OSIA justifiable objects to a Pearson Education History text that does not merely OMIT that Italian Americans were interred during WWII, but DENIES it.

See below: OSIA Deputy Director, Dona DeSanctis plea for help, OSIA's President Robert A.Massa letter to Pearson, and Larry DiSantis' initial comprehensive letter.

PLEASE take a moment to send an Email, make a phone call, or mail a letter to: Email: Communications@pearsoned.com
Telephone: 201-236-7000
Mail: Peter Jovanovich, CEO
Pearson Education, Headquarters
One Lake Street
Upper Saddle River, NJ
Pearson Education - Live and Learn
http://www.pearsoned.com/
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From: Dona De Sanctis, Ph.D., Deputy Executive Director,
Order Sons of Italy in America

The Sons of Italy sent the attached letter to Pearson Education which recently published a college history text that entirely ignores the treatment of Italian Americans during World War II. (See details in letter from Robert A. Messa, OSIA National President ).

This was brought to our attention by historian Lawrence Di Stasi, an expert on the "Storia Segreta" issue.  He has contacted the publisher.

We urge all of you also to write to complain.  The book will be used by college students and gifted high schoolers in the AP programs.  We need to pressure the publisher to recall the book and make the correction.
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July 11, 2003

Peter Jovanovich, CEO
Pearson Education, Inc.

RE:  "Created Equal:  A Social and Political History of the United States," Vol. II
by  Jacqueline Jones, Peter Wood, Thomas Borstelmann, Elaine Tyler May and
Vicki L. Ruiz.

Dear Mr. Jovanovich:

The Order Sons of Italy in America (OSIA) is the largest and oldest national organization in the United States for people of Italian heritage.

Today historian Lawrence Di Stasi informed us of an extremely disturbing error in the above-mentioned textbook Pearson Education, Inc. recently published for college students and gifted high school students in Advanced Placement programs.

He directed our attention to the material on World War II in Chapter 23: Global Conflict, which declares on page 776 that

"People of Japanese descent were the only residents of the United States who were relocated during the war.  Although the United States was at war with Germany and Italy, those of German or Italian ancestry were spared internment.  Because they were white, nobody claimed that the Germans or Italians belonged to an "enemy race."

First Mr. Jovanovich, we have to question why any editor permitted that last sentence, which injects racial bias into what should be an objective analysis of recent history.  The sentence is not attributed to any source and clearly expresses the opinion of one or more of the text's authors.

Second, and far worse, the statement is entirely erroneous.  As Lawrence Di Stasi so clearly and exhaustively documented in his July 8 letter to Steven Dowling (copy attached) on this subject, Italian and German residents of the United States were not only interned, but were also subjected to curfews, forced evacuations, house searches and the confiscation of goods and property.

What astonishes us is that your historians, all of whom we are told have university appointments, were completely ignorant of the law passed in 2000, The Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties Act which throws open the Justice Department's files on this sad chapter of our history.

The passage of this law received enormous media attention.  As a result, a number of books and documentaries have been released about the treatment of German and Italian residents in the U.S. during World War II and a quick Google search on the Internet for "Italian Americans in World War II" reveals fully 10 pages of websites.  The very first reference, by the way, is to the above-mentioned law!

We are eager to know how Pearson Education plans to correct this enormous error, Mr. Jovanovich.  It would be indeed unconscionable to allow thousands and thousands of young Americans to be misinformed about our recent history.

It also would be illegal since, as Lawrence Di Stasi points, Public Law #106-451 mandates that these events be correctly referenced in cultural and educational materials.

Please contact OSIA's deputy executive director, Dona De Sanctis, Ph.D., at our national headquarters in Washington, D.C. to let her know what steps you plan to take to correct this.   She will be writing about this incident in the fall issue of ITALIAN AMERICA, the most widely read cultural magazine in the United States for Italian Americans.

