Introduction
This project will focus on the Greek immigrant experience in the United States from 1890 to 1970. The project will include detailed accounts by Greek immigrants of their experience but will also make use of US and Greek government sources. For example, I will be referencing how various perceptions of Greeks changed throughout the period covered. I will also focus on how there were various periods of migration in which Greeks were more likely to stay in the US, others where they were likely to return to Greece and others when they would return to the US after having left and returned to Greece. Tying in to this back and forth I will also discuss the ways that Greek immigrants managed and have continued to manage to keep close ties to their homeland and culture despite various wars and conflicts decreasing their ability to remain in physical contact across the Atlantic.
Today, Greeks make up a visible and economically significant minority in the United States but when they first started coming in large numbers to the US in the late 19th century they often arrived with nothing and were treated like the lowest of lows in the society. Ideas of Greeks ranged from an honest people to people with mixed blood who were unfit to be called European or disgraces to the images and memory of Classical Greece. Phrenological studies of Greeks varied wildly and was often based on their occupation, hometowns and their physical appearance. Along with the Italians, Greeks were the Southern Europeans who emigrated to the US in the highest numbers. As a result, they drew the ire of Americans who could trace their ancestry to what they considered the more “pure” European areas such as England or Germany. Like many other immigrants from these non-traditional areas, Greeks were also adversely affected by the quotas on immigration enacted by the US government starting in 1924. In spite of this, Greek enclaves quickly formed across the United States as more and more Greeks came over to the US mostly via Ellis island. Many of these enclaves continue to exist today such as Astoria in New York or Tarpon Springs in Florida.
The writings on the topic also change drastically over time. For example, in Henry Pratt Fairchild book in 1912 he was discouraged to find that opinions of Greeks were full of generalizations, disparaging comments and overtly phrenological remarks. As time went by other scholars wrote to discover their own heritage like Anastasia Christou’s work on Second Generation Greeks and others like Lawrence W. Baker who wrote comprehensive accounts of Greek immigration and detailed how the migration changed over time.
Greek Immigration was dissimilar to many other historical mass migrations in that the people who migrated were not all from the same geographic location but were instead linked by ethnicity or a Hellenic identity. While the majority of early migrants to the United States came from the Peloponnesus region, there were Greeks scattered across the Balkans, the Black Sea, the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East who all traveled to the US along with those from mainland Greece. Despite the fact that they often did not all speak the same Greek dialect or even Greek at all they still joined together in enclaves across the United States due to being Greek Orthodox or their shared belief in a Hellenic identity. The period I will be covering of 1890 to 1970 covers the most important periods of Greek migration to the United States. The decade of the 1890s is a good starting point because it shows a time in which there were only a couple thousand Greeks in the United States and is useful for understanding American reactions to the increase in their numbers later. The next period I will discuss is the 1900s to the 1920s in which Greek immigration numbers to the United States rapidly grew due largely to those fleeing the Greek Genocide by the Turks and also population boom and financial crisis in the Peloponnesus. Immigration was then cooled with the Immigration act of 1924. During the period of 1920-1950 in which there is not much immigration to the United States I will discuss Greeks who returned to Greece and how those who stayed in the US began to assimilate. The final period I will cover is following WWII until 1980 as Greeks fled first from the country’s Communist Civil War and then from the Military Junta that took power following the end of the Civil War.
The project will be divided into the aforementioned three eras, 1890 to 1924, 1924-1950 and finally 1950-1970. The decade of the 1890s represents a period in which Greeks were in small numbers and only beginning to arrive to the United States and I will have a cursory discussion of the Greeks currently in the United States. It will be to set the scene and allow for an understanding of how much the situation changed. The next part of this era from 1900-1924 will be the most dense part of the museum exhibition. I will cover the economic situations and the population explosion in mainland Greece and how that led to mass migration of young men. I will also cover how the Greek merchants outside of the mainland were often forced to move as well as the Genocide of Greeks in Anatolia and how this led to even more migrations. I will also cover anti-immigrant sentiment and how this led to the Immigration act of 1924. The period of 1924-1950 will focus on Greek connections to the motherland and will tell the story of the lives of Greek immigrants during this time. The final period will cover Greek feelings about the Cyprus conflict and how this created tension between the more recent and the second generation Greek migrants. Finally it will discuss how the migrants fleeing the Civil War and the military junta were different to those that had left previously.
(Baker 2004, 455-483)