Internationalism and the New Turkey: American Peace Education in the Kemalist Republic, 1923-1933 9783031009327, 3031009320

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MODERNITY, MEMORY AND IDENTITY IN SOUTH-EAST EUROPE

Internationalism and the New Turkey American Peace Education in the Kemalist Republic, 1923–1933

Erik Sjöberg

Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe Series Editor

Catharina Raudvere Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark

This series explores the relationship between the modern history and present of South-East Europe and the long imperial past of the region. This approach aspires to offer a more nuanced understanding of the concepts of modernity and change in this region, from the nineteenth century to the present day. Titles focus on changes in identity, self-representation and cultural expressions in light of the huge pressures triggered by the interaction between external influences and local and regional practices. The books cover three significant chronological units: the decline of empires and their immediate aftermath, authoritarian governance during the twentieth century, and recent uses of history in changing societies in South-­ East Europe today. More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15829

Erik Sjöberg

Internationalism and the New Turkey American Peace Education in the Kemalist Republic, 1923–1933

Erik Sjöberg Södertörn University Stockholm, Sweden

ISSN 2523-7985     ISSN 2523-7993 (electronic) Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe ISBN 978-3-031-00931-0    ISBN 978-3-031-00932-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00932-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Research is most of the time a lonely labor, as is the process of writing. Nevertheless, although the resulting monograph has only the name of one author on its front cover, there are always a number of people who have assisted the author in matters large and small, without whom the project might never have come to fruition. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-­ Curie grant agreement no. 842046. Apart from this body of funding and the anonymous reviewers of my application and, later, my book proposal, I would like to extend my gratitude to the following institutions and individuals. Catharina Raudvere welcomed me to her research center The Many Roads in Modernity, which, with its focus on the transformation of Southeast Europe and the Ottoman heritage from 1870 to the twenty-­ first century, was an ideal environment wherein to pursue this project. Apart from Mogens Pelt, Petek Onur, and many other participants of the center’s seminar, I am grateful to Södertörn University, for granting me leave of absence, and to the University of Copenhagen and the staff of its faculty service, for smoothing the temporary transition from Sweden to Denmark. I would also like to acknowledge the help and dedication of the archivists at the Rare Book and Manuscript Libraries of Columbia University and the Ohio State University, despite the many obstacles to their work caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, and the friendly senior staff at Robert College, Istanbul, for granting permission to reproduce photographs from its collections. Maria Småberg read and commented on an early version of Chap. 5, while Reşat Kasaba commented on a draft of the v

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entire manuscript, graciously sharing his insights about interwar Turkey and his own recollections as a student at Robert College. Marie-Louise Karttunen of Emelle Editing proofread the book manuscript with a keen eye for detail, while Meagan Simpson, Sam Stocker, and Vinoth Kuppan of Palgrave Macmillan and Springer Nature were of assistance at different stages of the process resulting in this book. Last but certainly not least, I thank my wife Elisabeth for all her love and support throughout the years, and our little son Valdemar, for being the joy of our lives.

Contents

1 Introduction: Internationalism and the New Turkey  1 2 Background: Robert College and Late Ottoman Society 23 3 Years  of Transition: Adapting to the Republican Order, 1923–1927 57 4 “A  Moderate and True Nationalism”: The Philosophy and Practice of Internationalism and Peace Education at Robert College, c. 1927–1933111 5 Wonderful  Changes, Broken Unity: Modernity, Ottoman Past, and National Belonging in the Essays of Robert College Students151 6 Internationalism Defeated: The Downfall of Edgar Fisher199 7 Epilogue and Conclusion235 Index255

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Robert College, campus. Source: News Letter, 3:2 (April, 1922), Robert College Records, Box 50, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Reproduced with permission from Robert College, Istanbul Edgar Jacob Fisher, Dean of Robert College between 1917 and 1933. Source: Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, August 19, 1922 Paul Monroe, founder of Columbia University Teachers College’s International Institute and President of Robert College 1932–1935. Source: Robert College Herald, 4:1 (October 17, 1933), Robert College Records, Box 49, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Reproduced with permission from Robert College, Istanbul Robert College: Hamlin Hall foregrounded by Kennedy Lodge, one of the dwellings for the college staff. Source: News Letter, 3:2 (April, 1922), Robert College Records, Box 50, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Reproduced with permission from Robert College, Istanbul Caleb Frank Gates, President of Robert College between 1903 and 1932. Source: Near East Colleges Newsletter, 13:2 (October, 1932), Robert College Records, Box 50, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Reproduced with permission from Robert College, Istanbul Robert College faculty, 1923. Front row, center: Caleb Gates. Seated front row, second from right: Abraham Hagopian, Professor of Armenian and later Psychology. Second row, first from left: Edgar J. Fisher. Also in the second row, third from

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right: Hüseyin Bey (Pektaş), Head of the Turkish department. Source: News Letter, 5 (June, 1923), Robert College Records, Box 50, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Reproduced with permission from Robert College, Istanbul 77 “The picture which made all the trouble for Fisher,” as Caleb Gates’ handwritten note accompanying the copy he had made of the “Three friends” slide reads. Source: Robert College Records, Box 29, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University 87 “An oasis of peace in a desert of discord”: The image of inter-ethnic friendship, cultivated in the college newsletter. Source: News Letter, 3:4 (December, 1922), Robert College Records, Box 50, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Reproduced with permission from Robert College, Istanbul 102 Mary Mills Patrick, President of Constantinople Woman’s College between 1890 and 1924. Source: News Letter, 5:1 (December, 1923), Robert College Records, Box 50, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Reproduced with permission from Robert College, Istanbul 104 The class of 1932. Caleb Gates, seated front-row center. Seated to his immediate left, second and third from the right are the students Hagop Touloukian and Nejat Ferit, both members of Fisher’s Political Science Forum. Source: Robert College Herald, 11:9 (June, 1932), Robert College Records, Box 49, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Reproduced with permission from Robert College, Istanbul 157

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Internationalism and the New Turkey

In early January 2021, Turkish police clashed with protesting students at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi (Bosporus) University amidst concerns about the loss of academic freedom in Turkey. The catalyst for the protests was the appointment of a new rector affiliated with the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP), upon the orders of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.1 The move was widely interpreted as an attempt to bring one of Turkey’s most prestigious universities under the control of the ruling party as part of the ongoing crackdown on civil liberties and purges of the academic community since 2016. Sometimes dubbed the “Harvard of Turkey,” Boğaziçi University is noted for its liberal arts tradition and international outlook, which sets it apart from other institutions of higher learning. As such, it has long been an object of resentment as well as a coveted prize of upward social mobility to Erdoğan’s religiously conservative supporters. Deploring its alleged indifference to patriotic values and the absence of nationalists among the university faculty, members of the governing AKP have accused the university of pandering to foreign interests and of being an alien body in the Turkish nation, in what seems to be a repudiation of cosmopolitanism and the West itself. Thus, the 1  Bethan McKernan, “Istanbul university students clash with police over rector appointment”, The Guardian, January 6, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ jan/06/istanbul-university-students-clash-with-police-over-rector-appointment.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Sjöberg, Internationalism and the New Turkey, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00932-7_1

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appointment of the new rector was a matter of claiming the university for what they consider the Turkish people, as opposed to a small elite of rootless cosmopolitans who have monopolized top jobs in government and business for decades.2 Students opposed to the ruling party, on the other hand, viewed their university as the country’s last sanctuary of free speech, a place now under threat from a deeply unpopular government bent on forcing its ideology upon them and their professors.3 Whereas the AKP and its particular brand of nostalgic Islamic-Turkish nationalism emerged in recent decades, the conflict that engulfs the campus on the Bosporus has century-old precedents. Boğaziçi University traces its origins to Robert College, which was, together with the Constantinople Woman’s College and the American University of Beirut, one of the oldest and most significant private institutions of higher learning in the Middle East—see Image 1.1. Founded in 1863, the college had ties to the vast network of missions, schools, and hospitals of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), but remained an independent, non-denominational institution which welcomed Christian, Jewish, and Muslim students alike. Robert College and its sister school tended to the needs of foreigners in Istanbul as well as the burgeoning business elites of late Ottoman society, who wanted their sons and daughters to have a Western education. Whereas the First World War (WWI) and the destruction of the Ottoman world dealt a blow to the work of the ABCFM in Turkey, Robert College and the Constantinople Woman’s College managed the transition to the post-Ottoman republican era by reinventing themselves as joint Turkish-American institutions. Because of the long-time association of the American colleges and the missionary movement with Ottoman Christians, they had to contend with the hostility of Turkish nationalist opinion, while, paradoxically, also attracting students from the new Turkish elites and aiding the Ankara government in its efforts to modernize the country.4 Although the American missionaries 2  Carlotta Gall, “Prestigious Istanbul University Fights Erdogan’s Reach”, The New York Times, February 1, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/world/asia/turkey-­ bogazici-university-protests-erdogan.html. 3  The appointed rector, Melih Bulu, was removed from office by a new presidential decree on July 15, 2021, after having failed to assert his authority over protesting students and faculty. https://www.duvarenglish.com/after-six-months-of-protests-erdogan-sacksbogazici-universitys-appointed-rector-news-58194. 4  Robert L. Daniel, “The United States and the Turkish Republic before World War II: The Cultural Dimension”, Middle East Journal, 21:1 (Winter, 1967): 52–63.

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Image 1.1  Robert College, campus. Source: News Letter, 3:2 (April, 1922), Robert College Records, Box 50, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Reproduced with permission from Robert College, Istanbul

and educators are long gone, their liberal educational philosophy remains a contested legacy in today’s Turkey, portrayed by Islamist and secular nationalists alike as a key threat to national security.5 Others, however, have portrayed Robert College and its Turkish successor as a “bridge of culture between … East and West,” a “cultural beacon that shines across national boundaries and internal political divisions, distinguished by the diversity of its student body and faculty and its tolerance of ethnic, religious and cultural differences.”6 This is a study of the paradoxical relation between internationalism and nationalism in an educational setting in the first half of the twentieth century. The story of Robert College has been told in memoirs and scholarly studies over the years, often presented as one of liberal triumph, resulting 5  Jenny White, Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014, 80–4. A testimony to this legacy is found in the way Turkish authorities singled out the American pastor, Andrew Brunson of the Izmir Resurrection Church, as a fellow conspirator of the Gülen movement, accused of the 2016 attempted coup, thus souring US-Turkish relations. 6  John Freely, A Bridge of Culture: Robert College—Boğaziçi University: How an American College in Istanbul Became a Turkish University. Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitetisi Yayinevi, 2012 (2009), 2–3.

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from its commitment to progressive ideals, resilience in the face of adversity, and successful adaptation to rapid change. Much emphasis has been put on the American school’s importance in fostering local intellectual, business, and, in a few cases, political elites, illustrated by alumni who rose to prominence as prime ministers in nineteenth-century Bulgaria and, later, in the twentieth-century Turkish Republic.7 By attending a Western elite institution premised on progressive teachings, and experiencing a uniquely multicultural (or at least multi-ethnic) environment, generations of students presumably learnt the virtues of tolerance and independent thinking, apart from technical skills of vital significance for the modernization of their countries. These lessons in knowledge and attitudes, it is assumed, were passed on to other parts of the educational system and civil society. By shaping young minds and molding them in the image of America while at the same time preparing them to serve their own nations, Robert College and its Turkish successor university contributed to the democratization of Turkey, just as the college itself was democratized after 1923 by severing the ties to its Christian missionary past and embracing students and ideals associated with the Turkish-Muslim majority culture. In that sense, the story of Robert College, as it is often presented in celebratory speeches and writings, is part of the grand narrative of the emergence of modern Turkey told by Bernard Lewis and other observers sympathetic to the Kemalist ideology that, in one form or another, dominated the country’s political and cultural life well into the 1990s.8 Rising from the ashes of the discredited Ottoman Empire, Turkey had rejected the stifling conservatism of traditional Islamic society, according to this master narrative. Under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, it turned instead to Western role models and transformed itself into a secular, democratic republic, thus claiming its rightful place among the modern nation-­ states of the world. Viewed within the prism of the East/West dichotomy, the 2021 row over Boğaziçi University appears as a re-­enactment of earlier clashes between Islamic fundamentalists and secular democrats, another 7  In the latter case, Bülent Ecevit, who graduated in 1944, and Tansu Çiller, a graduate in the class of 1963 at Robert College’s sister institution, the American College for Girls, and the country’s first female premier. Orlin Sabev, Spiritus Roberti: Shaping New Minds and Robert College in Late Ottoman Society (1863–1923). Istanbul: Boğaziҫi University Press, 2014, 44. 8  For example, Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002 (1961); Lewis V. Thomas and Richard N. Frye, The United States and Turkey and Iran. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951.

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episode in Turkey’s century-old drama of the battle between tradition and modernity. This narrative simplifies—not to say distorts—a more complex reality. The dichotomy between religion and secularism, so often conjured up in analyses of Turkey’s current affairs and in the historiography of the country, obscures the fact that the Kemalists’ hold over organized religion through the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet Iş̇ leri Başkanlıg ̆ı), set up in 1924, meant that Islam and the state were never separated. Defining the Turkish nation-state as secularist although not secular, the scholar Erik Jan Zürcher points out that the rulers of the republic never rejected Islam as such, but rather sought to discredit religion as an independent political force.9 Likewise, the reforms carried out in the 1920s did not amount to a wholesale adoption of Western role models. The latter would have to be reconciled with a Turkish nationalism suspicious of things foreign, which meant that some aspects of Western “modernity” were readily accepted while others were rejected. This complicates the narrative of Robert College and similar American institutions in Turkey as well. Behind the saga of successful adaptation and benign influence presented in the literature on Robert College looms a different story of compromised integrity, loss of autonomy, and eventual decline. It raises questions about the nature of the influence that American educators sought to establish in Turkey and their interaction with local authorities and native students in the founding years of the Kemalist republic. What did internationalism, democracy, and modernity mean in this setting? How did educators work to reconcile their educational philosophy with the reality of an authoritarian government bent on nation building with coercive methods? These are the central questions that this study attempts to answer.

Earlier Research on Robert College and American Missionary Education in Turkey The Turkish Republic and the United States became allies in 1947 as a result of the Cold War and the Truman doctrine. This had the effect of opening the national economy to US investors and Turkish society to American cultural diplomacy, whose goal was to counter Soviet influence 9  Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey. London: IB Tauris, 2010, 271–85.

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in a frontline state. However, it was not the first time that the country and the wider Middle Eastern region had been exposed to American “soft power,” to use the terminology of Joseph S.  Nye.10 American scholars were already becoming interested in elements of the “cultural dimension” of Turkish-American relations during the Cold War: the private organizations and institutions of an earlier era that, chiefly through their educational work, had aided in the modernization of Turkey and laid the foundations of the perceived political and ideological friendship of the present.11 The records of Robert College and those (more fragmentary) of its sister school, The Constantinople Woman’s College—after 1932 the American College for Girls at Istanbul—contain important sources for the history of Turkish-American relations as well as that of the country itself. Historians use them, and also the considerably larger collection of records produced by the ABCFM and kept at Harvard University, because of the commentary offered by missionaries and college officials on political and social developments during times of turmoil and rapid transformation. Indeed, a growing body of scholarship has emerged on Anglo-American Protestant mission to the Ottoman Empire, especially over the course of the last two decades, dating roughly from the time of renewed American engagement with the Middle East following the Cold War’s end and the start of the so-called war on terror.12 These works broadly cover the 10  Cemal Yetkiner, “After Merchants, Before Ambassadors: Protestant Missionaries and Early American Experience in the Ottoman Empire, 1820–1860”. In Nur Bilge Criss, Selçuk Esenbel, Tony Greenwood and Louis Mazzari (eds.), American Turkish Encounters: Politics and Culture, 1830–1989. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011, 8–34. Cf. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “Soft Power”, Foreign Policy 80 (Autumn 1990): 153–71. 11  Daniel 1967; Joseph S.  Szyliowicz, Education and Modernization in the Middle East. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973. 12  Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008; Nur Bilge Criss, Selçuk Esenbel, Tony Greenwood and Louis Mazzari (eds.), American Turkish Encounters: Politics and Culture, 1830–1989. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011; Paul Sedra, From Mission to Modernity: Evangelicals, Reformers and Education in Nineteenth-Century Egypt. I. B. Tauris, 2011; Mehmet Ali Doğan and Heather J. Sharkey (eds.), American Missionaries and the Middle East: Foundational Encounters. The University of Utah Press, 2011; Hilde Nielsen, Inger Marie Okkenhaug, and Karina Hestad-Skeie, Protestant Missions and Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Domestic Frontiers: Gender, Reform, and American Interventions in the Ottoman Balkans and the Near East. University of Massachusetts Press, 2013.

