Abstract

The charges that led Gen. John L. DeWitt to deport Sylvester Andriano from the Western Defense Region in 1942 were bogus, the product of an anti-Catholic campaign by Communist Party activists, Masonic anti-Catholics in the Italian community, and recent Italian anti-Fascist exiles (fuorusciti). This wartime abuse of civil rights in the name of national security grew from a discourse of demonizing the religious, not solely the racial and ethnic, Other. The article makes several arguments about ethnicity and religion on the Pacific Coast: faith-based political activism played significant role in the region’s urban political culture, as did cultural politics between Catholics and anti-Catholics. Irish American Catholic clergy welcomed, not excluded, Italian American laymen into the Church’s highest counsels in San Francisco, where the Irish had long dominated civic life. However, Italian Americans were bitterly divided between devout Catholics and disaffected anti-clericals.

During the 1930s a devout Catholic Italian American attorney in San Francisco named Sylvester Andriano emerged as the leading figure in a faith-based cultural and political reform movement known as Catholic Action. Along with other militant lay men and women, Andriano joined his local archbishop in using church resources to battle communists, socialists, freethinkers, and anarchists, as well as reformers who advocated birth control, divorce, eugenics, and the undoing of traditional gender role definitions. He also participated in the cultural and business outreach programs of the Fascist government of Italy. To Andriano, this seemed legitimate; after all, Italy and the United States maintained friendly relations, and ethnic pride could arguably coexist with loyalty to America. Once war broke out, however, Italian American Catholics such as Andriano, who had regarded themselves as non-political and had cooperated with the Mussolini regime’s outreach programs, became vulnerable to charges that their attempts to foster ethnic pride in their Italian heritage constituted collaboration with the enemy.¹

On August 19, 1940, six days after the Luftwaffe unleashed its deadliest attack in the Battle of Britain, a witness testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that Andriano was "indubitably the fountain head of all Fascist activities on the Pacific coast." In May 1942 the California legislature’s Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities (known as the Tenney Committee for its chair, Jack Tenney) announced that Andriano and two other San Franciscans, journalist Ettore Patrizi and attorney Renzo Turco, were the ringleaders of California Fascism. Andriano denied all of the charges under oath in 1942, but the Tenney Committee nonetheless declared him a security risk, and in September the U.S. Army served him with an order that excluded him from the Western Defense Region.

Fig. 1 about here

Andriano’s public career included both city politics and Catholic Church activities, and by the early 1920s he counted himself among the prominenti, the North Beach Italian American district’s leading business and professional figures. In the late 1920s Andriano and his friend and law client Angelo Rossi had both gained citywide influence by serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Rossi became mayor in 1931, sent Andriano to Europe as the city’s delegate to an international conference, and appointed him to the police commission. Andriano also served on a local draft board. A close associate of Archbishop Edward J. Hanna in the latter’s efforts to promote greater religious activity among San Francisco Italian Catholics during the 1920s, Andriano developed even stronger ties with Hanna’s successor, coadjutor Archbishop John J. Mitty, who officially replaced Hanna in 1935. That year Mitty delegated Andriano to organize a new Catholic Action program called The Catholic Men of San Francisco. With the mayor’s support and assistance, Andriano and Archbishop Mitty commenced a citywide campaign to shape municipal reform and labor relations according to a program based on Catholic moral principles.

Andriano’s assumption of leadership in San Francisco Catholic Action triggered a campaign against Catholic activism from three different local sources linked to transnational political competition. One assault came from the leaders of the city’s Italian Masonic organization, who regarded Andriano as an embodiment of the monstrous political offspring produced by the Vatican’s illicit embrace of Fascist evil. A second set of attacks came from anti-Fascist political exiles from Italy (fuorusciti) who regarded devout local Catholics as morally equivalent to the bureaucrats running Benito Mussolini’s allegedly criminal regime. A third offensive against Andriano, Rossi, and Catholic Action derived from the local Communist Party (CP). Local party leaders followed up their success in shaping the strategy and tactics of the 1934 waterfront and general strike with a vigorous program of labor organizing and electoral politics. Like its counterparts in leading cities in the United States and Europe, the San Francisco CP followed the program of the Communist Third International organization (Comintern) and denounced Catholic cultural authority and political influence in its San Francisco publications and public meetings.²

On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and three days later Italy declared war. Self-appointed super-patriots and public officials joined forces in the weeks to come and set out to identify dangerous and disloyal Italian-born residents. Andriano’s and Rossi’s various critics--communists from outside the Italian American community, Italian socialists, and anti-Catholics inside "the Italian colony"--seized the opportunity provided by the national emergency to discredit the leadership of Catholic Action and weaken Catholic political power in the city. International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) president Harry Bridges (a secret member of the Communist Party who went by the name "Rossi" in clandestine communications with the Comintern) and several other critics of Catholic activism volunteered to testify before state and federal un-American investigating committees that the mayor and his former police commissioner were Fascist agents "potentially dangerous" to the United States.³

Previous historians, beginning with John P. Diggins in 1972, have illuminated the complex divisions within California’s Italian American communities during the period. They have established that the investigation and relocation of Andriano, Patrizi, and Turco were the products of accusations by political critics within the Italian American community who harbored personal grievances, as well as of post-Pearl Harbor security considerations and anti-Italian ethnic prejudice on the part of public opinion shapers and government officials outside the community. This article uses existing scholarship and extensive new archival evidence to explore the proposition that Andriano’s relocation derived from his militant Catholic activism and the reaction that it engendered both inside and outside the Italian American community. A political clash between militant Catholics and determined anti-Catholics played a central role in Andriano’s designation as an "un-American" citizen who was "potentially dangerous" to the security of the nation.⁴

The Andriano story provides an opportunity to investigate the ways in which both international and national events impinged on local political culture from World War I to World War II, eventually influencing domestic security politics after Pearl Harbor. The article begins with a brief account of Andriano’s background and career and then provides a detailed analytical narrative of his role in Catholic Action and San Francisco politics, including local consequences of the victory of Fascism in Italy, the Lateran Accords between the Italian state and the Vatican (which Mussolini cynically described as providing the Church a sovereignty "neither sovereign nor free"), the labor conflicts of the Great Depression, the Communist Party’s role in local politics, and the outbreak of World War II in Europe and the Pacific. ⁵ The final sections describe the security investigations of Andriano and discuss the implications of his case for the historiography of un-American activities controversies and civil liberties in time of war.

Sylvester Andriano arrived in San Francisco in 1901, a month before his twelfth birthday, from his birthplace in Castelnuovo d’Asti, near Turin in the Piedmont region of Italy. One of seven children, he joined an older brother who operated a restaurant in San Francisco, working there while completing grammar school and high school in the city. Another older brother, Angelo, a Roman Catholic priest ordained in Turin, arrived in 1905 and became the pastor of a series of Bay Area parish churches before returning to Italy in 1929.⁶

At St. Mary’s College of California, Sylvester Andriano graduated maxima cum laude in 1911 with medals for excellence in both modern languages and Christian doctrine. In his junior year, the twenty-year-old Andriano had become a member of the Salesian Council of the Catholic Young Men’s Institute, the first of numerous religiously-based local Italian American organizations he joined during a professional career that spanned nearly five decades. The council operated in connection with Saints Peter and Paul Church, a parish church delegated by the San Francisco Archdiocese to Salesian priests for the pastoral care of the Italian community. Andriano returned to Italy after graduation and traveled in Europe to improve his French and Spanish language skills; when he returned, he studied law at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. He became a naturalized citizen while a student at Hastings and graduated with his law degree in 1915.⁷

That autumn Andriano opened a law practice with another Hastings graduate, James A. Bacigalupi, an American-born son of Italian immigrants who had arrived in California in the 1870s. By the time Andriano joined the practice, Bacigalupi, whose offices occupied the floor above the headquarters of Amadeo P. Giannini’s Bank of Italy, had built a thriving business that included Giannini as well as the Italian consulate. Two years later, Bacigalupi accepted Giannini’s offer of a position in the bank, so Andriano and attorney Michael Cimbalo took over Bacigalupi’s clients, including an account with the Italian consulate. They represented the consulate in cases involving industrial accidents and also those concerning non-resident heirs to estates left by deceased Italian residents of San Francisco. When Cimbalo moved to New York City, Andriano kept the consulate account, but he was not--as the Tenney Committee would later claim misleadingly--"the attorney for the Italian Consul in San Francisco."⁸

Andriano next joined forces with William R. Lowery, a fellow graduate of the St. Mary’s College class of 1911. At this time, the city’s Italian-born residents and their American-born offspring numbered some 46,000, nearly 9 percent of the city’s total population of 506,676. The 1920s witnessed the high point in the demographic expansion of the city’s Italian American community. After reaching 58,000 in 1930 (just over 9 percent of the total), the numbers gradually declined to 29,000 (4 percent) in 1970. Catholic Italians belonged to a vast archdiocese that contained 171 parishes, over 600 priests, and over 400,000 Catholics living in thirteen Bay Area counties, from Santa Clara in the south to Mendocino in the north.⁹

Andriano built his law practice in this growing community, conscious that, in contrast to his own decision to become a naturalized citizen and his devout Catholicism, most of his North Beach neighbors demonstrated little interest in citizenship, Americanization, or Catholic religious practice. In 1920, 80 percent of the city’s Italian immigrants retained their Italian citizenship. Ten years later only 44 percent of the men and 31 percent of the women were U.S. citizens. In addition to the contrast in outlook evident in choice of citizenship, differences in regional, political, and religious mentalities marked the city’s Italian "colony." Like the Andriano brothers, more than two-thirds of the community hailed from the more prosperous and industrialized regions of northern Italy. By 1930 three parish churches, two in North Beach and one in the city’s southeastern area, served the Italian Catholics of the city. At the same time, Masons, socialists, and anarchists among the Italian residents developed institutional and ideological bases of operation.¹⁰

