le Priscilla Capps built bridges to other relief agencies too. I quote from a 1929 report of the Near East Foundation, submitted on the eve of the Great Depression:
“Miss Capps gives us a most remarkable report covering her work for the month of March . You will note that she is most confident in being able to continue the Industries without orders from America. With Mr. Acheson’s approval, Miss Capps has been loaned by the Near East Relief for two hours daily to organize the various refugee industries under the Refugee Settlement Commission. In this connection it is interesting to advise you of the fact that about 300 of our ex-orphan girls are employed by the Danish Mission work-shops. Their products are entirely of a different character than anything produced by Miss Capps’ workers and practically the entire output is sold in Denmark. These girls have clean, well-lighted work-rooms and Miss Yibson, the Director, is a Danish woman of the finest type. The girls have daily religious exercises before beginning their work and this one industry has done much to keep alive hundreds of Armenian families supported entirely by these ex-orphan girls.”
The Refugee Settlement Commission with which Priscilla Capps collaborated had been created by the League of Nations in September 1923 at the request of the Greek government, and was vested with full legal authority to coordinate resettlement of refugees. In 1924 her father, Edward Capps, had declined to serve as one of its four members because of other commitments.
Nonetheless, Edward Capps did continue his involvement in refugee affairs, albeit not to the extent of Priscilla’s. Most of the men employed between 1923 and 1925 in the construction of ASCSA’s Gennadius Library were refugees. Capps also raised funds to employ Greek men formerly held as prisoners in Turkey so that roads around the School could be improved. In 1925 he even proposed building a model women’s workshop with salvage timber from the construction of the Gennadius Library (Newberry Library, Horace S. Oakley Papers, Capps to Oakley, April 24, 1925). And he served as a trustee of Near East Relief. Bert Hodge Hill also joined the Refugee Settlement Commission alongside Edward Capps from 1927 until its dissolution in 1930 (Daleziou 2013).
Caught in the Great Depression
By 1931, in the heart of the Great Depression, the financial situation of Near East Industries had become grim. Priscilla’s summer sale in 1931 had failed to deliver anticipated profits and, among other problems, tourism in Athens had declined. She responded to this downward trend in sales by introducing new product lines and by accepting new commissions. Her women were now making embroidered suits, dresses, and coats, and she announced that Near East Industries would produce stage curtains for the theater of the University of Athens, for the house of the director of the Gennadius Library, for the professors’ house at Athens College, and for the new Corinth Museum.
One product line sold on commission in the U.S. during the 1930s remains popular among collectors today — 8” dolls dressed in traditional costumes of Greece, Albania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Palestine. From the mid-1930s they were distributed in the United States by Kimport Dolls, a company managed by Ruby and Arthur McKim of Independence, Missouri. Kimport had contracted with Near East Industries to market them, but it is clear that the same or similar dolls were already being made in the 1920s in Athens by refugee women.
Making Garments for Air Raid Victims
Sales on Cape Cod continued to be held on behalf of Near East Industries even on the brink of America’s entrance into WW II. A press release from the Near East Foundation Archives describes an exhibition of craft goods to be held in Yarmouth Port in July, probably 1940. The S.S. Excalibur of the American Export Lines had carried the goods from Greece across the Atlantic, running “the gauntlet of mined areas of the Mediterranean.”
Priscilla soon abandoned the production of craft goods for export to America altogether as conditions in E