American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [197]
By February 1942, Bishop faced another threat. He was now considered an enemy alien, since authorities declared his place of birth as Austria, though this was unusual since Austrian citizens were generally not considered enemy aliens. He was now brought to Ellis Island with hundreds of other accused enemy aliens.
Though Bishop was vocal about his support for Nazi Germany, the OSS report was careful to note that many of those imprisoned on the island were not Nazis and several were “on the verge of a nervous breakdown only because of this intolerable Nazi atmosphere.” These unfortunate individuals had been caught up in a bureaucratic dragnet based on false accusations.
One of them was the forty-nine-year-old Italian opera singer Ezio Pinza. The leading basso at the Metropolitan Opera, Pinza was arrested at his home in suburban New York in March 1942 as an enemy alien. The news of his arrest made the front page of the New York Times. Pinza would spend nearly three months in detention at Ellis Island and feared that his career was over.
The FBI had talked to a number of informants willing to peddle salacious stories about Pinza, including a fellow opera singer who resented him and former girlfriends jealous that he had recently married another woman. The case against Pinza rested on a number of allegations: he had owned a ring with a Nazi swastika on it; he had a boat from which he broadcast secret radio messages to Europe; he was friends with Mussolini and was even nicknamed after the dictator; he sent out coded messages during his performances at the Metropolitan Opera; he had organized a collection of gold and silver at a benefit for the Italian government in 1935. Only the last charge had any merit. Pinza, along with other Italians working at the Met, contributed to a benefit for Italy, but less out of sympathy for fascism than for patriotic support for their homeland. The benefit occurred after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, which Pinza, like most Italians, supported at the time.
Thanks to a good lawyer and the dogged persistence of his wife, Pinza was able to prove his innocence. He was even able to enlist the aid of New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia, whose dentist was Pinza’s father-in-law. He was eventually released on parole from Ellis Island in June and had to report weekly to his local doctor, who acted as his sponsor. On Columbus Day 1942, a few months after Pinza’s release, the Roosevelt administration lifted the enemy alien designation from Italians living in the United States, but it was not until 1944 that Pinza received his unconditional release.
Ironically, three years after his release, Pinza was invited to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a welcome-home celebration for General George Patton at the Los Angeles Coliseum. In 1950, Pinza won a Tony Award for his role in the Broadway musical South Pacific. Yet he never completely got over the heartbreak of his wartime detention. His widow, Doris, charged that his imprisonment worsened his heart condition and helped speed his early death in 1957 at the age of sixty-four.
Ezio Pinza’s story was just one of thousands. By September 1942, some 6,800 aliens of German, Japanese, and Italian ancestry had been arrested by the Justice Department. Of those, half were quickly released or paroled, like Pinza. The other half remained in detention, including the Neupert family. In the summer of 1942, Emma Neupert was taken to Ellis Island as an enemy alien. Her husband, George, was a naturalized U.S. citizen and her nine-year-old daughter, Rose Marie, was a U.S. citizen by birth. By December, Rose Marie was taken to Ellis Island to be with her mother. A few months later George had his citizenship revoked, and he too found himself in detention with his wife and child.
Young Rose Marie remembers that the internees spent most of their days in the Great Hall of the main building, which by 1942 had become “dingy, dirty, and grey with age.” To make matters worse, “every time anything would be moved, the roaches would scurry about.