 3 March 1942. Following Italy's defeat in September 1943, most of the Italian civilians interned were released. By May 1945, only six Italian Canadians remained in the prison camp, Giacomelli among them. RCMP, Annual Report for the Year Ending March 31,1945, 'Commissioner's Report,' 36; RCMP, MO, C 11-19-2-3, vols. 1-6, 'Release' dates; Luigi G. Pennacchio, private papers, Italian Canadian internment data. Interviews and Scardellato's essay in this book, on Giaconnelli's photographs of internment. Interviews with Osvaldo Giacomelli, 2 Sept. 1995, 23 April 1997. For a reasoned, contemporary discussion of the official Canadian position, see especially RCMP, MO, vol. 3563, C-11-19-2-3, vol. 1, N.A. Robertson to E. Lapointe, 29 May 1940,1-3; NRP, vol. 12, memo, 'Nazi-Fascist Activities and the Naturalization Act/ 15 May 1939, file 133. Quoted in Brandino, 'Italians of Hamilton,' 14; interviews.

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Part Two Other Canadian Internees: Drawing Distinctions

Why should the internment of Italians be compared with that of any other group? The obvious answer is that such comparisons have already been drawn. When the Japanese redress campaign succeeded in securing an official apology together with financial compensation, it triggered similar efforts among other aggrieved immigrant organizations that were eager to equate their group's experience with the Japanese. The politics of redress therefore began as a comparative exercise. Apart from their political use and misuse, however, comparisons are a fundamental tool for advancing understanding. The Italian-Canadian experience acquires deeper meaning when compared to other groups in Canada such as Japanese Canadians, conscientious objectors, and German Canadians, discussed in this introduction; and women, Jews, and communists, dealt with in chapters 6, 7, and 8, respectively; and to Italians abroad, as analysed below in Part III. Other Groups Interned The details of the Japanese-Canadian uprooting, relocation, dispersal, and deportation have been amply dealt with elsewhere.1 Here we want to make some important distinctions. Despite some superficial similarities, the Japanese and Italian experiences are not comparable. It is true that action against Italians and Japanese was triggered by war panic, specifically the fear of fifth-column activity following Mussolini's 'stab in the back,' and following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the fall of Hong Kong, respectively. It is also true that, through language schools, as well as immigrant associations and newspapers, both groups were the target of intense propaganda from their countries of origin

122 Part Two: Other Canadian Internees which viewed them as nationals living abroad. Finally, in the wake of the Italian redress campaign, we have been told that both groups suffered wartime internment. One of our concerns in this book is with government policy. In the case of the Japanese, measures were taken against an entire group and not, as with the Italians, a small minority. All those of Japanese 'racial origin/ most of whom were Canadian-born, were forced to abandon their homes, businesses, and jobs and to evacuate the Pacific coast, where they were overwhelmingly concentrated. The government put pressure on them to disperse throughout the country. Communities were destroyed and families separated. The possessions of all Japanese Canadians were seized and eventually sold, in a number of cases at below market value, to pay for expenses related to evacuation and relocation. The families of the 600-odd Italian internees, for their part, certainly endured economic hardship as a result of the loss of their principal breadwinner. But they were neither dispossessed nor compelled to pay for their interned relative's upkeep. As well, ItalianCanadian men of military age could serve in the armed forces, whereas Japanese Canadians were barred from doing so until the final phase of the war, because the government feared that they might use such service as an entitlement for the right to vote. Towards the end of hostilities, Ottawa planned to 'repatriate' all Japanese Canadians to their devastated country of origin. But because of a rising movement of revulsion at their treatment and opposition to their forced expulsion, the government 'persuaded' only 4,000, half of whom were Canadianborn, to 'go home.' The rest were prohibited from returning to the Pacific coast for several years and scattered in several provinces. Nothing remotely similar happened to Italian Canadians. Nor are Italophobia and Nipponophobia comparable. While Italians, as individuals and in groups, were victims of hostility and discrimination, they were not subjected to the systemic racism practised against the Japanese since the end of the nineteenth century. Stripped of many civil rights, the latter's status resembled that of the Jews in the early years of Nazi Germany. They and their offspring could not vote, run for public office, work for the government, or bid for public contracts. White competitors subjected them to intense pressure in an effort to force them out of their economic pursuits. They were excluded from the practice of law and medicine. They were also the victims of random individual and collective violence. Pearl Harbor finally gave white British Columbians the opportunity to demand that their province be

Drawing Distinctions 123 cleansed of Japanese, a goal in which W.L. Mackenzie King's government was shamefully complicitous. This book is also concerned with daily life in the camps. Once again the Italian and Japanese experiences were very different. While separated for a time from family, friends, and daily routines, after their confinement Italian internees returned to a familiar environment, even if it had undergone disruption and change. The Japanese could never return 'home/ Their uprooting meant that they had to begin their lives anew in unfamiliar surroundings. Most were 'temporarily' housed in primitive and cramped family-size dwellings in ghost towns in the Fraser and Kootenay valleys. Others worked in sugarbeet farms or on road contstruction camps from British Columbia to Ontario. Their movements were subject to restriction and control by local RCMP officers. Their mail was censored. Given the evacuees' physical appearance and the isolation of the sites, there was no need of uniforms, barbed wire fences, turrets, and armed guards. Despite common parlance, however, these were not internment camps. The few who chose to go east, in accordance with the government's wishes, encountered open hostility in many cities (with the singular exception of Montreal) and were subject to severe disabilities, such as not being able to start a business or buy property. Finally, at the end of the war, most settled permanently outside the restricted zone along the Pacific coast, after having incurred heavy financial losses because of unemployment or underemployment. Only the situation of the 800-odd Japanese confined at Angler, a totally isolated site north of Lake Superior, is comparable to that of Italian internees. However, there is no in-depth study of their experience.2 We know that inmates included members of the Nisei Mass Evacuation Group who resisted evacuation, as well as those who violated travel restrictions, caused disruptions in the camps, or supported Japan. As time went on, the government tried with modest success to separate the 'harmless' internees, whom it encouraged to take employment in eastern Canada, from the 'dangerous' ones, suspected of contaminating the others with their unconditional Japanese patriotism. However, the resentment felt by many inmates at their overall treatment proved to be a real obstacle to these efforts. Close to half requested, though unsuccessfully, to be relieved of their Canadian citizenship and repatriated to Japan. As in other internment camps, Japanese inmates received supplies, books, and gifts from religious and humanitarian organizations. Pastimes consisted of sports (including traditional martial arts), vegetable

124 Part Two: Other Canadian Internees and flower gardening, journalism (the camp had its own a newspaper), as well as artistic endeavours,' such as poetry, painting, and music. Young men were given the opportunity to further their education and take high school and university examinations. Hut leaders, elected by fellow inmates, represented them in negotiations with camp commandants. Regarding camp conditions, one man sarcastically observed: 'Why should I leave here, the Government is looking after the folks for me, while they are doing this I can eat the best of food and all I want of it ... Then I can go to my bunk and read and sleep till the next meal comes around. Then too we have our moving picture shows, baseball games, tennis courts, recreation halls, etc., why this has been one grand holiday, I could never afford to pay for it myself/3 But Angler also differed from other internment camps. Despite the preceding quotation, it appears that food was not abundant, especially in winter, when it had to be rationed. Medical care was deficient. As well, difficulties arose relating to rates of pay for work that the inmates were expected to perform. As in civilian life, the Japanese were offered ten cents a day, half the wages of other inmates. As a result, many refused to do the work prescribed by the army commandant. Internment was also longer for the Japanese. Eight months after Japan's capitulation, Angler still had 423 inmates who did not know whether they would be released in Canada or sent to Japan. Of the Japanese, it can be truly said that Canadians and their government waged a war on ethnicity that was traumatic for the whole group. However, the ability of human beings to survive and be resilient is remarkable. Slowly, in the period after the war, the Japanese picked up the pieces and rebuilt a community life largely invisible to outsiders.4 The wartime experience of the ten thousand or so conscientious objectors (most of whom were Mennonites) might be considered somewhat analogous to the internment of enemy aliens. After all, Mennonites, Hutterites, and Doukhobors were of German or Russian ethnic origin. However, their official status as pacifists derived from their religious beliefs, not from their ethnicity, and despite real difficulties they were on the whole content with the results of their negotiations with government authorities over their status. Under the arrangement, men of military age were given the possibility of alternative service in camps situated in national parks or in facilities used to intern enemy aliens during the First World War. Their work consisted in fighting fires or planting trees. Although such work was obligatory, conscientious ob-

Drawing Distinctions 125 jectors went willingly. It is true that movement outside the camps was somewhat restricted during the work week and the low rates of pay caused discontent. But it cannot be said that this was a form of imprisonment. In some cases, however, conscientious objectors were jailed if they violated travel restrictions or failed to prove their convictions to the satisfaction of the authorities. This situation is in marked contrast with group internment that is the focus of our study.5 Among pacifist groups, Jehovah's Witnesses had the distinction of being declared an illegal organization under the Defence of Canada Regulations, much like the fascio and the Deutscher Bund. Their provocative opinions on the war brought them little sympathy from the majority of Canadians, although their numbers increased markedly during this troubled period. Their illegal condition, however, did not result in mass internment. Rather, individuals who engaged in active proselytism - a condition of their religious membership - were arrested. Thanks to the intervention of J.L. Cohen, a brilliant lawyer and staunch defender of civil liberties, the dominion government stopped supporting provincial prosecutions against the group.6 The wartime experience of religious dissenters therefore was altogether different from that of enemy aliens and as such is not the focus of our attention. The German Canadians selectively interned as enemy aliens on the grounds of national security are probably the closest parallel to the Italian case. Important aspects of the German wartime experience can be found in this part in the essays by Whitaker and Kealey (chapter 5) and by McBride (chapter 6). These authors also take issue with the existing studies on German internment.7 Essays in This Part The essays in this part dealing with a curious combination of groups interned - women, Jews, and Communists - broaden our discussion by shifting the focus from a specific ethnic group to groups that were ethnically diverse and, in the case of leftists and women, included both Canadians and immigrants. In his analysis of the 100 men interned as Communists, Ian Radforth (chapter 8) explains their odd status as internees: the Canadian government categorized them as enemy aliens, although they were either Canadian-born or naturalized, with no ties to enemy nations. Instead, the Communists' links were with the Soviet Union, which from June 1941 was one of Canada's allies. The short-

126 Part Two: Other Canadian Internees term rationale for internment lies partly with international events: during 1939 and 1940 the Soviet Union had been a belligerent state, and Canadian Communists were charged with trying to sabotage Canada's war effort through industrial action. But the long-term explanation takes us back to the Russian Revolution and a history of state surveillance and repression of the left - a theme that Whitaker and Kealey (chapter 5) and McBride (chapter 6) also address. McBride's essay suggests that the greatest discrepancies of all emerge in an examination of female internment. By far the most curious group to end up in Canada's internment camps came from abroad - Jews from Germany and Austria who were transferred from Britain to Canada. As Paula J. Draper (chapter 7) explains, these refugees from Nazism ironically found themselves in forced confinement with Nazis and Fascists in a country at war against Hitler. All the papers in this part underscore two key themes of this book state policy regarding enemy aliens and daily life in the internment camps. Notes 1 See Ken Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians (Toronto, 1976); Ann Corner Sunahara, The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War (Toronto, 1981); Barry Broadfoot, Years of Sorrow, Years of Shame: The Story of Japanese Canadians in World War II (Toronto, 1977); Patricia Roy, J. Granatstein, Masuko lino, and Hiroko Takamura, eds., Mutual Hostages: Canadian and Japanese during the Second World War -(Toronto, 1990). 2 See the internment memoirs by Takeo Ujo Nakano, Behind the Barbed Wire Fence (Toronto, 1980), and Robert Okazaki, P.O.W. Camp '101,' Angler, Ontario (Scarborough, 1992). Conditions in the Angler camp are briefly described in Roy et al., Mutual Hostages, 192-5. 3 Roy et al., Mutual Hostages, 195. 4 See, for example, Keibo Oiwa, 'The Structure of Dispersal: The JapaneseCanadian Community of Montreal, 1942-52,' Canadian Ethnic Studies 18, no. 2 (1986), 20-37. 5 T.D. Regehr, Mennonites in Canada, 1939-1970: A People Transformed (Toronto, 1996); William Janzen, Limits on Liberty: The Experience ofMennonite, Hutterite, and Doukhobor Communities in Canada (Toronto, 1990).

Drawing Distinctions 127 6 William Kaplan, State and Salvation: The Jehovah's Witnesses and Their Fight for Civil Rights (Toronto, 1989). 7 See Robert Keyserlingk, 'Breaking the Nazi Plot: Canadian Attitudes towards German Canadians, 1939-1945/ in Norman Hillmer, Bohdan Kordan, and Lubomyr Luciuk, eds., On Guard for Thee: War, Ethnicity, and the Canadian State, 1939-1945 (Ottawa, 1988), 53-69, as well as Keyserlingk, "'Agents Within the Gates": The Search for Nazi Subversives in Canada during World War Two,' Canadian Historical Review 66, no. 2 (1985).

5

A War on Ethnicity? The RCMP and Internment REG WHITAKER and GREGORY S. KEALEY

The story of internments during the Second World War can be told from various points of view. One of these is from the perspective of the security service of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the agency charged with developing the intelligence base for identifying those considered, according to government criteria (to which the RCMP itself contributed), sufficiently dangerous threats to national security and the war effort to require internment. How did the 'Mounties' view the internment process? What did their performance reflect of their strengths and weaknesses as a security intelligence force? What lessons did they draw from the experience? This essay attempts to address these questions by looking at what the RCMP did for internments, at ethnicity and ideology, at ethnicity on trial, at homegrown fascism, and at what internments did for the RCMP. What the RCMP Did for Internments Nothing in the wartime experience has led to more notoriety for the RCMP's security service than the internment of various people under the Defence of Canada Regulations (DOCR). Depriving people of their liberty without the normal safeguards of charges under the Criminal Code, legal counsel, habeas corpus, and a 'day in court' - all possible to some degree under the draconian provisions of the DOCR that put the safety of the state first - was bound to rouse resentments on the part of those on the receiving end. Internment of unpopular minorities was widely applauded at the tirrie by the majority. This only deepened the anxieties of affected minorities, especially in retrospect, when a new era

A War on Ethnicity? The RCMP and Internment 129 of postwar multiculturalism spurred feelings of ethnic victimizatio that could not have been openly articulated during the war itself. The Japanese-Canadian community has been offered an official apology by the Canadian government for the forcible relocation and confinement of the entire Japanese population of the Pacific coast and the confisca tion of its property. Italian Canadians too have received an official apology from Ottawa for the internment of 600 Canadians of Italian origin, while at the same time criticism of how that apology was ob tained has surfaced from within the Italian-Canadian community.1 Scholarly arguments have also been made about the efficacy of the internments of 847 German Canadians.2 In other cases where ethnicity was replaced by ideology as grounds for internment, complaints of serious injustice have also been sounded.3 The RCMP was the agent of the state in this activity, as in other intelligence and national security matters. The commissioner of the RCMP was appointed Registrar General of Enemy Aliens under the authority of the DOCR. By March 1940, 16,000 'enemy aliens' (Canadian residents of German birth not British subjects by 1922) had been registered through a special branch of the RCMP set up for this purpose.4 The Mounties were expected to gather intelligence on subversive activities carried out by groups banned under the DOCR by the cabinet, to prepare lists of persons associated with such groups designated for internment, and to take such persons into detention when their names were approved by an advisory internment committee of senior government officials. Under an order-in-council of 4 June 1940, RCMP officers were made justices of the peace for the purpose of issuing search warrants regarding illegal organizations. As William Kaplan explains, 'The effect of the new regulation was that any time an RCMP officer wished to search any premises all he had to do was prepare in his own hand an order giving him the authority to enter and search for any reason, or no reason/5 Police forces are rarely heard to complain about being given too many powers: the Mounties were no exception. The DOCR and the atmosphere of wartime emergency allowed the force to exercise a degree of intrusive surveillance and control over groups that it considered suspicious, without the usual set of peacetime constraints. Policies such as national registration of aliens offered the force the opportunity to expand its surveillance database, as did security screening of government employees and the application of fingerprinting.6 These develop-

130 Reg Whitaker and Gregory S. Kealey merits accelerated the acceptance of modern techniques of political policing and as such were welcomed by a force eager to build up its overall capabilities. Ethnicity and Ideology The actual conduct and conditions of internment were not an RCMP responsibility. The instance of apparent ethnic victimization that has gained most attention - that of the Japanese relocations - actually fell outside the internment program as such; ironically, the RCMP was taken off this case precisely because its advice was not alarmist about the supposed threat of a Japanese 'fifth column/ Nor was the RCMP particularly hawkish about the threat posed by German and Italian Canadians, despite well-founded concerns about Nazi and fascist activists among their ranks.7 Another group that drew unwelcome attention because of its pacifism and unconventional social customs - the Mennonites (of largely German extraction) - was viewed with some sensitivity by the Mounties.8 When ethnicity was mixed with left-wing ideology, it was a different story. The RCMP, in keeping with the always dominant anticommunism of the security service, was implacable in pursuit of pro-communist Ukrainians, Red Finns, and other ethnic associations of leftist bent. While able to conceive of the notion that most Canadians of German, Italian, and Japanese origin were probably loyal and lawabiding, especially if treated fairly, to be firmly distinguished from the potentially disloyal minority of activist trouble-makers, the RCMP showed few signs of any sympathy for members of leftist ethnic associations - even when these associations were enthusiastic supporters of the war effort, as they were following the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941. One of the groups that did suffer from internments and from property seizures was the Ukrainian Labour-Farmer Temple Association (ULFTA), which had its string of cultural centres across the country closed and their assets disposed of. The RCMP not only kept close scrutiny on the ULFTA but invariably interpreted the words and behaviour of its officers in the worst possible light.9 Close to a hundred Communists or those associated with communism according to the dossiers of the security service were interned, eventually all together in the Hull Jail just across the Ottawa River from Parliament Hill.10 Even after the USSR entered the war on the allied side, many of the communist internees were kept behind prison bars

A War on Ethnicity? The RCMP and Internment 131

Communist activist Stewart Smith (facing camera) being taken by paddy wagon to Toronto's Don Jail (no date).

for close to another year. In this and in the maintenance of the ban on the Communist party throughout the war, the RCMP was not simply a silent agent but an active lobbyist within government against any legitimation of the Communists. Yet when it came to drawing up the 'particulars/ as the official charges against the internees were called, the security service, which would have contributed the bulk of the evidence, was not always very precise, or even credible. Ludicrous particulars in the case of individual Communists (that X had attended a civil liberties meeting or that Y 'associated' with Z, who associated with Y, thus demonstrating a conspiracy) eventually drew unfavourable press attention. One communist internee was even charged with contesting the constitutionality of Quebec's notorious Padlock Law!11 Despite detailed knowledge of who was who in the party, amassed from undercover sources, evidence of actual treasonous or even illegal behaviour by individual Communists seemed hard to come by. Perhaps there was no such evidence, despite revolu-

132 Reg Whitaker and Gregory S. Kealey tionary rhetoric that the RCMP no doubt found seditious. Or perhaps what evidence there was would have pointed to secret sources the RCMP had no wish to disclose, nor any need, given the expansively draconian scope of the DOCR. Ethnicity on Trial? The Italian Community A major criticism made of the RCMP in relation to the German and Italian groups is that the force lacked intelligence resources of sufficient quality to identify properly and then isolate the small minority of actively disloyal agents of the Axis powers from the wider ethnic communities in which they were hiding. Some critics have gone so far as to deny the very existence of enemy agents. The result is that in the eyes of these critics, innocent persons were rounded up and interned, on the basis of their ethnicity alone: thus, critics argue, the RCMP and the Canadian state in effect abused minorities in the name of WASP hegemony, making the internments a case of 'ethnicity on trial/ The security service was certainly aware of its own deficiencies with regard to the Japanese community. In its internal annual report for 1941-2, the Intelligence Branch conceded that surveillance of the community was 'maintained only with difficulty, as due to racial and physical dissimilarities, our sources of contact are limited/12 Yet similar arguments regarding the German and Italian communities do not stand up to close scrutiny. For one thing, the security service did generally possess adequate language facilities to watch political developments in these communities. For another, its surveillance of pro-Nazi and pro-fascist activities had long antedated the war. In fact it had been acting closely with Norman Robertson, a senior official in the Department of External Affairs soon to become under-secretary of state, and other senior civil servants through the latter half of the 1930s to monitor such activities. J.L. Granatstein describes this as a 'desultory process of planning' and a 'belated effort' and implies that Robertson had to do some of the RCMP's intelligence work. No doubt Robertson, who semi-humorously described his role to his parents as a 'one man Cheka or Gestapo ... civilian commissar with the RCMP' did marshal some useful intelligence (including information on fascists quietly acquired from Communist and later convicted Soviet spy Fred Rose),13 but it is misleading

A War on Ethnicity? The RCMP and Internment 133 to suggest that the RCMP had no interest of its own in Nazi and fascist activities in Canada. Intelligence on fascism in the Italian community began prior to Robertson's initiative. Interest was spurred, several scholars suggest, by the Ethiopian invasion of 1935-6, which revealed to the Canadian government the potential dangers of Fascist oaths taken by Italian Canadians when Canadian and Italian foreign policies came into conflict.14 Constant reports flowed from Commissioner Wood to Robertson.15 Translations and analysis of the Italian-language press in North America (including the United States) were supplied, but, much more important, sources were developed within the various Italian communities around the country, which yielded increasingly detailed reports in the late 1930s.16 The RCMP found especially useful a network of informants from the communities. Willing collaboration was fairly widespread, perhaps reflecting anti-fascist sentiments and resentment against some of the community leaders enlisted by the Italian diplomats, in other cases involving more mixed motives.17 Undercover RCMP operatives, such as John Leopold and Frank Zaneth, who had been employed to penetrate the Communist party and labour unions, proved less useful than voluntary informants from the community: there were few RCMP officers with the requisite language skills to be credible undercover 'Italians/ When Italy and Canada formally went to war in June 1940, the RCMP was very well prepared. According to an internal RCMP memorandum, 95 per cent of the Italian Fascists were 'known to us': 'We have complete files and enough evidence to warrant their immediate arrest.'18 As McBride puts it, 'Essentially ... the Canadian government interned those whom the Italian community told it to arrest/19 A crucial distinction was made between leaders and rank-and-file followers. The registration of enemy aliens was also a key surveillance tool. Fingerprinted, the dangerous could be detained while the 'sheep,' the words of a Justice Department official, could be 'kept track of/20 Once Canada was at war with Italy, the DOCR permitted the seizure of documents that led police to make further arrests. In Quebec, the RCMP asked the Quebec provincial police to assist th m, using Maurice Duplessis's Padlock Law. It is hard to square this account wi h the image of a force too illinformed to finger those likely to cause trouble or potentially vulnerable to Mussolini's agents. Indeed, despite retroactive protestations of innocence, it does seem that the activities of most of those rounded up

134 Reg Whitaker and Gregory S. Kealey in 1940 constituted prirna facie threats to national security in a war in which Italy was an enemy state. The German Community Similar points could be made with regard to pro-Nazi organization among Canadians of German background, although the latter community was more dispersed than the Italians, especially in the west, where pro-Nazi activity was most successful, and thus a somewhat more difficult target for surveillance. According to Jonathan R Wagner, the Germans, predominantly farmers, who settled the prairies were more recent arrivals than the more urban workers and artisans in the east, were less assimilated than their eastern counterparts, and were more likely to have been exposed to strong German nationalist ideas prior to emigration. Moreover, during the Depression years they tended to be more economically insecure, thus easier targets for pro-Nazi agitation. Not surprisingly, much of the pro-Nazi activity was in fact directed at the west, but the small, rural, rather self-contained German communities on the prairies were perhaps somewhat harder targets for the RCMP to penetrate than the urban Italian communities.21 The RCMP had been keeping tabs on German-Canadian political activities (of both left and right) as early as 1931,22 but after Hitler's ascension to power in 1933, the politics of anti-communism sometimes played against building an effective dossier on pro-Nazi organizations. For instance, when the Deutscher Bund, one of the most important tools for Nazi influence in Canada, applied for a beer licence in 1936, the RCMP determined that the Bundists were 'anti-communist' and thus less dangerous than their left-wing rivals.23 By mid-1938, however, public opinion in Canada had turned sharply against Nazi Germany, increasingly seen as a potential adversary. The RCMP began directing closer attention to the influence sought by the Nazis over the Auslandeutsche (ethnic Germans living outside the Reich) and to the specific mechanisms of influence through various German-Canadian organizations with connections to the homeland. Obviously, the racial ideology of Nazism lent itself to potential extensions of the Nazi state through 'Aryan' brethren abroad. Yet if notions of the 'master race' and of German cultural and racial superiority were breeding grounds for Canadian Nazism, they also limited the potential reach of these ideas. German Nazis had little or nothing to do with homegrown Canadian pro-Nazi activists, whom they tended to look

A War on Ethnicity? The RCMP and Internment 135 down on as racially inferior. There was thus little likelihood of any proHitler infection spreading into the wider population from the seeds planted by the German government in the German-Canadian community - unlike the potential of a common conservative Catholicism to lead to links between the Montreal Italian pro-fascists and the extreme right wing in Quebec, as noted in RCMP reports. The Canadian government made a serious error, as senior officials later admitted among themselves, in not making some official statement indicating the potential disloyalty implicit in membership in suspect pro-Nazi organizations. Consequently, some German Canadians may have joined such groups without realizing that it put them in jeopardy when war broke out with Germany.24 Scholars argue that Canada had failed its ethnic communities in the 1930s by not stopping the actions of the German and Italian consuls earlier and then had little choice with the war 'but to attempt to protect the rest of the country from the potential problems of allowing a portion of its population to embrace fascism/25 Whatever the limitations of past practices, when war did break out, it would seem that the RCMP did have relatively good intelligence on potential German troublemakers - not perhaps as detailed or as rich as the information on the Italian pro-fascists - but good enough to yield a list of virtually all the leaders. Wagner declares that by 1939 'little escaped the force at this point, as informers and agents reported on any activity which might be construed as pro-Nazi/ He adds that within the space of a few days at war's outset, 'the country's leading Nazis were rounded up and detained.'26 The first and biggest sweep was accomplished in lightning police raids before dawn on 4 September 1939 (before Canada was officially at war, thus pre-empting some, though not all evasive action). Some of those initially detained were later found to be less serious cases and were subsequently released. Others were later detained as a result of information gathered in the first round of internments, thus illustrating once again that internment and seizure of assets and information were effective surveillance tools in themselves. That some Germans rounded up may not have been real Nazi activists would not be surprising; mistakes can be made in such wide sweeps. Some 'mistakes/ however, may have been deliberate. For instance, the German-Canadian League, an anti-Nazi organization, reported that a detainee in the initial sweep was one of its 'undercover' members. The League did not wish to see him released, however, as he might prove a useful informant to the police from within the intern-

136 Reg Whitaker and Gregory S. Kealey merit camp. While the RCMP had been reluctant earlier in the 1930s to cooperate with anti-Nazi elements in the German-Canadian population because of its anxieties about communist influence, it was actively cooperating with the German-Canadian League as well as other antiNazi forces in 1939. A handwritten note to the commissioner in October 1939 gloats that it is 'interesting to note how dog eats dog, thus simplifying our campaign/27 Keyserlingk condemns the RCMP for interning farmers and workers, whom he assumes were unlikely to be effective agents of Nazi sabotage or subversion. Yet he admits that almost all those included in the initial sweep were members of pro-Nazi organizations. Keyserlingk derides the arguments of the RCMP that such action broke the back of potential Nazi activity against the war effort.28 The RCMP's claims were indeed stated somewhat extravagantly. Clifford Harvison of the Intelligence Branch, later an RCMP commissioner, wrote that within forty-eight hours 'more than 200 leaders and sub-leaders of Nazi groups were arrested' in Quebec, mostly in Montreal. 'Due to the surveillance work that had continued up to the last moment, all but two or three of the leaders were among those apprehended and they were arrested within the next few hours ... Years of painstaking investigation that had at times brought severe criticism proved its value/ Harvison claimed that captured enemy agents later told the RCMP that the 'speedy arrests had completely wrecked the carefully built German espionage apparatus in Canada/ As additional proof of the 'effectiveness of the anti-subversive work ... not one case of enemy sabotage occurred during the war/ Harvison went further to state that the German High Command confirmed all this after the war. There appears to be no evidence to support this latter assertion. Another official in the security service, Charles Rivett-Carnac, was only slightly less restrained in his praise of the branch that he supervised in the late 1930s, asserting that 'we were able to take effective measures against those aliens in Canada who could otherwise have proved hostile to the Allied cause/29 Keyserlingk assumes, along with other critics, that because little or no pro-Nazi activity against the war effort was later uncovered, no threat existed in the first place. It is surely equally reasonable to conclude that prompt action had pre-empted such activity by removing those whose previous links with pro-Nazi or profascist organizations would make them the nucleus of any potential enemy-directed plots. After all, Nazism and fascism were racial ideologies that claimed the loyalties of 'blood brothers' across the seas.

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137

The fifth-column scare in the spring of 1940 serves to highlight a marked gap between popular anti-German hysteria and the relative coolness and professionalism of the RCMP. As Harvison recalled years later, 'Each setback in Europe was followed by a flood of calls, letters and visitors volunteering information' on alleged fifth columnists. After the fall of France, 'the flood became so heavy as to require the setting up of a large, special staff to receive visitors and to handle mail and telephone calls ... Almost always, the information was the result of overwrought imaginations, but every scrap of information required checking. There was always the long chance that the information might contain a grain of truth. More important was the need for reassuring the public as to the interest and alertness of the security service.'30 While it was important that the RCMP be seen to be responding to public anxieties, it is evident in retrospect that they remained steady in the face of the anti-German prejudices that were animating many people. The internments were more remarkable for their relative selectivity than for putting 'ethnicity on trial/ striking not at the ethnic communities in general but at the ideologically suspect minority - in striking contrast to the experience of the 1914-18 war. At most, 847 proGermans were interned (out of a potential population base of more than a half-million), with most released by late 1944 or early 1945 - in striking contrast to the 9,000 or so persons of German and AustroHungarian origin interned during the first war. The total numbers of Italian internees peaked at 632, with most released by the end of 1943. If we add in Communists and Canadian Nazis, the total number of internees appears to have reached just over 1,200 in 1940. This total excludes the 'relocated' Japanese population of British Columbia, and also the refugees from Hitler's Germany, many of them Jewish, sent from Britain to Canada and kept behind bars for much of the war (see the essay by Draper in this volume). The Japanese experience is of course a notorious exception to this observation, as this community was indeed severely penalized on the basis of ethnicity, but again the RCMP played no active role in this sorry tale. Where it was directly involved, the RCMP might actually be given some credit for the relative selectivity that the state did demonstrate. Homegrown Fascism The RCMP's intelligence on the homegrown varieties of Nazis and Fascists31 was not as good at the outbreak of war as its knowledge of the

138 Reg Whitaker and Gregory S. Kealey German and Italian communities. The leading force on the extreme right in Canada was Adrien Arcand, the firebrand 'fiihrer' whose activities were centred in Quebec. Although investigation of Canadian fascism was launched seriously in 1935, detailed information on Arcand and his followers (whose public activities were systematically scrutinized from 1938 on) came with internment, rather than preceding it. When Arcand was interned in 1940, an impressive array of documents was seized relating to correspondence with German Nazis since 1933, and membership lists from the Arcand group and others across Canada came into possession of the police.32 By that time, war with the fascist powers put paid to any future for homegrown Canadian Fascists in the postwar era. Perhaps the RCMP had not taken these groups as seriously as it might have before the war, but it was clear that they hardly posed a continuing security threat. This may explain the absence of much mention of Nazi activities in the RCMP's internally circulated Intelligence Bulletins,33 a point noted by critics of the RCMP within the civil service.34 While this has led some to conclude that the RCMP was blind to right-wing extremism allied to Canada's foreign enemies while hypersensitive to left-wing groups allied to the USSR (which take up most of the attention in the Intelligence Bulletins), McBride makes the entirely sensible point that Fascists were considered by the RCMP important enough to be candidates for internment, but not to be as significant long-term security threats as the Communists.35 The notion that there was some active sympathy in the RCMP with Fascists, apart from a shared anti-communism, is not very convincing. It is true that on the eve of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Charles Rivett-Carnac, then head of the Intelligence Branch, attempted to assure Norman Robertson that communists were a worse menace than Nazis/since fascism did not involve 'the overthrow of the present economic order - and its administrative machinery ... Fascism is the reaction of the middle classes to the Communist danger and, as perhaps you are aware, the Communists describe it as "the last refuge of capitalism/"36 Yet despite this predisposition to view fascist activity less seriously as a security threat than communism, and despite an official Canadian attitude towards Hitler's Germany in the late 1930s that combined isolationism with occasional naivete (at least on the part of Prime Minister Mackenzie King), evidence of positive pro-Nazi sentiment, or even a willful blind eye, on the part of the RCMP is simply not there. Certainly the doctrine of German racial supremacy was hardly calcu-

A War on Ethnicity? The RCMP and Internment 139 lated to appeal to a force thoroughly impregnated with the ideals of a Canada loyal to the British imperial mission. Nor were the clandestine, 'subversive' aspects of extreme right-wing organizations, with their overtones of foreign interference, likely to commend themselves to a force fully committed to the conservative political policing of Canadian society. Once war with the Axis powers had begun, the RCMP knew very well who Canada's enemies were and who their potential Canadian allies were - although this did not diminish its certainty that the Communists remained once and future threats, despite the wartime alliance with the USSR. What Internments Did for the RCMP If the RCMP and its small Intelligence Branch were key instruments of the state in the implementation of the internment policy, interment also represented concrete advantages for the RCMP's security intelligence role. Emergency wartime powers, especially of detention, search and seizure, and censorship, provided unparalleled opportunities to extend and consolidate political policing. Internment particularly contributed to the delegitimation of political extremism in ways especially helpful to the RCMP. The idea that certain kinds of political activity were subversive had always been a powerful tool, but the Intelligence Branch had always been constrained to a degree by the need to fit its political policing into a framework of criminal law enforcement. Policing of the communists had reached a peak in the early 1930s with the use of section 98 of the Criminal Code, deportations of foreign-born communist union organizers, and the jailing of a number of communist leaders following the Rex v. Buck et al. treason trials of party officials in 1931, but this had proved controversial and allowed communists such as Tim Buck to pose as martyrs. In 1938, the RCMP prepared a nation-wide assault on the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) with detailed plans for the arrest of the leadership for violations of neutrality and passport regulations relating to recruitment for the Spanish Civil War. Cooler heads prevailed, however, and the memories of CPC successes in the aftermath of the Buck trial played a major role in the decision not to arrest and prosecute people. The DOCR, with their banning of political associations and arbitrary powers of internment, provided a far more flexible and politically effective instrument in the context of wartime patriotism and national discipline. Above all, the linkage between extreme ideologically moti-

140 Reg Whitaker and Gregory S. Kealey Shifting wartime allegiances and uneven internment practices made camps politically mixed. A song composed by leftist anti-fascist internees pokes fun at the wealthy and well-connected Italian-Canadian contractor James Franceschini, interned as a fascist:

Song of Franceschini I'll sing you a song of Franceschini, Whack fol the diddle lol de di do day, The lifelong foe of Mussolini, Whack fol the diddle lol de di do day. He spent his days in doing good, O, he was the pride of Commissioner Wood, He did the poor for all he could, Whack fol the diddle lol de di do day. (chorus) Whack fol the diddle lol de di do day, So we say, hip hooray, O come and listen while we pray: Whack fol the diddle lol de di do day. II

So when he landed in the clink, Whack fol the diddle lol de di do day, He drove Mitch Hepburn close to drink, Whack fol the diddle lol de di do day. But then he found a better plan, He sent for a Mountie get-your-man, That's how they got him from the can, Whack fol the diddle lol de di do day. (chorus) We're anti-fascists every one, Whack fol the diddle lol de di do day, It's men like us made Hitler run, Whack fol the diddle lol de di do day, If we got out we'd blast the hounds, We're interned on compassionate grounds, Whack fol the diddle lol de di do day. (chorus)

A War on Ethnicity? The RCMP and Internment 141 vated political movements and Canada's foreign enemies served to discredit these movements and to place them in a kind of special quasi-legal status as legitimate targets for permanent surveillance. For the RCMP, the quiet go-ahead given the Intelligence Branch to penetrate and monitor Italian and German pro-fascist groups in the late 1930s was a very useful precedent. These groups were not illegal entities under the current law of the land, and the government of Canada had given no official warning that membership or participation in such groups should pose any concern to individuals. Yet under the shadow of war the government had, in its secret councils - in which the RCMP was a key participant - made certain definitive judgments about the potential disloyalties attached to membership in specific groups and had then charged the RCMP with responsibility to identify and locate the leaders and potential troublemakers from within the groups, for internment the instant the previously prepared orders were enacted. The relative effectiveness of the force in carrying out these responsibilities, along with the apparent nullification of the espionage, sabotage, or subversion threats believed to have been posed by these groups, ensured that the RCMP would carry out of the war an enhanced prestige within the Canadian state and some surety of a continued pre-eminent role in security intelligence in the postwar era. In retrospect, it is apparent that the wartime internment experience helped lay the groundwork for the Cold War anti-communist security measures that followed. Once again, as it had been since the labour revolt of the First World War, the RCMP's security service was given the task of developing intrusive surveillance of a legal political entity - the CPC - and its various arms and fronts.37 Once again, such extraordinary peacetime political policing was set up by a government decision that communists, in the context of a possible future war with the Soviet Union, would constitute a serious security risk that would require internment. Once again, lists were to be drawn up for action when warranted. The maintenance of such lists was part of the justification for a vast postwar surveillance operation against Communists, Communist allies, and people with any associations with Communists. Such was the scale of this operation that a royal commission in the late 1970s discovered that the RCMP held security files on some 800,000 individuals and organizations.38 Potential internment was not the only basis for such a vast operation - the security clearance system in the public service and immigration lent powerful impetus to the accumulation of secret dossiers as well - but especially in the 1950s, when war some-

142 Reg Whitaker and Gregory S. Kealey times seemed a very real possibility, preparation and maintenance of the lists of internees (code-named operation PROFUNC) ate up some of the security service's time and resources. There was one other lesson that the RCMP may have drawn, to its profit, from the wartime internment experience. Indiscriminate internment of 'enemy aliens/ as in the First World War, or the direct targeting of an entire ethnic community for relocation and detention, as with the Japanese in the Second World War, were inherently divisive in a country with large immigrant communities. The RCMP record from 1939 to 1945 on this issue is not at all as questionable as some critics have claimed. On the whole, and given the obvious limitations imposed on it, the RCMP proved fairly adept at distinguishing ideology from ethnicity. There is a complex wartime history of the relationship between the Ukrainian-Canadian community and the Canadian state and the relationship between pro-communists and nationalists within that community that illustrates the difficult passage that had to be negotiated by the force. Pro-communist Ukrainian groups were of course fundamentally suspect, and in 1940 the Canadian government had taken an active hand in creating the Ukrainian-Canadian Committee as an umbrella group of respectable anti-communist nationalists. After the Nazi invasion of the USSR the following year, however, a delicate problem presented itself: pro-communist Ukrainians were now vociferously supporting the war, while the loyalties of some of the antiSoviet nationalist Ukrainians might be considered suspect. The RCMP kept a close watch on all factions and employed well-placed informants to pass on detailed information. For a time in 1941, a key figure in the wartime effort by Ottawa to develop a policy towards ethnic communities was employed by the RCMP as a temporary director of the 'European section/ Tracey Philipps, an Englishman with interwar experience in British intelligence, was cautiously anti-communist but above all interested in building unity behind the war effort. Following his stint with the RCMP, he continued as an adviser on nationalities but ran into fierce (and unfair) criticism from the pro-communist Ukrainian-language press - criticism that in the prevailing atmosphere of the Grand Alliance was picked up by some sections of the mainstream press as well. External Affairs, pressured by its new Soviet allies, was doubtful about allowing public assertions of Ukrainian independence, and Phillips was eventually squeezed out of official Ottawa. So was a close ally on minorities policy, Professor Watson Kirkconnell, who, though never directly employed

A War on Ethnicity? The RCMP and Internment 143 by the RCMP, was to be an ally of sorts in the coming Cold War as an inveterate anti-communist public crusader. While official policy on minorities never formally gelled around firm support of anti-communist ethnic organizations during the war, the RCMP, in its careful handling of the prickly Ukrainian-Canadian problem, showed the way towards the future of state-ethnic relations. Keeping a watchful eye on all factions, the RCMP nevertheless steered towards legitimizing and thus domesticating the more conservative ideological tendencies, while identifying and isolating the pro-commuist Ukrainians as potential security threats.39 The contrast with the much blunter sweep of the First War against 'enemy aliens' was sharp and instructive. This lesson was to stand the RCMP in good stead in the Cold War days ahead, when it was careful to target only the procommunist ethnic associations and to establish working relationships with anti-communist organizations from the same communities. It cannot be said that in the wartime internments the RCMP showed any great respect for civil liberties.40 Of course, it did not have to, given the extraordinary wartime state of emergency and the powerful forces, both populist and governmental, demanding stern and swift action in the name of national security. Nor was there in the Canada of the 1940s any Charter of Rights or the same consciousness of the rights of minorities as exists in the 1990s. In any event, the RCMP's Intelligence Branch was a security force and a political police; concern for civil liberties was neither part of its job description nor on the list of tasks presented it by the government. That said, it is noteworthy that it acted within the parameters set for it with reasonable restraint, especially in the face of the temptations to exploit ethnic prejudices - temptations to which other agencies of the Canadian government succumbed in the case of the Japanese Canadians, to Canada's lasting shame. Notes 1 Bruno Ramirez, 'Ethnicity on Trial: The Italians of Montreal and the Second World War/ in Norman Hillmer, Bohdan Kordan, and Lubomyr Luciuk, eds., On Guard For Thee: War, Ethnicity, and the Canadian State, 1939-1945 (Ottawa: Canadian Committee for the History of the Second World War, 1988), 71-84; papers presented at the 'Internment of Italian Canadians during World War IF conference at York University, Toronto, Oct. 1995; and the Introduction and the essay in this volume by lacovetta and Ventresca.

144 Reg Whitaker and Gregory S. Kealey 2 Robert H. Keyserlingk, '"Agents within the Gates": The Search for Nazi subversives in Canada during World War II,' Canadian Historical Review, 66, no. 2 (1985), 212-39, and 'Breaking the Nazi Plot: Canadian government Attitudes toward German Canadians, 1939-1945,' in Hillmer, Kordan, and Luciuk, eds., On Guard for Thee, 53-70. 3 William Repka and Kathleen M. Repka, Dangerous Patriots: Canada's Unknown Prisoners of War (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1982). Reg Whitaker, 'Official Repression of Communism during World War II,' Labour/Le Travail 17 (spring 1986) 135-66. 4 Carl Betke and Stan Horrall, Canada's Security Service: An Historical Outline, 1864-1966 (Ottawa: RCMP Historical Section, 1978), 484. 5 PC 2363,4 June 1940. William Kaplan, State and Salvation: The Jehovah's Witnesses and Their Fight for Civil Rights (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 49-50. 6 On screening and fingerprinting, see Larry Hannant, The Infernal Machine: Investigating the Loyalty of Canada's Citizens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). 7 Caution and moderation with regard to the 'enemy alien' minorities are quite evident from the annual wartime reports of the security service. During the height of the fifth column scare in 1940, RCMP headquarters was flooded with denunciations by Canadians of German-origin neighbours, including a list of 'traitors' submitted by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. The RCMP handled these complaints with what can best be described as weary forbearance: those checked out invariably proved unfounded. See the papers of the House of Commons Committee for the Defence of Canada Regulations, Office of the Clerk of the House of Commons, Ottawa, and the essays by Principe and Bruti-Liberati in this volume. 8 Gregory S. Kealey and Reg Whitaker, eds., RCMP Security Bulletins: The War Series, Part II, 1942-1945 (St John's: Canadian Committee on Labour History, 1993), 1 March 1943, 64-6, and Introduction, 22. 9 On the ULFTA, see Whitaker, 'Official Repression of Communism.' The ULFTA's complaint that its property and halls had in some cases been sold by the Custodian of Alien Enemy Property to its 'bitter political enemies/ the Ukrainian National Organization (a complaint echoed by a number of respectable civil libertarians in mainstream Canadian society), was dismissed by the RCMP in its internal Intelligence Bulletin in the following extraordinary fashion: 'The psychological effect upon the ... membership through loss of their halls to its [sic] opposition helps to keep alive the enthusiasm in their organization and produces a state of exuberance [!] so

A War on Ethnicity? The RCMP and Internment 145

10 11

12 13

14

15 16 17

18 19

20

necessary to back their demands to the Government.' Kealey and Whitaker, War Series Part II, I March 1943, 56. See the essay by Radforth in this volume. The 'Padlock Law' allowed the Quebec government to close premises deemed to be used for the dissemination of 'Communist propaganda/ the latter term being defined not in the law but arbitrarily by the attorney general. The law was passed by Maurice Duplessis's Union Nationale government in 1937 and ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1957. Report dated 14 April 1942. J.L. Granatstein, A Man of Influence: Norman A. Robertson and Canadian Statecraft, 1929-1968 (Ottawa: Deneau, 1981), 81-90. A. Grenke, 'From Dreams of the Worker State to Fighting Hitler: The German-Canadian Left from the Depression to the End of World War II,' Labour'/Le Travail 35 (spring 1995), 65-105, points out (94) that Robertson's advice overrode the RCMP's intention to intern left-wing German Canadians on the basis of information that they were anti-Nazi and pro-war, despite the HitlerStalin pact. See, for example, Michelle McBride, 'From Internment to Indifference: An Examination of RCMP Response to Fascism and Nazism in Canada from 1934 to 1941,' MA thesis, Memorial University, 1997, 33, and the essays on Italian Canadians in part I of this volume. An account of 'consular fascism' can be found in Martin Robin, Shades of Right: Nativist and Fascist Politics in Canada, 1920-1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 207-32. Wood to Robertson, 1 Feb. 1938, with reference to initial letter from Robertson dated 27 April 1936. See the essay by Bruti Liberati in this volume. Michelle McBride, 'Fascism, Secret Agents, and the RCMP Security Service, 1939-41: Preliminary Remarks on Three Secret Agents in the Italian-Canadian Community of Montreal/ paper presented to joint session of the Canadian Historical Association and the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies, University of Ottawa, 31 May 1998. CSIS 87-A-130, V.A.M. Kemp, Superintendent O Division, to the Commissioner, 15 May 1940. McBride, 'From Internment to Indifference/ 170, and the essays in part I of this volume. Some informants, she writes, and as others have shown, were secret agents, others vindictive neighbours, while others were simply trying to be good Canadian citizens. Quoted in McBride, 'From Internment to Indifference/ 169.

146 Reg Whitaker and Gregory S. Kealey 21 Jonathan R Wagner, Brothers beyond the Sea: National Socialism in Canada (Waterloo, Ont: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 1981), 18-21. On German-Canadian Nazism, see also Robin, Shades of Right, 233-64. 22 CSIS 117-89-94. 23 McBride, 'From Internment to Indifference/ 39-40. 24 CSIS 87-A-130, Norman Robertson, memorandum to O.D. Skelton, 17 April 1940, and Robertson to Bavin, 17 April 1940. 25 McBride, 'From Internment to Indifference/ 200-1, and the essays by Pennacchio and Principe in this volume. 26 Wagner, Brothers, 131-2. 27 CSIS 117-89-94, 7 Sept. 1939. 28 Keyserlingk, '"Agents within the Gates."' 29 C.W. Harvison, The Horsemen (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967), 101. Rivett-Carnac, Pursuit in the Wilderness (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 295. 30 Harvison, Horsemen, 144. 31 On homegrown fascists, see Lita-Rose Betcherman, The Swastika and the Maple Leaf: Fascist Movements in Canada in the Thirties (Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1975); Robin, Shades of Right, 125-206. 32 CSIS 87-A-130. After his release from internment, Arcand sued unsuccessfully to regain possession of his papers. 33 Gregory S. Kealey and Reg Whitaker, eds., RCMP Security Bulletins, The War Series, 1939-1941 (St John's: Canadian Committee on Labour History, 1989); War Series, Part II, 1942-1945. 34 H.S. Ferns, Reading from Left to Right: One Man's Political History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 182. 35 McBride, 'From Internment to Indifference.' 36 NA, Norman Robertson Papers, vol. 12, f. 137, Rivett-Carnac to Robertson, 24 Jan. 1939 37 For the early history of these files, see Gregory S. Kealey, 'The Early Years of State Surveillance of Labour and the Left in Canada: The Institutional Framework of the RCMP Security and Intelligence Apparatus, 1918-26,' Intelligence and National Security 8, no. 3 (1993), 129-48. 38 Commission of Inquiry Concerning Certain Activities of the RCMP, second report, vol. 1, Freedom and Security under the Law (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services, 1981), 518. 39 On the Ukrainian Canadians and the Canadian wartime state, see Bohdan Kordan, 'Disunity and Duality: Ukrainian Canadians and the Second World War/ MA thesis, Carleton University, 1981; Thomas M. Prymak, Maple Leaf and Trident: The Ukrainian Canadians during the Second World War

A War on Ethnicity? The RCMP and Internment

147

(Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1988); N.F. Dreisziger, 'The Rise of a Bureaucracy for Multiculturalism: The Origins of the Nationalities Branch/ 1-30, William R. Young, 'Chauvinism and Canadianism: Canadian Ethnic Groups and the Failure of Wartime Information/ 31-52, and Bohdan Kordan and Lubomyr Luciuk, 'A Prescription for Nationbuilding: Ukrainian Canadians and the Canadian State, 1939-1945,' 85-100, all in Hillmer, Kordan, and Luciuk, eds., On Guard for Thee; and Frances Swyripa's essay in this volume. 40 For a critical account of RCMP failures in this regard, see John Stanton, 'Government Internment Policy, 1939-1945,' Labour/Le Travail 31 (spring 1993), 203-41, and his My Past Is Now: Further Memoirs of a Labour Lawyer (St John's: Canadian Committee on Labour History, 1994).

6

The Curious Case of Female Internees MICHELLE MCBRIDE

The history of state surveillance, repression, and, most recently, internment has undergone a rapid expansion. Access to previously restricted documents has helped leftist labour and social historians in particular to tackle subjects such as RCMP spy networks, traditionally the domain of political and military historians. This growing literature, notably on internment, has largely been a history of men or of organizations and communities treated as genderless subjects. Even the much-studied evacuation of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War ha not really considered the differential impact that state policies and camp life had on the men and women involved.1 The history of the internment of women during the Second World War is largely unwritten. Although there were far fewer females interned, they remain an important part of the story. Several issues are involved here, including the experiences of female internees and the perspectives and lives of the wives of male internees left to cope on the outside. This paper is a preliminary attempt to write women into internment history and to gender the topic. From 1939 to 1942, Canada interned twenty-one women in Kingston Penitentiary for Women. Each was accused of violating Canada's Defence of Canada Regulations (DOCK). Most were charged under section 21, which gave the state power to arrest and intern anyone deemed to be acting contrary or in a manner prejudicial to public safety or the safety of the state. In addition to the internees, many more women were convicted of violating the DOCR and spent some time in jails across Canada. The internees, this paper argues, constitute a curious group whose confinement suggests the highly haphazard manner in which state officials dealt with women.

The Curious Case of Female Internees 149 Large discrepancies emerge in the treatment that women received and between stated policy and practice. For example, while some (like men) were interned for making 'poor' or 'wrong' political choices, others were detained for reasons seemingly far removed from politics. At least one woman was targeted for medical, or even moral, reasons: she had contracted venereal disease (VD). The cases of female internees yielded other surprises. Although some committed fascists were released soon after being arrested, other women, seemingly less threatening, spent longer periods in jail. Another discrepancy concerns ethnicity. Quebec had the largest fascist organization in Canada - Adrien Arcand's National Social Christian Party (NSCP). Yet no women from that organization were interned, nor were women belonging to Canada's other domestic fascist organizations. I used several critical records for this study, the majority of which are housed in the National Archives of Canada (NA), mainly in the files of the Department of the Solicitor General, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and the Norman A. Robertson Papers. This material, largely snippets of official state responses giving only limited data on women's wartime activities and internment experiences, is fragmented and therefore frustrating. It offers crucial glimpses of the state in action in wartime, particularly the decision-making process, but provides very little personal detail on specific female internees. What detail there was has been deleted by NA censors. In reconstructing the history of female internees, the written correspondence between the warden of Kingston Penitentiary, the Department of National Defence, and the RCMP proved critical. These files provide valuable information such as names, ages, and religion, and they comment on the behaviour of the internees. Furthermore, the personal history files of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Internment (IDC) and RCMP reports are invaluable in helping to determine the logic, or lack thereof, behind the internments. I look at women in fascist organizations (national and other groups) and their arrest, internment, and conditions of internment. Women in Fascist Organizations The RCMP files and IDC reports make it clear that women played a significant role in Canadian fascist organizations. Their role should not, however, be overstated, since they were not on the front lines or in positions of authority. Such organizations were largely male-dominated

150 Michelle McBride and patriarchal and stressed the value of the woman in the home. Women could certainly be activists. In Quebec, for example, some were taught drilling and ju-jitsu. But such skills were to be used only in times of emergency, after which women were expected to revert to their roles as fund-raisers and charity workers. In the German and Italian organizations they were responsible for community activism and fostering feelings of warmth for the home country. In the Italian community, for example, women in the dopolavoro clubs and the Order Sons of Italy gave support to expectant mothers and the elderly, did volunteer work in the schools, and helped to raise money for the building of the local Casa d'ltalia. While fascist movements idealized women's domesticity, they still created a public space for women's political activism. As Frances Swyripa has observed for Ukrainian right-wing organizations, there was a perception of women that both 'embraced and transcended their procreative function and their traditional prescribed role.'2 The fact that women were organizing separate branches of male-dominated organizations does not negate the fact that they could be effective public organizers. The RCMP was quite interested in the role that women played in fascist organizations. In October 1937, S.T. Wood, assistant commissioner of the RCMP, issued a memorandum requesting information on the various Italian women's fascist organizations: he asked for membership and executive lists and for evaluations of their popularity within the various Italian communities. Wood was especially concerned about the Fascio Femminile, whose members promoted fascism among the young and collected funds to support Italy's invasion of Ethiopia.3 In Montreal there were six branches of the women's fascio, the same number as the men's organization. There were also women's branches in North Bay and Hamilton.4 In addition, women could join separate lodges of the Order Sons of Italy and the dopolavoro. Membership in this last organization grew to more than 200 in Toronto.5 The German Deutscher Bund also had female branches.6 Cast largely as helpmates to the men and responsible for 'cultivat[ing] the good German family spirit,' women members collected goods and funds for the needy, promoted the German language and culture, and recruited new members.7 The largest of Quebec's fascist organizations, the National Social Christian Party, and its successor, the National Unity Party (NUP), had women's branches and several active members. Leader Adrien Arcand's wife, Yvonne, presided over the women's branches.8 His sister headed up the Montreal Women's League for Anti-Communism, which issued

The Curious Case of Female Internees 151

Members of Toronto's Fascio Femminile and Sara Tiberi, wife of the Italian viceconsul (middle, front row), at a pro-fascist social event in 1934. At far left is Tommasso Mari, editor of II Bolkttino italo-canadese.

several of Arcand's pamphlets, while his mother-in-law, Mme Paul Giguere, was a regular speaker at party meetings.9 Most members were middle-class women in their thirties and forties, who joined the party in support of their husbands, brothers, and fathers. In one instance, however, a single woman, Miss Burnet, joined out of her own belief in the parry's platforms. She was one of what the party termed its 'servant spies/ one of sixty to eighty housemaids working for its intelligence section. These maid spies were supposedly spread throughout Quebec gathering information in the homes of prominent politicians and other public people.10 Women in the NSCP performed a variety of tasks. They collected dues; gathered clothing, shoes and bedding for struggling party members; manufactured party uniforms; and sold contribution coupons. They also spread propaganda, including such anti-Semitic pamphlets as The Key to the Mystery and The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.11 They visited homes, delivered circulars by hand and mail, and gave money and medicine to the poor.12

152 Michelle McBride Women were instructed in drilling by Major J.M. Scott, who claimed that there were roughly 150 women in the Montreal feminine branches trained to help in future demonstrations. The RCMP suspected NUP women of orchestrating a boycott of Jewish stores and an antigovernment whispering campaign.13 The Canadian government, aided by RCMP intelligence, was well aware of fascist activities, imported and homegrown, within its German-, Italian-, English-, and French-speaking communities. But as the RCMP viewed communism as the greater threat, it had been content to watch, not halt, the spread of fascist organizations. Only when the international scene dramatically changed in September 1939 did Ottawa move to arrest the fascist leadership. By then, Canada was prepared for war. The RCMP had already been given wide discretionary powers of arrest and detainment and was empowered to monitor 'enemy aliens' and intern subversives. Originally, internment was to be restricted to foreign nationals, but the RCMP successfully lobbied to extend its powers of arbitrary detention to naturalized enemy aliens and eventually to British subjects - in short, to anyone acting in a manner deemed prejudicial to the state. This enabled the RCMP to pursue its favourite enemy, the Communist party.14 The IDC distinguished among its enemy aliens, particularly between the Europeans (Germans and Italians) and Japanese Canadians. While the former were reviewed on a case-by-case basis, the latter faced relocation en masse. Regarding enemy aliens of European origin, the government's initial plan was to intern about 500 members of the NSDAP and DAF and just under 200 Italian members of the fascio. Instead, it interned approximately 2,423 people during the war, a figure that does not include the thousands of Japanese Canadians forcibly relocated from their homes. The internees would be joined by thousands more who came from abroad, including Jewish refugees, Germans, and Italians.15 The Arrest of Troublesome Women The IDC's early lists of dangerous persons contained mostly male members of fascist parties, but the issue of how to handle women members arose immediately. When RCMP Superintendent E.W. Bavin first ordered a round-up of suspected Fascists he meant everyone, even 'nurses, and married women.' Like the men, the women would be interviewed and, if judged 'not important enough' a threat, would be released. The troublemakers would be detained.16

The Curious Case of Female Internees 153 With the war's outbreak, German women active in the pro-Nazi Deutscher Bund were targeted. Several were questioned about their active propagation of Nazism but were not interned. They included Paula Massig (a resident of Regina, Sask., and president of the Bund's Women's Auxiliary), who was under RCMP surveillance between 1938 and 1942. While professing loyalty to Canada, Massig, described as 'excessively interested in all things German,' was a highly active Nazi propagandist in western Canada and travelled frequently to Germany. During a trip in 1934, she was deemed influential enough to have an audience with the head of the German Foreign Division of the NSDAP, Wilhelm Bohle.17 Massig also played host to several Germans visiting Canada and specialized in spreading Nazi propaganda to other German-Canadian organizations. Her two children, daughter Lottie and son Dr Eric, were also Nazi supporters. Since the RCMP saw her more as a nuisance than a threat, she was allowed to continue running the Regina Office of the Aid Society for the Dependents of Interned Enemy Aliens, which gave her access to detailed information on internees and internment camps. In her work with the Aid Society, Massig contacted the dependants of the internees, advising them to apply for support.18 A second woman questioned but not interned was Irene Carter from Winnipeg. Carter arrived in Canada in 1927 with her family from Germany and later married a Canadian-born musician. She was fervently pro-Nazi, made several trips to Germany, associated with pro-Nazi Germans in Canada, and reportedly tried to cultivate acquaintances with Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) personnel in Calgary.19 She also made statements suggesting that Canada would be better off under a Hitler-type regime. Despite some protests against her continuing liberty, the IDC opted not to intern her, alleging lack of space for the detainment, absence of evidence regarding disloyal conduct during the war, and the need to give priority to the most flagrant offenders.20 Yet this decision is indeed curious, since Carter's profile closely resembled that of other women who were interned, including Geraldine Ulrey and Gertrude Kulessa. Also recommended for internment was Petrea (Mrs Luther) Sharpe of Bashaw, Alta. A naturalized British subject of Danish descent, she was decidedly pro-German. Sharpe had made statements cheering British losses on air, sea, and land and expressing the hope that Canada would have a dictator like Hitler. When her case was dismissed by an investigating magistrate, the townspeople became so angry that for her own safety the IDC recommended internment, but nothing was done.21 Ten Italian-Canadian women were detained for questioning. Nine

154 Michelle McBride had acquired Canadian citizenship through naturalization, all were married, and eight were either on the directorate of the women's fascio or served as a fiduciary. The other two were extremely active fascists. The RCMP was instructed by the IDC to interrogate them, warn them that any further activity in the organization would result in internment, and then release them. Half of the women were from Montreal. They included Fosca Giubilei and Giuseppina Di loia, both of whom had remained active during the war, the latter despite her husband's internment.22 Di loia was the fiduciary of the Montcalm women's fascio. Antonietta Mancuso, the wife of another internee, had been a teacher at the Montcalm Italian School, was active in the Italian War Veterans Associations, and was described by an RCMP secret agent as one of the most important members of the women's fascio.23 Rosa Spinelli, fiduciary of the Lachine branch of the women's fascio, was characterized by secret agents as an intelligent woman with influence and great organizational skills. Carmela Frascarelli, the recipient of the silver medal of the Order Sons of Italy had been a venerable of the order's Anita Garibaldi lodge and fiduciary of the women's fascio from 1936 onward. Frascarelli was zealously anti-British, according to reports from secret agents.24 Three women lived in Toronto: Maria Spaziani, Filomena Riccio, and Etelvina Frediani. The latter two were wives of internees. Frediani resigned from the women's fascio when she lost one job and was in danger of losing another because of her views and affiliations. But she remained active, collecting funds for the opening of the Mimico Fascist School.25 Francesca Olivieri of Hamilton, whose husband, Donato, had been interned, was jailed for one day for her activities in the women's fascio.26 Given that several women were not in positions of authority in their fascist organizations and were still interned, it does seem curious that these leaders were not. Several of those interned met the same criteria as those left at liberty - they were married and naturalized Canadians - hence it becomes difficult to pinpoint any real differences between those interned and those simply warned. Internment In contrast to their male counterparts who were sent to designated internment camps, women were housed in Kingston Penitentiary.27 Prison authorities were initially reluctant to take them for more than a

The Curious Case of Female Internees 155 short time, on the grounds that it would be difficult to segregate them from the convict population, which was much larger than normal. In response, the director of Internment Operations (DIO) in Ottawa set out to find them a new home. He investigated the possibility of placing the internees in separate denominational facilities. There were several options for Catholics, including the Convent of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Ottawa, but there were few readily available places for the Protestants. He also considered other sites such as the Maritimes Home for Girls in Truro, NS; the Inter-provincial Home for Women in Cloverdale, NB; the Civilian Welfare Institution in Winnipeg; and the Fort Saskatchewan jail, near Edmonton. In the end the women were kept at Kingston Penitentiary, as the convict population had stabilized.28 Internment Operations paid $1.50 a day per internee, covering lodging, laundry, food, and basic medical care. It also paid the salary of Vera Cherry, matron of the internees. Initially neither the women nor the representatives of countries designated as protective powers were pleased with their confinement in a jail. The protective powers were responsible for ensuring the fair treatment of interned foreign nationals in Canada. Mr Preiswerk of the Swiss legation, in charge of safeguarding German interests, protested the use of Kingston Penitentiary: 'Whilst there is no reason to complain about the general treatment, food and so forth/ he argued, 'the one stumbling block is the fact that these women are housed in a penitentiary and that contact with criminals cannot on certain occasions be avoided/ This is very much resented by the women in question ... the more so as when German women were interned in Holloway and other prisons in this country the German Government protested strongly and even threatened reprisals. I would not wish to pass the report on this women's camp on to Berne without at the same time being in a position to advise my Government that I had mentioned the matter to you ... Our Consul-General is ... taking the matter up with the Canadian Authorities, but if you could also let them know ... it might help in getting these women accommodated in quarters which would not have the stigma of a prison.'29 The cost of building an internment camp for such a small number of women, however, overrode such concerns. As the dominion government pointed out, conditions were far better in Kingston than they would be in an internment camp. Inmates were confined to an isolated wing; they had their own matron, church services, and mealtimes.30

156 Michelle McBride According to DIO Col. Stethem, two people protested their stay at Kingston Penitentiary not because of the 'stigma' of being in jail but because they had expected to be with their husbands at Kananaskis camp. Stethem was quite firm in his decision not to place wives with their husbands, stating that under 'no circumstances will any females be interned in male camps/31 For a short time the internees and convicts were allowed to interact in the courtyard for an hour on Sundays, but complaints by the protective powers put a stop to that. The internees themselves did not mind spending time with the regular prisoners. Some asked to be allowed to work with them. Government policy towards women internees was influenced to some extent by the fact that a number of Canadian women had been interned in Germany, and an understanding was reached whereby women internees in the two countries were repatriated or released as early as possible.32 While six women were in fact immediately repatriated, the others obtained their release at an early date. National and other Groups In total, twenty-one women were interned - twelve Germans, one Austrian, three Belgians, four Italians, and one English-Canadian. Of those, three were born in Canada, four were naturalized, nine, including the three Belgians, were foreign nationals, and five were of undetermined citizenship (probably foreign nationals). The average length of confinement was fifteen months, but there were ethnic variations: eight months for Italians, eighteen for Germans, thirteen for Belgians, which would have been longer had they not been repatriated to the Belgian Congo. The German figure is also skewed. Two German women, Ruth and Elizabeth Bronny, were detained briefly - for one and two months, respectively - before being repatriated. Without the Bronnys, the average for Germans rises to twenty-one months. Several other German women were also repatriated, which further distorts the statistics. The average age of internees was 37: 45 for Italians, 27.5 for Germans, and 34.5 for Belgians. Eleven of the women were interned under DOCK 25(8), while the remaining ten were interned under DOCK 21. The home province of those living in Canada is as follows: five from British Columbia, four from Saskatchewan, one from Manitoba, six from Ontario, and two unknown. The average period of confinement for naturalized internees was thirteen months, for foreign nationals sixteen

The Curious Case of Female Internees 157 months, if we assume that the five women of undetermined citizenship were foreign nationals. Germans

The German-speakers were interned for periods ranging from three months in one instance, to more than twenty months for many, to fortythree months in the last case. Eight were married, two were single, and the marital status of the other two is unknown. Their ages ranged from 16 to 38, with an average age of 28, which made them the youngest ethnic group. Among the German internees, three were naturalized, one was Canadian-born, five were foreign nationals, and the rest were of undisclosed citizenship. A number of them were arrested for expressing pro-German opinions, not for membership in a subversive organization. Geraldine Ulrey, nee Laird, of Regina, was born in Canada of German ancestry. Because she and her husband had uttered pro-German sentiments, the RCMP recommended their arrest. The police felt that although the wife was not a great danger to the state, her public statements had unleashed the community's wrath. Her case went before the Inter-Departmental Committee (IDC), which asked the RCMP to gather more information. Following the investigation, the local detachment recommended internment but requested leniency on humanitarian grounds. Superintendent Bavin overrode this recommendation. In light of 'the seriousness of present conditions/ he argued, 'humanitarianism cannot be allowed to interfere with the course of action adopted and as this woman is suffering from a communicable disease, her incarceration in Kingston Penitentiary will probably have beneficial effects/33 Although Ulrey had never belonged to any fascist organizations, she was interned for having VD.34 She was later released on condition that she refrain from openly expressing anti-British sentiments.35 German-born Gertrude (Mrs Gustave) Kulessa arrived in Canada with her three children in 1923. Through her husband, she was naturalized the following year. The IDC recommended Kulessa for internment on the grounds that she had been a continual source of trouble for her community in New Waterford, Cape Breton. A bootlegger and an avowed Nazi supporter, she had allowed Germans to meet in her home since the outbreak of the war and had distributed Nazi propaganda. However, the key reason for her internment was that she raised the ire of her

158 Michelle McBride local community by evicting tenants from her farm. Her action especially angered the local miners who had already proved a volatile group during the war, at one mine threatening to strike if men were interned, and at another mine refusing to work with any 'enemy aliens/ The farm was placed under the control of the Custodian's Office after her husband and son were interned. The IDC stated that 'as the local miners have gotten into the issue behind the Custodian's Office, we recommend interning Mrs. Kulessa for her safety.'36 Kulessa had in fact been previously charged with violating the DOCK but had been granted parole. This time the IDC was not so lenient. She was interned from 1 January 1942 to 2 August 1943 and was one of the two last females to be released.37 Austrian-born Bertha Hower (Haver) had lived in Canada with her husband, Louis, for over a decade before the war. She bought her own restaurant in Harrison Lake, BC, which was so successful that she lent money to several others in the restaurant business. When war broke out two of her debtors refused to pay her because of her foreign birth. When she sued them, they circulated a petition to have her interned. Rumours spread quickly about Hower's pro-Hitler stance. The IDC stated: 'In giving expression to her anti-British sentiments she had so aroused the animosity of the populace that, according to the reports, serious breaches of the peace were likely to ensue if she was not interned/38 Hower presented nineteen character references, all of them from British subjects, in her appeal, which was dismissed. Interned in Kingston Penitentiary on 27 August 1940, she was released on 5 May 1942. Hower repeatedly tried to have herself classified as an Austrian, not a German, and kept aloof of German internees. A strict condition of her release was that she not return to British Columbia.39 Katherine Margaret Haidinger, a single woman of German nationality and an avowed pro-Nazi, was arrested on 29 December 1939 and not released until 9 August 1943. Haidinger claimed that her heart condition was aggravated by 'ill-treatment' in Kingston Penitentiary, specifying that an argument with Matron Cherry had provoked a heart attack. She was told that she would not be released until the end of the war and then only to be repatriated.40 While Haidinger was not repatriated, others were, including Maria Augusta Klassen (Mrs Siebon), from Frenchman's Butte, Sask., interned from 24 July 1940 to 1 June 1942.41 Mariel (Mrs Johan Hans) Hilmer, a British subject through naturalization, attempted to have herself classified as a German woman at Kingston Penitentiary.42 A resident of Claybank, Sask., she was arrested

The Curious Case of Female Internees 159 on 7 July 1940 for being outspokenly pro-Nazi. Since her husband was also interned, Hilmer's four children were sent to an orphanage. The official reasons for her confinement were as follows: 'That you made statements in writing detrimental to the welfare of the State and in support of the Nazi cause, that, contained in your correspondence were insulting remarks directed to various members of His Majesty's Forces, that you attempted to correspond with enemy territory through an unofficial intermediary in the United States, thereby showing that you are disloyal to Canada.'43 Hilmer was not released until 27 March 1943. Lydia (Mrs Rudolph) Anwander, a German national from Port Alberni, BC, was interned on 23 August 1940 and repatriated to Germany on 6 June 1942. Elizabeth Bronny, along with her sixteen-year-old daughter Ruth, was also repatriated to Germany. After serving a year in jail for violations of the DOCR she was transferred to Kingston Penitentiary. Since her husband was also interned, their daughter was sent to the Girls Industrial Prison in Vancouver.44 Once it was decided to repatriate Bronny, the authorities arranged for mother and daughter to be held together at Kingston Penitentiary for a brief period. One exception to the long-term German internees was Muriel Maria Burzle of Winnipeg, a naturalized Canadian. Her husband, Professor John Anton Burzle, was also detained. The DIO believed that Burzle got herself deliberately interned to join her husband at Kananaskis camp. She was arrested on 26 August 1940 and sent to Kingston Penitentiary, where she 'raised the strongest protest, and, possibly, owing to her position in civil life, had more reason in doing so/45 The protest paid off, as she was interned for less than three months. On release Muriel Burzle only had to reregister and had none of the restrictions facing some other internees.46 Italians

Of the twenty-one internees, the case against the Italians appears to be the strongest, yet they were detained for the shortest time, ranging from five to twelve months. There were four Italians: Maria Egilda Fontanella, Luisa Guagneli, Verna Lo Bosco, and Maria Pressello. One was Canadian-born, two were long-term residents of Canada without naturalization, and the fourth was of undetermined citizenship. Two o the women were married, while the other two were single. Three were

160 Michelle McBride very involved in the women's fascio, while the fourth was not known to be active. The first case is that of Maria Egilda Fontanella, of Toronto. Fontanella was born in Italy and applied for naturalization in 1939. Because of her fascist affiliations her request was not granted. A single woman, she regularly attended meetings of the fascio. Financially independent and apparently well-respected by the Toronto Italian community, Fontanella became fiduciary of the women's fascio by April 1937.47 Her brother, Dr Pasquale Fontanella, also heavily involved in the fascio, fled to the United States just before the outbreak of war.48 Her brother's flight must have had an impact on her internment, which started on 12 September 1940.49 Following an appeal, she was released on parole on 18 February 1941. The fifty-five-year-old Fontanella returned to Toronto, where she reregistered with the RCMR A dedicated Fascist who showed no change in her beliefs with the outbreak of war, she spent only five months in jail. Canadian-born Verna Lo Bosco, a twenty-nine-year-old single woman, was very active in the women's fascio. A teacher at the Italian school in Welland, Ont., from 1935 to 1938, when it was closed, she was employed as a bookkeeper. Lo Bosco also became in 1936 the secretary of Cristoforo Colombo club, where she spoke at the commemoration of the founding of Fascism. She was also secretary of women's lodge of the Sons of Italy. Lo Bosco led a group of students to Italian summer camps under the direction of the Italian Fascist party in 1939. She was interned on 14 September 1940. After an appeal to Justice J.D. Hyndman, in charge of internee appeals, she was released on 8 July 1941. Verna Lo Bosco spent only ten months in jail. Some claim that people were interned because neighbours and rivals informed on them. This appears to be the case with Maria Pressello, since there is no evidence that she was a leader in the fascist movement or that she had even made pro-fascist statements. A fifty-three-year-old housewife from Windsor, Ont., Pressello was interned on 14 June 1940 and asked to be kept isolated from the other internees, including the Italians.50 She was released exactly one year later, following an appeal to Justice J.D. Hyndman.51 By contrast, forty-two-year-old Luisa Guagneli was arrested for being an active member of the women's fascio and for spreading fascist propaganda in the Italian schools of Niagara Falls. A naturalized subject, she was held in a Toronto jail for six weeks before being sent to Kingston Penitentiary.52 She was then accused of conducting unauthor-

The Curious Case of Female Internees 161 ized correspondence - a charge that she vehemently denied. The investigator, Warden Allan, found Guagneli uncooperative. Declaring that she refused 'to adhere to the truth in questioning/ he concluded that 'we will give her case our special attention here ... All communications to or from Guagneli should be very carefully examined, and every possible guard must be kept to prevent her from resuming the activities which she appeared to have practiced during her incarceration in Toronto/53 Despite the warden's warning and Guagneli's membership in the women's fascio, she was released after five months. Given her profile, her early release on 24 February 1941 was surprising.54 Belgians

The three Belgian internees were seized from the SS Leopold in Halifax. Angele van Caster, Mathilde van der Maesen, and Antonia Peeters were unmarried foreign nationals in their thirties who strongly supported Hitler's regime. Passengers complained that van der Maesen had threatened to report anyone not supportive of Hitler to the German consul general, adding that reprisals would follow against the passengers' families in Germany. Special Cases

One woman avoided internment and arranged for the release of her husband, Antonio, by acting as an RCMP informant against the Italian community in Montreal. The IDC had initially recommended Dr Laura D'Anna's arrest. Described as 'a striking beauty, an intellectual and ... a graduate medical doctor/ the report added: 'Possessing a charming personality, coupled with other talents, she has worked untiringly for fascism and the successful organization and activities of the Feminine Fascio in Montreal are largely attributable to her efforts.'55 Italian-born and the mother of two children, D'Anna had become naturalized in November 1937. A fund-raiser for fascist activities aimed at children and adolescents, she organized the women's fascio in 1934 and was fiduciary of four sections, including Lachine, Mile End, Montcalm, and Ville Emard. D'Anna was also very active in the Sons of Italy and the dopolavoro. Marchioness Etta De Simone, wife of the Italian consul general in Montreal, was a close friend of hers. According to reports from secret agents, even after her husband's internment D'Anna remained active in the fascist movement (see inset on 162-3).