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­radual transition from mission aiming to proselytize among local g Christians, to a more secularly oriented education which laid the foundations of nationalism among native intellectuals attending Protestant schools. The geographical focus of this research is mostly the Arab lands, such as Egypt and Lebanon, where the Syrian Protestant College (later the American University of Beirut) operated. The chronological period examined in these works is for the most part the nineteenth century up until the First World War. This was a time when the Arab-speaking regions of the former Ottoman Empire came under direct European colonial rule and— in the case of Anatolia—the genocide and expulsion of native Christians destroyed the preconditions for the Protestant missions. Of particular significance to this study is the work of historian Hans-Lukas Kieser, which charts the history of American millennialist and civic engagement in the Middle East, with an emphasis on the missionary experience in Anatolia against the backdrop of the Armenian question and interfaith dialogue with the Alevi community.13 Kieser’s focus is on the missionary organization ABCFM, from which the founder of Robert College, Cyrus Hamlin, had dissociated himself when he set up his own non-denominational school. This means that the American colleges that were not formally a part of the ABCFM and which, unlike most missionary schools, survived the transition to the republican era, receive no attention. The result is, by and large, a gap in our knowledge at precisely the historical moment when missionary America retreated while, simultaneously, the US State Department established new relations with the revolutionary nationalist republic that prepared the ground for the coming alliance after the Second World War. The two American colleges in Istanbul have been the subject of a number of studies over the years, mostly written by former faculty chronicling the histories of their institutions, based mainly on the published memoirs of college presidents.14 Given this affiliation and choice of source, they tend to be uncritical accounts, full of detail but with scant attention to analytical questions. This body of literature, written by American authors

13  Hans-Lukas Kieser, Nearest East: American Millennialism and Mission to the Middle East. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010. 14  For example, Keith M. Greenwood, Robert College: The American Founders. Istanbul: Boğaziçi University Press, 2000; John Freely, A History of Robert College. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2000; Freely 2012 (2009).

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and Turkish scholars affiliated with Boğaziçi University,15 conveys a mostly positive image of the intercultural encounters taking place at Robert College, although others have accused the institution of cultural imperialism. Some scholars, most recently the Ottomanist Orlin Sabev, have tried to shift the emphasis from the founders and presidents of Robert College to its educational ideals and the students attending the school. By identifying certain periods during the college’s first half-century of existence, when one ethnicity or the other dominated the student body, and using prosopographical methods to chart the careers of some alumni, Sabev claims to have balanced the perspective of American college officials with the voices of native students. Yet, while adding nuance to some of the earlier unreserved praise, he too ends up reinforcing the image of Robert College’s success in maintaining, “more or less unchanged, its educational ideals by reinventing itself time and time again.”16 However, few scholars of Robert College have addressed the content of the curriculum taught at the school or asked about its implications for relations with the surrounding Turkish society and the “modernization” of Turkey, in which the idea of universal education played a vital role.17 None of them addresses the inherent conflict between Robert College’s ambition to assist Turkish nationalists in their modernization program and its attempt to introduce an education that stressed the value of internationalism. The overall chronological focus on the early decades of the college’s history means that the crucial years after the end of the Ottoman Empire are poorly covered by research. It is this understudied aspect of the history of education and nation building during the first decade of Turkey’s republican era that is the focus of the present study.

15  For example, Aslı Gür, “Robert College; Laboratory for Religion, Shrine for Science— Transculturation of Evangelical College Model in Constantinople”. In Nur Bilge Criss, Selçuk Esenbel, Tony Greenwood and Louis Mazzari (eds.), American Turkish Encounters: Politics and Culture, 1830–1989. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011: 48–60; Ted Widmer, “The Long Journey of Cyrus Hamlin”. In Bilge Criss et  al. 2011, 61–74. 16  Sabev 2014, 278. 17  Cf. Andreas M. Kazamias, Education and the Quest for Modernity in Turkey. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966.

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Argument, Material, and Perspectives This study examines the complex interplay between nationalism and internationalism, between opposing ideas about the meaning of modernity at the dawn of the so-called American century, through the case of an American, private institution of higher education in early republican Turkey. Using a micro-historical approach, I argue that the study of the educational project for peace and international understanding, with a particular focus on one of its employees, offers a clue to a more nuanced understanding of elite nation formation in Turkey, as well as Turkish-­ American relations in the first half of the twentieth century. On a global level, it also contributes to a more complex understanding of the international rise of American progressive education in the non-Western world— often presented as a comforting liberal success story—as well as shedding light on the educational side of the 1920s’ peace movement. At the center of the study stands a single individual, Edgar Jacob Fisher (1885–1968), who taught and served as dean at Robert College from 1913 to 1933—see Image 1.2. A student of history, who obtained his PhD from Columbia University in 1911 with a thesis on the colonial administration of New Jersey on the eve of American independence,18 he took up a position as an assistant professor at Robert College, later replacing Alexander Van Millingen as head of the school’s history department. Here he devoted his efforts to fostering internationalist sentiment among students from different national, religious, and ethnic groups, by his own account adapting the teaching of history to the needs of the Near East. Perhaps to a greater extent than anyone else in the college’s faculty, Fisher epitomized the postwar movement of educating in the service of peace and international understanding—here referred to as international or internationalist education19—which is the main reason why he is the focal 18  Edgar J.  Fisher, New Jersey as a Royal Province, 1738 to 1776. New  York: Columbia University, 1911. 19  The term internationalist education is closely linked to the concepts of internationalism and international education. Here, they refer to the ideal of international cooperation and conflict resolution by peaceful means, based on a willingness to understand other cultures, nations, and religions. With regard to international education, one might find it useful to distinguish between (1) international and comparative education of the type that pioneering scholars of pedagogy like John Dewey, Paul Monroe, Isaac Kandel, and others engaged in, both as students of national education systems in different parts of the world and consultants to chiefly non-Western governments attempting to modernize education (see below); and (2) a type of education that sought to put the tenets of internationalism into practice by try-

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Image 1.2  Edgar Jacob Fisher, Dean of Robert College between 1917 and 1933. Source: Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, August 19, 1922

point of the study. Fisher has left behind considerable collections of his papers dispersed between the archives of several American universities, notably Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and Ohio State University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. These contain parts of his correspondence, diaries, various reports, lecture notes, and student essays, which makes it possible to reconstruct his teaching practice to some extent. Arriving in Istanbul shortly after the Balkan Wars and the CUP’s coup d’état, and on the eve of the First World War, his diaries cover two dramatic decades of late Ottoman and early republican Turkish history. In 1968 John Cecil Guckert wrote a dissertation about Robert College during the transition from Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic; this was shortly after the diaries were deposited at Ohio State University upon Fisher’s death in 1968 and Guckert used some of them as his primary source material, but seems to have been oblivious to their more ing to imbue students with international understanding. Sometimes this is referred to as peace education, an outgrowth of the international peace movement before and after the First World War. I have opted for the term internationalist education to stress this latter aspect.

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problematic implications.20 He ends his study on a sunny note, describing the harmony that supposedly characterized the college’s relations with the Turkish government post-1927, when the United States and Turkey resumed full diplomatic relations after a ten-year hiatus.21 The records of Robert College kept at Columbia University tell a different story. Here restrictions were imposed on nearly all material pertaining to Edgar Fisher, which only became fully accessible in 2019, suggesting a case of a very sensitive nature.22 Because of this secrecy, Fisher has become an obscure, largely forgotten figure in the history of Robert College, despite passing praise of him in the memoirs of Caleb Frank Gates (1857–1946), college president between 1903 and 1932, and the occasional reference to his role in the so-called donkey incident, which briefly threatened the college’s relations with the Ankara regime in 1924.23 Writing the history of internationalist education at Robert College and the hopes of its proponents for Turkey’s democratic future becomes a matter of excavating the long-­ buried case of this educator. In this study, I attempt to piece together clues extracted from Fisher’s and other college officials’ correspondence, reports, diary entries, syllabi, lecture notes, and articles in the college newsletter, as well as the writings of Robert College students in assignments and in the school magazine, into a coherent account of international education in Kemalist Turkey. A word is due about the selection and nature of the sources. As mentioned above, the records of the American colleges of Istanbul—some kept at the archive of Boğaziçi University although most are in Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New  York—contain important collections of primary sources for scholars interested not only in the history of the institutions themselves, but also in foreign educators’ accounts of Turkey. The newsletter of Robert College and the American University of Beirut, later the newsletter of the Near East College Association, for example, is particularly notable for its recurring commentary on aspects of the country’s rapid modernization as well on the role 20  John Cecil Guckert, “The Adaptation of Robert College to Its Turkish Environment, 1900–1927”. Unpublished PhD thesis. Columbus: Ohio State University, 1968. 21  Guckert 1968, 167, 181. 22  I am grateful to the staff at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library who kindly heeded my request to lift the restriction on access to the Edgar Fisher files in the Robert College Records. 23  Caleb Frank Gates, Not to Me Only. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940, 186. Guckert 1968, 155–57. Freely 2012 (2009), 236–37, 269–70.

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that American educators played or aspired to play in this process.24 One must, however, keep in mind that the audiences targeted by this publication were the friends and donors of the Association. This meant that information about tensions between the colleges and the Turkish authorities or alterations to educational philosophy was suppressed for fear of damaging fundraising work. The same can be said for the published memoirs penned by Caleb Frank Gates and those of college officials Floyd Black and Herbert Lane, which survive in typescript kept in the Robert College Records and which have been consulted by scholars of this institution, including John Freely and Orlin Sabev. The annual reports of the college presidents—another oft-utilized source in the literature on the Istanbul colleges—to the Association’s Board of Trustees in New York sometimes contained more candid assessments. Here too, however, an element of caution is observable on the part of their authors, as some board members were philanthropists who had invested heavily in college facilities using their own wealth and might not have responded calmly to bad news. The primary sources studied here are written in (and, in the case of Turkish press stories about Robert College, translated into) English. It is thus the perspectives and perceptions of American educators that are in focus rather than those of their Turkish counterparts. One might make the valid criticism that the selection of sources only captures one side of the story of the Turkish-American encounter. To some extent, it has the effect of leaving the researcher in a similar position as the college officials struggling to understand public opinion and government decisions in Turkey and often being forced to conjecture about the source of hostility. Turkish views on the American colleges and matters of concern to American educators, which from time to time appeared in regime-loyal press, were in some cases translated into English by Robert College’s Turkish-speaking faculty for the benefit of Board members in New York, especially publicity that gave cause for grave concern. An entirely different type of source material, which sheds light on the reception of American educational ideas in Turkey, can be found in the essays of Robert College’s native students. Discussed in a separate chapter, these essays offer a valuable counterpoint to the voices of American educators and Turkish government officials that otherwise dominate the study.

24  The title of the newsletter changed on several occasions during the period studied here. I cite this source according to the title of the particular issue.

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I analyze these sources with methods drawn from the hermeneutical research tradition that focuses on the time and context in which they were produced. This means placing an emphasis on contemporary domestic and international political developments as well as the late Ottoman background that shaped the fate of international education in Turkey, a perspective often missing from the literature on Robert College. The relationship between the American colleges and the Turkish state involved foreign policy considerations, complicated by the lack of full diplomatic relations between Turkey and the United States for the larger part of the 1920s. Central to the analysis, however, are the educational ideas and practice, with particular attention being paid to both explicit and implicit self-definitions that emerge in the texts. The discourse on international education is closely related to the different understandings of the concept of modernity that was central to the tension between Western internationalism and Kemal’s nationalism. Defined by sociologist Anthony Giddens in terms of industrial civilization and a complex of economic and political institutions, including the nation-­ state and mass democracy, which flow from the “idea of the world as open to transformation by human intervention,” modernity is the condition of a society which “lives in the future, rather than the past.”25 As such, it is related to the similar notion of secularism, also rooted in the eighteenth-­ century Enlightenment. Even though the noun “modernity” was never used in the primary sources for this study, the constant references to “modern society” and “modern life” justify the shorthand use of it. However, I treat the concept of modernity as a discursive, or rhetorical, construct rather than as a way of signifying a lived reality. What matters in the analysis is contemporaries’ perceptions of what it meant to be modern in the interwar decades rather than departing from a strictly normative assumption of what constitutes modernity. This means that different contemporary visions of a modern society and way of life must be taken into account. American and Western European democratic-capitalist “modernity” was one—that is, an understanding of what a modern society was and ideally should be. So was Fascist “modernity” and, for that matter, the Soviet Union’s version of what it meant to be modern. What these competing projects for modernity often shared was a promise of either individual liberty or improved material conditions that in both cases constituted 25  Anthony Giddens, Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, 94.

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a liberation from an oppressive past; yet they also shared a coercive impulse, expressed in a tendency to impose reform from above, telling people how to live their lives. Bearing in mind that “modernity” is not a given category, the project’s methodology therefore draws on the approaches to conceptual history developed by Reinhart Koselleck and Quentin Skinner, which, critical of unhistorical and normative assumptions inherent in Enlightenment thinking, argued that historically contingent values and practices must be understood in their particular contexts over time.26 This book addresses issues pertaining to the history of US-Turkish cultural relations during the founding years of the Turkish Republic. There is, however, a larger historical and transnational context in which the case of Robert College can be analyzed. This is the rise of international and comparative education during the first decades of the twentieth century which, in its turn, was an outgrowth of the American progressive education movement. At the center of it stood Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York City and its International Institute, created in 1923 by Paul Monroe (1869–1947), considered to be a pioneer, if not a founding father, of the field of international education—see Image 1.3. The Institute’s staff included the stars of progressive and comparative education such as John Dewey, Isaac Leon Kandel, and William Heard Kilpatrick, who traveled worldwide to study education systems in countries like the Soviet Union, China, Iran, Bulgaria, Sweden, and Denmark. They made it their mission to train foreign student teachers to become the intellectual and educational leaders of their countries. Chinese students in particular flocked to Columbia’s Teachers College in the aftermath of the revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1911, when Sun Yat-sen’s new republic was looking to Western role models in its drive to modernize post-­ imperial society. Many of them would become involved in the process of educational reform, and in that capacity invited their former academic supervisors from New  York to advise their governments. Between the early 1910s and the late 1930s, Dewey, Monroe, Kilpatrick, and others visited China both as part of the International Institute’s work and as consultants to the Kuomintang regime, with Dewey alone delivering 26  For example, Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated and with an introduction by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004; Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas”, History and Theory 8:1 (January 1969): 3–53. See also, Jan-Werner Müller, “On conceptual history”. In Darrin McMahon and Samuel Moyn (eds.), Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, 74–93.

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Image 1.3  Paul Monroe, founder of Columbia University Teachers College’s International Institute and President of Robert College 1932–1935. Source: Robert College Herald, 4:1 (October 17, 1933), Robert College Records, Box 49, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Reproduced with permission from Robert College, Istanbul

hundreds of lectures during a two-year stay.27 The Institute’s interest was not limited to East Asia, but extended also to the Middle East and the Ottoman Empire’s successor states, where Monroe undertook consultancy stints for the government of Iraq and Dewey for the Turkish Ministry of Education. The United States’ political establishment, by rejecting 27  “Shaping Education around the World”, Teachers College, Columbia University 2009, accessed March 11, 2021: https://www.tc.columbia.edu/articles/2009/july/shapingeducation-around-the-world/.

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League of Nations membership and retreating into isolationism, had refused to assume the position of global leader that the First World War had thrust upon it. Yet, somewhat independently, these education experts—much like the American bankers, jazz music, and Hollywood film industry of the same period—were performing the role of apostles for American “modernity.” The interwar period’s pioneers of international education have often been lauded by scholars of the field for introducing typically “American” progressive methods of teaching and democratic ideas to developing countries in the non-Western world.28 In that way, they can be understood as forerunners of the more active American engagement in Third World countries after 1945, epitomized by the government’s USAID program and the Peace Corps. This has led other scholars, more critical of US foreign policy and in tune with postcolonial studies, to call for the deconstruction of such “comforting histories” of the origins of international education, which they accuse of glossing over its entanglement with American colonialism. Noting, among others, Paul Monroe’s recommendations for education in the Philippines, then a US protectorate (as it had been since the Spanish-American War of 1898), the scholar Keita Takayama makes a case for analyzing the work of the International Institute not as a democratic enterprise, but as a way of rendering legitimacy to American hegemony and even white supremacy.29 Scholarly defenders of Monroe’s legacy, like Liping Bu, have in turn criticized Takayama for failing to understand that the International Institute of Teachers College was primarily a product of the peace movement in post-WWI America. The motives of Monroe and his fellow American educators are thus to be understood as idealistic, rooted in a genuine belief that the American

28  For example, Liping Bu, Making the World Like Us: Education, Cultural Expansion, Cultural Expansion, and the American Century. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003; Liping Bu, “Education and International Cultural Understanding: The Elite American Approach, 1920–1937”. In Richard Garlitz and Lisa Jarvinen (eds.), Teaching America to the World and the World to America: Education and Foreign Relations since 1870. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 111–34. 29  Keita Takayama, “Beyond Comforting Histories: The Colonial/Imperial Entanglement of the International Institute, Paul Monroe, and Isaac L.  Kandel at Teachers College, Columbia University”, Comparative Education Review 62:4 (October 2018): 459–81.

