WWII Italian Scare

I can hear my mother now, "Angelo, turn it down. People will hear." My father became a naturalized citizen September 5, 1939. I was there for the ceremony being a month shy of 10 years old. A child 8 to 10 years old has a pretty good grasp of the emotions of the times. Whenever my family visited with others who had immigrated from Dugenta, Italy, the conversations always included status reports of the happenings in Dugenta. In October 1935 Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. I have no childhood recollection of the reasons for that event other than remembering the intensity of family talk about events in the old country. Also, Mussolini started getting cozy with Hitler and signed a non-military alliance in 1936 and formalizing it into defensive agreement in 1939 which became to be known as the "Pact of Steel. I remember distinctly how some family talk ended up being a debate about the good, or no good, Mussolini was achieving. A phrase picked up from Italians who liked Mussolini made it into the press "he made the trains run on time." As all these events in Europe were unfolding, Italians in America were getting nervous as has been documented by many writers that distrust was growing about the immigrant Italian's loyalty to America. I cannot put the dates together, it being so long ago, but I remember well how my father started getting ready to be naturalized as a U.S. citizen. I see him, vividly, seated in a sofa chair stumbling over the words in our evening newspaper trying to learn English. My intuition tells me that he was nervous about his future as an alien at that time. Then, September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and Britain and France declared war against Germany. Although my father was naturalized five days latter, my father and mother, especially my mother, continued to be unsettled. I would imagine that most readers here have heard about the internment of Japanese during World War II, but it comes as a surprise that Italian Americans were considered enemies of the United States. In the summer of 2015, Maria J. Falco, PhD wrote an essay about the interment of Italian Americans during World War II. Dr. Falco is a retired professor of Political Science. There is one section of her essay that captures the distrust of Italians much better than I can, so I quote her with full credit. "Meanwhile in California, curfews were issued confining 52,000 Italian 'enemy aliens' to their homes between 8pm and 6am daily. Accordingly, they were forbidden to travel more than five miles from their homes on any given day. Not even Giuseppi DiMaggio was allowed to visit his son Joe DiMaggio's restaurant in San Francisco at that time! And opera star Enzio Pinza was arrested on March 12, removed from his home and was briefly imprisoned on Ellis Island. Eventually, the 'insanity' of this situation caused Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York City, to demand an end to all these 'ridiculous' and 'clearly illegal' actions. Finally, on October 12, 1942 (Columbus Day), less than a year after the original Order was issued, Attorney General Francis Biddle announced that 'Italian nationals in the US would no longer be classified as 'enemies.'" I expect the above illustrates why my family was concerned. And now about the reason for the quotation that initiated this essay. After the hostilities heated up, my father purchased a floor model Zenith radio that could receive shortwave stations. He used to listen to what was happening in Italy and other European countries. His intent was nothing more than he simply wanted to know what was going on. And when turned on the radio's short wave stations with their "crackle and static" it made my mother come unglued, " "Angelo, turn it down. People will hear."