162 Michelle McBride Some well-connected middle-class Italian Canadians benefited from fascist affiliation and later used their privilege to escape internment. This memo from ST. Wood, Commissioner, RCMP, to the minister of justice, dated 28 May 1941, suggests how a former head of Montreal's Fascio Femminile, Dr Laura D'Anna, avoided internment and secured her husband's release:

SECRET MEMORANDUM TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE MINISTER OF JUSTICE Re: Dr. Antonio D'ANNA, Montreal, P.Q. It is desired to bring to your attention certain circumstances concerning Dr. Antonio D'ANNA, Montreal, an Italian physician, who was detained for interrogation on June 10,1940, and subsequently interned pursuant to the provisions of Regulation 21 of the Defence of Canada Regulations, which I feel warrants his release from internment on compassionate grounds. 2. The subject arrived in Canada from Italy during February, 1930, accompanied by his wife, Dr. Laura D'Anna. He acquired Canadian citizenship through naturalization on June 7,1937. This couple have two children, aged seven and four years, who were born in Montreal. The family returned to Italy for a three-months visit during 1938. 3. Investigation performed by this Force into the ideology and activities of the subject disclosed that he was an active participant in the Fascio of Montreal and its auxiliaries. In the course of the examination performed by Mr. Gerald Fauteux, K.C., Departmental Counsel, the subject admitted past membership in the Fascio but stated he had neither paid dues nor attended meetings of the Fascio following 1938. 4. Since both he and his wife are intelligent and cultured persons, they moved in the higher circles of society in the Italian colony and were thus thrown into constant association with the Italian Consular officials who, we know, wielded absolute control over the colony and could make or break the career of any compatriot whose ideology did not conform with that prescribed by Rome. Since the subject was the official physician of five Italian societies, there is reason to believe that his ostentatious display of Fascism may have been adopted to further the interests of his medical career. 5. The subject's wife, Dr. Laura D'Anna, was the Directress of the Feminine Fascio of Montreal and collaborated extensively with the Italian

The Curious Case of Female Internees

163

Consular Authorities in administrating the affairs of the Fascio. During the past six months this lady has provided this Force with information of inestimable value, the genuinity of which has been authenticated. No inducement was extended and she imparted the information with a sincerity above question. 6. With respect to her husband, Dr. Laura D'Anna quite frankly states that he was a member of the Fascio but she points out that he did not propagandize that ideology and his affiliation was largely the result of the existing circumstances, in that his practice would have suffered had he acted otherwise. Furthermore, he wished to visit Italy to acquaint his parents with his Canadian-born children and did not wish to invite difficulties with the State Authorities of Italy. Following their return from Italy, her husband gradually severed his Fascist connections. Dr. Laura D'Anna assures us that, despite her husband's previous Fascist affiliations, he is entirely loyal to Canada, and, if released, his deportment will give no cause for concern. 7. In the circumstances, it is felt that the liberty of the subject does not constitute the danger that was originally anticipated and I recommend that he be released from internment. Yours faithfully, [signed] S.T. Wood APPROVED [signed Ernest Lapo inte] Minister of Justice

There are two known cases of left-wing Canadian women who were arrested, interrogated, and threatened with internment: Annie Duller and Gladys MacDonald. Annie Duller (Guralnick) sat on the national executive of the Communist party, was a union organizer, became a Toronto alderman, and was business manager of the Clarion, the official organ of the Communist Party of Canada. Duller's speeches to strikers repeatedly got her into trouble with the RCMR She was arrested several times for agitation, including after the coal strike in Estevan, Sask., in 1931. Duller was jailed again in 1940 after an article she printed in the Clarion came to the attention of the RCMR56 Charged with violating the DOCR, she received a two-year sentence in the Women's Jail at Portage

164 Michelle McBride La Prairie outside Winnipeg, along with fellow communists Ida Corley, Ella Gehl, and Margaret Mills.57 After her release on 19 October 1942, Duller was questioned and threatened with internment.58 Unlike Duller, Gladys MacDonald was interned when she was caught secretly mimeographing the outlawed Saskatchewan Factory and Furrow, which she co-edited.59 Before her arrest, MacDonald had been a local organizer of the Communist party and secretary of the provincial branch. After serving a one-year sentence of hard labour in the Battleford Women's Gaol, she was transferred to Kingston Penitentiary. She was the only English-Canadian internee and the only female communist interned. It is unclear why this was the case, since more active communist leaders such as Annie Duller were released and other members, such as Decky Duhay, escaped jail or internment entirely. MacDonald arrived at Kingston Penitentiary on 25 September 1941, sick and anaemic, although according to the wardens of both Dattleford and Kingston she was a model prisoner. Warden Millard of Dattleford recommended her release on the grounds that her views had changed considerably and she now desired to aid Canada in its war effort.60 Her attitude changes were in line with the updated Communist party line, which came to support the war effort. MacDonald was interned for one year, during which time she refused to associate with the other internees (mostly fascists) and volunteered to work in the prison kitchen. She appeared before the Advisory Board in August 1942, stating that she was a loyal Canadian citizen of Scottish descent who wanted to fight against Fascism and Nazism.61 MacDonald was released on 9 September 1942, on the condition that she 'not participate in any way in propagandist or other activities in the Communist Party of Canada or of any organization over which the Communist Party exercises control or of any association, society, group or organization declared to be illegal under Regulation 39C of the Defence of Canada Regulations.'62 Troublesome behaviour occasionally resulted in a longer confinement. This is what happened to Gertrude Kulessa. After almost two years of imprisonment, she was as committed as ever to Germany, going so far as to regret having become a naturalized Canadian. Despite a good grasp of English, Kulessa wrote most of her letters in German, even those to the Canadian government. She was characterized as insolent for her foul language and her accusations that prison authorities were treating the internees badly. Kulessa demanded to be classified as a German national and attempted to have herself repatriated in exchange

The Curious Case of Female Internees 165 for Canadian women in Germany or occupied Europe, but because of her Canadian naturalization this was not possible. Warden Allan considered her type of behaviour to be fairly common among people confined for long stretches of time. Conditions It would appear that the conditions of internment for women at Kingston Penitentiary were superior to those for men. Unlike their male counterparts, women could see members of their immediate family with prior permission from Internment Operations. Visits were generally restricted to two people and lasted no more than fifteen minutes. They were supervised and had to be conducted in English or in the presence of a translator, whose costs were borne by the visitors.63 Women also received extra privileges, such as having a radio in the common area between their cells. During the Christmas season each received a daily allowance of money for additional rations and entertainment. Letters could be written on plain paper for which the internees assumed the postage costs or on cards supplied by the DIO. Each item was censored unless it was addressed to Internment Operations.64 While correspondence between internees at different internment camps was not usually allowed, an exception was made in the case of the women at Kingston Penitentiary, who could write to their relatives. By 1942 the DIO and the warden were permitting internees to go into Kingston on an individual basis with Matron Cherry. They went every third week, as long as they maintained 'good' behaviour. Although they could purchase small items, such as clothing, it was the matron who carried their money and communicated with the storekeepers. The outings were planned for the forenoon, when the stores were the quietist. In view of a spectacular attempt at escape by Haidinger, the warden of Kingston Penitentiary considered these outings as potentially dangerous. He therefore warned the internees that privileges would end if they attempted to escape, mail letters secretly, use the telephone, or send wires.65 Women needing medical attention were cared for by the penitentiary physician. In cases requiring surgery or hospitalization, internees were sent to a local civilian or military hospital, where to prevent them escaping they were left naked, instead of being assigned a guard. Haidinger was the only exception to this rule. It was thought that she would try to escape even without clothes.66

166 Michelle McBride Conclusion This examination of female internment clearly shows that the IDC's policy was haphazard. No women were interned from the National Unity Party, the umbrella organization made up of several domestic fascist groups including Quebec's NSCP, Winnipeg's Canadian National Party, and Toronto's Canadian Union of Fascists. As well, highranking members of the Italian women's fascio remained free, while others were arrested for non-political reasons. Many Germans were interned for expressing pro-German sentiments even though they did not belong to any political organization or pose a serious threat to the state. In part these differences reflected Robertson's opinion that Italian Canadians joined the fascio more often than not for social reasons. The IDC was often more lenient with members of the women's fascio. These women were jailed for shorter terms possibly because of the lack of public outcry against them as 'enemy aliens.' This did not prevent Italian Canadians from turning in their own neighbours because of petty jealousy. The case of Laura D'Anna shows that Italians were just as ready as other Canadians to exploit internment for their personal benefit. There seems to be no rational explanation for the fact that some women were interned and others were left at large. The IDC claimed it was interning only women who flagrantly violated the DOCK and who were a danger to the state. But this category included women who had venereal disease or ran a successful business. Rather, it would appear that women were interned for a variety of reasons, very few of which were solely political. The state's haphazard action reflected the IDC's belief that on the whole women were not subversive or genuine threats in the same way as their left-wing or fascist menfolk. Notes 1 See Ken Adachi> The Enemy That Never Was: A History of Japanese Canadians (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1976), and Ann Corner Sunhara, The Politics of Racism (Toronto: Lorimer, 1981). 2 Frances Swyripa, Wedded to the Cause: Ukrainian-Canadian Women and Ethnic Identity, 1891-1981 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 11. 3 CSIS, 87-A-130, vol. 7, Memo to O.C., 'C Division, from S.T. Wood. 25 Nov. 1937.

The Curious Case of Female Internees 167 4 CSIS, vol. 7, Re: Fascism - Italian - in Canada, Aug. 1938. 5 Ibid., 28 Oct. 1938. 6 CSIS, vol. 7, What Is the German Bund, Canada, and What Are Its Intentions: Directions and Regulations, 25 Nov. 1942, 3. 7 To get an appreciation of how neglected women are in fascist history, see Jonathan Wagner's Brothers beyond the Sea: National Socialism in Canada (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1981). Wagner's book focuses solely on the male members, stating: 'Fascist solidarity is based ... on the social community - the uniforms, the camaraderie, the power structure ..., "the male fighting band."' 8 CSIS, vol. 7, Re: National Unity Party - Montreal, 24 April 1939,1. 9 Ibid., 25 April 1939,1. 10 CSIS, vol. 7, Confidential Report Re: French Fascism, made by investigator from Life, New York, after three days of interviews, 1 June 1939, 6. 11 CSIS, 87-A-130, wallet 25, doc. 7, vol. 4, Re: National Unity Party of Canada - Montreal, 9 Feb. 1939. 12 CSIS, vol. 7, Re: National Unity Party - Montreal, 6 June 1939,1. 13 Ibid., 5 June 1939, 2. 14 Greg Kealey and Reg Whitaker, RCMP Security Bulletins: The War Series, 1939-1941 (St John's: Canadian Committee on Labour History, 1989), 1011. Kealey, 'The Surveillance State: The Origins of Domestic Intelligence and Counter-Subversion in Canada, 1914-1921, Intelligence and National Security 7 no. 3 (July 1992), 179-210. Larry Hannant, The Infernal Machine: Investigating the Loyalty of Canada's Citizens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 76, and the essays in part I of this volume. As well, see Carl Betke and Stan Horrall, Canada's Security Service: An Historical Outline, 1864-1966 (Ottawa: RCMP Historical Section, 1978); and Michelle McBride, 'From Internment to Indifference: An Examination of RCMP Response to Fascism and Nazism in Canada from 1934 to 1941,' MA thesis, Memorial University, 1997. 15 Reg Whitaker, 'Official Repression of Communism during World War II,' Labour/Le Travail 17 (spring 1986), 145-6. 16 Bavin was responding to a question by MacNeill when he replied that even women should be interned. NA, RG 25, vol. 1964, 855-E-39, part I. Minutes of Committee Meeting, 31 Aug. 1939. 17 CSIS, 87-A-130, vol. 7, The Nazi Party in Canada, 15 Feb. 1938, 25. 18 NA, RG 24, vol. 11249, Lt. Col. Streight to Commissioner S.T. Wood, 9 Oct. 1942. 19 NA, RG 14, vol. 2483, file 59. Memorandum, 15 July 1940.

168 Michelle McBride 20 Ibidv RCMP - Information on Various Individuals, 18 July 1942. 21 NA, MG 30, E163, vol. 14, Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee, 24 Aug. 1940, 7. 22 NA, RG 18, vol. 3563, Cll-19-2-2, vol. 1, Memorandum To: The InterDepartmental Committee. Re: Mrs. Guiseppina Di loia, (Female), Montreal, P.Q 23 NA, RG 18, vol. 3563. Cll-19-2-3, vol. 1, Memorandum To: The InterDepartmental Committee. Re: Mrs. Antonietta Mancuso, Montreal, P.Q., 27 Aug. 1940. 24 NA, RG 18, vol. 3563. Cll-19-2-3, vol. 1, Memorandum To: The InterDepartmental Committee. Re: Mrs. Carmela Frascarelli, (Female) Montreal, P.Q., 23 Sept. 1940. 25 NA, RG 18, vol. 3563, vol. 1. Cll-19-2-3, vol. 1, Memorandum To: The Inter-Departmental Committee. Re: Mrs. Etelvina Frediani, Toronto, Ontario, 26 Aug. 1940. 26 See Gumbo's essay in this volume. 27 On comparable experiences of male communist internees, see Radforth's essay in this volume. 28 Immediately after the outbreak of war, several jails reported increased numbers of convicts because of the large numbers of vagrant women with venereal diseases picked up after mobilization. NA, RG 24, C5408 HQ57236-84-2, District Officer Commanding Military Dist. 13 Brig. Conolly to Stethem, 28 May 1940. 29 NA, RG 24, vol. 11245, W. Preiswerk to C. Ritchie, Canada House, 15 Nov. 1940. 30 NA, RG 24, C5408, HQ57236-84-2, Treatment of Enemy Aliens - Female Internees - Correspondence with Warden Allan. 31 NA, RG 24, vol. 11245. Col. Stethem to Skelton, 7 Jan. 1941. 32 CSIS, 87-A-130, vol. 7, The Nazi Party in Canada, Feb. 1947, 59. 33 NA, MG 30, E163, vol. 2, dossier 145a, Re: Ulrey, Mrs. Donald, Regina, Saskatchewan, 22 July 1940. 34 NA, RG 24, vol. 6568. 5-1-1, vol. 3, Drysdale, Inspector, RCMP, to Col. Stethem, 27 Dec. 1940. 35 NA, RG 24, vol. 6568. 5-1-1, vol. 3, Drysdale, Inspector, RCMP, to Col. Stethem, 27 Dec. 1940. 36 NA, MG 30, vol. 1, file 169, Re: Mrs. Gertrude Kulessa. 37 NA, RG 18, vol. 3569, Wallet G. Department of Justice, Record of Internment Hearings, 1939-1945,16-508. Kulessa, Mrs. Gustave. RG 18, vol. 3568, 'C' List of Internees, RCMP, Central Registry Classification Sheet,

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38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54

169

and RG 24, C5408, HQ 650-C-1308, HQS7236-84-2. Letter from Warden Allan to Col. Streight, director of Internment Operations, 10 Aug. 1943. NA, MG 30, C149, John Stanton Brief, Re: Bertha Hower, 2. NA, RG 24, vol. 6586, 5-1-1, vol. 3, Lt. Col. Streight to Allan, Re: P/W F.8 Hower, Mrs. Bertha, 29 April 1942. NA, RG 24, C5408, HQ57236-84-2, Streight to Allan, Re: Internees' Correspondence, Fl, Haidinger, K.M.; F.18, Kulessa, G. NA, RG 18, vol. 3568, 'C List of Internees, RCMP Central Registry Classification Sheet. NA, RG 24, vol. 11245, Letter to the Swiss Consul-General, Montreal, from Interned German Women, 18 Sept. 1940. NA, RG 73, ace. 80-81/253, box 73, 21-1-3, Particulars: Detentu - Mrs. Johan Hans (Mary) Hilmer - Claybank, Saskatchewan, 17 Nov. 1941. NA, RG 73, ace. 80-81/253, box 73, 23-1, part II, 23-1-19. NA, RG 24, vol. 11245, Letter from Col. Stethem to Skelton, 7 Jan. 1941. NA, RG 24, vol. 6586, 5-1-1, vol. 3, Lt. Col. Stethem to N.C.O. in RCMP, Kingston, Ont. Re: Release of Female Internee, F.10, Mrs. Muriel Maria Burzle, 6 Nov. 1940. NA, MG 30, vol. 1, file 151, Report on Inter-Departmental Committee on Internment Cases, Re: Fontanella, Pasquale, Dr., 20 April 1940. NA, RG 18, vol. 3563, Cll-19-2-3, vol. 1, Memorandum to: The InterDepartmental Committee. Re: Maria Egilda Fontanella, Toronto, Ont. NA, RG 73, ace. 80-81/253, box 74, 23-1-12, Re: Female Internee Maria Egilda Fontanella, 4 Dec. 1940. NA, RG 73, ace. 80-81/253, box 73, 23-1-2, Re: Female Internee Presselo, Maria, 29 March 1941. NA, RG 24, C5408, HQ57236-84-2, Lapointe to Wood, Re: Mrs. Maria Presselo, 14 June 1941. NA, RG 73, ace. 80-81/253, box 73, file 23-1, part I, Allan to Governor of the Jail, Toronto, Ont., Re: Female Internee Louisa Guagneli, 18 Dec. 1940. NA, RG 73, ace. 80-81/253, box 73, 23-1 part I, Re: Female Internee Guagneli (F-ll), 27 Dec. 1940. Guagneli was suspected of having smuggled out letters while incarcerated at either Kingston Penitentiary or the Toronto jail, Allan to Col. Stethem, DIO, Re: Female Internee Guagnelli (F-ll). NA, RG 18, vol. 3563, Cll-19-2-3, vol. 3, Letter from Lapointe to Wood, 17 Feb. 1941, Re: Mrs. Luisa Guagneli. RG 18, vol. 3568, 'B' List of Internees, RCMP Central Registry Classification Sheet. NA, RG 24, vol. 6586, file 5-1-1, Release of Ell, Guagneli, Luisa, 22 Feb. 1941.

170 Michelle McBride 55 NA, RG 18, vol. 3563, Cll-19-2-3, Memorandum to: the Inter-Departmental Committee Re: Mrs. Laura D'Anna (female), 24 Sept. 1940. 56 Joan Sangster, Dreams of Equality: Women on the Canadian Left, 1920-1950 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989), 167. 57 Louise Watson, She Never Was Afraid: The Biography of Annie Buller (Toronto: Progress Books, 1976), 65. 58 NA, RG 18, vol. 3569, Wallet G, Record of Internment Hearings, 19391945,11-236, Buller, Mrs. Annie (Guralnick). 59 Sangster, Dreams of Equality, 167. 60 NA, RG 73, ace. 80-81/213, box 74, file 23-1-7, Undertaking, 18 Sept. 1942. 61 NA, RG 14, vol. 2482, Petitions re: Gladys MacDonald, file 48. 62 NA, RG 73, ace. 80-81/213, box 74, file 23-1-17, Undertaking, 18 Sept. 1942. 63 NA, RG 24, C5408, HQ57236-84-2, Assistant director of Internment Operations Col. Stethem to warden Allan, Re: Visits for Female Internees, 7 Nov. 1940. For more information on male internees, see Radforth's essay in this volume. 64 NA, RG 73, ace. 80-81/253, box 73, file 23-1, part 1, Re: German Nationals Interned at Prison for Women, 5 Dec. 1940. 65 NA, RG 24, C5408, HQ57236-84-2, Lt. Col. Streight to warden Allan, Re: Letter from Mrs. Mary Hilmer requesting outside privileges, 26 Sept. 1942. 66 NA, RG 73, ace. 80-81/253, box 73, part I, file 23-1, part 1, Lt. Col. Stethem, Assistant director of Internment Operations, to Warden Allan, 28 Sept. 1940.

7 The 'Camp Boys7:

Interned Refugees from Nazism PAULA J. DRAPER

In my mind the injustice of the whole thing still rankles. After all, we were antiNazis. We were genuine refugees from German oppression. We lost our families to the Holocaust. We lost our chance for education in Germany. We lost all our possessions ... And we had to start life anew in England and due to the internment experience we had to start life anew in Canada again, penniless and without support... Somehow our youth was stolen away from us. By the time we came out, mentally, we were already beginning to be middle-aged. We had gone through too much ... It's a pity, but that's what happened. Interned Jewish refugee

One of the more bizarre stories of Jewish survival during the Holocaust occurred in prisoner of war camps in Canada between 1940 and 1944. The odyssey of the interned refugees from Germany, Austria, and Italy took them from the brink of death in Europe, through refuge in England, to incarceration in refugee internment camps in Canada, construction of a semblance of normality there, and a long struggle for release. It is a tale of both comic and tragic proportions - a Holocaust story with a happy ending. Many German and Austrian Jewish men sent to Nazi concentration camps in the late 1930s were released on condition that they emigrate. While a number of western European nations accepted refugees, only the United Kingdom opened its doors more than a crack. By September 1939 there were 76,000 Germans and Austrians in Britain. Eighty-five per cent were refugees. But in May 1940, as German armies overran western Europe, the British government began the mass internment of most German and Austrian males from sixteen to sixty, as well as

172 Paula J. Draper Italian nationals, also including some Jews. Fearing a German invasion, Britain decided to transfer some internees to the dominions of Canada and Australia. Four ships set sail for Canada in June and July of 1940. On 1 July the Arandora Star was torpedoed, with a loss of 603 lives, including many prominent German and Italian anti-fascists and 150 Jewish refugees. Most of the survivors were transferred to another ship, the Dunera Star, to be sent to Australia. The three ships that did land in Canada carried 2,284 refugees, whose ordeal was just beginning.1 As for Canada and the interned refugees, Ottawa had been pressed by the British to accept prisoners of war and 'dangerous enemy aliens/ only to discover on their arrival that these were 'innocent refugees/2 The British soon offered to return them to England and release them after each case was reviewed by a British representative. This procedure could be eliminated if 'the Canadian Government are prepared to allow them to remain at liberty in Canada and they themselves wish to be there/3 The British were admitting that they had made a mistake. However, the director of the Immigration Branch of the Department of Mines and Resources, Frederick Charles Blair, reflecting an anti-Jewish public mood, regarded appeals for the release of these wartime refugees as a Jewish plot to circumvent Canada's restrictive immigration policies. Frustrated by their indefinite incarceration, more than half the refugees decided to chance the dangerous Atlantic crossing in order to regain their freedom in England. The rest remained imprisoned by those who claimed to be fighting for the very ideals that the refugees held dear. They felt that they had escaped one anti-Semitic world only to be locked away in another. The military men who ran Canadian internment camps had a hard time handling the refugees who called themselves 'the camp boys/ While some commandants and guards displayed tolerance, if not sympathy, for their prisoners, others combined anti-German and antiJewish attitudes when dealing with them. 'It cannot be forgotten/ wrote one particularly hostile camp commandant, 'that they are German-born Jews. Jews still retain much of the same instinct they had 1940 years ago/ 'The combination of this insidious instinct/ he added, and 'the German habit of breaking every pledge ever made, is not a particularly easy one to handle except by maintaining strict discipline/4 Canadian Internment Camps The refugees were distributed among internment camps in New Bruns-

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wick (Camp B, Ripples), in Ontario (Camp R, Red Rock, and Camp Q, Monteith), and in Quebec (Camp T, Trois-Rivieres; Camp L, Quebec City; Camp S, St Helen's Island, Montreal; Camp I, lie aux Noix; Camp A, Farnham; and Camp N, Sherbrooke). Some of the internees spent time in several camps. The experiences of these 'camp boys' not only shed light on the personal tragedies and resilience of Jewish survivors5 but also reveal the hypocrisies and ironies that characterize the history of Canadian internments. Camp R One of these ironies was the mixing of refugees with Nazis in some camps. At Camp R, located in Red Rock, near Lake Superior, six miles west of Nipigon, the majority of the internees were pro-Nazi Germans, although other nationalities were also present. Among the refugees fifty men considered themselves Jews, but the British liaison officer noted that 'many of the Jewish race are Catholics or Protestants.'6 His intelligence report provides intriguing details on the remarkable mix of prisoners. 'At present there are both kinds of Germans. Those who are for Hitler and those who are not... The Anti-Hitler group contains no less that 15 distinct types of prisoners... genuine refugees, near communists, political refugees, police fugitives, adventurers, currency smugglers, international Trade Unionists, and probably a few Nazi agents in sheep's clothing. Numerically it is computed that out of some 1,100 prisoners, 85% admire Nazi Socialism while about 15% regard it with utter horror and loathing ... Approximately 900 of the prisoners are seamen ... More than 200 of these seamen are under 20.'7 The internees were met on arrival by the Fort Garry Horse Guards, who were expecting enemy parachutists and therefore dangerous prisoners. According to one Jewish refugee, 'Vigilant soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets [were] ready to charge at us at any moment.' The prisoners were ordered to remain in their unfurnished huts and to stay clear of windows and doors or risk being shot. Despite the beauty of the scenery, this camp was a desolate place. Enclosed by thick barbed wire and surrounded by towers equipped with machine-guns, huts holding twenty-eight men became their home for endless months.8 A British observer described the uniforms issued to all the internees - 'a circular flat-topped hat, strangely reminiscent of that worn by habitual criminals in England, a jacket on whose back was emblazoned a huge red circle, and a pair of bright blue trousers seamed

174 Paula J. Draper by a broad red band. The whole effect/ he noted, 'was derogatory and ridiculous/9 Inside the barbed wire the internees were free to roam the camp, required only to appear at the two daily roll-calls. Daily life tended to revolve around food. It was, by all accounts, good. Meals were prepared by seasoned chefs and stewards captured from German Atlantic luxury passenger liners who, according to one refugee, 'still wore their white apparel when serving the meals/ The prisoners and their jailors enjoyed the combination of 'high quality' Canadian food and gourmet preparation. There was a great deal of time, and very little to do in Camp R. No work was provided, so the internees created their own. There were some financial incentives. One refugee recalled 'the tempting and generous offers made by the Canadian officers and soldiers [who wanted] Nazi decorations, Parachute medals and other emblems ... A regular factory for the production of Nazi emblems was soon set going, with the result that although we arrived completely penniless ... a steady inflow of dollars, cigarettes and chocolate was soon forthcoming/10 Some educational facilities were eventually provided, with internees teaching the courses. The anti-Nazis were a varied group. The Jews, the elderly, and the politically active tended to form their own sub-groups. As Clive Teddern recalled, their interaction 'was fairly good natured, even though little things, like having a little extra butter, or jam for breakfast in the morning were of momentous importance. It could easily lead to a fight ... It was a very sore point if anyone got a little more than anyone else.'11 In these small disputes, people would side with their friends, and since economic status held no currency in the camp structure, these friendships were usually based on political, ethnic, and educational grounds. The strain of confinement led some to mental collapse. After only four days in Camp R, Rudolf Singer, an elderly Jew, had a complete nervous breakdown. He was 'escorted to Fort William ... under Doctor's care'12 and died in December of pneumonia. An inmate in his thirties known as 'the boy scout' because he had been a scout master and was arrested in his uniform, became increasingly mentally disturbed in the camp. As internment dragged on, 'he became extremely aggressive and vulnerable. He had outbursts of uncontrollable temper and violence. In fact it came to such a state that someone had to knock him out and he was taken to the camp hospital/13 Other refugees were eventually sent from Camp R to mental institutions. Indeed, all the interned refugees were at some time affected by despair, as their de-

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mands to be removed from this predominantly Nazi camp fell on deaf ears. The isolation played on their nerves. It took months to receive mail. And in that time the only outside representative to arrive was from the Swiss legation, representing German interests in Canada. Religious practice allowed some of the internees to maintain positive mental attitudes, and facilities were accordingly made available for Christians and Jews. Few of the Jewish refugees kept dietary laws, so the most they required was the time and place for sabbath services. Canadian Catholic and Protestant clergy cared for the Christians, but requests for a rabbi were denied. Jewish services were held, attracting even those who had not been observant before, and served as a means to promote solidarity. At first the Jews were constantly harassed by the Nazis, who held 'noisy boxing training exercises in the adjoining hut/14 Eventually they were allowed to move to a quiet hut, where forty men stood in a bare, dirty room while guards with fixed bayonets stood outside. Christmas came, and the refugees were still living side by side with Nazis. While they struggled to obtain chanukah candles, the Nazis received numerous parcels and erected a large tree and lights. Inevitably, the anti-Nazis were brought into direct conflict with their fellow inmates. The Camp R experience was unique among Canada's refugee internment camps, in that confrontations were part of the routine of daily camp life.15 On 1 October 1940, for example, a Targe' group of Nazi youths 'invaded the Camp hospital' and beat up the two refugee doctors, leaving the other two doctors untouched. Eugen Spier was part of a group that 'charged down to the hospital.' The violence ended only after 'the guards started shooting.' The refugees decided to go on a hunger strike until they were separated from the Nazi internees.16 The hunger strike ended on 3 October after the commandant, Major Berry, promised to have the refugees sent to their own camp. This promise, however, took a long time to materialize. In the meantime, Berry was persuaded to allow the refugees separate huts and arranged different meal times.17 Even the Canadian Jewish community approached the Jews in Red Rock with suspicion. An official with the United Jewish Refugee and War Relief Agencies (UJRA) stated: 'Our information is that all internees at Camp R are categorized as Class "A" [dangerous]... Our organization is interested only in Class "B" and "C" [friendly] internees, irrespective of whether conceivably there might be injustice in neglect-

176 Paula J. Draper ing the Class "A's/"18 Confused by the official, but mistaken pro-Nazi status of the Camp R inmates, the UJRA felt that the Jewish community could not risk appearing to consort with them and lose their hold on sympathetic public opinion. This led one leader of the Canadian Jewish Congress to ask: 'How it is possible for Orthodox Jews who need prayer books and kosher food, to be classed as pro-Nazi/19 Since October 1940, Commandant Berry had promised the anti-Nazis that they would be removed. In November, individuals began receiving transfers and on 25 January 1941 seventy-five men were moved to Sherbrooke (Camp N), and thirteen to Farnham (Camp A). Others headed back across the Atlantic. On 17 March the last anti-Nazis were transferred to Camp A. These included two Jews, approximately forty anti-Nazi civilians, and forty International Seamen.20 Only then did their stories join those of the other camp boys. Camp S

Certain aspects of life were common to all the camps housing refugees after October 1940, but each also developed its own distinctive character, depending on its administration, the prison conditions, and the composition of its internees. All housed German and Austrian civilians and a handful of other nationalities. The exception was Camp S, where a handful of interned Italian Jews were among the disparate group of Italians arriving on board the Ettrick, on 13 July 1940. The 401 Italian internees were housed in an old prison on St Helen's Island, across from Montreal. Most of these unfortunate Italians haphazardly rounded up in England were innocent of any anti-British activities.21 Many had been in the food and restaurant business in England and Scotland, which accounts for perhaps another distinct feature of Camp S - the high quality of its food. Otherwise, conditions were grim. A German refugee who spent time at this camp commented on the 'dungeon-like' atmosphere. 'You saw Montreal across the river, which I think somehow made your confinement feel worse.' Yet to outsiders, it seemed that those in Camp S 'were surprisingly jolly/ All government visitors commented that the Italians were 'remarkably cheerful and have few complaints.' Canadian military inspectors noted that, in contrast to the other camps, 'the whole area ... is very neat and tidy, and the discipline amongst the prisoners is excellent. Whenever one passed the prisoners sprang to attention. It was a pleasure to visit this camp.'22 Since no one had investigated the backgrounds of the Italians before

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their deportation, it was left to the British representative, Alexander Paterson, to take on this task. Rough estimates suggested that 60 per cent were anti-fascist and 40 per cent fascist. Based on testimony and reports that he gathered in Camp S, Paterson was 'inclined to think that the Italians prefer a safe war and a safe sea/ He found that 'many of these men, who had been born in Scotland, were only interned because at the statutory age they had not renounced their Italian descent' because 'they did not wish in the event of war to be conscripted to fight against Italy - or perhaps anyone else ... If war comes, they wish, at the end of it, to be on the winning side ... They will then go and sell ice cream to the winners.' A German-Jewish student visiting from another camp agreed with this sympathetic (if patronizing) depiction: 'I don't recall any politics with them. I really feel they weren't very politically oriented/ Indeed some described having felt 'mothered by these Italian men, who entertained and played soccer matches with the refugee boys/23 There were, however, about one hundred confessed Fascist internees, including, noted Paterson, 'the leader of the camp and his pugilistic brother/ Therein lay the potential for conflict. There were also thirty well-educated Jewish and political refugees who protested their incarceration among Fascists and were 'subject to constant friction and irritation/24 Among them was Guido Foa, a twenty-seven-year-old whose father had been Jewish. After losing his job because of racial laws, Foa left Italy for England 'hoping to build up a new life/ Giulio Perugia, twenty-eight, held a doctorate in agricultural science and lectured at the University of Florence before he was forced out.25 A Jewish doctor, Giulio Cantoni, had been involved in pharmacological research at Oxford University when he was interned. Released to Cuba on his American visa, he wrote to the Jewish community in Montreal urging it to assist his Jewish friends left behind in Camp S 'to recover a little mental peace and serenity, as really the atmosphere of Camp S is unbearable for a pro-British Jewish refugee/26 Jews were not the only anti-fascists in Camp S. Cantoni pleaded the case of a young merchant seamen, Bruno Castellani, who had sided with the refugees in camp and wanted to be removed with them. 'Having been with Castellani for many months and in different circumstances/ wrote Cantoni, 'I have not the least doubt in assuring you of his feelings and really hope that you will be able to do something to help this very brave and honest young man/ Other anti-fascists included political refugees such as Livio Zeno-Zencovich, a Lutheran historian. Paterson arranged for some to return to England.27

178 Paula J. Draper

Yeshiva students pursuing religious studies in Camp I, lie aux Noix/ Fort Quebec, c. 1941-2. Several later became rabbis in Canada.

Until January 1941 this small band of Italian refugees was overlooked by the UJRA and the non-denominational Canadian National Committee for Refugees (CNCR). Then, with the aid of Paterson, successful efforts were made to have the remaining anti-fascists transferred to Camps N, A, and I (lie aux Noix). By August 1944, fifteen of these Italians had been released for temporary residence in Canada.28 Camp Life The Education of Internment Life in the camps was perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this strange chapter of Canadian internment. Among the prisoners were

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Internees were put to work at various jobs, such as felling trees and trimming lumber, making nets, and sewing uniforms and knitting socks for Canadian soldiers overseas. Here, Jewish refugees at Camp N, Sherbrooke are engaged in war work. Large red circles on the backs of the uniforms made easy targets in any escape attempt.

some of the leading intellectuals, political activists, entertainers, musicians, and professionals of Germany and Austria. The impressionable young people included Klaus Fuchs (a future Soviet spy), Emil Fackenheim (the pre-eminent Jewish philosopher), and Gregory Baum (Catholic theologian). They mixed with students from yeshivas (Jewish seminaries) and universities, as well as merchant seamen. Despite its tedium and the petty tyrannies of the administration, camp life was an educational experience. Indeed, the camps were little male cities, replete with cafes, sporting areas, schools, workshops, and

180 Paula J. Draper places of worship. Canadian Jewish organizations and other charitable groups donated supplies. At Camp I, yeshiva students resumed religious studies. Everyone learned English. Most tried to use the 'lost time' wisely. The challenge was to maintain a sense of humour in face of the irony of their predicament. Sports and the arts served as time-consuming distractions. Abundant pools of refugee talent meant a vibrant cultural life. Once the regulations were relaxed, even tennis was possible, and in Camp N the courts were opened with some pomp and ceremony. After suffering a scratch from a ginger ale bottle used to christen the gate, the commandant 'was immediately besieged with bandages, iodine and even the MO... Thereafter it was his questionable pleasure to witness three of the worst played sets of tennis imaginable.'29 At Camp I, swimming in the river was permitted. After athletic events, refugees could repair to their coffee-houses, where expert bakers prepared European delicacies, and, amid the coffee and cake, a sense of happier pasts could be recaptured, for a time. Some men returned to their huts to listen to radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. Camp artists, such as Oscar Cahen,30 Robert Langstadt, Walter Ruhman, and Kurt Wiehs quietly polished their talents. Their drawings illustrated camp newspapers and decorated barren huts. One exhibition of nudes 'was ordered either to be clothed, or to be closed down.'31 Theatrical productions were common in the first year, before releases depleted the pool of talent. Among the professional actors there was Anton Diffring, later seen as a stock figure in British films about the war, usually playing a Nazi. Productions were mounted in both English and German; they ranged from skits and songs about camp life to operatic arias and violin, accordion, and piano recitals.32 Indeed music permeated the camps. Men pooled their funds to buy classical recordings for music appreciation groups. Serious musicians such as Helmut Blume, Gerhard Kander, and Johnny Neumark were busy, as were popular writers Freddy Grant and Ernest Sawady. Grant wrote the camp favourites - 'Knocking at the Gates of the States' and 'You'll Get Used to It' ('You can scream and you can shout, they will never let you out/). Sawady wrote to boost morale, as the following excerpt from his 'Internees' Journey to Canada' illustrates. We'll keep our sense of humour, Hope for a better day. And let no idle rumour, Our faith or feeling sway.

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That later we may answer: 'We were interned, fis known But still it was quite pleasant, We had a lot of fun.'

Young Henry Kreisel, who later became a writer in Canada, wrote of the solace that music brought to the refugees. ... And then - the music ceased to play. And the barbed wire that surrounded me, And the soldiers who were guarding, Rose out of the darkness In which they had fallen.33

Refugees and military authorities alike enjoyed the cultural activities of camp life. But as incarceration dragged on, the frequency and vibrancy of cultural events lessened, and an air of melancholy spread over the camps. Writing was a major occupation. Countless hours were spent composing letters, diaries, petitions, and appeals. Newspapers, printed by the inmates in English and German, were filled with the humour and pathos of camp life. They included editorials, sports, war news, personal problems, as well as poetry, essays, and short stories. The Camp N paper invited Ginger Rogers to visit her 600 admirers there: 'Regardless of any notices to the contrary in an unenlightened press, (my friends and co-unfortunates) have been, and are, and will be firmly, steadfastly, unhesitantly, unswervingly, hotly, thrillingly, intensely, constantly, unreservedly and simply unshakeably attached and devoted to you; that you are their Queen, Guardian Angel... and good fairy; in one word, that as one man, they are in love with you/ Another writer imagined what would happen if he could make a pact with the Devil. Suddenly, 'Sidney G. Lucifer, Assistant Secretary to the Infernal Refugee Board,' appeared. After selling his soul, the writer was released and made 'a bee-line for the nearest lavatory/ locked the door, and stayed an hour. These were the dreams of internment.34 Writing helped hone English-language skills, an important consideration, as most refugees envisioned their futures in North America. There were even formal debates, held 'in accordance with English debating societies/ Refugees watched 'with mouths agape' as their cointernees argued both serious and humorous topics in flawless English.35 These activities also proved useful for maintaining morale and offered a constructive outlet for pent-up hostilities.

182 Paula J. Draper Camp life offered a variety of learning experiences. Schools were organized and provided academic, religious, and technical training. In Camp N alone there were seven different educational programs operating simultaneously. Internees were eventually able to write McGill University matriculation exams at Camp S in order to enter university on release. Camp Politics

Although the most politically active refugees were the Communists and Zionists, ideology as such did not interest the majority of inmates, who were more concerned with the struggle to secure decent living conditions and release. From the beginning, camp administrators encouraged the formation of a refugee power hierarchy. Initially camp spokesmen were appointed by commandants, usually because of their command of English. Within the camps, democracy prevailed, with a pyramid extending from the camp spokesman down to the hut leaders. A group of men elected with the spokesman acted as a governing committee. Elections, wrote internee Harry Loewy were a major event. '[They] are fought in a determined manner' as though 'seats in the House of Commons [were] at stake/ Election posters were everywhere. In one campaign the most popular slogan was: 'For Freedom still this year, vote for Heller and Dr. Bahr.' The post of spokesman was important. He represented the refugees in all dealings with the commandant, although his influence was limited. Loewy explained that the military nature of the camps restricted any 'give and take.' 'If the current spokesman turned out to be a man of gumption and courage/ an unsympathetic commandant would ensure 'that he was either declared persona non grata or that he was transferred to another camp. Some spokesmen realized early the futility and frustration of their position and subsequently resigned/36 Still, there were benefits to the top job. A spokesman had direct access to the outside and was likely to win speedy release. Many internees resented this. Friends of those in power could be assigned better jobs, such as working in the kitchens, or be assured that their cases would get a hearing. Internal disputes among the refugees, involving petty squabbling and even fist fights, were solved through their own tribunal, composed of elected officers. But when frustrations resulted in strikes, the military accused the refugees of being 'uncooperative/ and turned to armed

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force and intimidation.37 In these cases the spokesman was usually summarily dismissed by the commandant. Camp administrations generally saw the internees, especially the Jews, as selfish, unpatriotic, and just a plain nuisance. The accusation of selfishness was especially unfair. Jewish refugees, despite their position and overall poverty, upheld the tradition of tzedekah (philanthropy). Many made donations to Jewish charities from their salary of thirty cents a day. In Camp A they pledged $360 to the UJRA on the third anniversary of Kristallnacht. Non-Jewish internees also contributed to the fund. In Camp N, concerts raised money for the allied war effort, including the Red Cross and the Queen's Canadian Fund of Air Raid Victims. In Sherbrooke a large campaign was mounted for the Canadian Zionist Organization, and in Camp I money was raised to assist Jews in Poland.38 For all their problems, the internees did not lose sight of the true victims of the war. Perhaps better than others, they sensed the immensity of the tragedy faced daily by the Jews of Europe. Anxious to fight in the war against fascism, they could only feel that their internment was an 'enormous waste of good will and waste of manpower and a waste of everything.'39 Morale

Individuals responded differently to their shared plight. Some found refuge in self-discipline, keeping clear of those who lost interest in life. Some gravitated to small groups, seeking out kindred spirits and avoiding conflict. But it was often difficult to fight the boredom, depression, and despair. A YMCA representative who was frequently in the camps reported on the 'magnificent' determination of some 'to keep themselves occupied and interested in the community life of the camp,' despite the injustice of their situation. Night-time provided the hardest hurdles. 'I remember I would wake up in the middle of the night/ one refugee reflected. 'Then I would ask myself: "Am I dreaming? Is it real? ... You who run away from Hitler, you are interned by the British?" ... That happened to me very often.'40 Depression was common among the young, separated from their parents and feeling very alone. They talked about how fortunate they were to be out of Europe yet struggled with the frustration of not knowing the fate of their loved ones. They traced endless circuits of the camps, talking and arguing. Julius Pfeiffer, the camp joker, recalled: 'I

184 Paula J. Draper tried to kill my time in order to forget that I was in the camp, [I] didn't know what to do with my life ... where my wife was, whether she was alive - my two children, my parents, so I made jokes/41 After the war he found his wife and children, who had survived Bergen-Belsen. Rumours, gossip, and bickering became a way of life. One refugee recorded in his diary: 'The continuous dirty arguing and insulting gets on one's nerves. Every chance is being used to interfere with one's neighbour, to insult him; he is careless, egoistic, narrow-minded, etc.' If one refugee vented his frustration on a neighbour, another might translate frustration into insubordination. Just breaking camp rules, no matter how minor the infraction, could give an internee some feeling of autonomy. Although they were well-fed, the camp boys pilfered food from the kitchens just to 'get things across from the guards.' Goodnatured rivalry, especially between the Austrians and Germans, was a common way to vent pent-up frustrations. 'They call us Pfiefkes/ recalled one Jewish internee, 'which has all the connotations of a dimwitted Prussian mail carrier. We ... call them Donaufetzen (Danube Rags), implying some sleazy and shiftless traits in their character.' Escape was not a real option. 'Where the hell would you go?' remarked one internee. 'Everyone was happy to have a roof over their head, and be looked after in a sense, except that it was becoming too long.' The trick to maintaining sanity was to resign oneself to the endless waiting. 'There was a stage,' wrote another, 'where some people even said the food was good. The treatment was good. They said that if only they had some female companionship, they wouldn't even leave the place.'42 Sexuality

The absence of women was felt acutely by the 'camp boys.' One internee remembers the pipe dreams of a rather shady character who began digging a runnel, not to escape, but to bring in prostitutes. Some of the men found Canadian girls with whom to correspond by mail. For a few of the internees, homosexual encounters and relationships were part of the camp experience. The youngest refugee in one camp was subjected to the sexual advances of a popular guard. Apparently no one understood why the boy avoided this sergeant, who was so kind and generous to them all. Yet few of the refugees were unaware of the activities of the handful of overt homosexuals among them. Commenting on their seduction techniques, one internee recalled: 'They did

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exceptionally well, with candlelight and reading poetry. A great deal like taking out a woman.' In some of the huts sections were cordoned off with blankets, and same-sex relations, or persistent rumours of them, became a fact of life. One internee explained: 'There were some people with strong homosexual tendencies who were trying to spread the "gospel." And I think some people who were lonely, or who were used to proper married life, and proper sex life and had sex drives did form some liaisons. I think that's only natural ... I would say that homosexual activities were confined to the minority.'43 Interviewees who spoke on homosexual activities in camp did so in a dispassionate tone. Their unsolicited comments confirm the observation that sexuality was considered a natural part of these men's lives, and its private expression was tolerated. For the majority, sex was probably more fantasy than reality. It was natural that the youths seemed most preoccupied. Older refugees were doubtful whether many of the youngsters 'did have any previous serious sex entanglements, but they nevertheless talked like true Don Juans. The same ribald stories were told over and over again relating the conquests they made just prior to internment/ Loewy observed that 'as a rule the men sublimated their sex urges by reading the more lurid stories in the True Confession type magazines, regularly "organized" from the soldiers' quarters.'44 The Struggle for Release While the refugees battled the government with petitions, letters, and strikes, several voluntary organizations, such as the Canadian Jewish Congress, worked tirelessly for their release and admittance to Canada. In the first year of internment the only refugees released into Canada were a handful of skilled technicians requested by the Department of Munitions and Supplies and eight men with first-degree relatives resident in Canada. By the spring of 1941, the British authorities had cleared all the refugees of any hint of suspicion, released those interned in Britain, and were pressuring Canada to take responsibility. Their reaction was to reclassify the camps as 'Refugee Camps.' Little else changed. The issue of release from the camps was raised in Parliament as public opinion turned in the internees' favour.45 Yet F.C. Blair was not about to give up without a fight, especially if release led to immigra-

186 Paula J. Draper tion. The pro-refugee lobby realized that a test case was necessary. In it, Blair met his match. An internationally known American actress and monologist, Ruth Draper had a special interest in the interned refugees. She considered a young Italian, seventeen-year-old Arturo Vivante, as family, having once had a love affair with his uncle. Draper had met Lauro de Bosis in 1927. Although he was many years her junior, she became devoted to this Jewish poet and member of the anti-Mussolini underground. In October 1931 the adventurous but foolhardy de Bosis piloted a small plane over Rome, dumping anti-fascist leaflets from the cockpit until he was forced to flee with the Italian air force on his tail. He was never heard from again. In 1937 de Bosis's sister's family, including Arturo, settled in England. Arturo attended school in Worcester. In 1940 he was shipped to Canada and sent to Camp S. Hearing of Arturo's plight, Ruth Draper set about trying to obtain his release. She wanted to bring him into the United States, where American relatives could take care of him. But U.S. authorities would not accept internees, claiming that if Canada felt it necessary to keep them locked up, they must be dangerous. So Draper set out to do what she could on her own. Renowned for her efforts at raising money for war relief, Draper toured army camps, canteens, and hospitals, cheering up the men and performing. In January 1940 she gave twenty-six performances in twentyeight days in Canada, raising $48,400 for the British Red Cross. Beginning in April 1941, Draper gave another eighteen performances for the Red Cross in eastern Canada. It was during this trip that she pressed for Arturo's release. First, she turned to her American connections. In a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, Draper requested the First Lady's help, explaining how Arturo was 'a splendid boy of the finest character, scholarly and intelligent and the whole de Bosis family are the most remarkable and superior people I know anywhere.' She concluded: 'I have been waiting and hoping for ten months to get this boy out of confinement. I hear now that the American Legion and certain members in Congress are definitely working against admission of any person of foreign birth into the United States who has been in internment camps, in spite of the fact that many have the highest recommendations ... and I am impelled by my great desire to see justice done these boys, particularly the one of whom I am so fond, and I therefore approach you and beg you to intercede on their behalf.'46 When Eleanor Roosevelt did not produce results, Draper played her Canadian hand.

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On 28 April 1941 Draper gave a benefit performance in Ottawa. Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who was expected, did not attend. A disappointed Draper wrote to King about Vivante, promising to get him into the United States when the immigration 'impasse' was overcome. King passed along Draper's request to Norman Robertson at the Department of External Affairs, who confirmed the details concerning Vivante. 'The chief difficulty/ commented Robertson to King, was that the 'the Director of Immigration fears that a precedent might be established which might result in the release in Canada of a large number of the refugees who could not be easily absorbed into the community.' But King was more concerned with keeping Draper happy. In a letter to Blair's superior, the minister of mines and resources, Thomas Crerar, King stated that he wanted Vivante released. He wrote that while the boy did not fit into the accepted release categories, 'in view of the record of his family which includes the brave flight over Rome by his uncle ... and his brother's present service as a soldier in the British forces, I feel that it is worse that ungracious, it is wholly wrong to keep him interned. I hope, therefore, that you may find it possible to take action for his release.' The decision was now out of Blair's hands. A few days later King wrote Draper assuring her of his support: 'I let it be known that I was interested in seeing as favourable a decision of the matter made as speedily as might be possible.'47 Was King truly touched by Vivante's plight, or did his personal admiration for Draper lead him to this decision? Or, considering the adverse publicity that Draper could stir up, was King's decision purely political? Whatever his reasons, King's action led to the crumbling of the Immigration Branch's last defence, as Blair had feared. On 13 May, King presented cabinet with a proposal for the release of internees. Vivante would be the first. All applicants, he allowed, 'should be dealt with sympathetically, on their merits and, provided that the bona fides of applicants were established, and reasonable guarantees forthcoming as to maintenance, permission should be granted.'48 The Vivante case had broken through. King's initiative, however, still left room for administrative interpretation. Blair was determined that few refugees would pass the test. On 15 May, Crerar wrote to King, confident that Vivante would be released 'within a few days.' All that remained was the formality of British approval. But it would be two months before Arturo tasted

188 Paula J. Draper freedom. And it was, of all people, Alexander Paterson who stood in his way! For the British representative, the UJRA, and the CNCR, all recognized that the Vivante case was their foot in the door. They were determined to make the most of it. So, in response to the Canadian request for Vivante's release, Paterson protested 'that it was difficult to ask for a special release for the protege of an American citizen when other boys in the camps with relatives and friends in Canada provided even more urgent reasons for release in the Dominion/ After both Blair and Crerar pointed out 'that the Canadian Government was considerably indebted to Miss Draper/ Paterson replied that he was 'unable, in conformity with the principles governing the administration of British justice to cable home to the effect that anxious parents ... could secure the release of their boys in Canada if they would contribute $10,000 to the Canadian Red Cross Society.' Paterson then addressed his concerns to the under-secretary of state, Norman Robertson. He laid down his conditions. If the proposal to release Vivante in Canada was 'accompanied by an assurance on the part of the Immigration Department that a considerable number of schoolboys and students shall similarly be released in this country/ Paterson suggested, 'then the admission of Vivante will be of gain to all concerned and will be welcomed as a liberal gesture on the part of the Canadian Government in helping to atone for some of the mistakes of my government/49 The ploy worked, slowly. While Blair was pressed to secure a compromise with Paterson, the prime minister was incensed to discover that Vivante was still incarcerated. Directing his venom at Blair, King told Robertson 'that he gave his word as Prime Minister that the man should be released, and that Mr. Crerar had given him his word that this should be done. "I want no more nonsense about it. I expect this to be done/" King also asserted that cabinet had agreed that 'sympathetic consideration should be given to other similar cases/50 And Paterson was determined not to leave Canada until the rule that would free Vivante was generally applied. Arturo Vivante was released on 10 July 1941 under an agreement that would, at first, permit the release, under sponsorship of Canadians, of approximately one hundred refugees under the age of twenty-one. A relieved prime minister wrote to Ruth Draper that he had begun 'to despair of officialdom ever doing its part to have Vivante given his freedom/51 Eventually, schemes were worked out whereby individuals could be released to study at universities if they were sponsored by Canadian

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families, farmers could request internees to help them, and skilled workers could be released for war work. The process was slow. Blair had the final authority on every release, and he used his power to obstruct the process. It was especially difficult for the older men to gain release in Canada. Those who were physically and mentally ill were deported. By the end of 1943 the camps were all closed. Nine hundred and sixty-six refugees were allowed to remain in Canada for the duration of the war. But this was not the end of their story. Conclusion In October 1945 former internees were formally permitted to apply for citizenship. Although mass repatriation had been considered, and the government was still hesitant to allow Jews entry, revelations of the enormity of the Holocaust and growing criticism of Canada's narrow immigration policy tied their hands. The 'camp boys' had become Canadians. They had married, worked hard to contribute to the war effort, and begun to rebuild their lives. Five years in limbo were finally over. Since the war the former internees have been an integral part of Canadian society. In many ways their achievements far exceeded anyone's expectations. They populate the top levels of government, industry, the judiciary, the arts, and universities. 'There is hardly a field you look at,' commented one former internee, 'where you don't find one of our boys right up on top. In retrospect, I think about the incredible amount of pluses that Canada achieved by some unwanted people who have added so much to Canadian life from literary to textiles to education. It was lucky for both. It's a lucky marriage for Canada as well as ourselves.' The irony of Canada's shortsighted policies towards admission of Jewish refugees is highlighted by the career of Arturo Vivante. Returning to Italy after the war, Vivante trained as a physician. He also began to write, eventually settling in the United States, where he became a prominent novelist and prolific author of short stories.52 This episode in Jewish and Canadian history is one of human perseverance and survival. The stigma of their internment remained with the internees for decades, and few do not remember the experience with mixed feelings. Yet those who have made Canada their home have come to terms with the ignominy of their arrival and have strong

190 Paula J. Draper feelings for Canada. Rabbi Erwin Schild is one of them. 'When I was suffering the cruelties of Dachau Concentration Camp/ he writes, 'I made a vow: If I should get out alive, as did not appear very likely, I would never allow any further adversity to depress or defeat me ... I remained true to that vow. It helped me tolerate the insignificant physical discomforts of internment and even the chafing deprivation of freedom. It helped me bear the much more difficult mental anguish, impatience and frustration ... Canada has more than compensated me for her initial rejection and her hostile indifference to my overtures. The opportunities she eventually offered ... have moved me to yield myself to a true patriot's love for this precious country/53

Notes 1 This article is based on material in Paula J. Draper, 'The Accidental Immigrants: Canada and the Interned Refugees/ PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1983. 2 Public Records Office (PRO), London, England, Dominions Office (DO), 35/996/PW19/143, Massey to Caldecote, 22 July 1940. 3 Department of External Affairs Records (DEA), Ottawa, RG 25, Dl, vol. 824, f. 713, Massey to Department of External Affairs, 30 July 1940. 4 National Archives of Canada (NA), RG 24, C17, vol. 15,399, no. 42, War Diary Camp N, 22 Feb. 1941. 5 The definition of 'Holocaust survivor' varies. Although not every interned refugee had been incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps, most had spent a significant part of their lives under fascist rule^. 6 NA, RG 24, vol. 11253, f. 11-14, Captain Kirkness Report, 12 Aug. 1940. Anyone with a Jewish grandparent was considered a Jew by Nazi racial law. 7 NA, RG 6 L, vol. 26, f. 10-22, Captain Kirkness to Headquarters, 26 Nov. 1940 in J.J. Kelly, 'The Prisoner of War Camps in Canada, 1939-1945,' master's thesis, University of Windsor, 1976, 62. 8 Eugen Spier, The Protecting Power (London: Skeffington and Son, 1951),. 148,153. 9 PRO, DO, 35 / 996 / PW19 /1 / 82, Report on Civilian Internees Sent from the United Kingdom to Canada during the Unusually Fine Summer of 1940 (Paterson Report). 10 Interview with Bernard Pfundt, Hull, Que., 3 Sept. 1980; Spier, The Protecting Power, 154,155,156; Imperial War Museum, London, England,

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

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Department of Sound Records, Ace. No. 3839/06, interview with Clive Teddern. Interview with Teddern. NA, RG 24, C17, vol. 15,414, War Diary Camp R, folder 1, 5 July 1940. Interview with Teddern. Spier, The Protecting Power, 164,168; interview with Teddern. NA, War Diary Camp R, folder 1, Nov. 1940. Spier, The Protecting Power, 172. Spier, The Protecting Power, 156; interviews with Teddern and Pfundt. Canadian Jewish Congress/Montreal (CJC/M), Aberbach File, Goldner to Thuman, 29 Oct. 1940. General Files, CJC/M: Rosenberg to Hayes, 12 Feb. 1941; Rosenberg to Hayes, 26 Feb. 1941; Rosenberg to Goldner, 10 March 1941. NA, War Diary Camp R, folder 1; Spier, The Protecting Power, 222-3; NA, RG 24, vol. 11253, f. 11-2-14, Inspection Report Camp R, 1 March 1941; Department of External Affairs (DBA), CRF 621-K-40, vol. 3, Paterson to Skelton, 15 Jan. 1941; Internment Operations memorandum, 20 March 1941, Stethem to Under Secretary of State, 19 March 1941. For more about the internment of Italian civilians in Britain, see the essay by Sponza in this volume. NA, RG 24, vol. 11253, f. 11-2-43, Inspection Report Camp S, 2 Aug. 1940; interview with Josef Kates, Toronto, 28 August 1979; NA, MG 27, III B2, vol. 4, f. 3; Inspection Report Camp S, 13 Jan. 1941, Inspection Report Camp S, 7 Aug. 1940. NA, Inspection Report Camp S, 7 Aug. 1940 and 13 Jan. 1941; Paterson Report; interview with Kates. Paterson Report; DO, RG 24, C17, vol. 1, 5401, no. 43, folder 1, War Diary Camp S; CCIR, General Files, CJC/M, Goldner Memorandum, 5 April 1940. DBA, CRF 621-A-40, part 1, Foa to C.O., Camp S, 1 Aug. 1940; Perugia to C.O. Camp S, 28 July 1940. NA, War Diary Camp S, folder 1; CJC/M, G. Cantoni file, Cantoni to Goldner, 12 Aug. 1941. DBA, CRF 621-AF-40, part 1, Zeno-Zencovich to C.O. Camp S, 2 Aug. 1940. NA, RG 76, Internees, part 7, Jolliffe to DBA, 18 Aug. 1944. NA, War Diary Camp N, folder 1,1 July 1941. The paintings of Oscar Cahen hang in the National Gallery of Canada. Franz Kraemer, 'Culture/ Stackeldraht, Camp A Newspaper, Nov. 1941. 'Little Cabaret/ program notes, Theo Stein private papers.

192 Paula J. Draper 33 Henry Kreisel file, CJC/Toronto. 34 From the columns of Das Nebengleis, Camp N newspaper, July-Sept. 1941, Dale Brown private papers. 35 CJC/M, Harry Loewy, Days behind Barbed Wire, unpublished manuscript, 223. 36 Ibid., 165, 248. 37 In Camp B there was a strike on the occasion of one year of internment. Ibid., 267-9. 38 CJC/M, General Files, Saalheimer to Bronfman, 18 Nov. 1941; 'Interned Refugees Raise Funds for Medical Aid to Russia/ Canadian Jewish Chronicle, 26 Dec. 1941; CJC/M, General Files, CCIR Memorandum, 12 Dec. 1941; NA, War Diary Camp N, folder 1, vol. 7, Appendix 1, 'Friendly Aliens Interned Here Give $101 to Palestine Appeal/ clipping 4 Aug. 1941. 39 Interview with Edgar Strauss, Montreal, 24 July 1979. 40 Dale Brown, Report of Educational Activities in Camps, 5 June 1942, 6, Dale Brown private papers; interview with Leonard Spanier, Montreal 24 July 1979. 41 Interview with Julius Pfeiffer, Montreal, 7 Sept. 1978. 42 Kurt Rothschild Diary 1 Dec. 1940, Kurt Rothschild private papers; interviews with Teddern, Dieter Bernhard, Toronto, 17 Jan. 1977, and K.E; Loewy, Days behind Barbed Wire, 278. 43 Interviews with internees Theo Stein, Toronto, 20 Feb. 1977; Gerry Waldston, Toronto, 11 April 1979; Helmut Muller, Toronto, 20 Feb. 1979; and psychiatric consultant Dr. Henry Fenigstein, Toronto, 1 May 1980. 44 Loewy, Days behind Barbed Wire, 164. 45 Canada, House of Commons Debates, 1 April 1941, 2058-9. 46 Ruth Draper, The Art of Ruth Draper (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 80-4, 90; NA, MG 26 J4, vol. 268, Draper File; Neilla Warren, ed., The Letters of Ruth Draper (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979) 225-6. 47 NA, MG 26, Jl, vol. 303, Draper to King, 29 April 1941, 256870-1; Robertson Memorandum for the Prime Minister, 7 May 1941, 256357-8; King to Crerar, 7 May 1941, 256355-6; King to Draper, 10 May 1941, 256872. 48 NA, 13 May 1941, RG 2, 7C, reel 1, Minutes, Cabinet War Committee Meeting. 49 NA, MG 26, Jl, vol. 303, 256359, Crerar to King, 15 May 1941; Paterson Report. 50 NA, MG 26, Jl, vol. 303, 256360, Robertson Memorandum, 23 May 1941; RG 76, Internees, pt. 1, Robertson to Blair, 26 June 1941.

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51 Paterson Report; NA, MG 26, Jl, vol. 303, 256879; King to Draper, 16 July 1941. 52 Carolyn R Balducci, 'The Garden of Arturo Vivante,' paper presented at 'The Jewish Experience in Italy' conference, SUNY Stony Brook, 24-5 Oct. 1998. 53 Erwin Schild, 'A Canadian Footnote to the Holocaust/ Canadian Jewish Historical Society Journal 5, no. 1 (spring 1981), 43.

8 Political Prisoners: The Communist Internees IAN RADFORTH

Among Canada's internees during the Second World War was a curious group of about 100 men interned as Communists. They stood apart from most of the other internees. Although the Canadian state labelled them 'enemy aliens/ they had no ties to the countries against which Canada declared war. Indeed, the Communists' international links were to the Soviet Union, which from June 1941 was one of Canada's allies. Neither were they aliens; they were all Canadian-born or naturalized. Furthermore, in contrast to many of Canada's internees, Communists did much to publicize their plight, both at the time of their incarceration and in subsequent years. For these activists on the left, the actions of the Canadian state became a target for criticism and agitation, an opportunity to expose the abuse of state power in a capitalist democracy, and a chance to draw people into the left movement. As Canadians, the communist internees and their many supporters publicly expressed their indignation, indeed outrage, both at the incarceration of leftists and at the label 'enemy alien.' The internees proudly and defiantly defined themselves as political prisoners. After first sketching the development of state policies regarding the internment of communists, this chapter examines next the process of detention and then life in the camps, as shown in the experiences of some of those leftist internees whose stories are available. It attempts a social history of their lives from the time of their arrest and temporary confinement in local jails across Canada, through internment, to the time of their release. With a few exceptions, including Gladys McDonald, the only woman interned as a Communist, all the leftist internees were men and shared group experiences as internees at two internment camps: Kananaskis, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and Petawawa, northwest of Ottawa.1

Political Prisoners: The Communist Internees 195 The sources for this social history are readily available. At least eighteen internees have told their stories in forms that have led to publication. While the earliest account was published in 1955, most of them became available in the early 1980s, nearly forty years after the events described.2 We are emphatically dealing with memory sources, then. Moreover, it is a distinct group of articulate activists who have chosen, and been chosen, to tell their stories. Kathleen M. Repka, in the introduction to the collection of left internees' memoirs, Dangerous Patriots: Canada's Unknown Prisoners of War (1982), explains that her husband, William Repka, had collected the accounts as part of his attempt to expose the history of his co-internees' little-known experience at the hands of the Canadian state. He turned to comrades still active in left circles. Memory sources, of course, inevitably provide only a partial description of what happened. In the telling and retelling, stories highlight certain events and memories, while they omit others, either intentionally or otherwise. Forty years after internment, these leftists had no trouble recalling versions of their experiences. Internment was an extraordinary time in their lives, an experience that stood apart in their memories. Moreover, the left internees and their comrades had worked hard at the time of internment to construct narratives of the internment experience, ones that would help their political campaign for release and expose the Canadian state for its shortcomings. Early on, these narratives became part of a 'social memory'3 - a shared recollection within the group, a memory that gave both meaning to the experience and coherence to the group. These oft-told narratives were the ones that, four decades later, came first to mind for the former left internees, and they form the backbone of the recorded accounts. When retelling their stories, these life-long leftists held to the same purpose forty years later: they wanted to instruct readers about the harm that a so-called liberal democracy can inflict on the working-class movement. Much-vaunted civil liberties can be a fragile fagade in wartime, and the bourgeois state can impede the people's struggle against even common enemies such as fascism. Because the leftists were retelling well-honed stories from an ongoing left perspective, their stories remain remarkably faithful to their experiences as they would have told them at the time. In the case of these memory sources, it may be that there has been less active restructuring of memories in the light of present circumstances than is commonly the case when people recall events of forty years in the past. Naturally, there are silences in these accounts. Sexuality, for example,

196 lanRadforth is not discussed. In the 1940s, the communist political discourse gave little or no room for public discussions of sexuality; the silence continued down through the decades. My discussion here is shaped, indeed constrained, by the conscious and unconscious choices made by the leftists themselves. On the basis of my reading of these sources, I argue that, while the Communists suffered the usual painful and humiliating constraints imposed on prisoners of war, life was more tolerable for them because of their left politics. As a relatively small group living cheek-by-jowl with those interned for their alleged right-wing connections, the communists stuck close together, looking out for one another and expressing a solidarity that had been nurtured within the wider communist movement. In camp, the pastimes of the left internees reflected their group commitment to tight organization, mutual improvement through education, and furthering the cause of their movement. The sense of injustice that individuals felt about the lack of due process at the time of their arrests, about internment itself, and about their treatment as enemy aliens only fuelled their left solidarity and their sense of self and mutual respect. State Policy What was the Canadian state's rationale for interning Communists during the Second World War? In 1939 and 1940, authorities maintained that the communists were threatening the nation's industrial war effort by fomenting strikes, allegedly to improve the lot of workers but actually as part of a strategy devised by the Soviet Union to undermine the strength of the allies. Ever since the founding of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) in 1921 against the backdrop of postwar social turmoil and the Russian Revolution of 1917, Canada's security forces had seen the party as a menace and done what they could to suppress it. According to state authorities, the Communists were disturbers of industrial peace, and threats, potentially at least, both to the long-term success of Canadian business and to the security of the Canadian state. Because the Canadian party belonged to the Communist International, with headquarters in Moscow and a commitment to overthrowing capitalism, the enemies of the CPC insisted that its members always put the interests of the Soviet Union ahead of those of Canada and Canadians. Of course, the authorities' concerns about the party's threat

Political Prisoners: The Communist Internees 197 to state security became more acute once Canada had declared war in September 1939. The fact that Germany and the Soviet Union had recently signed a non-aggression pact added to the sense of urgency. Furthermore, from mid-September 1939 until June 1941, the CPC was committed to campaigning to have Canada withdraw from what Stalin had called 'an unjust, imperialist war/4 The internment of Communists was also prompted by two other developments. First, the sweeping wartime emergency powers gave Canadian security authorities in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) a new advantage in their long-standing campaign against the communists. Beginning in September 1939 it was now a comparatively simple matter to arrest individuals under section 21 of the Defence of Canada Regulations (DOCR), which allowed for the internment for the duration of the war of any person who might act 'in any manner prejudicial to the public safety or the safety of the state/ Second, the mass arrests of June and July 1940 were directly triggered by the political concerns of W.L. Mackenzie King's Liberal government at Ottawa. The government wanted to be seen to respond effectively to widespread public fears that saboteurs within Canada posed a serious threat to the success of the war effort, as well as to public safety. Since the security services had little evidence of actual fifth-column plots in Canada's war plants, the Communists made convenient targets for detention. On 4 June 1940, an order-in council declared illegal the CPC (along with fascist and Nazi organizations) and fourteen of the party's so-called front or 'auxiliary' organizations. Security agents who had long had party activists under surveillance could easily identify and round up an impressive number of them.5 Naturally members of the communist movement had an altogether different perspective on these matters. Activists believed that their party offered the best opportunity for radical social change to Canadian working people who suffered exploitation and oppression under capitalism. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the party had struggled to build a mass movement of men and women of the working class chiefly by playing an active role in strikes and the trade-union movement, welding the unemployed into a political force, and campaigning to elect communists at all levels of government. Although at its peak in the 1930s the CPC never had more than 16,000 members, most of whom were immigrants from European countries with a left-wing presence, CPC members proudly pointed to the very active part that they continued to play in many strikes and labour unions.