Freemasonry had come to the city in the late nineteenth century, when Andrea Sbarboro and his colleagues founded a Masonic lodge by the name of Speranza Italiana. The Catholic Church had condemned Freemasonry in 1738, and rivalry between Catholics and Masons in San Francisco had simmered for years. It came to the boiling point when Ernesto Nathan, the mayor of Rome, came to the city to represent Italy at the Panama Pacific International Exposition, the 1915 world’s fair. Mayor Nathan’s Jewish family background and his membership in the Masonic Order provoked consternation among the city’s Catholics, especially Italian Catholics. They could recall Nathan’s speech at the opening of the 1911 Rome Exhibition, a speech made on the anniversary of the 1870 victory of Italian government troops over the army of the Papal States. For Nathan, Italy aspired to be "the champion of liberty of thought," except that the Catholic Church blocked the way, because the Vatican represented "the fortress of dogma where the last despairing effort is being made to keep up the reign of ignorance." Archbishop Hanna, who had lobbied unsuccessfully to have Nathan replaced by a Catholic, bemoaned the fact that "It makes one burn with shame to think of the Italy so glorious, so Catholic is represented here by a free-mason, a socialist, a Jew."¹¹

Archbishop Hanna moderated his anti-Semitism in the years to come.¹² Nevertheless, he gave no quarter to masonry and socialism, recruited zealous priests to expand services to Italian Catholics, and encouraged Italian laymen to build new social infrastructure to foster Catholic cultural power. The most eminent of the newcomers was Father Albert Bandini, a native of Florence trained in classical studies and the law. Hanna had served with the Florentine on the faculty of St. Andrews College, a seminary in Rochester, New York, before moving to San Francisco in 1912. In 1915, when newly installed as archbishop of San Francisco, Hanna invited his former colleague to the city. Bandini arrived eight months after Nathan’s controversial visit.¹³

By 1919 Father Bandini had become both a U.S. citizen and a member of the California Bar Association, and he ministered to the growing number of Italians in the San Joaquin Valley as assistant pastor of St. Gertrude’s church in Stockton (then part of the San Francisco archdiocese). That same year, Andriano and Bacigalupi, although no longer law partners, collaborated in mounting the city’s first Columbus Day celebration. They also organized the Italian Catholic Union (ICU), which promoted Columbus Day and provided the funds to publish a North Beach Catholic weekly to compete with several existing anti-Catholic and socialist newspapers. By the end of 1923 the four-year-old paper, L’Unione, with Archbishop Hanna serving as its honorary president, boasted accurately that it had "the Largest Circulation of any Italian-American Weekly published in San Francisco." Italian priests served as the paper’s first two editors, Bandini succeeding Father Oscar Balducci.¹⁴

The business staff included Luigi Providenza, the twenty-six-year-old former chairman of the Genoa branch of the Popular Party. The Popular Party (Partito Popolare Italiano, or PPI) was founded in 1919 by the former head of Italian Catholic Action, a Sicilian priest named Don Luigi Sturzo. PPI activists like Providenza were targeted by the hardliners who organized the Communist Party of Italy in January 1921, and he left Italy after surviving three assassination attempts. The new pope, Pius XI, preferred a Vatican-controlled Catholic Action program to a Catholic Action-oriented political party. By the end of 1922, with Mussolini the prime minister of Italy and the Fascists in power, the PPI’s days were numbered.¹⁵

Among San Francisco Italians, Catholicism competed with apathy, anarchism, masonry, socialism, and communism during the 1920s and 1930s. Most of the city’s Italian Catholics lived in North Beach, a cosmopolitan district that bordered on the waterfront and its "Barbary Coast" saloons, dance halls, and bordellos. Providenza’s work for L’Unione included selling subscriptions door to door to Catholic families in North Beach; he was "appalled to find that most of them had lost their Faith." In 1924 Providenza joined forces with Father Bandini to create the Italian Catholic Federation (ICF), a parish-based, bay-area-wide "lay apostolate" dedicated to the revitalization of religious observance, mutual benefits for members and families, and charity work. Andriano became active in the ICF, which sent missionary priests into Italian neighborhoods, sponsored retreats, and organized parades, processions, and public prayer devotions called novenas. Founded to promote Catholic practice, the ICF also boosted ethnic pride, and its bylaws included a "PATRIOTIC" [sic] clause: to "keep alive the respect and love of its members for their original Fatherland, encouraging and promoting at the same time some methods of enlightened Americanization among them." The ICF drew in several thousand members during the first decade; by the time the organization published its fifty-year history, the original group of twelve founding members at the Immaculate Conception Church in San Francisco had grown to 25,000 members in 225 branches, many outside California.¹⁶

During the first half of the 1920s, as subscriptions to L’Unione increased and the ICF began its work, Andriano continued his avocation as a leading builder of Catholic cultural infrastructure in Italian North Beach. The groups he organized or co-founded included the Dante Council of the Knights of Columbus, the Salesian Boys’ Club, and a chapter of the Boy Scouts of America. He also served as president and board member of the Italian School, which offered after-school Italian-language classes, the Italian Sports Club, the Italian Chamber of Commerce, the Bank of Italy, and a community center called the Fugazi Building. The boys’ club operated in quarters provided by Saints Peter and Paul Church. In 1922 Andriano presided over a fund-raising campaign for the church’s new building, raising over $100,000, some of which went for a massive Carrara marble altar and similar embellishments that earned the edifice the title of "the Italian Cathedral of the West."¹⁷

The Romanesque Revival-style church, with twin spires that towered over the neighborhood, announced to the city and the neighborhood that Italian Catholics intended to practice their faith in a dignified and impressive structure second to none. In 1923, while it was still under construction, Cecil B. DeMille used the church for scenes in his spectacular movie The Ten Commandments. When craftsmen completed the work three years later the parish dedicated the new altar. Then dynamiters attacked the new church. Between January 1926 and January 1927 four separate bombings shook the neighborhood, causing substantial but not extensive damage.

After the fourth bombing, city police announced to the press that they could no longer afford to protect the church, but secretly, Det. Sgt. Thomas DeMatei, whose cousin was a Salesian priest, organized a squad that kept watch on the church twenty- four hours a day. When two men, G. Ricci and Celsten Eklund, approached the church in the early morning hours of March 6, 1927 and tried to light the fuse of a bundle of dynamite, DeMatei and his men shot them, killing one and wounding the other, who died from his wounds several months later. Neither the police nor the press succeeded in identifying Ricci’s background, but San Franciscans familiar with the street life in the South of Market Street transient hotel district knew Eklund as a sometime soapbox orator; Seattle police had arrested him during a demonstration by backers of the Industrial Workers of the World. The dynamiters were likely members of the relatively anonymous population of transient single men who traveled a well-established route from Seattle to Portland to San Francisco to Los Angeles and San Diego and back, taking temporary jobs, reading, discussing, and sometimes acting upon anarchist (and frequently anti-Catholic) sentiments.¹⁸

While it is impossible to know the individual motives of the Saints Peter and Paul dynamiters in detail, other critics of Catholicism during the 1920s and early 1930s, including the Ku Klux Klan, Masons, socialists, communists, and anarchists, added the Church’s complacency about Italian Fascism to their list of grievances. Most Americans regarded Mussolini positively until the late 1930s. Anti-Fascist fuorusciti, however, condemned Time Magazine for putting Il Duce on its cover and cringed at such popular culture tributes as Cole Porter’s "You’re the top, you’re Mussolini." Most Italian American Catholics focused on "the reassuring and conservative aspects of his regime: the re-establishment of law and order, the repression of communism, the abolition of the right to strike, the agricultural projects for draining and reclaiming wastelands, the Crucifix again placed in the public schools, the trains which ran on time." Critics of the Italian American Catholic accommodation seethed. The biographer of Gaetano Salvemini, a historian member of the anti-Fascist exile community, recalled that "it was hardly possible to pronounce the words ‘on time’ in Salvemini’s presence, without his rising to his feet in a rage." ¹⁹

While the American Church produced no appreciable dissent against the Fascist regime and its activities, Father John A. Ryan, a professor at the Catholic University of America, critiqued Fascist theory. Ryan condemned "The Political Doctrine of Fascism" when he reviewed the English translation of a speech of that title by Alfredo Rocco, the Fascist minister of justice, in two issues of the weekly Catholic magazine The Commonweal in November 1926. Wilson Miscamble and Peter D’Agostino have described Ryan’s critique as mild, but mild or not, his argument that Fascism demonstrated principles and practices offensive to Catholics roused the ire of Father Bandini in San Francisco. In a letter to the magazine, Bandini accused Ryan of "overstating his objections to Fascism" and insisted that "any form of civil society, if safeguarding the authority of the Church and allowing the spiritual development of man does not contradict Catholic doctrine…[Ryan] probably does not mean to say that a good Fascist cannot be a good Catholic." Ryan replied that Fascism includes "the monstrous propositions that the state is an end in itself, that it is justified in using any means to attain its objects, and that it is the source of all individual rights--in other words, that the human person has no natural rights." Bandini had the last word in a second letter to The Commonweal, defending "the many Catholics, high and low, churchmen and laymen, who support Fascism in Italy."²⁰

Bandini’s insistence that one could be a good Catholic and a pro-Fascist accorded with Vatican practice, if not with natural law theology. Both D’Agostino and Miscamble have concluded that this represented the mainstream view among American Catholics during the mid-1920s. The apparent compatibility between Fascism and the Church won an even higher level of credibility when the Pope agreed to the Lateran Treaty of February 11, 1929. Through this treaty, the Vatican acquired sovereignty over its Roman properties, diplomatic relations opened with Italy, Catholicism became the official state religion, Catholic marriages and Catholic school diplomas acquired legal standing, elementary and secondary school students studied religion with books and teachers approved by the church, and Catholic lay organizations, specifically the Vatican’s Catholic Action lay organizations, received state sanction. Catholic Action had first received official papal definition in 1905, when Pope Pius X issued his encyclical Il Fermo Proposito (On Catholic Action in Italy), which urged lay men and women, under the direction of their priests and bishops, to organize ²¹

bands of Catholics who aim to unite all their forces in combating anti-Christian civilization by every just and lawful means. They use every means in repairing the serious disorders caused by it. They seek to restore Jesus Christ to the family, the school and society by re-establishing the principle that human authority represents the authority of God. They take to heart the interests of the people, especially those of the working and agricultural classes, not only by inculcating in the hearts of everybody a true religious spirit (the only true fount of consolation among the troubles of this life) but also by endeavoring to dry their tears, to alleviate their sufferings, and to improve their economic condition by wise measures.

All these works, sustained and promoted chiefly by lay Catholics and whose form varies according to the needs of each country, constitute what is generally known by a distinctive and surely a very noble name: "Catholic Action," or the "Action of Catholics."

