This excerpt from Jerre Mangione’s book, Reunion in Sicily, includes a story about an Italian American internee, who had protested his innocence as a 75-year-old with rheumatism and a son in the American army. It did no good. He was only released on parole when news came that his son had been killed in a raid over Italy, and that, therefore, “I couldn’t be very dangerous after all.”

This May 5, 1942 memorandum for the Attorney General clearly admits that “persons are at times interned where there is considerable doubt as to whether they are guilty of conduct endangering the nation.” Nonetheless, hundreds (another memo from October 1942 puts the number variously at 228 and 277, though more internments continued after that) were interned for fear of allowing any “potentially dangerous” persons to remain at large. The term “potentially dangerous” was thereafter invalidated as contrary to American law by the Attorney General in a memo to the FBI.”