Part 29

In his native village he is as chaste as the women, but in America he has a bad name and the neighbourhood in which he lives is not regarded as the safest for unprotected women. The Chicago police especially, has an eye upon his candy stores which are supposed to be as immoral as they often are uninviting. The fact that in the Chicago colony, 10,000 Greeks live, practically without their wives, explains this situation, and it is just possible that 10,000 Americans under the same conditions would not act differently.

The police in New Greece is not on a good footing with the inhabitants, and occasionally shooting and stabbing occur. At such times it is difficult to know who is more to blame; the police or the supposed culprits.

The modern Greek is still punctiliously pious, his church and priest follow him into every settlement, and he is loyal to the forms of his religion. It is doubtful whether here or in the Old World, it discloses to him the ethical teachings of Jesus; but in this, we are in a poor condition to “cast the first stone” at him. His priest is not servilely revered or feared, and the relation between them is too often that of buyer and seller. The priest has the means of grace, the Greek is in need of them for salvation, and he pays for what he gets,--sometimes reluctantly.

At present it would fare ill with any one who would try to wean him from his Church; for loyalty to it is loyalty to Greece, and the Greek has never been a turn-coat.

No more patriotic people ever came to us than these modern Greeks, and although that patriotism is centred upon their native country, they will ultimately make good citizens, and even before that day, make splendid politicians; for in the craft of politics every Greek is an adept, and he is a “Mighty (place) hunter before the Lord.”

The only trouble with the government of modern Greece is, that it has not enough offices for all the aspirants for them, and this learned proletariat is a fair sized menace in this little country. In governing themselves the modern Greeks have not been a conspicuous success, and the only things we can teach them in this line are, the willingness to acknowledge failure and the eagerness with which we seek the better way.

The New Greece of Chicago, a few blocks in a busy thoroughfare, is not a large world, yet it is more Greek than the Ghetto is Russian or Little Sicily is Italian. Homes in the true sense there are but few, because the women have not yet come; the housing conditions of the Greeks are bad and likely to remain so for a long time. There are grocery stores containing little or no American food; saloons, by far too many, but providing food and drink at the same time as is the custom in Greece; a Greek bank, the front windows of which are covered by the advertisements of steamship transportation companies; clothing and dry-goods stores, whose proprietors are Greeks, although their stock in trade is necessarily American; and the Greek church with a double cross to mark its orthodoxy;--this is New Greece.

Out of it some of our newly arrived immigrants will go in the morning, to the railroad tracks, to do the digging and the ditching. They will be “bossed” by “Big Pete,” whose size is exceeded only by the length of his oaths, and who boasts of being able to handle his countrymen easily, because: “The Greeks can be handled only by a man who can show them that he is a better man, and that I am; and if you don’t believe it, feel my muscle. I pay them $1.50 a day and I treat them like Greeks.”

I watched “Big Pete” treat them like Greeks for half a day, and I did not discover that such treatment saved a man from being geared to the highest notch and made to work incessantly, while “Big Pete” watched and cursed to help the pace.

The same night that they arrived, some of the young boys were looked over by the men of the Greek colony, who had assisted them to come, and whose labour was theirs until the passage money was paid, and paid with interest. The next morning they began their tutelage in blacking boots in so-called parlours, whose walls are covered by chromos depicting Greek wars in which the Greeks are always the victors and the Turks are slaughtered like sheep at the stockyards; there are also one or two pictures of classic ruins.

In such surroundings, and seemingly unconscious of the life about them, these boys will blacken boots for eighteen hours a day, with heart, mind and soul in Greece; and their fingers in America only when they handle our coin. They will attempt no conversation, even after they know our speech, literally obeying the Scriptural injunction to say “Yea, yea and nay, nay,” and not much else if they can help it. They are not nearly so communicative as the Italians, and although a smile sits well on a Greek face, I have rarely seen one there.

The confectionery stores which are outside of New Greece, are open all the time, at least so long as a customer may be expected, and although these customers are nearly all Americans, the Greeks have few friends among them. They all return to New Greece as often as possible, and there their virtues unfold, and “their soul delights itself in fatness.” They are not exceeded even by the Chinese in that loyalty to native food which I call the patriotism of the stomach, and a Greek grocery store is filled from one end to the other with food from the classic isles. There are dried vegetables whose present form does not betray their natural shape, but which taste luscious, because the flavour of the native soil clings to them; fish, dried, pickled and preserved in some form, and cheese made from the milk of goats whose horns butted broken classic vases instead of modern tin cans.

The smells seem ancient, too; but in these the Greek revels, and here he is at home.

