Making Turkey Pay

This chapter details the international response to the outbreak of violence on Cyprus, resulting in the Turkish intervention. It focuses on the effective efforts of Greek Americans to lobby on behalf of Cyprus, using national and local organizations throughout the country and garnering support from Armenian allies. It explains how key activists in Congress, with the crucial support of ethnic lobbyists, successfully organized to press the Ford administration to accept an arms embargo. Finally, it reveals the initial inadequacies of the White House in trying to counter this insurgency.

“They Have Made a Mess of Cyprus”

This chapter opens with the 1976 presidential campaign. Each candidate made efforts to attract Greek Americans’ support, but Carter criticized Ford’s handling of Cyprus, promising to do more for the island, and won them over. Vice President Mondale played a major role in formulating foreign policy and also served as liaison with his former colleagues in Congress. The new administration had to decide quickly how to deal with Cyprus. The US-Turkey Defense Cooperation Agreement that Ford had submitted to Congress caused some awkwardness for the Democrats. The new president sent senior statesman Clark Clifford to the eastern Mediterranean to gather information. Following Clifford’s report, the administration seemed ready to pursue a bizonal solution on the island, which Archbishop Makarios was willing to accept. With Makarios’s unexpected death and Turkey’s continuing resistance to US pressure, however, the White House paid less attention to the island, turning its attention to other regional troubles.

Introduction

This chapter provides an account of the Greek Orthodox Church's interrelationship with the Greek Americans throughout the twentieth century. It analyzes the Orthodox Church in the United States that plays a determining role in community affairs not seen anywhere else, such as its control of Greek-language schools. It also establishes the hegemony of the Greek Orthodox Church over the Greek American community. This chapter argues that the Greek Orthodox Church helped shape Greek American identity throughout the twentieth century and did so by adapting to the steady Americanization of the Greek Americans. It also reaches beyond the domain of Eastern Orthodoxy in America as it illustrates the way a relatively small, ethnically rooted religion can survive in the wider religious marketplace of America.

Greek Orthodoxy and the Ethnic Revival

This chapter discusses how the Greek Orthodox Church dealt with the era of ethnic revival that legitimized European white ethnic identities, including that of Greek Americans. It highlights the controversy Archbishop Iakovo generated when he decreed that parish priests could perform parts of the Sunday liturgy in Greek. It talks about Archbishop Iakovos message to Greek Americans of how most of them were now more comfortable with the English rather than the Greek language and how that development should be reflected in practice. The chapter mentions how Greek Americans experienced the most sustained revival of their identity of all the European “ethnics” due to a big influx of immigrants from Greece in the wake of the immigration reform of 1965. It discusses the exponential growth of Greek presence in the New York borough of Queens, especially in the Astoria section that became a “Greektown,”