In April 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote Federal Bureau of Investigation head J. Edgar Hoover to ask: “Have you pretty well cleaned out the alien waiters in the principal Washington hotels? Altogether too much conversation in the dining rooms!”1 This assumption that aliens automatically represented a security risk characterized the administration's attitude toward the foreign-nationality groups in America's population, whether from friendly or enemy countries, during World War II. Publicly, the government declared its confidence in the loyalty of these foreign nationalities, a group defined as consisting of the more “than one-fourth (35,000,000) of the present inhabitants of the United States who either were born abroad or were born in the United States of foreign or mixed parentage.”2 Privately, however, many officials believed fifth-column activity, or at least manipulation by foreign politicians, was a given in America's ethnic communities. Japanese Americans, small in number, geographically concentrated, and easily identifiable, suffered the most from this official suspicion.3 But what of the millions of others in the foreign-nationalities group who hailed from the continent of Europe? They could all not be interned, yet many of them had ties to countries that were ruled or occupied by the Axis enemies of the United States. American officials feared that foreign intrigue in these ethnic communities could endanger American security, disrupt the war effort, and involve the Roosevelt administration in ancient political quarrels that could undermine the Grand Alliance.