198 Ian Radforth Party activists saw no reason to apologize for their participation in the broad, international workers' movement coordinated by the Communist International and for the part that some members had played as soldiers in the anti-fascist cause during the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s. Canadian Communists accepted leadership that came from the Soviet Union because it was there that the revolution had already succeeded. Thus, in mid-September 1939, when Soviet leaders urged their comrades in Canada and elsewhere to oppose the war as an imperialist venture, the CPC followed the directive, in fact reversing the party's position announced just days earlier. Communists in Canada knew that it was a risky strategy to oppose state policy during the war, but the majority appeared willing to do so apparently because it believed that it was advancing the workers' cause internationally. (The party would reverse itself once again in June 1941, immediately after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. In the analysis of Canadian Communists, Canada's war effort was now part of the 'peoples' war' against fascism and an attempt to defeat the Nazi invaders of Communism's stronghold.)6 Detention Most of the Communists interned in Canada were rank-and-file members of either the party itself or of its closely linked ethnic organizations such as the Ukrainian Labour-Farmer Temple Association (ULFTA) and the Finnish Organization of Canada (FOC). But included among the internees were eight trade-union officials, four municipal politicians, three prominent leaders of ethnic organizations, three members of the central committee of the CPC, and two members of the national executive - Tom McEwen and Norman Freed.7 Certain of the top leaders of the CPC escaped interment. Beginning in September 1939 the party had gone underground, with only a few prominent members remaining in public, including those elected to municipal offices who could not perform their jobs from underground.8 Tim Buck, the leader of the CPC, moved to New York, where, along with Sam Carr and Charles Sims of the CPC executive, he hid with the help of the American party for more than two years. Buck's grip on the Canadian party was much weakened as a result of his departure, and the CPC re ained in some disarray throughout the period of mass internment. Communists in Canada were perfectly aware that they were likely

Political Prisoners: The Communist Internees 199 targets for wartime arrests and internment, but that knowledge did not lessen their sense of indignation when their freedom was actually taken away and their personal lives thrown into chaos. Years later, Muni Taub, a communist activist in the Montreal garment shops, was still annoyed at the way the RCMP picked him up, along with two other labour activists on 28 June 1940. 'The RCMP could have picked us up any day at work/ he said, 'but in order to make it sensational, they came to our homes around three in the morning when we were asleep.' 'There was a big story the next morning in the newspapers with our pictures, stating that the police were searching for people who were a danger to society/9 Charlie Murray, director of organization for the Canadian Fishermen and Fish Handlers Union of Nova Scotia, remembered being arrested at home in the evening of Sunday, 29 September 1940, while preparing to take his wife to hospital to deliver her baby. The RCMP took Murray to Halifax that night. After protests from Murray, the commanding officer at Halifax arranged for Murray to see his wife and baby - in the presence of officers - before he boarded the train for Petawawa. Tony Bilecki, a Ukrainian-Canadian activist, recalls the humiliating show that was his arrest, at dawn on 6 July 1940. While underground, Bilecki had taken a job delivering milk for the People's Co-operative in Winnipeg. Two police cars stopped his milk wagon on Selkirk Avenue; policemen boarded it and travelled with him to the coop. 'Many people on their way to work witnessed this parade, one police car in front of my wagon, the other behind, and two burly RCMP men standing with me in the wagon while I held the reins of my horse/10 Deciding which Communists to intern was a haphazard process. Most party members escaped internment, even many of those individuals known to the RCMP as Communists.11 Among those arrested were a few people whose detention seems curious indeed. One Ukrainian Canadian, who evidently had not had any political connections for years, was interned on the charge that he had belonged to the banned ULFTA in 1918! Police appear to have acted on the advice of a police informant who happened to be the man's vindictive ex-son-in-law.12 As a professional, Dr Howard A. Lowrie stood alone among the blue-collar internees. According to his story, he never did understand why he had been interned. He admits only to having been 'opposed to war between imperialist countries' and to having treated a patient whom the RCMP later interned. To no avail, the Toronto Star took up Lowrie's case, noting in an editorial that 'the rather curious suggestion' had been

200 Ian Radf orth made 'that his arrest and detention may have some connection with his treating a man for carbuncles, who was subsequently picked up as belonging to an illegal organization/13 C.S. Jackson, probably the most prominent labour unionist interned (he was a highly successful organizer for the United Electrical Workers), was not arrested until June 1941 - at the precise moment when his union was making organizational breakthroughs in Toronto and Hamilton. He sees his arrest (which occurred after Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union) as a clear example of how 'Canadian corporations, concerned about the rapid growth of unions, pressured a willing government to use the War Measures Act to try to stop the organizing drives.'14 If state officials were sometimes sloppy in selecting targets for arrest, in other instances they moved with razor-sharp precision. In their published recollections, several of the internees make clear how unaccustomed they were to being placed in jail (where they waited for transfers to internment camp). Decades later, William Repka, a communist labour organizer then working among Alberta sugar-beet workers, vividly recalled details concerning the various characters who occupied the cells at Lethbridge: a big, noisy Ukrainian who had been drinking, a worker accused of having set on fire the foreman of his railway extra-gang, and a young Saskatchewan farm girl, turned prostitute, who insisted on hugging him through the jail bars, much to his embarrassment.15 Ben Swankey, in 1940 a party functionary at Calgary, simply records, with indignation, that he 'was held in the Calgary City Jail for a month, mixed in with pimps, drunks, lawbreakers of all descriptions/16 Bruce Magnuson, of the Lumber and Sawmill Workers Union in Port Arthur, Ont., observes that at the Fort William jail he was put 'in a dirty old cell where they had somebody the night before. It hadn't been cleaned up and it was in a terrible mess/17 Tony Bilecki describes the 'real shock' that he received when he and other internees were transferred from jail to Winnipeg's CPR station in chains. 'Just imagine! I had never had handcuffs on my hands, let alone a long, heavy chain/18 By emphasizing such indignities in their accounts, the leftists may have been both expressing a genuine sense of outrage and intentionally cultivating public sympathy. Communists long struggled to portray themselves as respectable, ordinary Canadians in an effort to counter widespread propaganda generated by their enemies, who sought to make them appear weird, untrustworthy, and immoral. Pat Sullivan, president of the Canadian Seamen's Union, stresses the harsh treatment given internees detained temporarily at the Exhibition

Political Prisoners: The Communist Internees 201 Grounds in Toronto in June 1940 under a commanding officer whose watchwords were 'strictness and toughness ... carried to extremes/ On arrival the men were given a searching that 'could not have been more thorough; we were stripped to the skin and our shirts, underclothes, etc., were held up to a bright light, as though the Major were looking for secret documents which would reveal when the communist party had decided to launch the revolution in Canada/19 Sullivan makes these remarks in his Cold War classic, Red Sails on the Great Lakes, where as a convert to anti-communism he purports to tell all about the machinations of communism in Canada. Even though by the time Sullivan was writing (1955) he was sympathetic to wartime internment of Communists, he nevertheless strongly objected to the petty humiliations and the severity of his treatment during early detention. The arrests brought indignities for the men, but for their families it was the uncertainties that were the worst aspect of the ordeal. In many instances, wives and other close family members had little or no knowledge of where the men were or what the future would bring. Official notification of internment could take a long time. The father of Kent Rowley, a young union organizer among the textile workers, made repeated efforts to find out where his son was being held, but to no avail.20 Sometimes word did not get back to families for a few weeks, when censored mail from detainees at last reached home. Meanwhile, wives had to find ways to pay bills and look after their children in the absence of the chief or only breadwinner. Mary Prokop of Winnipeg, whose husband, Peter, was interned in September 1940, maintains that it was 'especially hard for mothers. Their hearts were breaking and they had to continually answer their children's questions about why the police had taken their daddy and when was he coming home/21 Anne Lenihan, wife of interned Calgary alderman Pat Lenihan, says that she and her children went to stay with her parents for a week or so, but 'they were in no position to support us/ She was forced to go on relief and had to face the indignity of visits by inspectors who checked to see 'if you were living within the limits of the relief payments/22 The private letters of internee Dick Steele, a left and labour activist in southern Ontario, give an intimate sense of one internee's personal crisis as he was taken from his family and locked up with no release in sight. In his correspondence with his wife, Esther, Steele comes across as very much a family man. He wrote home as often as permitted and filled his letters with questions about how the children and his wife were managing in his absence. At one point he urged Esther to make

202 Ian Radforth sure that the slivers were sanded off the teeter-totter so that the children would not be hurt - a job that he would have taken care of had he been home. Steele worried about his tools getting rusty and asked Esther to oil them. He begged for more details about the children's birthday parties. In contrast to the memory sources, which deal largely with public issues and touch fleetingly on private matters, such letters poignantly convey the challenge to masculinity that internment brought for OQ one man. The internees did not go to trial before being sent to internment camp. Instead, they proceeded to camp and then were given two hearings during their stay. At the first hearing before a judge, the internee, though present and possibly with counsel, was not informed ahead about the facts prepared against him and was not allowed to crossexamine witnesses. At the second hearing, the internee was prohibited from attending, although his counsel could present character witnesses.24 A few lawyers took a large number of the leftists' cases: Jacob L. Cohen, David Goldstick, and Norman Levy. The left internees remember these hearings as kangaroo courts where witnesses and police dossiers were brought forward to show that the individual had been active in communist circles. Repka says that, while at Kananaskis, he was called to Calgary to appear before Chief Justice Carter of the Supreme Court of Canada. The judge had a dossier on him 'four inches thick/ When questioned, Repka admitted to being involved in various protest marches, strikes, and so forth, and the judge readily concluded that Repka was a Communist and ought to be interned.25 In some cases, the authorities bluntly stated that 'representations had been made' that the individual was a Communist; the state had to prove not that the representations were correct, only that they had been made!26 Official regulations were thus followed, but left internees had little sense that justice - even bourgeois justice - had been allowed to take its course. Life in the Camps The two camps to which the left internees were taken - Kananaskis and Petawawa - resembled and were operated like prisoner-of-war (POW) camps. They were surrounded by double rows of barbed wire with a guard tower every 200 metres or so. If an internee went past an inner circle of barbed wire, guards were authorized to shoot. At Kananaskis there were about 800 prisoners housed in frame barrack huts with

Political Prisoners: The Communist Internees 203 twelve beds each. Inside the drafty huts stood a wooden table with benches, a box or barrel stove, some shelves, a water pail and cup, and a urine bucket. To the west of the rows of huts stood a kitchen, ablution huts, and latrines; to the southeast lay an office for the prisoners' spokesman, a guard room, and the 'cooler' - an isolation cell. To the southwest there were a hospital and a big recreation hall where old movies were shown. In the centre of the compound was a parade ground, which the Nazis called the 'Hitler Platz.' Petawawa was similar, except that the men were housed in larger, better-built huts; the camp was near the well-known military base. Each hut held about fifty men and was twinned with another; joining the two were a washroom and toilets. Internees wanting to move about either camp had to do so under close supervision of guards. On arrival at camp one of the officers gave instructions about how to behave and explained the camp regulations, including whom to salute and how. Civilian clothes were removed and uniforms issued: blue denim pants and jackets and shirts with large red circles on the back handy targets for guards shooting at would-be escapees. Men were assigned to huts. Initially, the leftists were split up and scattered among the other detainees. Drawing on their own well-honed organizing techniques, the left detainees agitated to be housed and recognized as a group - preferably a group of political prisoners. Eventually their agitation paid off, and they enjoyed a genuine boost to morale when they were permitted to live together and elect a spokesman. 'The International Hut/ as their quarters became known at Petawawa, was the best home possible under the circumstances. Within its walls was fostered a meaningful sense of comradeship. Work The daily routine began early, at 6:30 a.m., when a gong announced time to get up and head to the ablution huts. Breakfast was ready at 7, and the morning check of prisoners took place at 8 on the parade ground. The men then divided between those staying on site, where they either had free time or were assigned to work details, and those going off site to work. Prisoners not working off site gathered at 11:30 for another check before lunch. After lunch at 1:15 was another check, and then on-site work crews assembled for the afternoon assignments. All the men assembled for one more check at 5, a half-hour before supper began. After 8 p.m., the men had to stay in their assigned huts.

204 Ian Radforth ntil lights out at 9 or 10, the prisoners could read or play cards, work at hobbies such as woodcarving, or sit and talk. Work was assigned to all men under sixty years of age. Each hut had a quota, with some men being required to undertake tasks maintaining the camp - doing general repairs, kitchen patrol, cleaning the officers' quarters, and the like. There was also a quota of men required for offsite work - building roads, cutting timber, or working in a sawmill. The remuneration was twenty cents a day, paid out in yellow paper tokens with a buying power only in camp. (Prisoners ran a canteen, selling tobacco, chocolate, writing materials, and personal items such as soap, toothbrushes, and safety razors.) Work was supposed to be rotated so that each man did about three days of work or twenty-four hours per week, but in fact some opted to do more than their share, and thus others could take it easy.27 In their reminiscences, former internees agree that the work was welcome both because it broke the monotony of internment and because it was not too onerous. 'We bitched about it, but it was a way of getting out of camp, and it wasn't very hard work/ says Louis Binder, who had been arrested at Ottawa and sent to Petawawa. 'We had to load gravel onto a truck, and then we waited twenty minutes until the truck came back for the next load.'28 Magnuson, an experienced woods worker, recalls that the internees did not have proper clothes for logging. 'The blue denim clothes we wore got wet very quickly and froze, and this make it miserable. You had to keep on working to keep warm.' Nevertheless, he goes on to say, the work made time pass, and even as a prisoner, one could take satisfaction from doing a job well. Sometimes the men even held competitions 'to see who could saw a log the fastest.'29 In addition to being guarded while they worked, the men were supervised by individuals from within the ranks of the internees. Magnuson holds that class divisions were 'maintained in the camp very much as on the outside.' James Franceschini, the Toronto builder, and Leo Mascioli, the Timmins businessman, both interned for their alleged ties to Italian Fascism, served as foremen on the work crews. Curiously, even among the Communists, a touch of petty-bourgeois entrepreneurship surfaced in the camps. Prisoners were expected to wash their own clothes, but certain men offered to perform the service at five cents per load. And Peter Krawchuk, a young Ukrainian-Canadian leftist internee from Winnipeg, remembers that 'Mike Binowsky used to cut hair for five cents.'30 The anti-fascists, like the other internees, passed the time by working

Political Prisoners: The Communist Internees 205 on hobbies, such as woodcarving, although in the case of the communists the activity was, true to form, carried out in a structured, organized way, and it was given a political purpose. According to Charlie Murray, Scott McLean, a millwright with considerable knowledge and skill in woodworking, helped organize a cooperative handicraft project. He acquired and fashioned the necessary woodcarving tools, and then those with interest and talent turned out pieces for sale on the outside. Holding to the labour theory of value, the handicraft workers agreed to charge for the artefacts on the basis of the labour involved and established a price of twenty cents a day. Monies raised were used for the camp fund and to finance the campaign for the release of political prisoners. Some of the artefacts were displayed publicly in order to draw attention to the internment.31 C.S. Jackson, interned as a prominent labour leader with the United Electrical Workers, says that 'some beautiful pieces were turned out, including inlays of all kinds/32 Other handicrafts were also part of the project. Some men made macrame belts out of cellophane cigarette wrappers, with buckles fashioned from carved bones discarded from the camp kitchen. 'It is truly amazing what talents surface in time of need/ observes Jackson. Furthermore, the project is remembered as an experience that fostered cooperation and mutual help 'in that trying time/33 Recreation

The communist internees participated in the usual round of POW camp recreational activities, sometimes giving them a political edge. The YMCA supplied the prisoners with some sports equipment and reading material, which the men made use of. Ball games, ping-pong, body building, and band practice were all taken up by the anti-fascist internees. Sing-songs were popular in the evenings, when men were confined to barracks. 'Pat Lenihan treated us to delightful, satirical Irish songs/ recalls John Weir, a Ukrainian-Canadian Communist arrested at Winnipeg in October 1940.34 Songs were composed about the plight of the anti-fascist internees by talented members of the group. The Ukrainian anti-fascists formed a choir, which had some fine singers. On May Day 1941, the left internees at Kananaskis stayed behind after dinner, taking over the mess hall, where they held a concert and meeting, with 'speeches, singing of the Internationale and other songs/35 Bilecki tells the story of the time at Kananaskis when a concert was planned, to which the leftists were invited. They accepted and spent time practising

206 Ian Radforth both Ukrainian songs and some workers' songs in English. On their arrival at the concert, the leftists were greeted by everyone in the hall rising and greeting them with the Fascist salute. 'In reply we gave them our working-class salute, with the clenched fist raised over our heads/ says Bilecki. 'It was a response they hadn't expected.' Tension mounted. But in Bilecki's rendition of the story, the anti-fascists sang so beautifully that the Fascists actually applauded in the end.36 Such activities must have made the time pass a little faster, although Repka says that as the months dragged on it reached 'the stage where even a ball game [was] boring/ A number of the internees mention the political poetry and inspirational songs written by leftists behind the wire. Joe Wallace penned poems that touched the hearts of the communist internees and helped to define their group identity. One such poem, 'How High, How Wide?' Wallace wrote while confined to the 'cooler' for insubordination: My prison window is not large, Five inches high, six inches wide, Perhaps seven. Yet it is large enough to show The whole unfettered to and fro Of heaven. How high, how wide, is heaven? Five inches high, six inches wide, Perhaps seven.37

Mitch Sago, who says that he became a close friend of Wallace's when they were in the Hull Jail, helped on his release to arrange for the publication of Wallace's internment poems, which provided a lasting memento of the group experience.38 Reading and discussion, common pastimes for prisoners, the antifascists pursued with a keen sense of political purpose. They formally set up study circles to discuss party strategy and tactics and consider any news that they could glean from beyond the wire. In addition to authorized reading materials, the communists succeeded in getting their own books and newspapers from the outside. Pat Sullivan reports that within a month of the Communists' arrival at Petawawa, they had a copy of Capital, which had slipped past the censor because it was bound inside a copy of The History of Canada, with a few pages from the latter included at the front and back. Comrades sent food wrapped in

Political Prisoners: The Communist Internees 207 pages of the party's newspaper, the Clarion. Under the direction of the ranking party leaders on the inside, a carefully organized school was established. Language instruction (English, French, and German) enabled many of the left internees to pass the time and improve their language skills. Peter Prokop, for many years a highly active member of the Ukrainian-Canadian left, recalls that for him 'it was the first opportunity [he]'d had for regular study of English under supervision.'39 Political studies in trade unionism and Marxism were a way to spend time (at state expense) preparing comrades to take up the political struggle after one was released. The internees took delight in the irony of the situation; it was a way to maintain self-esteem in a context intended to humiliate. In his lurid expose of his years among the Communists, Sullivan observes that some of those interned as anti-fascists had arrived at camp with little genuine knowledge of Marxism or the party, but after 'one or two years of internment and continuous education along party lines, they had become dyed-in-the-wool Communists, with a communist education adequate for leadership requirements.'40 Treatment

In their reminiscences, the left internees make few complaints about their treatment in the camps. Even the food, so frequently a cause of griping among men living in barracks, is described as wholesome and adequate. 'We found that we were entitled to army rations, which were pretty good and made well-rounded meals/ recollects Norman Freed, a member of the CPC's national executive at the time of his arrest at Toronto in September 1940. 'They included all kinds of meat, fruit and vegetables.'41 On his release from Hull Jail in 1942, Magnuson declared publicly that the 'men at the camp were well treated, with army rations for food.'42 Muni Taub recollects that at one point during his internment at Petawawa the food did get bad. It turned out that the Italian internees working in the kitchen were keeping the best food for themselves and profiting by smuggling some out of camp in collusion with guards. The German internees got wind of this, and a brawl ensued. The end result, according to Taub, was that the Germans took over the cooking, and 'it all became German-style and for us that was not such a great improvement.'43 Memory sources depict camp life as a challenge met; men abused by the Canadian state refused to be mere victims and instead made the

208 Ian Radforth best of things, sometimes even getting the better of authorities. Yet sources generated at the time of internment hint at a more painful experience that lay beneath the surface. On his arrival at Hull Jail in October 1941, Bill Walsh wrote to his wife, Anne, in a remarkably cheerful tone that rings a little false. 'It hasn't taken me long to get into the swing of things. All the fellows have been swell to me, treating me as a guest... I've played a bit of volleyball & shared honours in my first two pingpong games. And tonight I'm to sing a solo!' A few days later he reported that he had been 'beaten at pinochle but had sweet revenge in contract bridge.' When he wrote on Christmas eve, however, Walsh was more honest: 'This is Christmas eve & soon we'll be having our feast and concert. We've got the place decorated and there will be good food aplenty, thanks to the magnificent efforts of so many friends on the outside. We're preparing to have a "good time" & I'll try to get into the spirit of the thing. But to be frank with you (as I wont to the gang here) I feel punk, & I know the others do too. To be forcibly separated from you today ... You dashing around in a restaurant dishing out grub to holiday makers, & I doing the same to a bunch of swell fellows trying to be more hilarious the more melancholy they feel.'44 Forty years later the former internees sought to maintain that bravado, that public face that Walsh's letter comments on and gets behind. In the memory sources, the left internees, while critical of authorities, speak well of the guards, most of whom were older men - First World War veterans. Pat Lenihan says of the Kananaskis guards: 'They treated us as humanely as possible under military law.'45 Of course, the antifascists were low-risk prisoners in so far as they had collectively decided not to make escape attempts for fear that these would jeopardize communists not yet arrested and undermine the campaign for the internees' release. Relations between the leftists and the guards improved after the Soviet Union entered the war, as many of the guards now saw the communists as allies. Some of the guards looked the other way when it came to smuggling in uncensored newspapers from the outside. The good turns worked both ways. Lenihan recalls that at Hull, when the left internees saw an officer approaching a guard who had fallen asleep at his post, they would 'holler or throw rocks to wake the guard.'46 Assessments of the officers are more mixed. Krawchuk says that the commandant at Kananaskis 'red-baited us all the time' and 'used to tell the Germans to make sure they wiped the floor with the communists.'47 Bilecki agrees with this assessment,48 but Lenihan says the officers at that camp 'gave us everything they could in that

Political Prisoners: The Communist Internees 209 situation/49 Sullivan describes the commandant at Petawawa as 'every strict, but as fair as he could possibly be under the circumstances/50 Communications with the outside were possible, but the state limited, monitored, and censored them - as best it could. Each month at Kananaskis a prisoner could write four letters of twenty-four lines and four postcards of seven lines. Letters in English, German, or Italian went through censorship at the camp, while letters in other languages were forwarded to facilities at Ottawa. Incoming mail was similarly checked. Correspondents grew familiar with black smears or snipped passages in their communications, although some writers became adept at sneaking news by the censors. According to Peter Prokop, his wife, Mary, came up with ingenious ways to outsmart the censors, such as mentioning meetings at Winnipeg's Ukrainian Labour Temple as get togethers 'at Aunt Tereza's place/ Prokop explains that in Ukrainian the temple was mortgaged to the Workers Benevolent Association, and RZT was Ukrainian for WBA.51 At Hull, the left internees got news via radio. Parts for a crystal set had been smuggled into the jail in the bottom of a tub of cottage cheese sent by the People's Co-op in Winnipeg. Charlie Murray, who had once worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), assembled the radio, and men took turns lying in a bunk, with the earphone pressed to the pillow, appearing to sleep. In fact they listed carefully for war news and reported it to the rest.52 It is evident from their recollections that the former internees long took pleasure as much from their successes in outwitting authorities as from their access to news otherwise denied them. Proximity to Fascists

One of the most extraordinary aspects of internment for the antifascists at Kananaskis and Petawawa was the fact of their proximity to Germans and German Canadians, and to Italians and Italian Canadians, all of them interned for their alleged sympathies with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. For more than a year, far right and far left coexisted within the wire. In their recollections, the leftists have little to say about the Italians, probably both because they numbered far fewer than the German internees and because the communists saw little evidence of overt support for the far right among the Italian and Italian-Canadian internees. Louis Binder remembers that when he and another leftist arrived at Petawawa in June 1941 the leaders of the Italian-Canadian internees

210 lanRadforth approached them, telling them that they knew who they were and did not want any trouble. 'We were quite happy with that arrangement/ says Binder. What stands out in the memories of the leftists are the pretensions and the privileges of those among the Italian internees who were 'rich/ In addition to serving as bosses on work gangs at Petawawa, wealthy Italians 'ate separately at a special table, served by other Italians/ says Tony Bilecki. 'They had a lot of money to throw around, and even the guards were very nice to them/53 Special treatment included daily newspaper deliveries to their quarters and, at least one leftist has charged, early release after substantial payments.54 Several leftist internees tell the story of a boxing bout at Petawawa, when a big Italian challenged the leftists. Evidently boxing talent was thin on the ground of the International Hut. The leftists put forward a resident who, though much smaller than the Italian, was far more agile and expert. To the cheers of the leftists, he clobbered the Italian. The punch line is that leftists knew that the 'anti-fascist' boxer was in fact a police informant who had been well schooled at boxing during his RCMP training at Regina! Displaying a competitive spirit and group pride, the leftists delight in celebrating their shrewdness and resourcefulness. Germans and German Canadians were a profoundly disconcerting, even menacing presence. The commandant at Kananaskis split up the leftist internees, assigning one to each hut. Initially the leftists feared for their safety, when surrounded and outnumbered by people supposedly at the far other extreme of the political spectrum. Jewish leftists had additional reasons for fearing pro-Nazi internees. Moreover, party mem bers and sympathizers feared that the authorities might provide the room for Germans to harass and beat them. The Communists' strategy was to lie low and give no reason for the Fascists to take offence. 'I was forced to live with eleven strange men who were at first hostile/ says Bilecki. 'I had to be decent to them, and I must say that they were always decent to me/55 As the former internees are quick to point out, not all the Germans and German Canadians were sympathetic to Nazism. Yet even those who were so, and threw their weight around, did not treat the communist internees as enemies during 1940 and the first months of 1941. 'The Germans in my hut didn't make things too hard for me/ recalls Repka. 'They thought that the Moscow-Berlin Pact meant Canadian socialists and German National Socialism had much in common/ Krawchuk maintains the Germans had 'implied that we were their allies - junior allies. We were tolerant and tried not to create

Political Prisoners: The Communist Internees 211 incidents or fights/56 Some of the left internees made friends with certain of the Germans whose politics were not hostile. Mention is made of a friendly young sailor from a German ship who openly took an anti-Nazi position. He was savagely beaten by Nazis at Kananaskis.57 Relations between pro-Nazi and left internees worsened suddenly on 22 June 1941. With the Soviet Union and Germany at war, there could be no illusion of common ground between National Socialism and Communism. At Kananaskis the Germans 'had a field day taunting us about how quickly "it will be kaput" for the Russians/ says Prokop. The situation became so tense at the camp that the anti-fascists, through their elected leadership, made representations to the commandant, demanding separation from the Germans. Within a few weeks, the leftists at Kananaskis were removed from the Alberta camp and sent to be with their friends at Petawawa. From the perspective of the authorities, it was a better location because of the proximity of the military base. Clashes between left and right could be quickly suppressed. The concentr tion of anti-fascists at Petawawa gave them a somewhat greater sense of security, as well as the confidence to mount a campaign seeking their isolation from the right-wing internees. Bilecki boasts that when the anti-fascists learned of good news from the front, they would stage a demonstration: 'We would all buy cheap two-forfive-cent cigars, light them (even those that did not smoke), and then parade around the camp. We wanted everybody to know that we were winning/58 The pro-Nazi internees retaliated by serving the leftists rotten food. One time, in response, Binder threw his soup in anger and protest, with the result that he was sent to the cooler. There he joined Joe Wallace, who was being punished for speaking out of line on the occasion of a visit to the camp by the brother of Anthony Eden, the British politician. These punishments provoked their comrades to stage a demonstration. Leftists marched around the cooler singing 'Solidarity Forever/ 'Hold the Fort for We Are Coming/ and various labour songs. Some of the leftists planned a hunger strike. After the demonstrators returned to their hut, soldiers moved in and surrounded it with barbed wire. For several days, the leftists ate their meals in their hut, waiting for a response from Ottawa to their demand for isolation from the proNazi internees.59 In the memories of the left internees, this protest, along with some other considerations, led to the decision of authorities to isolate them in the Hull Jail, far from the right-wing internees.

212 Ian Radforth The 'Red Patch' Internment at Hull was an improvement for the left internees because they were the only occupants of a large, never-before-used facility, and authorities gave them more latitude to manage their own affairs. One of the pleasures of the jail was that authorities turned a blind eye to the leftists' distillery, which produced a couple of gallons of over-proof alcohol a week. They also had access to a typewriter, which facilitated literary and propagandistic writing. A particularly interesting project of the prisoners at Hull was a commemorative booklet that the group put together for May Day 1942. Carefully produced on a typewriter, with heads in pen, 'The Red Patch' begins with an inspirational song written by John Weir.60 The 'Souvenir Issue' includes earnest expressions of solidarity with the worldwide anti-fascist struggle, stories of left action at Kananaskis, Petawawa, and Hull, recollections of 'Memorable May Days,' a couple of poems, and a list of the left internees with their dates of imprisonment and, where applicable, release. Making the booklet provided a diversion with a dual purpose: to lift the morale of restless prisoners and to inform the outside world of their eagerness to support Canada and progressive forces everywhere in the struggle against fascism. Particularly interesting is the way in which 'The Red Patch' draws on the memories of the communist internees to kindle the passion for struggle among leftists both inside and outside the camp. May Day, the booklet declares, is a time to 'review the power of the united working class of the whole world, its preparedness to battle for the emancipation of humanity.' The recollections of camp life centre on the prisoners' ongoing battles against regressive forces behind the wire. At Kananaskis the story focuses on how the camp was run by the Nazi element, which enforced its will with 'scientific beating[s] by the Gestapo.' The antifascists recall their heroic campaigns to establish the International Hut as a safe space and to hold their own May Day celebrations in 1941. In regard to Petawawa, the leftists choose to recall how 'we were eighty; they were seven hundred ... ambitious little businessmen whose miserable souls aspired to power, perverted petty-bourgeois "intellectuals" with an absorbing hatred of humanity, Hitler-bred, Mussolini-nurtured "politicos" and "fuehrers" with an over-weaning lust to crush and destroy, street-corner "ward rats," slot-machine, booze-running little gangsters, pimps, degenerates, - in a word, Fascists.' The 'Great Petawawa Strike' details how the leftists stood up for their rights and

Political Prisoners: The Communist Internees 213 won a transfer to their own quarters at Hull. The mettle of the Petawawa strikers is celebrated: 'here were men who had sat on the Winnipeg Strike Committee, had organized unions from Vancouver to Halifax, had struck from the mines of the Crow to the steel mills of Sydney/ In 'The Red Patch' there are also a few references to the men's loneliness as prisoners cut off from loved ones. A poem by J.S. Wallace follows the conventions of the love poem and shuns overt references to the political struggle. 'Escape by Night' is the cry of a lonely male prisoner. In his dreams he imagines visiting a woman who, though asleep in bed, makes clear that she 'loves you yet/For she dreams your name and her cheeks are wet.' Then sadly the prisoner is jolted by 'the clang of doors and the rub of walls,' and he awakens knowing, 'The feeling Hull is Hell.' Perhaps there is a political message here: this poem of unrequited love can be read as an expression of the men's sense of their own impotence as they remain incarcerated and unable to participate in the great war against fascism. The other references in 'The Red Patch' to the prisoners' isolation from loved ones are overtly political. One writer recounts the sad tale of a missed opportunity when the Kananaskis leftists were travelling by train through Winnipeg en route to Petawawa. Only a few of the wives of the prisoners knew when the men were coming, but even these women were shooed away by police. Nevertheless, the wives did 'battle to get closer and look into the dear faces they had not glimpsed in so long.' The familial image is, however, made political by the next sentence: 'It is the people of Canada stretching their hands out to us.' In another writer's account of the same incident he reports that his wife wrote soon afterwards: 'We came to the station and heard that the train had gone - no need to write how we felt, how our son felt. The poor boy has so many scars on his heart to heal that he will remember for the rest of his life.' But having presented himself as a family man, the writer proceeds immediately to present himself as a Communist. 'Its [sic] the truth,' he writes. 'Our hearts too have been wounded. But we will heal them. They will be healed by the victory of the Red Army, the victory of the people's war over fascism.' In these two instances, then, the leftists gave heart-felt human emotions a political meaning. The men were at once family men and left activists. The personal was political. The self-styled 'Hull House Fraternity' grew increasingly hopeful about the prospects for release. After all, by the summer of 1941, when the anti-fascists entered the Hull Jail, their prospects for release had already brightened with the new status of the Soviet Union as an ally of

214 Ian Radforth Canada in the war against Hitler. The release campaign gained momentum thanks especially to the prisoners' wives - on whom the men were now, curiously, dependent. Campaign for Release

The release campaign had been founded spontaneously by wives of some of the left internees. They had begun meeting privately to talk about the family and financial problems resulting from their husbands' internment and to share news of the internees. Before long they were enlisting the support of others, including lawyers, to test the legality of internment and to demand at least visiting rights for family members, if not full release. The women wrote countless letters to the minister of justice, Ernest Lapointe, and to the prime minister, focusing on the affront to civil liberties. Their activities led logically to the founding in 1940 by Communist party activists of the National Council for Democratic Rights (NCDR), which in large part replaced the Canadian Labour Defence League (CLDL), one of the banned communist-front organizations.61 In 1941 and 1942, the NCDR and its leader, A.E. Smith (former head of the CLDL), organized speaking tours by leading supporters to various parts of the country, launched petition campaigns, issued bulletins and leaflets, and paid lawyers to represent internees at hearings. Left women were the driving force behind the release campaign. They engaged in countless fund-raising projects to finance the activities of the NCDR and assist the wives of internees. The minutes of the Toronto local organization mention contributions such as those of Mrs Turpoff, of Mulock Avenue, who offered to knit a table cloth and contribute it to be raffled by the NCDR, and of the Ward 4 Committee, which held a Hungarian Goulash Supper in December 1941, as part of the Christmas Comforts Campaign to provide treats and presents for the internees.62 Kate Magnuson fought relentlessly for the release of her husband and his comrades, speaking publicly at the Lakehead, travelling to Ottawa to lobby the government, and writing letter after letter to authorities and newspapers. At one point, she made a personal appeal to Louis St Laurent, the minister of justice, whom she flattered, describing him as 'a man of understanding.' She urged him to go to Hull and to meet her husband 'and his fellow prisoners; talk with them and learn what manner of men they are/ Like St Laurent himself, she implied, they were men of character.63

Political Prisoners: The Communist Internees 215 Jennie Freed, wife of Norman, says that she and a number of wives hitchhiked from Montreal to Ottawa several times to meet with whomever they could and be a physical presence reminding the minister about the ongoing internment. Recently elected Dorise Neilson, CCF member of Parliament for North Battleford (and secretly a member of the Communist party), did all she could to draw the government's attention to the plight of the families and the injustice of internment.64 Afterwards, internees such Norman Freed paid tribute to the contribution the wives made to the release campaign. 'Those of us who were interned are very proud of the part played by our wives and other women,' he says. 'My wife Jennie played a persistent and inspiring role in the battle for justice in that dark period of history.'65 Archival evidence strongly supports his proud claim.66 Gradually the release campaign gained momentum. Of course, after Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, the government's principal rationale for interning the Communists was gone completely, and so more and more people saw the injustice of the case and were willing to declare their position publicly. In mid-1941 the NCDR developed new, more effective propaganda. Rather than presenting internment as an affront to civil rights perpetrated by an arbitrary state fixed on silencing opposition, it now assiduously avoided all criticism of the government and instead focused on the plight of the families of individuals interned and the absurdity of preventing effective proponents of total war from joining the Allies' struggle. One leaflet, for example, presented the case of Fergus McKean, secretary of the CPC in British Columbia at the time of his arrest. Alongside a lovely studio portrait of his wife and five smiling children was a short biography that noted that McKean was a fifth-generation Canadian, born in Pictou, Nova Scotia, of Scottish ancestry, who had once crewed on the governor general's yacht. To add to the portrait of respectability, it noted that his wife, Nellie, had 'worked constantly by his side since their marriage 1926.'67 The message was clear: Communists were not dangerous incendiaries operating beyond the law, but respectable family men, ordinary Canadians prepared to do their bit for the war effort. The release campaign highlighted the internment of C.S. Jackson, the prominent activist with the United Electrical Workers. Many liberals and labour supporters, including the Toronto Daily Star,68 were troubled by his arrest. It was widely suspected that he had been interned at the request of powerful employers who preferred this effective unionist off the scene. Many civil libertarians, including those from the social-

216 Ian Radforth

Communist activist William Kashtan celebrates his daughter's birthday on his release from Toronto's Don Jail, October 1942. In its publicity of the internment, the left emphasized that internees were ordinary family men as well as respectable and patriotic Canadians.

democratic left, refused to support the NCDR, which they saw as yet another communist front, but because of cases such as Jackson's, they added their voices to the call for release.69 The politics of release were at times rather curious. In 1942 one of the loudest critics of the federal Liberal government's internment of communists was the renegade Liberal and premier of Ontario, Mitchell Hepburn. To needle Prime Minister King, Hepburn 'ostentatiously sent the prisoners cigarettes and candy and publicly demanded their freedom.'70 Meantime, the Canadian labour centrals formally maintained a sceptical stance with regard to the release campaign. Though certain unionists would call for support at conventions of the two labour central organizations, the leadership, which was predominantly anticommunist, squelched them. Civil libertarian principles could be expe-

Political Prisoners: The Communist Internees 217 diently forgotten, given the opportunity to chalk one up for the cause of anti-communism. Internees were much encouraged by the work of the release campaign. It was important for morale for them to think that they were not forgotten and indeed that their cause might be a means for drawing public attention to the injustices perpetrated by the Canadian state. The campaign also gave internees a sense that they, though behind barbed wire, were still part of the left movement. From Hull, the internees repeatedly issued statements demanding their release so that they could put shoulder to the wheel in the struggle against the Axis powers. In December 1941, T.G. McMannus, spokesman for 'Camp H/ as the Hull Jail was called, announced that seventyfive of the seventy-eight anti-fascists then interned had declared their willingness to enlist in the Canadian armed services, and thirty-three of them were in good health and actually prepared to sign up then and there.71 Hull internees on more than one occasion bought $200 Victory Bonds - a concrete way to support the war effort, and one intended to bring favourable publicity and public support.72 While the men were interned at Hull, their wives and family members, as well as the NCDR, pressed the government to permit the prisoners to have visitors. An oft-told tale emerged from one attempt by a group of wives to meet the minister of justice. In September 1941 Jennie Freed organized a group of women to hitchhike from Montreal to Ottawa. After they failed to gain a meeting with the minister, they walked over to the Hull Jail and demanded entry. They were refused, of course, but the men inside caught sight of the women and shouted with joy. In a letter to the Toronto Daily Star, 'Mrs. Norman Freed' described the event: 'The enthusiasm of our husbands at seeing us was so great, even if they only caught a glimpse of us, that they burst into spontaneous song. We got the thrill that comes once in a lifetime, when all these men sang with voices full of confidence and courage, "Hold the Fort We Are Coming.'" In the same issue, an editorial entitled 'The Husbands Shouted for Joy' recounted the story and blamed Lapointe for the injustice. During her speaking tours for the NCDR, Freed retold the story again and again, to sympathetic audiences, some of them moved to tears. Both she and Norman Freed repeat the story in their reminiscences. So successful was the story as propaganda that it became a set piece in the memory culture of the internees.73 Whether as a result of the story, family visits were approved soon afterwards. It was in the early summer of 1942 that the Canadian government

218 Ian Radforth finally began to move towards a wholesale release of the leftist internees. As Whitaker explains: 'The state relented in its persecution of the communists to facilitate the war effort during an alliance of accident and convenience with the USSR/74 The government chose to go through the charade of due process and have a formal hearing for each internee. The internees' lawyer, distinguished labour lawyer and civil rights defender J.L. Cohen, advised the men to be patient with the process and to sign the commitments required by authorities. Although they had to swear that they would not take part in certain activities and that they would register regularly before local authorities, Cohen correctly supposed that the requirements could be safely ignored. Each man was provided with a train ticket home. .Reunions are remembered as highly emotional. Mitch Sago, arrested at Winnipeg in October 1940, recalls his uncle boarded the train at Schreiber, to welcome him to freedom. 'We embraced/ he says, 'with tears streaming down our faces, and then settled back and talked our heads off/75 For Repka, the 'most moving thing was to hear the voices of children - their joyous cries and their laughter/76 Here too their emphasis is on the ordinary reactions of family men. After the internees were released, the attention of the NCDR centred on lifting the ban on the Communist party, a campaign that failed to bring a change in the party's status during the war. Civil rights per se were not a fundamental concern of the organization. Indeed, as early as June 1942 it had been coupling the release of the anti-fascists with a call that the Canadian state more rigorously pursue Fascists. In a brief to the parliamentary committee on the DOCR, the NCDR urged that the regulations 'very precisely be aimed at the fascist fifth column and its supporters (witting or unwitting) whose words and actions are a danger to the safety and defense of the Dominion/ An earlier delegation to the minister of justice had urged that the RCMP 'follow the example of the FBI in the United States in taking strident action against agents of Axis powers/77 Larry Hannant maintains that those behind the NCDR were unsympathetic - or worse - to the plight of Japanese Canadians who, at the hands of the Canadian state, were in the process of losing much more than just their civil liberties. He adds that in their zeal to support the war effort, the Communists even helped gut the Canadian Civil Liberties Union.78 Of course, the Communists believed that at a time when Communism in the Soviet Union was being so seriously threatened by the armies of the Third Reich, there were more pressing priorities than civil liberties - an argument that curiously paralleled that of Ernest Lapointe in 1940.

Political Prisoners: The Communist Internees 219 After release, the left internees had to pick up the pieces of their lives. Dr Howard Lowrie says that his wife and family were deeply scarred by the ordeal and that it was some time before his health recovered and he could resume his medical practice.79 Like several others, Pat Sullivan was asked to appear on public platforms as part of the communists' efforts to draw attention to injustice.80 Most of the internees quickly resumed their activism, although now they were fiercely pro-war, and soon they went under the banner of the Labor-Progressive party (the CPC's legal reincarnation, established in 1943). Almost immediately on release several of the left internees visited recruiting offices and signed up so that they could serve in 'the great alliance against fascism.' As Tony Bilecki puts it in retrospect, The world's future was at stake; it was no time to hold a grudge.'81 Canadian military officials were soon actively recruiting members of left-wing ethnic organizations such as the ULFTA for some of the most dangerous missions behind enemy lines. Many Communists died overseas, some as war heroes.82 Eventually, forty years later, communist internees would tell their stories in an effort to bring attention to the injustice they suffered in wartime at the hands of the Canadian state. Unlike other Canadians interned in wartime, however, they would not seek redress. One can speculate why they did not demand an apology from the government of Canada. Perhaps there was little chance of their uniting to make the demand. During the intervening decades the party had haemorrhaged and fractured many times; one-time comrades in many instances had become bitter enemies, and the CPC was in a poor state to mount a campaign - a mere shadow of its former self. Perhaps/too, it was felt that little support for Communists would come from the Canadian public, now long steeped in the culture of the Cold War and its legacy. The experience of the communist internees is nevertheless worth remembering. It demonstrates the lengths to which a government could be pushed by rampant public fears - in this case, of wartime sabotage and by police authorities with their own preoccupations and agenda in this case, the menace of communism. The arbitrary results of the dragnet are worth noting, too: some prominent communists escaped untouched, while other Canadians whose record of activism was hardly impressive were swept up by police. Once interned, the Communists shared camp routines at Kananaskis and Petawawa with men interned because of their alleged fascist connections. Until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the two groups cohabited without much open conflict. Nevertheless, the Communists stood apart from the rest

220 Ian Radforth in their disciplined efforts to educate themselves along leftist lines, maintain their group morale as political prisoners, and work towards both their recognition as such and their release. The eventual release of the left internees came partly as a result of a vigorous campaign mounted by their wives and other comrades and sympathizers, but the changed geopolitical scene - the Soviet Union's entry into the war - was th most influential factor in the Canadian government's decision to free these most peculiar 'enemy aliens.'

Notes 1 See McBride's essay in this volume; and Joan Sangster, Dreams of Equality: Women on the Canadian Left, 1920-1950 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989). In 1942 propagandists involved in the campaign to release the communist internees noted that Macdonald needed extra support in part because she was 'isolated from her fellows.' See University of Toronto Archives (UTA), Roberts S. Kenny Collection, box 40, Bulletin of the National Committee for Democratic Rights, Ian. 1942. 2 J.A. (Pat) Sullivan, Red Sails on the Great Lakes (Toronto: Macmillan, 1955), especially chap. 6; William Repka and Kathleen M. Repka, Dangerous Patriots: Canada's Unknown Prisoners of War (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1982); Ben Swankey, 'Reflections of a Communist: Canadian Internment Camps/ Alberta History (spring 1982), 11-21; Peter Krawchuk, Interned without Cause (Toronto: Kobzar, 1985); Rick Salutin, Kent Rowley: The Organizer (Toronto: Lorimer, 1980). In her foreword to Dangerous Patriots, Kathleen Repka explains that her husband had collected 'most of the material... in the form of taped interviews; a few accounts were written and mailed in from distant parts of the country. All were based on memory, with some checking of letters and other documents for dates when this was possible ... it has not been possible to reconcile all ... discrepancies [in the various accounts]' 10. 3 James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Cambridge: Blackwell 1992); Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 4 The quotation is from Stalin's directive to the affiliates of the Communist International (18 Sept. 1939) reprinted in lohn Attfield and Stephen Williams, eds., 1939: The Communist Party and the War (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984), 166-7. On the repression of communism in Canada, see Reg Whitaker, 'Official Repression of Communism during the Second

Political Prisoners: The Communist Internees 221

5

6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

World War/ Labour/Le Travail 17 (spring 1986), 135-66; and the essay by Whitaker and Kealey in this volume. A useful bibliography on communism is contained in Norman Penner, Canadian Communism: The Stalin Years and Beyond (Toronto: Methuen, 1988), 300-6. See Ramsay Cook, 'Canadian Freedom in Wartime/ in W.H. Heick and Roger Graham, eds., His Own Man: Essays in Honour ofA.RM. Lower (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1974), 37-54; Daniel Robinson, 'Planning for the "Most Serious Contingency": Alien Internment, Arbitrary Detention, and the Canadian State, 1938-1939/ Journal of Canadian Studies 28 (summer 1993), 5-20; Gregory S. Kealey and Reg Whitaker, 'Introduction/ to their edited collection, R.C.M.P. Bulletins: The War Series, 1939-1941 (St John's: Committee on Canadian Labour History, 1989), 9-20; Larry Hannant, The Infernal Machine: Investigating the Loyalty of Canada's Citizens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 92-6 See Penner, Canadian Communism, 300-6; Central Committee, CPC, Canada's Party of Socialism: History of the Communist Party of Canada, 19211976 (Toronto: Progress Books, 1982). Penner, Canadian Communism, 166. Ibid., 163 Muni Taub in Repka, Dangerous Patriots, 133. Tony Bilecki in ibid., 50. Larry Hannant has shown that those workers in war plants who were identified through security screening as Communists were in most cases simply dismissed from their jobs. In some plants such employees were not even fired. Infernal Machine 155. Whitaker, 'Repression of Communism/ 147. Dr Howard Lowrie, in Repka, Dangerous Patriots, 213-14; Toronto Star, 26 June 1941, cited by Lowrie in Repka, Dangerous Patriots, 214. C.S. Jackson in Repka, Dangerous Patriots, 150. William Repka in ibid., 26-8. Ben Swankey in ibid., 64. Bruce Magnuson in ibid., 122. Tony Bilecki in ibid., 52. Sullivan, Red Sails, 72. Salutin, The Organizer, 26. Mary Prokop in Repka, Dangerous Patriots, 98. Anne Lenihan in ibid., 38. Archives of Ontario (AO), Multicultural History Society of Ontario (MHSO) collection, Dick Steele Correspondence, 1942-1944. Along with a few other labour activists, Steele was never sent to internment camp but

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25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

instead spent several months in the Don Jail and Guelph Reformatory. H wrote Esther from those locations. In the summer of 1941, the tribunals before a judge were replaced by hearings before committees of three civil servants or justices. See Toronto Globe and Mail, 21 Aug. 1941. William Repka in his Dangerous Patriots, 74-6. Whitaker, 'Repression of Communism/ 146-7. C.S. Jackson in Repka, Dangerous Patriots, 147. Louis Binder in ibid., 140-1; on other prisoners of war who worked outdoors, see Bill Waiser, Park Prisoners: The Untold Story of Western Canada's National Parks, 1915-1946 (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1995). Bruce Magnuson in Repka, Dangerous Patriots, 124. Peter Krawchuk in ibid., 45. Charlie Murray in ibid., 129; UTA, Robert S. Kenny Collection, box 40, Minutes of the National Committee for Democ atic Rights, 21 Aug. 1941. C.S. Jackson in Repka, Dangerous Patriots, 147. Charlie Murray in ibid., 129 John Weir in ibid., 62. Peter Krawchuk in ibid., 62. Tony Bilecki in ibid., 53-4. William Repka in ibid., 157. See Joe Wallace, Night Is Ended (Winnipeg: Contemporary Publishers, 1942), with Introduction by E.J. Pratt and Foreword by Margaret Fairley. Peter Krawchuk in Repka, Dangerous Patriots, 90. Sullivan, Red Sails, 75. Norman Freed in Repka, Dangerous Patriots, 164. Port Arthur News-Chronicle, 14 Aug. 1942. Muni Taub in Repka, Dangerous Patriots, 137. AO, MHSO Collection, Dick Steele Correspondence, mfm. no. 627, reel 3, Bill Walsh to Anne Walsh, 13 & 18 Oct. 1941,24 Dec. 1942. Pat Lenihan in Repka, Dangerous Patriots, 37. Ibid., 223. Peter Krawchuck in ibid., 43. Tony Bilecki in ibid., 53. Pat Lenihan in ibid., 37. Sullivan, Red Sails, 73. Peter Prokop in Repka, Dangerous Patriots, 93. Bill Walsh in ibid., 206. Tony Bilecki in ibid., 153.

Political Prisoners: The Communist Internees 223 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Salutin, The Organizer, 30. Tony Bilecki in Repka, Dangerous Patriots, 54. Peter Krawchuk in ibid., 49. See, for example, Peter Krawchuk and John Weir in ibid., 46, 61. Ben Swankey in ibid., 153. William Repka in ibid., 158. UTA, Kenny Collection, Pamphlets, 'The Red Patch: Organ of Hull AntiFascist Internees/ May Day Souvenir Issue, 1942. 61 On the Canadian Labour Defence League, see J. Petryshyn, '"Class Conflict and Civil Liberties": The Origins and Activities of the Canadian Labour Defence League/ Labour/Le Travail 6 (1982), 39^16. 62 UTA, Kenny Collection, box 40, Minutes of the NCDR, Toronto, 21 Aug. and 5 Dec. 1941. 63 National Archives, Ottawa, MG 30, A94, Jacob L. Cohen Papers, vol. 30, file 2917-S, Kate Magnuson to Louis St Laurent, 14 March 1942. 64 Jennie Freed in Repka, Dangerous Patriots, 173-4. 65 Norman Freed in ibid., 172. 66 See UTA, Kenny Collection, box 40, records of the National Council for Democratic Rights; AO, MHSO Collection, Bruce Magnuson Scrapbooks, mfm. no. 602, reel 1. 67 UTA, Kenny Collection, box 40, BC District Committee, NCDR, A Fighter for Freedom: Fergus Mckean, Interned Anti-fascist, printed broadsheet, n.p., n.d.. 68 Toronto Daily Star, 13 Sept. 1941. 69 Hannant, Infernal Machine, 222. 70 John T. Saywell, 'Just Call Me Mitch': The Life of Mitchell F. Hepburn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 488. 71 Canadian Tribune, 13 Dec. 1941. 72 OA, MHSO Collection, Dick Steele correspondence, mfm. no. 627, reel 3, Bill Walsh to Anne Walsh, 7 March 1942. 73 Toronto Daily Star, 27 Sept. 1941; Jennie Freed and Norman Freed in Repka, Dangerous Patriots, 172,174. 74 Whitaker, 'Repression of Communism/ 165. 75 Mitch Sago in Repka, Dangerous Patriots, 195. 76 William Repka in ibid., 237. 77 UTA, Kenny Collection, box 40, Brief of the NCDR to the Hon. J. E. Michaud, 8 June 1942; Information Bulletin of the NCDR, 28 Feb. 1942 regarding delegation to the minister of justice, Louis St Laurent, 23 Feb. 1942.

224 Ian Radforth 78 79 80 81 82

Hannant, Infernal Machine, 236-7. Dr Howard Lowrie in Repka, Dangerous Patriots, 217. Sullivan, Red Sails, 93. Tony Bilecki in Repka, Dangerous Patriots, 240. Whitaker, 'Repression of Communism/ 165; Roy MacLaren, Canadians Behind Enemy Lines (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1981), 131-54.

Part Three Italians Interned Abroad: Three Case Studies

As Richard Bosworth observes in this part (chapter 9), 'internment was not an invention of the Second World War/ Nor did the restrictions imposed on Italians and other 'enemy aliens' differ markedly in English-speaking countries with large immigrant enclaves. But though commonplace in wartime, internments elicited varied responses from the targeted minorities, as well as the mainstream majority. They have also generated a variety of personal recollections and scholarly assessments. The contributions in this part contain a cross-section of both. By offering in-depth case studies of Italians in three nations with historic links to Canada, they illuminate the similarties and differences that characterized the treatment of Italians in the English-speaking world during the Second World War. Our choice of essays again underscores the themes of public policy and social history. Regarding the politics of internment, Lucio Sponza's study of Britain (chapter 10) emphasizes the government's 'hurried and shifting policy' towards Italians, the authorities' 'muddled and controversial' handling of matters, and the narrow-mindedness of the security force (MIS). In her study of Italian Americans, Scherini stresses the many inaccuracies and securityinspired deletions in the security intelligence files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). She argues that police spent little time or trouble gathering appropriately incriminating evidence before proceeding with an arrest. By contrast, as we saw above, Whitaker and Kealey, McBride, and the Italian-Canadian specialists note how the RCMP and certain key government officials distinguished between ordinary Italians who joined fascist organizations for innocuous reasons and the mostly middle-class Italian-Canadian leaders chosen by the consuls, who

226 Part Three: Italians Interned Abroad displayed a commitment to Italian Fascism. Bosworth occupies what might be called the middle ground. Australian Italians, he argues, were punished essentially for their supposed 'primordial nationality/ but the government's internment policy, though 'frequently absurd and tyrannous/ was not, given Mussolini's actions and the wartime context, 'beyond the bounds of reason.' In the documenting of the experiences of internees and their families, fascinating details emerge about all the countries involved. As well, Scherini's discussion of the evacuation of west coast Italian Americans (chapter 11) features some cruel ironies: the Italian-American mother who lost a son and nephew at Pearl Harbor yet was branded an 'enemy alien' and forced to relocate; and Italian-American fishing families prohibited from working while U.S. officials decried acute wartime shortages of fish. So does Sponza, whose analysis of the British internments highlights the humble origins of many of the interned Italians - hardworking family men who, with their wives, had become owners of fishand-chips shops and other small businesses in Scotland, Wales, and England; hotel and restaurant workers or managers; and ice-cream vendors. These essays reveal marked differences in various settings. For example, we can contrast the requisitioned hotels and holiday boardinghouses that contained Britain's internees on Scotland's Isle of Man with the militarized camps of the North American interior. All, however, were run like prisoner-of-war camps, with barbed wire, watch towers, and armed guards. Bosworth, for his part, draws a link between the social experience of internment and the emerging national Italian identity of Italian Australians.

9

The Internment of Italians in Australia R.J.B. BOSWORTH

The Second World War had many faces. Indeed, it is best approached, at least at a preliminary level, as a multiplicity of wars. Both in the actual history from 1939 (or 1940, or 1941, or ... ) to 1945 and in the history writing that has gone on since, many separate and sometimes diverse conflicts can be located. Though certainly not the most significant or visceral, among them, from 10 June 1940 there was an ItaloAustralian war. In this war, Italians and Australians came into contact in four ways. First, they fought each other in battle, notably in North Africa. When allied forces moved forward in Libya, a host of Italian troops surrendered into Australian hands. Second, many of these prisoners of war (POWs), along with their fellows captured in other war zones, were transported to Australia by one route or other - some were still arriving from India in October 1943. Tallying in all approximately 18,500 men, the POWs were dispatched to camps in the nation's interior,1 and about three-quarters of these men were employed as 'farming soldiers.'2 Quite a number seem to have enjoyed this employment, to have viewed life as a prisoner as cushy indeed,3 and to have left Australia rather reluctantly after 1945, when the minister of immigration, Arthur Calwell, sticking to the letter of the Geneva Convention, insisted that all indeed must go.4 Third, Australians and Italians met in Italy. A number of Australians, captured during the North Africa campaigns, were held as POWs in Italy.5 Fourth, and most important, there were contacts between civilians. By 1940, some 35,000 Italian-born immigrants, two-thirds of them male, resided in Australia.6 A number had histories that went back to colonial times, and there were thus thousands of Australian-born 'Italians.'

228 RJ.B. Bosworth The majority, however, had migrated fairly recently, notably in the 1920s and especially to Queensland.7 During the war the Australian authorities interned 4,721 such 'Italians/ of whom 1,009 were either Australian-born or had become naturalized British subjects.8 In other words, about one in eight of what might be deemed Australian Italians was at some stage of the conflict classified as 'alien' and identified by, and punished for, what was defined as 'primordial' nationality. Such 'Italians' were rounded up at various times during the war, and the resulting detention could be of different duration for the individuals concerned. Why did this internment9 occur, and what were its shortand long-term effects on the Italian community in Australia? Before endeavouring to answer these questions, I must list a number of cautions. In the literature, terms such as 'concentration camps' are readily used10 - too readily, if the implication is that the fate of Italians in Australia bore any resemblance to what was occurring in other, greater, Second World Wars - that is, either during the 'barbarization of warfare' on the Eastern Front in Europe or during the racial war between 'enemies of a kind' in the Pacific. Much historical and other work since 1945 has been engaged in what might be called an 'Auschwitz competition.' In this macabre, often cynical, but sometimes also innocent contest in historical manipulation, each social or community group has sought to annex a holocaust to its past in order to bolster present claims.11 Any idea that the sufferings of Italians in Australia can be deemed to match those of the European Jews and gypsies, or of the peoples of all the Russias, or, indeed, the travails of any who endured the passage of a war front, including, from 1943, Italians living in the peninsula, must be set aside. In these, more terrible, conflicts some sixty million civilians died. When placed in context, events in Australia, however regrettable, do not amount to an Antipodean Auschwitz. The troubles of Italo-Australia require other contexts, too. As this book is making plain, the policy of internment was a common phenomenon in wartime. In this sense, worldwide structures were deciding the fate of Italo-Australians rather more than were the policies or prejudices of Australian leaders or of Australian public opinion. Even if the Second World War can still be defined as a 'Good War/ because it was fought against Nazi-Fascist (and imperial Japanese) racism,12 plenty of racism survived on the allied side. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Anthony Eden, and presumably Joseph Stalin, had not abandoned cliches about Italian racial inferiority, and such prejudices were scarcely checked by

The Internment of Italians in Australia 229 the manifold military failures of Fascist armies in the war. It was the rule and not the exception, in war as perhaps in peace, for Italians resident abroad to be treated with that special mixture of condescension and arrogance that constituted 'Italophobia: an English-speaking [but not only an English-speaking] malady/13 In 1939-40, Australian internment policy mirrored that being pursued by 'Mother England/ just as surely as Australian troops then fought for 'Home' and empire. Similarly, by 1942-3, the more relaxed policies then gradually adopted towards Italians in some part reflected both the milder U.S. practice and the fact that wartime events had pushed Australia from being a child of the British Empire to a new role as client of the United States. Of course, internment was not an invention of the Second World War. Indeed, much of the story told below of the confining of Italians after 1940 can be sketched in the history of the internment of Germans and 'Austrians' - the very confusing and confused term used by an ignorant Australian bureaucracy to cover ex-inhabitants of the Habsburg Empire - in the First World War. In newly federated Australia, Germans constituted the most numerous and influential of immigrants of non-English-speaking background. The 1911 census counted 32,990 German-born, and 2,774 from Austria-Hungary.14 Once Australia joined the imperial war effort in 1914, some 4,500 were interned. This figure meant that, roughly speaking, the proportion of the German 'community' interned in the First War equalled that of the Italians confined in the Second.15 Gerhard Fischer has written a careful account of the history of these German and Habsburg internees. Given the quality of his work, it is sensible to look at some of his conclusions. Motives behind the policy, he declares, were mixed. Officials acted in what had rapidly become an atmosphere of popular xenophobia and panic. Australians believed easily in an 'alien' threat. Perhaps, too, a certain envy was involved, an uneasy sense that wartime Australia was living outside the 'rage of history' and therefore should, as it were, create an ersatz conflict within the federation, if only to hide how comfortable life remained there for most who had stayed. Fischer also provides simpler explanations. War gave the opportunity for financial advantage, either in the general sense of Anglo-Australians ousting German business from the heights of the economy or in the particular case of small shopkeepers improving their commercial situation against 'German' rivals.16 Unions, too, were not averse to harnessing the occasion in order to benefit their members. In the Kalgoorlie Goldfields, where union power

230 R.J.B. Bosworth was particularly strong, some 700 local 'Slavs' (many of them 'prenational' Dalmatian islanders whom fascist rhetoric would later claim as 'Italian')17 were interned. One victim was 'Joe' Cepo, a seventeenyear-old new arrival. His army report would note: 'There was not the slightest charge against him. No suggestion of hostility. He is an ignorant peasant boy, and to intern him would not conceivably be in the public interest.' Cepo was none the less interned for the duration and, at the conflict's end, deported.18 What was the experience of those interned? Again the answer must be a textured one. Doubtless any person in confinement endure periods of boredom and depression and of disconcerting fear about the fate of family at home, but, for the luckiest ones, internment carried some relationship to life in a holiday camp. In Trial Bay, on the coast near Kempsey, NSW, internees could read a well-informed and intellectually sophisticated weekly paper and attend a variety of courses in the style of what would later be called an open university This camp even boasted a gourmet restaurant, called 'The Duck Coop,' which, for Christmas Day lunch in 1917 - a time of turnips and more turnips in Germany itself - offered a rich menu: 'Consomme in Cups - Filet of Kingfish Hollandaise, Boiled Potatoes - English roast beef garni - Roast goose, Compot, Salad - Lemon Pudding - Fruits - Coffee.'19 Alcohol, officially banned from all camps, may actually have been available to make still more replete and heartfelt the diners' cheer. Other camps, notably the one at Holdsworthy on the outskirts of Sydney, called unselfconsciously the 'Liverpool Concentration Camp/20 were tougher, and life there was at times bleak - in every place of internment, conditions varied, depending on the nature of the commandant and guards. Unpleasantness and prejudice did not emanate solely from Australians. The social and ethnic divisions of Europe often survived their translation to the Southern Hemisphere. 'Real' Germans differentiated themselves from citizens of Austria-Hungary or from German Australians, suspecting darkly that any who had lived for long in the Antipodes must have acquired some version of the 'convict taint.' As one internee would recall, it was common knowledge that 'the scum of Europe had taken refuge in Australia.'21 The long-term result of the internment of German Australians is easy enough to see. Although it would not be utterly destroyed, the German community would never regain the financial, intellectual, and relative numerical strength that it had possessed before the war. By 1945, de-

The Internment of Italians in Australia 231 spite the near doubling of the national population, there were fewer than half as many Germans resident in Australia as in 1914. Naturally enough, some of these survivors were interned in the Second World War - a few had been open Nazis in the 1930s;22 by November 1939,261 had been detained, and, by the war's end, almost ten times that number had experienced some form of internment. Eventually, these detainees were joined by 3,000 or so of their co-nationals sent from outside Australia. Since bureaucratic ignorance, caprice, and insouciance had not been altogether cured by the passing years, among them were numbered quite a few Jews.23 A history could also be written of Japanese24 and other 'Asian' internees. Pearl Harbor, not unsurprisingly, prompted some months of panic in Australia, during which time 587 out of 600 resident Japanese were interned.25 They included a one-legged shop assistant from Broome, WA, who had been born in Australia and who received a letter of support from a government minister noting that he had attended 'one of Perth's best colleges' and was 'an excellent citizen.'26 Predictably, local definitions of nationality, or of what was frequently still called 'race/ were rarely reliable. In June 1942, a list concerning the 'classification and definition of Alien nationals' was circulated to the Australian police. With somewhat faltering justification, it listed among the aliens Albanians, Austrians, Bavarians (could these last two be picked out from Germans by the thickness of the cream on their cakes and coffee?), Bulgarians, 'Chilians [sid],' Finns, Germans, Hungarians, Italians, Japanese, Rumanians, and 'Siamese Thai.' 27 Whatever the general nature of internment, the most numerous of those confined in Second World War Australia were the Italians, and, since, in exact reverse of the German experience after the First World War, immigrants from Italy would stream into Australia in the postwar decades and ultimately construct some sort of 'real' Italo-Australia, the story of their internment deserves detailed analysis. That story has a major place in the history, the 'mythistory/ and the memory of ItaloAustralia. Italians of some sort had begun migrating to Australia shortly after the commencement of white settlement in 1788. Since the Italian state was not created until 1861 (just as Australia would not be federated until 1901), the national identity of quite a few of these early arrivals is problematic and makes filio-pietist pursuit of the 'fathers of ItaloAustralia' indeed a dubious exercise.28 Even after Italian unification,

232 R.J.B. Bosworth many of the inhabitants of the peninsula were not yet nationalized, preferring to frame their subjectivity through their family, paese, or region rather than through their alleged belonging to a modern polity. Until 1914, such migration as had occurred to Australia was thus almost exclusively from the Italics rather than from the nation state called Italy. Typical were the fishermen (and women) of Fremantle in Western Australia. Divided into Sicilian! (the greatest number from Capo d'Orlando, Messina province) and Molfettesi (from Molfetta, near Bari), such self-consciously poveri cristi did their best to stay out of the hands of both Italian consular officials and the Australian state. Unaware of the homogenizing tendencies of the twentieth century, they still wished to live in their own worlds. They even had their own (mental) map of the West Australian coast, inscribed with their own names for key sites, rather than accepting that ordering, from Greenwich and other places, which was confining and 'disciplinising' time and space in the interests of 'modernity/29 Such preference for the retention of a pre-national world can similarly be found in Australia before the First World War. By 1918, the consular agents in the various states, acting both at the behest of the Italian government and with the approval of the Australian, tried to assemble those emigrants deemed eligible for national military service. At Broken Hill, a mining town near the border between New South Wales and South Australia, this attempt entailed the public and contested arrest of forty-four Italians, not at all anxious to participate in Italy's war.30 In Queensland, the consul managed to collect only 500 o an alleged total of 4,000. Although he blamed the nature of the 'sugar trade/31 the consul was probably combatting the age-old peasant wisdom, retained by the immigrants, that conscription agents were people to avoid at any cost. The interwar period produced a challenge to this sort of detachment from the Italian state but did not altogether end it. The challenge was, of course, posed by the Fascist regime, which, if at first reactively, decided both to curb emigration and to exert an allegedly totalitarian control over its subjects abroad.32 Fascist journalists could be found intoning that, whereas under the weakness of liberalism, emigration had made Italy anaemic, now emigrant men, and more especially emigrant women, daily knowing themselves to be more Italian, were indomitably harnessing their lives to Fascist power.33 In time, the regime's rhetoric would grow more complex as Mussolini, impelled by ideology

The Internment of Italians in Australia 233 or by opportunism, expanded Italy's own empire. But, whatever the contradictions of his regime, for all Italians abroad, including those in Australia, Fascism did mean a more solicitous and interfering government, which by its very definition could not forget those who had emigrated and which continued to demand that emigrants submerge their previous regional identities into the processes of the nationalization of the masses and renounce the Italics for Italy. Thus, during the interwar years, in Australia, as in North and South America and indeed anywhere else - Franco Battistessa, the most credulous and enduring Australian exponent of the 'fascism movement,' began his career as the organizer of the Bombay/ascz'o34 - a network of fascist institutions spread throughout the Italian 'community.' In the fishing centre of Port Pirie northwest of Adelaide, for example, a fascio was inaugurated in 1929. By 1932, it had enrolled eighty-three of the two hundred or so fishermen as members, had opened a women's branch, and had had its Fascist banner blessed by the local Catholic priest.35 During the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, it solemnly collected the gold wedding rings of community members, who were perhaps solaced when the steel replacements were blessed by the Catholic bishop of Port Augusta, Norman Gilroy.36 The Port Pirie f ascio even conserved an archive - a mistaken policy, because in 1940 this archive would be seized by the police and then Port Pirie's Fascists would pay for their connection with high politics by being interned. The purveyors of the Antipodean version of fascism were sometimes worldly wise consuls or local businessmen on the make, whose ideology was less than pure and whose commitment to the dogmas of the dictatorship was underscored by self-interest. However, the most public face of the Italian presence in Australia did now become Fascist. Events from the greater world, especially the invasion and conquest of Ethiopia in 1935-6,37 and more humdrum occasions - the visit of a cruise ship or of an opera company, the anniversary of the Fascist accession to power, of the 'Birth of Rome,' or of the 'glorious' military success at Vittorio Veneto - automatically acquired a Fascist gloss. Indeed, in 1935, one emigrant to Victoria would return home to volunteer for the Fascist armies and die on the Ethiopian front. In South Australia, another immigrant, Antonio Giordano, who after the war would become a filiopietist historian and a 'community' leader, informed the consulate that he was anxious to go, although he did not actually depart.38 When news of victory and the creation of the Fascist empire came through, immigrant miners of Wonthaggi, well outside Melbourne, held a spontane-

234 R.J.B. Bosworth ous demonstration, throwing their picks in the air as a sign of the overcoming, both of Haile Selassie and of the racial slurs of their Australian co-workers.39 In 1936, at least in some cases, it had become difficult to separate being Italian from being Fascist. Australians, too, sometimes sounded as though Mussolini was reversing their previous assumptions about 'natural' Italian racial inferiority. Catholic archbishops40 and politicians of an authoritarian bent openly expressed their admiration for il Duce and praised the Fascist draining of the Pontine marshes or the allegedly improved discipline of Fascist society. When the Depression struck Australia particularly hard, one Anglo-Australian commentator even sought to imagine a Mussolini in Canberra - since 1927, the national capital. In what the commentator called his 'phantasy/ a figure of mixed English, Irish, and Scottish descent headed a 'Unificationist Party.' 'At the age of forty he was a mild-mannered, though determined, man [once a school-master and journalist], consumed entirely by love of his country and a hatred of inefficient business men, ignorant Union secretaries and dishonest politicians ... After assuming office he spent a two weeks' vacation driving cattle in the Gulf country and flying to Alice Springs and back by Aeroplane.' Having started well, this 'Australian Mussolini' continued to improve, abolishing state parliaments and the arbitration system and pursuing an 'Australia first' foreign and trade policy (until overthrown by returning Laborites).41 Before long, however, the international crises of the 1930s, especially the rise of Nazism, began to limit Fascist allure in most eyes, although as late as 1939 B.A. Santamaria, a young integralist Catholic commentator with a family background in Lipari, who would become a major figure in conservative politics in Australia after 1945, nourished few doubts about Italian Fascism. Mussolini's regime, he thought, had ensured that the 'quality' of Italians was continuing to improve: 'A product of the Fascist education system, he [a new immigrant] will have received a satisfactory grounding in the doctrinal side of the Catholic Faith, and he will be possessed of a pride in Italy and a general morale which the older Italian settlers have always lacked.'42 That segment of Catholic Australia that Santamaria represented still saw both communism and liberal capitalism as a greater moral threat than Mussolini's version of fascism. Like other countries, Australia did possess among its immigrants a few outright anti-fascists. On the whole, the political left too was charActerizes by a hostility to fascism (sometimes this rejection retained

The Internment of Italians in Australia 235 traditional Laborite racial suspicion of Italians and any group whose workforce had not won the pay and conditions then achieved in Australia). Anti-fascists were not always united, however. Anarchists, communists, and the occasional gentleman democrat - Omero Schiassi of Melbourne being the most obvious example43 - contested the leadership of the anti-fascist cause through the 1930s. Some historians assert that, in north Queensland for example, antifascism did acquire a genuine popular base.44 Ernie Baratto, a caneworker from that part of the world, volunteered for the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and by 1939 had returned to tell his tale.45 In July that year, the spirit of anti-fascism was sufficiently developed for a conference to be held on the subject in the port centre of Townsville. In the meantime, the anti-Semitic racial legislation introduced in Italy by the Fascist regime in 1938 was forcing out such potential 'community leaders' as the radical Claudio Alcorso, whose influence was felt in Sydney and later Hobart,46 and the more moderate 'Joseph' Gentilli, who settled in Perth.47 The presence of such leaders would be significant but would not always advance the cause of political unity among the immigrants. European events sometimes caused other difficulties. The Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of August 1939 left the handful of Italian communists in Australia in a quandary, all the more when Mussolini's regime expressed evident sympathy for the Finnish cause in the 193940 'Winter War' with Stalin's regime. Divisions on the left may interest an historian, but throughout the 1930s in most parts of Australia the partisans of anti-fascism had done little to shake the official linkage between the cause of Mussolini's regime and that of the Italian nation. In Western Australia, for example, most Italian immigrants were still confined to the lower rungs of society, although an intellectual, Francesco Vanzetti, did teach the first tertiary-level Italian course in the country at the University of Western Australia. (Gentilli, his eventual biographer, has remarked that Vanzetti 'was intrigued by the rise of Fascism in Italy, and began to appreciate fascist social policies. As an emigrant of old standing, Vanzetti also admired what Fascism was doing to uphold the status of Italy and Italians abroad.')48 The great majority of Italians in the state, however, had a rather simpler understanding of Fascism. Working as fishermen out of ports such as Fremantle and Geraldton, or inland on the 'woodline,' where they were engaged in the backbreaking work of cutting timber for the

236 R.J.B. Bosworth gold-fields, Italo-West Australians had little time or opportunity for active politics. None the less, in the larger centres and especially in Perth, they were more likely to hear from Fascists than from the regime's opponents. Between 1929 and 1932, for example, the Italian community welcomed Renato Citarelli, a young war hero and an ostensibly committed Fascist, as vice-consul.49 He enhanced Fascist ceremonial by sponsoring a local Italian-language paper, La Stampa italiana under the enthusiastic, and probably self-interested, editorship of Luigi Mistrorigo.50 If the paper's accounts are to be believed, Fascist songs were sung, Fascist parades held, and Fascist anniversaries recalled and celebrated by the great majority of those who still in any way thought of themselves as Italians. Citarelli's speeches and the pages of La Stampa made it seem that a stato totalitario had indeed come into existence whenever Italians assembled in Western Australia. Some caution is, however, necessary in relation to such accounts of fully 'fascisted' emigrant communities. It is true that at certain times, especially in 1935-6, Fascism must have meant quite a lot to poor and doubtfully literate immigrants, still in transition from the pre-modern to the modern world, especially since Fascism had become another term for the nation. On many occasions the word must have had a still vaguer but more deployable meaning as a winning rejoinder to expressions of Anglo-Australian ignorance, hostility, racism, and wealth. For immigrants living by the sweat of their brow, Fascism could both promise official Italian-government sympathy (however much in practice consular officials, local intellectuals, and self-styled community leaders preserved the hierarchical and status-conscious attitudes and behaviour of their class) and seem to offer a way to resist Australian demands, whether explicit or implicit, that immigrants assimilate as soon as possible, given that their own culture was worthless. Thus in June 1940 the great majority of Italians in Australia were neither fanatically Fascist nor avowedly anti-fascist. They were not necessarily afascists, either. One early internee would tell his captors in classic phrases: 'I only know that there is a war because I was brought in, otherwise I would not have known it... The only people who buy [newspapers] are those who can afford them ... I am not interested in anything except my work.'51 But perhaps he protested too much, and a historian should be careful before reading these words as evidence of an absolute detachment from politics by all except that tiny minority of immigrants who were activist fascists or anti-fascists. In 1940, most Italo-Australians probably retained enough good sense to fear the war

The Internment of Italians in Australia 237 that Mussolini had now entered (but the Second World War was 'unpopular' at its commencement everywhere, even in Nazi Germany). However, had that war been the one that Mussolini, much of the Fascist elite, and perhaps many of the fiancheggiatori expected - that is, a lightning war of complete success, leading to the overthrow or redimensioning of the British Empire to Italy's advantage - there is little reason to doubt that quite a number of such 'ordinary men'52 (and women) would have sought to profit from the national and Fascist victory. Then they would indeed have agreed that they were Fascists because they were Italians and Italians because they were Fascists. Many would have enjoyed the defeat of Anglo-Australians, those arrogant and lazy people of 'six meals a day.'53 The internment policy that Australian officials, another set of 'ordinary men/ would practise in the war, as we shall see below, was frequently absurd and tyrannous. It was not, however, beyond the bounds of all reason. Meanwhile, the Italian government was pursuing policies that almost seemed designed to make things as bad as possible for Italians in Australia. Despite its strenuous denials of historical parallels, the Fascist administration, in 1939-40, delayed for nine months before entering the war, just as the Liberal government of 1914-15 had done. Worse, Mussolini hid his own doubts and frustrations about Italy's ideal diplomatic strategy by making frequent declarations that the nation remained adamantine in its alliance with Nazi Germany (and with Imperial Japan). He thus continued a line best defined as one of 'open conflicts openly arrived at/54 which had been damagingly typical of much Fascist diplomacy and now also vexed Italians who resided in other countries.55 Given such flaunting of aggression to come, it was natural for Australian governments to prepare themselves well before the actual event for an Italian entry into the war. Already in 1939 Conservative Prime Minister Robert Menzies had received from his bureaucrats the National Security (Alien Control) Regulations. Largely replicating both the practice in the First World War and similar legislation then being adopted in Britain and elsewhere, the regulations were wide-ranging: 'If the Minister or any person authorized by the Minister to act under this regulation is of the opinion that it is necessary or expedient to the interests of public safety, the defence of the Commonwealth or the efficient prosecution of the present war to detain any enemy alien, he may, by warrant under his hand, order the enemy alien to be detained in such

238 R.J.B. Bosworth place, under such conditions and for such period as the Minister or person so authorized determines/ Nor was the definition of 'alien' too narrowly cast. It could, for example, extend to 'naturalized persons' and, it was soon to be clear, could embrace those born in Australia. The government also prepared a list of categories by which one Italian could be distinguished from another. Category A targeted Fascists, Communists, 'mafiosi,' and exmembers of Italy's Royal Army; all were to be interned at once. Category B included those working in ports, in war factories, in public utilities, and in communications; category C, 'all leaders and people of influence in the Italian community'; and category D, all males of military age. Each of the terms set out in these last three groups could justify internment.56 In other words, by the time that category D had been reached, every male Italo-Australian could have a case mounted against him. As far as much of Australian public opinion was concerned, the more elastic the terms, the better. The determination of fascism to make a splash exacerbated the Australian public's common tendency to paranoia. In New South Wales, for example, during the war, ordinary citizens would warn officials that Italo-Australians could assemble an armed band of 50,000 and use it to overthrow the White Australia Policy57 or that money was being surreptitiously dropped from mysterious Italian airplanes to immigrant chicken farmers. One bloodthirsty racist even suggested to the state premier that such aliens should be placed on a boat, which could be towed out to sea and sunk.58 In north Queensland, in the autumn of 1942, there was much warming to the idea of a deportation of all local Italians at least 100 miles inland, a plan also supported by the state's commissioner of police. The prospect was scotched only after opposition from the army and because morale improved with the May 1942 victory of the United States over the Japanese fleet in the Battle of the Coral Sea.59 Throughout the war, anti-Italian correspondence in the archives is sad testimony to the fact that 'ordinary men and women' potentially exist everywhere, although presumably the officials who filed this sort of material did not take the denunciations too seriously. However, the combination of Fascist boasting and Fascist tardiness had ensured that internment would commence with the outbreak of war. On 25 May 1940, still more than a fortnight before Italy's armies were ready to invade the French Riviera, Australian military officials were instructed that 'in the event of war being declared between Australia and Italy it

The Internment of It lians in Australia 239 will be necessary for the concentration and internment of certain Italian nationals/ Off Fremantle, a droll contest also began to ensure that the MN Remo, an Italian liner waiting to dock, would not be ready to leave port and thus would become Australia's first prize in the war with fascism.60 Both Conservative and Labor supporters agreed that some punitive action against anyone who sympathized with Mussolini's regime was fully justified. In Adelaide, for example, both waterside workers and masons used the war to remove Italians as competitors in the workplace.61 An occasional voice could be heard defending liberty and due process, but most Australians had had their existing prejudices about Italians confirmed by the timing and nature of Italy's entry into the war. Mussolini, the press proclaimed in reiterated metaphor, was the 'jackal' of the present conflict. Italians, it was assumed, racially unable to fight like men, preferred, on this as on other occasions, the 'stab in the back.' In June 1940, few Australians believed that italianita amounted to much more than a combination of cowardice and violence. At first the army had envisaged the internment of only 'a comparatively small number of leaders'; rapidly, however, it abandoned this limitation, with an acknowledgment that 'local considerations' and 'the attitude of the British Subjects regarding the presence and property of Italians in the community' could be decisive.62 As has been noted above, between 12 per cent and 15 per cent of all Italo-Australians would eventually be interned, although the national proportion could rise towards 25 per cent if children and women are excluded (a few women were interned but mostly, it seems, only briefly, given that Australian officials shared with fascism the sexist assumption that women did not count politically). In some places, notably northern Queensland, the total, especially after the 'crisis' of 1942, was more like 50 per cent of available males. Although not all Italians were interned, a considerable proportion were. What further information is available about these internees and their wartime meeting with the Australian state? I should at once admit that the existing historiography on this subject is partial and unsatisfactory and, on quite a number of topics - for example, on the social history of internment - virtually non-existent. My account of both the history and the 'memory' of internment must therefore be read as highly tentative, more an invitation to further work, rather than as some sort of measured historical set of conclusions (should such a thing ever be possible or desirable).

