The American Committee on Italian Migration, Anti-Communism, and Immigration Reform

Abstract

WITH THE ONSET OF THE Cold War in the late 1940s, many ethnic groups in the United States were presented with a complex set of problems regarding their homelands and Communism. American ethnics often had to renegotiate their relationships with their homeland governments, institutions, and countrymen and women in light of the new geopolitics of the Cold War. Many groups also found that the politics and culture of the Cold War affected their own social and political positions within the United States as well. This was no less the case for Italian Americans than it was for ethnic Americans with homelands within the Soviet bloc. Throughout the postwar period, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was one of the strongest Communist parties in Western Europe. And although it never obtained majority control of the Italian government, the PCI exercised significant influence on Italian politics and Italy’s strongest labor union, the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro. Moreover, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the triumph of anti-Communist forces in Italy was hardly a foregone conclusion. Only with substantial economic and political support from the United States, and with notable intervention from the Vatican, did the Christian Democratic Party gradually and tenuously gain control of the Italian government and establish democratic hegemony in the country. Historians have well documented how beginning with Marshall Plan aid in 1948 and continuing throughout the following decades, American political, financial, and military aid buttressed postwar Italian anti-Communist coalitions led by the Christian Democratic Party. They also have noted how Italian Americans, as well as other ethnic groups, became Cold War “warriors” or “ambassadors” by promoting democratic governments and culture, free trade, and American friendship in their homelands. Ethnic Americans often undertook these tasks for a variety of reasons. They hoped combating Communism in their homelands would help achieve favorable foreign policy decisions toward those homelands, including economic assistance