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Exile
Utah Historical Quarterly
Vol. 38, 1970, No. 2
Exile
THOUSANDS CLAMORED for steerage space. Some wore the native dress of the mainlanders and islanders, white kilts and pom-pom-tipped curved shoes. Gangs of them from the Island of Crete wore black vrdkes (full breeches), cummerbunds, and black fringed head kerchiefs, often with an amulet of Cretan earth sewn inside their shirts. Few Greek women came to America with their husbands. Money was too scarce. Family clans pooled their resources to send one of their members, and he, in turn, worked to send passage for brothers and cousins.
Songs of xenetia filled the clear air of the plains, mountains, and islands.
Tied to the lapels of the men's jackets were tags. On them were written the men's destination and the name of a fellow countryman or that of a Greek labor agent who had recruited them in the coffeehouses, seaports, and streets of Greece for illegal contract labor in the new country. A small bundle or straw suitcase held their possessions. The majority came, though, without true sponsors, their families' pool of silver coins sewed to their rough goatshair underclothing.
They were the sons of peasants; they knew only limited farming and the raising of goats and sheep. The long Turkish occupation that had allowed the country to deteriorate had been followed by the action of England, France, and Russia placing the seventeen-year-old Bavarian Prince Otto (Othon) on the throne of Greece. With him he brought six thousand soldiers to be supported by heavy taxation of the peasants. The guerrilla fighters turned to robbery and kidnapping to exist. For the thirtytwo years of Othon's rule the country further disintegrated. Technical knowledge faded with centuries of disuse. Greek emigrants fell in, then, with the army of unskilled immigrants passing the Statue of Liberty.
The young men who came alone, and especially those who emigrated in the year 1907, suffered incredibly. The United States was in a state of economic depression, the Panic of 1907. Earlier Greek emigrants, destitute, were returning to Greece at that country's expense. The Greek government became alarmed at stories of hunger and deprivation in America (their own chronic form never preoccupied them for long) and were concerned that the country's future was in jeopardy with the exodus of their youth. Greek newspapers printed harrowing stories of the plight of emigrants in America; they exhorted the young men to remain in their mother country.
Heedlessly the young continued their flight, their only fear that a blemish, a cough, or caprice on the part of an official at Ellis Island would turn them away from the Promised Land. A yearly average of thirtyone thousand boys and men came to America between the years of 1906 and 1914. Entire villages were left with only women, children, and a few old men.
They left fields to be worked and goats to be pastured by the old and by young girls. A phenomenon occurred. In villages, towns, and the few cities there were no young men to marry the girls. The few men who remained found themselves in an enviable position; families of marriageable girls vied for them with large dowries that left them in penury.
The traditional May First celebrations— in which young people reigned laden with blossoms and bells, singing the song of "May First" (a paean to youth and young marriage) and girls displaying their dowries of embroidered and woven linens and house furnishings — became desperate affairs. The few young men looked calculatingly at the displays. A generation of young women in Greece remained spinsters ; a few married old men. When the men who had emigrated to America were ready to marry, they sent for younger, marriageable girls.
While the women and girls sang the old songs of their sons, brothers, and beloved in foreign lands, the young men left Ellis Island. Some came to Utah directly. The 1903 strike in the Carbon County mines opened the way for them. The Coal Inspector's report of that year includedan interview with Superintendent Sharp of the Sunnyside mine. Management, he said, preferred young Mormon farmers to work the mines. If they would come, "the foreign element (Italians and Slavs) would never again be permitted in the mines of the Utah Fuel Company. . . .We have suffered enough from these foreigners." Mormons in sufficient numbers did not come, and the Greeks were brought in.
Governor Heber M. Wells sent the Utah National Guard into the coal area. Italians and English-speaking miners were driven from the country. The great labor leader Mother Jones was arrested and held in the Price jail. The young Greeks knew nothing of the issues; they did not understand their position. An employer in Greece could do what he liked with his property. To strike against an employer, no matter how cruel, was a strange idea to the Greeks.
Each freight train and sometimes a passenger train brought in more of the young Greeks. In 1900 there were 3 of them in Utah, but by 1910 there were 4,062. They continued coming until they were the largest labor force in the state.
