Book Description

"Early in the morning of a fair spring day during the Great Depression, a group of nine New Yorkers traveled 145 miles up the Hudson Valley to their state capital, Albany. Their mission was to initiate Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt into their fraternal society, the Greek-American organization known as the Order of AHEPA... The nine men who took time off their busy schedules included a florist, a baker, an electrician, a waiter, a grocer, a lawyer, an accountant, a banker, and the odd one in the group, the man who persuaded his distinguished friend to join AHEPA, Ulius L. Amoss. The only member of the delegation not of Greek descent, Amoss was a staunch philhellene who led the Y.M.C.A. in Greece while moonlighting as a cloak-and-dagger American spy in the Balkans..." This monograph contains four narratives. First, it brings to light the events that led up to Roosevelt's induction into AHEPA. It then reviews and analyzes the underlying events boasted by Roosevelt at his initiation: that his family donated a frigate for Greece's War of Independence in the 1820s and that he himself contributed two battleships for Greece's defense in World War I. The book then discusses the role played by Roosevelt's friend and AHEPA sponsor, Ulius L. Amoss, in events that followed FDR's initiation. During World War II, Amoss and AHEPA collaborated with Roosevelt's intelligence services in Greece's resistance against the Nazi occupation. This included the raising of an irregular army of Greek American volunteers, recruited by AHEPA's then Supreme President and trained under the auspices of the O.S.S.