VOL. XIV, Nos. 1 & 2 SPRING-SUMMER 1987 Publisher: LEANDROS PAPATHANASIOU Editorial Board: ALEXANDROS KITROEFF PETER PAPPAS YIANNIS P. ROUBATIS Managing Editor: SUSAN ANASTASAKOS Advisory Board: MARGARET ALEXIOU KOSTIS MOSKOFF Harvard University Thessaloniki, Greece SPYROS I. ASDRACHAS NICOS MOUZELIS University of Paris I London School of Economics LOUKAS AXELOS JAMES PETRAS Athens, Greece S.U.N.Y. at Binghamton HAGEN FLEISCHER OLE L. SMITH University of Crete University of Copenhagen ANGELIKI E. LAIOU STAVROS B. THOMADAKIS Harvard University Baruch College, C.U.N.Y. CONSTANTINE TSOUCALAS University of Athens The Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora is a quarterly review published by Pella Publishing Company, Inc., 337 West 36th Street, New York NY 10018-6401, U.S.A., in March, June, September, and December. Copyright © 1987 by Pella Publishing Company. ISSN 0364-2976 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS PETER D. CHIMBOS is Associate Professor of Sociology at Brescia College, London, Ontario . DAN GEORGAKAS is a lecturer at Van Arsdale School for Labor Studies, Empire State College—SUNY .. ALEXANDROS KITROEFF is an Editor of the Journal . BABIS MALAFOURIS is a veteran journalist and author of Ellines tis Amerikis 1528 - 1948 . CHARLES C. MOSKOS is professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, Illinois . ADAMANTIA POLLIS is profes- sor of Political Science at the New School for Social Research, New York ... JOHN E REXINE is professor of Classics at Colgate Uni- versity, New York . MARION SARAFIS has written extensively on Greece in the 1940s . WALTER F. WEIKER is professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, New Jersey. The editors welcome the freelance sub- Articles appearing in this Journal are mission of articles, essays and book re- abstracted and/or indexed in Historical views. All submitted material should be Abstracts and America: History and typewritten and double-spaced. Trans- Life; or in Sociological Abstracts; or in lations should be accompanied by the original text. Book reviews should be Psychological Abstracts; or in the Mod- approximately 600 to 1,200 words in ern Language Association Abstracts (in- length. Manuscripts will not be re- cludes Language Bibliography); or turned unless they are accompanied by in International Political Science Ab- a stamped, self-addressed envelope. stracts; or in American Bibliography of Slavic & East European Studies, in ac- Subscription rates: Individual—$15.00 cordance with the relevance of content for one year, $27.00 for two years; to the abstracting agency. Foreign—$20.00 for one year by surface mail; Institutional—$25.00 for one year, $45.00 for two years. Single issues All articles and reviews published in cost $4.50; back issues cost $6.00. the Journal represent only the opinions of the individual authors; they do not Advertising rates can be had on request necessarily reflect the views of the by writing to the Publisher. editors or the publisher. TABLE OF CONTENTS The Greeks In America by Dan Georgakas 5 Georgakas on Greek Americans: A Response by 'Charles C. Moskos 55 Response to Charles C. Moskos by Dan Georgakas 63 The Moskos-Georgakas Debate: A Rejoinder by Alexandros Kitroeff 73 The Struggle For A Living by Babis Malafouris 79 Propaganda in the Greek-American Community (from the John Poulos Collection) 105 Occupational Distribution and Social Mobility of Greek-Canadian Immigrants by Peter D. Chimbos 131 Book Reviews Adamantia Pollis on Lost Opportunities: The Cyprus Question, 1950-1963 145 Marion Sarafis on The Elgin Marbles: Should They be Returned to Greece? 147 John E. Rexine on Kostis Palamas: A Portrait and an Appreciation 150 John E. Rexine on The Longest Night: Chronicle of a Dead City 150 John E. Rexine on Leonis: A Novel 150 John E. Rexine on The Greek Theater 154 Walter F. Welker on The Tragedy of the Turkish Capital Tax 156 3 The Greeks In America* by DAN GEORGAKAS One Greek scholar has attempted to document the proposition that Christopher Columbus was a Byzantine nobleman.' While that hypothesis remains dubious at best, it is likely that some Greek mariners sailed in Columbus's flotilla. Most certainly there was a Greek caulker named Theodoros on board a Spanish expe- dition headed by Panifilio de Navarez, which anchored in present- day Pensacola, Florida in 1528; and there were some five hundred 'Greeks, mainly from Mani, among the 1,400 colonists who founded the ill-fated community of New Smyrna, in Florida, in 1768. During the subsequent hundred years, however, Greek in- volvement with North America was minimal There were many years when fewer than fifty identifiable Greeks immigrated to America. That pattern began to change in the 1890s. Of the 19,000 Greeks who immigrated to North America in all of the nineteenth century, fully 16,000 arrived during its last decade. This figure swelled tenfold to 167,500 in the first decade of the new century, and by 1940 no fewer than a half-million Greek immigrants had put down roots in the United States. 