Most Italian Catholics in the United States celebrated the 1929 settlement of "the Roman Question" and the opening of what they hoped would be a new era of Catholic influence in Italy. Four months after Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Pietro Gasparri signed the treaty, Sylvester Andriano’s brother Angelo resigned as pastor of St. Gertrude’s Church and returned to Italy. In addition to his parish work, Father Andriano had served as chaplain of the ICF in the late 1920s. In a letter to Archbishop Hanna, Sylvester Andriano expressed his disapproval of his brother’s decision; however, he appreciated that Angelo wanted to "play a part in the reflowering of religion in Italy, following the settlement of the Roman question."²²

Sylvester Andriano first became interested in formal Catholic Action theory and practice during a visit with his brother Angelo in Italy during the summer of 1931. The visit coincided with a clash between the Pope and the Duce after the Fascist government attempted to wrest control of some of the Catholic Action programs away from the Vatican. On June 29, 1931 Pius XI issued the encyclical Non Abbiamo Bisogno (Concerning Catholic Action in Italy), which underscored his remarks on Catholic Action in his 1922 Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio (On the Peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ) and reiterated Pius X’s definition of Catholic Action. Pius XI stressed that

A conception of the State which makes the rising generations belong to it entirely, without any exception, from the tenderest years up to adult life, cannot be reconciled by a Catholic either with Catholic doctrine or with the natural rights of the family. It is not possible for a Catholic to accept the claim that the Church and the Pope must limit themselves to the external practices of religion (such as Mass and the Sacraments), and that all the rest of education belongs to the State.

That September both parties agreed to a compromise that strictly limited Catholic Action to non-partisan spheres; the crisis ended, and relations between the church and the regime entered what Richard A. Webster has described as "idyllic years."²³

Twelve years later, Sylvester Andriano recalled the significance of his 1931 visit to Italy: The Pope was "stoutly defending Catholic Action against the unwarranted attacks of the Fascists and denouncing some of the teachings and practices of Fascism including the Fascist oath. I became really interested in Catholic Action and upon my return to San Francisco undertook the study of it in earnest."²⁴ Andriano’s decision to make Catholic Action a preoccupation came at an auspicious moment, because a strong proponent of the papal initiative, Father John J. Mitty, arrived six months later to become San Francisco’s Coadjutor Archbishop; Mitty succeeded Edward Hanna as archbishop when the latter retired in March 1935. Mitty began the city’s Catholic Action campaign on May 7, 1932, with a speech at a reception for the Archdiocesan Council of the National Council of Catholic Women (NCCW). Mitty told the group’s members that he wanted "greater effort and activity on your part" to monitor and shape the work of "our State Legislature and our National Congress" to ensure the defeat of "bills [that] totally ignore fundamental Christian and American principles." Mitty then moved beyond political action and called for a broad campaign on several fronts. "Catholic Action," the archbishop reminded his audience, "has been preached to us in season and out of season" and it was time to move beyond rhetoric to practice.

Our aim [in this campaign] is to bring the ideals and principles of Christ into every phase of human life, into our own individual life, into family, social economic, professional, political and national life. We are striving to advance the interests of Christ, to bring the spirit of Christ into our homes, our reception halls, our workshops, our offices, our legislative assemblies. We have a duty to make a contribution of Christian ideals and principles to the nation.

The "purpose and object" of lay organizations, Mitty stressed, "is not political. Neither as a Church nor an organization are we interested in any political aim or any political party." However, "We cannot live as if we were not part of the country," and we must "work unceasingly for both Church and country, for both Cross and Flag."²⁵

Andriano turned to his friend James L. Hagerty for assistance in gaining the archbishop’s approval for a new organization called The Catholic Men of San Francisco. Hagerty had graduated from St. Mary’s College in 1919 and begun teaching at his alma mater immediately after receiving his baccalaureate degree. He earned a master’s degree in 1921 and commenced a career as a philosophy professor at St. Mary’s until his death in 1957. Hagerty edited an influential review, The Moraga Quarterly, from its first issue in 1930 through World War II.²⁶ He and Andriano formed a Catholic Action prayer and study group, and they asked Archbishop Mitty to approve plans for a more extensive program of study and action. In 1935 Mitty asked Andriano to speak on Catholic Action to the graduating class at St. Mary’s, and the following year the archbishop asked him to address the combined graduation ceremony of the city’s seven Catholic high schools at the Dreamland Auditorium. While impressed with his zeal ("Mr. Andriano has probably read everything that has been published on the subject and has the Catholic ideal of it"), Mitty proceeded cautiously. He dispatched Father Thomas N. O’Kane of St. Joseph’s College to meet with Andriano, Hagerty, and their colleagues "so that the group would keep within the reservation."²⁷

Fig. 2 about here

On December 22, 1936, Archbishop Mitty invited several dozen men from throughout the city for a meeting in the basement of St. Mary’s Cathedral to discuss "uniting the parishes of San Francisco in a definite program of Catholic Action." In addition to representatives from the largest parishes, the invitation list included high-ranking officers from important municipal government departments and executives from the city’s largest and most prestigious business firms. Most of the men who attended this first meeting on February 12, 1937, continued to gather every other week during that year for focused discussions on how to move from the theory of Catholic Action to the practice. By the autumn of 1937 Andriano and Hagerty had met with the pastors of each of the sixty parishes in San Francisco to solicit support for a city-wide Catholic Action lay organization, and they presented Mitty with a draft "Plan for Catholic Action." The proposal called for a "constant, patient, consistent Crusade," including a diocesan "truth crusade," mission bands of priests who are "young, zealous, enthusiastic Americans," pamphlets, lectures, and Catholic shelves in public libraries.²⁸ On the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, 1938, between 200 and 250 men gathered in the cathedral’s basement and formally inaugurated The Catholic Men of San Francisco. Hagerty announced that "Confirmation is the Sacrament of Catholic Action, making men soldiers," and suggested that the assembled volunteers should regard themselves as part of the "priesthood of the layman."²⁹

Mitty appointed Andriano and Hagerty to the positions of president and executive secretary of the new organization; Andriano traveled to Rome that March to secure official Vatican approval of the Catholic Action initiative in San Francisco. Pope Pius XI gave the group his blessing, and Giuseppe Cardinal Pizzardo, the Chief Assistant for Catholic Action in Italy, and Monsignor Luigi Civardi, author of the official Manual of Catholic Action (1935), assured the San Franciscan that his plan was a sound one. On October 29, 1938, the eve of the Feast of Christ the King, Archbishop Mitty announced that "I like to sum [Catholic Action] up in one phrase: That what the Holy Father wants you to do is to vitalize your religion, make it something really vital in your lives." He criticized the notion that

Religion is not supposed to come out of that [certain limited] compartment and overflow into our being. We have a feeling of inferiority about religion, due to an historic situation where we were out-numbered. But there is no necessity for it today. Human life has been practically denuded of Christian principles. What the pope wants is to vitalize them. That is the meaning of Catholic Action--no more, no less….[I]n doing that we not only make a contribution to the progress of the Church, but we are making a substantial contribution to the welfare of our own land, a contribution to America which it badly needs; we are making a contribution to human civilization, until we bring about a right balance between material and spiritual things, which are going topsy-turvy.³⁰

From 1938 until the spring of 1942, when the their work was derailed after the Tenney Committee subpoenaed Andriano and accused him of being a Fascist agent, Andriano and Hagerty built up Catholic Action’s numbers and expanded the organization at the city-wide and parish level. The Catholic Men operated as a Bay Area lay person’s interest group, working with the Knights of Columbus (K of C) and Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH). They successfully lobbied for local ordinances prohibiting sexually explicit magazines from sidewalk news kiosks and magazine racks, and they boycotted movies that sympathized with the Spanish Republic or included licentious behavior on the screen. Parish councils, charged with organizing Catholic Action Circles in each of the city’s sixty parishes, pursued a three-part agenda of devotional revitalization involving individual sanctification; sanctification of the home; and sanctification of society. The program included participation in parish holy-hour devotions; regular celebration of annual feast days; blessing of homes, grace before meals, family communion, and renewal of marriage vows daily; parish Sunday mass crusades aimed at increasing regular attendance and limiting latecomers and those leaving early; and the use of the missal and active participation in rosaries, benedictions, and Stations of the Cross.³¹ By mid-1941, according to an official report, 160 of the 174 parishes in the archdiocese had established Catholic Action Circles involving 1,500 men and 300 women. Catholic Action schools for parish priests and parochial school teachers operated in San Francisco, Alameda, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties. In 1939 the archdiocese published a local manual for Catholic Action work, as well as Catholic Action and the Priest, a booklet by Father John J. Hunt, the group’s chaplain. The archdiocesan council published a monthly newsletter and operated a speakers’ bureau that dispatched lecturers to meetings and radio programs in all the bay area counties. St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park added a required Catholic Action course to its curriculum. Bay area Catholic high schools also established student Catholic Action Circles.³²

In the late 1920s Andriano moved beyond the Italian community to the larger arena of San Francisco municipal politics and public office. In 1928 Mayor James Rolph, Jr., appointed the attorney to replace a member of the city board of supervisors who had died in office, and Andriano took up the first of a series of positions that included police commissioner, library commissioner, and chairman of a local draft board. Andriano’s friend Angelo Rossi became the city’s first Italian American mayor in January 1931. That summer Andriano traveled to Paris as Mayor Rossi’s representative in a delegation of U.S. mayors visiting the Paris International Exposition.³³

By the early 1930s prominenti such as Rossi and Andriano, banker Amadeo P. Giannini, and former school superintendent and longtime board of supervisors member Alfred Roncovieri, were enjoying high status and prestige in San Francisco. The more numerous Irish and German Catholic civic, business, and labor leaders joined with Andriano and Hagerty in supporting the archbishop’s call for a Catholic Action program and actively participated in its program. Their determination to base public policy on Catholic moral principles, however, produced a counter-offensive by the leaders of the city’s ideologically committed and well-organized Communist Party (CP). The Party developed a strong political presence in the Golden State at the very time that Catholic Action was moving from theory to practice. In San Francisco, the party’s work developed in response to both Comintern policy and local anti-Communist initiatives. In 1934, during a waterfront strike from May through July and an eleven-day general strike, CP activists decisively shaped the dock workers’ strategy and tactics, while Mayor Rossi, Andriano, and other members of an informal emergency citizens’ committee picked by the mayor planned the city’s strategy and brokered the strike settlement. In the aftermath, Harry Bridges, chairman of the strike committee and member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party USA, as well as other CP leaders, became particular targets of the Catholic Action mobilization.³⁴

