Italian-American West Enders’ Fight for Citizenship in the 1950s

Two Italian-American West Enders fought for their legal right to live in the United States during the 1950s, with varying degrees of success. These cases reveal how the “immigrant era” of the West End continued after the 1920s, the traditional ending of that period.

Although Italian immigrants had made the West End their home since 1880, America’s immigration authorities had sometimes created legal difficulties for Italian-Americans already living in, or seeking to return to, the West End. Two cases in the 1950s, involving West Enders Giacomo Quattrone and Carmela Peluso, reveal that the West End’s “immigrant era” continued after the 1920s, the decade commonly understood as the end of that era after the federal government created new restrictive ethnic quotas. While immigration to the West End did not again reach its height at the turn of the twentieth century, some Italian-Americans continued with varying degrees of success to assert their right to live in the United States as citizens.

Giacomo Quattrone came to the United States when he was 17 years old, in 1907, and lived in the West End since 1930, on 34 Staniford St. In January 1953, then a 63-year-old father of eight children and a “presser” for a coat manufacturer, Quattrone faced federal deportation proceedings for his alleged affiliation with the Communist Party. The McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, which required that Communist and “subversive” organizations register with the federal government, allowed for the deportation of any foreign-born persons affiliated with certain organizations on a list made by the US Attorney General. The McCarran Act was passed over President Harry S. Truman’s veto. Truman, in his speech on the veto, argued that the bill would “put the Government of the United States in the thought control business” and, concerning its immigration provisions, “require us to exclude and to deport the citizens of some friendly noncommunist countries.” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote against the McCarran Act in 1952 after a federal judge ordered the deportation of a Finnish man, Carl Latva, who lived in the United States for 38 years.

In Quattrone’s proceedings, Judge George Sweeney determined that he, while not officially a Party member, was affiliated with the Communist Party because he subscribed to the Daily Worker, a Communist newspaper, and raised funds for the Communist Party in Boston. Quattrone’s lawyer, Frederick Cohen, argued that the McCarran Act was an unconstitutional violation of Quattrone’s First Amendment rights. The United States Court of Appeals (First Circuit) denied Quattrone’s appeal and upheld his deportation on February 19, 1954, and he departed for Italy on June 15. A decade later, sections of the McCarran Act were struck down by the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds until most of the bill was repealed by Congress in 1993.

Another West Ender, Carmela Peluso, faced a different legal barrier to her American citizenship. Peluso, who lived on 66 Allen St., was born in the United States yet brought to Italy by her parents at the age of 3. She stayed in Italy until deciding, in 1949, to return to Boston and join her parents who came back in 1947. But the American consulate in Palermo denied Peluso a passport on the inaccurate premise that she voted in two Italian elections in 1946 and 1947. Peluso and her Boston attorney, Samuel Valenti, challenged the withholding of her passport, and the consulate eventually agreed to give one to Peluso during the Fall of 1953. On January 6, 1954, Assistant US Attorney James Sullivan, Jr. admitted in federal court that the US government’s position was “on further investigation not to have been substantiated,” and the case was resolved. Peluso brought her son and two step-children from Italy to live with her parents in the West End. Her husband and daughter remained in Italy and applied to enter the country.