Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2021/Spring/105/Section 60/A.G. Alexander

Overview
Alecos Harzialexandris, also known as A.G. Alexander, was a Greek man who immigrated to the U.S. from Turkey in the early 1910s, who eventually settled in Asheville, North Carolina. He was interviewed under the name Pete Miltiades on March 16, 1939, by a writer named Carter Douglas working for the Federal Writers Project.

Biography
Alexander grew up in a Greek town in the Ottoman Empire, which would later become Turkey. His father owned a farm where he grew “tobacco and food” and raised farm animals but struggled to pay school tuition for Alexander and his eleven siblings. As they grew up, the siblings all helped run the farm, including Alexander. Alexander held several different jobs in Turkey, but his father collected all of his wages. After hearing about well-paying jobs in Pennsylvania, Alexander went on strike from working on the farm and demanded his father send him to America to work. He immigrated to America in the early 1910s, repaid his father for the travel money months after getting to America, and never sent his family money again.

Following his immigration, he found a sense of belonging within Greek communities in the U.S. He later joined the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association, which he described as a group which “all Greeks who want to be good American citizens belong to.”

His first job was at a mill where “there were a lot of Greeks" and his first home was “a house with some other Greeks.” After working at the mill, Alexander found a job in Pittsburgh working on different railroads. Following the end of World War One, he lost his job at the railroad and moved a lot in search of well-paying work, washing dishes in Pittsburgh, then Georgia, Virginia, and finally becoming a cook at a cafe in Kentucky. Eventually, Alexander “borrowed the money from another Greek, and bought the business,”  running the cafe with a partner. After finding out this partner was stealing from the cafe, Alexander kicked him out of the business and opened a new cafe in Virginia.

After getting married to a Native American woman, their family moved to Asheville, North Carolina and opened up a cafe. His father-in-law also owned a farm in North Carolina, and he was able to find community within their family. He was still running the cafe in 1939 at the time of the interview and hoped to save enough money to buy a house. He had two children with his wife, both of whom went to Greek school.

Joblessness & migration during the 1930s
At most generous estimates, unemployment rates during the Great Depression may have reached 24.9 percent of adults in the United States. It has been researched that “geographical mobility is significantly affected by labor market conditions,” meaning one’s condition of unemployment often dictated where people decided to move, as they were driven by potential job prospects. During the Great Depression, a pattern formed of many people moving to farms in the beginning of the 1930s, and then many people moving to more urban areas during the second half of the decade. This migration was so extreme during the Great Depression that it “was large enough to temporarily reverse” past patterns of movement from rural to urban areas.

This means that at the end of the Great Depression, the population in rural areas was higher, giving businesses in rural and Southern areas more customers.

Native American conditions leading up to & during the Great Depression
Native Americans suffered especially from unemployment during the period of the Great Depression. From 1887 to the end of the Great Depression, “over half of the tribal land base was lost to land thieves, tax sales, and governmental sales of ‘surplus lands.’” In 1924, Congress gave citizenship to all Native Americans without their input, stripping them of “their federal land allotments and treaty rights” and subjecting them to state tax sales. This led to many Native Americans having their land “sold out from under them during the 1920 and 1930s.” This theft devastated Native Americans, and was paired with forced assimilation. The U.S. government forced Native children to attend boarding schools with poor conditions which were designed to “Christianize” and “civilize” them, without allowing them to see their parents. These practices of family separation, theft, and general ignorance of the rights and desires of Native Americans all influenced how the Great Depression impacted them. Following the mistreatment of the previous decades, “unemployment on most Native-American reservations continued to be well over 50 percent throughout the 1930s,” a rate twice that of the highest recorded unemployment rate of the U.S. overall during that time period. This demonstrates how Native Americans were particularly harmed by the Great Depression.