Archbishop Mitty, chaplain of the California chapter of the American Legion in 1935, helped to organize its "United Front" against "Radical and Communistic Activities." Mitty’s efforts gained enthusiastic support from the K of C, the AOH, and the Young Men’s Institute (in which Andriano had served as "Grand President"). When CP front organizations successfully attracted hundreds to public meetings in 1936 and 1937, Catholic Action responded with programs that drew thousands to Kezar Stadium and the Civic Auditorium. At the Kezar Stadium event, Mitty forthrightly condemned "appeals to class warfare" and the "philosophy that at once blasphemes Christ and aims to destroy our Government."³⁵

Fig. 3 about here

From the turbulent July days of the general strike in 1934 to the end of the decade, Andriano, Hagerty, Rossi, and Mitty aggressively sought to bring San Francisco’s public policy and labor relations into conformity with Catholic moral principles. In 1937 and 1938 Mayor Rossi signed into law a spate of anti-smut and anti-prostitution ordinances passed by the city board of supervisors after being introduced by board members close to Andriano. In 1939 Rossi and Leland Cutler, president of the city chamber of commerce and director of the Golden Gate International Exposition, sent Andriano to France and Italy to boost the event. Catholic Action won a victory at the exposition when The Catholic Men of San Francisco convinced the administration to cancel an exhibit in the Hall of Science sponsored by the Birth Control Federation of America. Margaret Sanger happened to be speaking to the League of Women Voters of San Francisco the same week that the exposition announced the cancellation of the birth control exhibit. Sanger expressed her disappointment to a reporter for The People’s World, the local Communist Party newspaper: "Wherever I go I meet the same opposition--and I must say that it is most insidious and effective."³⁶

Attorneys in the Catholic Action organization established a separate lawyer’s guild called the St. Thomas More Society. The lawyers organized a Spanish Relief Committee and raised funds for reconstruction of battle-scarred communities. In 1937 the committee published Democracy! Which Brand, Stalin’s or Jefferson’s by Umberto Olivieri, editor of L’Unione and a professor of Italian at the Jesuit-run Santa Clara University. Andriano wrote the preface, arguing that "the Red Government of Spain, far from being the champion of democracy, is a regime of tyranny, persecution and barbarism and the only hope for the triumph of order and justice and of true democracy lies with the Nationalists."³⁷

In 1938, with the support of the archbishop, Jack Henning, John F. Maguire, and Laura Smith organized another Catholic Action front, a San Francisco chapter of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU). The new organization, with membership restricted to Catholics, ratified a constitution that declared its purpose in language that St. Mary’s College graduate Henning had used in a speech at his alma mater: "To foster and spread … sound trade unionism built on Christian principles." The ACTU program drew upon Catholic labor teachings and stressed both the rights and duties of workers. The rights included job security, an income high enough to allow a family to live a decent life, collective bargaining through independent, democratic unions, a decent share in employer profits, the right to strike and picket for a just cause, a just price, and decent hours and working conditions. Duties included performing an honest day’s work, joining a union, striking only for a just cause, refraining from violence, respecting property rights, living up to agreements freely made, enforcing honesty and democracy in the union, and cooperating with employers in establishing industry councils and producer cooperatives.³⁸

San Francisco ACTU members self-consciously worked to build Catholic Action into a force within the San Francisco labor movement, particularly on the waterfront. The most dramatic success of the ACTU’s work occurred in Local 10 of the ILWU, where ACTU members competed with Communist Party candidates for local offices. In 1943 ACTU member James Stanley Kearney defeated CP member Archie Brown, a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, in the election for local vice-president.³⁹

Kearny’s success demonstrated that Catholic ideology provided an attractive alternative to the party’s agenda. The ACTU’s success led Bridges to assign an informer to attend ACTU meetings and provide ILWU leaders with detailed notes. The Australian labor leader was the subject of loyalty investigations himself and fighting a deportation order issued by the U.S. Attorney General. In the city election of 1939, the CP ran a slate of candidates for local office, but they were all defeated. Catholic voters generally, not merely those of Italian birth or extraction, mobilized to keep Mayor Rossi in office, which was also the goal of the Italian consulate, according to evidence discovered by Stefano Luconi. Rossi’s main opponent, Franck Havenner, had a long record as a progressive candidate supported by the political left generally, including the Communist Party. Bridges and ILWU members personally campaigned for Havenner; Communist Party members of other Congress of Industrial Organization unions also backed him. Their efforts proved futile, and Rossi won with 48 percent of the vote in a three-sided race.⁴⁰

Figure 4 about here

Following the Nazi attack on Poland in September 1939, criticism of Catholic leaders who refused to condemn Fascism increased. The numbers of anti-Fascist fuorusciti in the United States swelled with the arrival of new refugees from the European crisis, and in late 1939 Gaetano Salvameni, Max Ascoli, and other anti-communist opponents of Mussolini founded the Mazzini Society, a national organization with local branches aimed at expanding and intensifying the critique of alleged Fascist sympathizers in the Italian American community. In November J. Edgar Hoover instituted an FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) file of possible suspects with Italian, German, or Japanese backgrounds. Then on June 10, 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt added to the discourse on Italian American propensity to disloyalty when he enlisted a hoary anti-Italian stereotype during a commencement address at the University of Virginia to condemn Italy’s invasion of France: "the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor."⁴¹

Critiques of Catholic complicity with Fascism increased in late 1939 and 1940, but the charges represented nothing new. Communist Party condemnations were a staple of 1930s political discourse, and critiques by Masons and other anti-Catholics predated World War I. In San Francisco, as far back as the 1920s, the newspaper Il Corriere del Popolo had castigated Archbishop Hanna for his outreach activities among city Italians, and it singled out Andriano for particular scorn as early as 1930. Now, however, the local competition became caught up in the national debates about whether the United States should participate in the European war, and whether Italian and German ethnic organizations threatened American national security. Anti-Fascists, including Masons, fuorusciti, and Communist Party members alike, assuming the role of seasoned fighters against clerico-fascist dictatorship, volunteered for service against Catholic prominenti whom they regarded as Mussolini sympathizers in the nation’s Italian communities.⁴²

San Francisco anti-Fascists named Andriano as a Fascist agent at three sets of hearings called by two subversive-hunting government agencies, the first in August 1940 by the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC); the second in December 1941; and the third in May 1942, by the California legislature’s Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities (Tenney Committee). Congress had established HUAC in mid-1938 as a temporary investigating committee consisting of seven members charged with tracking "un-American" individuals, organizations, and publications and reporting the findings to Congress and the nation. Martin Dies, a Texas Democrat, the committee’s first chairman, served until it became a permanent standing committee of the House in January 1945. Dies devoted most of the committee’s efforts during 1939 and 1940 to monitoring those charged with Communist and Nazi fifth-column activities, tactics he decried in his 1940 book Trojan Horse in America. Dies included only one fifteen-page chapter on Mussolini’s regime in his book, but he insisted that the regime’s sympathizers had to be included in his investigations because "Italian consular officials and secret Fascist agents are spreading Fascist propaganda throughout the ranks of many Italian-American organizations in the United States."⁴³

In July 1940, as German forces occupied the Channel Islands and the Luftwaffe expanded its bombing of Britain, Dies and his investigator, James Stedman, held executive hearings in Tennessee, Texas, and California. On August 16 and 17, with Germany announcing its total blockade of the British Isles, they took testimony in Los Angeles about communist activities. Two days later, in San Francisco, they heard from Myron B. Goldsmith, a member of the American Legion, and Antonio M. Cogliandro, a former president of the Speranza Italiana Masonic lodge. Goldsmith asserted that Andriano’s practice of concluding his speeches to Catholic audiences with the refrain "Our Light Comes from Rome" proved that he harbored Fascist sympathies. The legionnaire also insisted that Andriano’s leadership in Italian ethnic heritage organizations that received Italian government subsidies constituted prima facie evidence that the lawyer served Mussolini. "This man [Andriano]," he proclaimed, "is indubitably the fountain head of all Fascist activities on the Pacific Coast."⁴⁴

Cogliandro, a veteran of the competition between Catholics and Masons since World War I, identified himself to the committee as "a thirty-third degree Mason" and boasted of his father’s exploits fighting alongside Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini against the Vatican in the 1860s. A native of Calabria, Cogliandro had attended a seminary but then dropped out and left the Church. By 1940 he was as disaffected as Andriano was devout, and he was no doubt chagrined by the well-known fact that the Italian Catholic Federation’s missionary work had succeeded in convincing many of the Southern Italian and Sicilian members of Speranza Italiana to become active Catholics and raise their children in the Church. Cogliandro joined Goldsmith in singling out both Andriano and Father Joseph Galli, the pastor of Saints Peter and Paul Church, as Fascist leaders. Galli came under attack for, among other things, his sponsorship of an alleged Fascist organization, the Gruppo Giovanile Italo-Americani, a North Beach ethnic pride drill team and marching band that Andriano also supported. Neither Goldsmith nor Cogliandro offered evidence proving the Fascist provenance of the group, nor did they volunteer the information that the banner carried by the youth group in parades featured both the American flag and the Italian national colors.⁴⁵

Cogliandro and Carmelo Zito used similar tactics of guilt by association and misleading half-truths when they told the Tenney Committee that Andriano deserved exposure as a leading Fascist fifth-columnist. The Tenney Committee, like similar "little HUACs" established by state legislatures before 1945 in Massachusetts, New York, and Oklahoma, was the product of state and national partisan rivalries, in addition to concerns about the impact of international affairs on national security. Born in early 1940 as a temporary committee of the state assembly to ferret out potential communists in the State Relief Administration, it grew into a permanent joint assembly and senate committee of seven members in January 1941. Jack B. Tenney, a Los Angeles musician, chaired the committee until mid-1949, first as a Democratic assemblyman and later as a Republican state senator. The legislature authorized Tenney’s committee to continue searching for subversives in state government agencies. It also expanded the committee’s powers to include subpoenaing witnesses and gathering information about any activities that could be construed as threatening coastal defense, jeopardizing the Golden State’s economy, or weakening citizens’ patriotic devotion to the nation. The committee received explicit approval to investigate "Communist Party, Fascist, and Nazi Bund" activities and individuals, as well as organizations "controlled by a foreign power."⁴⁶