240 R.J.B. Bosworth We do know something about the statistics. It is easy to establish that the peripheral states, Western Australia and Queensland, and the Northern Territory, were the most enthusiastic interners. A total of 1,196 (more than 85 per cent of them Italian nationals) would be confined in West ern Australia, and 2,216 (almost 30 per cent of them naturalized or Australian-born) in Queensland. The Western Australian authorities tended to do their interning first. In the rest of the country, 855 Italians were interned in New South Wales, 171 in South Australia, 170 (an anomalously low figure) in Victoria, 65 in Tasmania, and even 50 in the sparsely populated Northern Territory.63 Among this last group was Giuseppe Zammarchi, a leftist-inclined prospector at Tennant Creek, far in the outback. Zammarchi was sufficiently politicized to protest at his treatment, and, after his case was taken up by a lawyer interested in civil liberties, he would win early release.64 The differences between the states have not been fully explained. Perhaps paranoia was greater in outlying regions and more prevalent in the countryside than in the city. In South Australia, the fishermen of Port Pirie were more likely to be interned than were the marketgardeners or terrazzo workers of Adelaide.65 The relative size of an Italian community could also have an influence. In Western Australia there had been an appreciable migration before the First World War (in 1911,2,361 Italians were tallied as residing there - more than 35 per cent of all Italian immigrants then living in Australia).66 Queensland had been the great venue for interwar migration. Each of these states had also already experienced open outbreaks of hostility to Italians. In Western Australia, there had been (minor) anti-ethnic riots at Kalgoorlie in 1919 and 1934.67 When war began, a particularly zealous local army commandant would favour mass internment on the grounds that he was protecting both Italians and the goldfields from further outbreaks.68 In Queensland, ethnic conflict of a kind seems similarly to have been endemic, especially on the sugar-fields of the north, even though a recent historian has suggested that by the 1930s some tensions had been easing in towns such as Babinda and Ingham, where Italians could outnumber Anglo-Australians.69 By contrast, the smaller degree of internment in Victoria is sometimes explained by the presence in Melbourne of the Italophile (and Mussolini-phile) Irish-Australian Catholic archbishop, Daniel Mannix, with his political contact, Arthur Calwell. Each of these two men did have a sense of Christian mercy, at least for Catholics. (This special history of the war may have assisted Victoria after 1945 when it replaced Queensland as the favoured venue

The Internment of Italians in Australia 241 for immigrants and as, more important, it became the centre both of overt power and of history and myth-construction in Italo-Australia. These matters are noted further below.) What was the political basis of internment? How 'Fascist' were the internees at the time of their arrest, and what did confinement do to their ideological beliefs and practice? The evidence relating to such matters is spotty. It is a simple affair to find muddle, ignorance, and ridiculous self-importance; general bewilderment when confronted with 'foreign' ideologies; and a grotesque over-estimation of the significance of an immigrant's fascism on the part of the Australian authorities. With some justification, those (from category A), who headed the fasci, which existed in all centres with a sizeable Italian presence, were usually among the first to be interned. But so too were quite a few others, the profundity or menace of whose political commitment was not wholly evident. In Western Australia, for example, one of those who suffered did so because officials, less than well prepared linguistically, could not distinguish the name of a local club of Mazzinian traditions, the Club Giovane Italia, from the Gioventu Italiana del Littorio all'estero (Italian Fascist Youths Abroad). In northern Queensland, security officers behaved with quite bathetic incompetence. Before the eagle eye of one such investigator, a poor sugar-farmer near Mackay was reported for owning a dog which, it was alleged, would, with intolerable Italian patriotism or Fascist ideological ardour, proffer its paw to a visitor in imitation of the 'Roman' salute.70 Being rounded up for having had little more than a brush with fascism was quite common. In Fremantle, for example, Salvatore Paino, a relatively prominent fisherman, had his house searched on rumours of fascist zealotry and of an arms cache in his cellar. It turned out that there were no arms and indeed no cellar, although the authorities, in their pursuit of Paino, did manage to seize one Fascist-government bond and one book about Italy's victory in Ethiopia. It was true, too, that Paino had on occasion attended consular ceremonies and in patriotic response to sanctions in 1935-6 had favoured the collection of gold. Through such less-than-far-reaching fascist deeds, Paino probably reflected rather well the sort of ideological commitment common among Italo-Australians, a commitment that existed in its way but which, except in circumstances of actual Fascist invasion, could scarcely be seen as a threat to Australia. If the authorities were maladroit in assessing the subtleties of fascist

242 R.J.B. Bosworth belief, they were similarly unreliable in distinguishing one brand of 'alien' politics from another. Caterina Pasculli of Port Pirie was, for example, arrested by the police for her 'strong Communistic views/ even though she led the Port Pirie Fascist Women's Section.71 In this regard, Soviet-Nazi relations in the period between the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact (1939) and Operation Barbarossa (1941) did after all give some grounds for confusion. Certainly, in the minds of security officials, communism, anarchism, and socialism all sounded un-Australian. Being an anti-fascist was not therefore a guarantee against internment. The most notorious case in this regard is that of the anarchist Francesco Fantin. His security report of 1941 duly illustrated the propensity of Australian officers to lump one ideology in with another: 'Fantin is a particularly cunning and crafty type of Italian alien who has been engaged in anti-British propaganda under various guises/ the report ran. 'He has been listed as an Anarchist, a Fascist, and a follower and teacher of Communistic doctrines. He has a bitter hatred of England and Englishmen and is definitely opposed to Democracy/ A police raid on his house uncovered the humble tokens of an emigrant's politics-booklets, including one by 'C. Marx' (did the investigating officer work out that Carlo could translate as Karl, or did he simply fail to recognize the name?), letters 'in foreign language/ and a 'multicoloured handkerchief with photograph of B. Durriti.'72 On the basis of this 'evidence/ Fantin, in February 1942, was confined at the Loveday camp in rural South Australia. His story did not end there. Loveday had become a national centre for Italian internees, and Fantin was soon the object of insult and attack by Fascists, who could indeed distinguish an anarchist from themselves. In November 1942 Fantin died after an affray with Giuseppe Bruno Casotti, a recently arrived internee from Western Australia. The circumstances of the death are still disputed, but some thought Fantin the latest victim of fascist murder.73 Nor was Casotti the only one to retain his fascism behind a camp's walls. Admiration for Mussolini continued at Loveday and in other places of internment, where a 'True Italian movement/ while not daring to speak the name of fascism, presumably stayed loyal to its cause and that of the nation.74 Cases can also be found of relatively unpolitical internees adopting fascism in the camps, all the more because of what they perceived as the injustice of their internment.75 Lingering fascist sympathies had not disappeared even in 1945, when, for example, certain priests - notably Faustino Lenti at Cowra76 or the more ubiquitous figure of the Jesuit, Ugo

The Internment of Italians in Australia 243 Modotti - had not yet comprehended that anti-communism, however much it might remain the ideology of conservative and Christian Democratic Italy, could no longer appear in the guise of fascism. Currents of more informal politics, those of the Italics as much as those of Italy, must also have eddied among the internees, but they are difficult to trace very far in the literature. We do know that, in north Queensland, allegations about the influence of the 'Black Hand' (presumably a local version of the Calabrian 'ndrangheta), still common before 1940,77 lessened after 1945; perhaps this change reflected a certain 'nationalization' of internees in that region. However, the 'ndrangheta would develop a more marked postwar presence in, for example, Griffith in southwestern New South Wales. In that region, some internment of early settlers did occur, but the existing historiography is too primitive to know with what effect.78 Internment may well on occasion have been a nationalizing experience, in which immigrants, arriving with identities from the Italics, left with some sort of at least verbal commitment to the Italian nation. 'Verbal' may have more than one nuance - in the camps some dialect speakers for the first time made themselves familiar with the national language. A period in a camp could bring other opportunities for contacts to be made and skills acquired. The D'Orsogna smallgoods company, by then a flourishing concern notably in Western Australia and headed by a family of immigrants from the Abruzzi, seems to have taken off after the employment of one of its number as a camp butcher. The effect of internment on the 'Italian family' and its myth also deserves consideration. As has been noted above, women were rarely interned and, when they were, could expect early release. The interning of men, however, often meant that during the war immigrant wives or daughters had to assume responsibilities more openly or more fully than in the past. For women left alone with others of their gender, internment in a sense replayed that customary history of emigration, in which men had, grandly or foolishly, ventured forth, leaving their women to defend hearth and home. In recent years a fair amount of evidence has been collected to show that women in Italy, who had been confronted with these circumstances, took responsibility or 'agency' for their own and their children's lives with alacrity and competence.79 Such fleeting evidence as exists80 suggests that the same was true of wartime Australia. Another topic badly in need of proper scholarly investigation is the history of those males who were not interned. Two very contradictory

244 R.J.B. Bosworth and very brief references to this fate can, however, be located in ItaloWestern Australia. The intellectual and 'university man' Vanzetti, was, his biographer has stated, saved from internment through his 'contacts'81 - presumably his friendships within the Anglo-Australian power elite of the state. By contrast, Peter Ciccotosto, a naturalized emigrant from Vasto, who in 1940 was working on a farm at Waroona, south of Perth, was disgusted when his friends were interned and he was not. This omission seemed to threaten his notions both of nationality and of masculinity, with the latter predominating.82 His complaints, however, were unavailing, and when he was conscripted into the Australian army he had to content himself with absconding for a time. Other issues to do with internment also await their historian. We know, for example, that the POWs of Cowra produced 'first-class spaghetti'83 and that those at the Murchison camp planted prickly pears, which, somewhat to the consternation of Anglo-Australians, still bear fruit.84 Other voices add the predictable message that enduring AngloAustralian cooking was one of the more painful features of camp life, even if there was some acknowledgment at the fairness of a society in which the diet of camp guards and camp inmates was the same.85 We know too that at Loveday the camp garden expanded from two to 400 acres while Italians were there and that illicit camp stills sprang into action after grape-picking expeditions.86 A historian has also related solemnly that 'gambling was a more popular recreation among the hard-nosed inmates of Loveday than the calisthenics, libraries, and concerts of the earlier [and less 'Italian'] camps.'87 More, however, needs to be discovered about ordinary living conditions, which must have varied from one camp to another and from one period of the war to the next. The religious history of internment is also a tantalizing subject. ItaloAustralia would become more publicly pious after 1945 than it had been before the war, but, Archbishops Mannix and Duhig apart, there is little evidence that the predominantly Irish-Australian Roman Catholic Church, which had until 1940 largely ignored the presence of Catholics not of Irish origin, was particularly helpful to the internees or their families. Whatever was true in immigrant Italian hearts, the new forms of piety would come from Italy, and from the United States, rather than being the natural and inevitable result of a linear history of ItaloAustralia. Finally, we need more detail on the release of internees, whether that meant returning to their original employment, to service in the Civil Alien Corps, where the labour was generally situated in the

The Internment of Italians in Australia 245 bush and conditions were tough indeed, or, in a minimal number of cases after 1945, to eventual expulsion. Mannix was of course not the only Australian publicly to doubt the wisdom of internment policies. Fremantle's mayor, Frank Gibson, regularly denied that national difference should be equated with treachery, and throughout the country politicians could expect the occasional humane and good neighbourly letter urging that after all the interned Italians had before the war worked hard, uncomplainingly, and fruitfully. Sometimes an acknowledgment of past Italian effort had present implications. The fishing industry of Western Australia, for example, had become particularly dependent on the immigrants' labour and expertise, a fact that was emphasized in requests for the early release of those needed all the more in wartime to bring in the harvest of the seas.88 A full-scale study of such interventions in favour of the internees awaits its historian. Such gaps in the evidence notwithstanding, it is time to ask about the long-term effects of internment on Italo-Australia. More especially, what was the significance of this history in the light of the arrival between 1950 and the late 1960s of a previously unimagined wave of immigrants (the census of 1971 would count some 290,000 Italian-born)?89 It is this wave that now allows spokespersons of the community to talk about 'one million' Australians as being possessed of some Italian 'heritage/ Plainly the 'making of Italo-Australia' occurred in most ways only after 1945, but how conditioned was this sea change by the experience of internment? A response can be given on a formal or informal level. The formal tale is brief enough. From 1943 to 1948, Italo-Australia experienced its own small version of what happened in Italy itself during those years - the 'diversion' of the radical possibilities of the left's coming to power in favour of continuity with the past. In the immigrant community - that is, in its public face on ceremonial occasions and in its dealings with Australian officialdom - a type of 'Christian Democracy regime' was soon established in the Antipodes. After 1943, the existing community leaders, who had 'fellow-travelled' or worse with fascism, were briefly challenged by anti-fascists, such as Schiassi and Alcorso, enrolled in the local branch of Italia libera and for a time editing a paper with the appropriately leftist title of II Risveglio. The challenge was soon repelled, however. The most evident example of leftist defeat was in Victoria, where continuity with the past was maintained by the alliance

246 R.J.B. Bosworth of the Catholic Church, especially as embodied by Mannix; a classically 'transformist' businessman, Gualtiero Vaccari, who had added to his prestige by intervening in favour of internees; and Minister of Immi gration Calwell, himself an anti-communist Catholic of decidedly paro chial bent and thus open to manipulation by the collaboration of Mannix and Vaccari. With its access to finance severely limited, 11 Risveglio was soon countered by La Fiamma, a paper with more orthodox patriotic and even fascistic overtones; its first editor, Anastasio Paoletti, a 'missionary to the migrants' from the United States, could readily don the armour of a Cold Warrior.90 With the verities of the Cold War thus established in the politics of Italo-Australia, the official reception of more than two hundred thousand immigrants would over the next two decades mix a generic patriotism with a convinced social conservatism. Plenty of continuities would survive from the Fascist era, but the public expression of italianita would not be as strong and would defer to official Australia's demand for rapid and complete assimilation. In the eyes of the community leaders, the most important task for the mass of new immigrants it seemed was not to rock the boat. In particular, immigrants should be wary of revealing any political views and should show polite respect for the powers that be - in Australia, in Italy, and in the so-called Western world. It is highly predictable that the main Anglo-Australian historian of Italo-Australian internment after 1940 should have been assured by respondents in 1979 of 'their belief that the circumstances of war satisfactorily explained their internment.'91 Such at-times-sly quietism meant in turn that Australian officialdom was not alerted to some of the social difficulties that confronted new immigrants. Community leaders also automatically rejected any idea of critical history and instead enhanced the always-present possibility that the Italo-Australian community's own reflections on the past would be crudely linked to the shoring up of the non-elected positions of the notabili. But what of the impact of internment at a more informal level? In this regard, we may see three results. One was sharply to separate the lifehistory of those who had been through internment from those who had not. A historian of the Hungarian presence in Australia has come up with the memorable idea that immigrants need to be distinguished by their 'vintage/92 by which he means that all analyses of immigration should be careful with chronology and meticulously seek to locate the exact time and historical circumstances of emigrants' departure from

The Internment of Italians in Australia 247 their place of origin. His proviso is useful. There can be little doubt that Italo-Australians, who were soon labelling themselves the 'pionieri' of the community, were crafting, both in their own minds and wherever they could in the historiography, a typically pioneer understanding of the relationship between past and present. In this 'mythistory/ the pionieri had endured manifold travails, notably during their internment, but in its aftermath they had struggled through to a better present, made concrete by their blood, sweat, toil, and tears. In the face of this heroic achievement, the new generation should be grateful, respectful, admiring, and obedient but somehow would probably turn out never to possess enough of those qualities. Internment thus reinforced a gulf of considerable incomprehension between those new immigrants who had experienced the Second World War in Italy or on the Fascist battlefront and those older ones who had lived it in Italo-Australia. A second, less visible division also probably existed, more difficult to document. The erratic nature of the selection for internment left in many a desire for some sort of logical explanation. Citizens of the Italies, and especially of southern Italy,93 who had grown up on such profoundly pessimistic sayings as 'the rich man has a father in hell who prays for him/94 had not forgotten that, back home at least, 'risk, fraud, and the absence of scruples were indispensable qualities for success/95 Now too they were suspicious of their neighbours. Could internment be blamed not so much on the injustice of the Australian government (all governments were both foreign and unjust, by definition) as on the malevolence of a neighbour, a fellow 'Italian'? Were not even paesani likely to be unscrupulous? Had not internment sprung as much from factors operating within the Italian 'community' as from outside? Such thoughts are seldom admitted publicly, but they do indeed seem to have been part of quite a few immigrants' comprehension of a 'time of troubles/ We need to take into consideration the assumptions of envy and betrayal before opting for a cosy, italiani brava gente, Toto-style, image of any section of the Italo-Australian community. We are moving, somewhat uneasily, from the realm of history to that of 'memory/ It is true that Pierre Nora and his followers are not always convincing in their protestations that there is something more 'real' and 'organic' about memory than about academic scholarship.96 None the less, in an age of identity politics we are becoming increasingly used to the spectacle of communities' proclaiming their memory, and presentday Italo-Australia has not been backward in such matters. Historians,

248 R.J.B. Bosworth however uld remain sceptical in the face of present man of memory, just as they would, or should, be in their reading of any evidence and any historical account. In the last decade, attempts have been made to ease the tension underlying memories of the internment story. In New South Wales in 1990 and in Western Australia in 1991, public dinners were held, with the premiers, Nick Greiner and Carmen Lawrence, respectively, being present. Survivors of internment were invited to these events so that they could receive an official apology for the injustice perpetrated on them by the Australian government. Moreover, if it has not yet stimulated a scholarly history, internment has become the object of museum display. In 1996, for example, one such exhibit toured rural Western Austalia and reportedly brought tears of comfort to elderly survivors of the Italo-Australian war. At a dinner or the opening of a display, official discourse emphasizes an embrace - the embrace by the Australian nation in its new 'multicultural' humaneness, the embrace of a single Italian nation that suffered (no time now to talk about Fascism or about differences between the Italics or about present-day Italians' reactions to immigrants arriving in their nation), the dbbracci of real friends. No doubt such warmth of spirit is all to the good, as the candles flicker, the wine is circulated, the food is consumed, and a certain reconciliation results. But something manipulative is also occurring, as it must when human beings turn their eyes to history. On these occasions, the past is being homogenized and pasteurized, as it were. It is being given a simple binary nature, in which being Australian and being Italian are defined as straightforward and immutable matters. In this cosy mood of dolcezza, some of the actual tyrannies, selfishness, ignorance, and self-importance of the past are being disguised and papered (or, to be more accurate, worded) over, as is the sort of equivocal goodness in which humankind specializes but that is too nuanced to receive proper expression on official occasions. Making the past manageable through public ceremony carries a further disadvantage. Any past is of no interest in itself but only as it can be related to a present and a future. But in our present and our most likely future it is easier to detect tyranny, selfishness, ignorance, self-importance, and equivocal good than it is to perceive a folkloric world of endless embrace and complete amity. Identity history can usefully display the texture of a society; it cannot by itself, however, solve the problems of humankind. In this sense, reconciliation is not enough, and even the small history of the Italo-Australian war goes on needing critical analysis.

The Internment of Italians in Australia 249 Notes 1 For a populist account of one set of camps, see J. Hammond, Walls of Wire: Tatura, Rushworth, Murchison (Tatura, 1990). 2 The fullest, if non-scholarly, account of their experiences is A. Fitzgerald, The Italian Farming Soldiers: Prisoners of War in Australia 1941-1947 (Melbourne, 1981). Even cosier is B. Bunbury, Rabbits and Spaghetti: Captives and Comrades. Australians, Italians and the War, 1939-1945 (Fremantle, 1995). The only attempt at overall academic study, combining the experiences of POWs and internees, is C. and C. Alcorso, 'Italians in Australia during World War II,' in S. Castles, C. Alcorso, G. Rando, and E. Vasta, eds., Australia's Italians: Culture and Community in a Changing Society (North Sydney, 1992). The essays there collected, however, are very disappointing in quality, and their authors ask few serious or worthwhile questions. 3 Certainly POWs, now sent to Australia, fared hugely better than did Italian POWs, imprisoned in Austria or Germany during the First World War. Then the death rate was some 20 per cent, the majority of whom starved to death (according to their most recent historian, with the ruthless cognizance of the Italian government). In this past, you had to scrabble for bread; in Australia, you were given meat (even if it was mutton). For the sad fate of the First World War POWs, see G. Procacci, Soldati e prigionieri italiani nella Grande Guerra (Rome, 1993). 4 One journalist has described how Italians, confined at Cowra, NSW, and in great contrast to Japanese POWs who had been penned in the same camp, would be applauded and saluted by local children and would reply cheerfully to them and 'throw down packages of candy and chewing gum and biscuits/ Perhaps this sort of acceptance by the locals helps to explain why, when the Japanese broke out of the camp in 1943, the Italians refused the chance to leave their hut. In other camps, however, a fanatical fascism can be traced. H. Gordon, Die Like the Carp (Maryborough, 1980), 32; J. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 134-5. 5 For some account of their experience, see R. Absalom, A Strange Alliance: Aspects of Escape and Survival in Italy 1943-45 (Florence, 1991). 6 By the 1947 census, the figures were reckoned to be 22,506 males and 11,126 females. See R.J.B. Bosworth, 'Post-war Italian Immigration/ in }. Jupp, ed., The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People and Their Origins (Sydney, 1988), 613, and, for more statistics, see H. Ware, A Profile of the Italian Community in Australia (Melbourne, 1981). 7 For a useful regional history, see W. Douglass, From Italy to Ingham: Italians in North Queensland (St Lucia, 1995).

250 R.J.B. Bosworth 8 For the statistics, see I. Martinuzzi O'Brien, 'The Internment of Australian Born and Naturalized British Subjects of Italian Origin/ in R. Bosworth and R. Ugolini, eds., War, Internment and Mass Migration: The ItaloAustralian Experience 1940-199 (Rome, 1992), 92, 98. 9 There is one general history of internment in Second World War Australia, being largely a narrative of policy. Dedicated to 'my personal heroes: The men of the Australian and American forces who fought the Battle of the Coral Sea,' the book is bland or exculpatory in tone. It is also very vague about the internees and talks about Guisseppi, Mateotti, and so on. See M. Bevege, Behind Barbed Wire: Internment in Australia during World War I (St Lucia, 1993). 10 For but one example, see G. Rando, 'Italians in Australia: Assimilation, Integration, Multiculturalism,' in G.E. Pozzetta and B. Ramirez, eds., The Italian Diaspora: Migration across the Globe (Toronto, 1992), 55. 11 For an exploration of the historiography, see R.J.B. Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War 19451990 (London, 1993), and 'Nations Examine Their Past: A Comparative Analysis of the Historiography of the "Long" Second World War/ History Teacher 29 (1996). 12 See, classically, S. Terkel, The Good War': An Oral History of World War I (New York), 1984. 13 See R. Harney, From the Shores of Hardship: Italians in Canada (Welland, Ont, 1993), 29-74. 14 E. Scott, Australia during the War (Sydney, 1941), 105. 15 G. Fischer, Enemy Aliens: Internment and the Homefront Experience in Australia, 1914-1920 (St Lucia, 1989), 102, notes that among those interned was for a time C.P.L. Ratazzi, the person who at the start of the war and in proper appreciation of the Triple Alliance was acting consul in Perth for both Italy and Germany. 16 Ibid., 122. 17 A. Splivalo, The Home Fires (Fremantle, 1982), 17, in his autobiographical account, notes that his father would write letters home in Croat, while his mother preferred to use Italian as reflecting 'a sensitive, poetic mind and her very strong Catholic convictions.' 18 G. Fischer, Enemy Aliens, 169. Fischer reports that the Boulder Miners' Association, with a certain naivete about the world, had wanted the 'Slavs' infiltrated by someone 'with knowledge of the Balkan language' (p. 159). 19 Ibid., 251. 20 See, for example, Scott, Australia, 116. 21 Fischer, Enemy Aliens, 208.

The Internment of Italians in Australia 25 22 One local German, however, was put off by Hitler's admiration for Italian Fascism: 'He sympathizes with Mussolini too much for me. The Italian only fights well from behind. I think nothing of these traitors.' Quoted by J. Perkins, The Swastika Down Under: Nazi Activities in Australia, 193339,' Journal of Contemporary History 26 (1991), 116. For German internment in the war, see the narrative in Bevege, Behind Barbed Wire, especially 1319. 23 For an introduction, see K. Kweit, 'Inter-war German Community Life,' in Jupp, ed., The Australian People, 490-2. The most notorious incident (sometimes exaggerated) in this regard involved those being transported to Australia from Britain on the Dunera. For a journalistic account, see B. Patkin, The Dunera Internees (Sydney, 1979). 24 For a narration, see C. Carr-Gregg, Japanese Prisoners of War in Revolt: The Outbreaks at Featherston and Cowra during World War II (St Lucia, 1978). 25 Bevege, Behind Barbed Wire, 138-42. In the general crisis that year, some twenty members of the Australia First movement, a confused group who declared themselves anti-Semitic, anti-capitalist, and anti-British, were also interned. 26 Ibid., 141-2. 27 For examples, see M. Bosworth, 'Internment/ in J. Gregory, ed., On the Homefront: Western Australia and World War II (Nedlands, 1996), 200-11. 28 For typical examples, see R. Pascoe, Buongiorno Australia: An Italian Heritage (Melbourne, 1987); T. Cecilia, We Didn't Arrive Yesterday: Outline of the History of the Italian Migration into Australia from Discovery to the Second World War (Red Cliffs, 1987). 29 For some introduction, see R. and M. Bosworth, Fremantle's Italy (Rome, 1993); see also the account of Western Australia by a consul there. L. Zunini, L'Australia attuale: usi e costumi (Turin, 1910). A translation of this book, edited by RJ.B. Bosworth and M. Melia, has now appeared: Western Australia As It Is Today: 1906 (Nedlands, 1997). 30 D. O'Connor, No Need to Be Afraid: Italian Settlers in South Australia between 1839 and the Second World War (Kent Town, SA, 1996), 90. O'Connor also notes (91) that Gualtiero Vaccari, secretary of the Melbourne consulate, 'did not hesitate to ring the police when Italian workers turned up at the consulate to obtain information about the call-up.' In his later life, Vaccari would frequently get on well with police. 31 Scott, Australia during the War, 430. 32 For my own account of this somewhat contradictory process, see Italy and the Wider World, 123-6 33 Mario Appelius in II popolo d'ltalia, as cited in Z. Ciuffoletti and M.

252 R.J.B. Bosworth

34 35 36 37

38 39

40

41 42 43 44

45 46 47

48

Degl'Innocenti, eds.,L'emigrazione nella storia d'ttalia 1868-1975 (Florence, 1978), vol. II, 129-32. See G. Cresciani, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Italians in Australia, 1922-1945 (Canberra, 1980), 45, 58-62. M.P. Corrieri, 'Italians of Port Pirie/ unpublished ms., 1990, available at Port Pirie Library, SA. D. O'Connor, No Need to Be Afraid, 148. The most public event in the history of the Adelaide fascio would be its hailing of the conquest of Addis Ababa. The ceremony was held at the factory of a local Italian ice-cream manufacturer and allegedly attracted 'many Australian sympathisers.' See ibid., 150. Ibid., 158. Giordano seems to have quite a lot of trouble working out which ideology best fitted his ideals or ambitions. N. Randazzo, 'Breve storia degli italiani in Australia/ in Ricordo del Santuario di S. Antonio e deifondatori (Melbourne, 1969), 92-3. Randazzo, editor of a conservative paper, the Globo, was coming from a background of friendship with people like Battistessa. See, for example, Archbishop Duhig of Brisbane, who was still enthusing about Mussolini in 1945. For some introduction, see D. Dignan, 'Archbishop James Duhig and Italians and Italy/ in I. Grosart and S. Trambaiolo, eds., AHro Polo: Studies of Contemporary Italy (Sydney, 1988), 163-70. J. Godsall, 'Mussolini at Canberra: A Phantasy/ Australia Quarterly 5 (1930), 104-12. B.A. Santamaria, 'The Italian Problem in Australia/ Australasian Catholic Record 16 (1939), 298. For an account of his life, see Cresciani, Fascism, 223-43. K. Saunders, War on the Homefront: State Intervention in Queensland 19381948 (St Lucia, 1993), 46 or, more fully, D. Menghetti, The Red North: The Popular Front in North Queensland (Townsville, 1981), and her 'The Internment of Italians in North Queensland/ in G. Cresciani, ed., Australia, the Australians and the Italian Migration (Milan, 1983), 88-101. Menghetti, The Red North, 88. For his not very revealing memoirs, see C. Alcorso, The Wind You Say (Sydney, 1993). After the war, Gentilli would prepare a guide for the new wave of immigrants, using a metaphor not unfamiliar in earlier Italian history. See J. Gentilli, Australia: terra promessa (Florence, 1952). J. Gentilli, The Unbent Poplar: Francesco Vanzetti and His Times (Nedlands, 1988), 43. For Gentilli's own autobiography as a Jewish Italian whose departure coincided with the racial legislation but, according to him, was

The Internment of Italians in Australia

49

50

51 52

53

54 55

56 57

58 59 60

253

not altogether occasioned by it, see J. Gentilli, 'The Geographer/ in L. Hoffman and S. Masel, eds., Without Regret (Nedlands, 1994), 101-14. For some of the lights and shadows of his career, see R.J.B. Bosworth, 'Renato Citarelli: Fascist Vice Consul in Perth: A Documentary Note/ Papers in Labor History 14 (1994), 91-6. For the ambiguities of this editor, see R. Bosworth, 'Luigi Mistrorigo and La Stampa: The Strange Story of a Fascist Journalist in Perth/ in R. Bosworth and M. Melia, eds., Aspects of Ethnicity: Studies in Western Australian History 12 (Nedlands, 1991), 61-70. Cited by G. Cresciani, 'Peasant Immigration in Australia 1920-1940,' Spunti e Ricerche 2 (1986), 40. My reference is of course to Christopher Browning's terrifying accounts of those who would carry out Nazi racial policies in eastern Europe and his noting of the fact that murder squads were composed less of fanatics than of 'poor sods' who in wartime could not find more pleasant employment. The killers whom Browning describes were in this sense a sort of German 'Dad's Army.' See, for example, C. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1992). See, for example, J. Gentilli, Australia: terra promessa, 52, which, with a curious lack of historical sense, repeated this nationalist and fascist allegation against the English (though they were restricted in the original version to five meals per day). For more on the background of Italian images of Australia, see R. Bosworth, 'LTtalia d'Australia: 1988,' in R. Ugolini, ed., Italia-Australia 1788-1988 (Rome, 1991), 27-44. Bosworth, Italy and the Wider World, 45. In Adelaide a new consul, Felice Rando, mimicked his master by pressing fascistization even in 1940. He engaged in house-to-house visits and then left his archive detailing fascist sympathies to be seized by the Australian police. See O'Connor, No Need to Be Afraid, 160. Cresciani, Fascism, 172. In Australian attitudes towards Italians, even in scholarly circles, there was often an uncertainty about whether or not Italians could be accurately defined as 'white.' For the classic example, see W.D. Borrie, Immigration: Australia's Problems and Prospects (Sydney, 1949), 88. Cresciani, 'Lo spettro della quinta colonna in Australia: 1939-1942,' Affari sociali internazionali 13 (1985), 45-61. Bevege, Behind Barbed Wire, 165-8. For a further summary, see R. and M. Bosworth, Fremantle's Italy, 98-105; O'Brien, 'Internment', 89-90. The sister ship, the Romolo, left port in Brisbane before the war began. It was, however, pursued by the Australian

254 R.J.B. Bosworth

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85

navy and as a result scuttled by its captain. Its crew and passengers thus became among the first to be interned. O'Connor, No Need to Be Afraid, 173-5. It is true that, on the wharves, the Italians were usually either 'volunteer laborers' or scabs, depending on the onlooker's viewpoint. Martinuzzi O'Brien, 'Internment,' 90-1. Ibid., 92. Bevege, Behind Barbed Wire, 63,123-4. O'Connor, No Need to Be Afraid, 180-1. For the figures, see R. and M. Bosworth, Fremantle's Italy, 186. For an account, see R. Pascoe and P. Bertola, 'Italian Miners and SecondGeneration "Britishers" at Kalgoorlie, Australia,' Social History 10 (1985), 9-35. Bevege, Behind Barbed Wire, 64-6. Douglass, From Italy to Ingham, 159-62. D. Dignan, The internment of Italians in Queensland,' in R. Bosworth and R. Ugolini, eds., War, 62-3, and see passim for other, similar examples. O'Connor, 'Internment,' 183. P. Nursey-Bray, 'Francesco Fantin: Internment and Anti-Fascism in Australia/ Studi emigrazione 94 (1989), 227-8. Ibid., 232-6. R. and M. Bosworth, Fremantle's Italy, 111. See, for example, O'Connor, No Need to Be Afraid, 185. See G. Cresciani, 'Captivity in Australia: The Case of Italian Prisoners of War, 1940-1947,' Studi emigrazione 94 (1989), 211. For a rather confused account, see Douglass, From Italy to Ingham, 220-34. See, for example, T. Cecilia, Un giardino nel deserto. For examples, see Bosworth, Italy and the Wider World, 138-43. For some summary, see R. Pesman Cooper, 'Representations of Italian Immigrant Women in Australia: Past and Present,' Altreitalie 9 (1993), 5868. For oral history accounts, if only of Western Australia, see R. Bosworth, ed., 'Oral Histories of Internment,' in Bosworth and Ugolini, eds., War, 105-16. Gentilli, The Unbent Poplar, 50. G. Pitts, Emma: Celebrazione! (Sydney, 1996), 14-5; for further background, see E. Ciccotosto and M. Bosworth, Emma: A Translated Life (Fremantle, 1990). Cresciani, 'Captivity in Australia,' 202. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 142. See, for example, R. and M. Bosworth, Fremantle's Italy, 104.

The Internment of Italians in Australia 255 86 87 88 89 90

91 92 93

94 95 96

Bevege, Behind Barbed Wire, 189. Ibid. See M. Bosworth, 'Internment.' H. Ware, 'Origins of Postwar Italian Immigrants/ in lupp, ed., The Australian People, 623. For some introduction to these events, see R. Bosworth, 'Official Italy Rediscovers Australia 1945-50,' Affari sociali internazionali 16 (1988), 41-63, and cf. my 'Conspiracy of the Consuls? Official Italy and the Bonegilla Riot of 1952,' Historical Studies 22 (1987), 547-68. Bevege, Behind Barbed Wire, 233. E.F. Kunz, Blood and Gold: Hungarians in Australia (Melbourne, 1969), 180. For a still useful survey of the regional background of Italian immigrants, see F. Lancaster Jones, 'The Territorial Composition of Italian Emigration to Australia 1876 to 1962,' International Migration 2 (1964), 247-65. Jones shows that from 1880 to 1919 Sondrio was the top province of origin, followed by Messina. By contrast, from 1926 to 1962, the first source was Reggio Calabria, again followed by Messina. H. Hess, Mafia and Mafiosi: The Structure of Power (Farnborough 1973), 134. P. Arlacchi, Mafia, Peasants and Great Estates: Society in Traditional Calabria (Cambridge, 1983), 121. For the classic, brief, English-language introduction to Nora's ideas, see P. Nora, 'Between Memory and History: Les lieux de memoire,' Representations 26 (1989), 7-25.

10

The Internment of Italians in Britain LUCIO SPONZA

This chapter begins with the story of one not-untypical Italian immigrant family in wartime Britain. The second section deals with the British government's hurried and shifting wartime policy towards members of the Italian community as 'enemy aliens/ just before and then after Mussolini's declaration of war in June 1940, followed by their gradual release. The focus is on the muddled and controversial ways in which that policy was carried out and on the ensuing debate and criticism that it aroused within government departments. The third section deals with the internees themselves: their life in the camps, their work outside the camps, and their efforts to maintain connections with their families. Although the internment of Italians appeared justified as a security measure in the grave circumstances of the spring of 1940, the conclusion to this essay points to a deeper and darker motivation behind the hostile attitude towards them (as well as towards all 'enemy aliens'): entrenched xenophobia. An Emblematic Story In June 1940 Luigi Tognini and his wife, Amelia, lived in Prestwick, Scotland, where they owned a cafe with the distinctly attractive feature of a billiard room. They had four children: Renato, Piero, Anna and Adua, whose ages were eighteen, fifteen, thirteen and four, respectively. Adua was their only child to be born in Britain, despite the fact that the couple had settled in Scotland when they married, in 1921. In fact, Luigi had arrived in Scotland when he was only sixteen, in 1912, to help in a fish-and-chip shop run by a family acquaintance and fellowvillager. He went back to his village of Pelleroso, in the Tuscan moun-

The Internment of Italians in Britain 257 tains four years later to join the Italian army during the First World War. At the end of the war he returned to Scotland and established his own little business, also a fish-and-chip shop, together with a partner - who was also a fellow-villager. Original local ties strengthened when Luigi returned to Pelleroso to marry Amelia and take her to Scotland, where he set up a business on his own by the early 1930s. This had been possible because both Luigi and Amelia spent their energies in running the shop. But they also wanted a family, and each time Amelia was approaching the time to give birth, she returned to Pelleroso to have her children born there. The babies would also be raised in Italy by one of their grannies, at least for a few years, while Amelia almost immediately rejoined her husband in Scotland. However, by the time Adua was due, a young couple from a nearby Tuscan village had been brought over to help in the shop and with the domestic chores - and this is why Adua became the only member of the family to be born where they lived. Now in his early forties, after thirty years of assiduous work and enterprise, Luigi was rightly proud of his family and commercial success: the dual centre of his world - as was the case, in very similar circumstances, with thousands of Italians in Britain. That world was shattered when Mussolini declared war on 10 June 1940. In the evening of that same day Tognini's cafe was spared the window-breaking spree and looting by young hooligans that other Italian shops had to suffer throughout Britain, but more extensively in Scotland.1 The next morning Luigi and Renato were arrested and taken away to be interned. The others in the family were given three days to arrange their departure from the coastal area where they lived and to move inland. As Amelia spoke little English, Piero suddenly became totally responsible for the well-being of his mother and sisters. He managed to sell the goods stocked in the shop (only keeping for themselves the cigarettes, the most precious item, which were to follow the family's movements and become an effective bartering tool), to rent a room in Auchinleck, and to find part-time employment in a local cafe-cum-fishand-chip-shop, belonging to people of Italian origin luckily unaffected by the measures against 'enemy aliens.' Then, at the beginning of July, misfortune struck again, only partly unexpectedly. Still without any word from and about Luigi and Renato, the news of the sinking of the SS Arandora Star in the Atlantic reached the family (2 July), with the terrifying fear that Luigi and Renato might be among the hundreds of Italian deportees to Canada who drowned in

258 Lucio Sponza that disaster. The following day was Piero's sixteenth birthday, the lower age limit for internment, and two policemen knocked at the door and took him away, leaving his mother and sisters to cope on their own. Thus Amelia was on the verge of near-despair, from which she was rescued by the information that her husband and sons were all safe and reunited in one of the internment camps in the Isle of Man. Before the end of the year Piero was released, having undertaken to work on any assignment of 'national importance' - which happened to be as a lumberjack. He could now assist and support his family, while waiting for the release of his father and brother. They would be freed at the beginning of 1944, and at the end of the war the Togninis returned to Prestwick, as soon as their house and shop were vacated by the tenants who had temporarily occupied the premises.2 The story of the Togninis is emblematic. Most interned Italians, whether they remained behind barbed wire for some months or until the end of the war, were family men who had lived in Britain for many years, had worked hard, and in many cases had succeeded, to become owners of little shops, in Scotland, in South Wales, or in London. Others were engaged in hotels and restaurants, as managers, directors, cooks, or more often - waiters. There were also ice-cream street vendors throughout the country. Only the narrow-minded Security Services could seriously believe that these humble people represented a 'fifth column' risk in case of German invasion. Even though they had joined the fascist party, their true loyalty was towards their own families and kin. A section of the Italian Fascist party was established in London as early as 1921 - one of the first to be set up outside Italy - but recruited with difficulty among suspicious and apolitical emigrants. However, 'fascism' was gradually supported, even by those still reluctant to join the party, as momentous events were impressed on the community: Mussolini's trumpeted visit to London in 1922; the Lateran Agreement of 1929 between the state and the Roman Catholic Church (Mussolini was then indicated by Pope Pius XI as the 'Man of Providence'); and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935-6, which established an Italian empire and created the illusion that Italy had become a world power.3 Furthermore, these traditionally neglected emigrants were blandished by fascist party representatives, who ran the leading community organizations, and by the diplomatic and consular Italian authorities in Britain, who adopted popular and populist policies (such as provision

The Internment of Italians in Britain 259 of Italian education, entertainment, and welfare). Last but not least, there was weekly propaganda from the sole Italian newspaper printed in Britain and circulating within the community, which had fallen under the control of the fascio since the early 1920s. In the end, therefore, fascism became synonymous with patriotism to the vast majority of Italians in Britain, and anti-fascist activity was confined to some elder anarchists and even fewer political refugees.4 Government Policy 'Collar the Lot!'

As early as the end of April 1940 the Aliens Department of the Home Office alerted all police stations in the country to be ready to arrest all Italian males aged between sixteen and seventy, with less than twenty years' residence in Britain - in addition to the '1,500 members of the Fascist Party' whose names were being supplied in great secrecy to the local constabularies by His Majesty's Secret Service, MIS. In the end, only about half that number of 'dangerous characters' were rounded up, including sixteen women. Incidentally, the wholesale arrest of Italian women was discounted not out of principle, but simply because there was nowhere to put them, as Sir Alexander Maxwell, permanent under-secretary at the Home Office, admitted.5 There was no time to classify the Italians according to their estimated danger to security as had been done with the other 'enemy aliens,' the Germans and the Austrians.6 It is not surprising that when Italy declared war - trusting that the conflict would soon be over, and won (by the German ally) - the operation of rounding up the Italians was carried out with haste and that 'differences, anomalies and idiosyncrasies abounded in the method used.'7 The decision to 'collar the lot' was taken at a crucial cabinet meeting on 11 June: the Home Office was instructed to proceed with the rounding up, while the War Office was to organize and administer internment camps and the movement of internees. Nearly 4,200 Italians were arrested (virtually all males), out of some 18,000 registered with the police (approximately 11,000 men and 7,000 women).8 Half of them were living in London, but there were also substantial communities in Scotland (especially in and around Glasgow), in South Wales, and in most of the main provincial cities. Unlike the case of Germans and Austrians, very few Italians were political or

260 Lucio Sponza racial refugees from Fascist oppression, and equally few had ever manifested anti-fascist views. Most of them would recognize themselves in the characteristics of the Togninis. In addition to the 4,200, some 300 British-born sons of Italian immigrants were arrested under Defence Regulation 18B, which was the main legal instrument to put away British fascists. The Aliens Advisory Committee of the Home Office met on 15 June to consider what to do with the Italians. It was recommended that as many as possible, whether arrested or at liberty, should be sent back to Italy, partly because any of them might be a security risk in case of attempted invasion and partly because having been used to a relatively comfortable life in Britain they would soon turn into foci of discontent in the harsh conditions of Italy at war. Nobody pointed out the irony of using a potential Italian 'fifth column' in Britain (stridently denounced by many newspapers) as an effective British-Italian 'fifth column' in Italy9 However, those possessing exceptional technical knowledge, those in the age-group for military conscription, and - perhaps - those who had British wives and had 'thrown the lot with this country' were allowed or forced (as the case might be) to stay in Britain. The snag was that there was no available ship for that massive operation, nor was the Ministry of Shipping prepared to release for that purpose the twentyone Italian vessels that were seized in British ports or waters on 10 June.10 In the end, the only Italians to be repatriated were those included in lists presented by the Italian embassy - minus those whose names were struck out by MIS and those who for various reasons refused to go: altogether 629 Italians were shipped to Italy, in exchange for British civilians leaving Italy and returned to Britain. Many of those people, on both sides, were diplomatic and consular personnel and their families. Meanwhile, Canada agreed to receive up to 4,000 internees and 3,000 prisoners of war (POWs), whose presence in Britain was regarded at the time as a source of major risk. Four ships sailed off to Canada with large human cargoes between 21 June and 4 July 1940: all in all, 4,380 German/Austrian and 403 Italian internees and 1,956 POWs (mainly Germans) arrived. One of the four ships, the Arandora Star, carrying the highest number of Italians, never reached Canada, as it was sunk by a German U-boat. A total of 446 out of 717 Italians aboard perished, as did 175 out of 478 Germans/Austrians.11 It was soon revealed that notorious anti-Nazi and anti-fascist 'enemy aliens' had been embarked on the ill-fated former passenger liner and

The Internment of Italians in Britain 261 that some had died. Yet, in reply to critical questions in Parliament, the government spokesmen doggedly maintained that only category A Germans/Austrians (to which POWs were assimilated) and Fascist Italians had been selected for deportation on the Arandora Star. As the damning evidence could not be swept aside for long, an inquiry was eventually conducted by Lord Snell, a former Labour MP who had also been the leader of the London County Council. His report was never published in its entirety. Only a summary appeared in print, in which a number of mistakes in the compilation of lists for deportation were admitted: 'Taking the broad view of the programme of deportation and the conditions under which the work of selection had to be done, Lord Snell did not consider that this number of errors was a cause for serious criticism/12 Still, criticism had been piling up on various grounds. It was a true cruelty to re-embark many survivors of the sinking (including 200 Italians) on SS Dunera, bound for Australia - without even letting those wretched people contact their families to assure them that they at least were still alive. Indeed, it was unacceptable that communication between internees and their families was virtually non-existent on all fronts and that when information arrived, after much delay, it was often inaccurate and misleading. Such a deplorable state of affairs prompted Viscount Cecil of Chelwood to pronounce in the House of Lords the famous sanctioning of the way in which the internment policy had been enacted as 'one of the most discreditable incidents in the whole history of this country.'13 It was not just a mixture of blunders and muddle that characterized the implementation of that policy by the War Office. Cases emerged but were kept within the tight folders of various departments - in which the persistent mistreatment of the deportees by their guards and even officers left government officials appalled. A well-known case, first mentioned by Lord Halifax (the foreign secretary) to Sir John Anderson (the home secretary) concerned the callous treatment of deportees re-embarked on the Dunera.u Another case is referred to in a report on the voyage of the Ettrick to Canada: 'While the sinking of the Arandora Star became known on the second day [of the journey], no precautions were taken beyond the issue of lifebelts. The Officer commanding the transport, Colonel Freesen (?) [sic] refused to see representatives of the internees throughout the voyage. His exclamations ("You lousy lot", "Scum of the earth") and his behaviour on the day of arrival (kicking and beating internees) were unworthy of his position.'15

262 Lucio Sponza The deportation of internees to Canada was also subject to official reprimand by the government in Ottawa when it realized that 'a number of the internees sent to Canada [were] innocent refugees' - contrary to the original undertaking by the British authorities to send there only dangerous 'enemy aliens.' In providing the Dominions Office with the reply to the Canadian high commissioner in London, Sir John Anderson admitted that 'His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom subsequently to the original communication to Canada on the subject, came to the conclusion that it was desirable to transfer overseas as many internees, whether individually dangerous or not, as the Dominion Governments were willing to accept, in order to reduce the general danger arising from the presence of a large number of internees in this country.' The attached memorandum providing the Canadian government with full information pointed out that 'the 407 [403, in fact] Italians who were sent to Canada on the Ettrick were not Fascists.'16 Changes in Internment Policy The Arandora Star disaster of early July 1940 precipitated a series of major changes on internment, at administrative and policy levels. The administration of internment camps was transferred from the War Office to the Home Office. Any further deportation overseas was abandoned. Two advisory committees were set up, one to keep internment policy under review and the other to watch over the welfare of internees. A policy and the procedure for the release of internees were laid down and began to be implemented with the publication of a White Paper (Command Paper No. 6217, July 1940), which envisaged eighteen categories for release. It applied only to Germans and Austrians (mostly Jewish refugees) who were either old and invalid or to skilled people willing to contribute to 'work of national importance.' Two more White Papers (Command Paper No. 6223, August 1940, and No. 6233, October 1940) added new categories for release and extended their application to Italian internees. Meanwhile, a Home Office Advisory Committee (Italian) was set up under the chairmanship of Sir Percy Loraine (the last British ambassador in Rome) to interview the applicants for release and recommend a decision to the home secretary. The first interviews took place late in October. 'Every day a group of seven or eight Italians were brought before the Committee and had to go through meticulous questioning on any aspect of their life, their political views and their past and recent

The Internment of Italians in Britain 263 relationship with Italy.' So wrote Cabisto Cavalli many years later. Cavalli was summoned before the 'Loraine Tribunal' early in 1941 but was refused release and remained interned for another three years.17 His background was very similar to Luigi Tognini's: since 1920 he had been living in London, where he finally owned and ran a 'Cafe Restaurant.' He had joined the Italian Fascist party in 1935 but had never bothered about politics and considered himself just a 'fervent patriot.' We do not know whether his release was refused because of this 'patriotic fervour' or because of his party membership - he could see no difference, and neither could most Italian internees. Sir Percy knew and understood this: he firmly and consistently maintained that membership of the Fascist party did not necessarily involve Fascist commitment. He had the backing of the Foreign Office in this, but against him was the equally determined opposition of the Security Service (notably MIS), which regarded that membership as constituting unreserved loyalty to Mussolini. The Home Office steered a cautious course between the two positions, and its stance created immense frustration to Sir Percy. He strongly - but ineffectively - complained about the lengthy procedures imposed on the working of his committee, the disregard shown towards his advice, and the apparently autonomous actions taken by certain officials who by-passed the committee - and even acted against its recommendations.18 If the narrow-minded views and obstinate meddling of MI5 drove Sir Percy to the brink of resignation, it was all too much for Lord Lytton, who chaired the Advisory Council on Aliens. An exasperated memorandum written in March 1941 by a young Foreign Office official and member of the council, Richard Latham, stated: 'The problem is to deal with the inefficiency of MI5, which is generally admitted by those who have contact with that body. The other fault of MIS, namely its tendency to interfere with policy [as opposed to intelligence] for reasons which it does not disclose and are usually bad, is a direct consequence of its inefficiency.'19 Lytton's hope that the Home Office would support his suggestion to set up a special department to 'tidy up' the policy towards 'enemy aliens,' so as to avoid MIS's interference, was dashed - and he resigned in June 1941. The decision was officially motivated by his poor health, but he left the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden (who had replaced Lord Halifax at the end of 1940), in no doubt as to the real cause: 'An opportunity is now afforded to me of retiring on grounds of health which will, I hope, relieve you of any embarrassment which might be caused by the publication of my real reasons for giving up the work.'20

264 Lucio Sponza It was not the first time that Lytton refrained from speaking his mind about internment. When he was invited to broadcast a talk on that subject to the United States and to Canada, he intended to start as follows: 'The English are said to be an illogical people, and our critics may find in our treatment of aliens of enemy origin since the outbreak of the war further proof of our disregard of logic and consistency. Our policy in this matter has in fact been determined throughout by the varying degree of our own danger and the consequent fluctuations of a public opinion which has been spontaneous and uninstructed.' This entire paragraph was dropped because, it was pointed out to Lytton, it 'would be liable to be interpreted either as a confession of national stupidity or as an instance of national hypocrisy.'21 Release of Internees

For all the frustration suffered by Sir Percy Loraine and Lord Lytton, the release of internees (both in Britain and in Canada) was proceeding without interruption - if painfully slowly. As far as the Italians were concerned, there were three stages. In the first stage, between the autumn of 1940 and January 1942, the total number of internees was halved: from over 4,000 to around 2,000. The pace slowed down throughout 1942 and most of 1943, so that by September of that year the Italian internees still numbered around 1,500. After the separate armistice with Italy, in September 1943, releases were sped up and some 1,000 people were returned to their families in the following fifteen months. When war ended in Europe, in May 1945,573 Italians were still behind barbed wire - 371 of them merchant seamen. Also in Canada and Australia the numbers of Italian internees were down substantially by the end of 1943: in January 1944 they amounted to 127 (sixty-four merchant seamen) and 147, respectively; in May 1945 the relevant figures were seventy-four (fifty-nine merchant seamen) and eleven.22 Three categories for release, out of the twenty-three contemplated by Command Paper No. 6233, had been applied in the case of the vast majority of Italians: category 22, the most popular, referred to those who had been living in Britain for at least twenty years and were friendly towards their adopted country; next was category 3, which dealt with the 'invalid and infirm'; and then was category 12, which concerned the internees who agreed to join the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps (as did Piero Tognini). That merchant seamen were released much more reluctantly was the

The Internment of Italians in Britain 265

Isle of Man prison enclosure, 1940. A tourist postcard of a boarding-house on England's Isle of Man that had been vacated in order to house interned civilians. Courtesy of Harry Seidler, Paula Draper Collection

result of a technicality: they were regarded as military POWs, rather than civilian internees. Merchant seamen tended to have genuine Fascist sympaties and, from the Autumn of 1940, were separated from the bulk of other Italian internees. Their fate was in the hands of the War Office, which could deal with them only in the same way as it did with the many thousands of real Italian POWs who were brought to Britain as forced labour, mainly to be engaged in agriculture.23 The return of POWs to Italy began only at the end of 1945. In April 1946, therefore, 334 Italian seamen were still held in Britain, and 58 in Canada. Life in Internment Camps Virtually all interned 'enemy aliens' were kept in various 'camps' in the Isle of Man, which had served the same purpose during the First World War because it combined the advantages of isolation and surplus accommodation, because all its hotels and boarding-houses normally

266 Lucio Sponza opened only in the summer to holidaymakers from the mainland and from Ireland. Each 'camp' on the Isle of Man consisted of a number of hotels and/ or boarding-houses, requisitioned by the authorities (who paid a fixed rent), surrounded by barbed wire and watched over by armed guards. The War Office supplied the military personnel, whereas the Home Office - as we know - soon took over the responsibility for administration of the camps. Altogether, eleven such camps were opened. Six of them were in Douglas - the capital town, on the eastern coast of the island; they were named after the one or main hotel around which they were established: Central, Granville, Hutchinson, Metropole, Palace, and Sefton. Not too far from Douglas, to the north, was Onchan Camp (from the name of the town); Mooragh Camp was at Ramsey, in the far north; Peveril Camp was at Peel, on the western coast; the two remaining camps were located in the south at Port Erin (for women and some of their children) and at Port St Mary (for married couples and some of their children). The early Italian camps were Palace (the largest, with a capacity of 2,000), Granville (capacity: 750), and Metropole (capacity: 700). From the overcrowded Palace Camp some internees were frequently moved either to Metropole or to Onchan: to the latter camp were transferred all the 'Palace Italians' when the camp was closed in August 1941. Three months later Granville Camp was also closed, and its inmates were moved to Mooragh Camp, which accommodated Germans, Austrians, and Finns. When even Onchan Camp was closed, in March 1944, the Italians were allocated partly to Metropole and partly to Mooragh. By mid-1945 Metropole and Mooragh were finally closed, and the last internees moved to the only surviving camp: Peveril. In addition to occasional visits to the camps by government officials, by members of the Advisory Council on Aliens and similar bodies, and by representatives of religious and humanitarian organizations, the most regular visitors were officers of the International Red Cross. At the end of each visit Red Cross Officials sent detailed reports on camp life to their headquarters in Geneva, with a copy to the Home Office. Descriptions of the actual daily routine and menu lists were often attached to the reports. So, for instance, an early (French-language) report by Monsieur R. Haccius referred to his visit in August 1940 to Palace and Metropole camps. Thirty-two three- or four-storey hotels and boarding-houses made up Palace Camp; Metropole consisted of fourteen. Food was provided according to the 'Home Service Ration

The Internment of Italians in Britain 267 Scale/ but internees had asked to have less meat and more fish, fewer potatoes and more pasta. Subsequent reports pointed out that there was no shortage of Italian cooks to prepare the meals. Internees wore their own clothes and shoes, but indigents were supplied with whatever they needed. A library was being built, and a long list of books was requested - in particular, several copies of Manzoni's nineteenthcentury historical novel, I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), Italian and English grammars, novels, and other literary texts and anthologies, and manuals on mathematics and sciences. British newspapers and magazines were also allowed. Among the requests of a more general nature, internees emphasized their desire for a more effective system of communication with their families, whether in Britain or in Italy; their wish to do voluntary work outside the camps; and their hope to see sport, cultural, spiritual, and leisure activities improved. Religious and spiritual assistance was at first provided by the several Italian missionary priests who were forced to follow their flock into the internment camps (two embarked on the Arandora Star, and one perished). The largest dining-room in Palace Camp was transformed into a church for Sunday mass, but in fine summer days religious functions took place in the open. All other activities in camps were organized by elected ad hoc committees. Educational activities varied greatly in different camps, but the main effort was made in the teaching of languages. Voluntary schooling was offered to internees aged sixteen to eighteen. In December 1940, for example, 153 men were in that age group - most of them in Palace Camp - and it is likely that many of them took the opportunity to improve their education and skills. Classes started at 9 a.m. with English, Monday to Friday, except on Tuesday, when 'Geography and World Produce7 was taught instead. Between 10 and 12, mathematics, physics and technology, and technical drawing marked the weekly program, except on Thursday at 11, when classes of English history were given. After lunch and walking exercises, the students would return to their classrooms only for two hours, to do a mix of chemistry, more physics, and above all 'Practical Installations' (whatever that meant).24 A truly practical - and welcome - installation in all camps was that of radio receiving sets. News from Rome could be listened to, as well as the British Broadcasting Corporation. This privilege was granted so that authorities could monitor reactions to Italian war bulletins. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons sports and games attracted

268 Lucio Sponza many internees: those inclined towards sedentary pursuits could play cards, draughts, chess, billiard, and 'morra' - the popular Italian game in which two players try to guess the sum-number of the fingers of the one hand that each of them quickly and simultaneously displays. The most widely practised outdoor sport was inevitably soccer, to which virtually every youngster and reasonably fit man had to contribute. When Gaetano Rossi, a missionary priest, arrived at Palace Camp, he was greeted by a 'young man with a long black beard/ whose first words were: 'Father, do you play football?' The answer was: 'Yes.' 'Well,' replied the young man, 'you will be playing for my team/25 Various competitive games were organized in all camps, but the most interesting case was at Mooragh, which had substantial numbers of Italians, Germans, and Finns, and where truly international multi-sport days took place. In September 1943, for instance, a championship was arranged with twenty-one types of competition, including two football tournaments (for eleven-a-side and five-a-side teams). Five points were awarded for first place, three for second, and two for third. The Finns won by a large margin (79 points), followed by the Italians (42), and the Germans (35). Still, Italians had the consolation of finishing on top of both soccer tournaments.26 Much-relished recreations were also sea-bathing in summer, when weather conditions were suitable and within a circumscribed precinct of the camp, and organized weekly visits to local cinemas and country walks, both under escort. Country walks came to particular good use with Gaetano Loria during his brief captivity: he was a well-known singing teacher, who had given lessons to the Princess Royal and who took advantage of his country walks to collect dandelion for his dietetic salads. Enterprise and imagination went into activities within the compounds: making useful or simply decorative objects out of twigs or any scrap of timber and metal that could be found was quite common, and the likely results were baskets, toys, and artificial flowers. Sometimes inventiveness went too far. The most glamorous case was that of Luigi Trombetti, whose occupation in normal times was given as 'Fish Restaurant/ in South Wales. He was involved in two judicial cases. First, he managed to make an illicit distillery out of tins, ball valves, and parts of a geyser that he retrieved from a dump in the camp. He was caught in the act of turning a mash of potatoes, dried fruit, ginger, and beets into a liquid that contained 43 per cent of proof spirit. Second, he transmuted 'silver' coins (two-shilling and half-crown pieces) into rings to be traded in the camp: apparently they were in great demand by internees who were

The Internment of Italians in Britain 269 about to be released and wanted to have a souvenir of their internment. He was fined the enormous sum of £200 (subsequently reduced to a still-onerous £10) for the spirit making and was given a month's imprisonment for 'defacing coins of the Realm' (no discount here).27 Voluntary Work outside the Camps More energies, if less imagination, poured into official work both inside and outside the camps. Generally unpaid, tasks within camps ranged from cleaning (which engaged the highest number of people), through cooking and canteen service, to clerical and medical duties. Voluntary and paid work outside began to be organized as early as August 1940, when the (Isle of Man) Government Office issued the following circular with instructions to farmers and market gardeners who intended to obtain internees, labour: Applications should be made to the Camp Commander, and the assignments will depend on whether the necessary escort can be spared. At least 20 internees must be engaged, but if the labour is required in two adjoining farms, the farmer engaging them can distribute them between the two farms, providing that they all work within close distance of each other, so that the guard can exercise proper supervision. The employer must pay to the Camp Commander each evening a shilling per day per man, and defray the cost of necessary transport... The internees will be absent from the camp from 8.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. Any internees employed must be an addition to the British labour normally employed on the farm, and not in substitution for it.28

One year later, a high proportion of Italians at Granville and Metropole camps were working for farmers and other contractors: at Granville, 155 out of a camp strength of 496; at Metropole, 143 out of a total of 642.29 Internees at Palace Camp provided a much lower proportion of outside workers, as many of them were middle-aged and even elderly. On average, up to the end of 1943, about 60 per cent of all Italian internees had regular employment outside their camps. In the last two years of the war that proportion increased, with monthly peaks of 90 per cent, partly because there was stronger demand for work and partly because those who were still interned - the (real or presumed) fascist and pro-fascist lot, as well as the merchant seamen - were younger and more energetic. Monies accruing to camp commandants from employers of internees

270 Lucio Sponza ('one shilling per day per man') were divided in three equal parts: onethird was credited to the cash account of the internee-worker concerned;30 one-third to the Camp Welfare Fund, administered by a Home Office welfare officer resident in the camp; and one-third to the treasurer of the Isle of Man government, to go into a fund for providing work for internees, including the purchase of material and machinery in support of such employment. This last third was in effect a tax levied by the local authorities for the benefit of the local employers. When representatives of the national government queried the fairness of this arrangement, the Isle of Man's government secretary, Bertram Sargeaunt, wrote: 'Our scheme for enabling farmers to employ internees ... give[s] the internee a wage which would approximate the surplus wage which would be available for a British farm labourer after he has paid for his cottage and the maintenance of his family. The internee is housed, fed and clothed at the expense of the Government. In addition, the farmer ... has to provide food for the internee.' The authorities in Whitehall do not appear to have replied, but Sir John Moylan's handwritten comment on the margin of Sargeaunt's letter is revealing: 'This does not of course meet the point that Manx farmers are getting sweated labour.'31 Sir John might have added that, for all the susceptibility of the island's authorities with regard to British interference in their affairs, Sargeaunt failed to notice that the 'Government' footing the bill for the housing, feeding, and clothing of internees was that based in London, whereas the government getting part of the monies was the one based in Douglas. That the work done by the Italian internees was valuable was clearly expressed during an exchange of correspondence between the Foreign Office and the Home Office in the late summer of 1942. The former suggested that Italian internees in Britain should be deprived of certain privileges (such as the use of radio sets and visits to local cinemas) in order to put pressure on the Italian government to improve the alleged unsatisfactory conditions in which British internees were kept in Italy. There was a prolonged consultation within the Home Office, and its reply concluded: 'The proposal to withdraw certain privileges now allowed to Italian internees would not effect its object [because the Italian government had already shown disregard for the fate of Italian internees], while it might impede our war effort, as most of the Italians interned in the Isle of Man have volunteered for labour outside the camps and are doing valuable work in aid of the Air Ministry, or as

The Internment of Italians in Britain 271 agricultural workers who are now assisting in gathering the biggest harvest in the Island for many years.'32 The 'valuable work in aid of the Air Ministry' was done by the 'Fascists' at Metropole Camp. It consisted in the construction of a reservoir as a water-supply to the Andreas Aerodrome in the north of the island. Yet at the same time Metropole Camp internees gave cause for serious concern when three of them escaped, in two separate incidents. They were all soon found in an adjoining hotel, where they went to meet their relatives who had arrived to the island to visit them. In one case, the fugitive was found in flagrante delicto in his wife's bedroom. Keeping in Touch with the Family

These visits were very important for the internees to satisfy their overwhelming need to keep in touch with their families. They were allowed to send two letters per week, with no limits to the number of letters that they could receive. Still, they were eager to see relatives as often as possible - if they could afford the expenses that the journey and the hotel accommodation entailed. For this, wives, fiancees, brothers, and sisters patiently applied to the Home Office for the visit permit and embarked on an often-long and uncomfortable train journey to Liverpool, where a ferry-ship would take them to Douglas. Arriving early in the morning, to make the most of the limited permission to stay in the island, involved night train travelling and hours of queue waiting outside the booking office of the ferry company in Liverpool port to get the tickets. Some days in the summer, when excursionists were still numerous, the ferry-ship was soon filled and several would-be passengers had to wait for more hours for the next vessel. The ordeal did not end when they at last arrived at Douglas: visitors to internees had to go to the police station to receive a permit to enter the island and to remain there for the days allowed to complete the visit covered by the Home Office permit. Visitors were normally permitted to stay in the island for two full days and to make up to four visits per year to their relatives. This unnecessarily cumbersome procedure reflected - again - the hostility of the local authorities towards the ruled imposed on them by central government.33 The island's government saw the internment of enemy aliens as a burden, even if on balance it created more economic

272 Lucio Sponza advantages than disadvantages, and not only to the employers of internee labour. For instance, visitors to internees took advantage of the relative abundance of food and other merchandise available in the island's shops, compared to the mainland's more severe rationing, and spent a good deal of money.34 Relatives visiting internees would indeed bring them various items for their comfort - mainly food. There were strict regulations as to what was allowed into the camps, and sometimes relatives were caught while trying to smuggle prohibited items. One such case for which we have full details occurred when Maria Pacitti arrived from Glasgow (where she managed the family shop, 'Confectioner and Tobacconist') with a load of goodies to make Christmas (of 1942) less miserable for her husband, Guglielmo. Here is the list of the contents, as indicated in the report written by an officer, with his comments and perplexities: '1 pair trousers; 1 cheese grater; 1 piece Parmesan cheese, about 2 Ibs. (not rationed); 2 large packets Co-op processed cheese, probably about 10 Ibs. total (rationed - ordinarily unobtainable now); 200 Churchman's No. 1 cigarettes; 2 bottles salad oil, unlabelled (rationed'); l/2 Ib. Rowntree's Cocoa (rationed'); 1 tin drinking chocolate - found to be mixed with sugar [which was rationed]; 1 packet of coffee (size about 4 l /2 Ibs.) - found to contain a 4 Ib. package of sugar inside; 2 tins red peppers; 1 Ib. bottle of Bovril; 1 turkey with 2 tins of condensed milk secreted in its inside; 1 paper bag containing garlic.'35 Regulations restricting communication and exchange were broken in other instances by relatives, friends, and even casual acquaintances. Ida Polledri was fined £10 because she was seen talking to an Italian through the barbed wire of Granville Camp ('I just spoke to Capella, my old governor,' she said). She had arrived from London two days earlier to see her husband, also interned there.36 Chiara Orsi and Ethel M. Charles were fined £20 each for approaching Celeste Orsi (Chiara's husband) and Antonio Orsi (Ethel's fiance and Celeste's brother) while they were working on a farm. When arrested, Charles was in possession of £912s.; Mrs Orsi had with her the remarkable sum of £82, in one-pound notes. They denied having tried to pass over any money to their men. Mrs Orsi's unlikely story was that 'she usually carried a lot of money with her, as she kept a restaurant in London, where they did a lot of business, and she required change.' She paid up her friend's fine - which Charles could not afford - as well as her own.37 Some ten days after the Orsis's case, another little and more complex

The Internment of Italians in Britain 273 family saga with judicial consequences unfolded. Four young women from South Wales arrived on the island to visit seven internees - relatives, fiances, or friends. Twenty-eight-year-old Louise Cooper, who was considered the ring-leader, had come mainly to see her fiance, Frank Belli, and her cousin, also named Frank Belli (let's call him Franco). Ines Belli (twenty-one) was Franco's sister and Frank's cousin. Mary Belli (seventeen) was Frank's sister. Nora O'Sullivan (twentyfive) was Franco's fiancee. On previous visits some of the women had made the acquaintance of on the camp guards (Corporal Schofield), with whom they kept in touch. The corporal was alleged to have acted as go-between for the internees and their visitors, so that communication between the two parties was made possible outside the legitimate visiting time, both outside and in the camp itself. The visitors carried over a great deal of food and cigarettes; Ines Belli, in particular, admitted to having brought with her at least '2,000 cigarettes' and also 'cartons of chocolate.' They were fined between £5 and £15 each.38 A heavier fine of £25 (plus £5 costs) was imposed on Ida Croci. After visiting her husband at Ramsey she smuggled out of the camp some papers that he had written. It did not matter that they were instructions concerning his poor health and his need to eat much fruit and vegetables: a heavy hand was applied towards Mrs Croci because she was 'a woman of 39, capable of running a business [an Italian and Continental Grocery Store in Cardiff] and therefore must have known what she was doing.'39 Also from Wales were Giuseppina Sidoli and Maria Rizzi, who were accused of offering money to a camp guard in order to induce him to deliver parcels to their interned husbands. The parcels contained chickens, cigarettes, cakes, a head of celery, and a leek, together with articles of clothing,. The defendants maintained that they offered only a few shillings to the guard out of friendship, not as a bribe. Perhaps they were believed, as they were fined just £2 each.40 Rare visits and limited exchange of letters with her husband, Pietro, were too frustrating for Giannina Casci. She arrived in the island at the end of May 1943 with her two children and frequently visited Pietro in the following weeks. They worked out a plan by which letters would be exchanged by their hiding them 'under a stone marked with a cross on the beach where the husband bathed.' In view of 'the innocent character of the letters,' Giannina's fine was limited to £15.41 A final case - both exceptional and indicative - is worth mentioning. Eighteen-year-old Olimpia Rossi was fined £3 (and costs) for 'removing two pairs of slippers' from the camp for married couples where her

274 Lucio Sponza entire family was interned: father Aleandro (aged fifty-three), mother Maria Francesca (forty-five), sisters Amelia (twenty-one) and Rita (eight), and brother Luigi (sixteen). Olimpia was at liberty for the very purpose of 'keeping a cafe running [in Durham] while her family were interned/ She maintained that her mother had put the slippers in her suitcase and she forgot to take them out before leaving the camp.42 One notable point emerges from most of the above cases, in addition to the role of the family network as emotional support for the internees: the fundamental role of women in carrying on with the family business, so that when their husbands, fathers, and brothers were released, normal life could resume fairly smoothly. This has been very rarely ackowledged. One such exception is Monsignor Gaetano Rossi who has written: 'One thing struck me during all these visits [to Italian internment camps, after he himself had been released]: the great courage of the wives and mothers who had been left behind. They continued to run the shops, they faced all kinds of difficulties, orders, accounts, etc. and at times even having to face humiliations from certain sections of society, but they faced up to everything with admirable courage/43 Conclusion: A Web of Prejudices and Resentments More serious disciplinary matters were obviously raised in the abovementioned instances of escaped internees. In such rare but high-profile cases, the real concern of the central government was that the island's authorities and public opinion might jump on the opportunity to give vent to their critical feelings towards His Majesty's Government. This resentment vividly surfaced in the local newpapers44 as an aspect of residents' mythical attachment to their mixed Gaelic and Scandinavian origins,45 which merely strengthened their xenophobia. So, for instance, the island's great leader in the Church of England (whom many regarded as the best candidate to the see of Canterbury), the bishop of Chichester (George Bell), was reviled on the occasion of his visit to internment camps in the island, because he was campaigning for a clear distinction between pro-Nazi enemy aliens and anti-Nazi Germans and Austrians (whether Jews or not). In a leading article of the Isle of Man Examiner, he was described as 'A Busy Bishop ... the self-appointed champion of captive Nazis and Fascists in our midst/ In another leader of the same day and paper, with reference to the early releases of internees who joined the Pioneer Corps, it was perversely argued that they were even worse characters because 'the enemy alien who buys

The Internment of Italians in Britain 275 his liberty by disowning his country is nothing but a traitor, and treachery is always a despicable thing.'46 In some government departments, as we know, such sentiments were shared, if not so crudely described - despite the fact that 'the vast majority of enemy aliens were never suspected of anything and it was accepted that [the Germans and Austrians] were largely innocent refugees. They were detained simply because they were German, Austrian, or Italian - detained, not as individuals, but part of that collective group: enemy aliens.'47 Colin Holmes put it into a broader context, when he wrote: 'In its pursuit of aliens as part of this [internment] policy the government could draw upon the strong strains of anti-alienism and anti-Semitism that existed within British society. Indeed, the internment episode can be regarded as the culmination of the hostility which had been directed towards the alien refugees before the war.'48 Did British institutions and public opinion become more trusting and sympathetic towards the new waves of immigrants and political refugees, after the war? One always hopes that the better side of our ambiguous human nature in the end will prevail. But what can one make of the following quotations from two ideologically contrasting sources, referring to the 1990s? 'A year ago at the start of the Gulf War [1991], Abbas Shiblak ..., a Palestinian author, ... was arrested and detained under national security provisions ... It has since been recognised that [his] detention and [that of] a number of other Palestinians and Iraquis was a security bungle: not only was the information on which MIS acted inaccurate, but many of those detained were in fact anti-Saddam Arabs' (Guardian, 21 Jan. 1992, 4). As well, 'Over the years, as civil liberties have been gradually eroded by a stream of new laws, international scrutiny of Britain's record has become increasingly critical. The United Nations Human Rights Committee ... concluded in a recent report that the system for securing political and civil rights in Britain was defective ... It also drew attention to the way some ethnic minorities were disproportionately targeted for being stopped and searched' (Economist, 15 Feb. 1997, 26). Notes 1 See L. Sponza, The Anti-Italian Riots, June 1940,' in P. Panayi ed., Racial Violence in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 1st pub. 1993 (London: Leicester University Press, 1996).

