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The Exiled Greeks

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The Exiled Greeks 13 THE EXILED GREEKS BY HELEN Z. PAPANIKOLAS Small bird, there where you fly to Ameriki, Tell me, where does my son sleep ? When he is sick, who tends him? —Folk song of immigration At the beginning of the century, thousands of young Greeks began coming to Utah to live their first years of exile in a new land. Like myriad Greeks since ancient times, forced to leave their rocky land that could not sustain them, they vowed to return within a few years. Any life outside patridha, "the fatherland," was exile. Not knowing what the three Moiroi, "the Fates," had decided for them during their first three days of life, many brought a bit of earth in an amulet or small bottle. If their destiny was death in American exile, a priest would have a pinch of Greek earth to sprinkle over them as they lay in their caskets. The boys and young men had grown up in one of the most devastating periods of Greece's turbulent history. Struggling in the decay left by 400 years of Ottoman rule, their northern provinces still under Turkish control, many of their islands governed by the English and Italians, Greece became bankrupt in 1893. In 1897 the Greeks were defeated by the Turks and further humiliated by the Great Powers' imposing financial control over them.1 The educa­ tion of this generation, then, was poor, often completely lacking, their opportunities stultified. When the main industry of Greece, the currant crop, failed in 1907, families mortgaged their land at usurious rates to send sons to America. It was their only hope to survive penury and to provide daughters with necessary dowries. The few yearly emigrants stand­ ing on wharves with their scant belongings multiplied into thou- This essay is based mainly on the author's Toil and Rage in a New Land: The Greek Immigrants in Utah, 2d ed. rev., reprinted from Utah Historical Quarterly 38, no. 2 (1970). 'L.S. Stavrianos, The Balkans Since 1453 (New York, 1966), p. 467. 409 HELEN Z. PAPANIKOLAS sands, among them men wearing white kilts or Cretan breeches. Villages were left with only women, children, and old men to harvest crops and to tend goats.2 Previous generations had gone to Rumania, Russia, and Egypt. Sailors were wont to jump ship in outposts throughout the world. The young at the turn of the century sat in village squares and in coffeehouses listening to priests reading letters from Ameriki and gazing at photographs of former villagers dressed in American finery. Work was everywhere, the letters said, especially on the sidhero dhrames ("rail lines"). Often the well-dressed emigrants themselves returned as labor agents for American industrialists. Although contract labor had been made illegal after the inundation of Irish immigrants a half century earlier, it had continued covertly. Into remote mountain villages of Greece, labor and steamship agents climbed to entice the destitute who were eager to indenture themselves to reach Ameriki. With their families' pool of silver sewed inside the lining of their jackets or pinned to their homespun underwear, some with clarinets and stringed instruments under their arms, they boarded crowded ships at Piraeus, Patras, and Heraklion. Many of them were forced to wait a week or more in Naples and other European ports for space on ships crossing back and forth to the United States. They stood on the crowded lower decks with hope and anxiety, hope for a new life, anxiety that they would be turned back by officials at Ellis Island who every day rejected thousands of immigrants. Gheorghios Zisimopoulos, who would change his name to George Zeese and be­ come the owner of a grocery chain in Utah, feared that he would be sent back because of a missing index finger. George Cayias, who became a leading Utah insurance man, was nine years old when he reached Ellis Island. Through a misunderstanding his older brother was not there to meet him. He was put back on board ship, got off in Spain by mistake, and after many harrowing adventures, again sailed for Ellis Island. The island was a symbol of what awaited them in America. The Greeks came later to America and to Utah than the Italians with whom they are often compared. Italians had been in Carbon County mines since the late 1890s and were followed by relatives and countrymen. Yet a greater number of Greeks came to Utah.3 * Ibid., p. 481. The 1910 Census lists immigrants from Greece as follows: J850-86; 1860-328; 1870-390; 1880-776; 1890-1,887; 1900-8,515; 1910- 101,282. 'Ibid. In 1910 Utah's population was 373,351. Greeks numbered 4,039 or 6.4 percent of the foreign-born population; Italians 3,117 or 4.9 percent. 