The Tenney Committee first heard from Cogliandro, Zito, and Andriano himself at sessions in San Francisco in November and early December 1941. That testimony convinced Tenney that "considerable Fascist activities" and "Fascist propaganda and indoctrination" existed in "the Italian colony in San Francisco," and he scheduled four public hearings the following spring. Like the anti-communist show trial hearings of the 1950s, the May 1942 anti-Fascist proceedings in the Borgia Room of the St. Francis Hotel turned into a political circus. Open to the public, the room was crowded with newspaper reporters and press photographers who eagerly recorded the finger-pointing charges against alleged traitors and the arm-waving protestations against "star chamber proceedings." The spectators erupted in laughter when Mayor Rossi balked theatrically before taking an oath to tell the truth and announced that he was worried that someone would take his photograph and claim he was giving the Fascist salute.⁴⁷

Zito, one of the nation’s leading socialist fuorusciti, provided most of the testimony against Andriano during the May hearings. Zito had left Italy shortly after Mussolini came to power and moved to San Francisco in the early 1930s. In 1935 he began editing Il Corriere del Popolo. Zito published a steady diet of editorial commentary designed to expose the city’s "clerico-fascist alliance." Stephen Schwartz interviewed Zito and utilized his files for a book on West Coast radicalism; Zito "was as anticlerical as he was antifascist, and he doubtless considered support for the Vatican tantamount to support for the fascists." John P. Diggins drew upon interviews with Zito to conclude that his testimony represented the culmination of one of several "noisy ideological feuds that had been going on for almost a decade" across the country.⁴¹ Ironically, the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department and the Office of Naval Intelligence included Zito on its so-called "ABC List" of suspected individuals tagged for investigation by the FBI in the event of war.⁴⁸

In addition to Zito’s extensive charges, the Tenney Committee heard from several other North Beach anti-Catholic activists, including Charles H. Tutt, a former Italian language teacher who had recently moved to San Francisco to manage a local branch of the Mazzini Society.⁴⁰ Bridges and his fellow Communist Party member Archie Brown used the hearings to even the score with their Catholic opponents; their testimony focused primarily on Rossi’s Catholic Action-inspired labor relations practices. Chairman Tenney, who typically demonstrated considerable skepticism about the veracity of a CP member’s testimony, now asked Bridges to serve as an expert witness concerning the mayor’s political philosophy. "Bridges smiled. He was permitted to put this unsupported statement on record: ‘I always thought Rossi was a Fascist. I was always sure of it, in my own mind--politics aside. I am glad people are waking up to it.’ "⁴⁹

Such transparent ideological critiques also pervaded the hostile testimony against Andriano, but neither HUAC nor the Tenney Committee turned up evidence that Sylvester Andriano served as an agent of the Fascist government of Italy. The committee heard from a total of thirty-three witnesses in the executive sessions of November and December 1941 and the public meetings in May 1942. Only eight witnesses referred to Andriano at all, five of whom merely acknowledged that they knew of his work with the Italian-language school. Mayor Rossi affirmed Andriano’s patriotism, denied charges that he was a Fascist agent, and testified that he had never seen Andriano give the Fascist salute. Zito and Cogliandro claimed that Andriano stood at the apex of a San Francisco Fascist triumvirate, but they offered no evidence that any of his extensive activities involved attempts to influence public opinion on behalf of the Italian government. Nor did they present evidence that Andriano lobbied on behalf of Mussolini’s regime to shape government policy in ways that would help Italy and harm the United States.⁵⁰

Stefano Luconi and Matteo Pretelli have recently conducted extensive research on overseas activities of the Fascist government in Rome. They confirmed that Sylvester Andriano participated in the regime’s cultural and business programs, such as the language school and the chamber of commerce, but they found no evidence that the attorney received any instructions from the Fascist state, let alone that he operated as an undercover agent. Nor has such evidence been discovered in the extensive Andriano files in the archives of the San Francisco Archdiocese and in the Andriano correspondence in the archives of St. Mary’s College of California. ⁵¹

The two witnesses who asserted that Andriano was a security risk pointed to his long-time participation in the Italian Catholic Federation and his other Catholic Action activities as proof of his affiliation with the Fascist state. Because the Vatican, which had accommodated itself to Mussolini’s regime, had officially sanctioned Andriano’s organization, Andriano himself was therefore complicit with Fascism. In addition, according to his detractors, his legal business with the Italian consulate, his service on the boards of directors of an Italian language school and Italian Chamber of Commerce, and his work as director and later president of the chamber also qualified as Fascist leadership. Cogliandro and Zito omitted from their testimony the fact that Andriano had accepted nomination for the office of chamber president at the request of members who correctly expected that they could block a genuinely pro-Fascist candidate from winning the election if a Catholic Action leader were on the ballot.⁵²

Why did Sylvester Andriano fail to explain his motivation for accepting the Italian Chamber of Commerce presidency, and why did he refuse to discuss the rationale for his work during the previous twenty years? Andriano’s silence regarding the nature of his election to the presidency of the Italian Chamber of Commerce in 1940 exemplified his behavior before the Tenney Committee. Like Angelo Rossi, who denounced his accusers for participating in a "cowardly attempt to [sic] political assassination," Andriano denounced the charges as "a pack of lies" and denied the committee’s legitimacy and right to question his activities.⁵³ After the hearings, Hagerty suggested that Andriano should protect Catholic Action from possible guilt by association by making a public announcement explaining the nature of his work with the Italian consulate and detailing the reasons that his work with the Italian language school and Italian Chamber of Commerce did not constitute disloyalty. After all, it was common knowledge that the consulate used those institutions to promote Fascist cultural policy; the Fascist government set the curriculum and provided the books used in the school. Andriano replied that he was modeling himself on "the example of St. Thomas More."

By standing on my civil rights, far from doing a disservice to that cause, I am actually rendering a service to it, for surely no one can be censured for upholding the dignity of the law by insisting upon not being stigmatized as a dangerous or potentially dangerous citizen without due process of law, or for not countenancing any abuse of authority in violation of constitutional rights. 54

Figure 5 about here

Andriano reviewed his promotion of Italian culture, which began while he was a student, continued after his graduation in 1911, expanded when he began his law business, and persisted after he became a city supervisor, police commissioner, draft board chairman, and president of The Catholic Men of San Francisco.

Because we are at war with Italy must I now apologize if for thirty years and more I have striven with what little talent god [sic] has given me to keep alive and foster in the hearts and minds and wills of my people the faith, the culture and the traditions which earned for Italy the proud title of mother of civilization?

He explained to Hagerty that he had always intended to promote American patriotism as well as Italian pride; through all of his cultural work ran one "dominant thought: To be true to the faith of their fathers; to glory in and live up to their moral and cultural heritage; to be faithful, loyal and devoted to this their country to which they were so greatly indebted."

If on two or three occasions I said a good word about Mussolini it was always in connection with some specific thing that he had done, such as restoring order, setting up vocational groups as advocated in the Pope’s encyclicals, introducing the teaching of religion in the public schools or signing the Vatican Treaty.

Andriano insisted that "I never had any sympathy with Fascism as such although I did approve some of the things done by it, but I have always strongly disapproved of some of its principal tenets such as its totalitarian philosophy, its claim to monopoly in education; its regimentation of youth and its militarism." He reminded Hagerty that after he returned from his European trip in 1938, he had expressed even stronger objections because of "Mussolini’s tie-up with Hitler."⁵⁵

The Tenney Committee accepted its witnesses’ condemnations of Andriano rather than his denials of the charges, labeled the attorney a security risk, and recommended that he be relocated east of the line drawn 150 miles from the coast that marked the border of the Western Defense Region.⁵⁶ Il Corriere del Popolo and the San Francisco Chronicle demanded that Andriano resign from the draft board and called upon the Justice Department to revoke his citizenship and deport him to Italy. Andriano’s Catholic Action colleagues and Archbishop Mitty immediately began a campaign to dissuade the Army from implementing the committee’s recommendation. City officials and business leaders, including Sheriff Daniel C. Murphy and District Attorney Edmund G. "Pat" Brown telegraphed President Roosevelt in an unsuccessful request for presidential intervention in the case. Mitty even traveled to Washington, D.C., and asked U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle to convince the Army to allow Andriano to stay in San Francisco. Frank J. Hennessy, the U.S. Attorney for the region, had been a personal friend of Andriano for twenty-five years and was predisposed in his favor. Hennessy and his deputy, Alfonso Zirpoli disagreed with the exclusion recommendation and appealed the decision when the military board met to issue the order; Zirpoli considered Andriano "a real patriot," not a pro-Fascist security risk.⁵⁷

Gen. John L. DeWitt, the commanding general on the West Coast, impervious as usual to such appeals, banished Andriano nonetheless. Mayor Rossi and then Archbishop Mitty met personally with DeWitt and asked him to reconsider, but he treated Rossi with disrespect, displayed minimal civility to Mitty and refused to reconsider. Andriano traveled by train to Chicago, but he decided not to stay there, on the grounds that, "if I was not going to be let alone and I must defend myself against denaturalization proceedings I might as well have a showdown in the jurisdiction where I have lived and labored for over forty years."⁵⁸ Then followed a cat-and-mouse game that saw Andriano violating the exclusion order by returning to the Bay Area, then moving to Denver, then to Los Angeles, then back to Denver, followed at every step by FBI agent Martino and his two deputies. Then on August 9, 1943, one month after the Allied invasion of Sicily and a month before the armistice between the Allies and the Pietro Badoglio government, the Justice Department called for an end to Andriano’s exclusion after concluding a formal review of his case. The Army cancelled his exclusion order and allowed him to return at the end of December 1943.⁵⁹