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system of “democratic education” would provide a basis for democracy and world peace if spread to other nations.30 While largely one-dimensional, and often remiss in attention to the local conditions that shaped educational work, these conflicting perspectives on international education are pertinent to the case of the American colleges in Istanbul. Robert College and its sister school predated the rise of international education by several decades and, although there were no formal ties between them and the Institute at Columbia University, many personal bonds existed, not least because the Near East College Association had its offices in New York. Some of Robert College’s faculty studied at Teachers College, like Harold Scott who wrote his term paper on foreign schools in Turkey,31 while others, like Edgar Fisher, were influenced by its brand of progressive education. The Institute’s staff in their turn showed an interest in the work carried out by the American Istanbul colleges, which they viewed as the natural springboard for the dissemination of their ideas on modern education in that part of the world. Its founder, Paul Monroe, visited Robert College on several occasions in the 1920s and would, as its president between 1932 and 1935, play a pivotal role in its history, as we shall see. The micro-historical study of internationalist teaching at Robert College not only sheds light on a chapter in the “modernization” of Turkey and Turkish-American relations, but contributes to our understanding of a larger, global history of the interwar years and beyond.

Outline of the Book Apart from this introduction, this book is divided as follows: Chap. 2, “Background: Robert College and Late Ottoman Society,” briefly describes the early history of the American colleges, set against the backdrop of Ottoman reform, war, and collapse that preceded the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923. For the benefit of readers largely unfamiliar with the subject, I structure it around at least four important 30  Liping Bu, “Paul Monroe and the Origins of American Comparative Education”, Rockefeller Archive Center Research Report, January 2019, 1–12, footnote 25. Downloaded from ResearchGate, January 25, 2021: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332656834. Cf. Bu 2012, 112. 31  Harold L.  Scott, “Foreign schools in Turkey, 1914–1926”, term paper in Education 309, Teachers College, January 1927; Robert College Records; Box 53, Folder 12; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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historical and geopolitical contexts in which the history of Robert College is embedded. The first context is the traditional history of Ottoman reform, beginning with the shocks of the Napoleonic Wars, the Greek and Egyptian secessions that prompted the Tanzimat in 1839, and, after Anglo-French pressure during the Crimean War, the Hatt-ı Hümayun of 1856, promising freedom of worship and raising the prospect of emancipating the Ottoman Christians. The debates on constitutional reform and competing ideas about imperial preservation and rejuvenation under a new, encompassing, umbrella identity are addressed; as are the growing economic might of the emerging Rûm and Armenian middle classes, with their interest in Western education. The second context of importance is the history of American mission to the Ottoman lands, with its roots in the evangelical Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century. Its millenarian beliefs in the necessity to convert Jews and, later, Near Eastern Christians, in view of Christ’s Second Coming spurred Protestant mission to “Bible lands.” The byproduct of this mission was the introduction of Western education, which scholars of the era identify as a vector of modernization and a factor in the ethno-national “awakening” of Ottoman Christian minorities, primarily Armenians and Bulgarians. The missionaries’ interest in interfaith dialogue and the receptiveness of some parts of the Alevi community were important factors in Abdul Hamid II’s push for a revival of Sunni Islam; he was concerned that the missionaries would destabilize the Empire and lure pious Muslims to convert. This was perceived as perhaps a bigger threat than the secessionism of Ottoman Christians as it tallied with existential fears about an ever-diminishing Ottoman Muslim world. These concerns contributed to shaping Hamidian attitudes toward Robert College and led to a ban on Muslim student attendance. The third context addressed is the history of Robert College from 1863. Although non-denominational, unlike the schools run by the ABCFM, attention is due to the Protestant ideals of its founders and faculty, which early on led to a clash with Armenian students calling for a strictly secular education. The fourth and final context or, to be more precise, section of this chapter, are the developments from the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 to the First World War and the Armistice years, and their impact on Robert College. Chapter 3, “Years of Transition: Adapting to the Republican Order, 1923–1927,” covers the period from the end of the Allied occupation of

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Istanbul to the establishment of full diplomatic relations between Washington and Ankara, a time during which the American colleges of Istanbul struggled to survive and find a new role in the emerging Turkish nation-state. The abandonment of the Ottoman capitulations in the Lausanne peace treaty and the loss of many of the Greek Orthodox students, who until 1923 made up the bulk of the student body, forced college officials to reconsider the school’s mission and, to some degree, start anew by attracting Turkish-Muslim students to a greater extent than before. However, this put the college on a collision course with the new Ministry of Education at Ankara, which moved to bring all domestic and foreign schools under its control. At the center of this chapter is an analysis of the hostile encounter between the American colleges and the new nationalist regime with a particular focus on Edgar Fisher—who as a history instructor at Robert College was particularly vulnerable—and the strategy developed by college president Caleb Gates. The latter was designed to defend the autonomy of his school against the encroachment of the Turkish state while simultaneously serving the interests of the new Turkey and making the case for the American colleges as “an oasis of peace in a desert of discord”: model institutions that would provide a springboard for the Near East’s modernization and a “cure for war.” Chapter 4, “A Moderate and True Nationalism: The Philosophy and Practice of Internationalism and Peace Education at Robert College, c. 1927–1933,” addresses the question of what a modern, secular education promoting peace and international understanding meant in a post-­ Ottoman context. As the chapter’s title suggests, the focus of attention is on the teaching context and the extracurricular activities in which students encountered internationalism. Special attention is devoted to the paradoxical relation between nationalism and internationalism, as American educators understood it, with the former as both an obstacle to and necessary prerequisite for the development of “world-mindedness.” Chapter 5, “Wonderful Changes, Broken Unity: Modernity, Ottoman Past and National Belonging in the Essays of Robert College Students,” continues to examine themes addressed in the previous chapter, but this time from the perspective(s) of the native students themselves. Departing from the notion of Fisher’s internationalist teaching as Ottomanism for the post-Ottoman world, it asks what it meant to be modern in the eyes of his students, as well as how they understood the implications of international education for their own group identities. Particular attention is paid to how students from the remaining Armenian and Greek Orthodox

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communities made sense of their position in the new republican Turkey as well as the problematic aspects of the recent Ottoman past that threatened to surface. Chapter 6, “Internationalism Defeated: The Downfall of Edgar Fisher,” tells the story of the demise of internationalist education at Robert College during the final years of Caleb Gates’ presidency and the brief tenure of his successor Paul Monroe, set against the backdrop of power struggles within the Kemalist establishment and the subjugation of civil society in the early 1930s. At the center of the chapter is an analysis of the second Fisher incident, an obscure but arguably major turning point in the history of Robert College. Finally, Chap. 7, “Epilogue and Conclusion,” addresses the implications of the choices made in connection with the second Fisher incident for the continued existence of the American Istanbul colleges, along with a discussion of the study’s findings.

References Bu, Liping. 2003. Making the World Like Us: Education, Cultural Expansion, Cultural Expansion, and the American Century. Westport, CT: Praeger. ———. 2012. Education and International Cultural Understanding: The Elite American Approach, 1920–1937. In Teaching America to the World and the World to America: Education and Foreign Relations since 1870, ed. Richard Garlitz and Lisa Jarvinen, 111–134. Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2019. Paul Monroe and the Origins of American Comparative Education, Rockefeller Archive Center Research Report, January 2019, 1–12. Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332656834. Accessed Jan 25, 2021. Criss, Nur Bilge, Selçuk Esenbel, Tony Greenwood, and Louis Mazzari, eds. 2011. American Turkish Encounters: Politics and Culture, 1830–1989. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Daniel, Robert L. 1967. The United States and the Turkish Republic before World War II: The Cultural Dimension. Middle East Journal 21 (1): 52–63. Doğan, Mehmet Ali, and Heather J. Sharkey, eds. 2011. American Missionaries and the Middle East: Foundational Encounters. The University of Utah Press. Fisher, Edgar J. 1911. New Jersey as a Royal Province, 1738 to 1776. New York: Columbia University. Freely, John. 2000. A History of Robert College. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları.

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———. 2012 (2009). A Bridge of Culture: Robert College—Bogă ziçi University: How an American College in Istanbul Became A Turkish University. Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitetisi Yayinevi. Gall, Carlotta. 2021. Prestigious Istanbul University Fights Erdogan’s Reach. The New  York Times, February 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/ world/asia/turkey-bogazici-university-protests-erdogan.html. Gates, Caleb Frank. 1940. Not To Me Only. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1998. Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Greenwood, Keith M. 2000. Robert College: The American Founders. Istanbul: Boğaziçi University Press. Guckert, John Cecil. 1968. The Adaptation of Robert College to Its Turkish Environment, 1900–1927. Unpublished PhD thesis. Columbus: Ohio State University. Gür, Aslı. 2011. Robert College; Laboratory for Religion, Shrine for Science— Transculturation of Evangelical College Model in Constantinople. In American Turkish Encounters: Politics and Culture, 1830–1989, ed. Nur Bilge Criss, Selçuk Esenbel, Tony Greenwood, and Louis Mazzari, 48–60. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Kazamias, Andreas M. 1966. Education and the Quest for Modernity in Turkey. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Kieser, Hans-Lukas. 2010. Nearest East: American Millennialism and Mission to the Middle East. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2004. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Trans. Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press. Lewis, Bernard. 2002 (1961). The Emergence of Modern Turkey. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Makdisi, Ussama. 2008. Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. McKernan, Bethan. 2021. Istanbul university students clash with police over rector appointment. The Guardian, January 6. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2021/jan/06/istanbul-university-students-clash-with-police-overrector-appointment. Müller, Jan-Werner. 2013. On conceptual history. In Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, ed. Darrin McMahon and Samuel Moyn, 74–93. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nielsen, Hilde, Inger Marie Okkenhaug, and Karina Hestad-Skeie. 2011. Protestant Missions and Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Leiden: Brill. Nye, Jr, and S. Joseph. 1990. Soft Power. Foreign Policy 80: 153–171.

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Reeves-Ellington, Barbara. 2013. Domestic Frontiers: Gender, Reform, and American Interventions in the Ottoman Balkans and the Near East. University of Massachusetts Press. Sabev, Orlin. 2014. Spiritus Roberti: Shaping New Minds and Robert College in Late Ottoman Society (1863–1923). Istanbul: Boğaziҫi University Press. Sedra, Paul. 2011. From Mission to Modernity: Evangelicals, Reformers and Education in Nineteenth-Century Egypt. I. B. Tauris. Skinner, Quentin. 1969. Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas. History and Theory 8 (1): 3–53. Szyliowicz, Joseph S. 1973. Education and Modernization in the Middle East. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Takayama, Keita. 2018. Beyond Comforting Histories: The Colonial/Imperial Entanglement of the International Institute, Paul Monroe, and Issac L. Kandel at Teachers College, Columbia University. Comparative Education Review 62:4 (October 2018): 459–481. Thomas, Lewis V., and Richard N. Frye. 1951. The United States and Turkey and Iran. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. White, Jenny. 2014. Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Widmer, Ted. 2011. The Long Journey of Cyrus Hamlin. In American Turkish Encounters: Politics and Culture, 1830–1989, ed. Nur Bilge Criss, Selçuk Esenbel, Tony Greenwood, and Louis Mazzari, 61–74. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Yetkiner, Cemal. 2011. After Merchants, Before Ambassadors: Protestant Missionaries and Early American Experience in the Ottoman Empire, 1820–1860. In American Turkish Encounters: Politics and Culture, 1830–1989, ed. Nur Bilge Criss, Selçuk Esenbel, Tony Greenwood, and Louis Mazzari, 8–34. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Zürcher, Erik J. 2010. The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey. London: IB Tauris.

CHAPTER 2

Background: Robert College and Late Ottoman Society

On September 16, 1863, while the American Civil War raged at home, an American college commenced its first academic year in faraway Constantinople.1 The circumstances seemed inauspicious; only four students had enrolled, thus being fewer than the faculty hired to teach them. Classes were held in a decrepit building in the neighborhood of Bebek, as the local authorities rejected the college founder’s request for a building permit for the land he had bought on the hilltop above the ancient fortress of Rumeli Hissar, overlooking the Bosporus. Nevertheless, the man behind the enterprise remained undeterred. Cyrus Hamlin (1811–1900), a first cousin of Abraham Lincoln’s vice-president, Hannibal Hamlin, had spent two decades working as a missionary in Ottoman Turkey before resigning from the American Board of Foreign Missions to set up his own school. Named after his sponsor, the New York businessman and philanthropist Christopher Rhinelander Robert, the college would eventually grow into one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the Ottoman Empire and, later, republican Turkey, committed, according to its own lore, to Hamlin’s vision of a school working for the benefit of all its peoples, “without distinction of race, language, color, or faith.”2 1  Orlin Sabev, Spiritus Roberti: Shaping New Minds and Robert College in Late Ottoman Society (1863–1923). Istanbul: Boğaziҫi University Press, 2014, 70-1. 2  Cyrus Hamlin, Among the Turks. New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1878, 286.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Sjöberg, Internationalism and the New Turkey, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00932-7_2

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A question which kept recurring in festive speeches at college anniversaries throughout the years was why there was an American college in Turkey at all. To be able to answer that, the emergence of Robert College needs to be examined against the backdrop of the larger developments that transformed and ultimately destroyed the Ottoman Empire over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This chapter is not meant to comprise a history of the Ottoman Empire aimed at specialists; rather, it is intended for the general reader wishing to understand the historical background and broader setting in which the American colleges of Istanbul came into existence. It therefore commences with an account of the entangled history of missionary Protestantism and the period of Ottoman reform known as the Tanzimat, before turning to the school itself and its first half-century. Finally, it addresses the history of ethno-­ religious violence accompanying each attempt to introduce constitutional reform and political equality between the different communities of the Empire, which ended in the disastrous decade between 1912 and 1922 and set the stage for the Kemalist modernization of Turkey.

Nineteenth-Century Beginnings: Protestant Mission in the Age of Ottoman Reform The beginnings of American educational interest in the Middle East— then referred to as the Near East and including the Ottoman Balkans—lay in the first half of the nineteenth century, which saw the conjuncture of European colonialism, Ottoman attempts to reform and revitalize its waning imperial model, and Anglo-American evangelical revivalism, known as the Second Great Awakening in the United States. Rooted in postmillennialist theology, the latter movement emphasized the duty of Christians to spread the Gospel and prepare the world for the Millennium, the Thousand-Year Kingdom of God that would herald the second coming of Christ. In 1810, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) was founded in Boston by a group of Congregationalists who had been swept by revivalist fervor while attending Williams College in western Massachusetts. With the aim of proselytizing among the “heathen nations,” the organization established mission stations in British India, Southeast Asia, and Hawaii, as well as among the Native American Cherokee tribes, before concentrating on the famed “Bible lands” of the Near East. In 1819, two missionaries, Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk, set out to explore the Anatolian hinterland of Smyrna (Izmir) and Lebanon, with

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an eye to establishing a permanent American evangelical presence. A strand of millennialist thought held that the conversion of Jews, “restored to Palestine and to Jesus,””, was a particularly important precondition for God’s earthly kingdom, making mission to the Near East all the more urgent. Realizing the difficulties of winning over Jews in larger numbers and the nigh impossibility of proselytizing among Muslims in a state where apostasy was still punishable by death, the two missionaries settled for the more realistic objective of preaching the Gospel to Ottoman Christians. Dead from exhaustion within a few years of their arrival in the Levant, Parsons and Fisk nevertheless laid the foundations for a vast network of mission stations, schools, and hospitals throughout the Ottoman lands that for a century would be the most significant American presence in the region.3 The men and women devoting their lives to overseas missions in the service of the ABCFM were for the most part highly educated graduates from universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, or the theological seminaries at Andover and Bangor. Knowledge of and sensitivity to the native cultures of the host societies had high standing in the ABCFM, although the eventual conversion of the Other to the American Protestant interpretation of the Gospel was the main objective of intercultural encounters.4 A case in point was Dr. Mary Mills Patrick (1850–1940), the future president of the Constantinople Woman’s College, who learnt both ancient and modern Armenian along with colloquial Turkish and Greek during her missionary days, in addition to being a scholar of ancient Greek philosophy.5 Politically, the members and sympathizers of the ABCFM tended to be progressive liberals, championing the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women and Jews, and the rights of the North American Indians. It was, in fact, the trauma of having failed to protect their Cherokee converts from deportation (the Trail of Tears) under the Indian Removal Act passed during Andrew Jackson’s presidency that helped shift the ABCFM’s focus of activity from the American West to the Near East in the 1830s.6 Disabused of their hopes for the marginalized indigenous 3  Hans-Lukas Kieser, Nearest East: American Millennialism and Mission to the Middle East. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010, 15-33. 4  Kieser 2010, 27. 5  See Carolyn McCue Goffman, Mary Mills Patrick’s Cosmopolitan Mission and the Constantinople Woman’s College. Lexington: Lexington Books, 2021. 6  Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008, 145.

