Greek Americans

GREEK AMERICANS. Approximately half a million Greeks emigrated to the United States between 1900 and 1940. Although the post–World War II generation would emerge as one of the most affluent and best-educated ethnic groups, the initial immigrants were mainly unskilled male workers who were regarded as only quasi-European and were harshly discriminated against in local statutes and hiring. The first political clubs, while mainly concerned with republican versus royalist struggles in Greece, also served as centers for domestic politics. Through the 1930s, worker-led struggles against the Ku Klux Klan and state militias for political rights were as ardent as the battles waged on economic issues.

The first American radical organizations to reach Greeks were the Socialist Labor Party and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The Socialist Labor Party developed a Greek-language section and a newspaper with some influence in New England. Two IWW pamphlets appeared in Greek, and there was IWW impact on miners in the West, loggers in the Northwest, and food handlers in the East. Militant Greek workers played major roles in the Bingham Canyon, Utah, copper strike of 1912, the Lowell, Massachusetts, textile strike of 1912, and the Ludlow, Colorado, coal strike of 1913. The most vibrant radical presence, however, formed around a New York group that published Phone tou Ergatou (Voice of the Worker), 1918–1923; Embros (Forward), 1923–1938; Eleftheria (Freedom), 1938–1941; and Helleno-Amerikaniko Vima (Greek-American Tribune), 1941–1959. These papers, sometimes daily, usually weekly, reflected the views of the Communist Party with name changes indicating policy shifts. Top weekly circulation of approximately ten thousand occurred in the 1940s when liberal and conservative dailies printed approximately fifteen thousand copies each. During the period when the Communist Party had ethnic units, there were some five hundred members in the Greek section. Organizational life revolved around publishing ventures and organizing worker clubs. These clubs, most of which were east of the Mississippi and north of the Mason-Dixon line, became the backbone of the thirty Greek lodges of the International Workers Order.

Greek Communists led Local 70 of the Fur Workers Union, which became a fulcrum for Greek radicalism in the East. Greek-speaking radicals, primarily Communists, were also active in organizing locals of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the steel, rubber, mine, textile, food, maritime, and electrical industries. The Trotskyist-oriented Communist League of America had a number of Greeks who led a successful general strike of New York hotel workers in 1934. Some Greeks were founding members of the Socialist Workers Party and the Workers Party, but they had little impact on the Greek community. Other radical activity included a continuing attraction of intellectuals to various forms of anarchism, Greeks for Norman Thomas, Greek candidates for the American Labor Party and the Progressive Party, and a cooperative system of profit-sharing among Greek sponge divers in Tarpon Springs, Florida.

The Greek Left reached its peak of influence in the early 1940s when a liberal/radical coalition led community support of EAM-ELAS (the National Liberation Front of Greece) and the war effort at home. This respectability was shattered at war’s end by the impact of the civil war in Greece and McCarthyism in America. A number of Greeks, nearly all involved with the labor movement, were deported and Greek dissent was chilled. No further Left initiatives among Greeks took hold until liberals and radicals created the anti-junta movement of 1967–1974. Among the lasting consequences were Left organizations in the Astoria community in Queens, New York, and a strong radical presence in both the English-language and Greek-language ethnic press.

Georgakas, Dan. “The Greeks in America.” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 14, nos. 1 and 2 (spring-summer 1987).

Georgakas, Dan. “Greek-American Radicalism: The Twentieth Century.” In The Immigrant Left in the United States, edited by Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.

Moskos, Charles C. The Greek Americans. Rev. ed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1989.

Psomiades, Harry J., and Alice Scourby, eds. The Greek American Community in Transition. New York: Pella, 1982.