During his months of exile, Andriano and his supporters in San Francisco discussed the possibility that a partisan political dynamic played a role in the sensationalistic condemnation of him that pervaded the reporting and editorials in one of the two morning newspapers. They suspected that the Republican Party-oriented publishers and editors of the San Francisco Chronicle wanted him "out of the way" until after the gubernatorial election in November 1942, because he and his Democratic Party supporters favored incumbent Culbert Olson while the paper backed the challenger, state attorney general Earl Warren.⁶⁰ No evidence exists to confirm the suspicions of Andriano and his supporters, but the Chronicle did in fact side with the finger-pointers and equated assertions of subversion with evidence of guilt. The Examiner and the afternoon papers covered the same events differently; they reported the political character, lack of evidence, and inconclusive nature of the witnesses’ testimony. The Monitor went even further, forthrightly criticizing the hearings in a front-page editorial and condemning the motivations of Andriano’s accusers. The Chronicle remained content to parrot the attackers’ charges and to call for Andriano’s exclusion, his removal from the draft board, and even the revocation of his U.S. citizenship. In late December 1943, three months after Attorney General Biddle’s Columbus Day declaration that Italians were officially no longer America’s enemies and the government had cancelled all restrictive measures, the Chronicle persisted in its mendacious characterization of Sylvester Andriano. It announced his return to the city by describing him this way: "Long one of the West’s outspoken advocates of Fascism."⁶¹

Conclusion

Writing from Denver a month before his return to San Francisco, Andriano shared with Hagerty his suspicion that "perhaps I am still potentially dangerous in some quarters," but that was not the case for the leaders of the San Francisco Catholic Church or the city’s Italian Catholic community. Andriano remained close to Archbishop Mitty, who continued to call on him for a variety of services. In 1944 Andriano directed a relief program for residents of Italian cities, a project that earned him a commendation from Pope Pius XII. In 1946 he won election as the first postwar Grand President of the Italian Catholic Federation. The San Francisco Communist Party, however, did regard Andriano as still dangerous and kept up its counterattack against his Catholic Action program, which now operated under the direct leadership of the archbishop. Frustrated by its inability to limit Catholic political power in local elections and in the labor movement, the San Francisco CP’s county committee commissioned a research report on "Catholicism in San Francisco" in early 1948. "We Communists have been negligent in taking this factor into consideration, and while there has been a token recognition of the importance of Catholicism in our community, we have not given it the attention it merits." Party activists discussed the eight-page single-spaced report at neighborhood branch meetings and then at a day-long conference in September. As they prepared for the 1948 elections, San Francisco communists did so with the understanding that "Catholicism has a broad mass appeal which has been carefully fostered over the centuries," that "Catholic Action is a world wide movement," and that "the Church through Catholic Action is out to reclaim its lost worlds."⁶²

This study of Sylvester Andriano, Catholic Action, and un-American activities in California demonstrates that political competition between Catholics and communists for status and power in the second-largest city of California began in the 1930s and continued into the postwar period. Before, during, and after the war Catholic Action advocates were determined to make room for what might be called applied religion in the making of public policy. Communist Party activists, along with Masonic leaders and anti-Fascist fuorusciti were just as determined to stop them. This continuity underscores the importance of both Roger Lotchin’s disproof of the generalization that World War II produced a wholesale transformation of the major California cities and Mark Massa’s and Philip Jenkins’s affirmation of the persistence of anti-Catholicism in American history.⁶³

Andriano’s Catholic Action derived from his religious faith, and his zealous commitment to that faith coexisted with a deeply felt devotion to his cultural roots as a native of Piedmont and pride in Italian language, culture, and history. Andriano would not have been hauled before investigating committees had he not been Italian, but it was two Italian anti-Catholic activists who seized the opportunity afforded by the HUAC and Tenney Committee hearings to neutralize a Catholic opponent whose political power was on the ascendant. This finding suggests that the conclusions of Rose Scherini, Gloria Lothrop Ricci, and others, which demonstrate how ethnicity made Italian residents of California vulnerable to un-American activities investigations, need to be revised to take into account the role played by Catholic religious activism and anti-Catholic prejudice.⁶⁴

Andriano was a prominent Catholic who happened to be Italian. His San Francisco residence placed him in a city where Catholic moral principles enjoyed legitimacy and where Catholic business, labor, and political leaders, irrespective of ethnicity, enjoyed considerable power, privilege, and prestige. Their assimilation allowed Angelo Rossi and Sylvester Andriano to avoid being part of a mass roundup and to avoid long-lasting damage to their financial assets, reputations, or standing in the community. Stephen Fox has demonstrated that this high degree of assimilation of Italians played a role in their avoiding the internment that proved the fate of Japanese residents; Fox has also brought to light evidence of the punitive and inhumane approach to his duties adopted by General DeWitt. The Andriano case confirms the importance of assimilation and provides additional evidence of DeWitt’s disregard of the individual rights of those suspected of and charged with being "potentially dangerous." Andriano’s status (along with the city’s mayor) at the top of the predominantly Irish Catholic social and religious establishment provided him with the backing of the archbishop, the district attorney, the sheriff, and a dozen more supporters who pressured the Army on his behalf. DeWitt dismissed the entreaties out of hand, ordered Andriano’s exclusion to proceed, and rejected the later appeal by the U.S. Attorney.⁶⁵

The fact that it was the leaders of competing religious and political institutions, and not an uprising of the general public, that originated, developed, and resolved the Andriano case demonstrates the importance of interest group politics in California’s un-American activities controversies during World War II. The Andriano case also shows the crucial importance of the strategic choices made by political officials in their relations with the leaders of such interest groups. This can be seen in the contrast between the modus operandi of the Tenney Committee and the Tolan Committee (House of Representatives Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration) in 1942. Assemblyman Jack B. Tenney selected witnesses known to be hostile to Andriano, encouraged them to offer unsubstantiated charges filled with half-truths and falsehoods, and then claimed to have made a vital contribution to Pacific Coast defense by removing Andriano from California. By contrast, Congressman John H. Tolan, as Fox has demonstrated, conducted his hearings in an opposite fashion. Tolan carefully selected witnesses to facilitate his goal of limiting public anxiety and "deftly extracted their testimony in a way that evoked sympathy for the Italians." ⁶⁶

Finally, this study disproves the notion that a generalized hysteria gripped the people of the Pacific Coast in the first six months of the war, to the point that they clamored for government suppression of civil liberties. Andriano’s exclusion did not occur because of the eruption in California of mass cultural phenomena such as Richard Hofstader’s "paranoid style" or Michael Rogin’s "countersubversive tradition" and "American demonology." Instead, the Andriano case demonstrates the importance of studying loyalty investigations during wartime with a methodology that takes account of culture and discourse, to be sure, but mindful of the causal influence of biography, religion, society, and politics. This approach, which can be termed critical realism, has also been used to good effect in studies of security investigations such as those by M. J. Heale and by John Sbardellati and Tony Shaw.⁶⁷ The un-American activities investigations in wartime California that jeopardized the civil liberties of Sylvester Andriano can best be understood as a political process created by the decisions of particular individuals in specific institutions in the context of local conditions and national and international developments.

This essay could not have been written without the help of dedicated archivists at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; the Chancery Archives of the Archdiocese of San Francisco; the San Francisco History Center of the San Francisco Public Library; the Anne Rand Research Library of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union; the Archives of the College of St. Mary’s of California; the Northern California Labor Archives and Research Center of San Francisco State University; the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research. I am grateful to members of the Bay Area Labor History Workshop for comments on an early version. Thanks also to Andrew Canepa, the late Peter D’Agostino, John P. Diggins, Stefano Luconi, Matteo Pretelli, and Stephen Schwartz, and to my research assistants, George Malachowski, Giovanna Palombo, and John Rosen. I would also like to thank the four anonymous referees for the Pacific Historical Review, Jeffrey M. Burns of the Chancery Archives, and Kathleen Maggiora Rogers of the Associazione Piemontesi nel Mondo of Northern California for their well-informed and thoughtful critiques of earlier drafts. Responsibility for any errors or omissions that may have escaped my attention is mine alone.

1. On Italian Fascism and American Italians, see Gaetano Salvemini, Italian Fascist Activities in the United States (New York, 1977); John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, N.J.,1972); Wilson D. Miscamble, "The Limits of American Catholic Antifascism: The Case of John A. Ryan," Church History, 59 (1990), 523 - 538. On the relationship between Roman Catholicism and American Italians, see Peter R. D’Agostino, Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004). On Catholic Action, see Joseph P. Chinnici, O.F.M., Living Stones: The History and Structure of Catholic Spiritual Life in the United States (Maryknoll, N.Y., 1996), 135 - 171.

2. Robert W. Cherny, "Prelude to the Popular Front: The Communist Party in California, 1931 - 1935," American Communist History, 1 (2002), 5 - 42.

3. We now have reliable documentary evidence of Harry Bridges’s membership in the CP, but he never admitted to being a member of the Party and never explained why he chose the party name "Rossi." See Robert W. Cherny, ""Constructing a Radical Identity: History, Memory, and the Seafaring Stories of Harry Bridges," Pacific Historical Review, 70 (2001), 571 - 599; Robert W. Cherny, "Harry Bridges and the Communist Party: New Evidence, Old Questions; Old Evidence, New Questions," paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, April 4, 1998, copy in author’s possession; Harvey Klehr and John E. Haynes, "Communists and the CIO: From the Soviet Archives," Labor History, 35 (1994), 444 - 446; Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven, Conn., 1995), 104.

4. This article builds on previous research on San Francisco and Los Angeles by Rose D. Scherini, "Executive Order 9066 and Italian Americans: The San Francisco Story," California History, 70 (1991/92), 367 - 377, 422 - 424; Scherini, "The Fascist/Anti-Fascist Struggle in San Francisco," in Richard N. Juliani and Sandra P. Juliani, eds., New Explorations in Italian American Studies (Staten Island, N.Y., 1994), 63 - 71; Gloria Ricci Lothrop, "A Shadow on the Land: The Impact of Fascism on Los Angeles Italians," California History, 75 (1996/97), 338 - 353, 385 - 387. Stefano Luconi has accepted the veracity of the pro-Fascist charges against Angelo Rossi and has argued that the mayor was a political opportunist, not an ideologue, in "Mussolini’s Italian-American Sympathizers in the West: Mayor Angelo J. Rossi and Fascism," in Janet E. Worrall, Carol Bonomo Albright, and Elvira G. Di Fabio, eds., Italian Immigrants Go West: The Impact of Locale on Ethnicity (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 124 - 133. See also Stephen Fox, The Unknown Internment: An Oral History of the Relocation of Italian Americans During World War II (Boston, 1990); Bénédicte Deschamps, "Opposing Fascism in the West: The Experience of Il Corriere del Popolo in San Francisco in the late 1930s," in Worrall, Albright, and Di Fabio, eds., Italian Immigrants Go West, 109 - 123; Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, "Ethnics at War: Italian Americans in California during World War II," in Roger W. Lotchin, ed., The Way We Really Were: The Golden State in the Second Great War (Urbana, Ill., 2000), 143 - 163; Lawrence DiStasi, ed., Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment during World War II (Berkeley, 2001). Two studies have acknowledged the importance of the Masonic order and other sources of anti-Catholicism, but they have not utilized Catholic archival sources. See Patrizia Salvetti, "La communità italiana di San Francisco tra italianità e americanizzazione negli anni ’30 e ’40," in Studi Emigrazione, 19 (1982), 3 - 39, and Andrew M. Canepa, "Profilo della Massoneria di lingua italiana in California (1871 - 1966)," in ibid., 27 (1990), 87 - 107. John P. Diggins has addressed the role of Catholicism, socialism, communism, and anti-clericalism in Mussolini in America, as has Stephen Schwartz, in From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind (New York, 1998), but Diggins and Schwartz have not analyzed the case of Sylvester Andriano and the security investigations in San Francisco.

