Konstantinos Dioyos, The Greek Vision for the United States of America: From the Greek Revolution to World War I. [Κωνσταντίνος Διώγος, «Το όραμα των Ελλήνων για τις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες της Αμερικής. Από την Ελληνική Επανάσταση έως τον Α΄ Παγκόσμιο πόλεμο».] Athens: Alexandria, 2024. Pp. 315. Paper €21.00.

Professor Dioyos’s book is a welcome addition to Greek scholarship on the USA. The author confirms that Greek interest in the first republic of the modern world predates the Greek Revolution; in fact, information received by Greeks in the Greek-speaking world about distant USA was primarily but not always mediated through French and British sources. The book depicts a relationship that was not always straightforward, claiming that Greek discourse about the USA was a discourse of self-reflection on the meaning and structure of a modern state. This historical account is structured as a detailed narrative which unfolds as a romance or even a bildungsroman.¹

Western accounts of the so-called New World circulated before the Greek Revolution among literate Greeks, creating images of a virgin land with noble or not so noble savages while at the same time describing the birth of New Europes in the virgin lands with towns that carried the names of old European cities. The creation of the first modern republic stirred the hearts and minds of the Greeks on the eve of the Greek Revolution and posed a blueprint of political options for the Greek revolutionaries. It was a challenge and an inspiration for the political future of the new state to be. However, the contribution of the USA to the actual struggle was reduced to assistance from two groups: the American Philhellenes, who rushed to embattled territories to participate in the battles, and the so-called orphans of the Greek Revolution, who were children taken to the USA to be educated primarily at Amherst College so that some of them could return to their homeland after the Revolution to serve as Protestant missionaries and educators.

The project of the Enlightment as applied to the creation of the USA constitution, Modernity, Manifest Destiny and the presence of American missionaries in the new state became core issues in Greek discourse on the USA during the years after the Revolution and during WWI. The project of the Enlightment along with the belief that Ancient Greece is the progenitor of the modern state becomes part of the nascent ideology of Greek society. Such ideology is propagated by Adamantios Koraes and the Greek intellectuals and politicians before and during the Revolution; all of previously mentioned individuals, in their enthusiasm, they look up to the USA as a blueprint of how to structure a liberal political entity. Yet their failure to identify that the project of the Enlightenment excludes women and people of color is prominent. The author of this book mentions the response of the Greek intellectuals especially after the American Civil War to the institution of slavery. However, the fact that the USA was and is a racially stratified society was not viewed as a contradiction in Greek discussions of USA as a liberal political entity.

Notions of modernity and modernization predominated in the decision of thousands of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, including Greece, to emigrate to the USA. A widespread positive image of the country as a land of opportunities functions to Americanize such immigrants even before their emigration, as they espouse the so-called American Dream. Like all other nationals, the Greek immigrants view the USA as the completion of Greece; it is the country where the march of civilization leads them from their pre-industrial society to Modernity. As it happens, though, the massive exodus depletes Greece of the most vital elements of society. The official Greek response to immigration underscores this negative aspect for the native land: given the massive exodus of primarily young men, the Greek State seeks to curb this wave; as the author points out, the negative response of the Greek State begins to subside only when the hard-earned money of immigrants begins to arrive to the communities left behind.

At this point, it is necessary to recognize the process of ethnicization of Greek immigrants, influenced as they were by discourse which claims that modern Greece is closely connected to ancient Greece. Amid widespread racism in the host country, it is crucial for the immigrant to claim that since Ancient Greece is one of the foundational influences of Western civilization, he/she is part of that civilization, not a “mediterranean nigger,” as the new immigrants were characterized. Such a connection facilitates the Americanization of the immigrants and their inclusion within the white majority.

A pertinent point raised in this book is that one of the pillars of USA ideology appeals to the supporters of the Greek Great Idea. A key component of USA ideology, Manifest Destiny, refers to the westward expansion of USA on the American continent, north and south, supposedly as a divinely ordained duty to Christianize and subsequently civilize the so-called savage inhabitants. Obviously, this was a very thinly disguised imperialistic project. It appealed to and was adopted by Greek Statesmen such as Eleftherios Venizelos. Woodrow Wilson’s post-world war ambitions to expedite the self determination of ethnic and national groups of the erstwhile imperial Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire was seen by Venizelos as an opportunity not to be missed. Venizelos promoted Greece to the world and especially to the USA as a modern, westward looking, law abiding and progressive country. According to Venizelos, Greece could be a trustworthy agent of civilizing the East, while at the same time serving the interests of the West as a potentially powerful country between East and West. According to Dioyos, there was very little opposition to Venizelos’ plans. The only voice raised to challenge Wilson’s projects was that of future dictator Ioannis Metaxas.

Nevertheless, Venizelos persisted in his efforts to win over the support of the Americans. His parallel plans were to showcase Greece as a hospitable, religiously tolerant society for all USA citizens but primarily for the Protestant missionaries. In the nineteenth century, these were some of the so-called orphans of the Greek Revolution among others who founded schools in the Ottoman Empire and the recently liberated Greece. Christos Evangelides’s school in Hermopolis, Syros, is a case in point. Evangelides introduced American methods and curriculum in the educational program of his school. Yet such experiments were not always welcome in newly liberated Greece as they were suspected as a means to convert Greek students to Protestantism. As Dioyos claims, this reflected a crisis in the new identity of the Greek citizens who viewed themselves as uniformly Hellenic and Orthodox. All the same, Venizelos generously encouraged American interests in that field, expediting plans of the American Red Cross and YMCA to establish themselves in Greece proper as well as the new territories after the Balkan Wars.

In sum, Konstantinos Dioyos’s book records painstakingly the amorous and not so amorous relationships of the Greek intelligentsia, as well as those of the common Greek people who arrived in the USA from the early years of the American Republic. In that sense, the book is cast in the narrative mode of a romance. However, it is also cast as a bildungsroman, as it records the struggles of the Greek State as it was forming itself by trying to live up to or avoiding the model republic beyond the Atlantic. Overall, Dioyos’s book is very well researched, I could say exhaustively researched and is also meticulously constructed. As such, it is a necessary addition to the Greek bibliography on the USA.

Yiorgos Kalogeras

June 08, 2025

Yiorgos D. Kalogeras is Professor Emeritus of American Ethnic and Minority Literature. He taught until his retirement (2018) at the Department of English Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He is the author, co-author and editor of ten books; he has produced numerous articles in Greek and English primarily in the field of Greek American Studies. His Ethnic Resonances in Performance, Literature and Identity (co-edited with Cathy C. Waegner) was published by Taylor and Francis in 2019.

Note

1. My use of the terms romance and bildungsroman derives from Hayden White’s idea that any historical account is cast in a narrative mode which carries ideological significance. Such a claim aims “to deny history as a bedrock of factual truth.” Any distinction between history and ideology on the basis of the presumed scientificity of the former is spurious.