The rest of the young immigrants who eventually reached Utah left Ellis Island and found there was not work for the Americans, let alone for those whom the newspapers called "undesirable aliens."
Eating dried beans the men — called teenagers in later times — walked the streets of big cities with newspapers folded inside their jackets to keep out the wind. Trying to find work and not knowing a word of English, they found hostility and violence and were jailed for vagrancy. When their sentences were over, they were taken to the city limits and told, "Go West."
West was where the new country was expanding. Men were laying rails, building roads, constructing bridges, and digging water lines. The young Greeks rode the freights and met other Greeks also going west. In Chicago's Greek section on Halstead Street, they found countrymen who directed them to labor gangs building railroads in North and South Dakota, roads in Nebraska, and sewers as far south as Oklahoma. Often a labor agent took a man's last gold piece and sent him into deserts and prairies where he was turned away from gangs that had no need for him or where there was no gang at all.
Sometimes the men found work for fifty to seventy-five cents a day. Sometimes they were fortunate and worked a few weeks or months on labor gangs hundreds of miles from the nearest house. If all could not find work, those who did sustained those who had no jobs.
The men were stunned by the life they were living. It was not as they had heard in their village coffeehouses. The loneliness of the prairies and deserts w r as hard for them. They had come from a gregarious people who met after the day's labor in coffeehouses or the village square; the women visited neighborhood courtyards; and families promenaded on the dusty streets of provincial towns in the evening. To keep the men from deserting in the night, employers often provided tent colonies of prostitutes for the larger gangs.
Except for those few from the northern Epirus Mountains, the Greeks had never experienced such bitter cold. In their society men had assiduously protected their women, and they in turn had waited on them slavishly. But, in America men had to learn the rudiments of cooking, washing clothing, and nursing illnesses.
They tried to remember folk cures used in their villages. They wrote to their families for advice and waited two months for replies. By then it was either too late or unnecessary. On an Oregon extra gang the young men used an effective American medicine. A teaspoonful of the bitter liquid cured an assortment of illnesses. A skull and bones was printed on the label and underneath the English words the men could not read: "For external use. For horses 20-30 drops rubbed on affected parts. For humans 2-3 drops."
The three winter months when labor gangs did not work sent the men to the nearest cities and towns where the forced idleness and dwindling of their savings exploded their anxieties into violence among themselves and retaliations against Americans who slandered or took advantage of them.
Those in all-Greek labor gangs fared better. They were with countrymen who spoke the same language and had the same customs. They chose one among them to do the cooking, usually the man with the least physical stamina. An oven was a hole scooped out of a dirt bank. A wood fire was made with a piece of metal against the opening to keep in the heat. When the wood burned to ashes, it was scraped out and dough put inside to bake. Meat was thrown onto the ashes.
In each gang there were always several great storytellers; for the Greeks are a storytelling people. They have come from a people who had few books and told their history, deeds, battles, triumphs, and defeats with the spoken word. Their stories helped the Greeks endure life.
Often one of the men brought a musical instrument with him: a clarinet, lyra, laouto, or mandolin. After work they sat outside their tents and listened to songs of their country with that homesickness that has no cure. They clasped hands and danced the same dances that the guerrilla klefts danced before going out to fight the Turks, the same dance that Achilles danced around the pyre of his friend Patroklus.
Around campfires and inside tents or railroad cars, they heard about lynchings of Negroes, whom the Greeks saw for the first time in America and with whom they were now relegated; the lynching of eleven Sicilians in New Orleans in 1891 ; and the killing of the Irish Molly Maguires in the Pennsylvania coal fields. (The Irish were now their foremen, but the young Greeks soon learned the unwritten law of the labor gang that any laborer who could whip the foreman became boss.)
Some of the men had seen the burning of South Omaha's Greek Town in 1909. A policeman, questioning a Greek's right to be seen with a "white" prostitute, was killed during the ensuing argument. A mob formed, rampaged through Greek Town, and set fire to it. Thirtysix Greek merchants were ruined. The Greeks claimed the policeman was drunk and was shot in self-defense. Although there are no official records, Greeks of that time insist that a twelve-year-old Greek boy was killed by a sniper.
Some of the men were among the one hundred Greeks who had cleared land of sagebrush near Mountain Home, Idaho. The night before they were to be paid and leave, they were routed from their tents by more than fifty armed and masked men on horseback and herded, halfdressed, down the railroad tracks clutching a few belongings.