276 Lucio Sponza 2 P. Tognini, A Mind at War: An Autobiography (New York: Vantage Press, 1990). More recently, another Italian Scot reminisced on his internment and deportation to Canada: Joe Pieri, Isle of the Displaced: An Italian-Scot's Memoirs of Internment in the Second World War (Glasgow: Neil Wilson, 1997). The island in question is St Helen's, Montreal. 3 Incidentally, Luigi Tognini's youngest child, Adua, was given the Italianized name of the Ethiopian town where the Italian colonial army was defeated in 1896, now that - fifty years after that event - Mussolini had turned that humiliation into a triumph. 4 Suffice it to say that Luigi Sturzo, the founder of the (Catholic) Popular party and for fifteen years the most prominent political refugee in Britain, maintained links with fellow-Italian anti-fascists only in Paris. 5 Public Record Office (PRO), Kew, London, Home Office (hereafter: HO) 215/1719. The expression was contained in a written answer to a departmental query raised by Frank Newsam, a senior officer at the Home Office, dated 1 June 1940. The upper age limit for internment was later reduced to sixty-five. On the internment of Italians in Britain during the Second World War, see P. and L. Gillman, 'Collar the Lot!' How Britain Interned and Expelled Its Wartime Refugees (London: Quartet Books 1980); L. Sponza, 'The British Government and the Internment of Italians,' and T. Colpi, 'The Impact of the Second World War on the British Italian Community/ in D. Cesarani and T. Kushner, eds., The Internment of Aliens in Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Frank Cass, 1993), 125-44 and 167-87, respectively. A contemporary criticism of the misconceptions and mismanagement of internment was cogently made by Francois Lafitte, The Internment of Aliens (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1940); a new edition was published in 1988 by Libris (London). 6 They had been divided into three categories: A, if regarded pro-Nazi and therefore highly dangerous - to be interned; B, not so dangerous and not to be interned, but subject to some restrictions; and C, friendly and exempt from both internment and restrictions. A poignant note is that most Germans and Austrians were Jewish refugees. 7 Colpi, 'Impact,' 173. 8 These figures refer to Italian nationals; their children were officially British subjects, if born in Britain and unless they had opted out of British citizenship. The Italian community as a whole therefore was substantially larger, numbering possibly around 30,000. Probably over half the holders of Italian passports had settled in Britain before the First World War. As a result, in several cases young Britons of Italian parentage were serving in his majesty's forces, while their brothers and fathers were interned 'enemy aliens.'

The Internment of Italians in Britain 277 9 On the 'fifth column panic' and the role of the media, see P. and L. Gillman, 'Collar the Lot,' passim, and F.H. Kinsley and C.A.G. Simkins, British Intelligence in the Second World War: Security and Counter-intelligence, vol. IV of the History of the Second World War (London: HMSO Books, 1990), 47-64. 10 PRO, HO 213/492, 'Disposal of Italians in this country. Report by the Aliens Advisory Committee,' 15 June 1940. 11 The Duchess of York left Liverpool on June 21 with 2,096 German/Austrian civilians and 529 POWs (mainly Germans). Also the Arandora Star and the Ettrick sailed from Liverpool, on 1 and 3 July, respectively; the latter carried 1,292 German/Austrian and 403 Italian internees, as well as 879 POWs (mainly Germans). Finally, the former Polish liner Sobieski left Glasgow on 4 July, with 992 German/Austrian civilians and 548 POWs (again, mainly Germans). Among the Italians who drowned with the sinking of the Arandora Star was Decio Anzani, a successful tailor and an active anti-fascist. He is the central character of A. Bernabei, Esuli ed emigrati italiani nel Regno Unito, 1920-1940 (Milan: Mursia, 1997). 12 Summary of the Arandora Star Inquiry, Command Paper No. 6238,1940. 13 Hansard (House of Lords), Fifth Series, vol. 117 (Session 1939-40), col. 132 (6 Aug.). The extensive debate in the Commons on the Arandora Star questions started on 10 July and continued for several days; see Hansard (House of Commons), Fifth Series, vol. 362 (Session 1939^0), cols. 1074-6, 1229-30, 1244,1250-3,1287. 14 PRO, HO 213/1746, Letter of 15 July 1940. On that episode, see also P. and L. Gillman, 'Collar the Lot,' 215-16. 15 PRO, HO 215/265/3A, 'Summary Report of the Internment of German and Austrian [and Italian] Refugees in Canada. M.S. Ettrick, January 1941.' At the top of the report some official wrote: 'Not for publication.' 16 PRO, HO 215/265 /2B. 17 C. Cavalli, Ricordi di un emigrate (London: La voce degli Italiani, [1973]), 88. 181 have dealt with the working and the frustration of the Loraine Committee in Sponza, The British Government,' 133-8. 19 PRO, Foreign Office (hereafter FO) 371/29176, folder 'W 3503.' The memorandum was written on 19 March 1941. Richard Latham's unyielding criticism of MIS has been acutely examined by P. and L. Gillman, 'Collar the Lot'; they have also pointed out that Latham was later called into the Royal Air Force and never returned from a mission over Norway in August 1943. 20 PRO, FO 371/29178. The letter is dated 11 June 1941.

278 Lucio Sponza 21 PRO, FO 371 /29173. The letter to Lord Lytton, dated 22 January 1941, was written by Richard Latham. The revised talk was broadcast early in March. 22 PRO, HO 215/273, 'Internment Statistics. Weekly Returning of Camp Population, 1941-46.' 23 See B. Moore and K. Fedorowich, eds., Prisoners of War and Their Captors in World War II (Oxford: Berg, 1996), chaps. 1 and 8. 24 PRO, HO 215 /125/3A. A weekly timetable was attached to a letter, dated 9 October 1941, written by Colonel Baggalley (commandant of the Men's Camps, Isle of Man) to Sir John Moylan, of the Aliens Department, Home Office. 25 G. Rossi, Memories of 1940: Impressions of Life in an Internment Camp (Rome: Scoglio di Frisio Foundation, 1991), 43. 26 PRO, HO 215/43/6C. That sport day was held on Saturday, 4 September 1943. 27 PRO, HO 214/42, 'Trombetti Luigi.' See the coverage on this case in: Daily Express and Manchester Guardian, 28 March 1944; and Isle of Man Examiner, 31 March 1944; and Isle of Man Daily Times, 1 June 1944. 28 Isle of Man Daily Times, 22 Aug. 1a940. 29 PRO, HO 215/323/22C. 30 Internees were allowed to be in possession only of at most 5 shillings at any one time, without special written permission of the commandant; they could also draw a credit up to £1 per week on their accounts, to be spent at the camp canteen. 31 PRO, HO 215/325/42B. Sargeaunt sent his letter to T.B. Angliss, the HO officer in charge of internees' welfare for the whole Isle of Man; it is dated 22 May 1941; Sir John's annotation is dated 2 June 1941. 32 PRO, HO 215/175/11A. The letter was dated 5 October 1942. 33 See the acrimonious correspondence on this issue of visit permits in PRO, HO 215/300. 34 Many Britons saw the Isle of Man as a privileged part of the country, and disapproving articles often appeared in the national press, duly rebutted by Manx newspapers. See, in particular: Isle of Man Examiner, 22 August 1941, in which a journalist from the Sunday Chronicle was taken to task for writing about an 'Isle of peace and plenty'; Isle of Man Daily Times, 28 July 1942, '"Pleasure Island" - More and More Lies and Exaggerations/ which was a response to an article in the Star, Isle of Man Daily Times, 3 March 1943, 'Alleged Food Abundance in the Isle of Man - Another "Story" in British Newpapers' - the targets here were the Glasgow Evening Citizen and London's Evening Standard. 35 PRO, HO 214/66, Personal files: 'Pacitti Guglielmo.'

The Internment of Italians in Britain 279 36 Isle of Man Daily Times, I April 1941. 37 Ibid., 8 Aug. 1941. 38 Ibid., 19 Aug. 1941. One of the two Frank Bellis was later involved in a different wrong-doing, when it was discovered that he and his internee friend Raffaele Giusti had exchanged love letters with two Manx teenagers (see Isle of Man Daily Times, 4 May 1942). 39 Ibid., 16 Oct. 1942. 40 Ibid., 25 Nov. 1942. 41 Ibid., 6 July 1943. 42 Ibid., 9 Nov. 1943. 43 Rossi, Memories, 62. See also S. Smith, 'Le esperienze di donne della comunita italiana in Gran Bretagna durante la seconda guerra mondiale,' undergraduate dissertation, University of Westminster (London), 1995-6. 44 The island's newspapers included the Isle of Man Daily Times, which I have used frequently and which was the only daily, appearing Monday to Friday, with its weekend edition called Island of Man Weekly Times (Saturdays); the Peel City Guardian (Fridays and Saturdays); the Mona Herald (Tuesdays); the Isle of Man Examiner (Fridays); and the Ramsey Courier (also Fridays). 45 Because of these historical origins, the Isle of Man has always enjoyed a form of home rule, with the Court of Tynwald as the legislature (House of Keys), and an executive authority, consisting of the lieutenant-governor and his council. Acts of Parliament (Westminster) do not apply to the Isle of Man, unless that is explicitly required and enacted. However, the laws of Tynwald must be approved by the crown. 46 Isle of Man Examiner, 25 Oct. 1940. 47 N. Stammers, Civil Liberties in Britain during the Second World War (Beckenham, Kent: Croom Helm, 1983), 59. 48 C. Holmes, John Bull's Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871-1971 (London: Macmillan, 1988), 192.

11 When Italian Americans Were 'Enemy Aliens7 ROSE D. SCHERINI

Nineteen forty-two, the first full year of the war for the United States, was devastating for many Italian families, part of the largest immigrant group in the nation. For all 'enemy aliens' - Japanese, Germans, and Italians - this was a time of fear and uncertainty. New regulations required the 600,000 Italian 'resident aliens' to carry photo-identity cards, restricted their freedom of movement, and forced an estimated 10,000 Italians along the west coast to relocate. Local police searched many homes to enforce prohibitions against aliens' possession of guns, cameras, and short-wave radios; within six months, 1,500 Italians were arrested for curfew, travel, and contraband violations; and some 250 Italians were sent to military camps for up to two years. Even some naturalized citizens had to leave their homes and businesses because the military decided that they were too 'dangerous' to remain in strategic areas.1 Only on Columbus Day in October 1942 did the situation begin to improve - as we see in the second section of this chapter. By 1941, there had been Italians in the United States for more than a hundred years. Peak immigration took place between 1900 and 1920, slowing after the Immigration Law of 1924, which cut back quotas for Italy and other southern European nations. However, by that time, Italians and Germans were the two largest immigrant groups in the country, and in 1940, Italians were the largest foreign-born group. At first, Italians were viewed with suspicion and distrust as outsiders from a very different culture who did not even speak English. Many were uneducated and worked at the most menial jobs, but a welleducated minority soon became successful in business and professional careers. When the war came, the mayors of two major cities on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts were of Italian descent: Fiorello La Guardia in New York City and Angelo Rossi in San Francisco.

When Italian Americans Were 'Enemy Aliens' 281 After Britain and France declared war on Germany in early September 1939, the United States declared itself a neutral nation, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed a state of 'limited national emergency/ Privately, the president requested the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to prepare, in conjunction with the army and navy intelligence units, a list of 'potentially dangerous' persons to be detained in case of national conflict. This came to be known as the Custodial Detention List. Then, in June 1940 the U.S. Congress passed the Smith Act, requiring all aliens to register and report any change of residence or employment; that same month, Italy entered the war on the side of the Axis and joined in the attack on France. Within months, Congress passed the Selective Service Act, requiring men between twenty-one and thirty-five years of age to undergo one year of military training. The following March, the Lend-Lease Act authorized 'all possible aid to Britain.' The president authorized the FBI to wiretap 'persons suspected of subversive activities,' with emphasis on aliens. In June, a German submarine sank an American merchant ship, and Roosevelt declared a state of 'unlimited national emergency.' That same month the United States closed Italian and German consulates in the country and repatriated the diplomatic staff. Thus were events set in motion that eventually led to Italian 'resident aliens' becoming 'enemy aliens'2 for most of 1942. 'Enemy Aliens' Internment of 'Dangerous' Aliens Arrests of enemy aliens began the night of 7 December 1941. Early that morning, Japanese airplanes attacked ships of the U.S. naval fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. After the news reached President Roosevelt just before 2:00 p.m. Washington time, he conferred with key government officials during the afternoon and evening and planned emergency procedures went into effect. The office of the attorney general prepared arrest warrants for certain Japanese, German, and Italian aliens, and that evening and over the next several weeks the FBI detained 1,540 Japanese, 1,260 German, and 231 Italian Americans.3 Many of those arrested and later interned were long-time residents and, while not naturalized citizens, had American-born children or wives who were U.S. citizens. Although the authorities never informed these individuals of the reasons for their detention, it is apparent from their FBI records that nearly all fell into one or more of these three

282 Rose D. Scherini categories: members of the Federation of Italian War Veterans, or IWV (veterans of the First World War in Italy) known as Ex-Combattenti in the Italian community; editor/writers for an Italian-language newspaper and announcers on Italian-language radio; and instructors in an Italian-language school sponsored by an Italian consulate. The FBI had identified these organizations as pro-fascist and had placed the names of members and staffs on the Custodial Detention List. Although the Italian veterans in the United States had fought with the allies against Germany in the 'Great War/ the IWV, with headquarters in Rome, was then associated with Mussolini's government. Branches in major U.S. cities had raised funds for Italian war widows and orphans under a permit issued by the U.S. State Department. When that permit was rescinded in May 1941, the organization ceased its fund-raising. None the less, all non-citizen members were interned, and even the naturalized citizens were later ordered to relocate from areas that the military designated off limits for individuals on the Custodial Detention List. According to an August 1942 Department of Justice document, there was 'lack of evidence of any subversive activities' on the part of the IWV; and, although there had been a 'technical violation' of the Foreign Agent Registration Act, the consular agents considered that all 'the leaders of the organization' had been repatriated to Italy prior to December 1941. And so the Department of Justice saw no point in prosecuting the organization as 'subversive.' Indeed, the group had actually disbanded two days after the United States declared war on Italy. Perhaps this decision was unknown to the War Department, which continued to take action against it, ordering the exclusion a month later of a dozen or more IWV members, even though they were naturalized citizens. All non-citizen members had already been interned for several months.4 In the case of Italian-language newspapers, only a handful of key staff on major western papers were interned or, in cases of naturalized citizens, later excluded from the prohibited areas. On the west coast, San Francisco's L'ltalia, Los Angeles's La Parola, and Sacramento's La Capitale lost their editors and other staff, and some papers simply closed. Yet the authorities never touched Generoso Pope, the editorpublisher of New York's // Progresso italo-americano, the pro-fascist paper with the largest circulation. It was perhaps because Pope was a powerful man with contacts at the highest levels of the government. By contrast, Ettore Patrizi, editor/publisher of San Francisco's L'ltalia, was

When Italian Americans Were 'Enemy Aliens' 283 ordered excluded from the area of the Western Defense Command, even though he was seventy-six and in ill health.5 There was almost no publicity about this internment of Americans, and the public, even most Italian Americans, knew nothing about it then or later, partly because the explicit government policy was to keep it confidential. The exact number and names of internees remain unknown, and various sources report the number as 228,250, or 277. Some names became known to researchers who have located and interviewed their families. Unfortunately, no internee himself has been interviewed, as all died before contact was made with the families. Like the Japanese-American story, it has taken a new generation to reopen this history. When the FBI arrived to arrest an alien, it told him and his family only that there was a presidential warrant for the arrest. Individuals were held in a detention facility of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and later transported to a military camp in an inland state, still not knowing the reasons for the arrest or what to expect. FBI agents arrested Carmelo Ilacqua at his San Francisco home one evening the week before Christmas 1941, searched his desk, found no 'incriminating' papers, and yet detained him at the local INS facility. His family learned of his whereabouts only several days later, when he telephoned to say he was leaving for 'parts unknown.' He and some other Italian and Japanese Americans were transported in a train with armed guards to Fort Missoula, Mont. The army had refurbished this old fort in the spring of 1941 to house Italian nationals who were merchant sailors from several luxury liners quarantined in U.S. ports at war's outbreak.6 Filippo Molinari, sales representative for L'ltalia in San Jose (just south of San Francisco) and an IWV member, described his arrest on 7 December 1941 in a letter to a relative many years later: 'I was the first one arrested in San Jose the night of the attack on Pearl Harbor. At 11 p.m. three policemen came to the front door and two at the back. They told me that, by order of President Roosevelt, I must go with them. They didn't even give me time to go to my room and put on my shoes. I was wearing slippers. They took me to prison... and finally to Missoula, Montana, on the train, over the snow, still with slippers on my feet, the temperature at 17 below and no coat or heavy clothes!'7 Carmelo Ilacqua, forty-six, had emigrated to the United States in 1924 and resided in San Francisco since 1928. As a 'local employee' at

284 Rose D. Scherini

Fort Missoula, Montana. This May 1941 photo captures the arrival of the officers and crews of Italian liners stranded in the United States when war began in Europe. Later, following Pearl Harbor, some Italian and Japanese Americans were also detained at the camp for several months. the Italian consulate, he provided liaison with the immigrants and their organizations and was contact person for visiting Italian ships, having been a merchant marine officer in Italy. Married to a naturalized citizen, he was the father of a six-year-old daughter when the FBI arrested him on 17 December 1941. At the time, the FBI knew little about him except that he held the position of 'chancellor' at the consulate until it closed in June and that he was a member and former officer of the ExCombattenti and an admitted past member of the Italian Fascist party a requirement of employment at the consulate in the 1930s. Another requirement was Italian citizenship, and Ilacqua had applied for U.S. citizenship within days of the consulate's closure. The first FBI report about Ilacqua is dated 10 January 1942, when he was already interned in Fort Missoula. His FBI file consists primarily of apparently unimportant or unverified bits of information: that he was the 'dominating figure' and 'most active member in the San Francisco section of the Combattenti'; that search of his residence 'failed to reveal any pertinent evidence'; that he 'apparently directed the ... collection

When Italian Americans Were 'Enemy Aliens' 285 campaign "of the IWV'"; and that he was 'observed to leave the Tatu Maru' on 20 March 1941. (In fact, he was on the Japanese ship to pick up Italian diplomatic mail then being routed through Japan because of the submarine war in the Atlantic.) The FBI file also contains twelve pages appearing to be a record of phone taps on the consulate's telephone lines from February through June 1941; the notes on Ilacqua's conversations reveal only normal contacts with local Italian-American organizations.8 The army censored all mail to and from internees, who could write only two short letters and one postcard per week. Bruna Ilacqua saved the letters that her husband wrote during his two-year detention, and this correspondence serves as the basis for much of the information available on life in these internment camps. Ilacqua and some other San Francisco internees were moved to a new camp every three or four months and were in four camps, in Montana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas. The reason for these moves is not clear; perhaps it was partly wartime chaos, space needs for the increasing numbers of incoming prisoners of war, or fear that these 'dangerous' persons might revolt and attempt to escape.9 When internees arrived at the first internment camp, a hearing was held before an 'enemy alien hearing board' with two army officers and two citizens, usually attorneys or professors. The accused was not informed of the charges against him or allowed representation by legal counsel. Individuals were usually far from home, often without resources, so their own testimony was their only defence. There is no known record that anyone was released at the first hearing. A former member of one such board at Missoula reported that the board had no written reports about the internees, did not know how the individuals had been selected for internment, and heard only testimony from the military, which the members did not question. Word soon spread that family members could request a rehearing, at which letters attesting to the internee's trustworthiness could be presented. Rehearings were scheduled many months after a request and resulted in 'exoneration' for many. Carmelo Ilacqua was released in September 1943, three months after his rehearing reached this conclusion: 'The board is thoroughly impressed with the alien's loyalty to the US and his truthfulness when he stated he "believed that Italy would be better off if the Allies won the war as he had always been opposed to the Axis." He stated he fought against the Germans once and would fight them again, and the board's conclusion was that "this man is very loyal to the US."'10 The U.S. Department of Justice made the final decision in these cases,

286 Rose D. Scherini and when the FBI objected to Ilacqua's parole on the basis of its so-called information about him, the attorney general overruled its objection, approving the internee's release on 4 September 1943, twenty-one months after his arrest. After his return home, the U.S. Army hired Ilacqua to teach Italian to servicemen in the Specialist Training Program at Stanford University. At least one other former internee, Angelo Baccocina, also went to teach there later that year. These two formerly 'dangerous' men were now helping with army plans for the occupation of Italy! By November, 1943, Italy was no longer an enemy but an ally, and all ItalianAmerican internees were released on parole by December.11 Unfortunately, even some anti-fascist aliens had been interned. Guido Trento, an actor who wrote for L''Italia on theatre and special events, and Giovanni Falasca, editor of Los Angeles's La Parola, were two such internees, who, though members of the Ex-Combattenti, considered themselves anti-fascists. The hearing board that reviewed Trento's internment in June 1943 concluded that he had been interested in the theatre and not at all in politics and that his membership in the IWV was indeed, as the man had claimed, inactive. When Trento's release was approved in October 1943, the hearing board noted that he had been 'erroneously regarded as a fascist.'12 Besides interning some Italian-American resident aliens and Italian nationals, the U.S. government also negotiated the internment of some two thousand enemy aliens from Latin America. The purpose was to exchange them for U.S. citizens detained abroad, including the 3,300 Americans in China interned by the Japanese. The United States and Panama had discussed such a plan as early as October 1941. South American leaders wanted to rid themselves of enemy aliens, especially Peru, where a long-established colony of Japanese emigres owned thriving businesses in spite of anti-Asian prejudice. Along with the Japanese, some Germans and a smaller number of Italians were arrested in eleven Latin American countries - the majority in Peru - and transported to the United States beginning in spring 1942. The FBI had helped to identify these aliens in Latin America, where it had been authorized to conduct operations since the autumn of 1939. The process consisted of arresting and placing these aliens on ships bound for the United States. Aboard ship, they were asked to surrender their passports, and when they landed in the United States, authorities arrested and detained them as illegal immigrants! By August 1942, the United States had exchanged 737 Japanese Latin Americans for an equivalent number of American citizens held by the Japanese. The

When Italian Americans Were 'Enemy Aliens' 287 remaining Latin Americans were held in military camps in Texas until the end of the war; most were deported to their or their parents' country of origin, but some two hundred Japanese Peruvians fought in the courts against deportation and were eventually allowed to remain. It is believed that the Italians were probably deported to Italy, but the full story remains unknown.13 Enemy Alien Registration and Restrictions This program affected all 600,000 Italian aliens and their families, so that many Italian Americans experienced the stigma of being an 'enemy alien' in spite of having long-term residence in the country and native-born children. Several weeks after the declaration of war, local officials posted notices for the 1.1 million Italian, German, and Japanese non-citizen residents to register at local post offices. Each alien was required to bring a passport-sized photograph, be fingerprinted, and then carry this photo-identity card, entitled 'alien registration certificate' at all times. Regulations set out a curfew between 8:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m.; restriction on travel more than five miles from home; prohibition against possession of guns, ammunition, short-wave radios, cameras, and signalling devices; and a requirement to report any change of residence or employment to local police. The curfew and travel restrictions hurt the livelihood of many Italians working in restaurants, fishing, garbage collection, janitorial work, or other employment requiring either hours or travel proscribed by the regulations.14 By June 1942, fifteen hundred Italians had been arrested for various reasons such as contraband, curfew, or travel violations; the largest numbers were in the New York City area, California, and Louisiana; many were released within days, but some were held for several months. Aristide Bertolini, a truck farmer near Santa Rosa, Calif., was arrested while returning home between 8:30 and 9:00 p.m. after delivering a rush order of tomatoes to one of his clients. He was detained for over two months in Sharp Park, a camp of quonset huts hastily constructed by the INS in early 1942. Joseph L. Cervetto, a new immigrant working as a window washer and also arrested for curfew violation, was held for two weeks on San Francisco Bay's Angel Island, where FBI agents questioned him every day about whether he had emigrated to San Francisco to 'blow up the bridges.' Cervetto's reply, every day, was: 'I came to San Francisco to wash windows.' Marie Ferrario of Marin County remembers a Sunday drive with her parents (naturalized citi-

288 Rose D. Scherini zens) and her aunt (an alien), when a policeman stopped them and inquired if all were citizens; her mother responded that they were. Her aunt was so frightened by this encounter that she did not go out again until the restrictions were lifted in late October 1942. One Italian immigrant cogently expressed the frustration and dissonance felt by many at being classified as 'enemy aliens': 'Don't those imbeciles in Washington understand that to have American-born children is to become an American for the rest of your life?'15 Chaos in Government Agencies

The myriad government agencies assigned to administer the enemy alien regulations were new at the task, even though this U.S. policy had precedents in earlier wars and the internment procedures were patterned after Britain's in this war. The resulting confusion, overlapping functions, and conflicts lead one to wonder whether control of enemy aliens could have been more poorly administered. Similar to conflicts between the Home and Foreign Offices in London, Washington's Departments of War and of Justice engaged in a running battle over both agency jurisdiction and individuals' civil rights. The War Department had established three military commands for the nation's defence Western, Eastern, and Southern - each headed by an army general with authority for designating areas in which restrictions, evacuation, and exclusion would be imposed on enemy aliens and some naturalized citizens; for promulgating the regulations and restrictions on all enemy aliens; and for guarding the Italian and German internment camps and, later, the Japanese relocation centres as well. The military issued over one hundred separate orders affecting enemy aliens during the war. Lieut-Gen. John L. DeWitt, commanding general of the Western Defense Command (WDC), became the best known because of the perceived greater threat of invasion on the west coast as well as what was seen later as his racism and paranoia concerning enemy aliens.16 Units in the Department of Justice, headed by Attorney General Francis E. Diddle, had responsibility for most other functions regarding enemy aliens: the FBI for designating dangerous aliens, for arresting aliens in violation of regulations, and for supervising those naturalized citizens who received exclusion orders from the army; the Enemy Alien Unit for coordinating the legal aspects of regulations and other actions affecting enemy aliens through the regional offices of U.S. attorneys; and the INS for administering the internment camps. Inter-agency

When Italian Americans Were 'Enemy Aliens' 289 clashes occurred most often between Attorney General Biddle and Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Frequently such conflicts arose from DeWitt's actions and would have to be resolved at the cabinet level, sometimes involving the president himself.17 Although Congress did not openly debate internment of enemy aliens, the House of Representatives set up the Tolan Committee to investigate 'national defense migration/ covering, among other things, the restrictions on aliens' freedom of movement. While the committee was holding hearings in March 1942, and concluding that each enemy alien should be evaluated as an individual, with 'loyal' aliens exempted from restrictions and relocation, the WDC had already ordered all enemy aliens out of zones along the Pacific coast that the military had designated as 'prohibited.'18 Areas Prohibited to Enemy Aliens

Designation of 'prohibited areas' imposed hardships on the largest number of Italian Americans - an estimated ten thousand in California alone. The authority for this action came from Executive Order 9066, signed by the president on 19 January 1942 and enforced by congressional passage of Public Law 503, authorizing the military to designate areas from which they could exclude 'any person.' Intended primarily to facilitate wholesale relocation of the Japanese on the west coast two-thirds of whom were American-born, thus U.S. citizens - but naming no specific groups, this document became the basis for ordering all enemy aliens from coastal and other strategic areas, adjacent to military bases or war-production plants. This evacuation took place only along the Pacific because of the fear of Japanese invasion, not on the Atlantic, which was the scene of more submarine activity and closer to the enemy in occupied France. It was on the Atlantic coast that in early 1942 two German submarines landed eight men, whose mission was to sabotage wartime facilities; they were, however, captured before they could engage in any such acts. The Japanese did also invade the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, then a U.S. territory, only 600 miles from the Japanese Kurile Islands and within bombing distance of Seattle. However, the differential treatment of aliens on the west coast had more to do with previously existing anti-Japanese attitudes that then spilled over onto Italians and Germans in the early days of the war. The military was seeking scapegoats for the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the immigrants - often the targets of fear and hatred - were thrust

290 Rose D. Scherini again into that role. These attitudes formed the basis of policies in the WDC. DeWitt himself promoted a notion that Japanese Americans had been providing information to the enemy, claiming as evidence unidentified radio signals from off-shore; government archives confirm that even he knew these allegations to be false. The FBI and the Federal Communications Commission had investigated and identified all radio signals as having originated from U.S. sources.19 An estimated ten thousand Italian aliens had to move from prohibited areas in California during February and March 1942. Many were older women with little English, living in extended family households, and not having applied for final citizenship papers for various reasons: fear of the English-language examination, distance from the INS office, or simply not understanding the significance of naturalization. Thus the aliens had to find other places to live at a time when housing was extremely scarce because of the migration of people drawn to the west coast by wartime job opportunities. A committee from the town of Pittsburg, Calif., travelled by train to Washington, DC, to protest the removal of its Italian aliens - a large part of this community - but the relocation proceeded on schedule. Some Italians moved into available but substandard migrant-labour housing; some could move only a block away, while others went some distance to find housing. Rosa Viscuso left her Pittsburg home and family, taking only her twelve-year-old daughter; they joined other evacuated relatives in renting a house twenty miles away in Concord. Mr Viscuso and the four older children remained in their home; a citizen, he was employed in building warships, and two sons worked at Columbia Steel, also in war production. Even people bed-ridden and those in wheel chairs had to relocate: Placido Abono, eighty-nine years of age, was carried out of his Pittsburg home on a stretcher. Several Italian men in the San Francisco area and one in Stockton committed suicide rather than suffer the indignity of giving up their homes and businesses. This evacuation created considerable emotional and economic turmoil in thousands of families; then, inexplicably, within five months, the order was lifted, and enemy aliens could return home! Government records suggest that, because the 'dangerous' aliens were by then interned, the others could safely return; however, the Italians on the 'dangerous' list were already in detention several weeks before the posting of the evacuation order.20 Italian fishing families along the California coast - where they accounted for 80 per cent of the fishing fleet - suffered most from the

When Italian Americans Were 'Enemy Aliens' 291 relocation. Alien fishermen were not allowed to fish in coastal waters; the Coast Guard confiscated boats owned by aliens as well as by naturalized citizens and used them to patrol the coast looking for submarines. Most fishing families resided in 'prohibited' areas, so they also had to relocate. Although the Coast Guard paid monthly compensation for use of the fishing boats, the fishermen had lost their livelihood as well as their homes. Ironically, within a short time, the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a series of posters urging greater food production for the war effort; the caption on one poster read: Fish Is a Fighting Food: We Need More. Vitina Spadaro of Monterey described her family's situation when she was thirteen: her father could no longer fish because his boat was confiscated, and then the six of them had to move inland because her mother was not a citizen. When they arrived at a house in Salinas that they had arranged to rent, the landlord barred their entry because he had discovered that they were 'enemy aliens.' He was unresponsive to their claims that they, except for the mother, were all citizens, so they left in the rain to look for another place to live. Rosina Trovato had to move from her home in Monterey even though her son in the U.S. navy had been killed during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Celestina Loero, member of a Santa Cruz fishing family and with two sons and two grandsons serving in the armed forces, had to leave the only home she had known for fifty years; many years later, she would still break into tears whenever she recalled the night - la mala notte, she called it when she was ordered to leave. Even on the east coast, where enemy aliens were not relocated, Italian fishermen were forbidden to ply their trade in coastal waters: in Boston, two hundred Italian fishermen were affected by that restriction.21 A New Dispensation Columbus Day, 1942 In October 1942, after all the restrictions and relocation endured by thousands of Italian-American families, the government removed Italians from the category of enemy aliens. Attorney General Biddle made the announcement on Columbus Day, the U.S. holiday that is uniquely Italian American, noting that members of this ethnic group had shown themselves to be 'responsible citizens.' Government records suggest, however, that the impetus for this change had more to do with two

292 Rose D. Scherini other factors: congressional elections in the following month and army plans to invade Italy in the spring. As the largest immigrant group in the country and the largest ethnic voting bloc in the country, Italian Americans' goodwill suddenly became an overriding issue. Moreover, a large proportion of the armed forces was made up of the sons of Italian immigrants - according to some reports, 300,000 - and it was crucial to ensure their unqualified support in the Italian campaign. There were reports that men in the armed forces who had enemy-alien parents were angry enough to revolt. Another consideration was that this move might help to soften resistance in Italy to the allied invasion. No longer technically enemy aliens, the several hundred Italian fishermen barred from coastal waters were allowed to resume fishing by the end of 1942. Still subject to some restrictions, an Italian alien could work only on a boat where the captain or 50 per cent of the crew were citizens; port captains issued an identity card to any alien who met this requirement. The fact that Italians were no longer enemy aliens made no difference, however, for those 'dangerous' Italians who had been interned or excluded: they remained exiled or imprisoned until the end of 1943.22 The Individual Exclusion Program

The Custodial Detention List included some naturalized citizens among the 'potentially dangerous.' Although their U.S. citizenship had forestalled internment, they were still not in the clear, as the War Department, especially DeWitt, alleged that they were as dangerous as aliens. When the administration did not support the removal of all enemy aliens and naturalized citizens from the WDC, DeWitt proposed the exclusion, at a minimum, of those on the list on the basis of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the military to remove 'any person' from strategic areas. So in August 1942 the exclusion process began on the west coast, and it was later applied in the eastern and southern commands, resulting in the removal of only thirty Italians (out of a total of 244 exclusions). They resided primarily in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the two largest centres of Italians in the west, and these Italians, after receiving exclusion orders, chose to move to inland cities such as Reno, Las Vegas, Denver, and Chicago. Although only men had been interned in the earlier action, some women - two Italians in San Francisco - now received exclusion orders: one, a teacher in an Italian-language school, and one, a member of the Ladies' Auxiliary of the IWV.

When Italian Americans Were 'Enemy Aliens' 293 Two additional forces supported the exiling of these Italians: the west coast's small contingent of anti-fascists and the California legislature's UnAmerican Activities Committee (the Tenney Committee). What role did the anti-fascist community play in the exclusion? It had, for some years prior to the war, tried to counter pro-Mussolini bias in the U.S. press prevalent before Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia and in most Italian-language newspapers until 7 December 1941. The anti-fascists most of them political exiles from Italy - had received little support from the U.S. government, with Congress and the FBI continuing to focus on communists as the major threat to the nation. In fact, the antifascists - who had supported the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-8 - were then categorized in FBI reports as 'Communist' and later as 'prematurely anti-fascist.' Carmelo Zito, editor of San Francisco's socialist newspaper, II Corriere del popolo and leading spokesman of antifascists on the west coast, appeared on the Custodial Detention List and was described in his FBI file as 'prematurely anti-fascist.' When the Tenney Committee held hearings in San Francisco in 19412, the anti-fascists' frustrations of many years burst forth - they finally found someone to listen to their complaints about the fascists - and thus contributed to devastating consequences for their paesani, both pro- and anti-fascist, in ways that they could not have predicted. Prior to the outbreak of war in Europe, the committee had been concerned primarily with identifying communist groups and individuals; later, it gave more attention to Nazi groups. Not until late 1941 did it investigate fascists, holding hearings in San Francisco and Los Angeles in 1941-2 and concluding that three men in San Francisco's Italian community were the 'leaders of the fascist movement in California.' The three were Sylvester Andriano, an attorney active in the Italian community and in city government; Ettore Patrizi, editor-publisher of L'Italia, the leading Italian-language newspaper in the west; and Renzo Turco, another attorney and community leader. The committee heard five days of testimony in December and three days in May, testimony based largely on hearsay, newspaper reports, and unverified allegations of events occurring long before the war. Within four months, these three men, all naturalized citizens and residents for twenty years or more, received individual exclusion orders.23 While L'ltalia had supported Mussolini prior to Pearl Harbor, when there was considerable support for his Fascist government among San Francisco's Italian community, the Tenney Committee heard no testimony that these three men (or any others) had engaged in any subver-

294 Rose D. Scherini sive actions either before or after the declaration of war. Considerable evidence of their loyalty to the United States could have been found, had anyone cared to look. All three became naturalized citizens within several years of arrival in the United States. (Seven years of residence was then a requirement for citizenship.) Just prior to his exclusion, Andriano was chair of a draft board - these bodies made decisions on exemptions from service in the armed forces - and earlier had served as elected member of the city's board of supervisors and appointed member of its police commission. He was also director of the Dopo Scuola, an Italian-language school, and board member of the Italian Chamber of Commerce - two organizations on the FBI's list of suspect groups. A respected citizen in both the Italian and the wider civic community, he had graduated from St Mary's College and Hastings College of Law. Twenty years after his exclusion, St Mary's honoured him as alumnus of the year for his many civic contributions. Patrizi was a patron of the arts and sponsor of Italian opera in San Francisco. A U.S. resident since 1898 and a citizen for thirty years, Patrizi was seventy-six years old and in hospital when he was served with an exclusion order. A.P. Giannini, founder of the Bank of Italy (later Bank of America) and an officer in the American Legion, asked that Patrizi be exempted from the exclusion because of age and infirmity, but the only concession that the army made was to allow him ten additional days to leave the area, or twenty-four hours after his discharge from the hospital. On his release from hospital, he moved to Reno, Nev, where several other San Francisco excludees had resettled. In October 1943, Patrizi was allowed to return home because of failing health; he died within a year. Turco closed his law office and disposed of his home furnishings within the ten days allowed by the exclusion orders; he and his wife moved to Chicago, where he was for some time unable to find a suitable position. Required to report weekly to the FBI office and to inform prospective employers of his status, he was unable to find work until he presented a letter of recommendation from a San Francisco judge; with that, and assistance from the FBI's Chicago office, he obtained a position as tax auditor for the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. The War Manpower Administration was responsible for assisting excludees to find employment and found it difficult to convince employers to consider an applicant banned as 'dangerous' and required to report weekly to the FBI. Andriano, the third 'fascist leader,' also moved to Chicago. Although

When Italian Americans Were 'Enemy Aliens' 295 he had suggested that Patrizi appeal his exclusion order, Andriano did not appeal on his own behalf. Others began a petition drive for a presidential exemption for Andriano, and San Francisco's Catholic archbishop appealed in person to Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy in Washington, but to no avail. Andriano did resist some exclusion procedures by refusing to sign the exclusion order and by declining to inform the army of his destination. Moreover, he returned to visit his mother in California in April 1943, and when the WDC learned of this violation, it asked the Department of Justice to prosecute him; he had already violated his exclusion by traveling to Washington, DC, another prohibited area. Because of Attorney General Biddle's refusal to prosecute, the War Department took Andriano's case to the attention of the president. Roosevelt referred it back to Biddle with a request to try to iron it out with Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Biddle believed the individual exclusion orders unconstitutional, and the issue became moot when Andriano moved, this time to Reno. (Several GermanAmerican excludees also violated their exclusion orders, and the Justice Department refused to prosecute any of these cases.)24 No Italian American brought a suit against the U.S. government over the exclusions (or the internments). Most who were affected wanted to forget the experience; they did not even consider court action. Angelo de Guttadauro, son of an excluded man, who testified many years later to the federal commission investigating these wartime events, replied when asked if his father had sought 'relief through the courts': 'My father did not... He was an old-fashioned man. He was not the type of man to ask redress from anyone. He would never ask for anything, the very nature of the man ... he was brought up in a very closed society ... It was not like people of his background to ask redress from a government.' Several German Americans did file lawsuits appealing their exclusions, and the court's decision in most of these cases was that, in spite of a finding of no evidence of dangerousness, the court did not wish to 'supersede the military's judgment.' In some other instances of resistance to exclusion orders in the Los Angeles area, the military took enforcement into its own hands, forcing entrance through locked doors and escorting violators to Las Vegas.25 Remo Bosia's exclusion was perhaps unique: he is the only known native-born American of Italian descent who received an exclusion order. Born in Madera, Calif., of immigrant parents, Bosia moved to Italy

296 Rose D. Scherini at the age of six when his family decided to return there. Then in 1923, when he was eighteen, he returned alone to live in San Francisco. After several short-term jobs, he found employment in 1928 as a translator with L'Italia, eventually becoming its managing editor. When the war came, he planned to enlist in the armed forces as a flyer, since he already had a pilot's licence, but was advised that his age (thirty-six) would probably bar his acceptance. When he received an exclusion order on 9 September 1942 - apparently because of his fourteen-year employment with the pro-fascist UIt alia - he volunteered for the army, hoping to get assigned to the Intelligence Unit, as he was trilingual. Married and the father of a small child, he would probably not be drafted into the armed forces, so his enlistment could have been viewed as a patriotic gesture. When he discussed his desire to enlist with the army officer in the WDC office, Bosia understood that such enlistment was acceptable - after all, even enemy aliens were being drafted. So he enlisted, informing the exclusion office that he had done so. Bosia reported to the army induction centre at Monterey but, within several weeks, was arrested for violation of his exclusion order, as he was within the prohibited area. He was held in the military guardhouse until a hearing, at which the WDC officer testified that he knew that Bosia was planning to enlist, whereupon Bosia was released, only to be returned to the guardhouse a week later and then transferred to Fort Douglas, Utah, where a court martial was scheduled for December. Two months after his first arrest, he was finally informed of the specific charges against him - namely, that he had enlisted in the army following receipt of an exclusion order; that he was in Monterey, a prohibited area; and that he had not advised his commander of the exclusion order. The court martial found Bosia not guilty, as testimony showed that he had followed procedure as he understood it. Ironically, he was thereafter given an assignment as a military policeman (MP) and then supervisor of teletype equipment in the commander's office. In an interview years later, Bosia described these events: '[One day I was] a potential enemy of my country, then an MP, and today, custodian of high military secrets.' Soon after a transfer to Fort Riley, Kan., Bosia's health deteriorated, and he received an honourable discharge from the army in April 1943, eighteen months after his receipt of the exclusion order. However, Bosia's problems were not over; the day following his return home to San Carlos, Calif., FBI agents came to his door to inform him that he must leave the prohibited zone within twenty-four hours.

When Italian Americans Were 'Enemy Aliens' 297 So the following day he went to Reno, where he soon found employment as a clerk in a gambling casino (the major business there), and his wife and five-year-old daughter joined him. Later he wrote a book about these experiences; he never understood why 'DeWitt was out to get me.' Remo Bosia claimed that he opposed fascism and had tried to be a moderating influence on L'ltalia's pro-Mussolini stance.26 Eventually, across the country, 254 citizens received exclusion orders: 174 in the WDC, including only 25 Italians; the majority of excludees were German Americans, plus a small number of 'American' fascists. Even though the exclusion and internment procedures were meant to be confidential, some names appeared in local newspapers, creating the impression that these persons were indeed 'dangerous.' Exclusions began in the autumn of 1942, just before Italian Americans were removed from the enemy-alien category, but this change did not affect those who had been excluded. Most excludees, like internees, were not allowed to return home until the end of 1943, having been exiled for fifteen months. Sadly, government records indicate that, although most internees and excludees had been indicted on the basis of membership in an organization, there was no information on these organizations available to the hearing boards, the army, its Intelligence Division, or the commanding generals of the defence commands who made the final decisions on exclusion. Apparently, the decisions on both internments and exclusions had been made solely on the basis of the FBI's list, unaccompanied by supporting evidence. According to the army's own report, information on the organizations was available to it only 'many months after war started.' Moreover, Eugene Rostow, a noted law professor, has written that the courts have made it clear that exclusion would be sustained only on a showing of 'clear and present danger' of an imminent threat to public safety or of aid to the enemy. He also noted that international law permits controls on enemy aliens solely to prevent them from aiding the enemy. No evidence of such threat or aid was demonstrated in the Italian-American cases. In fact, Attorney General Biddle himself prepared a memo to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in July 1943, in which he declared that there was 'no justification' for the Custodial Detention List; that the list was 'invalid,' that the evidence used was 'inadequate'; and that 'determination as to how dangerous a person is' cannot be made 'in the abstract'

298 Rose D. Scherini but 'must be based on investigation of activities of persons who may have violated the law.' Biddle directed that a copy of this memo be placed in the FBI file for each person whose name had been on the list and that each document classifying that person as dangerous was to be stamped: 'THIS CLASSIFICATION is UNRELIABLE. IT is HEREBY CANCELED, AND SHOULD NOT BE USED AS A DETERMINATION OF DANGEROUSNESS OR OF ANY OTHER FACT/

Although the Department of Justice had instituted denaturalization proceedings in all cases of exclusion, it appears that no Italian lost his or her citizenship. To carry out denaturalization, officials must present evidence of either fraud in the citizenship process or disloyal actions after the declaration of war. There was no such evidence. Sadly, none of the agencies involved, except perhaps of the attorney general, paid much attention to evidence, nor did they understand the difference between being pro-Italy and being subversive.27 Remembering and Forgetting Not until many years after the war ended did the story of the civilian internments come to public attention, and then only after Japanese Americans in California waged a campaign to submit a request for redress to Congress. Their efforts resulted in the establishment of a Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) in 1980. The commission held hearings on both coasts and issued its report and recommendations in 1982. The report included a chapter on German Americans, wherein there is one mention of interned Italian Americans. Only one Italian American, Col. Angelo de Guttadauro, U.S. Army, appeared before the commission to describe the effects on his family of his father's exclusion. While the commission's files indicate that some efforts were made to locate persons who could testify on the experiences of the Italians and Germans, those efforts were minimal, and no German American gave testimony, even though thousands had been interned and hundreds excluded. In December 1982, CWRIC published its recommendations that Congress acknowledge that 'a grave injustice was done' to Japanese Americans; offer the nation's apologies for the acts of exclusion, removal, and detention'; and pay 'redress to those who were excluded.' The recommendations for redress made no reference to any other group except the Alaska Aleuts, who, though not enemy aliens, had been relocated because of an expected Japanese attack. While the omission of the other

When Italian Americans Were 'Enemy Aliens' 299 two groups is understandable, because the wholesale relocation of Japanese Americans - the majority, 70,000, being American-born - was the more egregious violation, it is none the less unfortunate that the affront to Italians and Germans has not yet been acknowledged. When Congress implemented the CWRIC's recommendations in the Civil Rights Act of 1988, one of the legislation's purposes was 'to discourage the occurrence of similar injustices and violations of civil liberties in the future.' Without considering the numbers of Italians and others who also suffered, that purpose will not be fulfilled.28 In contrast to Japanese Americans, the Italian community has not made a coordinated effort even to seek acknowledgment and apology from the government. One of the primary barriers to such action has been widespread ignorance that Italians and Germans were also interned, excluded, and evacuated. Another obstacle has been that the 'selective internment' and 'individual exclusion' provisions that applied to the Italians were not publicized either by the authorities or by the victims, who felt stigmatized by being selected for banishment. Even today, some in the Italian-American community feel that the story should be not publicized but rather forgotten, because they consider it a blot on their history. And the stories of the fishermen and others who had to move from their homes are known primarily in their own closeknit communities, where most families shared that experience. Recently, a few scholars have begun to write about these events, and some preliminary steps are being taken towards informing the public and, it is hoped, the appropriate authorities. Most of the activity has taken place in California, where the largest number of Italians were affected. In 1992, the Sons of Italy's Social Justice Commission wrote President George Bush, requesting acknowledgment of and apology for the wartime treatment of Italian Americans. The annual convention of the Grand Lodge passed a resolution requesting 'full public disclosure of the injustices suffered by Italo Americans during WW II and that an apology be made not only to Americans of Italian ancestry, but to the nation as a whole.' The Department of Justice's response was that since 'a relatively small group of ethnic Germans and Italians received exclusion orders, no further action is necessary.' Such a statement is not only unresponsive but also reflects ignorance of the actual events of 1942. A second effort to publicize the wartime story at least has informed more Italian Americans around the nation. In early 1994, the western chapter of the American Italian Historical Association presented an exhibit, 'Una storia segreta: When Italian Americans Were Enemy Ali-

300 Rose D. Scherini ens/ which has travelled under the sponsorship of numerous ItalianAmerican organizations within California and on the east coast for over two years, receiving good media coverage.29 The historical experience of immigrants has taught them to avoid drawing attention to themselves, because this has often elicited negative reactions to the entire ethnic group. None the less, historians and many whose families suffered these indignities want very much to see this story told, so that public knowledge may create pressure to prevent it from happening to others. The recent past does not offer much hope, as, whenever conflict occurs between the United States and another nation, there are media stories of possible detention of another immigrant group.30 Conclusion Prior to the Second World War, resident aliens generally had the same legal rights as citizens, except for voting, serving on a jury, holding a government job, or obtaining a business or professional licence. However, aliens were also required to serve in the armed forces during both World Wars, but this principle was not generally accepted in international law. Most important, aliens are covered by the fourteenth amendment to the constitution, which forbids any U.S. state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of its laws. This protection includes a right to due process of law and protection from unreasonable search and seizure, both rights that were violated during the war. According to some legal scholars, the U.S. Supreme Court, final arbiter of individual rights in the United States, has not satisfactorily answered questions about alien rights in wartime. Most cases of wartime exclusion brought before appeal courts resulted in decisions upholding the military's authority to override constitutional protections in wartime. Still, congressional action in ordering reparations for the Japanese relocation effectively denied the claim of military prerogative when the legislation specified that there was no military necessity for the Japanese-American relocation. And, if there was none for the Japanese, surely there was no necessity for relocation, exclusion, and internment of Italian Americans. The Second World War experiences of civilian internees around the world cry out for preventive measures in both national and international law.31

When Italian Americans Were 'Enemy Aliens' 301 Notes 1 Much of the information in this chapter is derived from documents found in the National Archives, Washington, DC, whose records are classified by record group (RG), and in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library (FDR Lib.), Hyde Park, NY; from records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice; from papers collected by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment (CWRIC) on microfilm at the Green Library, Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif.; and from records of the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS), Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. I obtained data in interviews with participants in these experiences and with their family members. Statements of some were collected at forums in California and in the New York City area at showings in 1994-6 of the exhibit 'Una storia segreta: When Italian Americans Were Enemy Aliens,' sponsored by the Western Regional Chapter of the American Italian Historical Association; see the catalogue of the same name by Rose Scherini and Lawrence Di Stasi with Adele Negro (San Francisco, 1994). 2 On immigration and population, see Graziano Battistella, ed., Italian Americans in the '80s: A Sododemographic Profile (Staten Island, NY: Center for Migration Studies, 1989), and U.S. Census of Population, Characteristics of Population (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940) vol. 11, Table VII, 'Foreign-Born White by Country of Birth for the U.S.: 1940.' On events after 1939, see Roger Daniels, 'Bad News from the Good War: Democracy at Home during World War II,' in Kenneth O'Brien and Lynn H. Parsons, eds., Home-Front War: World War II and American Society (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995), 157-72. The Custodial Detention List of Italian Americans is on CWRIC microfilm, reel 24: 25780-5; on similarities with Britain, see Peter and Leni Gillman, 'Collar the Lot': How Britain Interned and Expelled Its Wartime Refugees (London: Quartet Books, 1978), 8-10, 42-4. 3 Until April 1942, these actions applied to Germans and Japanese as well as Italians. Then, all Japanese Americans in the west were 'relocated' - i.e., interned. For that story, see Roger Daniels, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H.L. Kitano, eds., Japanese Americans from Relocation to Redress (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986). 4 I have FBI files of nine Italians who were either interned or excluded,

302 Rose D. Scherini

5 6

7 8 9 10

11

12

which I obtained through an FOIA request accompanied by written proof of subject's death); Department of Justice, Criminal Division, Caldwell to Berge, 8-15-42,146.6-18, section 05; 'Report on Organizations/ General Sedition Section, box 15, RG 60. FDR Lib., PPF 4617: Generoso Pope; Individual Exclusion Case Files: Ettore Patrizi, box 10, RG 210. On numbers of Italians interned, see War Relocation Authority, San Francisco Daily Press Review, no. 1715, 8 Oct. 1942; Jerre Mangione, An Ethnic at Large: A Memoir of America in the Thirties and Forties (New York: Putnam, 1978), 343; and 3 May 1942, Department of Justice Press Release, Fiorello La Guardia Papers, box 425, New York Municipal Archives. The Ilacqua story is based in part on my interviews with Costanza Ilacqua Foran, Sacramento, Calif., 27 May 1988,14 July 1989, and 2 July 1993, and correspondence and telephone conversations over those years; World War II Detention Centers: Missoula, boxes 68-70, RG 85; on internment of the Italian merchant sailors, see Carol Van Valkenburg, 'An Alien Place: The Fort Missoula Detention Camp/ Master's thesis, University of Montana, 1985, and the video Bella Vista: An Unseen View of World War II, written and directed by Kathy Witkowsky, MQTV, Missoula, Mont.; my interview with Tony Vitale (Italian sailor detained at Missoula), Castro Valley, Calif., 18 June 1992. Filippo Molinari to Carlotta (surname unknown), Arcadia, Calif., 25 July 1985; personal collection of Andrew M. Canepa, San Francisco. FBI Headquarters file 100-5929: Carmelo Ilacqua. Carmelo Ilacqua's letters are in the personal collection of Costanza Ilacqua Foran, Sacramento, Calif. 'Instructions to U.S. Attorneys re: Alien Enemies/ A 7.03, JERS; Alfonso Zirpoli, 'Faith in Justice: Alfonso Zirpoli and the U.S. District Court for the Northern District/ 5862 (1984), Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Thomas Barclay (former hearing board member), my interview, 4 Aug. 1989, Palo Alto, Calif.; Department of Justice file 146-13-2-61-23, 'Rehearing Memo for Chief of Review Section/ 18 Aug. 1944, in author's collection. FBI file on Ilacqua; interviews with Costanza Ilacqua Foran; Mussolini was deposed in July 1943, and the new Italian government soon joined the Allies; see Dennis Mack Smith, History of Italy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975). FBI Headquarters file 100-61677: Guido Trento; interview with Gloria R. Lothrop (re her stepfather, Giovanni Falasca), Sacramento, Calif., 6 Aug. 1996; on wartime experiences of Los Angeles Italians, see Gloria R.

When Italian Americans Were 'Enemy Aliens' 303

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

Lothrop, 'The Untold Story: The Effect of the Second World War on Calif. Italians/ Journal of the West 35, no. 1 (1996), 6-14. C. Harvey Gardiner, Pawns in a Triangle of Hate: The Peruvian Japanese and the United States (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981); Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project, 'The Japanese Latin Americans and World War II,' National Japanese American Historical Society, n.d.; INS Annual Report (1947), 29. INS, Report on Alien Registration (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, n.d.), D.203, JERS; U.S. Army, Western Defense Command and Fourth Army, 'Civilian Exclusion and Restriction Orders and Collected Documents/ 1942-43n, CWRIC Reel 25: 26376-8. FBI Custodial Detention files, '1521 Italian Aliens Taken into Custody by FBI/ 30 June 1942; on Bertolini, see Santa Rosa Press Democrat, 3 June 1994, 'Gaye LeBaron's Notebook'; Joseph L. Cervetto, Sr., telephone conversation with author, San Rafael, Calif., 11 March 1991; and Lawrence Di Stasi, 'Impersonizing Columbus/ Before Columbus Review 3, no. 2 (1992), 6-11; Marie Ferrario, public statement at meeting of Gruppo Lonatese, 30 July 1995, Corte Madera, Calif.; Mangione, Ethnic at Large, 343. P. and L. Gillman, 'Collar the Lot', 7-9; Stephen C. Fox, 'General DeWitt and the Proposed Internment of German and Italian Aliens during World War II,' Pacific Historical Review 57 (1988), 407-38; Peter Irons, Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 2^47; and Dale Minami, 'Coram Nobis and Redress/ in Daniels et al., Japanese Americans, 81-5. Irons, Justice at War, 32-48; FDR Lib.: OF 4805, Military Areas 1942-43, Biddle to President, 9 April 1942; James Rowe Papers, box 37, Loyalty Boards, Rowe to Clark, 22 April 1942; PSF, box 10, War Department, Jan.Aug., 1942, President to Secretary of War, 5 May 1942; Biddle Papers: FDR, box 2, Biddle to President, 27 Jan. 1943. Stephen Fox, The Unknown Internment: An Oral History of the Relocation of Italian Americans during World War II (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 126-34; House Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration, 77th Congress, 2nd session, Fourth Interim Report, 'Findings and Recommendations on Evacuation of Enemy Aliens and Others from Prohibited Military Zones/ May 1942. Executive Order 9066 is in Federal Regulations 7, no. 140 (1942), 2199; 'Instructions to U.S. Attorneys re Alien Enemies/ A 7.03, JERS; on German saboteurs, see Irons, Justice at War, 23, and FDR Lib., PSF, box 57, Justice, President to Attorney General, 30 June 1942; on anti-Japanese attitudes, see Morton Grodzins, Americans Betrayed (Chicago: University of Chicago

304 Rose D. Scherini

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

Press, 1949), and Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962). Fox, The Unknown Internment, 145; written statement of Rose Viscuso Scudero re Feb. 24,1942, in 'Una Storia Segreta,' Pittsburg Historical Society (June 1994); Fox, The Unknown Internment, 1, 65; 'Individual Exclusion Program of Non-Japanese,' Supplemental Report on Civilian Controls Exercised by the Western Defense Command, Part III (Jan. 1947). Fox, The Unknown Internment, 72, 83-6; Scherini and Di Stasi, eds., Una storia segreta, 20; Geoffrey Dunn, 'Male Notte: Santa Cruz-Italian Relocation and Restriction during World War II,' Santa Cruz County Historical Journal (1994), 83-8; Pasquale Verdicchio, 'Little Italy/ Journal of San Diego History 27, no. 4 (1981), 220; Boston Globe, 18 Oct. and 20 Nov. 1942. Francis Biddle, In Brief Authority (New York: Doubleday, 1962), 229-31; San Francisco Call-Bulletin, 3 Nov. 1942; Wartime Civilian Control Administration, press release, 23 Nov. 1942. Supplemental Report, 836-8, 842-52; Scherini, 'The Fascist/Anti-Fascist Struggle/ Richard N. Juliani and Sandra P. Juliani eds., New Explorations in Italian American Studies, American Italian Historical Association (1994), 6371; War Relocation Authority, The Evacuated People: A Quantitative Description (1946), 180,185; interviews with author: Renzo Turco, 11 Nov. 1973, San Francisco; Remo Bosia, 10 Sept. 1987, San Carlos; and Josephine de Guttadauro (daughter of Nino de Guttadauro, excluded), 16 May 1988, Palo Alto; Scherini, 'Fascist/Anti-Fascist Struggle/ 68-70. Calif. Legislature, Report of the Joint Fact-finding Committee on Un-American Activities in California (1943), 309-14; Scherini, 'Executive Order 9066 and Italian Americans/ California History 70, no. 4 (1992), 372^4; Scherini, 'Fascist/Anti-Fascist Struggle/ 63-71; Supplementary Report, 856; Individual Exclusion Case files: Sylvester Andriano, Ettore Patrizi, Renzo Turco, box 10, RG210; FBI Headquarters file 100-6471, Lorenzo Palmiro Turco. Transcript of Angelo de Guttadauro's testimony, CWRIC: Washington hearings, 23 Nov. 1981, in personal collection of de Guttadauro, San Antonio, Tex.; U.S. Army, 'Individual Exclusion Program/ typed government report, 1947, 912-32. Remo Bosia, The General and I (New York: Phaedra, 1971); U.S. Army v. Remo Bosia, transcript of Court Martial Proceedings, 23-^4 Dec. 1942, Italian American Collection, San Francisco Public Library; Fox, The Unknown Internment, 171; Remo Bosia, interview with author, 10 Sept. 1987, San Carlos. Peter Sheridan, 'The Internment of German and Italian Aliens Compared

When Italian Americans Were 'Enemy Aliens'

28

29

30

31

305

with Internment of Japanese Aliens in the United States during World War II: A Brief History and Analysis/ typed report for U.S. Congress, 24 Nov. 1980, 9, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress; San Francisco Call-Bulletin, 12 Oct. 1942, 'Andriano Leaves: 39 Cases Pending,' and New York Times, 19 Oct. 1942; Supplemental Report, 856-9; Eugene Rostow, The Japanese American Cases: A Disaster,' Yale Law Journal 3, no. 54 (1945), 489-533 (see especially note 13, 495-56); Attorney General to FBI Director, 16 July 1943, FBI file 100-5901: Nino de Guttadauro; on denaturalization, see 'Miscellaneous Bulletins,' 4 Oct. 1942, D 2.03, JERS, and 'FBI General Intelligence Survey' (June 1943), 19, RG 59. Much has been written about the inadequacies of FBI investigations. For example, see Athan Theoharis, Spying on Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), and Wesley Swearingen, FBI Secrets: An Agent's Expose (Boston: South End Press, 1995), wherein a former FBI agent in the 1970s alleges that agents sometimes created 'paper informers' providing fictitious information about suspects. CWRIC report was published as Personal Justice Denied (1982), and Part 2: Recommendations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1983); on Aleuts, see Part 2,10-12. News articles about the internments appeared in the New York Times, 12 Jan. and 5 Feb. 1942; San Francisco Call-Bulletin, 18 Dec. 1941, and San Francisco Examiner, 21 Feb. 1942; Richard Armento to President George Bush, 10 April 1992; 'External Resolution' of Sons of Italy in California, 26 June 1992; John Dunne, Department of Justice, to Armento, 25 June 1992; (this correspondence in the files of the Social Justice Commission, Sons of Italy, San Francisco); Scherini and Di Stasi, eds., Una storia segreta, 30. CWRIC Witness files: Washington hearings, John J. McCloy, 1982; Gulf War news accounts in New York Times, 8 Jan. 1991, and San Francisco Chronicle, 21 Feb. 1991. Ernest Puttkamer, ed., War and the Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), 48-9; also see Jacobus Ten Broek, 'Wartime Power of the Military over Citizen Civilians within the Country/ California Law Review 41, no. 2 (1953), 168-208.

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Part Four Memory and Redress: The Uses of the Past

While the politically minded might urge others to heed the lessons of history, especially its tragedies, the past probably does not resonate strongly with most people on a day-to-day basis. On occasion, however, the discovery of previously unknown incidents, or public disclosure of events long held as forbidden topics, can fuel the passions of today's citizens, even provoking them into political and social action. History thus becomes alive, as something to be collectively recorded, commemorated, protected, and passed on to subsequent generations.1 An intimate relationship between past and present has emerged in present-day redress campaigns protesting the wartime mistreatment, of white ethnic minorities in North America. These lobbies seek both to raise public awareness about violations of civil liberties committed in wartime and to wrest from current governments some form of compensation for the sufferings and losses of the victims. A key factor behind the rise in recent years of these lobbies was the success of the Japanese-American and Japanese-Canadian campaigns for redress. Although many people believed in the justice of those cases, both campaigns involved protracted mobilization, lobbying, and tough-minded negotiations. Victory came first in the United States, on 10 August 1988, when Republican President Ronald Reagan, an unlikely ally of either civil libertarians or racial minorities, none the less signed the historic Civil Liberties Act. The act granted an official apology to Japanese Americans for their loss of civil rights and property during the Second World War, financial reparations to those evacuated and imprisoned ($20,000 for each victim), and community restitution. Partly in response to U.S. pressures, Canada's Conservative prime minister, Brian Mulroney, who had taken Reagan's lead on other, less

308 Part Four: Memory and Redress progressive issues, followed suit. The Canadian government's 1988 apology to Japanese Canadians was accompanied by a $300-million settlement: $21,000 in restitution to each survivor; $12 million to the community for educational, social, and cultural programs; and a $24-million contribution to the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, jointly funded with the National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC), which negotiated the deal, to fight racism and promote racial harmony.2 Recent studies of the Japanese-Canadian campaign written by redress leaders reveal the many challenges involved in organizing a mass-based lobby. They learned how to deal with government intransigence, raise public awareness, overcome internal divisions, and develop political strategies. The origins of this redress lobby actually go back to the late 1940s, when Japanese Canadians demanded compensation as part of a renewed struggle (begun in the 1930s) to achieve full citizenship rights, including the vote. The franchise was finally granted in 1949, but hopes for a genuine compensation package for wartime losses ended when a commission under Mr Justice Henry Bird set up by the BC government in 1947 presented its report three years later. The mandate of the Bird Commission had been so narrowly defined3 that only a small minority of Japanese Canadians received even modest compensation. No consideration was given to violations of civil rights, loss of income and education, and emotional and psychological trauma. While some Japanese Canadians looked on the commission as a further injustice, its recommendations nevertheless served to diffuse for almost two decades further community lobbies. Protest rekindled in the mid-1970s, when access to previously confidential government records permitted a fuller examination of the issue. Significantly, historian Ann Gomer Sunahara, author of The Politics of Racism, played a critical role by using the government's own documents to show that the Japanese-Canadian 'uprooting' had been a racially motivated political act, not a security measure. Also influential were new developments in the United States. In 1980 the U.S. Congress set up the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians to investigate the uprooting and imprisonment of Japanese Americans. The publicized testimony of the victims enlightened many and garnered public sympathy, including in Canada, where media attention soon focused on the more severe violations committed by the Canadian government - for example, the repatriation plan. No such policy of exile was pursued by the U.S. government. As well, American citizens

The Uses of the Past 309 of Japanese origin began returning to the west coast in January 1945. Japanese Canadians were not permitted to return home until spring 1949. No comparable program of compulsory dispersal occurred in the United States. The substantial compensation awarded Japanese Americans bolstered the Canadian campaign and helped publicize the cause among nonJapanese Canadians. In March 1984, the NAJQ under the leadership of Roy Miki, a Winnipeg public school principal, produced its brief, Equality Now!, which laid out demands and recommendations that gained considerable public support. Several obstackes still to had to be overcome, however, including the creation of a breakaway organization, the 'Survivors' Group,' that briefly challenged the NAJC's leadership. But the greatest problem came from prime ministers Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney and a string of multiculturalism ministers who expressed sympathy for the cause but refused to negotiate a substantial compensation package. Given Pierre Trudeau's strong opposition to redress settlements, few expected his Liberal government to be generous. Indeed, the NAJC rejected as insulting an offer of 'regret' and a $5-million donation to help combat racism. More surprising perhaps was the intransigence of Brian Mulroney's Conservative government. As leader of the Opposition, Mulroney had declared his support for Japanese-Canadian redress, but once he was in power, his ministers initially proved stingy with their offers. In response, the NAJC eventually chose a strategy outlined in another brief, entitled Democracy Betrayed (21 November 1984). It called on the government to negotiate a 'just and honourable settlement' based on a fair assessment of the losses and sufferings endured. In effect, the NAJC was refusing to accept some arbitrary amount of money; it wanted to reach a fair settlement for each victim, based on an examination of the historical and documentary evidence. The fledgling lobby received a boost in spring 1986 from two events: the results of a questionnaire distributed to Japanese-Canadian communities across the country indicating strong support for compensation; and the release of the Price Waterhouse report on the economic losses suffered by Japanese Canadians (estimated at more than $443 million).4 By then, Canadians had warmed to the idea of a settlement: a March 1986 poll showed that 63 per cent of Canadians favoured redress; of those, 71 per cent favoured individual compensation. The Tory government's rejection of the Price Waterhouse study, and of the NAJC's demands for individual compensation, led to a breakdown in talks. In

310 Part Four: Memory and Redress response, the NAJC during the autumn of 1987 launched its biggest-ever educational campaign. Emboldened by passage of the U.S. Civil Liberties Bill, and the growing support of Canadian politicians, the NAJC forged an alliance with organizations across the country, and on 14 April 1988 a rally brought together hundreds of senior Japanese Canadians and their supporters from across Canada to demand 'redress now.' The NAJC soon negotiated a settlement with the government. In the words of its leaders: 'The historic Redress Agreement signed by the NAJC and the federal government on September 22,1988 ... is one of the most important in the history of democratic community action/5 The success of the Japanese-American and Japanese-Canadian campaigns spurred other groups to mount or renew similar campaigns or begin publicizing their grievances. As Scherini's essay above, on the United States noted, Japanese Peruvians, whose forcible internment in the United States during the Second World War was not acknowledged in the U.S. Civil Liberties Act, as well as German-American internees are currently preparing court cases demanding reparations. West coast Italian Americans affected by relocation and exclusion have also begun to organize appeals for redress. For them, a starting point was the recent exhibit, 'Una storia segreta,' which travelled the country. A project of the Western Regional Chapter of the American Italian Historical Association, the display was intended to 'publicly validate' the experiences of those 'who endured the confusion and losses of wartime largely in silence' and to educate all Italian Americans about this secret past.6 While support was not unanimous, the exhibit drew appreciative audiences and endorsement from several levels of government. Without the contributions of historians such as Scherini, who conducted interviews and used the cumbersome freedom-of-information legislation to gain access to confidential records, the project might not have materialized. Aside from the Ukrainian and Italian lobbies featured below (chapters 14 and 15, respectively), current Canadian campaigns include protests against the head taxes levied on early-twentieth-century Chinese immigrants, the exclusion of Sikh immigrants and Jewish refugees in 1914 and in the 1930s, respectively, and finally the internment of German Canadians during the Second World War. Protest lobbies came from other quarters too. As Radforth observes above, the efforts of communist internees to record and publish accounts of their wartime experiences forty years later reflected the same political purpose that had guided them in wartime: to record the violations of civil rights committed by the Canadian bourgeois state and thereby expose the

The Uses of the Past 311 hypocrisy of liberal democracies that purport to hold individual rights and freedoms in such lofty regard. The 'ethnic' (as opposed to communist) protests have received a sympathetic hearing in both 'ethnic' and mainstream Canadian circles, although to date only the Italian lobby, which won an apology but no compensation, has made notable gains in the wake of the Japanese-Canadian settlement. The other essays in this part raise their critiques of the ItalianCanadian redress lobby through a consideration of certain untested claims or 'myths' that have emerged as compelling symbols or assertions among redress supporters. Roberto Perm's analysis (chapter 12) of journalist and writer Mario Duliani and Gabriele Scardellato's photographs (chapter 13) raise questions about the oft-stated claim that all of Canada's Italian internees were political innocents. Notes 1 For more analysis, see, for example, Richard Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima and the Second World War, 1945-1990 (London, 1993). 2 The following discussion draws on Roy Miki and Cassandra Kobayashi, Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement (Vancouver, 1991); Maryka Omatsu, Bittersweet Passage: Redress and the Japanese Canadian Experience (Toronto, 1992); and Ann Corner Sunahara, The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War (Toronto, 1981). See also Mona Oikawa, 'ReMembering "The Internment": Women, Memory and Re-Constructing the Subject(s) of National Violence,' PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1999. 3 It considered only the government's sale of personal property and required the owners to submit claims proving the market value of their property. 4 The accounting firm Price Waterhouse had agreed to prepare an estimate of economic losses suffered by Japanese Canadians. Lacking sufficient funds to pay for such a report, the NAJC negotiated a deal with the company, which agreed to complete the study for a minimal cost of $27,000, with an understanding that the full fees would be paid only if a redress settlement were reached with the government. The report estimated total economic losses at $443,139,000. Miki and Kobayashi, Justice, 92-3. 5 Ibid., 64. 6 Scherini's essay in this volume. See also Una storia segreta: When Italian Americans Were 'Enemy Aliens/ Catalogue, American Italian Historical Association, Western Regional Chapter, text by Rose Scherini and Lawrence Di Stasi with Adele Negro (San Francisco, 1994), especially 29-31.

