Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/394

 380 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

American-born. The Greeks claim four or five times as many and undoubtedly during the winter the colony is very much larger. The school census was taken in May after the "gang" workers on the railroads had gone out for the summer, so that a great many of those who make Chicago their home during the winter months and come back to us between jobs in the summer, were not counted.

Most of the Greeks who come to the United States are from the Peloponnesus. All of them talk of "the Athens" as though it had been their home, but although it belongs to them in a very intimate sort of way, very few of them have ever seen it. For example, out of 424 who live within a few blocks of Hull House 205 came from Sparta, 102 from Tripolis, and 5 from Athens. Moreover, most of those who say they came from Sparta and Tripolis, have not really lived in those towns but in the country villages near by.

Like all pioneers who come from the various countries of Europe to the United States the Greeks expect to return. Many of them are sending money home not only to support the wife and children they left behind them, but to buy land in Greece. But of those who return, undoubtedly the great majority will find that ten or fifteen years in the United States has unfitted them for contented residence in Greece. To those who succeed in the United States the quiet simplicity of life in the Peloponnesus will prove irritating and they will feel more at home with their partially Americanized friends in this country. By no means all of them expect to return to stay permanently. Out of 790 men over twenty years of age who were reached through the investi- gation made last summer 124 had been naturalized — not a small number when it is remembered for how short a time the Greeks have been coming to the United States.

The largest settlement of Chicago Greeks is in the nine- teenth ward, north and west of Hull House. Here is the Greek Orthodox Church, a school supervised by the priest in which about thirty children are taught a little English, some Greek, much of the achievements of Hellas, and the obligation that rests on every Greek to rescue Macedonia from the Turks and