The men were bewildered on being told of the inflammatory reports in the nation's newspapers. The Greeks were called "the scum of Europe," "like oil and water, they don't mix," "undesirable," they possessed "the savage blood lust of this Southern European peasantry," "ignorant, depraved, and brutal foreigners."
The 1900 mine disaster that killed two hundred men in Winter Quarters, Utah, was attributed by many to the low intelligence of the foreigners, two of whom may have been Greek. The Los Angeles Herald said: "The importation of contract labor and then of the worst offscourings of Europe to take the place of intelligent, civilized labor in the mines has almost driven American labor from the field, more especially in the East."
The word "Greek" was used indiscriminately to refer to any Balkan accused of a crime. A crusading Greek editor said, "After all, we Greeks of the United States have plenty of problems of our own without having the Slavs burden us with theirs."
A small number of Greeks were attempting to establish themselves in business during this early period and fought against overpowering resistance. The action of a mass meeting in Montana was typical.'
In the 1909 strike at the Murray smelter, a public mass meeting was called for the purpose of "ridding Murray of the foreigners." Greeks, Italians, and Austrians were discharged. "All white men who were compelled to stay out on acount of the attitude of the strikers" were allowed to return.
Conscious of the contempt the Americans had towards them, Greek clannishness, fostered by the Turks for centuries, increased. The Greeks had brought with them the quality of General Karaiskakis who sometimes played the Greek trumpet and sometimes the Turkish toubelekia. The Greek labor agent, the dishonest padrone who got them jobs at the cost of a gold piece and a monthly fee; the native Americans who charged them more at the mine company stores than they did the native and Northern European immigrant groups; and those who forced them to live in firetrap houses and tenements were to the Greek immigrants only a replacement of their old enemies, the Turks. To them the Greeks showed not their true selves, but whatever suited the occasion: obsequiousness, friendliness, anger — whichever trumpet or toubelekia was necessary at the moment.
The Americans were afraid, and for good reason, that the "foreigners would take over." A million immigrants were coming into the country each year, a staggering prospect for any nation to face, even one as large and rich as the United States. Americans knew this country needed immigrants to mine, build, and farm, but they wanted Anglo-Saxons and other Northern European immigrant stock to do this. Yet there were not enough of them.
Bitter denunciations of the Balkan and Mediterranean people filled the newspapers of the day. The United States was in danger of supporting an outcropping "of insane asylums and almshouses filled with this human flotsam, and the whole tone of American life, social, moral, and political, has been lowered and vulgarized by them."
Comparisons between the immigrants and the laboring classes in the United States were unfairly made. "The low cultural level of immigrants was now still more apparent than in the days of the Irish influx because meantime the U.S. masses had greatly advanced."
In 1907 the U.S. Immigration Commission was appointed to study the problem and in 1910 presented its conclusions. Later another report was made by Dr. Harry Laughlin of the Carnegie Institute. Both of these commissions advised that immigrants from Russia and Southern Europe be discouraged from entering the United States because of racial and social inferiority. 33 The findings were widely publicized. These damaging, unscientific investigations resulted later in the Johnson Act of 1921 that was a great blow to the Greeks. From that year on Greek immigrants were limited to one hundred a year.
The methods used by these commissions have been discredited, but the effect of the reports on the Greeks and other South European immigrants was long lasting. Not only was the immigrant generation affected, but their children grew up under immense prejudice.
Oalt Lake City was the center for Greek immigrants in Utah. In what Americans called "Greek Town," located on Second South between Second West and Fifth West, were coffeehouses, restaurants, saloons, candy stores, two Greek newspapers, and stores selling octopi, Turkish tobacco, olive oil, goat cheese, liquors, figs, and dates.
Church services for the all-male congregation were held on the third floor of the Utah National Bank Building at the corner of Main Street and First South. Plans were soon made for a church on Fourth South between Third and Fourth West. It was consecrated on October 29, 1905, and served the Greek, Serbian, and Russian people.