5. Benito Mussolini, "Realizione alla Camera dei deputati sugli Accordi del Laterano," Opera omnia; a cura di Edoardo e Duilio Susmel (36 vols., Florence, 1953 - 1964), 24: 44, as quoted in A. James Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought (Princeton, N.J., 2005), 199.

6. Details concerning Andriano’s life, unless otherwise indicated, derive from a single-spaced fifteen-page autobiography, sent in a letter from Andriano to James L. Hagerty, March 10, 1943, original in box 237, James L. Hagerty Papers, Archives of the College of St. Mary’s of California, Moraga (hereafter Hagerty Papers); and from Angelo Andriano file, Chancery Archives of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, Menlo Park (hereafter Chancery Archives).

7. Andriano to Hagerty, March 10, 1943, Hagerty Papers; Alessandro Baccari, Jr., Vincenza Scarpaci, and Gabriel Zavattaro, S.D.B., eds., Saints Peter and Paul Church: The Chronicles of the Italian Cathedral of the West, 1884 - 1984 (San Francisco, 1985), 44, 63, 96.

8. California Legislature, Senate, Fifty-fifth Session, Report of the Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in California (Sacramento, Calif., 1943), 291. Felice Bonadio, A. P. Giannini: Banker of America (Berkeley, 1994), 46 - 47.

9. Andriano to Hagerty, March 10, 1943, Hagerty Papers; Dino Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco: The Immigrant Experience (Stanford, Calif., 1982), 18 - 19; William Issel and Robert W. Cherny, San Francisco, 1865 - 1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development (Berkeley, 1986), 56 - 57; Rose Scherini, "The Italian American Community of San Francisco: A Descriptive Study" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1976), 3.

10. Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco, 21, 248 - 249; The Italian American Community, 159 - 160; Paola A. Sensi-Isolani, "Italian Radicals and Union Activists in San Francisco, 1900 - 1920," in Philip V. Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer, eds., The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism: Politics, Labor, and Culture (Westport, Conn., 2003), 189 - 203.

11. D’Agostino, Rome in America, 99 (Edward Hanna quote); 84 (Ernesto Nathan quote). Andrew M. Canepa, "Profilo della Massoneria di lingua italiana in California (1871 - 1966)," Studi Emigrazione, 27 (1990), 87 - 107.

12. Hanna won the annual award for the promotion of better understanding between Christians and Jews sponsored by the American Hebrew magazine in 1931. For more on this topic, see William Issel, "Jews and Catholics Against Prejudice," in Ava F. Kahn and Marc Dollinger, eds., California Jews (Waltham, Mass. and Hanover, N.H., 2003), 123 - 134.

13. Albert Bandini file, Chancery Archives.

14. Andriano to Hagerty, March 10, 1943, Hagerty Papers; Baccari, Jr., Scarpaci, and Zavattaro, eds., Saints Peter and Paul Church, 69; Marino De Medici, "The Italian Language Press in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1930 to 1943" (M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1963), 17 - 20.

15. Italian Catholic Federation, The Italian Catholic Federation: The First 50 Years (San Francisco, 1974), 4 - 11; Richard A. Webster, The Cross and The Fasces: Christian Democracy and Fascism in Italy (Stanford, Calif., 1960), 78 - 106; Roy Palmer Domenico, Remaking Italy in the Twentieth Century (Lanham, Md., 2002), 37 - 46; John N. Molony, The Emergence of Political Catholicism in Italy: Partito Popolare 1919 - 1926 (London, 1977).

16. The Italian Catholic Federation: The First 50 Years, 5, 7.

17. Andriano to Hagerty, March 10, 1943, Hagerty Papers; see also Andrew M. Canepa, The Founders of Il Cenacolo (San Francisco, 2001).

18. Baccari, Jr., Scarpaci, and Zavattaro, eds., Saints Peter and Paul Church, 96 - 101; Issel and Cherny, San Francisco, 1865 - 1932, 73 - 78.

19. Iris Origo, A Need to Testify: Portraits of Lauro de Bosis, Ruth Draper, Gaetano Salvemini, Ignazio Silone and an essay on Biography (London, 1984), 40.

20. John A. Ryan, "The Doctrine of Fascism," The Commonweal, 5 (Nov. 17,

1926), 42 - 44; Ryan, "Fascism in Practice," in ibid. (Nov. 24, 1926), 73 - 76; Albert Bandini, "The Doctrine of Fascism," in ibid. (Dec. 15, 1926), 158; Bandini, "The Facts of Fascism," in ibid. (Jan. 19, 1927), 300; D’Agostino, Rome in America, 187 - 189; Miscamble, "The Limits of American Catholic Antifascism," 523 - 538.

21. Webster, The Cross and The Fasces, 109 - 112; Domenico, Remaking Italy in the Twentieth Century, 57 - 59. The encyclical is at the website: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_x/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-x_enc_11061905_il-fermo-proposito_en.html. The official English titles of encyclicals are not necessarily verbatim translations of the original Latin or Italian.

22. Andriano to Hanna, June 13, 1929, Angelo Andriano file, Chancery Archives.

23. Webster, The Cross and The Fasces, 112. For the 1922 and 1931 encyclicals, see the following websites:

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_29061931_non-abbiamo-bisogno_en.html and http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_23121922_ubi-arcano-dei-consilio_en.html

24. Andriano to Hagerty, March 10, 1943, Hagerty Papers.

25. Sermon by Coadjutor Archbishop John J. Mitty to the Council of Catholic Women, May 7, 1932, Mitty Sermon Collection, Chancery Archives.

26. Biography file, Hagerty Papers.

27. Mitty to Andriano, March 4, 1936; "A" folder, Correspondence files, 1936 - 37; Mitty to Rev. [Father] Thomas N. O’Kane, Oct. 7, 1936, letter marked Confidential, Catholic Action 1936 - 1940 folder, Correspondence files, all in Chancery Archives.

28. "Plan for Catholic Action" in Correspondence Files, Catholic Action 1936 - 1940 folder, Chancery Archives; Andriano to Hagerty, March 10, 1943, Hagerty Papers.

29. Mitty to various addressees, Dec. 22, 1936, Correspondence files, Catholic Action folder, 1936 - 1940, Chancery Archives; uncorrected draft "Catholic Action Group" marked "News item: The Monitor," and attached typewritten notes of Jan. 6, 1938, meeting in ibid.

30. John J. Mitty, "Address on Catholic Action," Oct. 29, 1938, Mitty Sermons and Addresses, Chancery Archives. Andriano to Most Reverend and dear Archbishop [Mitty], May 19, 1938, Correspondence files, Catholic Action 1936 - 1940 folder, in ibid.; Msgr. Luigi Civardi, A Manual of Catholic Action (New York, 1935).

Giuseppe Pizzardo also served as Vatican Secretary for Extraordinary Affairs and maintained an "affectionate" relationship with Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, foreign minister from 1936 to 1943, and ambassador to the Vatican. Count Galeazzo Ciano, Ciano’s Hidden Diary, 1937 - 1938 (New York, 1953), 40.

31. Hagerty to Mitty, March 28, 1938, in Correspondence files, Catholic Men folder 1 of 2, 1938 - 1941, Chancery Archives; William T. Doyle to Mitty, March 22, 1935, "A Plan for the Knights of Columbus of California" and "Plan for Council Participation, Knights of Columbus; Mobilization for Catholic Action," all in Knights of Columbus folder, 1933 - 1936, Correspondence files, Chancery Archives; Andriano to Hagerty, March 10, 1943, Hagerty Papers.

32. The Catholic Men of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, "Summary of State of Organization Following Spring Series of District Meetings, 1941," Chancery Archives; John J. O’Connor, "Emphasis on Action," St. Anthony Messenger (Feb. 1942).

33. Andriano to Hagerty, March 10, 1943, Hagerty Papers; Issel and Cherny, San Francisco, 1865 - 1932, 198.

34. Cherny, "Prelude to the Popular Front;" Andriano to Hagerty, March 10, 1943, Hagerty Papers. The role of Catholic leaders and Catholic labor relations principles in the settlement of the 1934 strike is detailed in William Issel, "Business Power and Political Culture in San Francisco, 1900 - 1940," Journal of Urban History, 16 (1989), 52 - 77.

35. "Address at St. Vincent De Paul Golden Jubilee Dinner," Jan. 5, 1936, Mitty Sermons, Chancery Archives; The Monitor [San Francisco], Feb. 22, 1936; "Closing Address, Regional Catholic Conference on Industrial Problems," June 9, 1936, Chancery Archives. Several items are in the Archive’s Communism 1936 - 1937 folder, Correspondence files, 1936: "Special Memorandum in re: Harry Bridges, Oct. 25, 1936; "San Francisco Mailing List of the American Friends of the Soviet Union," n.d.; Mitty to My dear Jim [Hagerty], Nov. 13, 1936, marked "confidential"; and Mitty to Rev. [Father] Bryan J. McEntegart, April 14, 1937. San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 25, 1936; San Francisco News, April 29, 1937.

36. Sue Barry, "News and Views," The People’s World, May 22, 1939; Anthony B. Diepenbrock to Board of Directors, Golden Gate International Exposition, March 4, 1939, Golden Gate Exposition folder 1 of 2, 1939 - 1940, Correspondence Files, Chancery Archives.