Dr. De Sanctis can be reached at 202 547 2900 or ddesanctis@osia.org

Awaiting your kind reply, I remain

Yours truly,
Robert A. Messa
National President

cc:  Lawrence Di Stasi
      Philip R. Piccigallo, Ph.D., OSIA executive director
      Michael Paolucci, national president, Sons of Italy Commission for Social Justice
      Steven Dowling, executive vice president, Pearson Education
      Will Ethridge, president, Pearson Education's higher education division
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July 8, 2003

Steven Dowling, President
Pearson Education, Inc.
One Lake Street
Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458
In re: Created Equal: A Social and Political History
 

Dear Mr Dowling:

I am writing in response to your recently published text, Created Equal: A Social and Political History of the United States, Vol. II. It was brought to my attention by a colleague who teaches high school in Los Angeles; she received an examination copy.

The text, with authors Jacqueline Jones, Peter Wood, Thomas Borstelmann, Elaine Tyler May and Vicki L. Ruiz, historians all with University appointments, purports to be one that acknowledges "the diversity of class, race, culture, region and gender that has always been part of the American story, and pays unique attention to the large middle class that has been central to the development of American society." That may well be true in a larger sense. But in the specific area with which I am familiar, your text fails miserably to live up to its own self-billing. I am referring to the material on World War II, in Chapter 23: Global Conflict: World War II, 1937-1945, and more specifically, the section under the subhead "Japanese American Relocation." In describing what happened to Japanese Americans, your authors begin well enough, but then blunder into a misconception that has reigned for years, but of which I would have expected working historians, by 2003, to have disabused themselves. With mounting self-righteousness, they declare, on page 776, at the end of the first paragraph under the aforementioned subhead:

People of Japanese descent were the only residents of the United States who were relocated during the war. Although the United States was at war with Germany and Italy, those of German or Italian ancestry were spared internment. Because they were white, nobody claimed that the Germans or Italians belonged to an "enemy race."

Despite the boast about "diversity of culture" and "attention to the large middle class," this is the last we hear of "those of German and Italian ancestry" in WWII, and thus conclude that these "white" immigrants were not affected in any way. In fact, we are led to believe that the nearly one million German and Italian resident aliens living in the U.S. at that time were not affected at all, primarily because they were 'white.'

The truth is quite different. The truth is that 600,000 resident aliens of Italian descent nationwide were severely restricted as to movement and possessions, and were required to carry pink ID booklets under pain of internment. The truth is that approximately 3200 resident aliens of Italian descent were arrested, and some 300 interned in camps like Fort Meade, Maryland or McAlester, Oklahoma run by the U.S. Army, not one of them ever charged with a crime. The truth is that some 10,000 resident aliens of Italian descent in California were forced to leave their homes and businesses (we call it evacuation, to distinguish it from the Japanese relocation) located in "prohibited zones" established along the west coast, including hundreds in cities such as Eureka, Pittsburg, Stockton, Richmond, El Cerrito, Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and Monterey. They were not spared because they were "white." They were not spared as a group or as individuals, or because most of them were elderly women. They were forced to move out of those zones en masse because they had been born in Italy, a nation with which the United States was at war, and that made them too "dangerous" to remain in 'sensitive' zones. The same fate befell German-born enemy aliens-nearly 11,000 of whom were arrested and/or interned, 300,000 of whom were restricted. Indeed, the initial measures-restrictions, registration, internment, evacuation-  taken against all three enemy alien groups were identical.

What makes your erroneous treatment even more egregious are two other references, both under the "Wartime Migrations" subhead. The first refers to the "sleepy town of Richmond, California," which "underwent a profound transformation." True. But what your story leaves out is that Richmond, populated before the war by large numbers of Italian immigrants, many of them truck farmers, was almost entirely prohibited to enemy aliens. This meant that over 600 Italian resident aliens had to leave the city in February of 1942, and find housing elswhere. In the process, some lost their farms and/or businesses. Secondly, the last sentences of this section refer to the postwar push for naturalization:

The largest numbers came from countries that were embroiled in the war: the British Empire, Italy, Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union. Naturalization was a concrete way for newcomers to clarify their status and their loyalty, especially in the wake of the Smith Act of 1940. This law required all foreign-born residents to be registered and fingerprinted, and broadened the grounds for deportation.

What is entirely missing here is the fact that despite this 1940 registration, the immigrants from Italy, Germany and Japan had to re-register in February of 1942 as enemy aliens, and carry their pink ID booklets containing fingerprints and photos at all times. What is left out is that as alien enemies they were subject to search and seizure at any time. What is left out is that the impetus to naturalize, which you highlight, derived largely from the shame of being branded not just as aliens, but as enemies of their adopted country. It is a sense of shame that persists among many to this day.