Early priests in America were from impoverished villages and were poorly educated. Better educated priests wanted to remain in large cities, "near civilization." Few came willingly to Utah; fewer still wanted to serve in Carbon County, "the Siberia for Greek Orthodox priests in America." Defrocked priests at times conducted liturgies for congregations that would have had no clergy otherwise. Three enlightened priests of Utah later rose in the church hierarchy. One of them, Father Artemios Stamatiades, is Archbishop of Nablus in Jerusalem.
In Greek Town the young immigrants found that all work was dispensed by Leonidas G. Skliris, leading Greek labor agent in the West. He was called the "Czar of the Greeks" and was a figure of power as labor agent for Utah Copper Company, Western Pacific Railroad, Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad, and the Carbon County coal mines.
With three brothers and other subordinates, he exacted a sum of money from each immigrant seeking work in mines, smelters, mills, "extra" and section gangs, and on road crews. He had contacts with labor agents in Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada, and California. With a telegram or telephone call, he could have any number of men traveling wherever he designated. Not until they arrived at the appointed place did the men know what they would be doing, and often they found they were to be used as strikebreakers.
The men were desperate for jobs; they waited in coffeehouses for months without work. Only the most menial type of labor was available to them; they neither spoke the language of the country nor had special skills. They had come from a country long accustomed to the Turkish pattern of paying bureaucrats and petty officials for the smallest of services. Skliris's web reached throughout the West, and the immigrants paid not only for their jobs but a monthly sum thereafter. Their need for work was so great that, at first, they did not question the "Czar of the Greeks."
The laborers were sent to five areas: the Bingham copper mines, the Magna mill and Garfield smelter, the Murray-Midvale smelter, Carbon County where thirty mines worked three shifts and five hundred dome-shaped coking ovens burned continuously, Ogden at the Oregon Short Line Railyards (later the Union Pacific) and north of it where the narrow-gauge rails of the railroad were being changed to standard gauge.
The men lived in shacks and in boardinghouses. The various nationalities, Serbians, Croatians, Italians, Austrians, and Greeks, lived separately as a rule. The Greeks from the Island of Crete lived apart from the other Greeks. The Cretans had left their country but recently freed of the Turks. From long isolation they considered themselves Cretans first and signed the mine and smelter rolls as Cretans, not Greeks.
Each nationality had its own foreman, someone who spoke a few more words of English than they. Each group also had one or more interpreters. Almost all of the Greeks had a year or two of grammar school in Greece; some, however, could neither read nor write. The man with four years of grammar school, the extent of grade school education in those days, was considered educated. These men learned English quickly. With their pocket-sized English-Greek dictionaries, they became interpreters for their countrymen.
They also interpreted for the men at court. A man could languish in jail a month as one did in Soldier Summit seventy miles south of Salt Lake City. An interpreter came along to explain to him that in America it was a crime to catch fish in a trap as he had done in his village.
A man who could only shrug while a judge castigated him for assault— the young Greeks had become notoriously known for fighting anyone who belittled their nationality — required the services of an interpreter to smooth his way with the law. Most important, as the Greeks took out citizenship papers, they needed an interpreter to teach them the correct answers and, if the judge was venal, the interpreter acted as the intermediary for a bribe. A few interpreters were of high character; the majority were confidence men.
The outside forces of American prejudice and rejection were nearly balanced by the nefarious hold over the Greek laborers not only of labor agents, but also of interpreters. With their better Greek education, from the more sophisticated towns and cities of Greece, and with a distaste for manual labor, the interpreters managed to live well by convincing the illiterate Greeks they needed their services for the most routine matters.
For filling out a money order to Greece, the interpreters charged exorbitant prices. They represented minor court matters as serious charges that could lead to expulsion from the country. In addition to his own fee, the interpreter added the bribe of an official who sometimes existed but often did not.
Many beatings and killings among early Greeks that baffled the authorities were the revenge of laborers for the cruel acts of interpreters and of labor agents. Not speaking the native language and with little trust in American justice, the Greeks often scoured the West until they found their persecutor. In Winter Quarters, Utah, a Greek miner killed a labor agent working under Leonidas Skliris. Shaving off his mustache to elude the sheriff and with the help of his countrymen, he escaped to Greece, a reversal of the usual vendetta.
