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Yugoslav-Americans and National Security during World War II, by Lees, Lorraine M.

Xenophobia and the curtailment of civil liberties on the American home front are far from unknown during wartime. World War I offers numerous examples of what historian Lorraine Lees justifiably calls paranoia and callousness in this regard, and we readers are tempted to add that we see the same, to some extent, in our country in the current century. The book at hand is an attempt to examine this same phenomenon during the Second World War, specifically by an analysis of the activities and interaction of various agencies of the U.S. government and the South Slavic immigrant community here. Lees opens her book with a useful, short history of American nativism, especially as it affected law enforcement and national security in the two world wars. Despite the reprises of Red Scares, she points out that there is an essential tension in the U.S. government’s approach to immigrant communities in time of war, with propaganda and mobilization alternating with paranoia and persecution. This ambivalence or rivalry between competing socio-political impulses makes a fascinating background for her clearly argued and well-researched volume. One way to sum up these framing considerations is to ask whether the definition of “American” or “patriotic American” or “real citizen” is essentially set by 1914, with clear racial outsiders and political enemies, or does it remain an ongoing project, still taking shape in a pluralistic, Progressive (and progressive) way, enriching and expanding itself with the hearts and minds and commitment of newcomers, through the 1940s? Lees briefly identifies sectors of U.S. public opinion where these varying views predominated and, more importantly, different agencies of the American government hewing to one end of the spectrum or the other. The case of Yugoslav-Americans, as uneasily as that term sits on us in today’s post-1991 world, makes a good subject for a study like this one. To begin with, Washington had had good luck with Habsburg ‘subject’ nationalities’ loyalty and agreement with Wilsonian foreign policy principles in the World War I era, and although some of the Yugoslav nationalities, such as the Croats, are the same people, the definitions and lines of distinction look very different in the Second World War. Second, the United States was concerned