410 THE EXILED GREEKS It was the intense activity of Greek labor agents that brought thousands of their patrioti to that section near the Salt Lake City railyards called Greek Town. Of these, Leonidas G. Skliris, became a padrone of immense power. All Greek labor agents in the West either worked directly for him or had a reciprocal relationship with him. Americans called him the "Czar of the Greeks." Pictures of Skliris and other leading Greek immigrants appear in a 1908 issue of O Ergatis ("The Worker"), a Greek-English newspaper printed in Salt Lake City. Skliris is correctly described as a native of Sparta and incorrectly as the first Greek in Utah. (Nicholas Kastro was the first, coming to Utah in the 1870s; he was a friend of Brigham Young, an Indian fighter, and pioneer Bingham Canyon mining man.)4 The back page of the newspaper advertises Greek steamship lines with branch offices in Greek Town. Commissions from steamship companies for fares and from immigrants for finding them work were lucrative for the padrones during America's burst of industrialization. The Czar advertised in Greek newspapers in America, Greece, and Crete. His advertise­ ments in the journal of the Denver and Rio Grande and Western Pacific reads: L. G. Skliris The Reliable Labor Contractor Headquarters: 507 W 2d So., Salt Lake City. Branch offices: New York, St. Paul, Chicago, Kansas City, Denver, San Francisco and Sacramento.5 Skliris was the authorized labor agent for both the Denver and Rio Grande and Western Pacific railroads, the Utah Copper Com­ pany (now Kennecott Copper Corporation), and coal mines in Carbon County, Utah. Through arrangements with other Greek labor agents, he sent laborers to the Union Pacific and Oregon Short Line railroads, Wyoming and Colorado mines, Pueblo steel mills, and Nevada metal mines. Skliris's czardom accounts for the 1910 Census recording the largest concentration of Greeks in America as living in the Mountain States.6 Between the 1910 and 4 Greek Archives, Western Americana Division, Marriott Library, Uni­ versity of Utah. Nicholas Kastro, according to the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church of Salt Lake City Fiftieth Anniversary Book (Salt Lake City, 1955), pp. 38-39, returned to Greece at the age of 80. His descendants altered their name to Casto. 5 The Scenic Lines Employees' Magazine, Official Railroad Journal of Denver and Rio Grande-Western Pacific, September 1917, p. 38. " Greeks in Utah numbered 4,039. 411 HELEN Z. PAPANIKOLAS 1920 Censuses, the Garfield smelter was opened (1914), and eleven more coal mines began producing, bringing more Greeks into Utah. Padrones in the West supplied strikebreakers as well as workers. With a telephone call or telegram to western coffeehouses, Skliris could have hundreds of newly arrived, unemployed Greeks traveling to distant mines and railyards. When reaching their destination, the perplexed immigrants found they had to run through picket lines. Although the workers did not win their demands, the Greeks were impressed that lowly laborers had the effrontery to complain about employers. Unlike northern Italians and South Slavs, Greeks did not leave their country for seasonal employment in northern coun­ tries where radicalism was prevalent among workers. For supply­ ing strikebreakers alone, mine and railroad management found Skliris invaluable. In the first years of the century, Skliris sent lieutenants to Greece for his labor gangs. Among them was a contingent brought over to break the Carbon County strike of 1903.7 Skliris's advertisements made the journeys unnecessary. Greeks were coming into the country in such numbers that the Czar sent recruiters to' coffeehouses in the Greek section of Chicago's Halstead Street and to those in Denver and Pueblo, Colorado. These dispatches also became super­ fluous, except during strikes; Serbians, Albanians, and Lebanese, as well as Greeks, came to Skliris. Greeks without countrymen already employed in Utah worked their way across the country laying rails over the prairies, building roads, digging sewers, disposing of offal in slaughterhouses, and clearing land of sagebrush. They rode freights, munching bread and dried beans, trying to leam a few words of the new language from small, gilt-edged, Greek-English dictionaries bought in New York and Chicago. They climbed onto wrong freight cars, their food giving out, always alert for railroad detectives their countrymen had warned them against. They hid from town officials who would charge them a three-dollar head tax and jail them if they could not pay it. They were stunned by the hate of Americans. "The scum of Europe," "depraved, brutal foreigners" they were called in print, taunted and jeered when they asked for work. In coffeehouses along the way, they heard of attacks on Greeks: the burning of Omaha's Greek Town and the routing of a gang of Greeks clear- 7 Wyoming Labor Journal (Cheyenne), June 16, 1922. 412 THE EXILED GREEKS ing sagebrush south of Boise, Idaho, by masked men on horses, whips and guns in their hands.8 They arrived at last at the Salt Lake City railyards, the life- blood of immigrants in the state.
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