The men suffered from homesickness. There were fewer than ten Greek women in Utah by 1910. Mothers, grandmothers, and sisters were not there to honor them with feasts on the day of the saints for whom each was named nor to prepare the fast foods for the forty days before the great church events — Christmas, Easter, and the Dormition of the Virgin on August 15. When one of them was buried, no women sat by the casket and keened the mirologia, the Words of Fate. The comforts that a patriarchal society had provided them in their native land were memories.
The coffeehouse was their home and their only social life. After the long hours in the mine or mill, the men washed themselves — in Helper the men used the YMCA showers — and put on their Sunday suits for their visit to the coffeehouse. It was important to them to dress well, a sign of respectability.
The coffeehouse was the Greeks' own melting pot. Laborers, small businessmen, labor agents, interpreters, Greek government officials, priests, traveling newspaper reporters, gamblers, and panderers met there. To the men who had spent long desolate months laying track across deserts and over mountains and to herders who had brought sheep to winter grounds, the coffeehouse was their comfort, protection, and reassurance.
In the barren room of tables and chairs with basil plants lining the window sills and calendars of pretty women and pictures of grizzled Greek patriots on the wall, the men sipped Turkish coffee, read Greek newspapers, smoked the many-tubed nargile, played cards, and talked for hours. Conversation, a great love of the Greeks, expanded from small to larger and larger circles, from the recounting of trivial incidents on their jobs, to extolling their sisters and cousins' virtues for matchmaking purposes, the peculiarity of American customs and events, world happenings, the life they would lead when they returned to Greece, and Greek politics.
At long intervals wandering showmen from Greece came with puppet shows, the Karagiozi, where the slyly stupid Greek peasant always got the better of the supposedly crafty Turk. At even longer intervals shabby Greek women sang and danced to the rustle of tambourines, but they were Greek and brought nostalgic memories to dispel the evening's loneliness.
To the Americans the coffeehouse was the symbol of all that was offensive about the Greek immigrants. Yet without it the men would have led a life close to that of work animals. Older men assumed the patriarchal authority allotted them by Greek custom. They kept many young men from falling into the life of the gamblers and procurers who made the rounds of mining camps on paydays. Nick Dandolas, Nick the Greek, had a string of such young men whom he staked to card games. In a Carbon County mining town one payday night, a protege lost $50,000. The American expression: "Easy comes, easy goes" became theirs.
In each coffeehouse there was at least one better educated man with an altruistic interest in the younger men. Regularly he appeared in court to extricate the men from disturbance-of-the-peace charges and brought them back to the coffeehouse to face its judgment. A recalcitrant could find himself participating in a quickly arranged marriage to solve his impulsiveness.
It was an impossible task; there were thousands of exuberant young Greeks. By 1916 there were three thousand of them alone in Carbon County mining camps. Their ages ranged from a few at nine years of age to the majority at seventeen and nineteen.
They were without the domination of their parents and family who had always maintained carefully prescribed rules of conduct. The freedom of American women confused and demoralized Greek men; women in America crossed their legs, smoked, and stopped to talk with men acquaintances on the streets.
Even after sending monthly sums for their sisters' dowries, the men still had money to spend. In coffeehouses and cigar stores, professional gamblers and procurers were waiting for them. Women were scarce. Ternpers exploded over cards, old-country feuds, and politics. "Wild Greeks" the Americans called them.
The youngest ones, the water boys on labor gangs and in mines, are tragic figures in Greek social history. The poor but rhythmic life of their villages had been replaced by disorder and depravity. Shows of sexual perversions were common entertainment. Many who could have married later heeded a taboo of their people and refrained. Venereal disease was rampant. Men who became infected believed they would always have "bad blood" and could never marry and defile women and future children. They left the mainstream of Greek immigrant life and lived by their wits, knowing only coffeehouses and third-rate hotels, lonely and forgotten in old age.
Americans looking into coffeehouses at strange dark men reading newspapers in foreign lettering, maiming, even killing each other over oldcountry politics agreed with current editorials: the Greeks could never be assimilated into American life.
They were bloodthirsty, the native Americans said. The vendetta, that is still a part of Greek peasant life, was an aspect of Greek immigrant life. Many Greeks whose families' honor had been disgraced, murdered the offenders and fled to America. Even here the murderers were not safe. Male members of their victims' families followed to avenge the crime, to "wipe the stain from the family's name." Of these vendettas, Patrick Leigh Fermor says:
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