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peoples of their own country, the missionaries doubled down on their efforts to evangelize among the native Christians inhabiting the sacred geography of the Bible, perceived to languish under the double yoke of Muslim rule and the spiritual darkness of the Eastern Christian churches. The Ottoman world that the American Protestants encountered was in turmoil following decades of imperial decline and the shocks of Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, the Serbian uprisings in 1804 and 1815, the Greek War of Independence from 1821 to 1829, and the subsequent rebellion and de facto secession of Egypt under Muhammad Ali in 1831. A string of military defeats dating back to the Russian-Ottoman War of 1768–1774, combined with challenges from both rebellious Christians and entrenched Muslim elites jealously guarding their privilege, had convinced Sultan Mahmud II and his successor Abdulmejid I of the urgency to reform the state lest the Empire perish. Attempts to modernize along the lines of Western models and stem the tide of state disintegration became the leading theme of Ottoman imperial existence, as subject peoples sought national independence and Russia, along with other European Great Powers and international creditors, eyed Ottoman territories and assets covetously. In 1839, the same year that the missionary and future founder of Robert College Cyrus Hamlin arrived in Constantinople, Abdulmejid issued the Gülhane edict, launching the age of reform called the Tanzimat, the “reorganization” of the Empire. To be sure, it was not the first time that Ottoman sultans had looked to Western Europe as a source of inspiration. Much has been made in recent scholarship of the court of Ahmet III (1703–1730) during the so-called Age of Tulips a century earlier, which saw a famous embassy sent to Paris to study advances in technology and science and translations of European texts, as well as the setting up of first printing press in the Ottoman world to use the Arabic script.7 Sometimes portrayed as an “Ottoman Enlightenment,” this project of knowledge transfer, which seems to challenge dominant assumptions of a backward intellectual climate unresponsive to the early-modern European scientific revolution, was nevertheless short-lived. Encountering the determined 7  Molly Greene, The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1453–1768: The Ottoman Empire. Edinburgh University Press, 2015, 197-212; Ahmet Evin, “The Tulip Age and Definitions of ‘Westernization’”. In Halil İnalcık and Osman Okyar (ed.), Social and Economic History of Turkey, 1071–1920. Ankara: Meteksan, 1980: 135; Bekir Harun Küçük, Early Enlightenment in Istanbul. PhD dissertation: University of California, San Diego, 2012.

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resistance of the ulema, the learned Islamic clergy, who saw the translation of European works as a threat to their authority, as well as that of calligraphers fearing for their livelihoods, the printing press was shut down in the 1740s and the reforms abandoned.8 The dominant perception of Ottoman lands among European visitors steeped in Enlightenment values in the late eighteenth century was one of a general lack of interest in Western learning among the ruling Muslims,9 a perception which sometimes translated into contempt for the Ottoman Turks. The French traveler Claude-­ Étienne Savary, touring Egypt and the Greek archipelago in the late 1770s, saw an Oriental world of ignorance and decay, ripe for “enlightened” European rule, in an ominous foreshadowing of Bonaparte’s invasion of the Levant.10 Earlier Ottoman attempts at modernization had focused on military reforms and the restoration of central authority. What made the reform edict of 1839 different from its predecessors was the promise of an end to discrimination against the Empire’s non-Muslim subjects, which until then had been at the heart of Ottoman rule. The traditional imperial model distributed privileges across the various communities inhabiting the Empire at the same time as it celebrated Muslim supremacy over non-­ Muslims. Much has been made of the supposed Ottoman toleration of religious difference in conventional scholarship, which contrasts the treatment of Jews and other persecuted religious minorities in early-modern Western Europe with the more pragmatic or even benign approach to the coexistence of Muslims and the “protected” peoples of the Book found in the Ottoman world.11 This view has come under criticism for its bias, which reads the Ottoman past through the lens of modern Turkish ­nationalism, embellishing some aspects of this coexistence while ignoring the more problematic elements. The Ottoman Muslim community had its  Greene 2015, 210.  For example, Jonas Jacob Björnståhl, Resa til Frankrike, Italien, Sweitz, Tyskland, Holland, Ängland, Turkiet och Grekeland, part 3, Stockholm 1780, 18-19, 56-58. 10  Claude-Étienne Savary, Lettres sur la Grèce, faisant suite de celles sur l’Égypte. Paris: Onfroi, 1788, 359-61. 11  For example, Stanford J. Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. Vol. 1: Empire of the Gazis: The Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire, 1280–1808. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Stanford J.  Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. Vol. 2: Reform, Revolution and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Stanford J. Shaw, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. London: Macmillan, 1991. See also Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 8 9

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own perceived heretics, notably the Alevi Kizilbash sect, whose Shia beliefs and links with the rival Safavid Empire at times led to their persecution. Christians and Jews were defined as dhimmis, meaning protected but inferior unbelievers subject to discriminatory regulations governing a number of things from how they dressed, through the ban on building or even repairing churches and synagogues, to the poll tax (jizya) they had to pay as token of their protection by, and submission to, their Muslim rulers. To be sure, the Ottoman system of governance also granted a certain degree of religious and civil autonomy to the different religiously defined communities recognized by the sultans as millets, the separate “nations” that constituted the sultan’s subjects. The Constantinople-based patriarchs of the Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic (Gregorian) churches—that is, the leaders of the two largest Christian communities in the Empire—thus ruled over their flocks as the auxiliaries of Ottoman power, governing religious practices and family law, in return for remitting taxes to the imperial government and vouching for the collective loyalty of their respective millets. With this position came influence with the Sublime Porte in matters of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, which the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, the head of the Greek Orthodox Church, deployed to bring the thitherto autocephalous Serbian and Bulgarian Orthodox churches under his dominion in the 1760s. The clergy were not the only beneficiaries of Ottoman rule among members of the millet of the Rûm (romioi or Romans, as the Greek Orthodox had been called since Byzantine times) and its Armenian counterpart. Historically, the office of imperial dragoman (translator but also liaison between European envoys and the sultan’s court) was occupied by either Armenian or Greek-speaking Christians, while the Phanariots of Constantinople in the eighteenth century came to dominate positions in the Ottoman administration, notably those of hospodars (governors) of Wallachia and Moldavia, effectively making them active agents of Ottoman imperialism. The eighteenth century also witnessed the growing domination of the Empire’s foreign trade by Greek-speaking merchants, meaning that knowledge of Greek became indispensable to any Balkan Christian wishing to climb the ladder to social and economic power, despite the blatant discrimination they would risk in an Islamic court. Certain sectors of the subjugated Christian communities thus flourished under Muslim rule.12 Despite the summary execution of Patriarch Gregory V and the grim collective punishment meted out to Greek Orthodox communities in  Greene 2015, 163-91.

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Constantinople and across the Aegean littoral in the wake of the Greek Rebellion of 1821, the Church continued to have a stake in the preservation of the Empire and the social and ideological order that now began to crumble. To the ecclesiastical authorities belonged the control over education which, to the extent that it existed, trained future clergymen in communal schools such as the Greek Orthodox Megali tou Genous Scholi, the Great School of the Nation, in Constantinople’s Greek-dominated Phanar district, where the Ecumenical Patriarchate still has its seat. The right to excommunicate and ostracize those of their flock that strayed into heresy also belonged to them, which meant that they realized the challenge posed by the arrival of the Protestant missionaries and their schools sooner than their Muslim masters. The reform edict that launched the Tanzimat was not the result of a domestic social justice movement or any deeply felt regrets about the immorality of legally discriminating against non-Muslims on the part of Sultan Abdulmejid. Rather it was a concession to his protectors among the European Great Powers, made under duress as the Western-trained army of Muhammad Ali, the renegade ruler of Egypt, once again threatened the imperial capital. That was also the case with the subsequent Imperial Reform Edict of 1856 (Hatt-ı Hümayun), in which the sultan, in return for his Anglo-French allies’ support during the Crimean War, promised equality in the administration of justice for all Ottoman subjects regardless of religion. Non-Muslims were made eligible for government appointments previously reserved for Muslims and encouraged to elect their own representatives to newly set up communal councils, at the same time as the millet system and some of the old privileges that went with it were preserved. Half-hearted as the promises were or appeared intended to be, the reforms nevertheless integrated Ottoman Christians and Jews into the civil administration of the Empire to a degree never seen before. Of particular significance to Western missionaries was the promise that no subject would be hindered in the exercise of religion. Although Protestant mission was already a presence in the early nineteenth century due to the Ottoman government’s previous lack of interest in what it regarded as intra-communal Christian affairs, the mid-century Tanzimat pried the Empire wide open to the influence of Westerners, in everything ranging from foreign investments, through political debates about citizenship, to education. The Protestant missionaries were not alone in opening new schools. Predating their arrival by almost two centuries were the Jesuits, whose Catholic schools grew in number and became an extension

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of Napoleon III’s foreign policy in the Levant, which aimed to secure French influence over the increasingly indebted Ottoman Empire. French was the language of instruction at the prestigious Imperial School at Galatasaray, the main breeding ground of Ottoman and later republican Turkish government officials, which was founded in 1868 upon the model of the French lycée. Operating without the protection of the French government but still advertising French “civilization” was the Alliance Israélite Universelle, founded in 1860, which ran a network of Jewish schools aiming to emancipate Ottoman Jews on the model of French Jewry.13 The downside to the Tanzimat has been pointed out by numerous scholars writing with the benefit of hindsight and often reflecting the resentful viewpoint of twentieth-century Turkish nationalism. By the mid-­ nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire had turned into a kind of semi-­ colony in which different European imperialist powers vied with each other for influence and control, often using local Christians and their grievances as pawns in their great game. Important decisions about Ottoman affairs were, in the second half of the century, made in Berlin and other European capitals rather than in Constantinople. Great Britain and France sometimes acted as protectors of the enfeebled Ottoman Empire against the expansionism of Russia, but also as arbiters of what Ottoman Muslims viewed as internal Ottoman affairs, intervening on the pretext of safeguarding the rights of the Empire’s Christian subjects, and in the process of peace-brokering helping themselves to chunks of Ottoman territory and spheres of influence. The example was set by Catherine the Great’s negotiators who, in the peace treaty that concluded the Russian-Ottoman War in 1774, reserved the right for Russia to act as the protector of Ottoman Orthodox Christians, a right invoked as justification for Russian intervention in conflicts from the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s to the Bulgarian uprising in 1876. A pattern emerged in the nineteenth century whereby Christian grievances and pleas for justice, sometimes turning into armed rebellion, were met by harsh retaliation from Muslim overlords, after which Christian appeals were made for European Great Power intervention and arbitration. The result of this was often either local autonomy under Christian governors, as in the cases of the Lebanon in the 1860s and Crete in the 1890s, or full 13  Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling, 1860–1925. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990, 17-24.

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national independence (although under Great Power supervision), as in the case of Greece in 1830. Meanwhile, Westerners themselves living in the Ottoman Empire (and sometimes their local Christian protégés) enjoyed protection from Ottoman jurisdiction under the so-called capitulations: privileges originally extended to French and Italian merchants in the early-modern era, but from the mid-nineteenth century encompassing ever-growing categories of non-Muslim foreigners. According to a dominant, sometimes self-avowedly anti-colonial reading of late Ottoman history, the advent of nationalism and European imperialism fanned the flames of sectarian hatred and violence, hastening the inevitable decline and dissolution of a multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire. Nevertheless, it is a view that can be criticized for its retrospective determinism, which denies agency to the Ottomans themselves, whether Muslims, Christians, or Jews. As pointed out by Erik Jan Zürcher, the men and women living through the turmoil of the Ottoman Empire’s final century may not have perceived themselves as living in an era of imperial twilight at all.14 Other futures were possible. In a recent book, historian Ussama Makdisi argues that the Tanzimat enabled the emergence of an ecumenical frame in the Arab-speaking Ottoman Middle East, by which he means a “modern form of coexistence” that was decidedly anti-­sectarian in its outlook. It was “a body of thought that sought to reconcile a new principle of secular political equality with the reality of an Ottoman imperial system that had historically privileged Muslim over non-Muslim, but that was also attempting to integrate non-Muslims as citizens.”15 According to Makdisi, this idea survived into the post-Ottoman era and became a central tenet of secular Arabic nationalism. What he refers to as an ecumenical frame uniting Arabs regardless of faith is an aspect of the notion of Ottomanism emerging at about the same time, one that promoted a new form of collective identification with and loyalty to the Empire, regardless of religious belonging.16 This was also an idea that tallied with the idealism of the American missionaries attempting to build a peaceful, 14  Erik Jan Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey. London: I.B. Tauris, 2010, 57-72. 15  Ussama Makdisi, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019, 7. 16  For a critical discussion of the concept of Ottomanism, see Alp Eren Topal, “Ottomanism in History and Historiography: Fortunes of a Concept.” In Johanna Chovanec and Olof Heilo (ed.), Narrated Empires: Perceptions of Late Habsburg and Ottoman Multinationalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021: 77-98.

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earthly Kingdom of God in the Near East. It is no coincidence that Butrus al-Bustani, the founder of the first non-sectarian Arabic school, the National School in Beirut, and one of the ecumenical pioneer heroes of Makdisi’s story, was himself the product of American Protestant education.17 Bustani, a Maronite Christian who converted to Protestantism, went on to become one of the key figures of the nineteenth-century Nahda, the Arabic Renaissance. He taught in an American mission school but came to disagree with the ABCFM on the matter of religious instruction, which led him to found a school of his own premised on secular, non-sectarian teaching. The National School was founded in Beirut in 1863, the same year as the missionary Daniel L. Bliss, likewise in Beirut, received a charter from the State of New York for the Syrian Protestant College, later to become the American University of Beirut. Coincidentally, it was also the year that another American missionary who, like al-Bustani, had fallen out with the ABCFM over educational purpose, opened his own college in the faraway imperial capital.

A Non-sectarian College on Christian Grounds: Robert College’s First Half-century As noted earlier, Cyrus Hamlin came to Constantinople the same year as Sultan Abdulmejid proclaimed the Tanzimat. The ABCFM had set up its Near Eastern headquarters there eight years earlier, in 1831, and started proselytizing among the city’s Greek and Armenian communities. Led by William Goodell, a New Englander like Hamlin and many other ABCFM pioneers, the missionaries set up schools organized on the Lancastrian model, using older children who had already acquired some learning to provide a basic education with the limited resources available. The aim of the missionaries was to train local converts with the help of Bible translations into vernacular Armenian (the ABCFM soon found the Armenians to be more receptive to their teachings than the Greek-speaking Rûm), so that they might carry on the work of spreading the Gospel and reforming the Gregorian Church. Alarmed by this challenge to its authority, however, the Armenian Patriarchate used the threat of ostracism to bring Protestant converts into line, thwarting the Americans’ hopes of a local spiritual awakening within the Church. One of the lessons learned from the closing of Constantinople’s first Armenian-run mission school in 1838  Makdisi 2019, 64-74.

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was the need to establish schools under long-term American direction if the mission were to have a lasting impact.18 It was with this end in mind that the newly arrived Hamlin set up a seminary in Bebek the following year. Despite stiff resistance from the Gregorian Church, which sought to draw the attention of the Ottoman authorities to the threat posed by the missionaries to the established sectarian order, the seminary attracted a growing number of Armenians. The rift caused the Armenian community to break apart in the mid-1840s, as the Patriarch proclaimed an anathema against all those contaminated by Protestant “heresy,” forcing them to set up their own Armenian Evangelical Church. Since the United States carried little weight in Ottoman eyes at the time, the ABCFM became the beneficiary of British diplomacy to protect its interests. In 1847, after pressure from Stratford Canning, the British ambassador to the Porte, Abdulmejid granted the Ottoman Protestants separate millet status with the same rights as the established churches of Eastern Christendom and the Catholic millet, recognized in 1831. Unlike the other millets, whose organization bore the mark of strict clerical hierarchy, the new Protestant millet was a grassroots movement which elected its own head and an assembly of representatives according to a constitution (Nizamname) drawn up in 1854. This Protestant constitution would later serve as the model for the reorganization of the other non-Muslim millets with their elected communal councils, as stipulated by the sultan’s reform edict of 1856, in their turn serving as templates for the short-lived Ottoman constitution of 1876.19 Meanwhile, the ABCFM headquarters in Constantinople expressed concerns about the way that Cyrus Hamlin was running the Bebek seminary. A man of practical mind, Hamlin had established a workshop where poor students could learn useful trades, as well as a profitable bakery intended to make the seminary less dependent on charity. Furthermore, he had introduced the study of the natural sciences, with English as the language of instruction. None of this was to the liking of his fellow missionaries, wary from their experience with the Cherokees, whom they felt had been unduly exposed to the vices of modern civilization. Already, the students and graduates of Hamlin’s school were showing themselves 18  John Freely, A Bridge of Culture: Robert College—Boğaziçi University: How an American College in Istanbul Became a Turkish University. Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitetisi Yayinevi, 2012 (2009), 7-8; Kieser 2010, 44-47. 19  Kieser 2010, 47-50; Freely 2012 (2009), 21-32.