12

Actor or Victim? Mario Duliani and His Internment Narrative ROBERTO PERIN

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts As You Like It, II, vii

Mario Duliani was not an average Italian immigrant to Canada. After arriving from France in 1936, he rapidly integrated himself into Quebec's cultural life by becoming director of the French-language section of the Montreal Repertory Theatre (later the Mont-Royal Theatre fran^ais) and a journalist with the recently established daily UIllustration nouvelle. These and other activities - he was a well-known and spirited public speaker - put him in contact with intellectual, political, and literary figures in the host society. Arrested in June 1940, Duliani spent forty months in internment camps at Petawawa, Ont, and Fredericton, NB almost twice as long as most Italian inmates who had been released by the summer of 1942. He also distinguished himself by being the only internee, Italian or otherwise, to write a first-hand, book-length account of his confinement. The French-language text, entitled La ville sansfemmes, appeared in 1945. An Italian edition came out the following year. Nearly half a century would go by, however, before an English version was printed; The City without Women was published in 1994, in the wake of the partly successful campaign by the National Congress of Italian Canadians to have the federal government offer redress for the effects of its wartime

Actor or Victim? Mario Duliani and His Internment Narrative 313 policies on Italian Canadians.1 Supporters of this lobby have since been trying to lift Duliani out of the ignominy into which he has fallen.2 They consider him as, if not the father of Italian-Canadian literature, at least a central figure in it. His book has been described quite simply as 'a classic in Canadian letters' whose true worth was eclipsed by wartime politics, specifically the internal war waged by the federal government against its 'ethnics.'3 Whatever the book's literary merits, the problem is how to approach it. Is this a novel or a historical document? La ville sans femmes can certainly be read either way, provided that critics define their objectives at the outset. A literary method seems most appropriate for a stylistic or broadly thematic analysis. However, a historical approach is required to examine the complex question of government wartime policies or Italian-Canadian politics in the interwar period. In this case, commentators cannot simply present La ville sans femmes as a factual chronicle of what took place, since it is only one man's account, however privileged an observer he may have been. They must assess his narrative against a wide range of historical sources, including oral ones. But they must exercise caution and discrimination in evaluating the testimony of their interviewees, who, given the highly controversial nature of the topic, will consciously or unconsciously try to obscure the facts. Critics must remind themselves that oral interviews are, after all, no more pure or direct a source than is Duliani's book. Above all, they must consult the pertinent historical archives. Ironically, although Duliani revivalists are trained in literature, they fail to substantiate their ambitious claims concerning the book's literary merits. Instead they establish his importance as a writer by exploiting the politics of internment. In this essay I look at this ambivalent narrative, its depiction of life in the camps, the portrayal of the politics there, Duliani's own life, and his problematic legacy. An Ambivalent Narrative The author states at the outset that his work is neither diary nor memoir, but a novelesque account.4 The descriptions of the physical surroundings and daily life at Petawawa, as well as the portrayal of inmates, their thoughts, and their feelings, are, Duliani says, accurate. He claims literary licence only in juxtaposing characters and events to highlight certain themes and give his work cohesion. This technique does not, however, explain the book's incongruities, prompting Duliani's transla-

314 Roberto Perin tor to suggest that 'discerning readers will not overlook the tacit irony that subverts his conventional wisdom/5 Whether or not the author meant to be ironic - irony being much in vogue in current literary analysis - La ville sansfemmes is a profoundly ambivalent work. While emphasizing the terrible psychological toll borne by the inmates, the author in a preface entitled Tour s'entendre et se comprendre' (To Get Along and to Understand Each Other) defends the internment of both enemy aliens and Canadian citizens born in enemy states. The political and military situation, he feels, seemed 'fully' to justify such action. As if this statement from a long-serving internee were not startling enough, Duliani couches it in absolute terms: 'A government has the strictest duty to act in the most rigorous manner required by circumstances to protect the order and security of the whole nation which is asked to give copiously of its money and blood/ As for internees, he maintains that they were treated with 'unquestionable sentiments of humanity and generosity' and made to follow essentially the same regimen as the army.6 Duliani allows that errors may have been committed in the selection of those who were interned. 'But/ he asks magnanimously, 'what can be the worth of an individual's fate in the context of the collective and world drama of modern war?' Internment was, in the author's view, almost a necessary rite of passage, a purification, for those incriminated more by circumstance or appearance than by hard fact. The process itself clearly showed that inmates had done nothing, either in word or deed, against the Canadian government. They would return to their families without rancor or resentment against the host society, almost content to have endured an ordeal that lifted the stigma of suspicion afflicting them. The preface ends with an affirmation of love for the beautiful country that, Duliani announces, he intends definitely to make his own.7 Having begun with a strong justification of the government's policy, the author repeatedly affirms the internees' innocence in the rest of the book and seeks to evoke compassion for them. La ville sans femmes opens with lugubrious nocturnal images of Petawawa: the lampposts ominously reminiscent of gallows, the inmates' entombment in the deep, dark forest of northern Ontario, their nightmares of anxiety, and the vast, eerie silence broken only by their lonely cries for loved ones from whom they have been suddenly and violently wrenched. The internees' uniform, with its concentric circles of blue, white, and red on the back, would, Duliani feels, normally evoke a carnivalesque atmos-

Actor or Victim? Mario Duliani and His Internment Narrative 315 phere, were it not that it made them easy targets for guards posted in the camp's turrets.8 Duliani appropriates the voice of those falsely accused and wrongly interned. He introduces his protagonists as characters in a Greek tragedy, blind instruments of forces beyond their control and understanding. They become the playthings of remote governments pursuing an inscrutable iron logic. The chorus reminds us that these inmates did nothing to betray their adopted country. On the contrary, by establishing families in Canada they contributed to its welfare. Portraying them as casualties of a 'sale histoire' (dirty story) because they had once shown an abstract sympathy for fascist ideals, Duliani implies that occult forces had brought about their nemesis.9 The archetypal inmate is perhaps a young man aged thirty, married, with several children, and mistakenly arrested instead of his father, who had the same name as he. While the old man had been an active fascist, the son, we are told, was not even remotely connected to a political movement, and although he could prove his innocence, he was wary of betraying a loved one. As a result, he suffered his confinement in silence until his father's death eighteen months later.10 The reader is left to wonder whether someone so infused with filial piety could indeed betray his patria (homeland). Duliani describes the psychological state of many internees. He cites the anxiety that gripped those whose families, hard hit by the Depression, had been on public assistance before June 1940 and now found themselves cut off.11 Also in anguish were the many men aged forty to fifty who had patiently and strenuously built up successful careers only to find their prospects in old age hopelessly compromised.12 Some were mortified at the thought that internment made them objects of suspicion with their Canadian-born wives and children, who might think them capable of betraying their country.13 But if any category of internee were to be pitied, it was surely the young who were not allowed to taste the sweet fruit of freedom that their generation craved. As one youth succinctly put it: 'Le moral va bien. C'est l'immoral qui ne va pas!'14 (My morale is fine. It is my immoral that is not well!) This brings us to the leitmotif of the narrative - the absence of women. Duliani considers such a condition a tragedy for internees of whatever age or culture, because 'even in its least ideal and noble form, love is a very serious thing.' And he adds: 'It is through [love] that the world moves forward, renews and perpetuates itself.'15 The chapter

316 Roberto Perin entitled 'La ville sans femmes' stresses that women, by their absence, are obsessively omnipresent in the camp: in conversations, thoughts, fantasies, and anxieties. Mothers are the object of special solicitude, for, as one inmate put it: They make a mountain out of a mole hill. To handle the heart of so delicate a being as a mother is an advanced art/16 The camp, however, was not the domain of the Addolorata (the sorrowful Mother), but of Aphrodite, whose image was everywhere venerated: 'In every bunkhouse colour drawings forming gaudy stains on walls, window panes, cardboard partitions of sleeping compartments, even the backs of chairs, reveal naked or nearly naked women's bodies in provocative and lascivious poses. These drawings were cut out from Esquire or other similar magazines by companions, victims of "repression/"17 The absence of women provokes flights of creative fancy such as the chapter entitled 'Sanglots d'automne' (Autumn Sobs), interspersed with verses by the great nineteenth-century French poet Verlaine, or alternately darkest despair. Inmates sing the sentimental song Non ti scordar di me (recently popularized for North American audiences by tenor Luciano Pavarotti) in the hope that their loved ones will remain true to them.18 But ultimately Duliani does not intend to dwell on tragedy. To have an enduring stake in the country that he wants to adopt as his own, he must make his story one of redemption, in which human effort tames the wilderness, a prison camp, and the hostile environment. One commentator remarked that Duliani, by making this his central theme, inserts himself in a long Canadian literary tradition stretching back to Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush.19 Being immigrants, the internees manage to arrangiarsi ('getting by' 'making it'), transforming the bush both figuratively and literally into a garden. The author notes that Petawawa sprouted no less than fifteen large vegetable gardens, as well as ornamental ones tended by skilled gardeners. Dailly Life in the Camp Despite strange and at times difficult conditions, inmates re-create a familiar environment for themselves. Since many of them are from Montreal, it is perhaps fitting that one of their first acts is to christen the main thoroughfare crossing the compound 'rue Sainte-Catherine' after the city's bustling commercial artery.20 Duliani, though apparently not religiously observant in his personal life,21 stresses the internees' efforts to establish regular worship in the camp, thereby regaining their spir-

Actor or Victim? Mario Duliani and His Internment Narrative 317

Making music and theatre in the camp. Italian internees in costume perform as The Hill Billies band.

itual bearings. The news that Italian clergymen are among those interned is evidently greeted with great excitement. A choir and small orchestra are soon formed to give greater solemnity to Sunday mass. At Christmas and Easter, religious celebrations are especially comforting, as is the semi-annual visit of the apostolic delegate, Archbishop Ildebrando Antoniutti. Duliani notes that the adversity of internment turned many sceptics and supposed unbelievers into fervent practitioners of their faith, adding that 'If God did not exist, would we have such an intimate thirst for him in these terrible hours of existence?'22 As we have seen, however, the preoccupation of inmates is not only with the hereafter. They build bocce courts, form sporting teams, and organize annual or semi-annual field days, described as veritable olympiads!23 They publish their own newspaper, II Bollettino,24: and hold lectures, language classes, and courses in philosophy and literary history. Music, the cinema, and the stage also become part of everyday life. A theatre built by German internees includes stage, curtain, props, and make-up room. Duliani organizes two companies that perform plays in French and Italian.25 Concerts are frequent, since the camp boasts three

318 Roberto Perin orchestras as well as a number of choirs and soloists. An interned composer even writes a piece called 'A Prisoner's Song/ known to every inmate.26 The author emphasizes the internees' resourcefulness - a key ingredient in the ability to arrangiarsi. The fact that late one evening in 1940 the camp guards were clapping, singing, and dancing was widely interpreted as a sign that the war had ended. Since inmates were locked in their bunkhouses at nine o'clock and forbidden to speak after ten, it was virtually impossible to confirm the news. And so an accomplished amateur thespian among them 'developed' a raging toothache. The guard who quickly arrived on the scene was astonished: not only did the inmate refuse the ministrations offered him with plyers; but more curiously still, he asked the soldier the reason for his comrades' merriment.27 It is not surprising that the inventiveness displayed by these Italians becomes especially evident in the realm of food, 'the only pleasure left to [them].'28 It takes them little time to stock their canteen with items scarce in wartime, such as cigars, cigarettes, and fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as beer and even oysters. Supervision of camp cooking at first is entrusted to a chef who had been employed in one of the finest hotels in the country and had apparently prepared the gala dinner given on the occasion of the royal visit in 1939. Since a number of other chefs are also interned, culinary standards did not decline after his release. The kitchen staff includes butchers, bakers, as well as Montreal's best pastry chef. From time to time, when resources allow, banquets are organized for as many as three hundred internees. 'They then ordered the chef to prepare a proper dinner as they would have done with any good restaurant owner in a large city.'29 Tables are decorated with flowers, while music and singing accompanies the meal, which ends with speeches and good cheer. Only the absence of alcoholic beverages detracts from the illusion of reality. The internees' ability to make the best of a difficult situation seemingly earned them the respect of camp authorities, who try to make conditions as bearable, and even as pleasant, as possible.30 Rules regarding smoking, letter writing, and talking after curfew are relaxed.31 Radios, newspapers, and musical instruments are introduced into the camp. At Fredericton even the bars placed on bunkhouse windows are eventually removed.32 The humane treatment that seemed to be the hallmark of these camps is perhaps best illustrated by the story of a man suffering from a life-threatening illness. The owner of an elegant

Actor or Victim? Mario Duliani and His Internment Narrative 319 Montreal restaurant, he had already had surgery prior to his arrest. His condition, however, rapidly deteriorated in the camp, and doctors feared that he would soon be dead if he remained in confinement. A medical report was dispatched to the authorities, who were asked for his release. Within a short time news arrived that the request had been granted.33 Even the organization of the camps, Duliani is quick to point out, reveals a civilized society's concern for human dignity. Each bunkhouse democratically elects a leader and twelve representatives who are responsible for its welfare. These officials in turn choose an overall leader, who acts as the accredited intermediary between internees and the camp commandant. This person also convenes weekly meetings of hut leaders, similar in most respects to those of a town council. Duliani adds: 'It was comforting for us to witness the commandant discussing with internees in the most courteous manner issues relating to the good management and upkeep of the camp.'34 Politics and Internees La ville sans femmes contains almost no references to politics, political issues, or ideologies. It depicts internees as 'mostly good people whose level of culture is average or below average.'35 This lack of sophistication is reflected in their dim appreciation of world events, as shown in the following imaginary dialogue between two Italian Canadians just days before Italy's entry into the war: 'Do you think that Mussolini will declare war? - On whom? - On France and England because of the Axis Pact ... Never! At the time of the assassination of Chancellor Dolfuss [sic], Mussolini mobilized two divisions against Germany. In [19] 14 he was the most ardent supporter of Italian intervention against Germany and Austria.'36 Both speakers refuse to believe that Italy would deviate from the traditional alliance with France and Britain that had produced both its political unity and its economic prosperity. Duliani derides those within the camp who 'analyze the large questions of international diplomacy with the same ease that they comment on small misunderstandings among friends. - "If I were England," says one, "I would say to Italy:... withdraw [from the war] and we will leave you alone." - The other replies: "Yes, but I would say: I will gladly withdraw; but then let us be friends as before." And so on for hours. And then they say that women are talkative!'37 Claiming that inmates made available to him official documents

320 Roberto Perin relating to their imprisonment, Duliani authoritatively asserts that most were unable either to understand or to master ideological issues. He depicts them as southern Latins who suffer from an excessive need to show off. They had enjoyed taking part in banquets and parades organized by the Italian consul in their black shirts and amid swirling flags, making heady speeches at patriotic events, and seeing their names in print in the local press. 'The main criticism that can be made against the Italian internees in the camp boils down to this.'38 Theirs were peccadillos of ambition and vanity. Of course exceptions existed. The author speaks of four internees who told Canadian officials under interrogation that they would not respect Canadian laws. But Italy's military reversals and Mussolini's fall in 1943 altered the perceptions even of some of these hardened ideologues. An ex-Fascist, for instance, apparently characterized the civil war that followed Mussolini's fall from power as an Italian quarrel that had nothing to do with the inmates as Canadians.39 Duliani mentions the more prominent Canadian political figures detained at Petawawa only in passing, never by name. They distinguish themselves in La ville sansfemmes for their prowess in particular games and sports, not for their ideas or actions. This is the case with Camillien Houde, the mayor of Montreal, who for purely electoral reasons had often exploited sentiments of sympathy for Mussolini's Italy and its policies. In 1936 the mayor had donated municipal land for the construction of the Casa d'ltalia, which earned him a knighthood from the Italian king. In 1940 he openly encouraged popular defiance of Ottawa's national campaign of registration for military service, which triggered his arrest. But in the book Houde is mentioned only for his dexterity at Chinese checkers, skating, and ball playing. For his part, Adrien Arcand, leader of the fascist National Social Christian party (NSCP) and a virulent anti-Semite, is presented as a skilled tennis player. Despite their long confinement, observes Duliani, the two men avoid each other, and, 'when by chance they meet, they hardly greet each other, smiling faintly, for the sake of politeness.'40 As for his own political orientation and involvement, Duliani states that all his life he served the Latin ideal by working for closer ties between France and Italy. Right to the end he had refused to believe that these two nations could engage in a fratricidal war. But the Francophobes in Mussolini's cabinet took advantage of France's military defeats at the hands of the Nazis to push il Duce (Mussolini) to act. The author describes the declaration of war as a crime, an act of mad-

Actor or Victim? Mario Duliani and His Internment Narrative 321 ness, and a black day in the history of humanity and humanism.41 Rome should never have abandoned its neutrality. But this great tragedy, laments the author, was not understood by the poor inmates obsessed by their own small pain and by wild rumours that Italy's victory would herald their imminent liberation. Duliani the Person The ambivalence of La ville sans femmes concerns not only Duliani's simultaneous justification of government policy and affirmation of the internees' innocence, but his own activities and those of his fellow inmates prior to their arrest. A historian's insights concerning such issues do not spring spontaneously from the text or the self-interested testimony of his contemporaries. They cannot emerge without scholarly research in primary sources. Information about Duliani's life is scattered and therefore not readily available. But this does not excuse the critic from seeking it out. By piecing together documents relating to him, we get a clearer image of the man, his character, and his activities. At the same time, such material provides some necessary context for understanding the book as a historical document and its author as a political actor. Mario Duliani was born in 1885 in Pisino (now Pazin) in Istria, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Especially in his formative years and also later in life, he would be challenged by his illegitimate birth and his origins in a border area where ethnic identities were not clearcut. While he was still a child, he and his mother left Istria, most of which became part of Italy's northeastern frontier after the First World War. Territorial claims to the rest of the area (Italia irredenta, or unredeemed Italy) were variously advanced by nationalists and fascists alike. In 1919 Duliani, already a resident of Paris, spoke publicly in favour of the annexation to Italy of Fiume (now Rijeka), which had been awarded to the Yugoslav kingdom.42 Ten years later the Italian embassy in the French capital described him as 'an excellent Italian and fascist,' adding that 'it would be difficult to express doubts about his love of country and fidelity to the Regime.' While Duliani's personal life was marked by a degree of frivolity, regarded as a common trait of French journalists, the report noted that he promoted Italian interests even at his own expense. As actual editor of Paris-Presse, a daily owned by a rich Montreal capitalist, he 'promptly submits to the orders of Royal [Italian] Embassy, and seeks to promote all those Italians who do some-

322 Roberto Perin thing good/43 Duliani was also noted for his talents as a theatrical director. His income from journalism and the theatre was supplemented by his work as an agent of the Italian secret police, the OVRA.44 Despite these activities, it seems that Duliani always lived on the edge and well beyond his means. The frivolity alluded to in the report may be related to Duliani's multiple convictions by the Paris courts for fraud and writing bad cheques. He was found guilty ten times in as many years, beginning in 1926, when he was sentenced three times. Convictions followed in each of the following three years. These stopped briefly until 1935-6, when he was found guilty on three further occasions. His sentences varied from three to six months in jail, with fines ranging from fifty to one hundred francs. If Duliani did indeed fulfill these conditions, he would have spent three years and four months in jail and payed a total of 950 francs in fines. In February or more probably in March 1936 he left France for good, just before the last sentence against him was pronounced.45 He skipped off to Canada with the apparent complicity both of Italian diplomatic staff and Eugene Berthiaume, a French-Canadian newspaper owner (perhaps of ParisPresse) resident in Paris, who wanted Duliani to become editor of a daily that he was launching in Montreal.46 Shortly after arriving in the Canadian metropolis, the fugitive offered his services to Italian consular officials in Montreal and Ottawa, as the very Fascist consul general, Luigi Petrucci, apprised his superiors.47 Some months later, the consul in Montreal, Paolo de Simone, informed Rome: Thanks to my encouragement and the useful collaboration of... Mario Duliani (... sent by Mr. Berthiaume to be co-editor of L''Illustration nouvelle), the well-known local newspaper La Patrie published an entire page dedicated to Italy in its Sunday edition which has a wide circulation (100,000 copies)/48 Later, de Simone brought to the Foreign Ministry's attention an unsigned article in L'Illustration nouvelle entitled 'Le Canada reconnait enfin 1'empire italien d'Ethiopie' (Canada Finally Recognizes the Italian Empire of Ethiopia). About the author, whom he did not identify, the consul said that he is 'a sincere friend of Italy who does not miss an opportunity to be in touch with me, welcoming my discreet suggestions willingly... Even in the most sensitive and difficult periods, L'Illustration nouvelle has sided with us/49 In fact, Duliani became the linchpin in a well-orchestrated campaign already begun in 1934 by the Italian consulate in Montreal that sought to intensify the disunity existing between French and English Canadians over the country's pro-British attitudes in international affairs.50

Actor or Victim? Mario Duliani and His Internment Narrative 323 The article in question blatantly echoed official propaganda in favour of Italian expansionism. Ethiopia was described as a savage country where slavery was widespread. Its inhabitants were 'barbarians [who] had to be brought to reason' for their alleged violations of international law against Italy. In incorporating Ethiopia in its empire, it alleged, Italy was acting no differently from the United States, Britain, France, and Belgium had earlier done in Africa and Asia. Indeed the author intimated that Italians avoided such imperialist excesses as Britain had committed by expelling the Acadians during the Seven Years War, confining the Afrikaners to concentration camps during the Boer War, and destroying Arab villages in Palestine. The article flailed the campaign against Italy fomented in the League of Nations by 'the occult leaders of all the Internationals' and especially the actions of Canada's 'bungling' representative, Walter Riddell. By minding its own business, the author admonished, Canada would have saved a valuable commercial partner.51 We may well ask if this is what Duliani had in mind when he referred in La ville sans femmes to his life-long promotion of the Latin ideal? While the article may have impressed officials at the Italian Foreign Ministry, it did not escape the attention of Canadian bureaucrats, nor did Duliani's role in the efforts of Italian consular staff to cause mischief in Canada. Concerning Duliani, a Canadian government report noted: '[He] resides at the Windsor Hotel and obviously spends more money than he can earn as a reporter on the staff of a paper with a small circulation/52 The popular tabloid, L'Illustration nouvelle, first hit the news-stands in late February 1936. Situated well on the right of the political spectrum, it vehemently opposed Quebec's decrepit Liberal government under Alexandre Taschereau and was the unofficial mouthpiece of Maurice Duplessis and his freshly minted Union Nationale party, which rose to power in August of that year. The paper's editorial staff included Adrien Arcand, whose activities as a fascist leader received ample coverage in its columns. Its presses apparently also printed the NSCP organ, Le Fasciste canadien, and a voluminous quantity of anti-Semitic literature.53 Duliani and Arcand must have worked closely together during their three-year stint on the editorial board. Yet, as we have seen, Arcand appears in La ville sans femmes as a total stranger, a remote political figure. As L'lllustration nouvelle's foreign affairs specialist,54 Duliani certainly promoted Fascist Italy's interests. But his credentials as a journalist made him an easy conduit for Italian propaganda, especially in the form of photographs, that appeared in both the French- and

324 Roberto Perin English-language press of Quebec. These included Quebec City's Le Journal and Montreal's La Presse, La Patrie, Star, and Gazette.55 Can we honestly believe that such an attentive observer of the international scene had not foreseen Italy's declaration of war against France? Is his appropriation of the voice of the innocent in his book at all credible? Duliani and his activities were therefore well known to Canadian officials when he was arrested. The man whose seemingly glamorous life, spent in the company of diplomats, artists, intellectuals, and politicians, must have found his confinement as a common internee mortifying. It was not long before he asked that his conditions of detention be improved on the grounds of reciprocity, arguing that 'allied correspondents and journalists have a special regime of internment in Italy.'56 In no time at all, the man who so easily invoked the status of a foreign correspondent would soon be declaring his intention to remain in his beloved land of adoption. It is unlikely that the request for better treatment was granted. But Duliani managed sufficiently to ingratiate himself with the authorities to be named camp nurse. This position, as his book tells us, set him above the other inmates, who slept on paillasses in thirty double beds per bunkhouse. Duliani had a bed with sheets and pillow case in his own private room, where he was allowed to have his light on all night if he so wished.57 As one whose whole life was spent differentiating himself from the common man, it is ironic that in La ville sans femmes he should conceal his own political identity by covering practically all internees in the mantle of innocence. It is beyond the scope of this essay to examine the political antecedents of all inmates, which remains a necessary but formidable task. But is it just a coincidence that the newspaper that they published at Petawawa bore the same name as the Italian fascist organ printed in Toronto before the war? In any event, Duliani's depiction of internees as men of limited culture is simply not tenable. The study of their social background published in Bruti Liberati's essay in this volume shows that 60 per cent of them were merchants, professionals, industrialists, teachers, clergymen, and journalists. Even if we accept that the category 'merchant' could have included small shopkeepers, it still appears that half were in the upper echelons of Italian-Canadian society. Duliani's own book is peopled with doctors, lawyers, engineers, entrepreneurs, artists, journalists, chefs, merchants, and clergymen. Is it possible that such men did not understand the political significance of the speeches that they made, the black shirts that they wore, the articles that they wrote, and the associations that they joined?

Actor or Victim? Mario Duliani and His Internment Narrative 325 A memorandum written by Dr V.V. Restaldi, honorary Italian viceconsul in Montreal, argues instead that they understood too well the implications of their actions. Arrested in 1940, Restaldi spent two years at Petawawa before being repatriated as an Italian national. Duliani describes what happened next: 'In June 1942 he departed aboard the "Gripsholm" proud and happy. He left what he thought was a purgatory only to fall into the hell of a defeated Italy, torn apart by civil war. He ended up in an area completely dominated by the Germans. What happened to him in this turmoil, no one knows.'58 Restaldi was an unrepentant Fascist. One can imagine his dismay and anger at discovering how eagerly the elite among the internees reneged on their political and national allegiances in order to gain their freedom from the Canadian authorities. He noted with bitterness that those who remained steadfast were not the ambitious leaders who had revelled in the prominence and publicity conferred on them by fascism, but poor workers. The vice-consul also pointed out that internees had themselves been betrayed by ex-Fascists who eagerly provided information to the RCMP in exchange for their freedom.59 The story of internment is therefore far more complex, tragic, and sordid than Duliani's idyll of innocence and patient forbearance would have us believe. When he was released in the summer of 1943, the author, now almost sixty years of age, had few possibilities. There was the 'hell of a defeated Italy, torn apart by civil war.' This hell also included France, Duliani's first country of adoption. With his compromising past, he would certainly have been arrested had he returned to the liberated part of Italy. The same fate would probably have awaited him in France, where, in any event, he had lost his former patrons. It seemed that the safest course was to remain in Canada. The usefulness of writing a book justifying government policy and professing love for his new country of adoption and its democratic values could not have been more timely. This did not cause Duliani problems of conscience, any more than it would have the other internees who had betrayed themselves and their colleagues. Besides, the man had always been an actor, 'and one man in his life plays many parts.' La ville sans femmes was a necessary exercise in amnesia and became his passport to respectability in the new world born out of Hitler's defeat. After the war Duliani returned to journalism, editing among other papers the Montreal Italian-language weekly La Verita. In that capacity, he announced the imminent publication of a series of articles written by

326 Roberto Perin Gianni Grohovaz, a fellow Istrian who had immigrated to Canada after the war. It was an expose of the exploitative conditions confronting Italian immigrant labourers working for the R.R Welch Co., which held the maintenance contract for the rail lines of the Canadian National Railways (CNR). Since Grohovaz had visited several of these work sites as a white-collar employee of the company, his was an insider's view. Some time after the articles had been submitted, a Welch official summoned Grohovaz to his office and 'took a bunch of pages from the pocket of his jacket... Smiling, he said: "All the stuff that you write can be bought for 500 dollars/"60 When confronted by his compatriot, Duliani resorted to the well-known theatrical technique of the quick escape. Duliani died in 1964 in apparent penury in the city that had welcomed him before the war. The fact that three years earlier Georges Lapalme, Liberal minister of cultural affairs, had named him to the province's newly created Conseil des arts du Quebec (Quebec Arts Council) showed that in his twilight years the man still had connections. Even in death, however, his legacy survives. Duliani's Legacy The process of whitewashing a painfully ugly chapter in ItalianCanadian history, begun in La ville sans femmes, continues to this day. In a history of Italian Canadians, one of several 'ethnic histories' commissioned by the federal government to mark Canada's centennial, the once-proud and long-time anti-fascist activist Antonino Spada spoke of Duliani only in terms of his artistic achievements. Instead of reconstructing a vital though troubling past, Spada chose to celebrate ItalianCanadian heroes (even former mortal political enemies).61 A decade or so later an Italian-language journalist from Montreal, Jos Mingarelli, followed in Spada's footsteps. While alluding to Duliani's career in the press, he made no mention of his political allegiances and activities.62 A new generation of Italian Canadians active in the arts and ethnic journalism perpetuates this exercise in amnesia. It does so not because it sympathizes with Duliani's politics, but from a sense of mission to reconstitute the 'national' history of Italian Canadians and in some cases expose Canada's past slights and injustices towards them. As a result, it promotes an exaggerated sense of ethnic self-importance and grievance, as well as its own prominence within the group. Unacquainted with archival research and the methods of the historical discipline, it

Actor or Victim? Mario Duliani and His Internment Narrative 327 improvises a history that is part fact, largely devoid of historical context, and part myth. For example, the treatment of Duliani by Filippo Salvatore, professor of Italian studies at Concordia University, violates the canons of history in three fundamental respects: he trivializes documentary evidence clearly establishing the man's role as an OVRA agent; he uses totally unsubstantiated oral testimony to prove his 'incorruptibility'; and he legitimates his sympathy for Fascism by grossly exaggerating the degree of support for this ideology among Montreal's Italians and Quebec's French Canadians.63 Since all sheep are painted black, the black sheep in the herd cannot be distinguished. Content to repeat Salvatore's errors, poet-translator Antonino Mazza, without showing a shred of evidence, transforms Duliani into an anti-fascist icon, 'a fugitive from his authoritarian motherland/ as well as a martyr at the hands of a no less oppressive (and racist) Canadian state.64 The whitewashing of the past becomes the invention of history, a process encouraged by the National Congress of Italian Canadians and facilitated by the ethnicization of contemporary Canadian politics. My objective here is not to denigrate Duliani or to diminish his qualities and achievements. He was by all accounts a clever, cultivated, and thoroughly charming individual who knew how to win the favour of others. An incident recounted in his book gives a small measure of his abilities. Shortly after their internment Duliani got the Italians from Montreal to sing the popular French song 'La Madelon/ which produced the desired effect on Petawawa's French-Canadian guards, who exclaimed: 'I thought they were Italians. But they are exactly like the French!'65 Naturally one treats the members of an extended family, even if they are inmates, differently from total strangers. Duliani undoubtedly played a key role in improving Montreal's rather anaemic theatrical life. Not only did he introduce major playwrights such as Luigi Pirandello into the local repertory, but he promoted struggling French-Canadian authors such as Gabrielle Roy and Germaine Guevremont. He also supported the careers of future celebrities of the stage such as Yvette Brind'Amours, Juliette Huot, and Judith Jasmin.66 His daily newspaper column, 'L'information litteraire,' broke new ground in French-Canadian journalism by regularly covering the literary and theatrical scene. Thanks to his initiative, L'lllustration nouvelle publicized many of the city's cultural events, such as the Gala of French Poetry.67 But this was neither the whole man, nor even the essential one. His dedication to art could not financially sustain him in Paris or Montreal.

328 Roberto Perin Duliani's legacy? Montreal's English-language Centaur Theatre recently staged Vittorio Rossi's play about Camp Petawawa, Paradise by the River. Excerpts from the program suggest the emotions raised by internment and show how a simplified version of complex events has become popular wisdom:

A Note from the Playwright When I first came across the subject of this play, I was immediately stunned at how ignorant I was with its history. I had heard stories of so and so's grandfather in the neighbourhood having been incarcerated in Camp Petawawa during the war, but I never realized how wounding and deeply humiliating the whole affair was to the Italians ... What was even more astounding was how little Canadians know of this very dark affair in our history. I knew then that eventually I had to tell this story. I don't think I had a choice. A play must live in the present... Personally, as I wrote the play I identified with the hero of the story as playwright. The prejudices he encounters throughout the story are not unlike what I've seen within my own profession. Why do Italian actors only get to audition for the gangsters and the Italian waiters? Why is the broad face of Canadian theatre, film and television essentially an Anglo-Saxon one? Why do I get more productions of my plays in the U.S.A. than in Canada? These questions are troubling when you consider the amount of ItalianCanadian talent in this country, and very disturbing when you consider other ethnic groups within the Canadian landscape ... The play is an attempt to dramatize events in which certain people in this nation were stripped ... of all their rights and privileges as citizens. On a dime, they were stripped of honour! This is not a history, but a play, the subject of which was worthy not only of being dramatized, but I hope might succeed in sparking a discussion with the public... History Over 600 men were eventually interned in a Prisoner of War Camp in Petawawa, Ontario. It took over three months for families to learn the whereabouts of those men. It has since been documented that only a small number of prisoners

Actor or Victim? Mario Duliani and His Internment Narrative 329 sented a threat to this country. The vast majority were innocent men held against their will for up to four years, imprisoned unjustly as other Italian-Canadians fought and died on foreign shores. Upon release, many were asked to join the Canadian forces and fight on behalf of their proud nation. ... Despite the Government of Canada finally issuing an official apology in 1990, the records of these men still show that they were prisoners which makes it exceedingly difficult for them when travelling abroad. To this day, no remuneration has ever been granted to these people. Though this violation of rights is not widely remembered or taught in our schools, it remains a black mark on our nation's history.

He had therefore subordinated his real talents to the cause of Fascist Italy in a relentless search for respectability and recognition. Italian diplomatic officials in Paris easily forgave his difficulties with the French judicial system as long as he kept them informed on the activities of nationals in Paris and otherwise promoted the cause of Fascist Italy. In Montreal he exploited the anti-British feelings that underlay French Canada's sense of alienation within Confederation by attacking British and Canadian foreign policy. At the same time he did not hesitate to advocate chauvinistic and even racist ideas. While not a subversive in the sense of committing acts of sabotage, he was nevertheless a compliant instrument of Italian foreign policy who sought to deepen divisions between English and French Canadians in the hope of crippling Canada's war effort. The Italians of Montreal paid a high price for his actions when Italy entered the war. But instead of recognizing the tragic consequences of his irresponsible conduct, Duliani tried to draw the veil of innocence that covered most Italian Canadians over himself. He who had incriminated them now used them to exonerate himself. In assessing his life, it is not enough to emphasize his artistic qualities and accomplishments, for that facet informed and enhanced a more insidious aspect of his persona, one that thought nothing of betrayal and deception. Thanks to the complicity, naivete, and ignorance of Italian and other Canadians, the legacy of deception has come down to us virtually intact after more than half a century. How much longer will it endure?

330 Roberto Perin Notes I am indebted to the following colleagues for providing me with material for this paper: Luigi Bruti Liberati, Jack Granatstein, and especially Robert Ventresca, who generously made available Duliani's file from Casellario politico centrale, Archivo centrale dello State, Rome. 1 Mario Duliani, La ville sansfemmes (Montreal: les Editions Pascal, 1945); Citta senza donne (Montreal: Gustavo D'Errico editore, 1946); The City without Women: A Chronicle of Internment Life in Canada during the Second World War, translated from the French and the Italian, and with an Introduction, by Antonino Mazza (Oakville: Mosaic Press, 1994). 2 La ville sansfemmes, for example, is not mentioned in the massive compendium of Quebec literature Dictionnaire des oeuvres litteraires du Quebec. 3 Antonino Mazza, 'Introduction to the English Edition/ in Duliani, The City without Women, xiii. Mazza adds in less than flawless prose: 'Banished from their homes, unable to provide for their women and children at a crucial time, the poorest internees especially become incensed at the indefinite term of imprisonment imposed on them without benefit of a trial/ See also Filippo Salvatore, 'La quinta colonna inesistente: ovvero 1'arresto e la prigionia degli Italo-canadesi in Citta senza donne (1945) di Mario Duliani/ Rivista di studi canadesilCanadian Studies Review/Revue d'etudes canadiennes 4 (1991), 65. 4 Duliani, La ville, 13. 5 Mazza, 'Introduction/ xii. 6 Duliani, La ville, 15. 'Un gouvernement a le devoir le plus strict d'agir de la fagon la plus rigoureuse qu'exigent les circonstances pour sauvegarder 1'ordre et la securite de toute la nation a laquelle on demande de donner sans compter son sang et son argent.' 'Le traitement... s'inspirait d'un indiscutable sentiment d'humanite et de generosite/ All translations are my own, based on the original French edition. 7 Ibid., 16-17. 'Mais au sein du drame collectif et mondial de la guerre moderne, pour combien compte le sort d'un individu?' 8 Ibid., 21-2, 30. 9 Ibid., 26, 52, and 81. 10 Ibid., 234. II Ibid., 45. 12 Ibid., 52. 13 Ibid., 53.

Actor or Victim? Mario Duliani and His Internment Narrative 331 14 Ibid., 101 and 216. 15 Ibid., 206. Tourtant! Meme sous sa forme la moins ideale et la moins noble, 1'amour est une chose tres serieuse. C'est par lui que marche, se renouvelle et se perpetue le monde.' 16 Ibid., 213. 'D'un atome, elles font une montagne. II faut un art raffine pour manier le coeur d'etres aussi delicats que les mamans.' 17 Ibid., 219. 'Dans chaque barraque, des dessins en couleurs qui font des taches criardes sur les murs, les vitres des fenetres, les cloisons de carton des couchettes, meme sur le dossier des chaises, etalent des corps feminins nus ou presque nus en des poses provocantes et lascives. Ces dessins ont ete decoupes dans les magazines Esquire ou d'autres periodiques [sic] semblables par des camarades victimes de "refoulement."' 18 Ibid., 190-1. 19 Susan lannucci, 'Contemporary Italo-Canadian Literature,' in Roberto Perin and Franc Sturino, eds., Arrangiarsi: The Italian Immigration Experience in Canada (Montreal: Guernica, 1989), 209-27, 211. 20 Duliani, La mile, 38. 21 Duliani was apparently divorced before coming to Canada. He braved the highly conformist (and some would say repressive) atmosphere that reigned among the French-speaking Catholic petty bourgeoisie of Montreal by living openly with an actress. In 1940 he probably entered into a marriage of convenience with another woman, which did not survive his internment. See Salvatore, 'La quinta colonna inesistente,' 67. 22 Duliani, La ville, 287. 'Si Dieu n'existait pas, aurions-nous cette soif intime de Lui, aux heures affreuses de 1'existence?' 23 Ibid., 180. 24 Ibid., 256. 25 Ibid., 199-201. 26 Ibid., 192-5. 27 Ibid., 132-3. 28 Ibid., 127. 29 Ibid., 128. '[Us] commandaient au chef de la cuisine un diner en regie comme ils 1'auraient fait chez n'importe quel grand restaurateur d'une grande ville.' 30 Ibid., 51. 31 Ibid., 66,168. 32 Ibid., 37. 33 Ibid., 82. 34 Ibid., 49. 'Pour nous, c'etait un reconfort de voir le commandant discuter

332 Roberto Perin

35 36

37

38 39 40 41 42

43 44

45

de la facon la plus courtoise avec les internes les problemes relatifs au bon fonctionnement et au bon entretien du camp.' Ibid., 52. 'Ce sont de braves gens pour la plupart dont la culture ne depasse guere la moyenne quand elle n'est pas au-dessous.' Ibid., 24-5.'- Croyez-vous que Mussolini declarera la guerre? - A qui? - A la France et a 1'Angleterre ... a cause du pacte de 1'Axe ... - Jamais de la vie! A 1'epoque de 1'assassinat du chancelier Dolfuss, Mussolini a mobilise deux armees centre 1'Allemagne. En 14, il fut un partisan ardent de 1'intervention italienne centre I'Allemagne et 1'Autriche.' Inspired by Hitler, the assassination of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in 1934 led to Italy's amassing of troops on its northern border to prevent Germany's annexation of Austria. Ibid., 130-1. 'Certains se croient capables d'analyser les grands problemes de la diplomatic internationale avec la meme facilite qu'ils peuvent se prononcer sur de petits differends entre amis. - Moi, dit 1'un, si j'etais 1'Angleterre, je dirais a 1'Italie: c'est un tort d'etre intervenue dans la guerre. Retire-toi de la et nous te laisserons tranquille. - Oui, repliquait un autre, mais, moi, je repondrais: je veux bien me retirer, mais alors, soyons amis comme avant. Et ainsi de suite, durant des heures. Puis Ton dira que les femmes sont bavardes!' Ibid., 53; see also 248. 'A cela pres se resume le principal reproche qu'on puisse faire a la plupart des internes italiens du camp.' Ibid., 267. Ibid., 246 and also 178. Ibid., 27 and 249. Archivio centrale dello state, Ministero dell'interno, Direzione generale di pubblica sicurezza, divisione affari generali e riservati, Casellario politico centrale (ACS, CPC), Rome, Telespresso 72590/5951, Communication of the Italian Foreign Ministry to the Ministry of the Interior, 21, Nov. 1929. Ibid., Copy of the Telegramme dated 18 Sept. 1929, no. 57217/4585, from the Ministry of External Affairs, 25 Sept. 1929. Luigi Bruti Liberati, // Canada, I'ltalia e ilfascismo 1919-1945 (Rome: Bonacci editore, 1984), 243. The author points out that Duliani's name appears in the Elenco nominative dei confident! dell'OVRA, published in Supplemento ordinario alia Gazzetta ufficiale, which came out on 2 July 1946. The fact that this list of OVRA agents gives only Duliani's Paris address may indicate that his activities as a paid informer were limited to his years in the French capital. ACS, CPC Protocollo 58574, Prefecture of Pola to the Minister of the Interior, 15 Nov. 1941.

Actor or Victim? Mario Duliani and His Internment Narrative 333 46 Ibid., Protocollo 11678, Consul general in Paris, G. Orlandini, to the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and the Interior, 26 Feb. 1942. It seems that Duliani obtained a valid passport from Italian consular officials in Paris in February 1936. 47 Archivio Storico-Diplomatico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Serie Affari politici, Canada (ASMAE), busta 5, Petrucci to the Foreign Ministry, 18 April 1936. 48 Ibid., busta 3, de Simone to the Foreign Ministry, 5 Nov. 1936. 49 Ibid., busta 3, de Simone to the Foreign Ministry, 16 Nov. 1938. 50 See my 'Making Good Fascists and Good Canadians: Consular Propaganda and the Italian Community in Montreal in the 1930s,' in Gerald Gold, ed., Minority and Mother Country Imagery (St John's: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University, 1984), 136-58; Bruti Liberati, // Canada, I'ltalia e ilfascismo. The perspective on this question of Italian bureaucrats travelling to North America is dealt with in Giovanni Pizzorusso and Matteo Sanfilippo, 'II Canada nei resoconti dei viaggiatori italiani (18201940),' Proceedings of the international conference 'Giovanni Caboto e le vie dell'Atlantico settentrionale' (Rome, forthcoming). Also worth reading is Romolo Tritone, 'Canada: prima incrinatura dell'Impero Britannico/ Nuova antologia (I June 1940), 221-8, which predicted that because of internal divisions Canada would be the weakest link in the chain of imperial unity. 51 L'lllustration nouvelle, 19 Nov. 1937. 52 National Archives of Canada (NA), 'Memorandum Regarding the Existence in Canada of Foreign Movements Antagonistic to the Existing Form of Government, and Evidence of Suspected Activities against the National Interest/ n.d., 5. 53 Lita-Rose Betcherman, The Swastika and the Maple Leaf: Fascist Movements in Canada in the Thirties (Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1978), 89-91. 54 See Joseph Bourdon, Montreal-Matin: son histoire, ses histoires (Montreal: La Presse, 1978), 51. 55 ACS, Ministero della cultura popolare, Paolo de Simone to the Ministry of Popular Culture, 23 Aug. 1938. 56 NA, RG 25, G2, file 3016-B-40, 'Complaints of the Internees at the Petawawa Internment Camp/ n.d. 57 Duliani, La ville, 76. 58 Ibid., 80. 'En juin 1942, il partit a bord du "Gripsholm" fier et content. II quitta ce qu'il croyait etre un purgatoire pour tomber dans 1'enfer d'une Italie vaincue, dechiree par la guerre civile et finit dans une region completement dominee par les Allemands. Qu'est-il devenu dans la tourmente. On 1'ignore.'

334 Roberto Perin 59 ASMAE, busta 12, memorandum 'Sul trattamento degli Italian! al Canada dopo la dichiarazione di guerra/ 12 Oct. 1942. 60 Gianni Grohovaz, Toronto's Italian Press after the Second World War/ Polyphony 4 no. 1 (spring/summer 1982), 105-13, 107. 61 A.V. Spada, The Italians in Canada, Canada Ethnica VI (Ottawa: Riviera 1969), 154. 62 Jos Mingarelli, Gli Italiani di Montreal, note e profili (Montreal: Edizioni Ciaca, 1980), 183. 63 Salvatore, 'La quinta colonna inesistente/ 69-76; also his Lefascisme et les Italiens a Montreal: une histoire orale, 1922-1945 (Montreal: Guernica, 1995). 64 Mazza, 'Introduction/ The City without Women, xix. On the fact that Duliani was included in the list of OVRA agents, Mazza's argument is both less than lucid and erroneous: 'Duliani's name ... did appear ... but so did the names of other prominent Italian-Canadians who, though unequivocally inculpable [sicl], were unknowingly similarly listed as being on the Italian government payroll as informers/ xvii. No other Italian Canadian appeared on the list. 65 Duliani, La ville sansfemmes, 41. 'Je croyais que c'etaient des Italiens. Mais ils sont tout comme des Frangais.' 66 Jean Beraud, 350 ans de theatre au Canada frangais (Montreal: Le Cercle du livre de France, 1958), passim 214-83. 67 Bourdon, Montreal-Matin, 51.

13

Images of Internment GABRIELE SCARDELLATO

A chance encounter with a collection of photographs preserved by an Italian Canadian who was interned during the Second World War led me to reconsider the iconography that has been created around this event. In examining these photographs, most of which had never before been released to the public, I realized that they raised interesting questions about the individuals and the internment event that they portrayed. The collection also prompted me to consider the various images that emerge in both scholarly and popular accounts of the internment of Italian Canadians. An analysis of how these images have been constructed, interpreted, and used may help us understand both the events themselves and their interpretation by contemporary scholars, film-makers, and community leaders. In particular, the analysis addresses a central premise, or myth, of most accounts of ItalianCanadian internment - namely, that the internees were naive victims of a government's 'war' against its ethnic minorities. One of the earliest images of the internees is provided in Mario Duliani's La ville sans femmes (1945). While interned, Duliani recorded 'impressions and observations, reflections and feelings, not merely my own, but those often shared by other inmates who were imprisoned with me.'1 Shortly after his release, he turned these writings into a 'documentary novel' that offers evocative descriptions of the men interned and their daily lives in the internment camps.2 Perhaps the most enduring image is Duliani's portrait of an elderly man: I still see an old man with silken white hair and a rather youngish demeanour ... Seated on his bunk with wistful eyes, untiringly smoking his pipe, never speaking a word. I had taken notice of him, and each time our glances met he would wink at me with hidden understanding.

336 Gabriele Scardellato After a week of this mysterious business ... this boyish old man took me by the elbow and ... said to me in a low whisper: ... 'You who are an educated man, could you be so kind as to tell me whether Italy entered the war on the side of France or against France?' France had capitulated, Paris was in flames, but he, this candid old man with his stylish pipe, was ignorant even of those responsible!3

Duliani's novel has been an important document for those seeking descriptions of the internees and their experience. Older narrative accounts of the experiences of Italian Canadians cite Duliani as the acknowledged authority, usually without comment or further evidence. In interviews with former internees, historians and historical researchers have also been guided by Duliani's portraits and descriptions. Italian-Canadian leaders embraced Duliani's image of the 'old man with silken white hair' during their redress campaign, and the image has also been used by cultural writers keen to promote Duliani's artistic output, as well as contemporary film-makers. In merely reproducing Duliani's portrait of the politically unsophisticated Italian-Canadian internees, historians and others have provided only partial biographical sketches. In his book on the history of Italian Canadians, the journalist Kenneth Bagnell chooses the memories of Dr Luigi Pancaro of Sudbury, Ont., as an aid in constructing his image of the internment episode. For Bagnell, Pancaro was a 'gentleman/ always 'deeply courteous,' whose life was rudely interrupted in June 1940 when RCMP officers entered his clinic, searched his patients' records, and arrested him. In the course of the arrest, however, one of the officers 'slowly removed ... and tore... up' a print of the Virgin Mary that had been pinned to the clinic wall. The episode, which Pancaro apparently recounted in an interview with Bagnell, provides a suitably melodramatic moment and indeed was re-enacted in the most recent documentary film on Italian-Canadian internment.4 Equally striking is the scene, also reported by Bagnell from Pancaro's recollections, of a pharmacist friend who arrived at the train station in Sudbury as the Italian-Canadian detainees were about to be shipped to the internment camp. 'The platform was empty. It was beginning to rain. Out of the dark and drizzle a single figure emerged. It was a friend of Pancaro's, a local pharmacist, carrying the doctor's topcoat over his arm. He handed Pancaro his coat and in indignation yelled at the police, "This man is a gentleman. This is a terrible, terrible mistake."'5 What Pancaro failed to mention, or his interviewer failed to report,

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however, is that from 1933 Pancaro had held the highest Fascist office, that of fiduciario or trustee, for the northern Ontario region. In recognition of his service to Fascism in Canada and Italy, Mussolini knighted him in 1936. The photograph of Pancaro published in Bagnell's book shows a smiling, genial, and silver-haired physician posed in front of a number of decorations, including the medal awarded for his knighthood.6 Another interned doctor, Vittorio Sabetta, features in Antonino Mazza's recent English-language translation of Duliani's book. Mazza rhetorically asks of the internees, 'Who were these men?,' and then answers by juxtaposing a description of his family friend Sabetta as remembered in 1974 - a 'sedate, gentle, seemly, frail, graceful man, of minute stature' - with one of Sabetta's arrest and internment. Calling it 'a very dark period' in Sabetta's life, Mazza recounts how 'RCMP officers stormed his Sault Ste Marie clinic, confiscated hundreds of his Italian-Canadian patients' medical files, arrested him with no warrant and took him away to the Petawawa Camp.'7 Once again, key details of a biography are omitted. Sabetta served as grand venerable of the Order Sons of Italy of Ontario (OSIO) from 1934 until his internment in June 1940. In contemporary photographs his diminutive stature is clearly evident, as is his very Hitlerian-styled moustache. As grand venerable, moreover, Sabetta was also a columnist in the fascist Toronto newspaper, II Bollettino italo-canadese, where he usually proclaimed the glories of the Fascist motherland and the duties of her immigrants abroad.8 A 'Naive Victim'? Former internees have also embraced the image of the naive victim. The collection of photographs that inspired this study was recovered by Dr Enrico Cumbo, who interviewed the owner, Osvaldo Giacomelli, of Hamilton, Ont., about his internment. The interview, particularly Giacomelli's responses, is revealing. Giacomelli insists that he was unjustly interned merely because of the 'accidents' of his personal history. The Canadian-born son of Italian immigrants from the town of San Lorenzo in Campo, in the Marche region, Giacomelli, at age eight, accompanied his parents on their return to Italy, where they resumed their lives as contadini (peasant farmers). Ten years later, they urged their son Osvaldo to return to Canada because of the 'talk of war' in Europe. He did so in July 1939, under the sponsorship of a maternal

338 Gabriele Scardellato uncle who had remained in Hamilton.9 Employed as a labourer on track maintenance for the Canadian National Railways (CNR) and living with an aunt's family in Hamilton, Giacomelli participated in the social life of Hamilton's Italian Canadians, joining the dopolavoro club and attending pro-fascist events in the Casa d'ltalia. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) arrested Giacomelli's uncle during the round-up of 'enemy aliens' that occurred after 10 June 1940. In that arrest, they found Giacomelli's passport and other documents in his uncle's house and promptly ordered his arrest. At the time, Giacomelli was working on the CNR line outside Bronte, Ont., and, he claims, 'didn't even know that war had begun.' The RCMP located him and, before arresting him, ransacked his belongings in the boxcar that served as a workers' dormitory. He was held in Toronto's Don Jail for about thirty days and then transferred to Petawawa. According to Giacomelli, it was his return to Canada in 1939, about eleven months before Italy declared war on Britain, that aroused suspicions that he had returned as a Fascist agent. In the camps, particularly in Petawawa, he also noted, his fellow internees were convinced that their internment was the result of the back-stabbing actions of informants who were rumoured to have received twenty-five dollars for each name that they submitted to the RCMP. He stressed not the arbitrary nature of internment, but the fact that the internees believed that others had avoided imprisonment by fingering their compatriots. Giacomelli also recalled that his fellow prisoners believed that many men avoided internment, or secured an early release, because of their wealth and / or connections.10 Like other internees, Giacomelli was brought before a tribunal. During his first interview, conducted six months after he reached Petawawa, he was questioned about his loyalty to Canada. When asked if he was willing to defend Canada, he replied, 'Yes.' He was then asked 'Will you go overseas to fight?' He replied: 'No, I have a brother in the [Italian] army, and my parents are over there [in Italy].'11 At a second interview he was asked if he would be willing to fight for Canada on the western (Pacific) front. Again, his reply was negative. 'After what they [the internment authorities] done [sic] to me why should I go and please them ...? But if Canada [is] attacked [on a home front I] will fight for country.' These replies, Giacomelli contends, explain why his release from Petawawa was denied. His internment was one of the longest of any experienced by ItalianCanadian civilians. He was released on 25 May 1945 from the camp

Images of Internment

339

near Fredericton, NB, known variously as the Ripples Camp, Camp B, Camp 70, or Camp B / 70, where he had been transferred from Petawawa, some two years after Italy had been defeated and had become a cobelligerent with the allies against Germany.12 Throughout his interview with Cumbo, Giacomelli, who sounds alert, dispassionate, and stoic, projects a sympathetic portrait of himself as a young man who was unjustly interned in 1940. He claims that he was unaware of Italy's entry into the war at the time of his arrest. In recounting an incident in which an interviewing officer slapped him in the face, Giacomelli volunteers the man's name but says nothing about his own response. When prompted by Cumbo about the slap, he says simply that his reaction was a shrug. His reply to Gumbo's observation that his was one of the longest internments is similarly understated; he claims simply that it was on account of his refusal to fight for Canada in Europe. Repeatedly, Giacomelli presents himself to his interviewer as generally unknowing or forgetful and casually dismisses any possible references to a political past. Although as a teenager in Italy he was a Fascist avanguardista (literally, a member of the Fascist vanguard), he denies any political significance to his membership, saying that his participation merely involved 'marching around' and that everyone else was doing it. Similarly, the Casa d'ltalia in Hamilton was only a place for socializing, and, even though his aunt and uncle were actively involved in its administration, he was unaware of its political affiliations and agenda. Giacomelli also claims to have no memory of political activity among internment-camp inmates and says that he can barely recall some of the names of other Hamilton Italians detained with him. His problem with recall, however, does not affect his ability to name various Italian-Canadian criminals who were interned or to offer an explanation for their imprisonment.13 Also, at various points in the interview, in the course of which Giacomelli produced his collection of internment photographs, Cumbo prompts him to consider the men and events in the images themselves. In response, Giacomelli names several fellow internees and recalls that he had learned to play the bugle (or trumpet) and the French horn while interned. Further, with the tape recorder turned off, Giacomelli also tells Cumbo that he had an unauthorized camera in his possession during his internment. Unfortunately, he did not indicate which photographs were taken with this illicit camera and whether they were taken at Petawawa or Fredericton.

340 Gabriele Scardellato Giacomelli's Photographs The Collection

The provenance of Giacomelli's photographs, as we see below, is important to our understanding of the internees, as is the iconography of the 'unofficial' photos among them, also examined below. The Osvaldo Giacomelli Collection, at the Multicultural History Society of Ontario in Toronto, consists of thirty-two photographs that can be divided into three subsets. One subset depicts a variety of group activities and consists of seventeen small photographs (about 1.4 inches by 2.4 inches) with stamped numbers (usually C30 or 618) on the back, and in some cases an additional, handwritten number. Six images in this subset are probably summer shots and show internees posed in what appears to be a vegetable garden (see photograph p. 348). Nine are winter shots of interness ice skating or standing in the snow (see photographs pp. 3445) or posed in small groups in front of the camp barracks (see photograph p. 344). The last two are indoor images of an orchestra with its members wearing uniforms of white ties and black or dark-coloured shirts (see bottom photograph p. 346). The second subset is formed by thirteen photographs (which measure roughly 5.4 inches by 3.4 inches) and includes eleven group portraits of internees posed outside their barracks (see photographs pp. 346, 348, and 349). The other two are panoramic shots of a fenced compound, showing gardens within the compound and various buildings covered in tarpaper or similar materials (see photographs p. 343). Ten of these images have the year 1943 handwritten in blue ink somewhere in their borders, one has been dated similarly as 1942 in handwriting, while the two panoramic views are not dated. Clearly, the ten images hand-dated 1943 were taken by or with the permission of camp authorities. They were posed by the photographer with a number displayed as a label or title, and some are also stamped on the back in red ink, 'INT. OP. CENSORED CANADA.' The image dated 1942 had the number '44' etched on its negative before it was developed and printed (see photograph p. 341).14 The third subset consists of two images that differ from the rest of the collection. One is a photograph of a man and woman posed in front of a white picket fence with crossed oars in front of them. The man's arm is draped over the woman's shoulder, and the couple is standing in front of a wooden sign mounted on a post. On the back of the photo is the

Images of Internment 341

inscription, 'Enrico con un [sic] ragazza di Pesaro di nome Ida' (Enrico with a young woman from Pesaro [Italy] named Ida) and bears the red rubber stamp of the censor. The other is a clipping from a magazine and shows a man wearing a cap and holding onto a suspended chain and counterweight. The caption reads 'O. Giacomelli/ On the back is a list of the names of workers (and their offspring) and of positions at the 'Hamilton Works/ suggesting that it comes from an in-house publication of Stelco. Provenance

The photographs pose some challenges. For example, it is difficult to determine precisely which photographs are of the internment camp at Petwawa and which of Camp B/70 at Fredericton although some educated guesses can be made. Another challenge arises in distinguishing between the 'official' photographer's portraits and those taken illicitly by camp inmates (or perhaps their guards?). In his study of the Fredericton camp, which includes many photographs, Ted Jones states categorically that 'cameras and photographic materials were definitely

342 Gabriele Scardellato prohibited from Canadian Internment Camps/15 Notwithstanding this prohibition and according to federal government documents also consulted by Jones, internees at Camp B / 70 began asking for permission to have cameras and to be allowed to take photographs of internees and of camp life in late 1941. The request was denied, but in May 1942 the Department of External Affairs did grant permission for an approved photographer to take shots that were to include ten or more internees, although it is clear from the Giacomelli collection that the conditions were not closely followed. The government photographs were available for prisoners to purchase by 23 June 1942. According to Jones, many of them - which are numbered and stamped on the back with 'Canada Internment Operations/Censored' - today are in the private collections of former Fredericton inmates. Clearly, at least twelve of the Giacomelli photographs (subset 2 above) originally were produced by the official photographer, including the two panoramic views of the Fredericton camp that were not numbered by the photographer.16 These two views were published in Jones's volume and are also preserved in the Giacomelli collection and reproduced with the present study (see photographs p. 343). In addition, both collections include a photograph of a musical ensemble that consists of eleven internees in costume - straw hats, corn cob pipes, long beards, and wigs - and holding a variety of musical instruments with a legend written on a mock drum in front of the group that reads 'ThE HiLL BiLLieS.'17 But the remaining seven photos are unique to the Giacomelli collection. Before analysing them, we should note that the handwritten date '1943' on the photographs in subset 2 is probably inaccurate. Also, the photograph in this subset numbered '44,' though bearing the handwritten date '1942,' is not so easily dated (see photograph p. 341). The latter photograph probably was the one that prompted Giacomelli to identify the names of other internees during his interview with Cumbo. He named seven men, all from Hamilton, including Francesco Zaffiro, who is described as a particularly close friend.18 Zaffiro was released from Petawawa on 18 May 1941, however, and this suggests that the handwritten date on this image is incorrect. Still, Zaffire's presence in the portrait suggests that it was taken at Petawawa. Moreover, although it resembles the 'official' Camp B/70 portraits discussed above, it might have been taken either with Giacomelli's with or someone else's illicit camera. 19

Images of Internment 343

The Unofficial

Photographs

I want to focus on the seventeen photos that appear to have been 'unofficially' taken. They differ significantly from the 'official' portraits and the more puzzling photograph '44.' Unlike the official images, some of the unofficial photos were taken in wintertime; two were taken

344 Gabriele Scardellato

indoors, and, with the exception of an orchestra shot featuring fifteen players, all show small groups of internees. Some of the outdoor photographs (see photograph above) that feature snow also include the side of a two-storey barrack that resembles the building in one of the panoramic views of Camp B/70 (see top photograph p. 343). There are also two photographs of ice-skaters in this unofficial group: one shows a lone skater, posed in the foreground, with another skater in the far distance and a row of one-storey buildings beyond him. The other shows three skaters posed on the ice (see photograph p. 345). Since ice rinks were constructed at both camps in the winter, it is difficult to place these two images clearly in one or the other camp.20 The two final winter shots are also difficult to place: one shows two men standing, one cradling a cat in his arms, and the other with a cat perched on his shoulder. In the background is a large stack of logs piled up by a one-storey hut and, beyond it, the uprights and wire fence of the compound. The second appears to have been taken at the same location and shows a lone man standing sideways to the camera with a trumpet raised to his lips (see photograph p. 345). Although the figure is difficult to make out, it may well be Giacomelli, who learned to play the 'bugle' in Petawawa and the French horn after he - as part of the small

Images of Internment 345

group of Italian-Canadian internees who had not yet been granted a release - was transferred to Camp B / 70 (see top photograph p. 346).21 Two interior photographs in the unofficial sequence show an orchestral ensemble of fifteen musicians, including five violins, a flute, two trumpets, a trombone, a double bass, percussion, a bassoon, a French

346 Gabriele Scardellato

horn, and a piano, the last barely visible in the right-hand corner of one of the photographs (see bottom photograph above). Either the piano was the property of the 'sanitary services sergeant - a young pharmacist from Ontario/ who lent his instrument to the Italian-Canadian internees or it belonged to the internees themselves, who eventually

Images of Internment 347

'raised the money to purchase' their own instrument.22 The ensemble in both photographs is posed on a slightly raised dais, possibly located in 'the amusement barrack' in Petawawa where the internees sometimes staged plays, celebrated religious feast days, and viewed films.23 In these two portraits a lone violinist, wearing a pale shirt that contrasts with the darker shirts of his fellow musicians, stands apart from the orchestra. On closer inspection, he appears to be quite young and thus might be Benny Ferri, a well-known Hamilton musician who was only sixteen when he was interned.24 The last six of the 'unofficial' photographs show posed groups of internees, either standing or seated under or near an arbour made of birch poles in a vegetable garden. All the men are in shorts and many are bare-chested. In the background is a large guard tower with a forest rising behind it. Two of these photos also show searchlights mounted on poles that were set up along the perimeter of the internment camps. Only one of these images is of a lone individual, Giacomelli himself, standing bare-chested, with arms folded, in a large rectangle of levelled, possibly sandy ground (see photograph above). Giacomelli may be standing on the bocce courts described in Duliani's book (he writes of the former 'forest floor' that the men 'domesticated - no small feat into four or five bocce courts'). These courts and gardens are clearly

348 Gabriele Scardellato

shown in all six photographs, and the distinctive birch-pole structures in these images match those seen in some of the photographs published in Jones's book on the Fredericton camp, thus placing these clearly also in Camp B / 70. In contrast to the official photos, however, none of these images from the Giacomelli collection are reproduced in the Jones volume. One of the garden shots is of particular interest. It is a photograph of a group of men posed beneath a birch-pole arbour: nine internees are posed in two rows, with those at the back, including Giacomelli, standing on a bench (see photograph above). The photo seems unremarkable; closer inspection, however, reveals that three of the men in the front row are holding, at about knee height and in a surreptitious manner, a partially unfurled black banner bearing the motto, 'Me ne frego.' When I first noticed the banner, I was surprised. The logo dates from the early years of Fascism in Italy, which witnessed the often brutal activities of the original squadristi. Why was it reproduced in a Canadian internment camp, and why did men in that camp chose to be photographed with it? Further, why were this photo and its companions preserved by an internee who, in his own words, was a political nai'f who could remember nothing about political activities or sentiments among his fellow internees?

Images of Internment 349

The appearance of this banner prompted a closer scrutiny of other photographs for surprises. And indeed there were, although unexpectedly they did not occur necessarily only in the 'unofficial' group of photographs. Rather, they emerge most obviously in the 'official' portraits and include a photograph that features eleven internees posed at the side of a barrack, including Giacomelli, who is on the right end of the back row (see photograph above). Standing next to him is an internee wearing a checkered, mackinaw-type jacket and a military-style cap on which the fascio emblem is barely visible, followed by the embroidered word 'FREGO.'25 The same individual wearing the same jacket and cap also appears in the photograph on p. 344. Another surprising photograph is a portrait of twelve internees again posed by the side of a barrack, with five squatting in a front row and seven standing in the back (see photograph p. 350). Giacomelli is in the front row and wears a distinctive white sweater and black cap with an emblem on it. Nine of the twelve men are wearing military-style caps, some of which have fezzes, and two are without caps. One man standing second from the right in the back row - holds his cap at waist

350 Gabriele Scardellato

height so that the camera can see the motto 'ME NE FREGO/ embroidered on its side. This motto is intersected by the Fascist emblem, which is attached to the cap after the word 'NE.' The man holding the cap appears to be the same individual shown wearing the mackinaw jacket in photographs on pages 344 and 349. The recurring motto, which is translated as 'I don't give a damn,' or 'What do I care?,' is revealing. A rallying cry from the earliest days of the Fascist movement in Italy, the phrase was used to express a sense of nihilistic heroism in the groups of 'fascist! della prima ora' (literally, those who joined the Fascist movement in its very first hours) as they marched, and oftentimes marauded, in support of their cause. The Internees Revealed In the discussions that have unfolded around the internment of Italian Canadians during the Second World War, much has been said about the actions of Canadian authorities and about the guilt or innocence of those interned and whether they posed an actual threat to the Canadian state. The images described and reproduced here put some real faces on

Images of Internment 351 the actors involved in these events and also offer a useful contribution to the debate. Most important, the evidence of Fascist mottos and other paraphernalia, displayed either for official or for surreptitious cameras, suggests that some of the internees were less than naive in their embrace and support of the political ideology of the Fascist homeland. Duliani describes the last few Italian-Canadian internees, including Osvaldo Giacomelli, who remained interned after his own release from Camp B/70 on 5 October 1943 as follows: 'Among the Italians ... there are only seven or eight men left here. Four of them have made sure they would never get out. When questioned, they answered that they did not intend to abide by the laws. Crude answer perhaps, but frank.'26 This is an enigmatic passage in Duliani's documentary novel. We do not know whether the refusal to abide by Canadian laws is a veiled reference to the political commitment of the seven or eight internees whom he says remained in Camp B/70 even longer than he did. It suggests an attitude of defiance that would be suitable for a group of men who displayed Fascist mottos in group photos or were photographed wearing some of the trappings of Mussolini's Fascism. Duliani does not appear to find any irony in the fact that Giacomelli, and a few others, are the only Italian Canadians left in the camp and that these last internees are those who 'did not intend to abide by the laws.' Apparently, Duliani did not find this to be ironic - present-day observers might arrive at different conclusions. Notes 1 This and all subsequent quotations are from Mario Duliani, The City without Women: A Chronicle of Internment Life in Canada during the Second World War, translated from the French and the Italian, with an Introduction, by Antonino Mazza (Oakville, 1994). 2 For a more detailed study of Duliani's novel, see Roberto Perm's essay in this volume. 3 Duliani, ibid., 26. Mazza himself, in Introduction, xi, and a number of other commentators have used this image to characterize Italian-Canadian internees; cf. Robert Harney, Italians in Canada (Toronto, 1978), 19, where the image used is that of a 'nonna/ or Italian-Canadian grandmother. 4 Kenneth Bagnell, Canadese: A Portrait of the Italian Canadians (Toronto, 1989), 75.

352 Gabriele Scardellato 5 Ibid. The documentary, which aired in March 1997 and used Antonino Mazza and Kenneth Bagnell as historical experts, is titled Barbed Wire and Mandolins. 6 Angelo Principe, The Darkest Side of the Dark Years: The Italian-Canadian Fascist Press, 1920-1940 (Toronto, 1999), describes Pancaro's role as a fascist trustee in northern Ontario; Bagnell, Canadese, 178ff., for the photograph of Pancaro posed with his medals. 7 Mazza, Introduction, xiv-xv. 8 A photograph of Sabetta, posed with other officers of the Order Sons of Italy of Ontario and the grand Venerable of the Order Sons of Italy in America, Giovanni di Silvestris in 1934, can be found in Gabriele Scardellato, Within Our Temple: A History of the Order Sons of Italy of Ontario (Toronto, 1995), 17. 9 Giacomelli does not comment about why only he was urged to return to Canada by his father while his younger brother, also a Canadian citizen by birth, remained in Italy, where he apparently served in the Italian army, see n. 11 below. 10 For further discussion of this belief, see Gumbo's essay in this volume. 11 In describing the circumstances around his family's return to Italy in 1931, Giacomelli notes that he had a brother, who was also born in Canada, and who was younger than he by some ten years. Thus he must have been a baby when the family returned to Italy and barely eight or nine when the war broke out. It seems unlikely that he was serving in the Italian army in 1940 or 1941. Unfortunately, Giacomelli did not indicate whether he had more than one brother and whether it was a different brother than the Canadian-born one who was serving in the Italian army. See Enrico Gumbo's essay in this volume for a somewhat different use of this piece of autobiography. 12 Ted Jones, Both Sides of the Wire: The Fredericton Internment Camp, 2 vols. (Fredericton, 1988). This is a useful, albeit awkward study that is more a collection of documents than an analysis of the history of internment at the Fredericton camp. It is particularly helpful for the details that it provides in the second volume for the period during which Italian Canadians and others were transferred from Petawawa to Camp B/70. 13 According to Giacomelli, who does not name his sources, the criminals were interned not necessarily as criminals but because the RCMP feared that they could be bought easily by the Italian government and used against the Canadian state. See Bruti Liberati's essay in this volume. 14 Another image, possibly from the same sequence of authorized photographs because it is labelled '33' in the bottom right-hand corner, appears

Images of Internment 353

15 16 17

18

19

20 21

22

23

on the back cover of The City without Women. The caption assigned to this image, presumably by the translator, is 'Mandolin Orchestra, 1940-1943, Petawawa & Fredericton Internment Camps,' and looks to be derived from Duliani's description (94) of various instrumental ensembles formed in the camp. 'As well, there was an all-Italian group that played mandolins and guitars.' In the photograph twelve men pose outside a barrack, ten are playing mandolins, one is shown holding a guitar, and one is without an instrument. Jones, Both Sides, 424. The two panoramic shots of the camp, the photographs on page 343, were not numbered by the official photographer. This photo bears the number 70 in Giacomelli's copy, but this number has been cropped out of the image in Jones, Both Sides. For a reproduction, see Perin's essay in this volume, page 317. In the same portion of his interview Giacomelli names the well-known Hamilton bootlegger and suspected mafioso Rocco Perri as well as other Hamiltonians - namely, Sam Bortolino, Donate Olivieri, Aurelio Del Piero, Giovanni Tagliarini, Francesco Zaffiro, and 'a guy from Toronto.' The shot in question (see photograph on page 341), includes Giacomelli himself, standing in the front row, second from the left, and a total of eleven internees. Francesco Zaffire's internment and eventual release are discussed in some detail in Bagnell, Canadese, chap. 4, passim, and his release date is reported on 90 in the same chapter. However, an unpublished source indicates that Zaffiro was released much later. I have not encountered any references to 'official' or other photographs from Petawawa apart from those discussed here. The photograph on page 345 shows a group of three skaters posed on a skating rink. Duliani, City, 85-6, mentions the construction of an ice rink in Petawawa on which ice hockey games were held. The photograph on page 345 shows the lone 'bugler' or trumpeter posed outdoors in the winter, and this may be the photograph to which Giacomelli was referring when he described for Dr Gumbo the musical training that he received while he was interned. Giacomelli also can be seen in the photograph on page 346 - the 'official' portrait labelled All standing in the back row, third from the left and holding a French horn. Duliani, City, 93. One of two photographs of the same orchestra is reproduced here on page 346. Giacomelli is in the back row, third from the left, with a trumpet at rest in the upright position on his lap. Ibid., 16.

354 Gabriele Scardellato 24 Giacomelli appears to refer to these photographs in his interview with Dr Cumbo, and he also names Benny (Frank) Ferri in the course of his references. Unfortunately, it is difficult to understand his recorded comments about Ferri and his role with the Petawawa orchestra. Bagnell, Canadese, 85, 94, describes Ferri's musicianship and his role as conductor of the camp orchestra. See also page 379, below, for more on Ferri. 25 This seems to be the same individual shown in the photograph on page 344, where he is posed outdoors beside a barrack wall, one of three standing men, with Giacomelli and another man squatting in front with snow in their hands. 26 Duliani, Cz'fy, 151.

14

The Politics of Redress: The Contemporary Ukrainian-Canadian Campaign FRANCES SWYRIPA Since the recent success of the Japanese-Canadian redress lobby, Canada has witnessed the rise of other ethnic movements aimed at correcting historical wrongs perpetrated by governments against minorities. Two highly visible campaigns have been the Italian-Canadian and Ukrainian-Canadian redress lobbies. The Italian-Canadian campaign (which, like the Japanese one, demands compensation for actions committed during the Second World War) has been partially successful. This three-part essay examines the origins and contemporary politics (section II) and then the reverberations in Canada and in the community (section III) of the partially successful Ukrainian effort, which began in 1980, to focus attention on Canada's first experiment with internment, during the First World War (examined in section I). From 1914 to 1920, almost 6,000 Ukrainians - as subjects of Austria-Hungary - were confined in camps across the country. Although provoking controversy over certain 'facts' and interpretations, an energetic circle of Ukrainian-Canadian activists has made this episode increasingly well known. As a result, it has been adopted and politicized by a previously indifferent Ukrainian-Canadian community. As Franca lacovetta and Roberto Ventresca show for the ItalianCanadian case,1 an analysis of how and why redress for wartime internments gained support among Ukrainian Canadians provides insights into ethnic myth-making and the mobilization of the past for reasons rooted in the present. In the 1980s and 1990s internment became a symbolic focal point for Ukrainian Canadians, as Canadians, still grappling with a legacy of prejudice, discrimination, suspect loyalty, and marginalization. Internment also became linked with the campaign to counter accusations that they, as Ukrainians, had been guilty of war

356 Frances Swyripa crimes in Nazi-occupied Europe. Mainstream responses to both Ukrainian internment and the arguments for redress often revealed quite different preoccupations and sensibilities. My paper also highlights the varied roles that historians have played, either as critics or advocates of redress campaigns, and the complex relationship between scholarly and community reconstructions of the past. My own situation is emblematic. I am a third-generation Ukrainian Canadian whose paternal grandparents emigrated in 1901-2 from the crownland of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, settling in rural Alberta; they married in 1907 and were naturalized in 1921.2 With the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, my family officially became enemy aliens, subject to the restrictions imposed on immigrants originating in countries at war with Canada. They were not interned and, their children recall, spent the next four years quietly on the farm. I am also a professional historian who teaches Canadian history at the University of Alberta, researches the Ukrainians in Canada, and heads the Ukrainian-Canadian Program at the University's Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS). I thus possess the personal and academic credentials to play a role - as either 'crusader' or 'expert' - in the campaign for redress. Instead I have resisted suggestions that it is my duty as a Ukrainian, and particularly a Ukrainian-Canadian historian, to support publicly the community's position, regardless of how I see the matter from a historical as opposed to a political perspective. I do not think that internment was justified on security grounds, as was argued at the time, and I sympathize with the general objectives of the redress lobby. But I disagree with the ways in which it has sometimes exploited and even distorted history to meet a contemporary community agenda. Ukrainian Canadians and the First World War

Approximately 170,000 Ukrainians from the Austro-Hungarian Empire immigrated to Canada between 1891 and 1914, the majority of them taking up homesteads in western Canada. Many middle-class AngloCanadians eagerly welcomed the Ukrainians as raw manpower in building the country but otherwise distrusted these 'foreigners' as a threat to their vision of Canada as a British and Protestant nation. Regarded as particularly dangerous were Ukrainians' peasant culture and living standards, their bloc settlements, and their community institutions and growing national consciousness. As a result, assimilationist propaganda and programs aimed to undermine the immigrants' traditions, loyal-

The Contemporary Ukrainian-Canadian Campaign 357 ties, and collective identity. Simultaneously, widespread prejudice and discrimination - which condoned and encouraged economic exploitation, political marginalization, and social exclusion - created both real and psychological barriers to acceptance and integration. The First World War underscored Ukrainians' ambiguous reception and precarious status. Some 80,000 unnaturalized immigrants, as Austrian subjects, immediately became enemy aliens. Over the next six years both they and naturalized or Canadian-born Ukrainians encountered widespread public animosity and loss of jobs, as war hysteria reinforced an existing negative stereotype. Under the sweeping powers of the War Measures Act, the dominion government also curtailed the civil rights and liberties of enemy aliens: their freedom of movement was restricted, they had to register and report regularly, and they could not own or use firearms. They were also subject to arbitrary detention in one of twenty-six internment camps erected across Canada.3 Ukrainians, primarily unemployed workers who had gravitated to cities such as Winnipeg during the pre-war depression, formed the great majority of the 8,579 individuals interned. That most Ukrainians were released in 1915 to work in agriculture and industry, when Canada faced a domestic labour shortage, shows how little national security had to do with their original incarceration. However, individuals such as Nykyta Budka, bishop of the Greek Catholic Church, raised doubts among Anglo-Canadians about Ukrainians' loyalty. Reflecting the pro-Habsburg sentiments of the Galician Ukrainian clergy, he wrote a pastoral letter the week before Britain declared war, calling on men of military age to return to fight for their homeland. He issued a second letter immediately after Canada became a belligerent, urging loyalty to the adopted homeland, but damage had been done.4 Most measures affecting Ukrainians targeted unnaturalized immigrants. But the War-time Elections Act, passed by Robert Borden's Conservatives prior to the 1917 dominion election to ensure a proconscription victory in the face of French-Canadian opposition, stripped naturalized British subjects of one of democracy's basic rights. The act enfranchised women with a male relative in the Canadian or British armed forces, while disenfranchising conscientious objectors and immigrants from enemy countries naturalized after March 1902. Fears were that the latter group, in gratitude to Clifford Sifton, the Liberal minister responsible for immigration at the turn of the century, would vote for anti-conscription Liberals, with their power base in Quebec.