2 The history of the 1890-1950 period has been slow to emerge. By the time the first professional histories began to appear in the 1960s, Greeks had become among the most prosperous of the immigrant groups, enjoying a reputation as hard-working, clever, and patriotic folk. In some ways, the Greek-Americans were the prototypical rags-to-riches European immigrants and, unlike the *An earlier version of this essay appeared as a six-part series in The Greek- American (Oct. 11, 1986-Nov. 15, 1986). The exchange of views between Moskos, Georgakas, and Kitroeff followed in successive weeks. 1Charles C. Moskos, Jr., The Greek Americans: Struggle and Success (Engle- wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980) begins a discussion of this and related topics. 2lmmigration and Naturalization Services, 1965 Annual Reports, pp. 47-49; Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1972, p. 92; and Immigration and Natural- ization Services 1976 Annual Reports, pp. 87-88. 5 6 JOURNAL OF THE HELLENIC DIASPORA group they most resembled, the Jews, they had a "public relations" advantage because they were Christian. Writing out of that reality, ethnic histories have tended to emphasize those groups and trends which came to dominate what became the formal com- munity; and, as a consequence of this hindsight approach, such accounts have neglected or misrepresented the vigor of dissenting movements and the often turbulent history of the Greek working class. Few Greek Americans of the post-war generations are aware that the pioneer Greek immigrants were among America's most despised minorities, considered to be unruly and unpatriotic quasi- Europeans who frequently resorted to violent means to settle personal—and political—disputes. While aware that Greek immi- grants served as strikebreakers, Greek Americans are usually not aware that, subsequently, those same workers were often leaders in American trade union struggles. Greek Americans who iden- tified automatically with white America during the civil rights turmoil of the 1960s did not know that the first wave of Greeks had often fought, gun-in-hand, against the Ku Klux Klan and state militias in order to establish their political rights. A group of Greeks in the 1920s even went so far as to burn an American flag as a gesture of political outrage.' Modern Greek immigration falls into four general periods: 1890-1922, 1923-1939, 1940-1959, and 1960 to the present. The first of these periods was, by far, the most trying and remains the least understood. At that junction in time, at least ninety percent of the immigrants were male, and the community was consumed with a passion to liberate unredeemed Greece (those Greek-speak- ing areas of the Mediterranean, Thrace, Epirus, Macedonia, and Asia Minor that were still under non-Greek rule, dominated primarily by the Ottoman Empire) Coincident with the Asia Minor Disaster of 1922, which largely fixed the boundaries of what became the contemporary Greek state, the Greek community in America became more stabilized, and a steady increase in female immigration produced a new family orientation. The major issue that came to face Greek men and women was the 3Helen Papanikolas, "Greek Workers in the Intermountain West—The Early Twentieth Century," Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Volume 5, 1979, p. 212. The Greeks In America 7 degree to which Greeks would assimilate into American culture, a question which blurred some of the earlier political and class divisions as the community overcame its inital poverty—a decisive forward momentum that was checked by the Great Depression. When Greek peasants wrote OXI on the mountainsides of Greece in 1940 and the Greek nation rallied to defeat Mussolini's forces, the Greeks in America were profoundly affected in terms of both their public image and self-image. The "quarrelsome" Greeks, with their complex political problems and uneven military record, were suddenly transformed, becoming the first nation in the world to militarily defeat a fascist power. Patriotic fervor swept Greek America. An all-out effort to defeat the Axis Powers and to assist the Greek resistance produced a temporary, but dynamic, Greek American community leadership run by a coalition of liberal and radical forces. That alliance fell apart as a conse- quence of the Civil War in Greece (1946-1949) and the rise of McCarthysim in the United States. Liberals distanced themselves from their former radical associates, some of whom were actually deported or jailed, and most of whom were systematically silenced. Concurrent with this political fragmentation on the left, the community consolidated and extended the economic gains it made in the war years. A new era in Greek American life was clearly evident by the 1960s. The formal community was now dominated by the Greek Orthodox Church, business interests, and politicians who accepted the premises of the Cold War. The military dicta- torship in Greece (1967-1974) and a new immigrant wave eventually revived some traditions of protest, but Greek American dissenters and radicals remained a distinct minority.