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To encounter this definitive turning point of the twentieth century history from an ethnic group view point about which there were misgivings owing to Italy’s enemy nation status, will help to shed light not only about Italian Americans, but also about the nation as a whole and others who would be in a similar position.
“Any war has two fronts.” commented Tom Brokaw in his well-received The Greatest Generation, wherein he cited exemplary performances of ordinary Americans both on the battle front and the home front. Brokaw’s work is a very useful reminder that “The home front rarely gets equal credit” for the commendable massive buildup of the sinews of war. “On factory assembly lines or in shipbuilding yards, in government offices and top secret laboratories, on farms and ranches, the men and women who stayed behind were fully immersed in the war effort.”1 A.A. Hoehling, in his volume on the topic, has made another sage observation revolving around the impreciseness of the home front as a malleable term, one which is not as readily definable as that which deals with the battlefront.2 The home front term encompasses a myriad of elements and frequently contradictory forces. To treat of the home front, is in other words, to deal with diversity and restlessness, to deal with commonalties and discrepancies. Nevertheless, in mining numerous and often overlooked threads of American life in this period, I am confident that it will substantially illuminate this important chapter in American history.
It is revealing to note that although some works on the home front do incorporate at least part of the Italian American experience, many others do not. Notwithstanding Brokaw’s superior effort in shedding light on what ordinary Americans were doing at this time, with two exceptions—one a reference to John Assenzio, apparently an Italian name, but not otherwise identified as such in the text, and the other Brokaw’s accolade of Congressional Medal of Honor winner Gino Merli in the introduction, no Italian American is given major treatment that revolves around his ethnicity. Likewise, the convergence of major American historians in a 1989 symposium to re-examine the topic of WWII, under the auspices of the Organization of American Historians, found participants voice concern with legitimate issues: the evil incarnated in German and Japanese characteristics, racism, segregation, Japanese American internment, anti-Semitism.