37. Umberto Olivieri, Democracy! Which Brand, Stalin’s or Jefferson’s (San Francisco, 1937).

38. Jack Henning, "The Catholic College Graduate and Labor," The Moraga Quarterly, 9 (Spring 1939), 165 - 170; "ACTU Preamble, Constitution, Pledge" and "Proposed Changes…San Francisco Chapter 6" (mimeo, July 8, 1948, in the Labor Management School Records/ACTU, Archives of the University of San Francisco.

39. For more on the ACTU and other Catholic labor initiatives, see William Issel, "‘A Stern Struggle’: Catholic Activism and San Francisco Labor, 1932 - 1958" in Robert W. Cherny, William Issel, and Kieran Taylor, eds., American Labor and the Cold War: Grassroots Politics and Postwar Political Culture (New Brunswick, N.J., 2004), 154 - 176.

40. The mayoral election of 1939 is detailed in William Issel, "New Deal and Wartime Origins of San Francisco’s Postwar Pro-growth Political Culture," in Lotchin, ed., The Way We Really Were, 68 - 92. The informer for the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union reported to the union’s research director, Paul Pinsky. See Issel, "‘A Stern Struggle,’" 175. See also Stefano Luconi, "Una Quinta Colonna nell’Urna: Il Regime Fascista e le Elezioni Presidenziali del 1940 negli Stati Uniti," in Michele Abbate, ed., L’Italia Fascista tra Europa e Stati Uniti d’America (Civita Castellana ed Orte, 2002), 47.

41. Rudolph J. Vecoli, "The Making and Un-Making of the Italian American Working Class," in Cannistraro and Meyer, eds., The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism, 22 - 23. For the Franklin D. Roosevelt speech, see the website http://millercenter.virginia.edu/scripps/diglibrary/prezspeeches/roosevelt/fdr_1940_0610.html

42. DeMedici, "The Italian Language Press," 54 - 55.

43. Martin Dies, The Trojan Horse in America (New York, 1940), 333. See also Francis MacDonnell, Insidious Foes: The Axis Fifth Column and the American Home Front (New York, 1995), 75 - 76. The HUAC hearings transcripts are published in U. S. House Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States. Volume 3 of 7, Executive Hearings, San Francisco, California: July 17 - August 20, 1940 (Washington, D.C., 1940), 1437 - 1463. Because the transcripts of the Tenney Committee hearings are not available to researchers, this account depends on newspaper accounts and the report of the committee, published as California Senate, Fifty-fifth Session, Report of the Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in California (Sacramento, Calif., 1943), 282 - 321.

44. Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities, 1443.

45. Ibid., 1446, 1457; Baccari, Jr., Scarpaci, and Zavattaro, eds., Saints Peter and Paul Church, 158 - 159; Canepa, "Profilo della Massoneria," 97 - 100. Antonio Cogliandro and Andriano each merited a full-page biography and portrait in an expensively produced coffee table book. See G. M. Tuoni, Attività italiane in California (San Francisco, 1929), 48, 54. Catholic success in convincing Italian Masons to raise their children in the Church can be seen in the case of Joseph L. Alioto, the son of a Sicilian fisherman member of Speranza Italiana Masonic lodge. Alioto attended Sacred Heart High School, became a protégé of Andriano’s colleague James L. Hagerty at St. Mary’s College, received a law degree at Catholic University, worked with Archbishop Mitty on Catholic Action projects, and later became a mayor of San Francisco. See William Issel, "‘The Catholic Internationale’: Mayor Joseph Alioto’s Urban Liberalism and San Francisco Catholicism," U.S. Catholic Historian, 22 (Spring 2004), 99 - 120.

46. Edward L. Barrett, Jr. The Tenney Committee: Legislative Investigation of Subversive Activities in California. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1951), 13. See also M. J. Heale, McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935 - 1965 (Athens, Ga., 1998); Heale, "Red Scare Politics: California’s Campaign Against Un-American Activities, 1940-1970," Journal of American Studies, 20 (1986), 188 - 211; Ingrid Winther Scobie, "Jack B. Tenney and the ‘Parasitic Menace’: Anti-Communist Legislation in California 1940 - 1949," Pacific Historical Review, 43 (1974), 188 - 211.

47. Report on Un-American Activities in California, 298; the hearings received front- page coverage in San Francisco newspapers, and detailed articles appeared in the two morning newspapers, San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle, on May 26, 27, 28, 29, 1942.

48. Stephen Fox, The Unknown Internment: An Oral History of the Relocation of Italian Americans During World War II (Boston, 1990), 174; Stephen Schwartz, "Catholic Action in 30s S.F. North Beach," e-mail letter to Bill Issel, January 22, 2004; see also Schwartz, From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind (New York, 1998), 274 - 275; Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 347. Diggins mistakenly asserts that the Tenney Committee investigated San Francisco’s "Italian American police chief." The city’s chief of police was not Italian American; the reference is probably to Andriano, a former police commissioner.

49. San Francisco Examiner, May 28, 1942. The Communist Party denounced socialists as well as Catholics during World War II. Socialist A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, found himself accused of having "guaranteed the triumph of fascism." See Daily Worker, Dec. 18, 25, 1942.

50. Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities, 1446 - 1462; Report on Un-American Activities in California, 284 - 319.

51. Luconi and Pretelli have utilized documentary collections in the Archivio Storico Diplomatico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri, located in Rome. Luconi, "Una Quinta Colonna nell’ Urna"; Matteo Pretelli, "Italian Language and Culture as Tools of Fascist Propaganda and Affirmation of the Italian Character among Italian Immigrants and their Sons in the USA," unpublished paper in author’s possession; e-mail from Matteo Pretelli to William Issel, April 22, 2004.

52. Alfonso Zirpoli Oral History, in The Unknown Internment, 167.

53. Report on Un-American Activities in California, 298; San Francisco Call Bulletin, May 26, 1942.

54. Andriano to Hagerty, March 10, 1943, Hagerty Papers; James L. Hagerty to Dear Syl [Andriano], Feast of Christ the King, 1942 (Oct. 25), Hagerty Papers.

55. Ibid.

56. Fox, The Unknown Internment, 123. The unscrupulous tactics used by the Tenney Committee were exposed in 1951 by a University of California law professor in a report underwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation. See Barrett, Jr., The Tenney Committee, 330 - 354.

57. According to Zirpoli, when Andriano’s supporters urged him to challenge the Army’s relocation order in court, he replied: "No. I don’t want to do anything that detracts in the slightest degree from the war effort." Zirpoli Oral History in Fox, The Unknown Internment, 167; Andriano to Very Reverend Bishop Thomas A. Connolly, May 29, July 9, 1942, in A folder 1942 - 1943, Correspondence Files, Chancery Archives; draft of telegram from Daniel C. Murphy et al to Honorable Franklin D. Roosevelt (n.d.); Andriano to Dear Jim [Hagerty], Nov. 17, 1942; Hagerty to Dear Syl [Andriano], Nov. 20, 1942, all in box 327, Hagerty Papers; San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 27, 1942; Il Corriere del Popolo, Oct. 29, 1942.

58. Andriano to Most Reverend and dear Archbishop [Mitty], July 29, 1943, A folder 1942 - 1943, Correspondence Files, Chancery Archives; Andriano to Dear Jim [Hagerty], Feast of Corpus Christi (June 24, 1943), box 327, Hagerty Papers.

59. "Exclusion Case: Sylvester Andriano," August 9, 1943, Records of the Office of the Secretary of War, Record Group 107, Box 7, National Archives and Records Service, Washington, D.C.; "Exclusion of Non-Japanese," Supplemental Report, Part III, 854-855, Records of U.S. Army Operational, Tactical, and Support Organizations (World War II and Thereafter), Record Group 338, Box 9, National Archives and Records Service, Washington, D.C.; Andriano to Dear Jim [Hagerty], Nov. 12, 1943, box 327, Hagerty Papers. I have not been able to ascertain agent Martino’s first name.

60. John P. Doran to Hon. Frank J. Hennessy, Oct. 22, 1942; Andriano to Dear Jim [Hagerty], Oct. 28, 1942; Hagerty to Dear Syl [Andriano], Nov. 15, 1942, all in box 327, Hagerty Papers; The Monitor, editorial, May 20, 1942; Mitty to Right Rev. Michael J. Ready, May 27, June 24 1942, A folder 1942-43, Correspondence Files, Chancery Archives.

61. The Monitor, editorial, May 20, 1942; San Francisco Examiner, May 27, 28, 1942; San Francisco Chronicle, editorial, May 29, 1942, Dec. 31, 1943.

62. "Catholicism in San Francisco," mimeographed typewritten report given at the County Convention, July 10 - 11, 1948, pp. 2, 3, copy in Subject File, CP 1948, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles, California. Andriano to Dear Jim [Hagerty], Aug. 1, 1945; Mitty to Andriano, March 2, 1946, Catholic Action File, 1945 - 1946, Chancery Archives; Il Bolletino, October 1, 1946. On the postwar competition between Catholics and the Communist Party in San Francisco, see Issel, "‘The Catholic Internationale’"; see also Richard Gid Powers, "American Catholics and Catholic Americans: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Anticommunism," U.S. Catholic Historian, 22 (Fall 2004), 17 - 35.

63. Roger W. Lotchin, "California Cities and the Hurricane of Change: World War II in the San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego Metropolitan Areas," Pacific Historical Review, 63 (1994), 393 - 420; Mark S. Massa, S.J., Anti-Catholicism in America: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (New York, 2003); Philip Jenkins, The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (New York, 2003).

64. Scherini, "Executive Order 9066 and Italian Americans: The San Francisco Story;" Scherini, "The Fascist/Anti-Fascist Struggle in San Francisco;" Lothrop, "A Shadow on the Land: The Impact of Fascism on Los Angeles Italians;" DiStasi, ed., Una Storia Segreta.

65. Stephen C. Fox, "General John DeWitt and the Proposed Internment of German and Italian Aliens during World War II," Pacific Historical Review, 57 (1988), 407 - 438. San Franciscans of Irish birth or ancestry still dominated much of the city’s public life during World War II.

66. Ibid., 419.

67. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York, 1965); Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan: The Movie: and other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley, 1987); Heale, "Red Scare Politics"; John Sbardellati and Tony Shaw, "Booting a Tramp: Charlie Chaplin, the FBI, and the Construction of the Subversive Image in Red Scare America," Pacific Historical Review, 72 (2003), 495 - 530.