New Greece in Chicago is fortunate in having as one of its boundaries, Hull House, one of the numerous activities of which consists in trying to discover the possible point of contact between the home-born and the stranger.

A Greek play given at Hull House opened the eyes of many American people to the fact that the past is alive in the modern Greek, and at a banquet, also at Hull House, where Americans and Greeks vied with each other in extolling the glory of Athens, the wealth of the past was again richly displayed. How near the American and the Greek have come to each other through these two notable events, it is difficult to tell; but I am sure that they have increased the pride of the Greeks, and have given us an added respect for them.

But after all, they will be judged by the way they live to-day and by the measure in which these small, dark-haired traders and workers exemplify in their lives the virtues of those men of old, whose names they have inherited and whose fame they are eager to preserve.

THE NEW AMERICAN AND THE NEW PROBLEM

The miracle of assimilation wrought upon the older type of immigration, gives to many of us, at least the hope, that the Slavs, Jews, Italians, Hungarians and Greeks will blend into our life as easily as did the Germans, the Scandinavians and the Irish.

The new immigrant, or the new American, as I call him, is however in many respects, more of an alien than that older class which was related to the native stock by race, speech, or religious ties. Therefore, I recognize the fact that it is easy to be too optimistic about this assimilation, and to regard the Americanizing of the stranger accomplished, when he discards his picturesque native garb and speech, to disappear in the commonplaceness of our attire; or when he has mastered the intricacies of American idioms.

Outwardly the changes will be the same as those which have taken place among the older immigrants, accomplished with the same dispatch, even where the foreigners are segregated in their own quarters. I have in mind a Polish colony of some six thousand souls in a New England town where there are Polish churches, Polish schools, Polish “butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers”; and yet if you walk through that section of the city you will see the women who a few years ago, when they landed, wore the numberless short skirts and picturesque waists of their own making, now sweeping the dust with long trailing skirts, their ample forms encased in corsets and shirt-waists; while here and there you will hear even the rustle of the silk lining.

The boys who upon landing wore coarse linen trousers and shirts have long ago rebelled against these marks of their Old Country lineage, and their fathers have bought them the short trousers and shirt-waists, which make them look like young Americans.

If you are careful to observe, you will see that the children wear stockings and underwear; luxuries undreamed of in the Old World, where boots and shoes were the signs of manhood or womanhood, and where stockings were unknown to the peasantry, being the marks of a high calling and fine breeding.

Especially on Sunday that quarter of the town looks resplendent in its newness, and the latest American fashions are reflected by the women who are never a season behind in expanding or reducing to proper proportions, their sleeves, which they wear short or long, very nearly as the ladies do, who at that moment have entered the portals of the great meeting house, the bulwark of American ideals in New England. It is true that they all still eat black bread, drink vodka, and say: “Pshas creff” when angry; but in eating, drinking and swearing, the whole colony is on the way to complete Americanization, and one need have no fear that externally the Slav, Italian and Jew will not “eat of the fruit of the tree of the garden and become like one of us.”

The same thing is a fact in the matter of external racial characteristics. The things which seem to us the most ineradicable and written as if by an “iron pen upon the rock” are in most cases but chalk marks on a blackboard, so easily are they washed away.

These things created by long ages of neglect, hunger, persecution and climate, are often lost within one generation. The crowd on Rivington Street in New York looks less Jewish than that in Warsaw, and the Bohemians in Chicago look so like “us,” that in spite of the fact that I have some training in detecting racial marks, I am often puzzled and mistaken.

American, Armenian, Austrian, Bohemian, Cuban, Dane, Dutch, Finlander, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Mexican, Negro, Norwegian, Pole, Roumanian, Russian, Scotch, Slovak, Spanish, Swede, Swiss. Can you tell them apart?]

Give me the immigrant on board of ship, and I will distinguish without hesitation the Bulgarian from the Servian, the Slovak from the Russian, and the Northern Italian from the Sicilian; but as I have said, I often have the greatest difficulty in accomplishing such a feat, two or three years after the men have landed. It is true that in the first generation, the old racial marks still lie in the foreground, and that even in the second generation, the blood will speak out here and there; but it will require a very sharp scrutiny to detect this, and in the most cases there will be no hint of the past.

In Chicago, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, St. Louis and St. Paul I have addressed audiences composed of Slavs and of native Americans; and I have vainly tried to distinguish them one from the other in the mass, although of course when I had a very close and long look, I could make my differentiation. These racial marks are most tenacious among certain Orientals where strange strains of blood have accentuated the difference; but I have seen some Armenians, people bearing the mark of their race most strongly, who after ten years of life in America, had lost the peculiar sharpness of their features and were in that stage of transition where the American image was being imprinted upon them.