Note own embroidery on apron: "If I am pure and good, I expect to be honored"
Molokan from Russia
From a semi-wild tribe, members of which eat no meat
If the immigration from Hellas keeps up, in twenty years the Greeks will own the candy trade of the country, the soda fountains and perhaps the fruit business. Born epicures and cooks the Greeks are going into the catering of food. In Atlanta they have 35 restaurants, in St. Louis 26, in Pittsburgh 25, in Birmingham 12 hotels and 14 restaurants.
Although Greeks are very rarely farmers, we hear of them as fruit raisers in California, miners in Utah, laborers on the railroads and fishers on both our coasts. In the cotton mills the Greeks are on a level with the more backward nationalities. They show little mechanical ability and few have reached responsible posts. They are sober and amenable to discipline, but some employers find them too excitable and unsteady to be good workers.
The ugliest thistle patch we owe to Old-World seed is the serfdom of thousands of Greek boys in the shoe-shining parlors that have sprung up everywhere. In some parts of Greece the peasant sets his children early to work in order that their earnings may leave him free to loaf the livelong day in a coffee-house. Upon them, too, he saddles the burden of providing dowries for their sisters. Accordingly, in certain districts, the poor send away their boys to the cities of Greece and Turkey, where they are hired out to peddlers, grocers and restaurant keepers, who treat them badly and work them unconscionably long hours. From such parents the Greek in America has no difficulty in recruiting boys whom he exploits under conditions that savor of slavery.
In thousands of Greek shoe-shining shops are working bound boys who are miserably fed and lodged by their masters, paid $3.00 or $4.00 a week and required to turn over all tips. Often the tips alone cover the boy's wages and keep, so that his labor costs the master nothing. Seeing that from each boy the padrone makes from $100 to $200 a year, a chain of such establishments yields him a princely income. No wonder the negro bootblack and the Italian bootblack have been forced to the wall.
The bound boys are on duty 15 or 16 hours a day and work every day in the year. They get in their eating and sleeping as best they can. They know no recreation. Late at night, completely exhausted, they drop with their clothes on into a bed that must suffice for four or five. Boys who have been in a city several years may learn nothing of it save the shop, their living quarters and the streets between. Since the padrone's game is to keep his boys dumb and blind, they are not allowed to talk freely with Greek customers. The moment a customer talks with a boy, "trusties" crowd round to listen. No truth can be gotten from the boys, concerning their age, their work or their pay. To avoid the arm of the truant officer, no Greek bound boy confesses to less than seventeen years. They are ignorant of the rights and rewards of labor in this country and are told that, if they leave their work, they will be arrested. Even their letters home are read and censored.
The effects of this servitude on the boys are shocking. They miss all schooling and years may elapse before they get their eyes open. The study of English is the first step towards emancipation; but where work is constant they miss even this chance and young men will be found who have been shining shoes for years and feel no ambition for anything else. The physical ravages of such work and confinement are appalling. In their memorial to the Immigration Commission the Greek physicians of Chicago say: