This October 18 Boston Globe article describes the joy in Boston’s North End when restrictions were lifted. The underlined sentence speaks to the shame of enemy alien status: “Italian girls in North End schools sometimes said they were “Polish” to escape the discrimination they felt in the stigma placed upon their unnaturalized mothers or grandmothers.” As to the fishermen who’d been forcibly idled, the president of the Fishermen’s Association described what that had been like: “Take a man off the water after he’s fished 30 or 40 years and give him a laborer’s job ashore, and he’s dead”.

In North Beach, San Francisco’s Italian neighborhood, the mood was the same. “I am no longer enemy alien? This is wonderful. This is living again.” It meant no more curfew. It meant radios again. It meant spiritual as well as physical freedom. It meant, “Now we can help to win the war.”