Finally, what is notably missing from your account-which features the stellar service of Japanese Americans in the military-is the corresponding fact that Italian Americans served the U.S. in World War II in huge numbers, some estimates going as high as 1.5 million under arms. This occurred despite the fact that many of these soldiers and sailors and marines knew that while they were risking their lives for their nation, their parents were under suspicion by that same nation, many of them forced to leave their homes and businesses. To be so treated is injury enough; to be left out of historical accounts like yours (and I am sad to say you are not alone) greatly compounds the injury.

The point here is that scholars like the ones responsible for this volume should be the first to be aware of recent work in their area of expertise. Stephen Fox's book, The Unknown Internment, (Twayne: 1990), which broke this story, has been available for more than a decade. The traveling exhibit of which I am project director, Una Storia Segreta: When Italian Americans Were 'Enemy Aliens,' opened in 1994, and has traveled to over 50 sites nationwide. Accounts of its appearances have been written in newspapers such as the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Los Angeles Times, the New Haven Register, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun-Times, the San Franisco Examiner and Chronicle, and countless papers in smaller regions, as well as on Good Morning America, and in a history channel documentary. Our website, www.segreta.org, has been in existence since 1996. My own book, Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment During World War II, (Heyday Books: 2001), is available in bookstores and on Amazon.com. Most conspicuously, the aforementioned exhibit led to national legislation-The Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties Act-that passed the U.S. Congress in October of 2000, and was signed into Public Law #106-451 on November 7, 2000 by then-President Clinton. As mandated by that law, in November of 2001, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a report-Report to the Congress of the United States: A Review of the Resrictions on Persons of Italian Ancestry During World War II-which details many of the restrictions that I have briefly outlined above. Our hope was that this report would end, once and for all, the false and demeaning statements like those found in your text. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Historical "experts" like the ones responsible for your text continue to disseminate their erroneous notions, in this case apparently driven by their illusory belief that excluding all but the racist component of the Japanese American internment somehow helps make up for the gross violation of civil liberties therein. But I would suggest that it is never a sound idea to denigrate one group in the belated attempt to placate another. "Whiteness" does nothing to compensate those who are unjustly treated, whose families are left without a provider, whose children are mocked, whose communities are driven by shame to obscure and abandon their history and even their origins.

I would suggest, therefore, that you take whatever steps are necessary to correct your text. I would suggest it very strongly, because Public Law #106-451 mandates that these events be correctly referenced in cultural and educational materials, and your text has most conspicuously failed in this regard. I would also appreciate your forwarding this letter to each and every one of your distinguished authors and consultants and editors and writers. And I should very much like to hear from them and from you about what it is that you propose to do about the errors and omissions I have pointed out.

I know about the pressures on schoolbook publishers in history texts, having worked for many years as a writer and editor for Harcourt Brace, Houghton-Mifflin and others. I appreciate the difficulty in referencing all groups in a diverse society like ours. But Italian Americans have played a very large part in the social history of this nation and have often been dismissed or underrepresented (not to mention casually maligned as prone to crime, even to this day) in the received standard story. To not only ignore their ordeal in WWII, but to specifically point them out as somehow associated with the "white" perpetrators of the violations against Japanese Americans, is to magnify the injury many-fold. Surely you can understand why such a gross distortion cannot be allowed to stand.

I look forward to hearing from you, and from your authors. I can be reached at P.O. Box 533, Bolinas, CA  94924, or by phone at (415)868-0538.

Sincerely,
Lawrence DiStasi
Past-president and Newsletter Editor
Project Director-Una Storia Segreta

cc: Adele Negro, President, American Italian Historical Assn, Western Chapter
      Dona DeSanctis, Director, Order Sons of Italy in America
      Joseph Cerrell, President, National Italian American Foundation
      Rosalyn Tonai, Exec. Director, National Japanese American Historical Society
      Rep. Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Congress
      Rep. Mika Honda, U.S. Congress
      Rep. Henry Hyde, U.S. Congress
      Joanne Chiedi, Civil Rights Division, US Department Of Justice