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reluctant to carry out missionary work in the Anatolian interior, preferring instead to remain in the capital and make use of their newly acquired trade and language skills. From a missionary viewpoint, the purpose of education must remain the training of ministers who could preach the Gospel in their native tongues. A decision was made in 1855 to phase out English as the language of instruction, close the workshop, and move the seminary to Marsovan in Anatolia, far away from the lure of urban life. Before this came into effect, however, Hamlin struck up a friendship with a wealthy New York businessman, Christopher Rhinelander Robert, who agreed to sponsor his project of establishing an institution of higher learning that would be Christian in spirit but independent of the ABCFM.20 The founding tale and early years of Robert College—a name chosen for its perceived neutrality—has been told in numerous publications, starting with the two memoirs Hamlin wrote in his later years.21 The initial resistance from Ottoman officials, as well as French Jesuit missionaries, to the perceived American intruder was eventually overcome, as the prestige of the US government grew after its victory over the Confederacy and the ignominious end to Napoleon III’s Mexican campaign. An imperial decree in 1868, secured through American diplomatic intervention, confirmed Hamlin’s right to build a campus on the land he had purchased above the Rumeli Hissar fortress. From the early 1870s onward, a number of imposing stone buildings were erected on the hilltop, the first of which was Hamlin Hall, the heart of a campus renowned for its beauty—see Image 2.1. Meanwhile, the school attracted growing numbers of students from the Ottoman Christian communities, especially Bulgarians, who predominated among the college’s students in its early years, adding immensely to its prestige following the establishment of the semi-independent Bulgarian principality in 1878, as graduates of the school rose to prominence in the new Bulgarian administration. The Bulgarians eventually became ­outnumbered by Armenian and Greek Orthodox students but maintained a strong presence well into the twentieth century. Relatively low tuition charges, with reduced fees for talented students of modest means, made Robert College competitive in comparison to its main rival, the Galatasaray lycée, and the communal schools of the Ottoman Christians.22  Freely 2012 (2009), 41-49.  Hamlin 1878; Cyrus Hamlin, My Life and Times. Boston and Chicago: Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society, 1893. 22  Sabev 2014, 87-91. 20 21

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Image 2.1  Robert College: Hamlin Hall foregrounded by Kennedy Lodge, one of the dwellings for the college staff. Source: News Letter, 3:2 (April, 1922), Robert College Records, Box 50, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Reproduced with permission from Robert College, Istanbul

A key factor which attracted local Christians (and, to a much smaller extent, Muslims and Jews) to Robert College was its non-sectarian character, and the promise of a modern Western education free from religious dogmatism. However, non-sectarian did not mean secular. Robert, the sponsor with whose money the institution was built, had specifically asked for a college founded on Christian principles. Participation in morning prayers and Sunday services at the college chapel was mandatory for all students and faculty, regardless of religion or denomination. This rule was the cause of a protracted conflict between the pragmatic Cyrus Hamlin and members of his own faculty and trustees, who saw the college as an extension of the missionary movement and called upon Christopher Robert to support them. Eventually, Hamlin fell out with his former friend and benefactor, leading him to lose the presidency of the college he had founded, to be replaced by his son-in-law, George Washburn, who had

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stronger ties to the ABCFM.23 This did not resolve the conflict over compulsory chapel attendance, however, as Armenian students in the 1870s rebelled against this regulation, with its vestiges of Protestant proselytism, egged on by the Armenian press and the Gregorian Church. Although both Washburn and his successor as president of Robert College, Caleb Frank Gates, had served in the missionary schools run by the ABCFM and remained sympathetic to its goals, they eventually realized that insistence on Bible study and chapel attendance risked alienating native students and their families. This became more evident in the early years of the twentieth century, as the numbers of Muslim students increased and with them the risk of conflict between the college and the Ottoman authorities.

The End of the Tanzimat and the Age of Hamidian Reaction The era of comparatively liberal reform ended in 1878. Only two years before, upon ascending the throne, Sultan Abdul Hamid II had made good on the promise of granting the Empire a constitution, resulting in the establishment of an Ottoman parliament. The constitution was the brainchild of the reformist Grand Vizier Midhat Pasha (later exiled and murdered on the sultan’s orders) and a like-minded group of Ottoman bureaucrats, who pressured the new sultan into accepting it as the only way out of the crisis caused by the growing public debt and international backlash to the brutal suppression of the Bulgarian uprising in 1876. The introduction of some sort of European-style constitutional government, along with guarantees of equal rights for non-Muslims, was meant to create a favorable impression on Western powers and creditors, considered to hold the Empire’s fate in their hands. Contemporary European publications on the Ottoman Empire tended to dismiss it as a diplomatic ruse,24 but the elections to the Ottoman parliament’s Chamber of Deputies held in 1877 produced an assembly representing Muslims as well as the non-­ Muslim millets, which proved quite adept at criticizing the sultan’s  Freely 2012 (2009), 84-98.  For example, Friedrich von Hellwald and L. C. Beck, Turkiet i våra dagar: Bilder och skildringar från alla delar af det osmaniska riket, part 1. Stockholm: E.T.  Bergegrens bokhandel, 1878, 110-16 (German original: Die heutige Türkei. Otto Spamer: Leipzig, 1878); A. de la Jonquière, Osmaniska rikets historia från äldsta tider till kongressen i Berlin. Stockholm: C.  E. Fritze’s k. Hofbokhandel, 1882, 575-81 (French original: Histoire de’l Empire ottoman depuis les origins jusqu’au traité de Berlin. Paris: Hachette, 1881). 23 24

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government, much to the dismay of Abdul Hamid. The subsequent defeat in the Russian-Ottoman War, however, and the dire terms of the San Stefano and Berlin peace treaties in 1878, gave him the excuse to suspend parliament and the constitution indefinitely. For the next thirty years, Abdul Hamid II ruled as an absolute monarch. The Hamidian era bore the mark of resentful Islamic reaction to the concessions made to foreign powers and Ottoman Christians during the Tanzimat decades. The rising wealth and influence of the despised dhimmi communities fed the grievances of Muslims accustomed to a dominant position won by right of ancestral conquest. Ussama Makdisi has likened this reaction to the contemporary rise of modern European anti-Semitism, targeting recently assimilated Jews, and the backlash against the emancipation of African Americans following the abolition of slavery and the era of post-Civil War reconstruction.25 As early as 1860, anti-Christian sentiment had burst into mob violence in Syria and the Lebanon, prompting European intervention, while recurring waves of Muslim refugees (muhacir) fleeing Bulgarian retribution and Russian expansion into the Caucasus and the Balkans in the following decades reinforced a sense of Ottoman Muslim victimhood. The disastrous defeat in the Russian-­ Ottoman War of 1877–1878 had convinced Abdul Hamid II that the Tanzimat’s emphasis on equal rights had been a mistake that had paved the way for Christian separatism and foreign meddling. Worse still, there were signs that the “contagious” activities of Western missionaries, which the sultan blamed for the unrest among his Christian subjects, were spreading into the Muslim community as the ABCFM made contact with the Alevi Kurds in eastern Anatolia. The Alevi community—that is, the Shia-leaning Kizilbash sect—had long been outcasts of the Ottoman Muslim ummah, condemned by Sunni orthodoxy, which had led them to forge relations of mutual sympathy with the equally shunned Armenian Christians. It was from their Armenian neighbors they first learned about the new Protestant millet. In the 1850s, local Kizilbash chiefs near Harput and Sivas proclaimed themselves Protestants and extended their protection to Armenian converts persecuted by the Gregorian Church and Sunni Muslim neighbors.26 Meanwhile, there were reports of Crypto-Christians in the Pontos region along the Black Sea littoral (converts to Islam who secretly retained Christian beliefs and rituals), who, encouraged by the  Makdisi 2019, 5-6.  Kieser 2010, 51-55.

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new atmosphere of religious freedom and the communal reform of the Greek Orthodox millet, publicly announced their return to Christianity, renouncing their earlier conversion to Islam.27 While American hopes of converting large numbers of Alevi Muslims to Christianity were probably always exaggerated, the possibility of an autonomy-seeking Armenian-­ Alevi alliance that might pry the eastern provinces away from the Empire became an alarming prospect for the Muslim rulers, feeding into their existential fear of an ever-diminishing Islamic world. Abdul Hamid’s response to the perceived threat was to reverse the reforms aimed at the emancipation of Ottoman Christians and reinforce the Empire’s Islamic character, emphasizing his role as caliph of the faithful, while seeking to emulate other aspects of Western modernity. New mosques were built and Sunni missionaries of the Hanafi denomination were dispatched to the Kurdish east to bring the Alevi back into the fold. The sultan also reached out to the notables of the major Sunni Kurdish tribes, who had lost much of their traditional power during earlier attempts at administrative centralization in the Tanzimat era. While continuing this centralization, he won over the Kurdish notables by siding with them in land disputes with their Armenian neighbors and by raising them to the status of privileged cavalry units in newly set up regiments—the Hamidiye—which would play a major role in the mass violence that shook the eastern provinces in the 1890s. Although parts of the Armenian millet, notably the middle-classes based in Constantinople and the larger cities, continued to thrive alongside their Ottoman Greek counterparts, as the Empire became further integrated into the world economy, the road toward political emancipation was closed. When Armenian demands for social justice and international guarantees—voiced for the first time at the Berlin congress in 1878—increased during the early 1890s, the Hamidian regime responded harshly. After a communal and international outcry at the brutal treatment of Armenian peasants refusing to pay their dues to their Muslim overlords, the sultan unleashed the Hamidiye in a terror campaign meant to collectively punish the Armenians for their perceived insolence that claimed tens of thousands of lives; earning him an international reputation as a bloodthirsty tyrant.28 27  Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions that Forged Modern Greece and Turkey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, 118-19. 28  Ronald Grigor Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015, 105-40.

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Though the ABCFM and American institutions like Robert College were protected from harm under the capitulations, the climate between them and the Ottoman authorities grew increasingly tense in the Hamidian era. Abdul Hamid II was aware of the role that Protestant education played for the growing economic success and newfound self-confidence of the Christian millets. Missionary schools and Protestant self-governance had served as role models for communal educational and democratizing reforms within the Armenian millet, despite the rivalry between the Gregorian Church and the Evangelicals. The prominence of Western-­ educated, Turkish-speaking Armenians in Ottoman journalism, literature, theater, science, medicine, and commerce created a dynamism, which the sultan viewed as a threat to, rather than an opportunity for, the state.29 Realizing that Ottoman Muslims in terms of education were lagging far behind the foreign institutions as well as the communal schools of the religious minorities, he sought to establish his own institutions of higher learning.30 However, these efforts were severely hampered by lack of funds, and perhaps also by the sultan’s fear of universities as a potential breeding ground for domestic opposition; the House of Sciences (Darülfunun), later the University of Istanbul that had been decades in the making, did not become permanent until 1900.31 The Imperial School at Galatasaray and other government schools previously established on the model of French lycées became more Islamic in character, as the French influence waned after the Franco-Prussian War and Napoleon III’s demise in 1871, and emphasis was put on religious instruction meant to instill loyalty to the sultan-caliph. Above all, the Hamidian regime sought to counter the potentially subversive influence that the ABCFM and other Christian institutions might have on young Muslims by discouraging and, from 1904, even forbidding them to attend foreign schools. Muslim ­parents sending their children to the American colleges were put under surveillance and urged to enroll their offspring in government schools instead. Nevertheless, a steady trickle of Muslim students found their way into American institutions around the turn of the century, and in 1903,

 Kieser 2010, 51, 57.  For an analysis of Hamidian educational policies, see Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimization of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011 (1998). 31  Sabev 2014, 87. 29 30

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Robert College saw its first Muslim graduate—a certain Hulusi Hüseyin, later in his life known as Hüseyin Pektaş.32

The Beginning of the Young Turk Era, 1908–1914 The reign of Abdul Hamid II ended in a series of dramatic convulsions, known as the Young Turk Revolution. In July 1908, army officers stationed in Salonica (Thessaloniki) mutinied with their troops, calling for the restoration of the 1876 constitution and threatening a march on the imperial capital. After having failed to suppress the mutiny, the sultan acquiesced to their demand, and proclaimed elections for a new Ottoman parliament. Scenes of joy erupted on the streets of Constantinople and other cities across the Empire, as the news broke and imperial subjects of all faiths joined hands in celebration and solemn declarations of fraternity. An attempt at counter-revolution in the following spring was thwarted, leading to the dethronement of Abdul Hamid, who was replaced with a more compliant sultan. The elections returned a parliament in which Ottoman Christians were well represented, in what appeared as the fulfillment of the hopes and aspirations awakened by the Tanzimat.33 The revolution has retrospectively been described as an “Ottoman spring,” in reference to the Arab Spring a century later.34 The parallel appears apt, insofar as the expectations of contemporary observers are concerned. Missionaries of the ABCFM and educators of the Near East Colleges saw in it an event of world-historical significance and a complete vindication of their educational work over the past seventy-odd years. While not denying that many disappointments might still lie ahead, Howard S. Bliss, the president of Beirut’s Syrian Protestant College was carried away by the boundless optimism and joy of the revolutionary moment in an address delivered to the National Geographic Society. “In fact, if this revolution should go back tomorrow to a period of bloodshed and persecution it would still be wonderful that so much was accomplished in a land where antagonisms

 Sabev 2014, 90, 103-10, 266  Catherine Boura, “The Greek Millet in Turkish Politics: Greeks in the Ottoman Parliament”. In Dimitri Gondicas and Charles Issawi (eds.), Ottoman Greeks in the Age of Nationalism: Politics, Economy, and Society in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, 1999, 193-206. 34  Hans-Lukas Kieser, Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018, 65. 32 33

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were so strong and where passions so easily slipped out of leash.”35 Without knowing much about who the secretive Young Turk revolutionaries were, Bliss and other American educators and missionaries declared themselves their allies in the quest to build a new, inclusive Ottoman nation.36 The Young Turks were mostly military men who came from lower middle class backgrounds and from outside the imperial capital, though many of them had studied at government schools there; notably the Military Medical School. Many of them, like the mutinous officers in Salonica, came from the Ottoman Balkans, where the threat from local Christian separatists sponsored by Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece was most acutely felt. Originally a term that encompassed a variety of political views opposing the Hamidian regime, including cosmopolitan liberalism, Young Turks eventually became synonymous with the party known as the Committee of Union and Progress (Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti); in the English-language scholarship on the Young Turk era usually referred to as the Unionists or by the English acronym CUP. Founded in the 1890s by students trained at the educational institutions established by Abdul Hamid, the CUP was concerned with how the Ottoman Empire might be saved from the onslaught of European imperialist powers. According to its tenets, the road to salvation lay in the centralization and modernization of the state, understood as the merging of European technology and science with a rejuvenated Islamic-Turkish identity. While membership was in theory open to any Ottoman citizen, regardless of faith, none of the leading cadres of the CUP was a Christian or even a Muslim Arab. The Unionists, deeply impressed by contemporary German national romanticism as well as Social Darwinism, identified themselves as (Muslim) Turks, whose loyalty was to an imagined Turkish nation rather than the sultan and the House of Osman, which they viewed as an obstacle to imperial/national rejuvenation and progress.37 The leading men of the Committee, identifying themselves with the Muslim resentment at the perceived loss of predominance and the plight of the muhacir, tended to view the Ottoman Christians as traitors, but for tactical reasons used a political language of Ottomanism and

35  Howard S. Bliss, “Sunshine in Turkey”, The National Geographic Magazine 20 (1909): 66-76, 71. 36  Kieser 2010, 67-84. 37  Zürcher 2010, 95-123.

