MODERN GREECE: A History since 1821 - Amazon Web Services

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: AN OVERTURE 65
In agriculture the recovery of French vineyards from the destructive
blight of 1870 dealt a serious blow to the currant-based economy of the
Greek South. With French production returning to normal in the 1890s,
the international demand for Peloponnesian currants and wine contracted,
generating ever-increasing surpluses. Despite efforts by successive
Greek governments to relieve the plight of bankrupt peasants,
thousands of them migrated to the United States. 2
On the eve of the twentieth century Greece’s political landscape was
a carryover from the last quarter of the previous century. The prevailing
bipolar system survived with Theodore Deliyannis still at the helm of
his party and Georgios Theotokis having replaced Harilaos Trikoupis
who died in 1896. Theotokis won the elections of 1899 but his government
fell victim to the riots of 1901 caused by an attempt by Queen Olga
(a princess of the Russian court) to supervise the rendering of the Bible
from the Hellenistic “koine,” into colloquial demotic Greek. This was
viewed, mainly by university students, as an attempt of pan-Slavic
circles in Moscow to adulterate Greece’s claim to its linguistic
continuity. 3
In the 1902 elections a third party under Alexander Zaimis became
the balancing force in Parliament. Bipolarity, however, was restored in
the elections of February 1905. The assassination of the aged prime
minister, Deliyannis, outside Parliament on May 31, 1905, by a gambler
protesting the closure of the casinos made the Crown the arbiter of
party politics. King George chose Dimitrios Rallis on June 9, 1905, to
assume the leadership of Deliyannis’s party and that of the government.
In November 21, 1905, Rallis resigned after loosing his majority.
Theotokis was given a mandate by the king to form a government
which lasted until July 4, 1909. 4
Socialist adherents abounded among the Greek intelligentsia but
they never managed to gather sufficient votes to make it to Parliament.
The “Sociological Society,” founded in 1908, supported trade unionism
and policies of income redistribution, but failed to make headway in a
society of small landholders (with the exception of Thessaly),
shopkeepers, and civil servants. Its founding members, Alexander
Papanastasiou, A. Delmouzos, A. Mylonas, and Constantine Triantaphyllopoulos,
among others, made their mark later mainly within
Venizelos’s Liberal Party.
The traumatic memory of 1897 generated a wide-ranging discourse
aimed at salvaging the imperiled nation from the blunders of an