358 Frances Swyripa In late 1918 two orders-in-council suppressed (among others) the Ukrainian-language press, Ukrainian socialist organizations, and all non-religious meetings in Ukrainian, as the new Unionist government moved to forestall a bolshevik revolution on Canadian soil. These actions, along with the deportation of suspected radicals after the war's end, reminded Ukrainians of how easily events in Europe could exacerbate existing prejudices. There was no single Ukrainian response to either government policies or public attitudes. The reactions of the ordinary people who were arrested, interned, fired from their jobs, or otherwise humiliated included suicidal depression, violent anger, humour, and inertia.5 A vibrant Ukrainian-language press, even under censorship, illuminates the stance adopted by a nascent community leadership, crystallized by 1918 around nationalist and pro-Communist poles. From the outset, Ukrainian socialists decried the war as an imperialist capitalist venture, opposed Canada's participation, and denounced the restrictions on enemy aliens. The nationalists - eager to integrate yet remain culturally distinctive, anxious for the fate of Ukraine and Ukrainians abroad, and mindful of the need to appear loyal but unhappy with enemy-alien status - had greater difficulty framing a public response. They supported Ukrainian internees, sending them priests, providing books, and collecting money for Christmas tobacco. For pragmatic reasons, however, their leaders muted any criticism of Ukrainians' wartime treatment, as they devoted much of their energy to saving bilingual schools.6 Yet despite their differing politics, this first generation of UkrainianCanadian politicians left no doubt that Ukrainians neither deserved nor appreciated second-class status. Their reaction to internment, disenfranchisement, and deportation expressed a genuine conviction that Ukrainians were participants in Canadian nation building, which guaranteed them certain rights and respect. In the pages of Kanadiiskyi farmer, Kanadyiskyi rusyn, and Ukrainskyi holos and in the Englishlanguage press, the nationalist intelligentsia repeatedly voiced Ukrainians' sense of betrayal. They emphasized their contribution to Canada, filling its manpower needs, and proving their loyalty through military and home-front commitments. The English in contrast, Kanadiiskyi farmer gently gibed, had staked their claim to the country with sabres and cannons.7 Such righteous indignation had a specific political goal - to prod the collective Anglo-Canadian conscience into easing the repressive wartime measures and raising Ukrainians' overall status in society. This

The Contemporary Ukrainian-Canadian Campaign 359 objective received wide exposure in 1916 when a Ukrainian mass meeting in Winnipeg adopted an 'Address to the Canadian People.' Published in the Winnipeg Free Press, it demanded an end to enemy-alien status and the release of 'unjustly interned' Ukrainians. 'Thousands of our Ukrainian boys have enlisted with the Canadian forces overseas, and many have already lost their lives fighting beside their English brethren on the battlefields of France/ the authors argued. 'And as the price of their blood we have the right to ask the Canadian people for better treatment of the Canadian Ukrainians.'8 After the war, in a speech to the congregation of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Winnipeg, Anna Bychinska directly tied Ukrainians' underappreciated labour in Canadian nation building to their unacknowledged sacrifice on the battlefield, where 'their blood mingled with that of the noble Anglo-Saxons ... to make the world safe for democracy.' What most saddened the Ukrainian in Canada, she said, was 'the fact that he is continually reminded that he is only a "foreigner" ... a sojourner who may be turned out of the country at any reasonable or unreasonable provocation.'9 In subsequent years, drawing on such sentiments, Ukrainian Canadians would cultivate a group myth that justified their right to recognition as equal partners in Confederation. A cornerstone of this myth was the Ukrainians' unparalleled role as a 'founding people' of western Canada. Another was blood sacrifice by men who volunteered to fight for Canada despite their enemy-alien status, in numbers exceeding Ukrainians' proportion of the population.10 Ukrainian-Canadian arguments had no great impact on wartime policy. That they struck a nerve, however, confirms the tensions in the Anglo-Canadian dilemma of wanting Ukrainian muscle but not Ukrainian values, of seeking Ukrainians as immigrants but only cautiously extending the rights of citizenship. A sense of guilt and 'British fair play' led a handful of Anglo-Canadians to echo Ukrainian condemnation of the unjust treatment of so-called Austrians. But this defence came after, not during the war, and more than one author criticized the ill-treatment or deportation of Ukrainians on the grounds that Canada could not afford to lose the labour.11 Interpretations to 1980

Over the next half-century, as Ukrainian Canadians began to write their history, discussion of the group's wartime experience remained superficial and limited. Authors in the nationalist and progressive camps

360 Frances Swyripa raised the 'injustice' of treatment as enemy aliens, but for neither group did the war years stand out as overly traumatic, memorable, or definitive for either individuals or the collective consciousness. The progressives emphasized Anglo-Canadian racism and repression during the First World War. They also referred to the camps as 'concentration camps.' Otherwise, their attention was taken up by other events, such as Ukrainian-Canadian radical politics following the Bolshevik revolution, the internment of Communists during the Second World War, and the Communist contribution to that war effort after the Soviet Union's entry in the conflict.12 Similarly, an earlier generation of nationalist historians mentioned but did not dwell on internment. A possible reason for this lack of interest may be what Myrna Kostash called the 'whitewashing' of the past by children of the first immigrants in order that they might be accepted by Anglo-Canadian society.13 A second is that individuals still close to these events found memories of the war years too painful to discuss (this explanation is popular among redress campaigners). A third is that the Great War was simply less critical to Ukrainians' emerging personal and collective identity than other factors - such as the prairie homesteading experience. Whatever the reason, nationalists focused instead on the Ukrainians' major contribution to enlistment some 10,000 Ukrainians, one of whom won the Victoria Cross - and to Canada's war effort in general. The stress was on Ukrainians' attachment to their new homeland and British ideals.14 While community histories in the half-century after the First World War condemned internment, disenfranchisement, deportation, and other restrictions, they failed to probe the motives and actions of the various players involved or examine the emotional legacy of those years. In raising the wartime treatment of Ukrainians, however, these historians were commenting, albeit unconsciously, on the state's obligations to its minorities and the boundaries of 'Canada' and 'Canadian.' But they wrote from the margins of Canadian society. For their part, mainstream historians ignored this question and still continue to do so.15 The earlier generation was preoccupied with the politics and repercussions of the French-English rift generated by the conscription crisis of 1917. By the early 1990s, two decades of multiculturalism had failed to produce more sensitive historical treatments in university survey texts.16 It was largely in reaction to such dismissal of the ethnic experience that in 1980 the CIUS held a conference on the impact of the First World War on Canada's Ukrainians. Some thirty to forty people attended. The

The Contemporary Ukrainian-Canadian Campaign 361 resulting book, Loyalties in Conflict, marked a first attempt to integrate the work and perspectives of mainstream and Ukrainian-Canadian historians. But clearly a sixty-year-old war lacked the popular appeal of other CIUS conferences held in those years, dealing with contemporary issues. Memory, Myth, and Redressing Wrongs What happened over the next fifteen years to catapult internment into national prominence? In general, two main factors lay behind the politicization and popularization of Ukrainian internment in Ukrainian-Canadian circles. The first was the well-organized and ultimately successful campaign by Japanese Canadians for redress for evacuation, property losses, and relocation in the Second World War. The surrounding debate and publicity forced Canadians to examine their country's record towards its ethnic minorities and to debate the moral responsibility of a present generation for the actions of its predecessors. That the Japanese grievance was acknowledged as legitimate owed much to political pragmatism, especially in the announcement of an apology and compensation by the Progressive Conservative government on the eve of the 1988 election, but also to changing attitudes about pluralism that the political establishment shared. Mobilization by the Japanese in the first place attests to a collective self-confidence and articulated sense of injustice perhaps impossible in earlier decades. The Japanese example served as a catalyst for a variety of groups seeking restitution from the Canadian state for historical injustices. Expulsion of the Acadians in 1755, the head tax levied on Chinese immigrants, Ukrainian enemy-alien status in the First World War, the exclusion of Sikhs in 1914 and German Jews in 1939, and the internment of Italians and Germans in the Second World War all were potential ethnic rallying points.17 Ukrainians embraced redress with intensity. A second factor sheds light on both the timing and the nature of the redress campaign. In 1985 Ottawa established a commission of inquiry under retired judge Jules Deschenes to investigate the presence of Nazi war criminals in Canada and the legal options for bringing them to justice. Clearing the name of veterans of the SS Waffen Division Galizien, and by implication all postwar Ukrainian immigrants, consumed the nationalists, especially displaced-person immigrants in Ontario. The issue was less potent in the old Ukrainian stronghold on the prairies, and largely irrelevant to the identity of descendants of the pre-1914 and

362 Frances Swyripa interwar immigrants. Deschenes presented his report in 1986; no Ukrainians appeared on the secret list submitted for immediate prosecution, although whether they figured among those identified for further investigation was less certain.18 The nationalist umbrella organization, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, mandated the Toronto-based Civil Liberties Commission (CLC), formed in 1985, to mobilize Ukrainian Canadians around the war-crimes issue and to represent the community before the commission and Canadian public. Significantly, the campaign for redress, initiated by activists in the CLC, coincided with the war-crimes controversy.19 The underlying message was that before Canada accused a broad section of its Ukrainian citizens of war crimes committed outside its borders, it should examine its own actions carried out in the name of freedom and democracy. Four observations are in order here. First, unlike fascist-non-fascist tensions in the contemporary Italian redress campaign, Ukrainian internment was not politically divisive. Ukrainians had been interned during the First World War because they were Austrian subjects, not because they held suspect views or belonged to suspect organizations. As such, redress had the potential to unite the two ideological wings of the community. In fact, redress led to the rehabilitation, albeit unintentional and one-dimensional, of the Ukrainian immigrant labourer in the nationalist consciousness. Yet although Communists supported the work of the Congress and the CLC, redress remained a nationalist crusade. Communists resented how the Congress, especially displaced persons, appropriated their past: This is the same UCC that discriminates against a significant section of the Ukrainian-Canadian community, some of whose members think that Ukrainian-Canadian history starts after their arrival following World War Two, the same UCC whose constituent organizations fell under the control of the post-World War II immigrants and set about excluding (by expulsion or derision) the very part of the community (that is, the earlier immigrants) whose cause they have supposedly begun to champion/20 Second, particularly when no satisfactory resolution was imminent, the redress leadership splintered over tactics, control, and personalities. In 1993, dissidents in the CLC accused the Congress of 'anti-democratic tendencies and unaccountability' and complained that its executive had unconstitutionally tried to disband the CLC 'just as the redress campaign entered a crucial and delicate phase ... and ... sectors within Canadian society again began raising the war crimes issue/21 The dissidents reorganized as the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Associa-

The Contemporary Ukrainian-Canadian Campaign 363 tion (UCCLA), which subsequently and deceptively claimed to be 'mandated by the Ukrainian-Canadian community/ while denying that it was 'a national body, preferring not to make specious claims of the sort so often heard out of Winnipeg.'22 The Congress formed its own Redress Committee. Two groups professing to speak for all Ukrainian Canadians and competing for the government's ear inevitably created confusion and tensions. Internal squabbles would be partly blamed for the failures of the Ukrainian campaign.23 Third, although redress emerged from a community elite motivated by its own agenda, it struck a chord among many who are outside organized community structures and politics and enabled three quite different immigrations to find common ground. Some descendants of enemy aliens or internees found 'closure' in the exercise; for others, including my own family, it meant little. Politicization also transformed internment from an act against individual Ukrainians into one against the entire Ukrainian group, which, as a community, was owed restitution. Finally, in seeking redress for wartime wrongs, community spokespersons chose the emotionally powerful issue of internment - or 'concentration camps,' evoking the Holocaust24 - over the less sensational issue of disenfranchisement. As propaganda, barbed wire makes a far more effective image than the ballot. Also, for displaced persons having to cope with the label of 'Nazi collaborator,' the internment parallel was psychologically more satisfying. In October 1986 delegates to the triennial meeting of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress deplored the 'injustices perpetrated against Ukrainians in Canada between 1914-1920, which involved prejudicial treatment such as internment, deportation, and disenfranchisement,' and directed the Congress to 'communicate these concerns to the federal government in order to obtain appropriate redress.' Under Lubomyr Luciuk, who became the public face of Ukrainian redress and worked through the CLC and then the UCCLA, the focus narrowed to internment. His A Time for Atonement, submitted on behalf of the CLC to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Multiculturalism in December 1987, set the tone and agenda for the ensuing campaign. The brief referred to concentration camps (at this point still in quotation marks), made much of women and children among the internees (in fact, only 81 women and 156 children of all nationalities joined their menfolk), and stressed the exploitation of Ukrainian prisoner labour

364 Frances Swyripa and valuables seized at the time of arrest (although much of this wealth would have come from the German officer class). The $32,000 held by the Receiver General of Canada at war's end, evaluated at $1.5 million in 1987 terms, together with hypothetical lost wages, became the basis for monetary compensation. The brief also asked the government to admit responsibility for 'the wrongs done to the Ukrainian Canadian community' and to help 'ensure that Canadians are never again subjected to such a mass violation of their human rights and civil liberties.' Finally, Ottawa was to negotiate a redress with the Congress.25 Little happened until the Japanese settlement. Then, on 28 October 1988, the Congress presented 'The Ukrainian Canadian Case for Acknowledgement and Redress' to Gerry Weiner, minister of state for multiculturalism and citizenship. Besides requesting that the actions of 1914-20 be declared unwarranted and unjust, the document asked for historical markers at all sites where 'Ukrainian Canadians' were interned, the reconstruction of Castle Mountain camp in Alberta, a change to the Emergencies Act to protect Canadians involuntarily holding dual citizenship from internment or other repressive measures, and $500,000 for archival research and an independent study into the economic impact of internment on the Ukrainian community. The whole issue was to be resolved by 1991, the Ukrainian-Canadian centennial year.26 That same day the Globe and Mail carried an article by Luciuk and Bohdan Kordan, both involved in the Weiner brief. 'Who Says Time Heals All?' brought Ukrainian redress into the public domain but took liberties with the past. It implied that the government acted against British subjects and not, with few exceptions, unnaturalized enemy aliens; that internment uprooted homesteaders and separated families; and that Ukrainians suffered large-scale seizure of their property and valuables. So deep were the scars, the authors said, quoting a RCMP constable from 1941, that 'even the leaders of the Ukrainian-Canadian community remained "in fear of the barbed-wire fence."' Luciuk and Kordan appealed for equal treatment with the Japanese to 'ensure that no other Canadians of whatever ethnic, religious or racial origin, are ever again subjected to such national humiliation and gross violations of their basic human and civil rights.' Had Ukrainians been able to make their case earlier, they speculated, perhaps the fate of their fellow Canadians in the Second World War could have been avoided.27 Whether the promoters of the redress campaign in 1988 expressed the views of the great mass of Ukrainian Canadians will never be known. But the Winnipeg Free Press reported that two prominent local

The Contemporary Ukrainian-Canadian Campaign 365 Ukrainians considered the initiative 'premature/ potentially 'divisive/ and limited to a clique. Historian Stella Hryniuk, in particular, pleaded for caution. She questioned whether the Ukrainian and Japanese cases could be compared. She also challenged the suggestions that Canadian citizens were routinely interned, that officials deliberately rounded up women and children, and that Ukrainians were singled out for their ethnicity rather than for their wartime status. The 'real affront to democracy/ she insisted, was the disenfranchisement, an issue ignored by the redress campaigners.28 When Ukrainian activists finally mentioned disenfranchisement as a parallel between the Ukrainian and Japanese cases, they revealed a weak grasp of (or disregard for) the fact that the Japanese had been denied the vote until 1948.29 The most thorough critique of the redress version of history came from historian Orest Martynowych, whose 'A Plea for a Rational Discussion of the Internment of Ukrainians in Canada, 1914-20,' appeared in the Ukrainian Weekly in 1988. The article insisted on the need to distinguish between unnaturalized enemy aliens, a fraction of whom were interned, and the Canadian-born or naturalized people who were disenfranchised. Martynowych emphasized that most internees were not women or children or even homesteaders with families, but single, migrant labourers with little property to be confiscated.30 He reminded those who denounced conditions in the camps that in the same period 'literally thousands of Ukrainian laborers, who were at liberty ... [were] killed, maimed and mutilated' because of indifferent and negligent employers.31 After Marty no wych's critique, the CLC quietly altered aspects of its campaign, while highlighting evidence to support its picture of wrongs perpetrated against peaceful Canadian farmers and families. Mary Manko Haskett was perfect for this purpose. Canadian born and aged six when she was interned with her parents and siblings at Spirit Lake in Quebec, she was the last survivor of the camps by 1993. Haskett became active in the redress campaign, accompanying delegates to Parliament Hill, writing open letters to Brian Mulroney when he declined to see her, and serving as honorary chair of the UCCLA's National Redress Council.32 She legitimized the continued use in the redress rhetoric of terms such as 'interned Canadians' and 'women and children.' In 1995 the UCCLA asked Sheila Finestone, minister responsible for the status of women, for a statue at Spirit Lake to mark the 'suffering of women and children who were imprisoned with the men' and sometimes died, like Haskett's younger sister.33 It was unfortunate, Luciuk

366 Frances Swyripa wrote, that Finestone and Weiner, both Jewish, seemed insensitive to the fact that 'thousands of civilians, mainly men, but also women and children, were thrown into Canadian concentration camps and brutalized/34 Letters, editorials, and articles gave the Ukrainian redress issue wide coverage in the mainstream press. Luciuk was cited by journalists who often appeared to have been approached by the CLC or the UCCLA. Although generally agreeing that internment had not been warranted, these reporters rejected both financial compensation and apologies for all manner of past injustices. The Canadian government and people, they felt, could only 'make a solemn effort not to repeat history's evils.'35 Few journalists trivialized the redress campaign like Christopher Dafoe of the Winnipeg Free Press. He favoured some sort of settlement for the remaining internees but opposed 'suggestions that all people of Ukrainian extraction ... share in the bounty ... Everybody you meet these days seems to have a Ukrainian grandmother back home cooking perogies. The bill could be enormous.' Dafoe then drew a scenario in which descendants of English immigrants to the prairies, still traumatized by signs saying 'Englishmen need not apply/ needed millions of dollars to 'make the hurt go away.'36 More sober voices pointed out the lack of unanimity in ethnic communities, insisted that past events be judged within the context of their times, and questioned the notion of 'group wrong' and 'group compensation' for actions against individuals.37 The mainstream press echoed the redress version of internment: using charged terms such as 'concentration camps/ 'Canadian gulag/ and 'slave labour'; making economic immigrants into 'refugees' from Austrian oppression; failing to distinguish enemy aliens from Canadian citizens; and muddling simple, easily verifiable facts.38 Since the mainstream print media widely discussed Ukrainian internment and redress, it is curious that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) refused to air Yurij Luhovy's documentary, Freedom Had a Price: Canada's First Internment Operation (1994), until Ukrainians publicly protested. Newsworld's claim to want 'more contemporary issues' suggests a time-linked hierarchy for assessing the validity of and interest in past wrongs. Don Blenkarn, Progressive Conservative MP for Mississauga South, took precisely this view towards compensating Ukrainians for something 'back in the Dark Ages.'39 The second reason invoked for not showing the documentary - 'funding by groups

The Contemporary Ukrainian-Canadian Campaign 367 and agencies with a specific point of view on the issue'40 - is disingenuous in light of the debatable impartiality of the public corporation's other public affairs programs. Perhaps the CBC declined because the issue of internment was promoted by a politicized community or was considered too narrowly ethnic to be of interest to other Canadians. In 1990 Brian Mulroney apologized for the internment of Italian Canadians in the Second World War; yet no similar gesture, then or later, was made to the Ukrainians. The difference no doubt reflects how the two groups - Italians living mostly around Toronto and Montreal, Ukrainians spread across the country - were assessed in terms of their voting strength. In 1994 a new Liberal government rejected any financial compensation to ethnic groups for past discrimination. Money, they argued, would be better spent combating racism to ensure a more equitable society today and in the future. Reverberations Official Measures

But to judge the Ukrainian redress campaign a failure, and to ignore its achievements, both in Canada and among Ukrainian Canadians, would be too harsh. A symbolic breakthrough occurred in 1991 when the House of Commons gave unanimous consent to a private member's bill introduced by Liberal Peter Milliken of Kingston and the Islands, Luciuk's MP. It called on the government to acknowledge that the repressive measures against 'Canadians of Ukrainian origin' between 1914 and 1920 were not only unwarranted and unjust at the time, but contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms adopted in 1982. It also proposed that the government negotiate with the CLC in favour of redress to the Ukrainian-Canadian community. Finally, Parks Canada would erect markers wherever Ukrainians had been interned, restore Castle Mountain camp, and mount a permanent historical exhibit in Banff National Park.41 This demand met with some success, despite resistance and controversy. In 1993, Jean Charest, then minister of the environment and a Progressive Conservative leadership hopeful, informed the UCCLA of the decision by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board that 'the internment within Canada's national parks ... of ethnic Ukrainians, the great majority of whom were, at the time, citizens of countries at war with

368 Frances Swyripa Canada, is not, in and of itself, of national historical significance.' There would be no plaque at Castle Mountain. The Edmonton Journal, for one, reacted angrily once Charest's communication was made public: 'Does Charest own history? What would he think if the descendants of Alberta's first Ukrainian settlers told him that a certain battle on the Plains of Abraham had no historical significance? Or that Quebec shouldn't bother to erect monuments to Louis-Joseph Papineau because the famous patriot lost the nationalist fight of 1837? ... Canadian history doesn't belong to one cabinet minister any more than it belongs to the English and French colonial gentry who populated our school textbooks for generations.'42 Besides challenging the political independence of board members, Bohdan Kordan raised deeper questions about the ownership of history and the ethics of its guardians, noting that 'official histories of the mountain parks ... consciously or unconsciously, all but avoid topics that may prove awkward.' Similarly, countless roadside markers described the natural wonders of Banff but never told 'the anaesthetized traveller that the roads they drive on are paved with the toil, sweat and anguish of thousands of interned laborers. The same laborers, who, invited to the country in times of plenty, were rejected in times of crisis.'43 Redress campaigners effectively exploited the emotion in the notion that Canadians and rich foreigners could enjoy Banff's treasures, including the Cave and Basin and world-famous golf course at the Banff Springs Hotel, because of the forced labour of Ukrainian internees.44 Two years later John Boxtel's statue of an internee (entitled 'Why?') and a trilingual plaque were unveiled at Castle Mountain.45 There was a delay, however, in installing the accompanying interpretive panels, in part because of a dispute between the UCCLA and Parks Canada over removal from the approved text of 'any reference to any injustice having been done to Ukrainian Canadians' because internment was 'carried out in accordance with Canadian law.' Ukrainians also objected to the panel's location at the Cave and Basin in the town of Banff, next to a restaurant and gift shop, which Luciuk likened to 'selling cupcakes and Coca-Cola in a concentration camp.' Postcards featuring prisoners behind a fence and the statement that commercial development of the Cave and Basin was unacceptable were distributed for mailing to Prime Minister Jean Chretien.46 Markers, funded by private donations and spearheaded by the UCCLA, have also been erected at other camp sites - such as Kapuskasing (1995) and Jasper National Park (1996). In 1990 a special joint Ukrainian Catholic and Orthodox Christmas service

The Contemporary Ukrainian-Canadian Campaign 369 at Old Fort Henry in Kingston, Ont., featured a tree draped with rusty barbed wire from Castle Mountain.47 Public monuments and commemorative plaques at points across the country might not have the symbolic value of a statement in the Commons or funds for community projects, but they represent a victory of sorts. Some tourists, though not all, will make an unplanned stop to look at the statue of the internee at Banff and read the explanatory text. And some, though not all, will think about what they have seen and read. Ukrainian-Canadian Attitudes

At the time of the Castle Mountain unveiling, Luciuk maintained that 'most survivors were so stigmatized' that they never spoke about internment - and their children, as a result, did not behave as typical second-generation survivors.48 He also tried to explain why former internees had not rallied around redress. 'Those who remain have secretly applauded our efforts/ he wrote, 'but they also stayed away from us. "You never know," stated one, "they might start interning us again." When I heard that, I understood that the greatest indignity these internees had experienced was the loss of one of life's most precious qualities - hope.'49 However, meeting Mary Haskett and another survivor struck Luciuk differently: 'Neither of them was particularly bitter about what had been done to them, no matter how wronged they had been. Instead, all they asked is that we remember their experience, their sufferings.'50 Which image - fear and hopelessness or lack of bitterness - best represents survivors (and their children)? The issue remains unresolved in the absence of more evidence, ideally from a disinterested source. Some personal responses clearly show the redress process to have been cathartic. The children of Mary Haskett, the child survivor who came to stand for all internees, had refused to believe her story.51 Letters to the editor spoke of families harbouring 'dark secrets' until the campaign for redress opened the subject up or convinced a sceptical generation that dido (grandfather) had indeed been interned.52 Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch had known nothing of her grandfather's stay in a Canadian internment camp, and his experience inspired her fictional children's story, Silver Threads (Ukrainian edition, Sribni nytky).53 The daughter of one internee said that a public acknowledgment, commemorative plaques, and symbolic financial redress would facilitate 'a

370 Frances Swyripa cleansing' for her family as well as for the country. 'I would like to see it done in memory of my father/ she wrote. 'He would be very proud/54 For such individuals, the redress campaign offered personal 'closure/ Community 'closure' is more problematic, especially as an activist core will be satisfied with nothing less than an acknowledgment. Moreover, it is impossible to test the claims of campaign activists that community life after 1920 was retarded by memories of the 'barbed wire fence/55 General Awareness The impact of the redress campaign and its message reached beyond the organized community and those personally affected. The packed and diverse audiences at the cross-Canada screenings of Freedom Had a Price are visible proof. Also, although Ukrainians' wartime treatment directly affects only descendants of the first immigrants, it has transcended time and place to be claimed by subsequent generations as part of their mythology and birthright as Ukrainian Canadians. The internalization of internment by the displaced persons and their organizations was seen in 1995 when the scouting Plast held its national tabir (camp) in Banff, near the Castle Mountain site. To the Ukraineoriented Ukrainian Echo, the internees were 'our people,' and it asked its readers to campaign actively for redress as part of a united voice. Postwar immigrants also spearheaded a historical exhibit, 'The Barbed Wire Solution,' mounted by the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre in Toronto and officially opened in Toronto's Metro Hall Rotunda in autumn 1995. A last example of the broad appeal of the internment issue is the artist Sophia Isajiw. In 1996 she received hard-won permission to commemorate the Ukrainian internee in sidewalk stencils in downtown Banff as part of her art show, 'History's Exiles/ at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies. The exhibit proper featured prints superimposing photographs of camp life over what were 'frankly racist excerpts' from wartime issues of the Banff Crag and Canyon.56 Ukrainians celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of their settlement in Canada in 1991. Perhaps it was inevitable that the celebrations became entwined both with internment in its historical context, part of the Ukrainian pioneer story of hardship and triumph, and with redress. Sentiments echoed those of 1914-20, as redress activists and others stressed the injustice of enemy-alien status and internment when Ukrainians were guilty of no crime but having come from Austrian-ruled

The Contemporary Ukrainian-Canadian Campaign 371 territory. In search of freedom, they had 'responded to the invitation from our Government to settle the prairies/ only to be betrayed by the country that they had helped build.57 Canada, in other words, had not always lived up to its ideals. An official in the redress campaign quoted Sir Wilfrid Laurier, warning the House of Commons that Ukrainians' wartime experience would make future emigrants from Galicia and Bukovyna think twice 'when they know that Canada has not met its pledges and promises to these people, who have settled in our midst ... if it be said in Canada that the pledges which we have given to immigrants when inviting them to come to this country to settle with us, can be broken with impunity, that we will not trust these men, and that we will not be true to the promises which we made to them, then I despair for the future of the country.'58 The opinion of a man of Laurier's stature seemed to validate Ukrainians' appeal for atonement. Their centennial also seemed an auspicious, and symbolic, moment to acknowledge past injustices against a people that had done so much for Canada.59 The tragedy, for Ukrainian Canadians who held such views, was that those in power did not feel the same way. Finally, Ukraine itself was drawn into the redress campaign. On the eve of Mulroney's visit to the USSR to open a Canadian consulate in Kiev in 1989, the Calgary Herald asked that the historical record be set straight with the Ukrainian community in Canada first.60 Democratic forces in post-Soviet Ukraine, including former dissident and political prisoner Vyacheslav Chornovil, reminded Canada of its duty to its people and ideals - appealing to Mulroney to 'do what is right and honourable' in settling the redress issue while thanking him for Canada's role in 'helping Ukraine secure its freedom and recognition.' These Ukrainians in Ukraine also assumed an explicit stake in the Canadian experience, speaking on behalf of their 'compatriots' overseas to show the 'same sort of solidarity with their cause as they showed during the years of our [national] captivity.'61 Conclusion The redress campaign brought Ukrainian internment into the public consciousness and created a popular image of concentration camps incarcerating innocent Canadian men, women, and children who were snatched from their homesteads, stripped of their property, and exploited as slave labour. While acknowledging the exceptions, a histo-

372 Frances Swyripa rian such as I would prefer a picture, using more temperate language, of unnaturalized single men from enemy countries rounded up because they were unemployed and destitute, forced to work for paltry pay, and sometimes mistreated.62 Whether redress campaigners have served history well or badly by misrepresenting the past, or allowing it to be misrepresented, in the interests of a contemporary political agenda is one question. Another is whether this second image would have weakened their position that internment, on security grounds, was unwarranted; that in practice it often proved arbitrary; and that the experience was traumatic for those whom it touched? And would this second image have lessened their argument that Ukrainians' wartime treatment could teach Canadians and their governments something about themselves?63 I think not. Notes 1 See their essay in this volume. 2 In 1919 naturalization of immigrants from enemy countries such as Austria-Hungary (which collapsed as the war ended) was suspended for ten years. Until the ban was lifted in 1923, Ukrainians such as my grandfather could say that they were from the Polish state - which they hated the new ruler of Galicia. Under 'nationality' on his naturalization certificate is 'citizen of Poland,' although he never lived in a Polish state, with 'Ukrainian' in parentheses, presumably at his insistence. 3 The various government measures are reproduced in Frances Swyripa and John Herd Thompson, eds., Loyalties in Conflict: Ukrainians in Canada during the Great War (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1983), Appendix II. See also V.J. Kaye, Ukrainian Canadians in Canada's Wars: Materials for Ukrainian-Canadian History, vol. 1 (Toronto: Ukrainian Canadian Research Foundation, 1983), 73-94; and Mark Minenko, 'Without Just Cause: Canada's First National Internment Operations,' in Lubomyr Luciuk and Stella Hryniuk, eds., Canada's Ukrainians: Negotiating an Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 288-303. 4 See Swyripa and Thompson, Loyalties in Conflict, Appendix I, for Budka's translated letters. Stella Hryniuk, 'The Bishop Budka Controversy: A New Perspective,' Canadian Slavonic Papers 23, no. 2 (1981), 154-65, contends that much of the criticism of Budka is unjustified. 5 On inmates' responses, see Peter Melnycky, 'The Internment of Ukrainians in Canada/ in Swyripa and Thompson, Loyalties in Conflict, 1-24; Bohdan

The Contemporary Ukrainian-Canadian Campaign 373

6

7 8 9 10 11

12

Kordan and Peter Melnycky eds., In the Shadow of the Rockies: Diary of the Castle Mountain Internment Camp, 1915-1917 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1991); and Lubomyr Luciuk, 'Internal Security and an Ethnic Minority: The Ukrainians and Internment Operations in Canada, 1914-1920,' Signum 4, no. 2 (1980). Orest Martynowych, Ukrainians in Canada: The Formative Period, 1891-1924 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1991), 309-41; and Nadia Kazymyra, 'Aspects of Ukrainian Opinion in Manitoba during World War I,' in M.L. Kovacs, ed., Ethnic Canadians: Culture and Education (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1978), 117-34. Kanadiiskyi farmer, 9 March 1917. Winnipeg Free Press, 17 July 1916. Kanadiiskyi ranok, 17 May 1921. For the 'packaging' of military enlistment, see Kaye, Ukrainian Canadians in Canada's Wars. The Ukrainian-Canadian press was quick to publicize such individuals. See, for example, Kanadiiskyi farmer, 29 Nov. 1918, 21, 28 Feb., and 7 March 1919; and Kanadiiskyi ranok, 17 May 1921. For a generally positive account of Ukrainian behaviour during the Great War, focusing on loyalty and high enlistment despite the obstacles, see F. Heap, 'Ukrainians in Canada,' Canadian Magazine (May-Oct. 1919), 39-44. See the first English-language history of Ukrainians in Canada - Vera Lysenko, Men in Sheepskin Coats: A Study in Assimilation (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1947), 113-20. Ukrainian-Canadian history in pro-communist circles came to be dominated by Peter Krawchuk, one of the movement's most prominent activists after he immigrated to Canada in 1930. See Petro Kravchuk, Na novii zemli: Storinky z zhyttia, borotby i tvorchoi pratsi kanadskykh ukraintsiv (Toronto: Kraiovyi vykonavchyi komitet Tovarystva ob"iednanykh ukrainskykh kanadtsiv, 1958), 117-29. Krawchuk denounced the racism of the 'Canadian bourgeoisie,' which he felt was 'as brutal as AustroHungarian absolutism.' Soviet historiography adopted a similar approach; see A.M. Shlepakov et al., Ukrainian Canadians in Historical Ties with the Land of Their Fathers: Dedicated to the 100th Anniversary of Ukrainian Settlement in Canada, trans. Viktor Kotolupov and Viktor Ruzhitsk (Kiev: Dnipro Publishers, 1991), 55-64. But internment in the First World War figured far less in Krawchuk's writing than the internment of Ukrainian communist sympathizers during the Second. (This latter internment was not mentioned by nationalist historians, or by redress activists in the 1980s-90s.). See Krawchuk's personal memoir, Interned without Cause: The

374 Frances Swyripa Internment of Canadian Antifascists during World War Two, trans. Pat Prokop (Toronto: Kobzar Publishing, 1985); Our Contribution to Victory, trans. Mary Skrypnyk (Toronto: Kobzar Publishing, 1985). For the internment of Communists, see Radforth's essay in this volume. 13 Myrna Kostash, 'Baba was a Bohunk/ Saturday Night (Oct. 1976), 33-8; her discussion of the First World War in All ofBaba's Children (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1977), 44-55, makes much of Anglo-Canadian 'chauvinism/ 14 Paul Yuzyk, the Canadian-born son of pre-war immigrants, has been pivotal to how nationalist Ukrainian Canadians see themselves. See his The Ukrainians in Manitoba: A Social History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1953), which devoted only four pages to the First World War and reduced internment to a single phrase. His uncritical handling of Ukrainians' wartime experience became typical of nationalist community histories. For example, neither William Czumer nor Julian Stechishin, two pioneer community activists, mentioned the First World War in their histories, published in Ukrainian in 1942 and 1975, respectively. Czumer's Spomyny or memoirs are available as Recollections about the Life of the First Ukrainian Settlers in Canada (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1981); the English edition of Stechishin's Istoriia poselennia ukraintsiv u Kanadi is A History of Ukrainian Settlement in Canada (Saskatoon: Ukrainian Self-Reliance League of Canada, 1992). See also Ol'ha Woycenko, Ukrainians in Canada, 2nd ed. rev. (Ottawa and Winnipeg: Trident Press, 1968), 20-1, 78, 85, 195-6, and 205-6, which barely alludes to either World War; although it stresses Ukrainian loyalty in the First World War, it does not mention enemy-alien status and its effects. Michael Marunchak, the major nationalist historian of the displaced-persons immigration after 1945, wrote the monumental The Ukrainian Canadians: A History (Ottawa: Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences, 1970), 318-19, 32437. A revised edition appeared in 1982. It has fewer than twenty pages on the First World War out of 350 pages dealing with the period up to 1920. Marunchak was the first nationalist historian of note to use the emotionally charged term 'concentration camps/ evoking Nazi atrocities, that redress campaigners would adopt. On Holocaust metaphors, see the essays by Bosworth and by lacovetta and Ventresca in this book. 15 This shows that the Canadian nation and identity were defined by the two 'charter' peoples and that Anglo-Canadian historians, like their Ukrainiancommunity counterparts, identified with and worked within an interpretive framework determined by their group interests. See William Morton, Kingdom of Canada, 2nd ed. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969), 42031; and Arthur R.M. Lower, Colony to Nation (Toronto: Longmans, Green,

The Contemporary Ukrainian-Canadian Campaign 375

16

17

18

19

1946), 454-73. These books examine the First World War in terms of a crystallizing Canadian nationhood, as a trial for national unity (because of the 1917 conscription crisis), and as a military enterprise. They do not mention enemy aliens as either a security or a nation-building issue, except to recite the provisions of the War-time Elections Act. Apparently the question was not considered a worthwhile statement about the nature, and limits, of the Canadian nation. The exception to mainstream indifference towards Ukrainians in the First World War is Charles Young, Ukrainian Canadians: A Study in Assimilation (Toronto: Nelson 1931), 80-1,136, 242-5; Young was also more thorough than Ukrainian community historians. R. Douglas Francis, Richard Jones, and Donald Smith, Destinies: Canadian History since Confederation, 3rd ed. (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1996), 206-29. They devote a few short sentences to internment (but only internment), laconically observing that it affected 'German and AustroHungarian immigrants.' Disenfranchisement is ignored altogether. Another collaborative effort by J.L. Granatstein et al., Nation: Canada since Confederation, 3rd ed. (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1990), 176-223, explains enemy-alien measures in terms of 'war-created xenophobia' and 'an extension of [existing]... anti-immigrant attitudes.' The reaction of Anglo-Canadian women to the War-Time Elections Act is mentioned, but not the disenfranchisement of naturalized British subjects. Destinies and Nation differ from earlier histories in their gender consciousness, but their treatment of minorities is disappointing. During the 1984 election, Mulroney made a general promise to examine redress if his party won. The next two years saw Ukrainian internment raised sporadically in the press, and the Japanese influence was apparent; see, for example, Lubomyr Luciuk, ed., Righting an Injustice: The Debate over Redress for Canada's First National Internment Operations (Toronto: Justinian Press, 1994), 1-11,15, 37 (also 23 for the claim that the Japanese settlement established 'a legal and moral precedent'). Below I refer to this book as RI. On the Record: The Debate over Alleged War Criminals in Canada (Letters to the Editor of'The Whig-Standard') (Toronto: Justinian Press, 1987), summarizes the arguments. See also Harold Troper and Morton Weinfeld, Old Wounds: Jews, Ukrainians and the Hunt for Nazi War Criminals in Canada (Markam: Viking Press, 1988); and Lubomyr Luciuk's review and the authors' reply, Canadian Ethnic Studies 21, no. 1 (1989), 136-9, and 22, no. 1 (1990); 115-18. Ukrainian Weekly, 29 March, 27 Dec. 1992 (RI, 104,110). Note that the official name until 1989 was the Ukrainian Canadian Committee.

376 Frances Swyripa 20 Ukrainian Canadian, Dec. 1988 (RI, 57). On communist support for the Congress's redress position, see William Chomyn in Ukrainski visti, Feb. 1991. 21 For the controversy between the CLC and the UCCLA as played out primarily in the mainstream media, see RI, 104,107,110-19,126-9. 22 Ukrainian Weekly, 7 Feb. 1993 (RI, 115-17). On the community's mandate claim, see, for example, the official program for the symposium the UCCLA organized in Banff National Park in October 1994, from the author's private collection. 23 Ukrainian Weekly, 9, 23 May 1993 (RI, 140,152). 24 Although 'concentration camp' can be found in wartime documents, occasional use cannot justify its substitution for the official and more widespread 'internment,' especially as the Nazi legacy of the Second World War creates untenable parallels. Lubomyr Luciuk, A Time for Atonement: Canada's First National Internment Operations and the Ukrainian Canadians, 1914-1920 (Kingston: Limestone Press, 1988), 7, defends 'concentration camp.' 25 Luciuk, A Time for Atonement (subsequent pamphlet). See also his 'Internal Security and an Ethnic Minority'; and Internment Operations: The Role of Old Fort Henry in World War I (Kingston: Delta Educational Consultants, 1980). 26 Ukrainian Canadian Committee, 'The Ukrainian Case for Acknowledgement and Redress/ submitted to the Honourable Gerry Weiner, Minister of State for Multiculturalism and Citizenship, 28 Oct. 1988. The Ukrainian delegates were Dmytro Cipywnyk, UCC president; John Gregorovich, chair, CLC; Lubomyr Luciuk, chair, research committee, CLC; and Orest Rudzik, member, UCC. Bohdan Kordan and Alexandra Chyczij, CLC, were alternates. 27 Globe and Mail, 28 Oct. 1988 (RI 42-4). 28 Reprinted in RI, 49, 51, 54. 29 See, for example, Luciuk, quoted in the Globe and Mail, 11 Oct. 1988 (RI, 34). Weiner was equally wrong when he defended the uniqueness of the Japanese case, saying that 'they were arbitrarily detained, roped off, disenfranchised, and interned'; Winnipeg Free Press, 23 Sept. 1988 (RI, 23). 30 See also Edmonton Journal, 8 Oct. 1988 (RI, 31), citing Bohdan Kordan and Peter Melnycky to the effect that the records almost always listed the internees as 'destitute'; a man on a homestead would have had at least his land for support. 31 Author's private manuscript copy; and Ukrainian Weekly, 9 April 1988 (RI, 65-8). See also Martynowych, Ukrainians in Canada, 309-41; and Luciuk's

The Contemporary Ukrainian-Canadian Campaign 377

32 33 34 35

36 37 38

39 40 41 42

review and Martynowych's reply, Canadian Historical Review 74, no. 1 (1993), 153-5, and 75, no. 1 (1994), 74-5. Haskett's activities on behalf of redress and how her story was portrayed in the press can be followed in RI, especially 118-21,135,144-6,151,153, 158,167-70, 212-13. Globe and Mail, 20 Oct. 1995. Toronto Star, 11 Aug. 1995. Ottawa Sun, 23 May 1991, also 10 Nov. 1988; Edmonton Journal, 9 Oct. 1988; Winnipeg Free Press, 17 Oct. 1988; and Globe and Mail, 27 Sept. 1988, 14 June 1990 (RI, 24-5, 37, 50, 78-9,100). For two unsigned pro-compensation arguments, see Gazette, 6 June 1993, and Toronto Star, 29 March 1993 (Rl, 129,156). Winnipeg Free Press, 22 Oct. 1988 (RI, 40-1). See, for example, lawyer Arthur Drache in the Financial Post, 6 Sept. 1990 (RI, 84-5). Vancouver Sun, 19 April 1993; Edmonton Journal, 30, 31 March 1993; Gazette, 11 May 1985; Toronto Star, 7 Nov. 1990, 29 March 1993; Globe and Mail, 22 Dec. 1984, 29 Oct. 1988; Ottawa Citizen, 16 March 1988; and Alberta Report, 17 Dec. 1990 (RI, 4,19, 45, 86-7, 93-6,121,124-5,136); also historian Desmond Morton's erroneous statement, Toronto Star, 1 Feb. 1991 (RI, 97), that Bishop Budka was Orthodox. Alberta Report, 17 Dec. 1990 (RI, 93-6). Edmonton Journal, 20 May 1994 (RI, 93-6). On Milliken's activities, see RI, 91-2,101-3,139, 203, 211, 215. For the mountain parks controversy, see ibid., 124-5,130-8,146,152.

43 Toronto Star, 4 May 1993; also Globe and Mail, 22 Sept. 1992 (RI, 105-6, 137).

44 RI, 73,104,122-3,136. Bill Waiser, Park Prisoners: The Untold Story of Western Canada's National Parks, 1914-1946 (Saskatoon: Fifth House 1995), rescues from invisibility the involuntary builders of the national parks system. 45 In October 1994 the UCCLA (with the support of the Congress) had sponsored an invitation-only symposium on redress in Banff National Park, featuring MPs from the Reform, Progressive Conservative, Bloc Quebecois, Liberal, and New Democratic parties. Reformer Jan Brown added another twist to the 'ethnic injustice' surrounding Castle Mountain, noting that the Siksika say that it was given to them in Treaty No. 7 but later incorporated into the park without their knowledge or consent; symposium packet (author's private collection). 46 Calgary Herald, 11,13 Aug. 1995; Toronto Star, 11 Aug. 1995; Edmonton

378 Frances Swyripa

47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62

63

Journal, 8,15,18 Aug. 1995; also the official invitation and program for the unveiling and the Chretien postcard (author's private collection). This was the second postcard campaign; the first, targeting Prime Minister Mulroney, asked for a parliamentary resolution acknowledging Ukrainian internment, the confiscation of property and valuables, and disenfranchisement as unjust. Globe and Mail, 12 Oct. 1995; official souvenir program of the Jasper unveiling (author's private collection); Ukrainski visti, Jan. 1991. Calgary Herald, 11 Aug. 1995. Toronto Star, 11 Aug. 1995; see also, for example, Calgary Herald, 31 Aug. 1990, and Vancouver Sun, 11 May 1993 (RI, 83,145). RI, vii (Introduction). Globe and Mail, 27 March 1993; and Studenetz, May 1993 (RI, 118,151). See, for example, Globe and Mail, 20 Oct. 1995. Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch, Silver Threads (Edmonton: Ukrainian Language Resource Centre, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1996); see also the 'Historical Note.' Edmonton Journal, 29 March 1993. See, for example, the official publication of Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Alberta Provincial Council, New Challenges (May 1993), 5-6. Banff Crag and Canyon, 9 Oct. 1996, editor's remarks. See also ibid., 25 Sept. 1996; Sophia Isajiw, 'Our Ancestors Walk with Us/ Cairn 21 no. 1 (1996), 6-7; and publicity materials for 'History's Exiles' (author's private collection). Ukrainskyi holos, 7, 14 Jan. 1991. Ihor Bardyn in Ukrainski visti, April, May 1991. See, for example, Toronto Star, 11 Feb. 1991; and Ukrainskyi holos, 5 Aug. 1991. Calgary Herald, 8 Nov. 1989 (RI, 73). Globe and Mail, 10 May 1993 (RIf 144). Destruction by the National Archives of Canada of files on national internment, which Luciuk called an 'Orwellian effort to ... cleanse Canadian history' (RI, 136,145), thwarts preparation of an in-depth profile of camp inmates to settle decisively the debate over accuracy. The most reasoned and persuasive statement of the lessons to be learned is Bohdan Kordan's speech on Ukrainian Heritage Day at the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village in August 1993, later published as Righting Historical Wrongs: Internment, Acknowledgement and Redress (Saskatoon: Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Saskatchewan Provincial Council, n.d.).

15

Redress, Collective Memory, and the Politics of History FRANCA IACOVETTA and ROBERT VENTRESCA

When Mussolini's Italy declared war on the Allied powers, Benny Ferri, an Italian-born Canadian citizen, became an enemy alien. By late July 1940, he was sent to the internment camp at Petawawa, Ont., along with several hundred Italian Canadians for their alleged association with Fascism. He was twenty-four, single, employed, and law-abiding - a model immigrant. Recalling the episode fifty years later, Ferri noted: 'It was very frustrating ... All they told us was that we could be enemies, that maybe we'd sabotage something.'1 Ferri was not a 'fifth columnist,' and he did not pose any other threat to Canada. Authorities decided as much when eleven months into his incarceration they released him. Some months later, he was conscripted into the Canadian army. The 'civilian internee' and 'enemy alien' had become a loyal Canadian. There were other innocent Italian Canadians in Petawawa: men, for instance, who had never joined immigrant organizations that had come under the sway of Fascist Italian diplomats and pro-fascist ItalianCanadian elites. Recently, Italian-Canadian leaders have used the sad scenarios of these men in a lobby to win from the Canadian state an apology for the mistreatment of Italian Canadians in the Second World War. Inspired by the settlement awarded Japanese Canadians for their wartime sufferings, the National Congress of Italian Canadians (NCIC) launched its redress campaign in January 1990. During the campaign, the 'story' of political innocents hurt by a vindictive wartime state effectively became the 'story' of all Italian internees. On 4 November 1990, the lobby won a first victory. At a luncheon in the Toronto suburb of Concord, before about 500 NCIC members and guests, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney issued 'a full and unqualified

380 Franca lacovetta and Robert Ventresca

Prime Minister Brian Mulroney being thanked for his apology to Italian Canadians, 4 November 1990. On the right is Dan lannuzzi, editor of // Corriere Canadese; on the left is Mr Zaffiro, former member of the Hamilton fascio.

apology for the wrongs done to our fellow Canadians of Italian origin during World War Two/ The forty-five years of silence on internment, he added, represented 'a shameful part of our history/ Mulroney publicly endorsed the Congress's version of history - that the treatment of Italians had constituted a 'war on ethnicity' and that Italian Canadians, like the Japanese Canadians, had been incarcerated simply because of their racial-ethnic origin. As he put it, 'Sending civilians to internment camps without trial simply because of their ethnic origin was not then,

Redress, Collective Memory, and the Politics of History 381 and is not now, and never will be, accepted in a civilized nation that purports to respect the rule of law.' For his action, Mulroney received a standing ovation, and hugs from teary-eyed elderly men who had been inmates at Petawawa.2 Mulroney's public apology seemed a happy ending to a painful episode in Canadian history. With few exceptions,3 media responses, including those of the 'ethnic' and the English- and French-language press, were positive. A Toronto Star editorial applauded Mulroney for doing 'the right thing' and concluded that 'Canadians are still capable of facing darker chapters of their past.'4 For the Congress, including President Annamarie Castrilli, the apology was a sweet victory after a campaign intended to focus attention on an event about which few Italian Canadians or other Canadians knew. A few years later, a still elated Castrilli told a largely academic audience that the apology was cause for national celebration. End of story.5 Or is it? For many Italian-Canadian supporters of the redress campaign, the story is not over. Dissatisfied with the banquet-hall venue, some want the prime minister, now Jean Chretien, to issue an apology in Parliament. While some former internees regret all the public exposure, others, both internees and community leaders, are lobbying for some form of financial compensation.6 For us, the story is not over for different reasons. As historians and educators, we both wonder what the legacy will be of a redress campaign that drew on selective evidence, ignored competing interpretations, and offered a simplified version of the past. In suggesting that redress leaders were guilty of bad history, if good (that is, successful) politics, we are not denigrating their efforts or successes. As a leading ethnic organization with a mandate to advocate on behalf of Italian Canadians, the NCIC was doing its job. To say that its (partial) success enhanced the leaders' reputation would be neither surprising nor a particularly critical remark. Members of ethnic elites, like most leaders, usually combine a mix of community altruism, political ambitions, hard work, and personal or professional selfinterest. Political campaigns, including progressive ones, need to be strategic and offer clear messages uncluttered by nuance or detail.7 But unsettling issues remain. The redress campaign opened for Italian Canadians a past that most never knew, and encouraged film-makers, writers, students, and the elderly to participate in a collective retrieval of the past. Yet it did so by reference to a simple plot line. This is not to say that there is a wholly different 'truth,' but we must insist that at the

382 Franca lacovetta and Robert Ventresea least there is more to the 'story/ and that history might be better respected. We first revisit the Italian-Canadian redress campaign, examining key players and developments, and draw some comparisons with the Japanese-Canadian campaign and the floundering Ukrainian-Canadian lobby, aimed at gaining redress for First World War internments. Second, we examine the making of an elite-led, collective memory of wartime internment by probing central assertions of the NCIC's campaign launched in 1990, the well-received National Film Board (NFB) feature Barbed Wires and Mandolins (1997), and public discussions recorded in the Italian-Canadian newspaper // Corriere Canadese, most particularly on history and multiculturalism. Third, we offer some challenges to this version of historical events and call for more research and debate on the ways in which politics and collective memory shape history. Redress The NCIC campaign,8 which focused initially on securing an apology, enjoyed quick success. After less than two years of organizing and only ten months following official launch of the campaign, the Congress met its first goal. By contrast, the National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC), which had a much stronger case, lobbied for several years before gaining its apology, although the apology came with an impressive compensation package. Castrilli herself identified the key reasons for success: a positive political climate, the Japanese-Canadian success, strong media support, and a 'really good team' of Italian-Canadian parliamentarians and professionals with 'an understanding of the political machinery' and a willingness to use it.9 The favourable political climate was illustrated by the NAJC's victory two years earlier. On the heels of U.S. President Ronald Reagan's compensation of Japanese Americans for their wartime loss of freedom and property, Prime Minister Mulroney in August 1988 did the same for Japanese Canadians. Aware of opposition in his own party, Mulroney had included only a few senior cabinet ministers in negotiations, including his 'Quebec lieutenant/ Lucien Bouchard, and the minister of multiculturalism, Gerry Weiner. The final apology came with a $30-million settlement.10 As in the Japanese-Canadian settlement, key to the success of the NCIC campaign was Mulroney himself, who worked hard to court

Redress, Collective Memory, and the Politics of History 383 Canada's racial-ethnic communities.11 Just why he was so disposed to this particular issue has not been fully answered, but his interest probably reflects a mix of moral conviction and political opportunism mediated by personal style. Partly to distinguish himself from Pierre Trudeau's tough, uncompromising position on national unity, Mulroney as opposition leader had adopted a rhetoric of conciliation and negotiation. When efforts to confirm that image as national conciliator floundered early in Mulroney's tenure as prime minister, new strategies emerged. It is no mere coincidence that the apology to Italian Canadians came in the wake of the defeat of the Meech Lake Accord - his biggest single setback.12 That failure to gain consensus on constitutional reform had involved a rejection of Mulroney's approach to constitution-making, which had been characterized by elite accommodation and backroom deals. Some of the loudest criticism came from 'ethnic' leaders, who argued that negotiating national unity in secret, or by reference to 'two founding nations,' or a 'distinct Quebec,' excluded millions of other Canadians. The 1990 apology to Italian Canadians, delivered when Mulroney was doing miserably in the opinion polls, also coincided with the launching of the Citizens' Forum on Canada's Future, or Spicer Commission, task force on a national unity. Sceptics dubbed it a political sop to a public angered by the elitist form of politics associated with Meech Lake. Ethnic leaders none the less sought to ensure greater representation of minorities on the commission. At the luncheon where Italian Canadians received their apology, NCIC President Castrilli argued that in the absence of more 'ethnic' representation on the Spicer Commission Canada risked repeating past mistakes. In this and other ways the Congress's redress campaign married past, present, and future politics.13 On the question of whether a present government should acknowledge the wrongs committed by former governments, the opposing views of Trudeau14 and Mulroney were well known before Mulroney assumed office. Ironically, the issue of Italian-Canadian redress first surfaced in Parliament in 1984 during a heated exchange between the two men over the treatment of Japanese Canadians. On Trudeau's final day in Parliament, Mulroney, as Opposition leader, asked him to 'grasp the moment to right a historic wrong.' In response, Trudeau reiterated his position that a current government 'cannot redress what was done' but can only 'express regret collectively, as we have done.' He dismissed the issue of compensation as a distraction from a bigger question, 'How many other historical wrongs would have to be righted?' He

384 Franca lacovetta and Robert Ventresca noted Mulroney's deep indignation over what had happened to Japanese Canadians and continued: I share that indignation. I have expressed it on other occasions. It seems to me he is making much of a semantic difference between an apology and a regret ... I do not see how I can apologize for some historical event to which we or these people in this House were not a party. We can regret that it happened. But why mount to great heights of rhetoric in order to say that an apology is much better than an expression of regret? ... Why only regret this particular aspect of our history? ... Why does he not apologize for what happened to Kiel? Why does he not apologize for what happened during the Second World War to mothers and fathers of people sitting in this House who went to concentration camps? I know some of them, Mr. Speaker. They were not Japanese Canadians. They were Canadians of Italian or German origin... Why do we not apologize to them? Why suddenly only the Japanese, Mr. Speaker? Why suddenly only the Japanese? Is it because there are votes in it?15

Though Trudeau's intentions were otherwise, the equating of Japaneseand Italian-Canadian internments helped to fuel the Italian redress campaign. The NAJP's success encouraged other ethnic lobbies to follow suit. Aside from the NAJP, only Italian Canadians have achieved some success, which may well reflect Tory desires to tap this large constituency of ethnic voters. As Frances Swyripa observes above in her account of the Ukrainian lobby, Italian-Canadian communities, concentrated in major cities such as Toronto, represented a greater electoral potential than the numerically large but more dispersed Ukrainian-Canadian population. With exceptions, Italian voters have backed the Liberals, whom they associate with pro-immigration policies. Mulroney thus had little to lose and plenty to gain by wooing this ethnic 'bloc/16 Also valuable to the redress lobby were parliamentarians and other middle-class activists from the mainstream, organized Italian-Canadian community. Close advisers to Mulroney, including Senator Con de Nino, pressed the issue. So did Vincent Delia Nocce, Conservative MP from Montreal, and Antonio Capobianco, also of Montreal, and a former internee and president of the Canadian Italian Business and Professional Men's Association (CIBPA). A group representing a mixed membership of contractors and builders, as well as professionals, the CIBPA

Redress, Collective Memory, and the Politics of History 385 in 1988 led the first contingent of Italian Canadians to approach Mulroney about an apology. But the request fell flat, as few people knew about the internments. Similarly, at the height of the Japanese-Canadian campaign, the Congress had rejected an invitation from the NAJP to join an alliance of 'minority communities' favouring redress because no one thought such an issue relevant to Italian Canadians.17 Shortly afterwards things changed dramatically. A national lobby quickly merged out of two fairly autonomous movements, one led by the CIBPA in Montreal, the other by Congress leaders in Toronto. A key development was the education of the members of the Congress's national executive, including Castrilli, on the internments. Given subsequent tensions between community leaders and historians over the issue, it is ironic that a turning point was a lecture delivered by historian Luigi Pennacchio on consular Fascism in Toronto's interwar immigrant community and the RCMP's wartime arrest of Italian Canadians. The lecture 'astonished' Castrilli, who had never before heard of the internments and invited Pennacchio (who later opposed the campaign) to deliver his paper to the NCIC executive. After carrying out some research, the Congress concluded that the issue merited further attention.18 The NCIC and CIBPA agreed to work in tandem on a national campaign. Partly in response to the Japanese-Canadian case, where internal divisions over compensation had hampered early efforts,19 they also chose to focus first on securing an apology. Compensation would be pursued later. The internment episode offered an organization claiming to represent 'the over one million Canadians of Italian background living across Canada'20 an opportunity to carry out its role as ethnic advocate. Composed of a national executive, seven affiliated regions, and several districts, the NCIC has a mandate to promote greater 'mutual understanding, goodwill and cooperation' between Canadians of Italian and those of other origins, act as mediator between the Italian-Canadian community and Canadian governments and organizations, encourage Italian-Canadian involvement in public affairs, and help foster the retention among Italian Canadians of 'their rich cultural heritage' and 'interpret the attributes' of that heritage to Canadians.21 Led by Castrilli, who combined her duties at NCIC president with those of a lawyer and member of the University of Toronto's board of governors, the Congress quickly compiled a brief for submission to Mulroney. A small team completed the research, drawing heavily on news coverage, a master's thesis, and work by an Ottawa journalist and

386 Franca lacovetta and Robert Ventresca historians Kenneth Bagnell, Pennacchio, and Bruno Ramirez. Castrilli and colleague Alfred Folco wrote the brief, entitled A National Shame: The Internment of Italian Canadians. No internees had been interviewed, because those involved thought it best initially to highlight 'objective' data, rather than personal reminiscences.22 The 1990 brief had introduced but not discussed restitution, saying simply that 'to the extent that individual claims can be quantified, they should be compensated.'23 Mulroney himself noted that Ottawa had not offered a settlement package because redress leaders had not demanded one.24 But the money issue soon surfaced. The day after Mulroney's apology, the new NCIC president, Folco, officially demanded restitution - $13,000 for each internee or surviving family and 'global compensation' for all 17,000 Italian Canadians placed on enemy-alien lists. The Congress struck a Redress Committee and joined the NAJP and others in a National Redress Alliance.25 The Redress Committee included members of the Canadian Italian Advocates Organizations (CIAO), the NCIC, and the CIBPA. Subsequent decisions helped democratize the campaign. Particularly effective were the public hearings that the Congress sponsored in several cities across the country. In Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, former internees and their families shared their recollections of their experiences and members discussed financial compensation.26 Negotiations with Ottawa did not go well, however. A proposal made in May 1993 by Minister Weiner included an apology delivered in Parliament, commemorative plaques marking the places where Italian Canadians had been interned (Fredericton, Petawawa, and St Helen's Island), the removal from legal records of internees' names, and a 'Nation-Builders Hall of Records' in the National Archives. The Redress Committee recommended rejection of the offer on grounds that it gave nothing substantive or new; a second apology was unnecessary, and the community could take care of plaques. It also perceived the gap between the Japanese and Italian offers as a political insult. As Castrilli told reporters, 'It makes me wonder, why disparate treatment between us and the Japanese community? We too suffered the same injustices, so why deny us the compensation afforded the Japanese.'27 In their formal rejection of the proposal, the Congress and CIBPA stated firmly: 'Our internees ... deserve much more than the platitudes and empty gestures you offered in your ultimatum.' Italian-Canadian Liberal MP Sergio Marchi raised the matter in Parliament, reminding Mulroney of his promise to resolve the issue 'urgently and efficiently' and thus 'expunge' the 'unfair stain placed upon the Italian community.' When Kim

Redress, Collective Memory, and the Politics of History 387 Campbell became prime minister shortly afterwards, redress leaders lobbied her office. But negotiations failed.28 The election of Jean Chretien's Liberals in 1993 helped renew demands for compensation, inspired partly by expectations that a Liberal government would court its Italian-Canadian constituency. ItalianCanadian Liberals, including Marchi and, for a while, Charles Caccia,29 had criticized Mulroney for not doing enough. Chretien also seemed favourably disposed, as he had shown interest in the Ukrainian case. But lobbying efforts went nowhere. Despite threats to press matters all the way to the United Nations' Human Rights Court, the Liberals steadfastly refused to negotiate financial compensation with Italian Canadians and all other groups.30 Some ethnic leaders continued their efforts, including Emilio Bisceglia, a lawyer and president of the NCIC's Toronto district, who proposed the destruction of all records of former internees and enemy-alien lists. Solicitor General Herb Gray responded that as internment did not amount to conviction for a criminal offence, there were no criminal records to destroy.31 But not all Congress members felt the same way. In November 1994, at its biennial convention, the NCIC passed resolutions effectively abandoning the campaign for financial restitution, although it favoured erasing RCMP files and erecting a memorial. The decision, made without consulting the Redress Committee, angered the negotiators, including Castrilli, who admonished the Congress for its 'ill-advised' and 'wrong' decision and reminded the executive of the community's great interest in seeing the monetary issue resolved. Accusing the NCIC of 'abrogating]' the 'principles of advocacy and democracy' that it was 'created to uphold,' she concluded: 'This is an issue of basic civil rights, of the fundamental relationship between citizen and state.' The Toronto district followed suit, with Bisceglia calling the Congress's behaviour 'shameful.' These interventions had their desired effect, but the matter remains unresolved. At present the NCIC demands a formal apology in Parliament and some form of financial restitution.32 The Making of a Collective Memory of Internment The subject of internment struck a chord with many Italian Canadians and even inspired writers, film-makers, and journalists. Special features of newspapers, student videos, an NFB film, and cultural writings on the topic have surfaced - and more particularly, as we see in this

388 Franca lacovetta and Robert Ventresca part, an influential brief on internment and redress, a documentary, letters to the editor, and participation in Canada's burgeoning multicultural politics. The internment 'story' relayed in most of these accounts is strikingly similar to the NCIC's version. So much is this the case that we can now speak of there being a collective, communitybased memory of Italian-Canadian experiences during the Second World War, one shared by a majority of Italian Canadians regardless of whether they have any personal ties to the events or people being described. In thinking about these issues, we have both been influenced by memory historians such as Henry Rousso, whose book on Vichy France acknowledges that his scholarly reconstruction of the past diverges, at times significantly, from people's memory of those same events. By 'collective memory' we refer to the ways in which history is reclaimed and rendered acceptable or relevant to a given group in the present. How and by whom do certain past events come to be recorded, interpreted, remembered, taught - and thus form part of what Rousso calls 'a living phenomenon?'33 Relevant scholarship, including feminist studies on women in wartime, have revealed how selective repression or silences (intentional or not) characterize personal and collective recollections of painful events.34 In considering how a certain version of Italian-Canadian internment has come to enjoy a position of dominance, we are not saying that there is always a clear distinction between history and memory, between scholarly reconstructions and a group's recollection of past events. History is not simply 'out there' for skilled technicians to gather 'facts.' Most historians are highly cognizant of the impossibility of objective analysis and see their scholarship as a mix of sheer detective work (diligent research in as many sources as possible), theoretical deliberation, and careful judgment of substantial yet invariably incomplete findings. But, as historians, we both sympathize with Rousso's claim for history as an 'instrument for the education of citizens,' not a tool for legitimating contemporary programs, however respectable.35 We are prepared to expose disturbing evidence and to debate with those who view it differently, and we appreciate that discovery of new evidence or approaches may revise our understanding of the past.36 The NCIC's Brief

Discussion of the making of a collective memory of Italian-Canadian internments must begin with the NCIC's 1990 brief to the prime minis-

Redress, Collective Memory, and the Politics of History 389 ter, a strongly worded version of events that was later endorsed by Italian-Canadian organizations nation-wide and the Canadian state and that resonated with countless Italian Canadians and other Canadians. To fully appreciate the document one must consider a central precept that of equating the wartime injustices perpetrated on Japanese and Italian Canadians. When Ken Adachi used the phrase 'the enemy that never was' in his account of the Japanese-Canadian evacuation, he meant that the forced dispossession, relocation, and postwar dispersal of an entire community in the name of national security was tactically unnecessary and morally wrong. The confiscation of people's property and their evacuation en masse were the actions of a state needlessly fearful of a Japanese attack 'from within' and long disdainful of its Asian populace.37 The NCIC's brief operated on the same premise - namely, that the wartime actions of W.L. Mackenzie King's government against Italians, most of them Canadians by birth or choice, were 'outrageous, arbitrary and lacked factual proof of any subversion or danger to the State.' These acts are defined: the designation of tens of thousands of Italian Canadians as 'enemy aliens,' required by law to register with the authorities, subject to fingerprinting, and denied basic civil liberties such as the right to bear arms; the RCMP's mass arrests and detainment of several thousand Italians (mostly men but some women) in the span of a few days in June 1940; and the government's eventual internment of approximately 600 of them (without rights to habeas corpus or a trial); and police searches without warrant and seizure of property from homes, shops, and factories.38 Aimed at a Taw-abiding' people,39 the violations were committed by a government that ironically was sending its youths to Europe to defend democracy. The brief reads like a defence submission in a court case and builds its argument for redress on the basis of what are presented as incontrovertible historical 'facts.' First, while some Italian Canadians had become involved in pro-fascist organizations during the 1920s and 1930s, the 'fact' is that most never swore allegiance to Mussolini and most remained loyal to Canada and Britain. Excerpts from Ramirez's work40 and the master's thesis are used for support. At one point, the brief reads: 'If there was any apparent fascination with Fascism [before 1940] this is dismissed by Joseph Anthony Ciccocelli in his Master's thesis ... [who] argues convincingly that "what many English-Canadians had mistaken to be an affinity for Fascism was in actuality a feeling of pride in the revitalization of Italy."'41 Establishing loyalty, particularly of

390 Franca lacovetta and Robert Ventresca those interned, was a clear priority. 'It is a fact/ the brief says, that 'not one of [the internees] was ever charged with any act of sabotage or disloyalty during the war/ It describes the internees simply as 'men between the ages of 16 and 70' who came from 'all walks of life lawyers, doctors, candy-makers, carpenters, cigar manufacturers, bakers, blacksmiths, pressers, wine makers, cab drivers, priests, contractors, postmen, shoe shiners and bricklayers' - and who 'were put to work building roads, clearing forests and doing other forms of manual labour/42 Apart from Mario Duliani, whose novel is mentioned, and one other man,43 no names are given. Another 'fact' is that the principles of due process and justice were violated. While acknowledging that the Defence of Canada Regulations (1939) gave the wartime government 'full authority' to curtail the rights of foreign nationals and to arrest or intern any suspected subversives, the Congress's brief maintains that the internment of Italian Canadians, like that of Japanese and German Canadians, was inexcusable. 'To treat these people as "enemy aliens" and to treat them so harshly in flagrant disregard of their civil rights/ states the brief, 'was unconscionable/ There were no warrants of arrest and no right of trial. Also, the 'reasonable grounds' required for internment by the government's own decree (order-in-council, 10 June 1940) were non-existent, consisting 'of suspicious reports by paid informers of dubious credibility, membership in associations with Italian names and involvement with organizations roughly equivalent to the heritage language classes of today.'44 The brief then shifts to the 'human cost' of internment, noting the humiliating and stigmatizing experience endured by the thousands of unnaturalized Italians forced to register with police. It highlights, above all, the personal trauma, even crisis in masculinity, suffered by the male internees. Given the potential emotional appeal of their stories, the lack of attention to the women detained or interned is surprising. Internment meant search, seizure, and arrest of men who never knew the nature of the charges against them. Many were taken into custody while at work and so could not inform their spouse or say good-bye to children. 'Deprived of the warmth and consolation of their families' and 'worried about the economic deprivation their families had to endure without the salary of the main breadwinner/ these men found 'their sense of purpose and their self-esteem deeply eroded/ To add insult to injury, the internee on release had to sign an undertaking that amounted to 'almost an admission of guilt ... for crimes for which he had never been prosecuted and which he had not committed/45

Redress, Collective Memory, and the Politics of History 391 Also discussed is the wider impact of state actions. Almost overnight, the brief states, 'a hard working, largely invisible segment of the Canadian population suddenly found itself the target of racial prejudice from neighbours and of close surveillance by governments.'46 In Toronto and Windsor, enemy aliens, even those not interned, were fired from work. Windsor city council suspended 'enemy aliens' employed by the city and the dominion Department of Transport fired all 'enemy aliens working on the construction of the Windsor airport - particularly harsh measures, given that most Italians held manual jobs (such as janitors and construction workers) and thus were hardly likely to encounter sensitive information. In some places, church services in Italian were prohibited. Italian Canadians who ran small businesses became easy targets of physical violence and economic intimidation. Windows were smashed, insults were hurled, and business declined.47 Drawing on contemporary news coverage, the brief cites an Italian fruit-store owner who claimed not to have had a customer for three days after Italy's declaration of war; a Toronto Star reporter who wryly observed that if most Canadian housewives had their way, 'Italian stores would be empty of business for the duration of the war'; and a story on Nova Scotia coal miners who refused to work with Italian miners.48 The families of internees also received attention. The brief observes that many Italian families on public assistance, already denied their main breadwinner by internment and the employment ban, were taken off the welfare rolls - a move that hit women and children hardest. The dominion government froze the bank accounts of internees, preventing wives from compensating the loss of their husbands' income with their own hard-earned savings. The property of enemy aliens was seized and administered by the dominion government and in many cases never returned to the owner. To survive, some families were forced to sell homes, businesses, or other 'valuable assets,' usually at 'below market values.' There were 'missed opportunities/ impossible to calculate, for the children compelled by their family's predicament to forgo educational opportunities. Canada as a nation also suffered from this careless 'squandering' of human resources.49 There is another striking feature of the brief and, by extension, of the whole redress lobby. For all its talk of the past, the campaign was firmly set in the present and, in a sense, the future. The Congress asserts that 'as Canada moves into the twenty-first century, the time has come to make amends to the injured so that we may learn from our past and move confidently forward as a nation.' The past is thus brought to life,

392 Franca lacovetta and Robert Ventresca taken out of dusty archives or obscure academic tomes, and made relevant to the present day. For redress activists, it was the court of contemporary public opinion, not history alone, that most mattered. Canada's Parliament, and Canadians, needed to be convinced that the issue was of national importance. In the absence of an official apology and the sort of financial compensation afforded Japanese Canadians, Canada, the NCIC suggested, could not move forward, because the wound caused by internment could not heal. Only by acknowledging and rectifying past wrongs could the state 'restore the positive image of Italian Canadians as significant contributors to this country of ours in this century.'50 The statement also speaks to the Congress's raison d'etre - the promotion of Italians as valued members of the Canadian family - and links Italian-Canadian successes in public life to the promotion of a healthier, multicultural nation. In this way, the NCIC effectively transformed what might have been dubbed an 'ethnic' issue into one that vote-conscious politicians and Canadians could embrace as a national one. The brief and the Congress's campaign encouraged the political awakening of Italian Canadians, and subsequent events, some directly influenced by the campaign, others less so, have contributed as well to the elaboration of a community history of the war years. The unresolved issue of compensation has acted as a catalyst here, beginning with the public hearings organized by the Redress Committee following Mulroney's apology and intended to explore the question of financial restitution. They became major community events, cathartic for the internees or family members who told their stories and moving for those in attendance, who witnessed elderly men and women tearfully recount harsh encounters with the RCMP or enforced isolation. The intensity of the response caught even the organizers off-guard.51 Italian-Canadian writers, literary critics, and journalists have probably helped to popularize the subject among many younger Italian Canadians, who might not otherwise be interested in a political issue regarding old people and a pre-war community with which they, as perhaps children of post-1945 newcomers, feel no personal affinity. One example is the ongoing efforts by members of the Italian-Canadian cultural and literary community to rehabilitate the checkered reputation of arguably the most famous internee of all - the Montreal-based journalist and dramatist Mario Duliani. Suffice it to mention a few features of this campaign: exonerating Duliani and by extension all

Redress, Collective Memory, and the Politics of History 393 internees and all Italian Canadians of that generation and establishing a pedigree for Italian-Canadian literature with Duliani as patriarch. An animated debate has emerged over the question whether Duliani had been a paid informant of the OVRA, the Fascist secret police. The positive reception that Mazza's 1994 English translation of Duliani's novel, The City without Women, has received suggests that to date the Duliani lobby is winning with public opinion. Reviewers have accepted Mazza's version of the internments, his claim for Duliani's reliable reconstruction of camp life, and his lament that Duliani's rightful claim to the Canadian literary canon was eclipsed by internment.52 Barbed Wire and Mandolins

Another example, and one that probably had even greater popular appeal, was the recently televised film Barbed Wires and Mandolins. Written by seasoned Italian-Canadian film-makers Sam Grana and Nicola Zavaglia, the documentary was co-produced with the NFB and first shown on 4 March 1997 on CBC-TV's program Witness. (The CBC has refused to air a documentary produced on the Ukrainian-Canadian internments.)53 The film, claims the press release, combines 'moving' interviews with internees and family members with 'rarely seen archival material' (mostly photographs) to explore 'this little-known episode from Canada's wartime history.' Interviews with the film's historical experts, Kenneth Bagnell and Mazza, are also featured.54 Intending mainly to convey the 'trauma of internment' on the inmates and their families, the film has its emotional moments, such as when wives and daughters recall the fear and apprehension of those years, the long trek to Petawawa for an occasional visit, and the humiliations suffered on the outside. The central narrative (also laid out in a synopsis and background notes) confirms the NCIC's version. The internees, described here too as men 'from all walks of life,' are portrayed as innocent victims of a government's war against its ethnics. When war broke out, Italian Canadians 'suddenly' became 'enemy aliens' in the eyes of the Canadian government, and within days the RCMP had 'detained' 17,000 people, including women and children, ordering them to report regularly. Some 6,000 men were arrested, of whom 700 were interned, without ever being charged, some for as long as four years. The 'operation' occurred in an 'atmosphere of fear and xenophobia,' amid 'unfounded theories' of pro-fascist 'fifth columnists' conspiring against Canada.55