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constitutionalism suited to winning over non-Muslims and Western public opinion.38 During its years of clandestine opposition, the CUP reached out to other secretive “revolutionary committees” (komiteci) that had sprung up during the Hamidian era.39 The most notable among these was the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutiun; hereafter Dashnak), which struggled for equal political rights, and with which the CUP cooperated in its early years. The new round of massacres against Armenians in and around Adana following the attempted Hamidian counter-revolution in April 1909 severely strained the CUP-Dashnak alliance, as many Unionists in the army instinctively sided with the local Muslim perpetrators, but survived until the very eve of the Balkan Wars in 1912.40 The outbreak of war with Italy in 1911, followed by a joint Serbian, Bulgarian, and Greek invasion of the Ottoman Empire’s European provinces the following autumn, ushered in a decade of warfare and unprecedented levels of mass violence against civilian populations. Referred to as the “Ottoman cataclysm” in a recent body of scholarship, it spelled the end of democratic reform aiming at preserving multi-religious and multi-­ ethnic coexistence.41 The so-called Second Constitutional era effectively ended in the military coup in January 1913 that toppled the multi-party cabinet of national unity, which the Unionists blamed for the disastrous defeat in the Balkans. From that moment on, the Empire’s fate lay in the hands of the CUP’s single-party dictatorship, dominated by the interior minister Talaat, war minister Enver, and to a lesser degree Cemal, navy minister and governor of Syria. The main challenge facing the new rulers was to resettle the hundreds of thousands of destitute Balkan Muslim refugees and secure imperial survival as they saw fit. This entailed finding a  Kieser 2010, 64-67.  Feroz Ahmad, “Unionist Relations with the Greek, Armenian and Jewish Communities of the Ottoman Empire.” In Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (eds.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Lands: The Functioning of a Plural Society. Volume One. The Central Lands. New York and London: Holmes and Meier, Inc., 401-34. 40  Suny 2015, 165-73; Kieser 2018, 76-79. Raymond H. Kévorkian, “Zohrab and Vartkes: Ottoman Deputies and Armenian Reformers”. In Hans-Lukas Kieser, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Seyhan Bayraktar and Thomas Schmutz (eds.), The End of the Ottomans: The Genocide of 1915 and the Politics of Turkish Nationalism. London: I. B. Tauris, 2019, 169-91. 41  Hans-Lukas Kieser, Kerem Öktem and Maurus Reinkowski (eds.), World War I and the End of the Ottomans: From the Balkan Wars to the Armenian Genocide. London: I. B. Tauris, 2015; Hans-Lukas Kieser, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Seyhan Bayraktar and Thomas Schmutz (eds.), The End of the Ottomans: The Genocide of 1915 and the Politics of Turkish Nationalism. London: I. B. Tauris, 2019. 38 39

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solution to the decades-old Armenian question that had been reignited by the Balkan wars and the London peace conference in 1913. Weary from the indefinite postponement of the pledged reforms that would guarantee equal rights and the return of Armenian land seized by Kurdish tribes in the wake of the Hamidian massacres, and wary of the CUP’s intentions, Ottoman Armenian politicians turned to the European powers for protection. In early February 1914, the great powers agreed to back a German-­ sponsored reform plan, by which the seven eastern provinces of Anatolia, where large numbers of Armenians lived, would be put under the control of two European inspectors, chosen from the neutral states of Norway and the Netherlands. The reform provided for local autonomy, in which Christian Armenians would be adequately represented alongside Muslim Kurds in local councils and the police. Without backing from their imperial German ally, the CUP leaders could do little but to acquiesce, despite their fear that this was the beginning of Armenian secession. A few months later, the July crisis of 1914 changed the game entirely. Sensing an opportunity to restore imperial greatness by expansion into the Russian Caucasus and Central Asia, they threw in their lot with Germany and the other Central powers, officially declaring war on the Entente in early October.42

The Ottoman Empire’s Great War and the Armenian Genocide The war that was to save the Ottoman Empire and avenge the catastrophes of 1912–1913 proved to be its undoing. The long-term consequences of the choices made and policies implemented by the Unionist regime can hardly be overstated. Under the cover of the world war, when foreign governments and public opinion were preoccupied elsewhere, the CUP carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing and demographic engineering whereby Christian minority populations were either compelled to leave or exterminated so as to make room for Muslim settlers who would guarantee a Turkish-Muslim demographic majority. These policies have been the subject of a constantly evolving body of research and scholarly debate within the field of genocide studies, which inevitably spills into political commentary as the Turkish state continues to deny any

 Kieser 2018, 151-210.

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responsibility, despite the recent engagement of Turkish scholars and civil society.43 For the purpose of this study, I only recapitulate the basic chronology of wartime developments here. A government-sponsored boycott of Greek business, followed by a campaign of terror and intimidation against the Rûm population inhabiting the Aegean coast near the strategic Dardanelles in the summer of 1914 accompanied state negotiations with the view of a partial “exchange of populations” with neighboring Greece—a precursor to the much expanded “exchange” carried out nearly a decade later.44 It was followed by the deportations of Armenians, starting in April 1915, under the pretext of countering an armed Armenian uprising in the wake of the Ottoman army’s dismal performance on the Russian front under the command of Enver, and in view of the Entente landing at Gallipoli. At first targeting Armenian political and intellectual elites in the capital and large cities, including the killing of unarmed Armenians conscripted into the Ottoman army’s notorious labor battalions, the campaign grew in scope over the summer and fall of 1915. In towns and villages all over central and eastern Anatolia, entire Armenian c­ ommunities 43  For example, Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, trans. Paul Bassemer. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006; and ibidem, The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012; Fuat Dündar, Crime of Numbers: The Role of Statistics in the Armenian Question (1878–1918). New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2010; Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. For a brief bibliographical discussion, see Suny 2015, 367-74. For analyses of the related Assyrian massacres, see David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia During World War I. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006; and David Gaunt, Naures Atto and Soner O.  Barthoma (eds.), Let Them Not Return: Sayfo—The Genocide Against the Assyrian, Syriac and Chaldean Christians in the Ottoman Empire. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017. For a discussion of the Ottoman Greek case, see Erik Sjöberg, The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016, 17-53. For a survey on Turkish historiography and recent public debate on the Armenian genocide in Turkey, see Alexandre Toumarkine, “Turkish History Writing of the Great War: Facing Ottoman Legacy, Mass Violence and Dissent”. In Hans-Lukas Kieser, Pearl Nunn and Thomas Schmutz (eds.), Remembering the Great War in the Middle East: From Turkey and Armenia to Australia and New Zealand. London: I. B. Tauris, 2021, 19-42. 44  J. Mourelos, “The 1914 Persecutions and the First Attempt at an Exchange of Minorities between Greece and Turkey”, Balkan Studies 26:2 (1986): 389-413.

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were rounded up and marched off to the deserts of Syria, on many occasions attacked and massacred en route by units from the CUP’s secretive Special Organization, often aided by Kurdish veterans of the Hamidiye. Within a few months, the old Armenian millet had effectively ceased to exist, as had large parts of the Assyrian Christian communities in southeastern Anatolia, which, while not explicitly included in the Interior Ministry’s orders for the Armenian removal, were swept along on the initiative of local CUP officials.45 In mid-July, 1915, Talaat allegedly boasted to the American ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, that he had accomplished more in three months with regard to solving the Armenian question than Abdul Hamid had done in thirty years.46 Meanwhile, despite confidence-boosting military exploits against the British Commonwealth forces at Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia, and on the Caucasian front following the Brest-Litovsk treaty, the Ottoman war effort ran out of steam. The halt in grain imports from abroad coupled with a labor shortage in agriculture—the result of peasant conscription into the army and the destruction of the Armenians—had by 1916 resulted in famine, while in Syria and Palestine a crop-destroying scourge of locusts in 1915 worsened the situation. Together with the brutality of Cemal Pasha’s local rule, these developments turned Muslim Arabs against the Young Turks at about the same time as the Sharif of Mecca proclaimed his rebellion against the Empire.47 Nonetheless, despite the loss of Palestine and southern Mesopotamia to new British offensives in 1917, and diminishing numbers due to hunger and disease, the Ottoman army was still a force to be reckoned with at the time of the Central Powers’ collapse in the autumn of 1918. However, the surrender of Bulgaria in early October,  See especially Gaunt 2006.  Morgenthau diary, July 18, 1915, 279. Cited in Kieser 2018, 232. 47  Makdisi 2019, 113-14; Zachary J.  Foster, “The 1915 Locust Attack in Syria and Palestine and its Role in the Famine during the First World War”, Middle Eastern Studies 51:3 (2015): 370-94. For a discussion of Cemal Pasha’s governorship in Syria and role in the Armenian genocide, see Ümit Kurt, “A Rescuer, an Enigma and a Génocidaire: Cemal Pasha”. In Hans-Lukas Kieser, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Seyhan Bayraktar and Thomas Schmutz (eds.), The End of the Ottomans: The Genocide of 1915 and the Politics of Turkish Nationalism. London: I.  B. Tauris, 2019, 221-45. For a discussion of Cemal’s policies toward Arab nationalists and the Yishuv in Israeli historiography, see Yuval Ben-Bassat and Dotan Levy, “National Narratives Challenged: Ottoman Wartime Correspondence on Palestine”. In Hans-Lukas Kieser, Pearl Nunn and Thomas Schmutz (eds.), Remembering the Great War in the Middle East: From Turkey and Armenia to Australia and New Zealand. London: I. B. Tauris, 2021, 117-31. 45 46

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following the Entente forces’ breakthrough on the Macedonian front and the realization that Germany was about to crumble, left the CUP government no other option than to acknowledge defeat and sue for an armistice. This was signed at Mudros on October 31, 1918, and entailed the demobilization of the Ottoman army and the surrender of Constantinople and the Straits to an Anglo-French expeditionary force in anticipation of the Paris peace negotiations. Shortly before the Entente occupation began, the most prominent leaders of the CUP fled the capital.48 The Ottoman Empire appeared to lie at the mercy of the victors.

Robert College During the World War and the Armistice The imperial capital and its multi-ethnic population had remained largely untouched by warfare and the extermination of the Armenians, apart from the initial rounding-up of their political and intellectual elite and the proximity to the fighting around the Dardanelles in 1915. Constantinople was a hub of foreign correspondents and international diplomats— particularly from Germany but also the United States, which was a non-­belligerent before 1917—meaning that the CUP trod more carefully there than in the provinces. The grim reality of the Armenian deportations, however, could not be kept entirely a secret, with the first reports of the massacres to reach the American Embassy coming from the consuls and the ABCFM missionaries stationed in central and eastern Anatolia. The memoirs of Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, published in 1918, in which he narrated his frank exchanges on the subject with Talaat, became one of the key sources of public knowledge of the crime.49 Together with the testimonies of missionaries and Near East Relief workers tending to the needs of countless orphans, it exerted a powerful influence on American public opinion, feeding into long-established perceptions of the “Turkish race” as inherently cruel.50 Meanwhile, the long-standing relations between the Armenian community and American educators meant that the Young Turks’ hostility to the former easily spilled over to the latter, as manifested in conspiracy theories circulated by CUP officials about missionaries ­aiding  Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History. London: I. B. Tauris, 2009 (1993), 118-21.  Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story. Garden City and New  York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1918. 50  Suny 2015, 266-67. 48 49

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the alleged Armenian uprising which were used retrospectively as a pretext for the harsh “preventive” measures.51 This begs the question of how Robert College and similar educational institutions were affected. Unfortunately, the Robert College Records kept at Columbia University contain very few primary sources from the war years besides the presidents’ annual reports to the Board of Trustees. Scholarship on the colleges tends to rely heavily on the memoirs of Caleb Frank Gates of Robert College, Mary Mills Patrick of the Constantinople Woman’s College, and other college officials, which stress their own valor and determination to keep the schools open.52 While these memoirs mention the hardships of a wartime economy and the occasional harassment and attempts by the Ottoman authorities to seize college facilities for military purposes, they also steer clear of sensitive topics.53 This is especially true of Gates, who tends to stress his rapport with Talaat and Enver, referring to courtesies and compliments paid him by the leaders of the Young

51  The Governor of Diyarbekir, Mehmed Reşid, thus wrote a lengthy report, justifying his actions by referring to a (non-existent) Armenian conspiracy led by American missionaries. Hilmar Kaiser, The Extermination of Armenians in the Diarbekir Region. Istanbul: Bilgi University, 2014, 217. See also Kieser 2018, 238. 52  Caleb Frank Gates, Not to Me Only. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940; Mary Mills Patrick, Under Five Sultans. New  York and London: The Century co., 1929; Mary Mills Patrick, A Bosporus Adventure. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1934; Guckert 1968, 78-112; Freely 2012 (2009), 198-229. 53  The most sensitive topic of all, of course, is Robert College’s connection to the wartime annihilation of the Armenians. Gates admits in his memoirs that thirteen Armenian “servants of the College” were deported to the Anatolian interior and later perished, despite his efforts to save them, but gives no specific details of who these unfortunate employees were (Gates 1940, 217). The overall silence with regard to this issue in the memoirs led John Cecil Guckert to conclude that none of the Armenian students at the college were harmed (Guckert 1968, 93). More recently, Orlin Sabev has noted that the enrollment of Armenian students actually increased significantly in the academic year 1915–1916, at the height of persecution, lending credence to Guckert’s notion of Robert College as a sanctuary during the war (Sabev 2014, 173). Overall, this reflects the cautious approach of the CUP regime with regard to the Armenians in the capital, where foreign diplomats were present and the usual pretext about the necessary removal of an unreliable population from a war zone would fail to convince. However, Sabev also refers to an article by journalist Rober Koptaş, an editor of the Istanbul-based Armenian newspaper Agos, which gives details of “about ten Armenian students of Robert College, who were victims of the 1915 Ottoman policy towards the Armenian population” (Rober Koptaş, “1915’in Robert Kolej’in Kurbanları”, cited in Sabev 2014, 29, n59).

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Turks, which he interprets as evidence of a general Turkish respect for the work carried out by Robert College.54 Unlike the British and French schools, which in 1914 turned into outposts of enemy nations, the American colleges in the capital remained open throughout the war. Robert College alone had by that time grown into an institution employing sixty-five teachers, whose property in Constantinople—seven large school buildings, sixteen dwellings, and fifty acres of land—was valued at about one million US dollars. Its student body numbered 550 boys, the overwhelming majority listed as Greeks by nationality (which could mean either citizens of Greece or, more commonly, Greek Orthodox Ottoman Rûm), with Armenians, Turks, and Bulgarians coming in at second, third, and fourth, respectively, in terms of numbers.55 Despite the shortage of teachers—the outbreak of the war found many of them vacationing in different European locations and not all were able to make their way back in the chaos of August 1914—the presidents of the two colleges on the Bosporus were determined to commence the academic year and carry on as usual. The main reason for this decision was the fear of losing the college property entrusted to them if the facilities were closed and abandoned, as the American ambassador urged them to do in April 1917 when the United States broke off its diplomatic relations with the Porte upon its entry into the war against Germany, the Young Turks’ ally.56 The fact that the United States, despite the official severing of ties, never declared war on the Ottoman Empire itself meant that the colleges could continue to claim strict neutrality in the conflict. Little is known about the impact of the war on the colleges’ multi-ethnic and multi-religious student body except that some of the faculty and students, especially the engineering students at Robert College, were subject to conscription. The prospect of students belonging to different nationalities and ethnicities turning on each other had been a concern since the First Balkan War in 1912, although it appears from the records that no noteworthy incidents occurred or, at least, none were reported. As Mary Mills Patrick notes in her memoirs, student concerts and dramatic entertainments were organized as usual, conveying an image of secluded normality, although the distant sound of gunfire from the  Gates 1940, 190, 237.  Caleb Frank Gates’ annual report for the academic year 1913–1914, cited in Freely 2012 (2009), 198-99. 56  Gates 1940, cited in Freely 2012 (2009), 208. 54 55

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Russian naval bombardments further to the north sometimes drowned the music.57 The war nevertheless was a harbinger of things to come. Up until then, the American colleges and other foreign and minority schools had been in control of the curriculum taught, with little to no interference from the Ottoman authorities. As a consequence of the old sectarian order, with its strict separation of Muslims and non-Muslims in education, no shared imperial or national curriculum had evolved. The imperial nationalists of the CUP, bent on the Turkification of the realm’s different ethnic populations under the cover of war, took measures to change that. When the Empire officially entered the Great War in October 1914, they abolished the old capitulations providing foreign nationals and institutions with, among other things, extra-territorial rights such as diplomatic protection from Ottoman courts. A new educational law proclaimed the introduction of “national education” aimed at fostering national unity through a uniform course of study with Turkish as the language of instruction. Additional regulations for private schools issued in 1915 stipulated that educational institutions operated by foreign citizens or non-Muslim communities must hold classes in the Turkish language, Ottoman history, and geography, taught by Turkish teachers. Each foreign or communal school was also to appoint a Turkish co-director,58 mirroring the practices established under the “national,” meaning Turkified, economy, whereby Greek or Armenian-owned firms were either seized or forced to accept CUP cronies onto their boards (who often ruined the businesses through their lack of management skills or overseas commercial networks).59 For the two American colleges in the capital, the requirement to teach Turkish was not a major obstacle to their program of study as they had long-established Turkish departments, but information about how or whether the accompanying requirements were implemented is scarce; judging from Gates’ memoir, however, Robert College and its sister school were exempted from many of the regulations or were given a grace period. This lack of information and Gates’ portrayal of himself as both resourceful and conciliatory have sometimes led uncritical scholars of a later era in  Mary Mills Patrick, A Bosphorus Adventure; cited in Freely 2012 (2009), 207.  Sabev 2014, 122-23. Guckert 1968, 79-82, 106. 59  Zürcher 2009 (1993), 126. See also Taner Akçam and Ümit Kurt, The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide, trans. Aram Arkun. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017. 57 58

