Author: Reina Gattuso / Source: Atlas Obscura
It started with suet. Some say camp administrators decided that Italian internees should cook with suet instead of olive oil to cut costs.
Others say lower ranking internees, who had been crew members on the ships they were taken from, suspected that former officers were getting olive oil while they were stuck with beef fat. Either way, tensions hit a breaking point when a group of angry internees charged into the kitchen.“They were swinging suet at the cooks,” says Carol Van Valkenburg, a Professor Emerita at the University of Montana School of Journalism who wrote a history of the Missoula internment.
It was the summer of 1941 in Fort Missoula, Montana. The United States would soon be at war. Approximately 1,200 Italian nationals, most of them sailors on boats stranded in American waters or employees of the Italian Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair, had been rounded up by the American government as “enemy aliens” and brought to Fort Missoula. The Italians called the camp Bella Vista, meaning beautiful view, but during the early months of their stay, when rules on visits to town were stricter, their view was marred by barbed wire.
In some versions of the olive oil tale, the Italians were so angry they rioted in the mess. Guards rushed in and sprayed tear gas to break up the fight, and in the chaos, a watchtower guard accidentally shot himself in the foot. According to Van Valkenburg, however, the olive oil agitation didn’t escalate, and the tear gas spraying and accidental self-shooting occurred during a more serious riot between the pro- and anti-fascist internees at the camp.
Nevertheless, food was serious business for the Italians at Fort Missoula, who often complained about the provisions. Unused to canned food, they claimed it was making them sick. Envious of the supposedly superior food eaten by their diabetic counterparts, internees fell victim to a “diabetes epidemic”—until the camp doctor warned them that true diabetics had to undergo uncomfortable treatment. For prisoners far from their homes and families, food mattered.
The Italians at Missoula were just a fraction of the 600,000 Italian Americans whom the U.S. government labeled “enemy aliens” during World War II. Across the West Coast, federal agents placed thousands of Italian immigrants under curfew. Authorities confiscated fishermen’s boats and forced 10,000 of those living close to the California coast to relocate inland. Across the country, intelligence agents surveilled Italian neighborhoods, searching for Mussolini supporters. Immigrants who had made the United States their new home found themselves suspect.
The Italian internees weren’t alone. Missoula held over 100 Germans and 1,000 Japanese Americans, who had been rounded up as part of a much larger surveillance program that the American government had been developing for years.
When the United States entered the war in 1941, the intelligence machinery swung into action. Federal agents forced Japanese Americans from their homes and into camps. Initially, agents targeted Japanese Americans with prominent roles in their communities: newspaper editors, judo teachers, Shinto clergy. But more than for…
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