394 Franca lacovetta and Robert Ventresca Like redress leaders, the film-makers were keen to exonerate the internees. Hence, while acknowledging that many had joined groups with 'fascist affiliations/ such as the Sons of Italy and dopolavoro clubs, they described these as 'social groups' that were 'not actively involved in politics.' Similarly, they acknowledge that a good number of the internees (they say about 100) had joined the fascio (local branches of Italy's Fascist party) and then, drawing on Bagnell's work, dismiss the point by likening them to social clubs and lodges that men joined out of 'naivete and idealism' and 'for the perpetuation of nostalgia and loyalties.' They also note (as do most scholars) that Prime Minister King and Norman Robertson from External Affairs disapproved of the scope of police action against Italians planned by the RCMP and approved by the minister of justice, Ernest Lapointe. (The point that Italians were victims of 'one of the biggest round ups in Canadian history' is reiterated here, as elsewhere.)56 Above all, the film emphasizes what the NCIC's brief calls the 'human costs' of internment: the internees humiliated by arrest and forcibly separated from loved ones, and the 'many' families that, cut off from 'any form of social assistance' and with their bank accounts frozen, 'were thrown into poverty.' Only after the arrival of a more lenient justice minister (Louis St Laurent), it argues, did many of the internees get released, only to discover that businesses had been closed or jobs filled.57 Finally, the film reiterates the NCIC's claim that internment permanently damaged the pre-war Italian-Canadian community: 'Leaders had been removed/ 'presses had been silenced/ and a whole community 'had been stigmatized.'58 Public Discussion The film's showing provoked new discussions among Italian Canadians and re-energized the redress lobby.59 The widely read II Corriere Canadese devoted much space to the issue in the days following: staff and guest columnists voiced opinions, described Congress's activities, and featured history articles and interviews with ordinary Italian Canadians. Among contributors, there is virtually total agreement over the version and meaning of the wartime events described and on the need to win financial redress.60 A few observations. First, the familiar reconstructions and interpretations reaffirm those in the NCIC's brief and NFB's film. In a lengthy historical feature, Mazza well articulates the war-against-ethnicity thesis, recounting the now-orthodox version of events, replete with denunciations of the RCMP, and then charging that

Redress, Collective Memory, and the Politics of History 395 the 'intent' of internment 'was to infringe the liberty of thousands of Canadians whose only crime was to have maintained cultural links with their native county that was now an enemy of Canada.'61 Some new elements also surface. Several writers invoked the language of 'concentration camps,' for instance, to describe ItalianCanadian internment - an association with the Holocaust that no one can miss. A front-page column entitled 'The Facts' uses the term, as does columnist Antonio Nicaso in a piece that implores Chretien to help the internees and the whole community resolve their 'legacy of shame.' Mazza's history feature favourably compares Duliani's depictions of the internees' Kafka-like existence in Petawawa to Holocaust writer Bruno Bettelheim's 'famous descriptions' of the 'nazi camps' inmates. He also describes Duliani's release as 'liberation.' In a frontpage editorial, prominent Italo-Canadian journalist Angelo Persichilli dubbed the internments a case of 'cultural genocide' from which the community 'has not yet recovered' and called on Ottawa to heal 'our' collective scar.62 The association with the Holocaust was made most explicit by Italian-Canadian students at York University interviewed for their responses to the NFB film. According to the reporter, those approached were troubled by the events described and expressed 'serious doubts' about a society that could 'explode' against its people. A female geography major maintained that 'the Canadian authorities did the same thing that the German authorities did to the Jews; used our culture as a badge of shame.' Insisting that 'a country that calls itself a multicultural society has a duty to confront tragic events/ she added: 'These things should be taught in the schools. We already know about the discrimination against the Japanese and the Jews. But who even thought of the Italian Canadians?' A male history student agreed: 'The Jews are doing everything so that history does not forget the Holocaust. We have to learn from that, so that past acts of discrimination against our community are never repeated.'63 II Corriere Canadese also pays considerable attention to the internees, telling their personal stories and displaying them as the victims of state crimes. Apart from occasional references to the women, it is the names, faces, and narratives of the male internees that punctuate the newspaper's pages. Historic photographs of the internees as young men are juxtaposed with recent ones of them as elderly, usually frail men. Ordinary men are featured, including Tony Danesi, a Petawawa inmate for two years, who recalled the freezing temperatures endured

396 Franca lacovetta and Robert Ventresca while working in the bush.64 But it is the arguably most famous internees - the middle-class doctors, other professionals, and community leaders - who get the lion's share of attention. Contractor James Franceschini is portrayed as a victim of his economic competitors acting as RCMP informants. Predictably, Duliani gets preferential treatment in Mazza's article, which denounces the 'totalitarian' tactics used against minorities in the name of democracy and laments the 'high price' paid and wretched legacy gained by 'innocent [Italian] Canadians.' Though dismissive of the competing interpretations, Mazza is the only contributor to these issues who acknowledges competing interpretations - in this case, over Duliani and his alleged Opera Vigilanza Repressione Antifascismo (OVRA) connections. In affirming Duliani's innocence, Mazza relies on the oral testimony of Dr Salvatore Mancuso, also an internee. Mazza concludes: 'Until there is definite proof that Dulinai was involved in subversive activities, in light of Dr. Mancuso's testimony, the accusation must be considered completely absurd.' None the less, talk of 'definite proof does not prevent Mazza from speculating that Duliani might have emigrated to Canada because of his discomfort with authoritarian regimes.65 History and Multiculturalism A final recurring theme concerns the relationship between history and current multicultural politics, which contributors raised much as the NCIC's brief did - by drawing links between redress, recovery, a revitalized ethnic community, and a renegotiated Canada. Such arguments emerged largely in the context of criticism aimed at Chretien's Liberals, whose continuing refusal to negotiate financial redress earned them such insulting labels as 'hypocrites' and 'two-faced.' Do we 'forgive and forget'? asks Persichilli in one of his editorials. He answers: 'Forgive we can try, to forget is more difficult,' partly because 'Chretien's government will not help us to do so/ An 'adequate response' from Chretien, he adds, is 'necessary' not only to 'cleanse the past' but also 'to give clear direction for the future' and render 'serious' Canada's 'talk of equality among all its citizens.'66 If Chretien's position has created a delicate situation for ItalianCanadian MPs, most of whom support redress but have adopted a conciliatory tone and avoided public battles with Chretien, some community leaders, including Bisceglia, have not tempered their anger and disappointment.67 Perhaps the best expressions of betrayal are found in

Redress, Collective Memory, and the Politics of History 397 Persichilli's editorials, where we see too a leap from specific grievances over redress to a multicultural vision of Canada. In an 'Open Letter' to Immigration Minister Sergio Marchi, praised as the leading ItalianCanadian politician, Persichilli offers a version of this argument by stressing Italian Canadians' rightful place in the national unity negotiations. 'Dear Sergio/ he writes: Amidst all the success stories there is also a dark chapter, that of internment. It has to do with Canadians like you. But they saw their rights violated because they had an Italian name like you. Mulroney apologized. You said it wasn't enough and that his apology 'was almost an affront.' You asked Mulroney to confirm the apology in Parliament. The response was negative. Today the Congress asks of Chretien what you asked of Mulroney ... You and your colleagues are silent... While usually silence is golden, this time silence is not an option ... The generation that then wanted to forget now wants to remember, the children who once ignored now want ... to know what happened [and] make sure that [it] will not happen again ... Our community is at a crossroads: it can disappear into nothing or become one identity capable of contributing to Canada's growth. And a nation grows when its government guarantees equality for all and not distinct society for a few.68

In another editorial, Persichilli notes the irony of Ottawa's advice to Italian Canadians 'to forget, to look ahead' while the country is being torn apart precisely, he claims, because anglophones and francophones, both groups that have enjoyed a history of 'privilege over other minority groups,' are not ready to forget past insults and injuries against each other. Arguing against any further talk about the rights of founding cultures and exclusion of minorities, he concludes: 'It is not through distinct societies that you build a future but equality, in the future as in the past.' As such comments suggest, the Italian-Canadian redress campaign was both facilitated by and has contributed to the growing 'ethnicization' of Canadian politics and of calls for a renewed federalism within a multicultural rather than two-nations context.69 We found only one voice in these issues of II Corriere Canadese critical of the redress campaign and the film Barbed Wires and Mandolins. In a letter to the newspaper, Paola Ludovici MacQuarrie of Hull, Que., called for some historical perspective on internment and pointedly asked 'why' the film's director 'did not trouble himself to interview at least one internee who had worn a blackshirt or the fascio fez?' By

398 Franca lacovetta and Robert Ventresca focusing exclusively on innocent Italian Canadians' emotional regard for Mussolini, and ignoring any committed Fascists, the film, she argues, failed to convey the real horrors of Fascism. 'Fascism/ she noted, 'was much more than making the trains run on time; it signified the abolition of parliamentary democracy, political assassinations, repression of opponents, collaboration with the nazis, expulsion of Jews to Aushwitz/ She queried whether the wartime sufferings of Italians were now being used for 'ignoble' ends. If the point of the redress campaign 'is to make our case no less than the Japanese/ who were interned 'en masse ... simply because they were Japanese/ she said, then 'I'm ashamed.' She concluded by noting that it was ironic that at the same time that a recent memorial in Ortona, Italy, commemorated Canadian and other Allied soldiers who lost lives liberating Italy from the Nazis, Italian Canadians were not prepared to address fully the fascist past in this country.70 There have been other critics of the redress lobby, among them Italian-Canadian historians who, though sympathetic to aspects of the campaign, have not publicly supported it. Even Ramirez has voiced discomfort over how his scholarship has been used in the redress campaign.71 With regard to the political uses of history, the NCIC-led redress campaign is in some respects similar to another Italian-Canadian lobby in the 1970s to have the government 're-Italianize' John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto) as the 'discoverer' of Canada. Historian Robert Harney saw in that campaign not just an interest in historical accuracy, but also 'the manipulation of the past to create a pedigree in the present.' To confirm that Italians were present at Canada's 'discovery' (which ignored First Nations) would confirm their role in contemporary Canada. Like the redress lobby, the Caboto campaign aimed partly to help a community still harbouring a legacy of immigrant bashing overcome its 'ethnic inferiority complex' and emerge as a full participant in the nation. In both cases, history served partly as a 'therapeutic tool' for contemporary ethnic relations.72 History: Politics, Memory, and An Uneasy Alliance The history of Italian Canadians in the Second World War was far more complicated, sordid, and turbulent than the community version permits. The streamlined story of internment fails to convey the intensely dramatic developments of those heady years, such as Fascism's popular appeal among immigrants, its totalitarian nature, and the hypocrisy

Redress, Collective Memory, and the Politics of History 399 and ironies revealed in the behaviour both of Canadians in general (including state authorities) and of Italian Canadians in particular (especially towards each other). True, as scholarly and contemporary claims suggest, relatively few Italian Canadians were ideologically committed to Italian Fascism, and fewer still ever entertained the possibility of sabotage. As almost everyone notes, Canadian leaders, including King and Robertson, thought this to be the case. Robertson offered a rather crude and elitist portrayal of Italians as mostly 'sheep' but nevertheless advised selective detention only of committed Fascists and influential leaders. Even so, well-intentioned desires to exonerate ordinary men and women from unfair accusations as fascists or fifth columnists do not absolve us, or them, from the responsibility of trying to understand how movements such as fascism came to enjoy popular appeal in communities across the globe. History teaches us that such movements can take hold even among honest, hard-working, law-abiding people. It is not a matter merely of pointing accusing fingers or demonizing whole communities, but of seeking to grasp more fully the still elusive origins and features of immigrant fascism in Canada. But why would the NCIC, mandated to celebrate the 'rich' culture and history of Canada's Italians, commemorate Mussolini, the bastard son whom no one wants to remember? Much safer to stick to Caboto or Columbus, or even Federico Fellini. Perhaps these silences regarding the fascist past are best understood as a defensive reaction on the part of a community still worried about its reputation as 'backward foreigners' - a reaction provoked in part by collective embarrassment over disturbing events associated, however tenuously, with some of the worst crimes known to humanity. Indeed, this negation might well reflect the concern provoked by an equation so deeply embedded in postwar popular memory: Fascism equals Nazism equals Auschwitz. And the Holocaust, in modern memory, is the ultimate evil, indeed evil defined. Any discussion of fascism, the mere mention of which invokes gas chambers and mass graves, is haunted by its horrific connotations.73 Of course, equating Italian Canadians who joined fascistorganized parades or sports with Nazis would be absurd. This is our point. Clear distinctions are necessary. But this requires first putting the subject, and its critical study, on the community agenda. It is important to address a central premise of current discussions: the equating of Japanese- and Italian-Canadian wartime experiences and, more recently, comparisons with Jews. Similar connections have emerged

400 Franca lacovetta and Robert Ventresca in the Ukrainian-Canadian lobby. As Swyripa notes, these are 'untenable parallels/ We do not wish to rate degrees of persecution or legitimate one group's suffering over another's. As U.S. writer Patricia Williams observes of contemporary Jewish-Black racial tensions in her country, it is destructive when victims compete over whose legacy of suffering is worse (in this instance, slavery or the Holocaust). Nor do we find helpful J.L. Granatstein's interventions on the topic of internment, especially his cheap shots at anti-racist activists in Canada and muddled critiques of multiculturalism.74 By the same token, lack of differentiation over these wartime experiences smacks of bad history that obscures more than it clarifies. As regards the Japanese analogy, we do not suggest that no similarities mark the treatment of Italian and Japanese Canadians. Both groups were transformed into 'enemy aliens,' and in both cases, the rights of Canadian citizens were suspended in the name of national security, and their detention was carried out in a context of hysteria fuelled by a fifthcolumn crisis and exacerbated by racism. In both cases, people whom the prime minister and other leaders considered loyal Canadians suffered the ignominy of 'internment.' But there the similarities end. One way to evaluate the differences is to consider the scale of the two operations. In the Japanese-Canadian case, an entire west coast community of some 22,000 people - men, women, and children - was rounded up, its property permanently confiscated and sold, and its members interned en masse in camps dispersed in the interior. Their relocation, begun after Pearl Harbor in 1941, obtained for the remainder of the war. The end of hostilities did not mean a return to normality for Japanese Canadians, who found themselves the target of an official plan to 'repatriate' to Japan as many of them as possible, including Canadian-born citizens who had never set foot in that country. Prohibited from returning to the west coast, the remainder dispersed themselves across Canada, where they rebuilt lives without state support or encouragement.75 By contrast, the Italian-Canadian internments involved 600 individuals, less than one per cent of a population of approximately 112,000. It was a selective policy that, at least officially, was aimed at suspected fascist leaders and committed activists. As Luigi Bruti Liberati has calculated, only 15 per cent of 3,500 Italian Canadians officially recognized as 'Fascists' were interned. Also, Ottawa began release proceedings of individual Italian Canadians almost immediately after ordering the police arrests of June 1940. No similar process obtained for Japanese

Redress, Collective Memory, and the Politics of History 401 Canadians, who remained imprisoned. For Italian Canadians, the period of internment ranged from a few months to a few years. By summer 1942, when the remaining Italians in Petawawa were sent to Fredericton, there were 162 internees (about 32 per cent of the total) left.76 And what of the process of release? The argument that Italians, like Japanese Canadians, were stripped of all legal rights has found much resonance in the present-day community. Certainly, the Defence of Canada Regulations (DOCR), which gave authorities sweeping wartime powers allowed precisely for the detention of any persons merely suspected of acting in a way 'prejudicial' to public safety or the state and did suspend habeas corpus and normal trial proceedings. Still, apart from Japanese Canadians, all those arrested for national security reasons, even the always-vilified Communists,77 had the right to an appeal of sorts, before a closed tribunal, though without benefit of counsel and with the express obligation to prove their own innocence. Furthermore, the tribunals, though hardly neutral and marked by internal disagreements (particularly among RCMP and Department of Justice members) recommended the release of most Italian Canadians detained in 1940. The hearings and releases continued for the remainder of the war, when the handful left were released. The Japanese-Canadian relocation operation also contrasts markedly with the RCMP's handling of the Italian community. Most scholars agree that the evacuation and relocation of Japanese Canadians are best attributed to racist motives - in particular, the near hysteria of white British Columbians and their political leaders in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Even allowing for fears of a fifth column, the evacuation policy can be understood only against the backdrop of decades of anti-Asian discrimination. While Italians in Canada are no strangers to discrimination, they did not find their whole community subjected to an official policy of evacuation, dispossession, relocation, and permanent dispersal. The depiction of the RCMP's arrests of Italians in June 1940 as the indiscriminate round-ups of a security force that lacked good intelligence but was poised to attack a despised minority is simply not accurate. For one thing, the RCMP, never a great defender of civil liberties, was empowered by the DOCR to act as it did. To carry out mass raids and arrests, its officers were made justices of the peace, fully authorized to issue their own search warrants and arrest anyone they merely suspected of being a security risk. Also, as scholars have documented, the RCMP was not

402 Franca lacovetta and Robert Ventresca especially alarmist about the supposed threats posed by Italian (or German) Canadians, despite clear evidence of fascist activities in these communities. In comparison with other authorities, including those handling the Japanese-Canadian relocations, RCMP officials even showed restraint. Finally, the evidence so far retrieved78 shows that the RCMP had been gathering good-quality intelligence on Italian-Canadian communities for some years before the war, especially after the invasion of Ethiopia, and had an accurate grasp of the nature of fascism in those communities. That information had come via a network of paid agents and volunteer informants, including anti-fascists who had kept track of fascist activities. The accuracy of the RCMP's intelligence was evident in the list of names that it first compiled, on the eve of war, when it was ordered by Ottawa to identify who might be interned in the event of war with Italy: approximately 100 men from across the country, most of them described as leaders or active Fascists, as well as suspected Fascist agents, including informants of the Opera Vigilanza Repressione Antifascismo. However, the RCMP's list grew by leaps and bounds when Italian 'informants' began supplying the police with additional names of hundreds of alleged Fascists. The RCMP was actually disinclined to believe many reports on the grounds that the information came from Fascist agents deliberately trying to 'misinform' the enemy. Others, they reckoned, were 'ex-fascists' trying to protect themselves from arrest by quickly renouncing Fascism and betraying former colleagues. And some were bitter rivals of the people whom they fingered. Before the RCMP could investigate the names, war broke out, and those listed were arrested and some interned. This late-hour phenomenon of 'Italians betraying Italians' out of greed, rivalry, or petty jealousy probably resulted in the internment of Italians innocent of fascist politics. It may also explain the inconsistencies in internment; why, for example, some well-known community leaders escaped punishment while some of those with rank-and-file memberships in immigrant clubs were interned. Female Fascists figured in such activities: one woman detainee avoided internment and gained her husband's release by acting as an informant against former party members in Montreal. While this sordid aspect of internment remains a source of bitterness for those affected, redress advocates have largely sidestepped it. Yet surely this dimension needs public airing; the healing must come also from within the community, not only from outside.

Redress, Collective Memory, and the Politics of History 403 As for lurid images of Canadian 'concentration camps/ we reiterate Swyripa's criticism of Ukrainian-Canadian leaders - that while barbed wires and death camps make for effective propaganda, their use in Canadian redress campaigns cannot be justified. Six million murdered Jews equals 600 Italians interned in Canada? The mind boggles at the suggestion. Among the most compelling arguments in redress discussions is the great wrong perpetuated against the internees. Initially faceless, the victims quickly grew visible as names and stories became stock trade in the public hearings, films, and publications that surfaced in the wake of Mulroney's apology. And yet, despite the critical importance that we must attach to the credibility of the internees' testimonials, redress leaders have considered it sufficient merely to relay their stories or rely on other uncorroborated oral testimony. While some internees might fear more in-depth interrogation, others, such as Benny Ferri, would welcome it. Given the understandable reluctance of many of these people to admit even to a brief and nostalgic flirtation with Italian Fascism, oral testimonies must be treated sympathetically but also with a healthy scepticism. Historians engaged in painstaking research are performing the difficult but important task of differentiation. Distinctions must be made between those who held prominent positions in satellite fascist organizations, such as Dr Mancuso; those who, like Franceschini, had been moderately involved in fascist activities; gangsters such as Rocco Perri, who were conveniently detained because of their bootlegging, not their political connections; and ordinary immigrants wrongly interned. Redress leaders cannot have it both ways - insist that internment deprived the community of its leaders and yet characterize the internees as political simpletons from 'all walks of life/ The evidence indicates that the majority of internees (including the women) were middle class - precisely from those ranks that had supplied the ItalianCanadian leaders in the Fascist years. And if there were no 'real' Fascists among them, why have historians turned up evidence to the contrary: a fascist banner probably made by camp inmates, fist-fights initiated by Fascists against former colleagues whom they accused of backsliding, and continuing correspondence between inmates and Fascist officials abroad? However much former Fascists may regret their earlier affiliations, they cannot deny the past. As the Israeli historian Ze'ev Sternhell observes in his book on French fascism, which also

404 Franca lacovetta and Robert Ventresca brings history and people's recollection of it into conflict, 'people can change and have the right to do so, but they do not have the right to distort their own history or that of their time.'79 Most disturbing is the refusal to confront the mounting evidence that Duliani was a less-thanexemplary figure. The jury is still out, but in the light of the damaging evidence, we are mystified by the mental gymnastics involved in protecting, or reinventing, his reputation. Left out of the community history of internment are many people and events, not least of them the anti-fascists - whether liberals, social democrats, leftists, or Protestants - who, despite their small numbers and formidable foes, mounted an opposition to fascism. From the start, they openly opposed pro-fascist activities in the immigrant communities and alerted Canadian authorities to the 'dangers' of fascism. For their efforts, they were vilified in the immigrant communities, placed on OVRA surveillance lists, and endured threats aimed at them or kin back home. Italian-Canadian and other Canadian clerics alike denounced them as evil Protestants and communists. And RCMP officials, though happy to receive their usually reliable information, also entertained ways of deporting these 'dangerous communists' back to Italy. It is not surprising that the mainstream community today has not embraced the radical anti-fascists. From a historical perspective, however, such neglect is unacceptable. To have figured them in would have further muddied the main flow of the narrative - the war against ethnicity. How does one assert that the fling with fascism had been entirely benign or merely nostalgic when critics at the time were issuing warning cries?80 Also muddying the waters are those Canadians who did not succumb to the temptations of wartime Italaphobia. In contrast to city councils in Toronto and Windsor, which suspended enemy aliens from work and cut off social assistance, municipal councillors in Crowland (Welland), Ontario, passed a resolution in 1940 defending the loyalty and integrity of its Italian residents. Hamilton, in contrast to Toronto, registered no reports of property damage or physical violence aimed at Italians, and some well-placed individual Hamiltonians intervened on behalf of those arrested or interned. And while much has been made of the group of Cape Breton coal miners who refused to work alongside Italian-Canadian miners, nothing is said of another group, located nearby, who refused to work without their Italian co-workers.81 Even these few examples suggest the need for more research on Canadian responses to Italian internments.

Redress, Collective Memory, and the Politics of History 405 Conclusion: History and the Politics of Shame A language of shame (vergogna) has informed the redress campaign and community discussions of Italian-Canadian internment. We are reminded of the humiliation suffered by that generation of Italians, an entirely convincing point. But more than this, community leaders have tarred every present-day Italian Canadian with the stigma of internment and asked the Canadian state to help 'us/ as a community, overcome a legacy of shame and assist our ascent into full citizenship. While both of us are sympathetic to those needlessly humiliated, and aware of Italian Canadians' continuing sense of vulnerability, we object to this politics of shame. It has made it easier to simplify and distort the past and has helped cultivate a climate in which critics or sceptics of redress are branded as traitors to the community. We, as present-day Italian Canadians, feel neither responsible for nor embarrassed by the turbulent events of fifty years ago and resent being told that we should. We want to probe, not gloss lightly over or cover up, these events. Nor are we interested in asking the Canadian state to confer on us a status as citizens that we already enjoy and aggressively exercise. Italian Canadians, rather than being fed a streamlined version of the past meant to serve contemporary political ends, deserve full disclosure of all the evidence and interpretations so far available. They can then decide for themselves, through informed reflection and debate, how best to understand the dramatic events of these years. To expect less is shameful. Notes We would like to extend our thanks to Annamarie Castrilli, for graciously consenting to be interviewed by historians who do not share her views on internment or redress, and to Ian Radforth and Roberto Perin for their thoughtful feedback. 1 Cited in Toronto Star, 11 Sept 1990. 2 Toronto Star, 5 Nov. 1990; Toronto Globe and Mail, 5 Nov. 1990. 3 For example, Christie Blatchford called the internments a 'civilized mistake' and the apology a 'shameful... performance by a prime minister who is lower in the opinion pols than any prime minister has ever been.' 'Apology Is PM's Shame/ Toronto Sun, 6 Nov. 1990.

406 Franca lacovetta and Robert Ventresca 4 'The Road to Redress/ Toronto Star, 6 Nov. 1990. For ongoing media support, see, for example, ibid., 12 Jan., 11 Sept., 5 Nov. 1990; Globe and Mail, 5 Nov. 1990, 9 April 1994; La Gazetta, 29 Jan. 1990; // Corriere Canadese (hereafter CC), 6, 7 March 1997. 5 Presentation to 'the Internment of Italian Canadians' conference, Columbus Centre, Toronto, Oct. 1995. 6 Carletto (Charles) Caccia, 'A quando le scuse del governo canadese?' La Gazetta, 29 Jan. 1990 2; CC, 6 and 7 March 1997. 7 The classic historical work on ethnic leadership remains John Higham, ed., Ethnic Leadership in America (Baltimore, 1978). Similar issues regarding the uses of history for present purposes have emerged over the role of the historian as expert in contemporary legal cases. See, for example, Ruth Milkman, 'Women's History and the Sears Case/ Feminist Studies 12 (1986), 375^00. 8 Little recorded evidence besides media coverage is as yet available on the campaign, and there is almost nothing on events leading up to the 1990 apology. While Congress staff graciously fielded our questions, they could refer us only to the modest collection in the NCIC Archives in Toronto. Still, our research has enabled us to piece together much of what happened. 9 Roberto Ventresca's interview with Annamarie Castrilli, Toronto, Queen's Park, 8 Sept. 1997. 10 For details, see the introduction to this part and Maryka Omatsu, Bittersweet Passage: Redress and the Japanese Canadian Experience (Toronto, 1992), chap. 1. 11 Mulroney's actions also earned him praise from ethnic leaders such as Castrilli, later a Liberal MPP from Toronto and now a Conservative, who applauded Mulroney for pursuing a cause that he 'truly believed in.' Interview, 8 Sept. 1997. 12 In noting that 'timing' was on 'our side' for the $300- million apology package, Maryka Omatsu, a member of the NAJP's redress negotiating team, similarly observed that 'political analysts ... pronounced that the ethnic minorities were getting restless and that Canadians did not trust the prime minister.' Bittersweet Passage, 160-1. 13 Castrilli, cited in Toronto Star, 5 Nov. 1990. Our discussion of Mulroney draws on: Michel Gratton, So, What Are the Boys Saying? An Inside Look at Brian Mulroney in Power (Toronto, 1988); Claire Hoy, Friends in High Places: Politics and Patronage in the Mulroney Government (Toronto, 1987); Michael Bliss, Right Honourable Men: The Descent of Canadian Politics from Macdonald to Mulroney (Toronto, 1994), and John Sawatsky, Mulroney: The Politics of Ambition (Toronto, 1991).

Redress, Collective Memory, and the Politics of History 407 14 As prime minister, Trudeau stated his position that responsibility for past wrongs does not transcend generations in January 1984, when the NAJP launched its campaign. In rejecting their demands, he asked, rhetorically: 'I am not sure where we could stop the compensating. I know that we would have to go back a great length of time in history ... perhaps beginning with the deportations of the Acadians and going on to the treatment of the Chinese in the late nineteenth century I do not believe in attempting to rewrite history in this way' House of Commons Debates, 2 April 1984, 2623. 15 Debates, Official Report, 2nd Session, 32nd Parliament, vol. IV (1984), 5306-8. 16 Swyripa's essay in this volume. On other ethnic lobbies, see the introduction to this part. 17 NCIC Archives, Ontario Branch, Toronto, R. Obata to NCIC, 9 Feb. 1985 (with NAJC submissions for redress, including Omatsu's 'Democracy Betrayed'); ibid., Annamarie P. Castrilli to Domenico Rossi, NCIC president, 30 Nov. 1994; interview with Castrilli 8 Sept. 1997. 18 Luigi Pennacchio's 'Exporting Fascism to Toronto's Italians' was part of a continuing lecture series on Italian Canadians sponsored by York University's Mariano Elia Chair in Italian Canadian Studies, Columbus Centre, Toronto. In addition to being a lawyer, Castrilli has a PhD in Italian studies from the University of Toronto. A practising teacher, Pennacchio is a doctoral candidate at OISE / University of Toronto. 19 See also Omatsu, Bittersweet Passage. 20 The membership is probably much smaller and appears to draw heavily on professional, business, and other middle-class Italian Canadians. Unfortunately, no one, including Congress staff in Toronto, could supply us with any membership figures. 21 The full mission statement and objectives are reproduced in Annamarie Castrilli and Alfred Folco, A National Shame: The Internment of Italian Canadians, Brief by the National Congress of Italian Canadians, Jan. 1990 (hereafter NCIC Brief). 22 The NCIC Brief does not fully cite sources, but it is clear that the following secondary works were used: Bruno Ramirez, 'Ethnicity On Trial: The Italians of Montreal and the Second World War,' in Norman Hillmer, Bohdan Kordan, and Lubomyr Luciuk, eds., On Guard for Thee: War, Ethnicity, and the Canadian State, 1939-1945 (Ottawa, 1988); Joseph Anthony Ciccocelli, 'The Innocuous Enemy Alien: Italians in Canada during World War Two,' MA thesis, University of Western Ontario, 1977; Kenneth Bagnell, Canadese: A Portrait of the Italian Canadians (Toronto, 1989). Castrilli used the word 'objective' in her interview.

408 Franca lacovetta and Robert Ventresca 23 NCIC Brief, 21. 24 The only solid request for money had concerned funds for educational purposes - to 'tell' the internment story. Toronto Star, 5 Nov. 1990. 25 The Congress supported the Alliance's objective to share experiences and discuss strategy but also preferred to present the Italian case on its own, not simply as part of a package. Interview with Castrilli, 8 Sept. 1997. 26 The hearings were recorded and videotaped, but despite following several leads we could not locate them. We hope that the records will be deposited in an archive. For a brief discussion of the hearings, see NCIC Archives, Castrilli to Rossi, 30 Nov. 1994, 4; presentations by Castrilli and Bisceglia to the 'Internment of Italian Canadians' conference; conversations with NCIC staff. 27 Quoted from 'II Congresso si appella a Mulroney/ CC, 31 May to 1 June 1993. 28 Renzo Orsi, NCIC president, to Weiner, 26 May 1993, and House of Commons Debates (Marchi), 27 May 1993, both cited in NCIC Archives, Castrilli to Rossi, 30 Nov. 1994, 5-6. 29 Caccia, long-time Liberal MP for Davenport (Toronto), distanced himself from his initial support for the NCIC's version of the internment as the indiscriminate rounding up of Italian Canadians by stating in May 1997 that he was now of the opinion that 'only those suspected of dealings with the fascist party were interned.' See Carletto Caccia's column in CC, 29 Jan. 1990; and Elaine Sambugaro, 'II caso degl'Internati e' da archiviare,' ibid., 8 May 1997. Caccia's change of heart, expressed during the latest debate recorded in the press following the showing of Barbed Wires and Mandolins, provided a rush of responses in CC, as did his criticism of the protest organized by some NCIC members at an address given by Chretien at the Columbus Centre on 28 April 1997. For example, see CC, 12 and 14 May 1997. 30 Castrilli, cited in CC, 5-6 Jan. 1994. This strategy had emerged earlier - for example, the committee indicated its plans to take submissions to the United Nations in its correspondence with Prime Minister Campbell - but it now became publicly discussed. 31 NCIC Archives, Gray to Bisceglia, 14 Feb. 1995; Bisceglia's presentation, 'Internment of Italian-Canadians' conference. 32 NCIC Archives, Castrilli to Rossi, 30 Nov. 1994; Bisceglia to Rossi, confidential fax, 17 March 1995; ibid., NCIC press release for press conference, 29 April 1997, Columbus Centre, Toronto. 33 Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). Rousso defines the history of memory as the

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34

35 36

37 38

39

40

41

42

study of 'the form and content of social practises whose purpose or effect is to the representation and the perpetuation of its memory within a particular group or the society as a whole/ 3. For example, the literature on women and wartime rape, including Annemarie Troeger, 'German Women's Memories of World War II,' in Margaret Randolph Higonnet et al., eds., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, Conn., 1987); Marlene Epp, 'The Memory of Violence: Soviet and East European Mennonite Women Refugees and Rape in the Second World War/ Journal of Women's History 9, no. 1 (spring 1997), 58-87. Here we diverge somewhat from Rousso, who did posit a clearer demarcation between scholarly reconstructions and group memories of the past. For fuller treatments of enduring debates about historical practice, see, for example, E.H. Carr, What Is History? (Middlesex, 1967); Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity' Question and the American Historical Profession (New York, 1988); Joy Parr, 'Gender History and Historical Practice/ Canadian Historical Review 76, no. 3 (1995), 354-76; Franca lacovetta and Wendy Mitchinson, eds., On the Case: Explorations in Social History (Toronto, 1998), especially the introduction. See Ken Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians (Toronto, 1976), and discussion below. NCIC Brief, 5; it notes that estimates range from more than 500 to close to 700 internees, ibid., 7. The 1941 census lists 112,625 persons of Italian origin, of whom more than 90 per cent were naturalized or Canadian-born citizens. For proof, it cites data from the 1921 and 1931 Canadian Census showing that the incidence of criminal activity was lower among southern, eastern, and central European immigrants than among Anglo-Saxon, French, and northern Europeans. Ibid., 5. The NCIC Brief cites the Canadian Committee for the History of the Second World War (CCHSWW) as the author, but the lengthy excerpt is from Ramirez's article in Hillmer, Kordan, and Luciuk, eds., On Guard for Thee, published under the auspices of the CCHSWW and edited by three of its members. What follows is: 'Bruno Ramirez comes to the same conclusion: "Of course, Italian Canadians who had actually sworn allegiance to Mussolini were very few in number. The majority instead had sworn allegiance to the English [sic] Crown, while at the same time preserving a sense of pride in their national origin.'" NCIC Brief, 6. Ibid., 7,10.

410 Franca lacovetta and Robert Ventresca 43 It notes that Joe Di Santi wrote Mackenzie King asking why his father was interned while an older brother served in the Canadian army. Cited from Grace Macaluso, 'Enemy Alien/ Windsor Star, 23 Jan. 1989, 9, in NCIC Brief, 19. 44 NCIC Brief, 6,12. 45 Ibid., 11,10; the critical phrase in the undertaking, reproduced in the brief, is the 'promise that I will carefully observe and obey the laws of Canada' and in no way cause 'injury' to Canada, the United Kingdom, and allies. Ibid., 11. 46 Ibid., 14. 47 Ibid., 14-18. Few Italians who were technically 'enemy aliens' - that is, not Canadian citizens in 1940 - were actually interned, for the RCMP did not consider them dangerous to national security. 48 Cited from W.D. Hamilton, 'Fifth Column Hysteria Is Helping Hitler,' Saturday Night, Dec. 1940, in ibid., 11; Toronto Star, 11 June 1940, cited in ibid., 18. 49 NCIC Brief, 18, 21. 50 Ibid., 1, 23. 51 Interview with Castrilli, 8 Sept. 1997; presentations by Castrilli and Bisceglia at the 'Internment of Italian Canadians' conference. 52 For an example of a very favourable review, see Mark Thompson's review of Mario Duliani, The City without Women: A Chronicle of Internment Life in Canada during World War II, translated from the French and the Italian, with an Introduction by Antonino Mazza (Oakville, 1994), in Globe and Mail, 9 April 1994, C19. See Perm's essay in this volume. 53 Zavaglia also directed and Grana also produced Barbed Wires and Mandolins; see also Swyripa's essay in this volume. 54 Quotations are from NCIC Archives, National Film Board (NFB) news release, synopsis, and background notes on Barbed Wires and Mandolins, 13 Feb. 1997; additional description draws on our viewing of the documentary. Bagnell is a Canadian journalist and writer and the author of Canadese. Unless otherwise stated, the description below draws on these sources. 55 NFB background notes. 56 NFB synopsis. 57 In 1943 the remainder at Petawawa were sent to Gagetown, near Fredericton. 58 Ibid. 59 This is not to suggest that redress efforts had ceased, as Bisceglia and others continued to press for compensation. See also CC, 5 March 1997, 3,

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73

411

on NCIC and Canadian Jewish Congress plans to attend the International Day for Prevention of Racial Discrimination in Washington, DC. There are a few errors, including assertions that variously 2,500 and 2,800 Italian Canadians were interned. Ibid., 5 and 6 March 1997. Mazza, 'La vergogna "degl'internati": una duplice eredita/ Speciale, ibid., 6 March 1997, 4-5. 'I Dati' (the data, as in 'the facts') sidebar, ibid., 5 March 1997, 3; Antonio Nicaso, 'II voltafaccia dei Liberali/ ibid., 6 March 1997, 4. For further discussion of the criticisms launched against the Liberals see below; Antonino Mazza, 'La vergogna .../ ibid., 6 March 1997, 5; Angelo Persichelli, 'Open Letter to Sergio Marchi,' editorial in ibid., 6 March 1997, front page. Colin McClelland, 'Internati: trattati come gli ebrei dai tedeschi/ ibid., 7 March 1997. He approached eight Italian-Canadian students, none of whom had known about the internments, and three agreed to be interviewed. Quoted in article '"Sei italiano?": E tutti pagarono col carcere' (no author credit), ibid., 3. See also Scardellato's essay in this book. Mazza, 'La vergogna/ 4-5. Angelo Persichilli, 'Perdonare si - dimenticare no,' CC, 5 March 1997, front page. While former Liberal John Nunziata has been mostly openly critical, Liberals such as Maria Minna, a respected social activist, have acknowledged the case for redress but also advised patience. Nunziata, Minna, Castrilli, and Joe Volpe, quoted in ibid., 6 March 1997. Angelo Persichilli, 'Caro Ministro Marchi/ ibid., 6 March 1997, front page. For an angry denunciation, see also Nicaso, 'II voltafaccia dei Liberali/ who writes: 'Basta con 1'ipocrisia ...' (Enough of the hypocrisy). To what extent the critique of the two founding nations - a critique that race-relations activists share - is also a response to Quebec separatists and the treatment of minorities in Quebec remains open for debate. Paola Ludovici, 'Ma erano fascist! davvero?' CC, 7 March 1997, 3. Ramirez expressed his concerns during a heated exchange between ItalianCanadian historians and NCIC leaders at the 'Internment of Italian Canadians' conference. Robert F. Harney, 'Caboto and Other Parentella/ in Roberto Perin and Franc Sturino, eds., Arrangiarsi: The Italian Immigrant Experience in Canada (Montreal, 1989). See for example, writings of Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, 1979); Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New

412 Franca lacovetta and Robert Ventresca

74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81

York, 1965); and R.J.B. Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War, 1945-1990 (London, 1993). Patricia Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights (Toronto, 1991). For the potshots against the 'multicultural mania' and other muddled arguments, see J.L. Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History? (Toronto, 1998). Ken Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians (Toronto, 1991). See also Marka Omatsu, Bittersweet Passage: Redress and the Japanese Canadian Experience (Toronto 1992). These calculations are based on data gathered on 503 internees. See Luigi Bruti Liberati, // Canada, I'ltalia e ilfascismo 1919-1945 (Rome, 1984). See Reg Whitaker, 'Official Repression of Communism during World War II,' Labour/Le Travail 17 (spring 1986), 135-66. Much of this history could not be written until researchers devoted considerable effort to gaining access to confidential records through the cumbersome freedom-of-information legislation. For fuller discussion, see, for example, Gregory S. Kealey and Reg Whitaker, Introduction, RCMP Security Bulletins: The War Series, Part II (St John's, 1993). Ze'ev Sternhell, Neither Left nor Right (Berkeley, 1986), xi. On the need for published histories of the Italian left in Canada, see also Franca lacovetta and Robert Ventresca, 'Italian Radicalism in Canada: A Note on Sources in Italy/ Labour/le Travail 37 (spring 1996), 205-20. On Hamilton, see Gumbo's essay in this volume; on coal miners see NCIC Brief; Bagnell, Canadese; and for the opposing view, Principe's essay in this volume.

Contributors

R.J.B. Bosworth is professor of history at the University of Western Australia in Perth and a specialist in Italian history, Italian-Australian immigration, and the Second World War. The author of a number of books on modern Italy, including Italy and the Wider World (1996) and The Italian Dictatorship (1998), he also wrote the critically acclaimed Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War (1992). Luigi Bruti Liberati of the University of Milan is research associate with the Inter-University Centre for the Study of Canada. He is the author of numerous articles and a book-length study, II Canada, I'ltalia, and il fascismo (1984), and editor of II Canada e la Guerra del Trent'anni (1990). He has written, with Luca Codignola of the University of Genoa, the first survey text on the history of Canada to be published in Europe. Enrico Carlson Cumbo earned his PhD from the University of Toronto, where he has also taught North American and immigration history. Chief researcher for the Italian Canadian Workers exhibit at the Ontario Arts and Heritage Centre, he is revising his thesis - a study of Italian children in interwar Toronto - for publication. His published work deals with Italian Pentecostals, folklore and culture, community life, and, more recently, boxing. Paula J. Draper, a scholar of immigration, the Holocaust, and memory history, is revising her dissertation on the internment of Jewish refugees in Canada for publication and completing a national study of Holocaust survivors in Canada. She is co-editor of the Canadian volume of

414 Contributors Archives of the Holocaust (with Harold Troper) and A Nation of Immigrants (with Franca lacovetta and Robert Ventresca). Franca lacovetta wrote the prize-winning Such Hardworking People: Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto and won the Therese Casgrain award to complete a book on immigrant and refugee reception work in Cold War Canada. A professor of history at the University of Toronto and coeditor of Studies in Gender and History at the University of Toronto Press, her recent books include the co-edited volumes A Nation of Immigrants; On the Case: Explorations in Social History (with Wendy Mitchinson), and Becoming a Historian (with Molly Ladd Taylor). Gregory S. Kealey is dean of the School of Graduate Studies at Memorial University in St John's and founding editor of Labour/Le Travail. He has published numerous articles on working-class history social history and, most recently, state repression and the left. The recipient of several scholarly awards, including one for his first book, Toronto Workers Confront Industrialism, Kealey's most recent publications include Workers and Canadian History and, with Reg Whitaker, the multi-volume RCMP Bulletins. Michelle McBride is a doctoral candidate in history at Memorial University in St John's and on staff at Labour/Le Travail. Her article in this volume draws on research completed for her master's thesis on the RCMP and fascism in interwar Canada. Her doctoral dissertation concerns the political economy of oil development in Newfoundland. Luigi G. Pennacchio has published numerous articles on Canadian immigration and security intellience history, Italian-Canadian studies, and educational history. A teacher in Toronto, Pennacchio is also completing a doctoral dissertation on Italians in Toronto during the Second World War at the University of Toronto (OISE). Roberto Perin is a history professor at York University and editor of the Canadian Historical Association's series of Ethnic Booklets. He has written numerous publications on Quebec, immigration, and the Catholic church, including the award-winning Rome in Canada: The Vatican in Canadian Affairs in the Late Victorian Age. He is also co-editor of Arrangiarsi: The Italian Immigrant Experience in Canada (with Franc Sturino).

Contributors 415 Angelo Principe is a veteran Italian-Canadian journalist and activist. He obtained his PhD in Italian studies from the University of Toronto and has been a part-time instructor there, as well as at York University. He is the author of The Darkest Side of the Fascist Years: The Italian Canadian Press 1920-1942 (Toronto, 1999). Ian Radforth teaches history at the University of Toronto and has published on working-class history, ethnic radicalism, and resource industries and of late on nineteenth-century state formation, colonial identities, and public spectacle. He is the author of and contributor to two prize-winning books, Bushworkers and Bosses and Labouring Lives, and co-editor of Colonial Leviathan (with Allan Greer) and Canadian Working Class History (with Laurel Sefton Macdowell). He is writing a social and cultural history of the royal visit to Canada and the United States by Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), in 1860. Gabriele Scardellato was for ten years director of research resources at the Multicultural History Society of Ontario in Toronto. Adjunct professor in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto, he is a specialist on Italian-Canadian immigration and western Canadian history and editor of Ontario History. With Roberto Perin, he is completing a multi-media study of ethnic churches in Toronto. Rose D. Scherini completed her PhD in educational anthropology at the University of California (Berkeley) and published her dissertation as The Italian-American Community of San Francisco (1980). She is curator of 'Una storia segreta: When Italian Americans were "Enemy Aliens/" the travelling exhibit that has been touring the United States since its first showing in San Francisco in February 1994. Lucio Sponza was born and educated (initially, in economics) in Venice and earned his MA and PhD degrees in history from the University of London, England. A professor of Italian studies at the University of Westminster (London), his numerous publications include Italian Immigrants in Nineteenth Century Britain: Realities and Images and Italy - World Biographies Series (co-edited with D. Zancani). Frances Swyripa is a professor of history at the University of Alberta

416 Contributors and director of the Ukrainian-Canadian Program at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies there. Author of many publications in Canadian immigrant and women's history, ethnic literature, and community politics, she wrote Wedded to the Cause: Ukrainian-Canadian Women and Ethnic Identity and, with John Herd Thompson, edited Loyalties in Conflict: Ukrainians in Canada During the Great War. Robert Ventresca, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto and co-editor of A Nation of Immigrants, has a combined interest in Italy, Canada, and migration. He has written on immigrant workers, radicals in the Italian diaspora, and modern Italy. In 1998-9, he was a recipient of the University of Toronto's Dissertation Fellowship and winner of the graduate student Siena study fellowship administered by the University of Toronto/University of Siena Exchange Programme. He is completing a dissertation on the social, gender, and cultural history of Italy's 1948 election. Reg Whitaker is professor of political science at York University and a specialist on Canadian politics, immigration policy, the RCMP, and the Cold War. He is the author of many articles and several books, including Double Standard: The Secret History of Canadian Immigration Policy and (with G. Marcuse) Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State. He is completing (with Gregory S. Kealey) a history of security intelligence in Canada.

Illustration Credits

Archives of Ontario: youth band, ITA 2004-6; Fascio Femminile, ITA 2559-6 T. Bock: Mulroney with lannuzzi and Zaffiro, Toronto Star, no. 90-11-04-2-22 Paula Draper Collection: yeshiva students, courtesy Rabbi Erwin Schild; prison enclosure, Isle of Man, courtesy of Harry Seidler Multicultural History Society of Ontario, Toronto, Osvaldo Giacomelli Collection: The Hill Billies band; twelve pictures that appear in Scardellato essay National Archives: excerpts from Italian grammar text, RG 30, E 163, vol. 12, file 137; secret memorandum re Dr D'Anna, RG 18, vol. 3563, Cll-19-2-3; internees at work, RG 24, National Defence Records, vol. 15399 Elvira (Marascha) Piccini: young Hamilton women in Italian summer camps Angelo Principe Collection: Franceschini reception; ad for picnic; boy meets Ciano; letter from inmate; Casa d'ltalia in Hamilton Vittorio Rossi: Program, Paradise by the River, c. 1997 Rose Scherini Collection: Fort Missoula, courtesy University of Montana Library University of Toronto Archives, Kenny Collection: Smith taken by paddy wagon; Song of Franceschini, 'The Red Patch/ 1942; William Kashtan, MS 179, box 43, file 12

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Index

Abano, Placido, 290 Acerbo, Giacomo, 28 Adachi, Ken, 389 Agro, Charles, 106 Agro, John, 106 Agro, Dr Vincent, 48,101 Alcorso, Claudio, 235 Alovisi, Ernesto, 91 Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 78 Ambrosi, Gian-Battista, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 62 American Italian Historical Association, 299, 310 Anderson, Sir John, 261, 262 Andriano, Sylvester, 293, 294, 295 anti-fascism, 15, 35, 58-60, 78,133, 195, 197-8, 234-5, 293, 404; Canadian League for Peace (League against War and Fascism), 33; Independent Order Sons of Italy (Order Italo-Canadese), 36 anti-Semitism, 17, 34-6, 38, 172; antiSemitic legislation in Italy, 235, 251 Antoniutti, Archbishop Ildebrando, 39, 317

Anwander, Lydia, 159 Anzani, Decio, 277 Arcand, Adrien, 10,15, 37,138,146, 150,151, 323, 420 Arcand, Yvonne, 150 Atkinson, J.E., 31 Attfield, John, 220 B., Ruggero, 28, 45, 51 Baccocina, Angelo, 286 Bagnell, Kenneth, 51,117, 336, 352, 353, 354, 386, 392, 394, 407, 412 Bahr, Dr, 182 Baratto, Ernesto, 235 Barboglio, Francesco, 52, 66, 74 Bartolino, Sam, 353 Battistessa, Franco, 233 Baum, Gregory, 179 Bavin, E.W., 84, 152,157,167 Bayley Charles, 9 Belcastro, Domenico, 45 Bell, Bishop George, 274 Belli, Franco, 273, 279 Belli, Frank, 273, 279 Belli, Ines, 273 Belli, Mary, 273 Bennett, R.B., 31

420 Index Beraud, Jean, 334 Berry, Major (commandant of Camp R), 175,176 Berthiaume, Eugene, 322 Bertolini, Aristide, 287 Bettelheim, Bruno, 395 Biddle, Francis E., 288, 289, 291, 295, 297, 298 Biffi, A.S., 28, 44, 45 Bilecki, Tony, 199, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 211, 219 Binder, Louis, 204, 209, 210, 211 Binowsky, Mike, 204 Bird, Henry, 308 Bisceglia, Emilio, 387, 396 Blacks, 8-9, 30, 33 Blair, Frederick Charles (F.C.), 172, 185,187,188,189 Blatchford, Christie, 405 Blaylock, S. Gwillim, 43 Blenkarn, Don, 366 Blume, Helmut, 180 Bohle, Wilhelm, 153 Borden, Robert, 357 Borsellino, Alfonso, 109 Bosia, Remo, 295-7 Bouchard, Lucien, 382 Boxtel, John, 368 Brifrene, Rose, 46 Brigidi, Giuseppe, 86 Brind'Amours, Yvette, 327 Bronny, Elisabeth, 156,159 Bronny, Ruth, 156,159 Brown, Jan, 377 Browning, Christopher, 253 Buck, Tim, 139,198 Budka, Bishop Nykyta, 357 Buhay, Becky, 164 Buller, Annie, 164 Burnet, Miss, 151

Burzle, John A., 159 Burzle, Muriel Maria, 159 Bush, Geroge, 299 Bychinska, Anna, 359 C, Pasquale, 70 Caboto, Giovanni, 398, 399 Caccia, Carletto, 387, 408 Cahen, Oscar, 180,191 Calwell, Arthur, 240, 246 Campbell, Kim, 387, 408 Canadian Italian Advocates Association, 386 Canadian Italian Business and Professional Men's Association, 384-6 Canadian Jewish Congress, 35, 81, 176,185,191-2 Canadian National Committee for Refugees, 178 Canadian Race Relations Foundation, 308 Cannon, Oscar, 108,110 Carman, Ellis, 110 Cantoni, Giulio, 177 Capobianco, Antonio, 384 Capozzi, Mrs, 43 Carter, Irene, 153 Carter (Chief Justice), 202 Carwell, Arthur, 227 Casci, Giannina, 273 Casci, Pietro, 273 Casotti, Bruno, 242 Castellani, Bruno, 177 Castrilli, Annamarie, 381, 382, 383, 384, 385, 386, 387, 405, 406 Casullo, Archbishop A., 57 Catholic church, 8,10, 38-9, 56-7, 244-6, 252, 317 Cavalli, Cabisto, 263, 277 Cecil, Viscount, of Chellwood, 261

Index 421 Cepo, Joe, 230 Cervetto, Joseph L., 287 Chamberlain, Neville, 39, 40, 50 Charest, Jean, 367, 368 Charles, Ethel M., 272 Chornovil, Vyacheslav, 371 Chretien, Jean, 368, 378, 381, 387, 395, 396, 397 Christie Pits riot (Toronto), 8-9,12, 14,15, 30 Churchill, Winston, 228 Chyczij, Alexandra, 376 Ciano, Galeazzo, 63 Ciccocelli, J. Anthony, 389, 403 Ciccotosto, Peter, 244, 254 Cipywnyk, Dmytro, 376 Citarelli, Renato, 236, 253 Cody, C.H. John, 31 Cohen, Jacob L., 125, 202, 218 Cohen, Oscar, 180 Colangelo, Fernanda, 106 Colonna, Duke Mario, 31 Colonna, Guido (vice-consul), 52, 65 Columbus, Christopher, 399 Colussi, Dante, 42 Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment (U.S.), 298-9, 308 Communist Party of Canada (CPC), 59, 139, 141, 152, 196-8, 215, 219 Connell, R.W., 16, 21 Cooper, Louise, 273 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), 59; Italian section, 33 Corde, Frank, 45 Corley, Ida, 164 Croci, Ida, 273 Crerar, Thomas, 187, 188, 192

Dafoe, J.W., 31 Daladier, Edouard, 39 D'Andrea, Frank, 396 Danesi, Tony, 395 D'Anna, Antonio, 162 D'Anna, Laura, 161-3 De Bosis, Lauro, 186 De Guttadauro, Angelo, 295, 298 Delia Noce, Vincent, 384 De Nino, (Senator) Consiglio, 384 Del Piero, Aurelio, 353 De Simone, Etta, 161 De Simone, Paolo, 39, 322 Defence of Canada Regulations (DOCR), 92, 99,102-3,107,112, 125,128-9,132-3,139,148,158, 162,164,197, 218, 390, 401 DeWitt, Lieut.-Gen. John L., 288, 289, 290, 292, 297 Diefenbaker, John, 42 Dieni, Gentile, 91 Diffring, Anton, 180 Di loia, Giuseppina, 154 Di Santi, Joe, 410 Di Silvestro, Giovanni, 352 Dolfuss, Chancellor Englebert, 319, 332 Doukhobors, 124 Draper, Ruth, 186-8 Dubro, James, 110,119 Duhig, Archbishop, 244, 252 Duliani, Mario, 13,14, 311, 312-15, 321-6, 335-7, 351, 390, 392-3, 395-6, 404; legacy, 326-9. See also Ville sansfemmes, La Duplessis, Maurice, 41,133,145, 323 Durritti, B., 242 Durso, John, 45

Dafoe, Christopher, 366

Eaton, Lady, 31

422

Index

Eden, Anthony, 211, 228, 263 Edwards, L., 46 Fackenheim, Emil, 179 Falasca, Giovanni, 286, 302 Fantin, Francesco, 254 fascism: - Canadian, 137-9; French Canadians and, 9, 38-9, 41; lack of Canadian policy towards, 37-41; National Social Christian Party (National Unity Party), 149-52, 166, 320, 323 - German-Canadian, 134-7; Deutscher Bund, 125 - Italian and diaspora: ItalianAmerican, 282-4; Italian-Australian, 233-4; Italian-British, 258; Italian-Canadian, 31-5, 132-4; associational life, 10, 24, 54-7, 85, 100-2: Casa d'ltalia, 64-5,100-2; dopolavoro, 55, 65, 82,100, 338; Fronte Unico Morale Italiano, 86; Order Sons of Italy, 55-6, 78; propaganda, 53-5, 57-8, 322-4; schools, 60-1; veterans association, 55, 65, 66, 82, 85-6,100, 282, 283-5; youth organizations, 61-4, 241 fascist women. See women Fauteux, Gerald, 86, 87, 88, 89,162 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) (U.S.), 14, 225, 281, 283-6, 293, 294, 297 Ferrario, Marie, 287, 303 Ferri, Benny, 347, 353, 354, 379, 403 Ferri brothers, 109 Finestone, Sheila, 365, 366 Fischer, Gerard, 229, 250 Flaxton, Geary, 47

Foa, Guido, 177 Folco, Alfred, 386 Fontanella, Maria Egilda, 159,160 Fontanella, Pasquale, 160 Franceschini, James, 28, 44, 58,140, 204, 396, 403 Franco, Francisco, 27, 39 Frascarelli, Carmela, 154 Frediani, Etelvina, 154 Freed, Jennie, 215, 217 Freed, Norman, 198, 207, 215, 217 G., Antonio, 56 Gehl, Ella, 164 Giacomelli, Osvaldo, 109,112,113, 119, 337-40, 341, 344, 347, 348, 349, 351, 352, 353, 354 Giancotti, Nicola, 47 Giannini, A.P., 294 Gibson, Frank, 245 Giguere, Mme Paul, 151 Gilroy, Norman, 233 Giordano, Antonio, 233, 252 Giubilei, Fosca, 154 Giusti, Raffaele, 279 Goggio, Emilio, 31 Goldstick, David, 202 Gouin, Paul, 38 Grana, Sam, 393 Granatstein, J.L., 76, 77,132 Grant, Freddy, 180 Gray, Herb, 387 Greiner, Nick, 248 Grohovaz, Gianni, 326 Guagnelli, Luisa, 159,160,161 Gualtieri, R.D., 48 Guevremont, Germaine, 327 Gunn, R., 47 Haccius, R., 266

Index 423 Haidinger, Katharine M., 158,165 Halifax, Lord, 261, 263 Harney, Robert, 8, 398 Harvison, Clifford, 136,137 Haskett, Mary Manko, 365, 369 Hepburn, Mitchell, 104,140, 216 Hilmer, Mariel (Mrs Johan Hans), 158, 159 Hilmer, Mary, 169 Hitler, Adolf, 5,11, 24, 34, 39, 40, 43, 50,106,126,134,137,161,183, 198, 200, 214, 215, 219, 251, 325 Holmes, Colin, 275 Hoover, J. Edgar, 297 Horrall, Stan, 144,167 Houde, Camillien, 38, 320 Hower (Haver), Bertha, 158 Hull, Quebec: Jail, 212-14 Huot, Jiuliette, 327 Hutterites, 124 Hyndman, J.D., 160 lannuzzi, Dan, 380 Ilacqua, Bruna, 285 Ilacqua, Carmelo, 283-6 Inter-Departmental Committee on Internment (IDC) (Canada), 149, 152, 153,154, 157, 158,161, 166 internees (male): in Britain, 254-8, 271-4; in Canada, 16-18, 92,105-8, 184, 201-2, 208-9, 213-14, 217-19, 243, 271^, 285, 315-16, 369-70, 391-2; Communists, 7,12,14,15, 125,130-1,140,163-4,194-220; Italian Canadians, 8H7-90; Jews, 17190. For female internees, see women internment: - Australia: daily life, 243-5 - Britain: daily life, 265-9; work, 269-71

- Canada, 15-16,123,124,172-8, 194, 202, 205, 208, 211-12, 212-14, 219, 312, 339, 341-2, 344-5, 348, 351, 363, 365-70, 386, 395-6, 403; daily life, 90-2,178-81, 202-3, 207-8, 316-19; morale, 183-4; photographs, 337-50; politics, 174, 182-3, 212-14, 319-21, 324-5, 348-50; recreation, 180-1, 205-7, 342, 344-7; scams, 110-11; sexuality, 185,195-6; tensions, 91, 175-6, 209-11; wardens, 158,161, 164,165,168,169,170; work, 203-5 internment legacy: Australia, 246-8; Britain, 274-5; Canada, 370-2; United States, 298-300 Internment Operations (Canada), director of (DIG), 155,156,159, 165 internment policy: Australia, 241-5; Britain, 259-65; Canada, 82-5, 196-202; United States, 12, 281-98 Isajiw, Sophia, 370 Jackson, C.S., 200, 205, 215, 216 Japanese Canadians, 7,12-17, 92, 95, 121^, 129, 143, 221, 382-92 Jasmin, Judith, 327 Jehovah's Witnesses, 37,125 Jewish refugees: interned in Canada, 173-90; camps: listed, 172-3, described, 173-85 Jones, Ted, 341, 352 Jung, Guido, 34

Kander, Gerhard, 180 Kaplan, William, 129 Kashtan, William, 216 Keyserlingk, H. Robert, 4, 81, 82,136

424

Index

King, William Lyon Mackenzie, 37, 38, 39, 40; view of Mussolini, 40-1, 50, 99,123,138,187,188,197, 216, 389, 394, 399, 410 Kirkconnell, Watson, 49,142 Kitano, Harry H.L., 301 Klassen, Maria Augusta (Mrs Siebon), 158 Kordan, Bohdan, 364, 368 Kostash, Myrna, 360 Krawchuk, Peter, 204, 208, 210 Kreisel, Henry, 181 Kulessa, Gertrude, 153,157,158,164 La Guardia, Fiorello, 280 Lamberti, Carlo, 47 Langstadt, Robert, 180 Lapalme, George, 326 Lapointe, Ernest, 28, 39, 41, 83, 214, 217, 218, 394 Lateran Pact, 56, 258 Latham, Richard, 263 Lattoni, Liborio, 31 Laurendeau, Andre, 31, 38 Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 371 Lawrence, Carmen, 248 Leniham, Anne, 201 Leniham, Pat, 201, 205, 208 Lenti, Faustino, 242 Leopold, John, 133 Levy, Norman, 202 Lewis, Austin, 46 Lo Bosco, Verna, 159,160 Loero, Celestina, 291 Loewy, Harry, 182,185 Longo, Domenico, 45 Loraine, Sir Percy, 262, 263, 264 Loria, Gaetano, 268 Lorschi, Countess Maria, 31 Lowrie, Howard A., 199

Luciuk, Lubomyr, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369 Luhovy, Yurj, 366 Luzzato, Luigi, 34 Lytton, Lord, 263, 264 Macaluso, Grace, 410 McCloy, John J., 295 McDonald, Gladys, 164,194 McEwen, Tom, 198 McKean, Fergus, 215 Mackenzie King, William Lyon. See King, William Lyon Mackenzie McLean, Scott, 205 McMannus, T.G., 217 MacNally, Bishop J.T., 31, 32 MacNeill, J.F., 83, 84 MacQuarrie, Paola Ludovici, 397 Madotti, Ugo, 243 Magi, J. Massimo, 32, 46 Magnuson, Bruce, 200, 204, 207 Magnuson, Kate, 214 Maltempi, Benedetto, 87 Mancuso, Antonietta, 154 Mancuso, Ferdinando, 35 Mancuso, Salvatore, 91, 396, 403 Manfriani, Zanobi, 10, 87 Mannix, Archbishop Daniel, 240, 244, 245, 246 Manzoni, Alessandro, 267 Marchi, Sergio, 386, 387, 397, 411 Margotti, Pio, 77 Mari, Tommaso, 37,151 Martini, Quinto, 42,107 Martynowich, Orest, 365 Marunchak, Michael, 374 Mascioli, Leo, 204 masculinity, 15-16, 185; idea of breadwinner, 92,105, 201-2 Massig, Paula, 153

Index 425 Maxwell, Alexander, 259 Mazza, Antonino, 109, 327, 330, 337, 376, 393, 394, 395 Mead, F.J., 79 Meech Lake Accord, 383 memory, 14, 113-14,189-90, 204-5, 208-9, 212-14, 239, 243-4, 298300, 313-21, 328-9, 335, 350-1, 361-2, 387-8, 398^05; Barbed Wires and Mandolins, 393-4; Freedom Had a Price: Canada's First Internment Operation, 366; A National Shame: The Internment of Italian Canadians, 386, 388-93; Una storia segreta, 299-300, 301, 304, 305, 311 Mennonites, 124,130 Menzies, Robert, 237 Mercer, R.E., 81 MI5, 225, 259-60, 263, 275 Miclet, Arnaldo, 37, 62 Miki, Roy, 309 Milliken, Peter, 367 Mills, Margaret, 164 Mingarelli, Jos, 326 Minna, Maria, 411 Mistorigo, Luigi, 236 Moffat, J. Pierrepont, 37 Mola, Gen. Vidal E., 27 Molinari, Filippo, 283 Molinaro, Frank, 31 Montreal Repertory Theatre, 312 Morrison, Jim, 110 Moylan, Sir John, 270 Mulroney, Brian, 6, 27, 44, 307, 309, 365, 367, 371, 379, 380, 382, 383, 384, 385, 392, 397, 403, 406 Murray, Charlie, 199, 205, 209 Mussolini, Benito, 9,10,11, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 52, 53,

56, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 67, 70, 78, 81, 99,106,107,112,121,140,186, 226, 232, 234, 235, 237, 239, 242, 251, 252, 256, 257, 258, 263, 276, 282, 293, 297, 302, 319, 320, 332, 337, 351, 379, 389, 398, 399

National Association of Japanese Canadians, 308-10, 382, 384-5 National Congress of Italian Canadians (NCIC), 312, 379, 3813, 386-9, 392, 393, 396, 399, 403 Neilson, Dorise, 215 Neumark, Johnny, 180 Nicaso, Antonio, 395, 411 Nisei Mass Evacuation Group, 123 Nora, Pierre, 247 Olivieri, Donato, 353 Olivieri, Francesca, 154 Orange Order, 32 Orsi, Celeste, 272 Orsi, Chiara, 272 Orsi, Renzo, 408 Orsini, Antonio, 272 O'Sullivan, Nora, 273 OVRA (Opera Vigilanza Repressione Antifascismo), 58-9, 79, 85, 322, 327, 334, 393, 396, 402 Pacitti, Guglielmo, 272 Pacitti, Maria, 272 Paino, Salvatore, 241 Pancaro, Luigi, 336, 337 Paoletti, Anastasio, 246 Papalia, Antonio, 45 Papineau, Louis-Joseph, 368 Parini, Piero, 31, 63, 64 Parisi, Raimondo, 45 Pasculli, Caterina, 242

426 Index Pataracchia, Nello, 107 Pater son, Alexander, 177,178 Patrizi, Ettore, 282, 293, 294, 295 Peeters, Antonia, 161 Perasso, Gian Battista, 72 Perri, Bessie Starkman, 105,116 Perri, Michele, 45 Perri, Rocco, 28, 45,104,105, 353, 403 Persichilli, Angelo, 395, 396, 397 Perugia, Giulio, 177,191 Petrucci, Luigi, 33, 39, 53, 56, 322 Pfeiffer, Julius, 183 Philipps, Tracy, 4, 37,112,142 Pinkhan, Annie, 44 Pirandello, Luigi, 327 Pius XI, 35, 64 Polletri, Ida, 272 Pope, Generoso, 282 Preiswerk, Mr (of the Swiss legation), 155 press, Canadian: - English-language: Banff Crag and Canyon, 370; Canadian Jewish Chronicle, 34; Calgary Herald, 371; Daily Clarion, 59, 207; Edmonton Journal, 368; Free Lance, 33; Globe (and Mail) (Toronto), 32, 33, 364; Hamilton Herald, 105; Hamilton Spectator, 102,104; Montreal Gazette, 324; Montreal Star, 324; New Outlook, 33; Toronto Evening Telegram, 32, 33; Toronto Star, 31, 32, 33-4, 54, 215, 217, 381; Ukrainian Echo, 370; Ukrainian Weekly, 365; Winnipeg Free Press, 31, 33, 359, 364 - French-language: Le Fasciste canadien, 323; L'lllustration nouvelle, 312, 322, 323, 327; Le

Journal, 324; Paris-Presse, 321, 322; La Patrie, 322, 324; La Presse, 324 - Italian-language: // Bollettino italocanadese (Toronto), 34, 35, 55, 57, 337; // Bollettino (Petawawa), 317; // Corriere Canadese, 395-6, 397; L'ltalia (nuova), 32, 35; // Messaggero, 42, 56; La Verita, 325; Voce degli Italo-Canadesi, 35 - Ukrainian-language: Kanadiiskyi farmer, 358; Kanadyiskii rusyn, 358; Ukrainiskyi holos, 358 press, United States: La Capitale, 282; L'ltalia, 282, 283, 286, 293, 296; La Parola, 282, 286; // Progresso italo-americano, 282; // Corriere del popolo, 293 Pressello, Maria, 159,160 Prokop, Mary, 201 Prokop, Pat, 374 Prokop, Peter, 207, 209, 211 Ramirez, Bruno, 386, 389 Rando, Felice, 253 Rasso, Tommaso, 45 Ratiliano, Anthony, 45 Reagan, Ronald, 307, 382 'Red Patch, The' (Hull Jail), 140, 212-14 redress politics, 12-14,129, 379-^05; Communist, 195, 219; ItalianCanadian, 44; Japanese-Canadian, 307-10; Ukrainian-Canadian, 35572; U.S., 298-300 Repka, Kathleen M., 195 Repka, William, 195, 200, 202, 206, 210, 218 Restaldi, V. Vittorio, 325 Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, 21, 235, 242

Index 427 Riccio, Filomena, 154 Riddell, Walter A., 38, 39, 41, 323 Rivett-Carnac, Charles, 136, 138 Rizzi, Maria, 273 Robertson, Norman, 11, 28, 41, 77, 83, 84, 85,132,133,138,149,187, 188, 394, 399 Rogers, Ginger, 181 Roggiani, Carlo, 28 Romano, Vincenzo, 45 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 186 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 39, 40, 228, 281, 283, 295 Rose, Fred, 132 Rossi, Aleandro, 274 Rossi, Amelia, 274 Rossi, Angelo, 280 Rossi, Domenico, 407, 408 Rossi, Monsignor Gaetano, 274 Rossi, Luigi, 274 Rossi, Maria Francesca, 274 Rossi, Olimpia, 273 Rossi, Rita, 274 Rossi, Vittorio, 328 Rossi-Longhi, Alberto, 40 Rostow, Eugene, 297 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), 7, 9,14,17, 24, 28, 33, 37, 38, 41, 58, 59, 66, 76, 128-43,14854,197, 199, 210, 218, 225, 338, 364, 387, 389, 392, 394, 396, 401, 402, 404; investigation of Italians, 77-82, 86, 88, 90, 91, 93,104,108, 109,110, 111, 112,123 Rousso, Henry, 388 Rowley, Kent, 201 Roy, Gabrielle, 327 Ruhman, Walter, 180 Sabetta, Vittorio, 35, 337

Sabino, Giuseppe, 37 Sacco, Peter, 45 Sacco, Vincenzo, 45 Saccone, John (alias Archie), 45 Sago, Mitch, 206, 218, 223 St Laurent, Louis, 214, 394 Salvatore, Filippo, 327 Salza, Father Giacomo, 31 Sansone, Donate, 32, 46 Santamaria, B.A., 234 Sarfatti, Margherita, 31 Sargeaunt, Bertram, 270 Sawady, Ernest, 180-1 Scandiffio, Antonio, 63 Schiassi, Omero, 235, 245 Schild, Erwin, 190 Scott, J.M., 152 Sebastiani, A.D., 28 Seidler, Harry, 265 Selassie, Haile, 234 Sharpe, Petrea (Mrs Luther), 153 Sidoli, Giuseppina, 273 Sifton, Clifford, 357 Silvestro, Frank (alias Frank Ross), 45 Simpson, James, 32 Sims, Charles, 198 Singer, Rudolf, 174 Skelton, O.D., 37 Skrypuch, Marsha Forchuk, 369 Smith, A.E., 214 Snell, Lord, 261 Spada, Antonino, 101, 326 Spanish Civil War, 15, 27, 34, 39, 43, 198, 235 Spaziani, Maria, 154 Spier, Eugen, 175,190 Spinella, Rosa, 154 Sponza, Lucio, viii, 7,18, 226 SS Dunera, 261

428 Index SS Ettrick, 176, 262 Stalin, Joseph, 197, 228, 235 Steel, Dick, 201, 202 Steel, Esther, 201 Sternhell, Ze'ev, 404 Stethem, Col., 156 Stevens, H. Harry, 31, 32 Stewart, James McGregor, 51 Stimson, Henry, 289 Sullivan, J.A. (Pat), 200, 201, 206, 207, 209, 219 Sunahara, Anna Gomer, 308 Swankey, Ben, 200 Taschereau, Alexandre, 323 Taub, Muni, 91,199, 207 Teddern, Clive, 174 Tenisci, Frank, 31 Tiberi, Giorgio, 34, 52, 54, 56, 58, 64, 65,66 Tiberi, Sara, 151 Tognini, Adua, 276 Tognini, Amelia, 256 Tognini, Luigi, 256, 263, 276 Tognini, Piero, 264 Trento, Guido, 286 Trombetti, Luigi, 268 Troper, Harold, 99,100 Trovato, Rosina, 291 Trudeau, Pierre, 42, 309, 383, 384 Turco, Enzo, 293, 294 Turpoff, Mrs, 214 Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, 363, 365-8 Ukrainian Canadian Committee, 142 Ukrainian Canadian Congress, 362-7

Ukrainian Labour-Farmer Temple Association, 130,198, 209, 219 Ulrey, Geraldine Laird, 153,157 Union Nationale, 41, 323 United Church of Canada (Methodist Church), 59 United Electrical Workers Union, 205, 215 United Jewish Relief Agencies, 175-6,178,183 Vaccari, Gualtiero, 246, 251 Van Caster, Angele, 161 Van der Maesen, Mathilde, 161 Vanzetti, Francesco, 235, 244 Varcoe, E.P., 85 Ville sansfemmes, La (Duliani), 31221. See also Duliani, Mario Viscuso, Rosa, 290 Vivante, Arturo, 186-8,189 Volpi, Giuseppe, 28 Wagner, Jonathan F., 135 Wallace, J.S. (Joe), 206, 213 Walsh, Bill, 208 War Measures Act, 3-5, 42, 357 Weiner, Gerry, 364, 366, 382, 386 Weir, John, 205, 212 Welch, R.F., 326 Wiehs, Kurt, 180 Williams, Patricia, 400 women, 16-18, 23,105,181,195-7, 232, 233, 237, 243, 256-8, 271-4, 290-1, 315-16, 395, 397-8; Anita Garibaldi Lodge, 48,154; Fascio Femminile (Montreal), 161,162, (Toronto), 151; girls, 61, 284; internees, 12, 16-18, 125-6, 149, 155-65, 292, 363, 369-70; Kingston

Index 429 Penitentiary, 148,154-6,158,1646; left-wing, 163-4,194; release campaign, 214-17; right-wing, 10, 54, 149-54, 161-5; visiting internees, 272-4 Wood, S.T. (Commissioner), 133,140, 150,162,163 xenophobia, 5, 8-9, 41-2, 76-7, 94, 104-5, 130,132, 227-9, 256, 280, 380

Yuzyk, Paul, 374 Zaffiro, Francesco, 46, 342 Zammarchi, Giuseppe, 240 Zaneth, Frank, 133 Zavaglia, Nicola, 393 Zeno-Zencovich, Livio, 177 Zito, Carmelo, 293