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Turkish-­ American relations to conclude that the “unselfish, continual commitment” by the colleges “to serve the needs of the Empire endeared them to the Turks and that this endearment was reflected in Turkish tolerance, understanding, and acceptance of the institutions.”60 The collapse of the CUP government and the sudden flight of Talaat, Enver, and Cemal in late October 1918 halted the forced Turkification of the Empire. Once again, the foreign schools came under the protection of the capitulations as Ottoman society seemingly reverted to the status quo ante, while anxiously awaiting the outcome of the peace negotiations. As an Allied fleet anchored in the Bosporus and the occupation began, the American institutions engaged in postwar reconstruction, although the challenges were formidable, especially for the ABCFM. The Armenian communities in central and eastern Anatolia had largely been wiped from existence, meaning that many of the mission schools tending to their educational needs no longer served any purpose. On the other hand, the thousands of orphans who had survived in Syria and elsewhere underlined the urgent educational needs that were to become the new raison d’être for American educators and humanitarian aid organizations like Near East Relief. One outcome of the war was the establishment of the Near East College Association—an umbrella organization for Robert College, the Constantinople Woman’s College, the American University of Beirut (formerly the Syrian Protestant College), and other American schools in Smyrna (Izmir), Sofia, and Athens—which grew out of a need to pool resources and coordinate study programs.61 The American colleges of the imperial capital were among those least affected by the war in terms of material damage and the prospect of student recruitment, but the stagnating living conditions of the war years and the devaluation of the Ottoman currency had taken a heavy toll on college budgets, forcing faculty and trustees to cover expenses out of their own pockets.62 Many students were dependent on college-funded scholarships to cover tuition fees, meaning the colleges had to double down on efforts to raise funds in the United States. This in turn arguably provided a powerful incentive to keep bad news out of the newsletters sent out to sympathizers and prospective donors.  Guckert 1968, 108.  “Co-Operation by Schools in Near East Is Planned”, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, June 10, 1920, 17. 62  Lynn A. Scipio, My Thirty Years in Turkey (1955). Cited in Freely 2012 (2009), 215. 60 61

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The War after the War, the Lausanne Treaty, and the New Turkey’s “Year One” That postwar conditions in Ottoman Turkey were not as promising as they appeared to be in the cautiously optimistic reports became clear in the late spring of 1919. In May that year, the governments of Britain and France allowed their Greek ally to land an expeditionary force in Smyrna and set up its own regime of occupation in western Asia Minor. It was an event that served to galvanize nationalist Turkish elements and turn Muslim public opinion increasingly against the new government and its collaboration with the Entente powers. The Sèvres Peace Treaty of the following year, which envisaged the partition of Ottoman territory into British, French, Italian, and Greek spheres of interest, further discredited the imperial government of Constantinople, now challenged by a rival nationalist government in Ankara. In the wars after the Great War that now ensued, the new nationalist movement in Anatolia, initially aided by the Bolshevik regime in Russia, defeated its adversaries in the Caucasus and Cilicia before turning westward. The French and Italians made their own agreements with the new rulers at Ankara, effectively leaving the British and their former Greek ally to fend for themselves. In late August 1922, the Turkish nationalist army routed the Greek expeditionary force in Asia Minor, capturing Smyrna in early September.63 The Greek defeat brought humanitarian disaster and a mass exodus of Orthodox Christians in its wake, spelling the end of the Ottoman Greek community in Anatolia and eastern Thrace. It also raised the prospect of a direct military confrontation between the victorious army of the Ankara government and the British forces occupying Constantinople and the Straits. The dangerous situation was defused in early October, as a new armistice was signed in Mudanya on the Sea of Marmara which left Britain in control of the imperial capital and the Dardanelles for the duration of the peace talks set to begin in Lausanne. Constantinople, as it was still known as in the 1920s, unaffected by military action and with its large non-Muslim communities relatively intact and unharmed, was the great prize. The negotiations in Switzerland, followed with great interest by Robert College officials, were conducted in a bad-tempered atmosphere. Lord 63  Michael Llewellyn Smith, Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor, 1919–1922. London: Hurst & Co, 1998 (1973).

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Curzon, the British foreign minister, opened the conference by lecturing the Turkish delegation on the crimes of the CUP government, and made it clear that the conference was about adjusting the terms of the Sèvres Treaty to the new situation. In its turn, the Turkish delegation, headed by Ismet Pasha, refused any concessions on the grounds that the Turks were the victors in their own War of Independence, not the defeated party of the Great War. Over the course of the eight months the conference lasted, the parties hammered out a treaty which established a new order for the postwar Middle East. A bilateral agreement with Greece enforced a compulsory “exchange of populations” in which the remaining Muslims of Greece—exempting those of western (Greek) Thrace—were swapped with the remnants of Greek Orthodox communities in Anatolia and eastern Thrace. An exception was made for the surviving Greek Orthodox and Armenian communities of Constantinople, which were recognized as minorities with certain rights, although there was no international supervision to enforce Turkish compliance. The Entente powers reluctantly accepted the abolition of the capitulations, but insisted that the Straits were to be demilitarized except for a garrison in Constantinople itself, and saddled the new Turkey with the lion’s share of the old Ottoman public debt. None of this was to the liking of the Ankara government, which failed to gain international recognition for its territorial claim on the Mosul region in northern Mesopotamia, but the basic demand for complete sovereignty over Anatolia had been met. No mention of Armenian or Kurdish autonomy was made in the Lausanne Treaty, signed on July 24, 1923.64 Alone among the former Central Powers, the newly established Republic of Turkey had successfully defied the original peace terms of the Entente powers. It was unofficially the Year One of the self-styled revolutionary nationalist movement now in power and, seemingly, the beginning of a new Turkey, to which the American colleges had to adjust.

References Ahmad, Feroz. 1982. Unionist Relations with the Greek, Armenian and Jewish Communities of the Ottoman Empire. In Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Lands: The Functioning of a Plural Society. Volume One. The Central Lands, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, 401–434. New  York and London: Holmes and Meier, Inc.  Zürcher 2009 (1993), 160-63.

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Akçam, Taner. 2006. A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. Trans. Paul Bassemer. New York: Metropolitan Books. ———. 2012. The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Akçam, Taner and Ümit Kurt. 2017. The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide, Trans. Aram Arkun. New  York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Ben-Bassat, Yuval, and Dotan Levy. 2021. National Narratives Challenged: Ottoman Wartime Correspondence on Palestine. In Remembering the Great War in the Middle East: From Turkey and Armenia to Australia and New Zealand, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Pearl Nunn, and Thomas Schmutz, 117–131. London: I. B. Tauris. Bliss, Howard S. 1909. Sunshine in Turkey. The National Geographic Magazine 20: 66–76. Bloxham, Donald. 2005. The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Björnståhl, Jonas Jacob. 1780. Resa til Frankrike, Italien , Sweitz, Tyskland, Holland, Ängland, Turkiet och Grekeland, part 3, Stockholm. Boura, Catherine. 1999. The Greek Millet in Turkish Politics: Greeks in the Ottoman Parliament. In Ottoman Greeks in the Age of Nationalism: Politics, Economy, and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Dimitri Gondicas and Charles Issawi, 193–206. Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press. Clark, Bruce. 2006. Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions that Forged Modern Greece and Turkey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Deringil, Selim. 2011 (1998). The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimization of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Dündar, Fuat. 2010. Crime of Numbers: The Role of Statistics in the Armenian Question (1878-1918). New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers. Evin, Ahmet. 1980. The Tulip Age and Definitions of “Westernization”. In Social and Economic History of Turkey, 1071-1920, ed. Halil İnalcık and Osman Okyar, 131–145. Ankara: Meteksan. Foster, Zachary J. 2015. The 1915 Locust Attack in Syria and Palestine and its Role in the Famine during the First World War. Middle Eastern Studies 51 (3): 370–394. Freely, John. 2012 (2009). A Bridge of Culture: Robert College—Boğaziçi University: How an American College in Istanbul Became A Turkish University. Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitetisi Yayinevi. Gates, Caleb Frank. 1940. Not To Me Only. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Gaunt, David. 2006. Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia During World War I. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press. Gaunt, David, Naures Atto, and Soner O.  Barthoma, eds. 2017. Let Them Not Return: Sayfo—The Genocide Against the Assyrian, Syriac and Chaldean Christians in the Ottoman Empire. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Goffman, Carolyn McCue. 2021. Mary Mills Patrick’s Cosmopolitan Mission and the Constantinople Woman’s College. Lexington: Lexington Books. Greene, Molly. 2015. The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1453-1768: The Ottoman Empire. Edinburgh University Press. Guckert, John Cecil. 1968. The Adaptation of Robert College to Its Turkish Environment, 1900-1927. Unpublished PhD thesis. Columbus: Ohio State University. Hamlin, Cyrus. 1878. Among the Turks. New York: Robert Carter and Brothers. ———. 1893. My Life and Times. Boston and Chicago: Congregational Sunday-­ School and Publishing Society. von Hellwald, Friedrich, and L. C. Beck. 1878. Die heutige Türkei. Otto Spamer: Leipzig. Swedish edition: von Hellwald, Friedrich, and L.  C. Beck. 1878. Turkiet i våra dagar: Bilder och skildringar från alla delar af det osmaniska riket, part 1. Stockholm: E.T. Bergegrens bokhandel. Jonquière, A. de la. 1881. Histoire de’l Empire ottoman depuis les origins jusqu’au traité de Berlin. Paris: Hachette. Swedish edition: Jonquière, A. de la. 1882. Osmaniska rikets historia från äldsta tider till kongressen i Berlin. Stockholm: C. E. Fritze’s k. Hofbokhandel, 1882. Kaiser, Hilmar. 2014. The Extermination of Armenians in the Diarbekir Region. Istanbul: Bilgi University. Kévorkian, Raymond H. 2019. Zohrab and Vartkes: Ottoman Deputies and Armenian Reformers. In The End of the Ottomans: The Genocide of 1915 and the Politics of Turkish Nationalism, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Seyhan Bayraktar, and Thomas Schmutz, 169–191. London: I. B. Tauris. Kieser, Hans-Lukas. 2010. Nearest East: American Millennialism and Mission to the Middle East. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Kieser, Hans-Lukas, Kerem Öktem, and Maurus Reinkowski, eds. 2015. World War I and the End of the Ottomans: From the Balkan Wars to the Armenian Genocide. London: I. B. Tauris. Kieser, Hans-Lukas. 2018. Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Kieser, Hans-Lukas, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Seyhan Bayraktar, and Thomas Schmutz, eds. 2019. The End of the Ottomans: The Genocide of 1915 and the Politics of Turkish Nationalism. London: I. B. Tauris. Kurt, Ümit. 2019. A Rescuer, an Enigma and a Génocidaire: Cemal Pasha. In The End of the Ottomans: The Genocide of 1915 and the Politics of Turkish Nationalism,

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ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Seyhan Bayraktar, and Thomas Schmutz, 221–245. London: I. B. Tauris. Küçük, Bekir Harun. 2012. Early Enlightenment in Istanbul. PhD dissertation: University of California, San Diego. Makdisi, Ussama. 2008. Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2019. Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Morgenthau, Henry. 1918. Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story. Garden City and New York: Doubleday, Page & Company. Mourelos, J. 1986. The 1914 Persecutions and the First Attempt at an Exchange of Minorities between Greece and Turkey. Balkan. Studies 26 (2): 389–413. Patrick, Mary Mills. 1929. Under Five Sultans. New  York and London: The Century co. ———. 1934. A Bosporus Adventure. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Quataert, Donald. 2005. The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rodrigue, Aron. 1990. French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling, 1860-1925. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Sabev, Orlin. 2014. Spiritus Roberti: Shaping New Minds and Robert College in Late Ottoman Society (1863-1923). Istanbul: Boğaziҫi University Press. Savary, Claude-Étienne. 1788. Lettres sur la Grèce, faisant suite de celles sur l’Égypte. Paris: Onfroi. Shaw, Stanford J. 1976. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. Vol. 1: Empire of the Gazis: The Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire, 1280-1808. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shaw, Stanford J., and Ezel Kural Shaw. 1977. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. Vol. 2: Reform, Revolution and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shaw, Stanford J. 1991. The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. London: Macmillan. Sjöberg, Erik. 2016. The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Smith, Michael Llewellyn. 1998 (1973). Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor, 1919-1922. London: Hurst & Co. Suny, Ronald Grigor. 2015. “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Topal, Alp Eren. 2021. Ottomanism in History and Historiography: Fortunes of a Concept. In Narrated Empires: Perceptions of Late Habsburg and Ottoman

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Multinationalism, ed. Johanna Chovanec and Olof Heilo, 77–98. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Toumarkine, Alexandre. 2021. Turkish History Writing of the Great War: Facing Ottoman Legacy, Mass Violence and Dissent. In Remembering the Great War in the Middle East: From Turkey and Armenia to Australia and New Zealand, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Pearl Nunn, and Thomas Schmutz, 19–42. London: I. B. Tauris. Üngör, Uğur Ümit. 2011. The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zürcher, Erik Jan. 2009 (1993). Turkey: A Modern History. London: I. B. Tauris. ———. 2010. The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey. London: I.B. Tauris.

CHAPTER 3

Years of Transition: Adapting to the Republican Order, 1923–1927

The nationalist forces entered Constantinople on October 6, 1923, five days after the last British soldiers left the Ottoman capital following the ratification of the Treaty of Lausanne. The pashas on horseback riding at the front of the marching columns were a stark reminder of the reversal of fortunes from the day, four years earlier, when General Franchet d’Esperey, the victorious commander of the Allied Army of the Orient, rode into the imperial capital, cheered on by members of the persecuted Christian communities. Now it was the turn of yesteryear’s vanquished to celebrate. Jubilant crowds of Muslims lined the streets, often with tears of pride running down their cheeks. Among the onlookers were many of those Greek-­ Orthodox and Armenian Christians who had opted to stay behind, and who had now donned the fez instead of their usual Western-style hats as a token of their renewed submission, in an atmosphere dense with echoes of Mehmet the Conqueror’s triumphant entry in 1453.1 Ironically, although the onlookers might not have realized it at the time, they were witnessing the death of the Ottoman Empire. Three years after the signing of the armistice at Mudanya, the old order collapsed in a dizzying sequence of events. The last sultan, Mehmet VI Vahteddin, had left in disgrace onboard a British ship in November 1922, followed by the  Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016, 82. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Sjöberg, Internationalism and the New Turkey, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00932-7_3

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Greek and Armenian patriarchs on the orders of the nationalist authorities. In March 1923, the sultanate was abolished and on October 29, the Turkish Republic was proclaimed, with Ankara as the new capital. The following year, in March, the ruling nationalists exiled the last caliph along with any remaining members of the Ottoman dynasty, while the institution itself was scrapped, to the bewilderment of Sunni Muslims worldwide. In September 1925, the republican government closed down the shrines (türbes) and convents (tekkes) of the influential dervish orders; followed, two months later, by a decree banning traditional male headgear like the fez and the turban, and replacing them with hats or caps in the European style. Additional reforms, intended to secularize and modernize Turkish society, came into force in 1926, when the Western calendar was adopted, as was the Swiss civil code, which abolished religious marriages and polygamy, and a penal code imported from Mussolini’s Italy. Finally, in 1928, the Latin alphabet replaced the old Arabic script, effectively severing the new Turkey from its Ottoman literary heritage. Within a decade of the end of the Great War, a seemingly self-confident and determinedly modern nation had emerged from the ashes; a striking contrast to the once reviled “sick man of Europe.” The nationalist victory had far-reaching consequences for the plethora of foreign schools that had operated in the old capital and its Anatolian hinterland. On the one hand, the modernization based on Western role models for the Near East that most of the foreign educators had advocated was suddenly (and seemingly) becoming a reality, if not in the precise manner they had envisioned. On the other, the abolition of the capitulations that had sheltered them in Ottoman times now left them exposed to a nationalist regime determined to centralize and control all forms of education in the land. At the same time, the local Christian communities that had been the raison d’être of Western missionary schools as well as the main source of recruits for non-denominational institutions like Robert College were mostly gone. This led some to terminate their presence in Turkey or end their educational activities altogether, while others were left to grapple with what their mission was to become in the new situation. The main question addressed in this chapter is how American educators at Robert College and, to some extent, the Constantinople Woman’s College navigated their way through the tumultuous beginning of Turkey’s republican era. This is a story that has been partially told in several memoirs and histories of the American colleges over the years, mostly as a tale of the farsighted leadership of college presidents Caleb Frank

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Gates and Mary Mills Patrick, and their successful eventual adaptation to the new order.2 What this literature often tends to obscure is the conflict between their own educational ideals and sense of integrity and the nationalist regime’s hostility toward these very ideas. At the center of this chapter is therefore an analysis of these hostile encounters and the strategies developed to reach compromise and a modus vivendi. In order to understand the factors that determined the fraught relationship between the American educators and the new nationalist regime, however, one must first turn to the larger domestic political context in which this encounter occurred. The chapter therefore commences with an overview of the developments that shaped what would later be known as Kemalism and informed its quest for a modern, national education.

