Fascist and Anti-Fascist Propaganda in America: The Dispatches o ...

They believed so-called inferior southern European races would adulterate the Nordic blood of America.⁴ This intolerance grew along with a rapid influx of foreigners and led to unjustified and exaggerated fears among the American public—as well as federal authorities. The Immigration Restriction League, the American Legion, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and several labor organizations professed, organized, and directed such prejudiced thinking for several years. Ultimately the nativistic Ku Klux Klan also picked up and adopted this attitude.

American hostility had already reared against Italian immigration before passage of the Johnson Bill in May 1921. In March, federal authorities at the Port of Philadelphia had imposed a quarantine of twelve days on the ships Regina d’Italia and San Rossore, each carrying 1,600 passengers. In New York they had imposed a longer quarantine on the Duca degli Abruzzi, which carried 1,500 passengers. These moves followed reports by two American physicians, Fama and King, which told of epidemics of bubonic plague and exanthematic typhus in Italy. According to unpublished documents in Rome’s Central State Archives, the two American doctors’ reports on health and hygiene in Italy in 1921 were inaccurate and of no serious account.⁵ The American consular authorities at the port of embarkation of the three ships had issued sanitary certificates, which proved and guaranteed rigorous sanitation practices aboard the ships and guaranteed that passengers migrating to the United States had been deloused and washed before embarking.⁶ Nevertheless, in the above-mentioned cases, although American authorities had issued clean certificates, tendentious denunciations of others carried the day. Alarming and unfounded telegrams were sent to the United States, and consequently the Italian vessels were treated with hostility in American ports by citizens and federal authorities. This situation prompted an immediate and strong response on the part of Italian consular authorities in Washington.