This takes approximately six minutes to read.
Quoting Professor Gian Giacomo Migone’s The United States and Fascist Italy, pages 345, 349–352:
[Robert A.] Divine’s own account of the itinerary of the second Neutrality Act clarifies just how the divisions among the isolationists blocked the approval of a law that, while remaining equally rigid in its formal impartiality, would have allowed the president to drastically reduce trade with [Fascist] Italy in the sectors most crucial to the war effort.¹⁴³ That bill had been specifically drafted to meet the demands of the group of isolationist senators headed by Senator Nye, especially including Key Pittman from Nevada.¹⁴⁴
[…]
Joseph C. Green, in charge of the Office of Arms and Munitions Control, enforced the enforcement of the neutrality acts. All the protests, pressures, suggestions, and other mail sent to the U.S. government concerning the war in Ethiopia arrived on his desk. His judgment was quite clear; in one of his long and detailed missives to a colleague, he summarized the course of events:
The reason for the defeat of the bill [presented by Pittman and McReynolds on behalf of the administration] has never been thoroughly understood by the public. I say reason [emphasis in original] advisedly. There was only one. The various criticisms directed against the bill on grounds of law and policy had no real effect. The bill would have passed had it not been for the highly organized and highly effective opposition of the Italian-Americans.
Fascist organizations all over the country had their members write five form letters each — one to the President, one to the Secretary of State, and one to each of their two senators and to their Representative of Congress. I handled over 10,000 such letters during the month of January. These letters were supplemented by the public appearance of Fascist representatives before the Committees and by intensive lobbying in the Senate and House Office buildings.
Senators and Representatives — particularly the latter — from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, Michigan and California trembled openly in their boots. The Italian-Americans are such a highly organized minority that Representatives facing election in November did not dare to vote for a neutrality bill which met with their displeasure.
Many of them were perfectly frank in their discussions with me in regard the situation with which they were confronted. One man from Connecticut, who was in principle strongly in favor of the bill, asked me how he could possibly vote for it in view of the fact that he had 40,000 Italians in his district.
The crisis came on February 7. McReynolds went to Pittman and told him that he could not proceed with the [administration’s] bill. Pittman and McReynolds came up to the White House and jointly told the President the same thing.
After a conference between the President, the Secretary [of State], Judge Moore [Assistant Secretary at the State Department], Pittman and McReynolds, the bill was dropped and Pittman hastily drafted the substitute which was eventually passed. […] The Administration unsuccessfully attempted to make it clear to the public that it had not changed its attitude, but that Congress had refused to follow its lead. […]
The Italian-Americans gave us a fine object lesson in the use of political pressure by an organized minority.¹⁵⁹
The lesson [that] Green referred to concerned the opportunities offered by the American constitutional and electoral system for minorities to exert political influence. The Italian-Americans were not alone in having access to legally defined spaces from which to influence politics, starting with congressional hearings[.]
The presidential elections, founded on a two-way winner-takes-all electoral college, acted as a multiplier of the votes they mustered, since any changed vote represents the gain (and loss) of two votes between the two major candidates. In the electoral college system, a minority group that can show its organizational strength and that identifies itself as a single-issue interest group can force each candidate to court its vote by taking a clear stand on that issue as an almost irresistible form of political conditioning on elected representatives.
Green did not know, although he intuited, that the Italo-American capacity to promptly mobilize and achieve goals was not spontaneous. The State Department, through an investigation by its chief special agent in New York, made a notable effort to find proof that the propaganda emanating from the Italo-American community was really the fruit of organizing by the consulates.¹⁶⁰
Several similar incidents in previous months had led to the dismissal of the Italian vice-consul in Detroit, and this gave the State Department hope that it might be able to repeat the exposure and the request for expulsion.¹⁶¹
A few cases had been raised before the newly sitting Committee on Un-American Activities in the House of Representatives. The special agent of New York affirmed that the organizers of a meeting he had investigated clearly had close ties with the consulate of New York, though they were American citizens. He was not able to prove that their activity had been directly incited by the consulate.
The investigative officer in Washington could only reassure his superiors that they would continue their efforts to find proof of a tangible relationship between the consulate and the American Friends of Italy, the committee used for antisanction propaganda, in the hope that they would drop their guard and show less caution in protecting the illusion of the New York consul’s noninvolvement.¹⁶² This hope came to naught, since Rosso and his collaborators were evidently aware of the gravity of any proven involvement by [foreign] authorities.
While it is probable, if not certain, that the consulates suggested and helped organize the activities of these prominent Italo-Americans, this was not the decisive aspect of the Italian contribution to the Italo-American campaign anyway. The real link was strictly political and had been decided years earlier. The most important rôle of Italian-Americans was their electoral power, which they used to the fullest extent possible in the American system.
The choice to naturalize, that is to take on American citizenship, was a natural path for immigrants; one might even say it was obligatory. American citizenship was prized because it guaranteed not only stability and permanent residence in the United States and the possibility of bringing over more relatives, but also the promise of upward mobility. As a citizen, the immigrant became part of the nation, participating in American political life and, within limits, organizing collectively and choosing and influencing a party (for most immigrants this was the Democratic Party) and its elected officials.
But [Rome] often acted contrarily to this process, both before and after the Fascist seizure of power. [Fascist] rhetoric about the adventures and suffering of the emigrant, rather than translating into living conditions that might lead him to remain in the mother country in order to spare him those pains, favored activities aimed at maintaining the emigrant’s links to the mother country: Italian schools, support for emigrants’ organizations, Italian language publications, congresses of emigrants’ representatives, legislation that maintained the right to vote in Italy even after taking foreign citizenship, and bank branches to make it convenient to send remittances back to Italy — a source of income the government relied upon for its balance of payments.
This network gave rise to public and private structures dedicated to nurturing the links between the emigrant and his land of origin, which were sometimes counterproductive for the government, and more often for the emigrant. In the specific case of the United States, every impediment introduced in the process of naturalization was not only damaging to the emigrant, but meant that he wielded less political influence that might favor the [Fascist] government.
(Emphasis added.)
As easy as it may be to resent Italo-American adults for supporting Fascist Italy’s war effort, Imperial America’s inadequate support for immigrant communities, coupled with Fascist Italy’s grooming of the Italian diaspora, made supporting Fascist Italy an obvious choice for ordinary Italians. The exceptions came from organized labor. Quoting John P. Diggins’s Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, page 83:
The obbligato of platitudes carried a few discordant notes. The Unione of Pueblo (Colorado), Lavoratore Italiano of Pittsburg (Kansas), and La Follia di New York had harsh words for Mussolini the “renegade and opportunist” and Fascism the “Frankenstein.” By and large, these small and scattered anti-Fascist publications represented the opinion of Italian-American labor.
Perhaps membership in a support network, or ‘family’, made it easier for these Italians to oppose fascism? I am uncertain. In any event, I trust that you yourselves can spot the parallels (or the differences) between this and the ‘State of Israel’s’ exploitation of the Jewish diaspora.