Black Thursday made an impact on Greece rather late, namely in the year 1930. To be sure, the resources of Greece have always been limited; nevertheless, this country was able to absorb, in 1922 and 1923, a huge refugee influx from Asia Minor; and simultaneously the government tried hard to get Greece industrialized. But it was impossible for the latter to avoid for ever the aftermath of the Great Depression. As a matter of fact, the Greek economy finally began to be affected; and in April 1932, Eleutherios Veniselos, Prime Minister since 1928, proposed the formation of a national coalition government in order to brave the crisis. The proposal was declined; moreover, Veniselos was exceedingly distressed about the reaction of his former political friends. Alexandros Papanastassiou for instance, a previous authority of the Liberal party’s left wing and now the leader of a new political organization, on April 27th 3 taxed Veniselos with “fatalism” as far as the solution of Greece’s economic problems was concerned. The Prime Minister was terribly upset; and the day after, he gave his former friend the following answer: “Yesterday, Mr Papanastassiou accused me of fatalism. Nevertheless, I am sure that when I die it will be Mr Papanastassiou who will pronounce the most touching funeral oration. And even now I can foresee what he will say. Dear friends, Mr Papanastassiou will say, the dead man lying here was a real man, very courageous, with self-confidence and a lot of faith in the destiny of the nation to whose government he was assigned. Perhaps he often made mistakes; but he never lost heart. Therefore, he was not a fatalist, for he did not expect from the destiny the progress of his country; on the contrary, he placed in the latter’s service all the fire of his soul, every capacity of his own, whether moral, intellectual or material.” It did not happen like this. Veniselos died not in Greece but in France, in March 1936; and Papanastassiou was given no chance to pronounce an oration. He dropped dead in November of that same year of a heart attack: he could not bear the restoration of the monarchy, for he had struggled against Kings and Queens all his life. Nevertheless, even today one can read the bittersweet remarks that Veniselos made in answer to the charge of his old friend. In fact, they are engraved on the former’s tombstone, in Crete, the mountainous island in the Eastern Mediterranean - and his birthplace. In point of fact, Veniselos might be called anything but certainly not a fatalist. A self-made man, always prepared to give battle if he believed he was right, he was quite willing to speak out the naked truth. He thought moreover that life is not a trivial matter and, accordingly, he never gave much care to the afterlife; thus money was of paramount importance to him. In short, he was a man who, with the passing years, became, openly or not, more and more alike to the human type emerging from the United States. He had travelled, besides, up and down in America during the year 1921. Papanastassiou, too, used to live in a same sphere of latent American influence. He had never been in the States; nevertheless, his ideas, his very personality made an impact on the Greek community in the USA. Both, Veniselos and Papanastassiou, had a very important part to play in the establishment and functioning of the First Republic in Greece.
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