“This Desert of Discord”: The Politics of Turkish Nationalism, 1923–1927 The nationalists that fought Turkey’s “War of Independence” and established the Republic have traditionally been known as the Kemalists, to set them apart from the Young Turkish imperial nationalists in the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) of the Ottoman twilight years; disgraced following the Empire’s defeat in the First World War. Under the leadership of a single, determined individual, General Mustafa Kemal, later known as Atatürk (“Father of Turks,” 1881–1938),3 they had distanced 2  Caleb Frank Gates, Not to Me Only. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940; Mary Mills Patrick, Under Five Sultans. New  York and London: The Century co., 1929; Mary Mills Patrick, A Bosporus Adventure. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1934; John Cecil Guckert, “The Adaptation of Robert College to Its Turkish Environment, 1900–1927”. Unpublished PhD thesis. Columbus: Ohio State University, 1968; John Freely, A Bridge of Culture: Robert College—Boğaziçi University: How an American College in Istanbul Became a Turkish University. Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitetisi Yayinevi, 2012 (2009). 3  Most Ottoman and early republican-era Turks did not have family names. Before a law compelled all Turkish citizens to adopt a surname in 1934, people were known by their birth name or by the name they were given at an early age, for instance on entering school. That was the case with the future leader of the Turkish Republic; born Mustafa, he was given the name Kemal in primary school, derived from the Arabic “Kamal” roughly meaning “perfection.” In addition, many prominent men held a title—“Bey” in the case of bureaucrats or “Pasha” in that of high-ranking military officers. At Robert College, Turkish-Muslim students were usually registered under their birth names with patronyms attached. In this book, Turkish individuals are referred to with their post-1934 surnames in parenthesis, if known.

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themselves from the follies of their Unionist predecessors, avenged the humiliation of the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 and, in defiance of the European colonial powers, secured a national home for the Turks in Anatolia (Türk Yurdu). This story of wartime heroism, survival against all odds, and eventual triumph and national rebirth takes its cue from Nutuk, the thirty-six-hour speech that Mustafa Kemal read out in installments (presumably interspersed by frantic clapping) before the congress of his Republican People’s Party (CHP) between October 15 and 20, 1927.4 The text became the basis of official Turkish historiography on the period, and has also been hugely influential in international scholarship on post-WW1 Turkey, following its translation into German, French, and English at the end of the 1920s. Contrary to what one might expect, the main theme is not the struggle for “national liberation,” but criticism of Kemal’s rivals within the nationalist movement. It makes for an exhausting read, as Kemal devotes page after page to quoting telegrams, statements, and letters of his former associates in extenso, to confirm them as incompetents or traitors who doubted the final victory and himself as the sole leader of the movement for national liberation. By opening the speech with his own arrival at Samsun on May 19, 1919, to organize resistance to the Allied occupation and partition of the homeland—later hallowed as the founding hour of national rebirth—he omitted the Great War itself from the national narrative and, crucially, the role that other leading nationalists had played from October 1918 onward. Above all, the selective chronology and blotted events obscured the origins of the later Kemalist establishment in the compromised Committee of Union and Progress. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the CUP leaders who were responsible for taking the Ottoman Empire into the war in 1914 fled into exile following the surrender at Mudros and the imminent defeat of their German allies. Although publicly disgraced, they entrusted the remaining party leadership in Constantinople with the task of organizing underground resistance to the coming Entente occupation, and hoped to play some part in the country’s political future. Talaat Pasha corresponded with leading politicians and military men, including Kemal, from his Berlin exile, while Enver plotted his return at the helm of an “anti-imperialist”

4  Kemal Atatürk, A Speech Delivered by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 1927. Istanbul: Ministry of Education Plant, 1963.

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alliance of Muslim peoples.5 It was the CUP establishment and Unionist officers in the War Ministry that sent Mustafa Kemal on his mission to eastern Anatolia, ostensibly to oversee the disarmament of the Ottoman forces agreed upon with the Entente, but secretly to do the opposite. Their intention was to use Kemal, his troops, and the newly constituted National Assembly at Ankara to put pressure on the European powers to get them to revise the peace terms. When the British arrested leading Unionists and had them deported to Malta awaiting trial for war crimes in March 1920, however, the party establishment in the capital lost its control over the Anatolian movement. With Talaat and Cemal conveniently killed by Armenian assassins, and Enver dead in battle with the Bolsheviks, Kemal was free of the challenge that the old leaders might have posed, and was able to shake off Unionist tutelage. Nonetheless, a strong opposition to Kemal’s growing dominance remained within the nationalist movement. This began to mobilize as soon as the British released the prisoners from Malta in 1921, having failed to prosecute them, but by then Kemal’s position was formidable, especially in the army. The victory over the Greeks in 1922 strengthened his prestige immensely, earning him the honorary title of “Gazi” (Conquering hero), awarded by the Grand National Assembly, and enabling him to consolidate his personal power in the postwar era. In the months leading up to the signing of the Lausanne peace treaty and the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey, Kemal turned down the offer to take on the leadership of a revived CUP, opting instead to form his own, much more tightly controlled political party, which eventually took the name Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, the Republican People’s Party (CHP). Many prominent Unionists transferred their allegiance to the new party, while others joined Kemal’s political opposition. The following years were marked by this rift in the Turkish nationalist movement. The dire situation in a country ravaged by a decade of war— with the economy shattered by the annihilation or expulsion of the Christian minorities and the problem of resettling Muslim refugees from the Balkans—created considerable popular discontent, which was exacerbated by the radical reforms imposed by the new government. There was a great deal of resentment in Istanbul at the loss of its capital status to Ankara, a move which left thousands of civil servants unemployed and 5  Hans-Lukas Kieser, Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018, 31, 381-403.

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made the city a stronghold of opposition. Likewise, the abolition of the caliphate by the government alienated many pious Sunni Muslims as well as others who saw the caliph as the only counterweight to Kemal’s concentration of power into his own hands. In November 1924, a group of deputies headed by Hüseyin Rauf (Orbay) defected from Kemal and formed their own Progressive Republican Party, alarmed by what they considered the radicalism and despotic overreach of the government. In order to stem the tide of desertions from the CHP, Kemal had his closest ally Ismet Pasha (Inönü) replaced as prime minister by another of his friends, Ali Fethi (Okyar), who was considered more liberal and conciliatory in the eyes of Rauf’s supporters. As a precautionary measure, however, Kemal stacked Fethi’s cabinet with hardliners of Ismet’s ilk, who saw their role as that of watchdogs meant to ensure Fethi’s loyalty. By the beginning of 1925, this faction was putting pressure on the recalcitrant Fethi to move swiftly against Rauf’s opposition party, which was building a grassroots organization in Istanbul and other parts of the country.6 At the same time as tensions were simmering within the political establishment at Ankara, an armed uprising erupted in the Kurdish-dominated Diyarbakir region in the east, with far-reaching consequences. The Kurdish tribes had largely remained loyal to their Young Turkish rulers during the war and joined forces with them against their Armenian neighbors, but with this common foe gone and peace restored, they now found themselves pitted against the centralizing Turkish state. The CUP regime had already carried out deportations of what it deemed potentially disloyal Kurds during the Great War, with the aim of assimilating them into the Turkish-speaking majority population.7 The republican government’s renewed policy of forced Turkification of the Kurdish east, which reneged on Kemal’s wartime promise of local autonomy, caused widespread resentment and disillusionment, while the decision to abolish the caliphate removed the main religious symbol that held together the Turkish and Kurdish Sunni Muslim communities. To many in the rural and religiously conservative Kurdish lands, this seemed like a betrayal of Islam. In February 1925, several of the most important tribes rose in a rebellion led 6  Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History. London: I.  B. Tauris, 2009 (1993), 156-60, 166-69. 7   Fuat Dündar, “The settlement policy of the Committee of Union and Progress 1913–1918”. In Hans-Lukas Kieser (ed.), Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Towards Post-­ National Identities. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013, 37-42.

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by Sheykh Sait, a religious leader (sheikh) of the influential Nakşibendi dervish order, who called for the restoration of the caliph and the holy law.8 The uprising was crushed by Turkish authorities in a brutal counterinsurgency operation, in which the same methods used in the massacres and deportations of Armenians in 1915 were now deployed against Kurdish villages.9 Sait and other ringleaders, along with Kurdish intellectuals and community elders not involved with the rebels, were hanged, and thousands of Kurds were deported to other parts of Turkey. From then on, the notion of a separate Kurdish identity became anathema in the government’s eyes and plans for pacifying and “Turkifying” the local population were drawn up, in many cases by the very same CUP officials who had carried out the genocidal campaign against the Christians of the eastern provinces a decade earlier.10 The emergency caused by Sheykh Sait’s uprising provided the hardliners of the Ankara government with the excuse they needed to get Fethi out of the way and strike out against political opposition. In a tense cabinet meeting in early March 1925, a week into the rebellion, Fethi lost a vote of confidence and resigned in favor of his rival Ismet Pasha, after Mustafa Kemal had sided with the hawks. Ismet’s first act after being reappointed prime minister was to have the National Assembly pass the infamous Law on the Maintenance of Order, whereby, in the name of national emergency, the government was given sweeping powers to ban any organization or publication it saw fit. The Independence Tribunals, which had persecuted alleged traitors during the Greco-Turkish and Turkish-­ Armenian wars, were now restored and given jurisdiction over the entire country, not merely the rebellious southeast. As mentioned above, the rebellion was used as a pretext to suppress the Kurdish intelligentsia, prominent members of which were brought from Istanbul to be tried and executed by the Independence Tribunal in Diyarbakir, but Kurds were not the only targets of state persecution. Under the new law, a number of the most important newspapers and periodicals in Istanbul—ranging from conservative and liberal to Marxist—were banned and their editors arrested  Zürcher 2009 (1993), 169-71.  According to Kurdish survivors, some of the Turkish military units were the same that had been involved in the destruction of the Armenian population a decade earlier. Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913– 1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 128. 10  Üngör 2011, 122-48. 8 9

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and in some cases brought before the tribunals. Apart from a few remaining independent publications, the free press of Istanbul was gone, leaving the CHP organ Cumhuriyet (Republic) and its Ankara equivalent Hakimiyet-i Milliye (National Sovereignty) the only national papers. In the early summer of 1925, it was the turn of Rauf’s Progressive Republican Party which, in spite of its professed support for severe measures against the Kurdish rebels, was closed down by the Independence Tribunals on the charge of exploiting religion for political, seditious purposes. The purges climaxed the following June, when Mustafa Kemal used a botched plot to have him assassinated as a pretext to rid himself of those former comrades-in-arms who still resisted his claim to leadership of the nationalist movement. In a series of show trials held over the course of summer 1926, a number of the best known Unionists and Progressive Republicans were sentenced either to death or imprisonment, although in some cases this was commuted to lifelong political exile.11 Among these individuals were Rauf (Orbay), Adnan (Adivar) and his wife Halide Edip—a prominent intellectual and a graduate from the Constantinople Woman’s College—as well as General Kazim Karabekir, the victor of the war against the fledgling Armenian state in 1920 and once a potential challenge to Kemal’s leadership. They were all singled out as doubters of the national cause in the years of struggle in Kemal’s speech of 1927, which appears designed mainly to justify the purges of the two previous years retrospectively.12 Although the outward appearance of parliamentarian rule was retained, the CHP was now the sole legally allowed party of the Turkish Republic, with Mustafa Kemal its undisputed master. From the mid-1920s, official Turkish nationalism was identical with Kemalism. As noted above, there were many continuities between the CHP and the Young Turkish CUP in terms of ideology, policies, and cadres, which complicates the assumption of a clean break between the Ottoman Empire and republican Turkey. In many respects, the new Turkey was a version of the rejuvenated, Turkified empire that the late Ottoman Young Turks had set out to forge under cover of the World War: a centralized state with uniform language, religion, education, and national loyalty. Both Kemal and his Unionist predecessor Talaat Pasha, whom Hans-Lukas Kieser has labeled the real father of modern Turkey in a recent  Zürcher 2009 (1993), 171-75; Üngör 2011, 126-27.  Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey. London: IB Tauris, 2010, 6-16. 11 12

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biography, were deeply influenced by the Turkist ideology of Mehmet Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924), which held that Turks must adapt to modern Western civilization while simultaneously retaining and cultivating their national essence.13 Yet there were also some differences between the national projects of the CUP dictatorship and its Kemalist heir that serve to highlight discontinuities. Gökalp’s Pan-Turkist vision of Turan, the reorientation of the Ottoman Empire toward Central Asia, which Enver Pasha had sought to bring about during the Great War, was abandoned by Kemal in favor of a much smaller national home in Anatolia. Pan-Turkists were to be found among the Kemalists as well, but they were kept on a short leash by the regime, which favored peaceful relations with its Soviet counterpart, which ruled over the Turkic peoples of the Caucasus and Central Asia. Associated with the wartime German alliance and, increasingly, Nazism in the 1930s, they briefly rose to prominence during the Second World War but were then—temporarily—purged in 1944, as the Ankara government sought to mend relations with the Allies. It was mainly due to this pragmatism that the Kemalists earned an international reputation as moderate republicans, in marked contrast to their warmongering expansionist predecessors. Despite this, the many other continuities between the two trajectories have put the historiographical claim of 1923 as a Year One into doubt in recent decades, meaning that many scholars of modern Turkey nowadays use a different periodization, introduced by Erik Jan Zürcher, which treats the years from 1908 (or 1913) to 1950 as one whole: the Young Turk era.14 For many contemporary observers whose impressions guided scholarship on the emergence of republican Turkey, the rupture with the Ottoman era was profound. The Kemalist state’s professed radicalism and belief in the model of republican France invited comparison with the centralizing Jacobin Montagnards of the 1790s, with the Kurdish east as Turkey’s version of the counterrevolutionary Vendée. The regime’s relentless campaign for secularization was a particular cause for celebration among Western observers accustomed to Orientalist stereotypes of despotic sultans, veiled women, and obscurant Islam. The subjugation of religion to the state, which foreigners sometimes mistakenly interpreted as a wholesale rejection of religion, reassured them of the enlightened nature of Turkey’s new rulers, and blinded them to the brute force with which  Kieser 2018, 413-17.  Zürcher 2009 (1993), 1-6. Üngör 2011.

13 14

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modernization was carried out.15 “The Turkish Revolution has decided to acquire Western civilization without conditions or limits,” stated Mahmut Esat (Bozkurt), the Minister of Justice who introduced the Swiss civil code. “This decision is based on such a strong will that all those who oppose it are condemned to be annihilated by iron and fire.”16 Indeed, popular resistance to the reforms was stubborn, not only in the Kurdish east, and was dealt with harshly by the Independence Tribunals, which under the Law on the Maintenance of Order handed down death sentences by the hundreds.17 With the repression of the dervish orders and the closing of their tekkes in the aftermath of Sheykh Sait’s rebellion, the resistance to the new order appeared to be broken, but the Kemalist regime remained wary and ready to suppress any sign of popular dissent. Modernization was therefore a top-down project in the new Turkey, led by a self-avowedly enlightened elite that had set itself the task of disciplining and educating a backward populace into becoming “modern” Turks. Kemalism in the 1920s was not yet the rigid ideology it would become in the 1930s. Few seemed to know what being a Kemalist, that is, a Turkish nationalist, meant, besides unquestioning faith in the “Great Gazi,” and for many the easiest way to demonstrate their patriotism was to accuse someone else of being anti-Turkish. What defined Kemalists in general was a belief in the value of modern science and technology for the nation, and because of that, an emphasis on secular education as opposed to traditional, religious instruction. One of the government policies that the CHP inherited from the CUP was that of aiming to bring all educational activities under the control of the state. The only way to end the fragmentation brought about by the weakness of the old Ottoman state and a decade of war which had torn the country apart—“this desert of discord,” as Mary Mills Patrick of the Constantinople Woman’s College put it18—was to make education a unifying factor. In the Kemalist mind, catching up with Western civilization meant turning the ethnically diverse inhabitants of the country into staunch Turkish nationalists. “The conception of nationality is a new thing in Turkey,” wrote an editor of the Istanbul press. “We are obliged to be extremely nationalistic now in order to make up for our lack  See Chap. 4.  Quoted in Hans-Lukas Kieser, “An ethno-nationalist revolutionary and theorist of Kemalism: Dr Mahmut Esat Bozkurt (1892–1943)”. In Hans-Lukas Kieser (ed.), Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Towards Post-National Identities. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013, 20-27. 17  Zürcher 2009 (1993), 173. 18  Mary Mills Patrick, “An Oasis of Peace”, News Letter 5:1 (December 1923). 15 16

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of it in the past. It is the duty of teachers to bring up the coming generation as extreme nationalists.”19 What this meant was further clarified by Ismet Pasha who, in a speech to the Turkish Teachers’ Union in 1925, stated that no foreign cultures would be tolerated alongside the Turkish nation in the new educational system.20 Unifying the various peoples inhabiting the new republic into one therefore entailed striking at the foreign and minority schools that had mushroomed across Ottoman lands since the days of the Tanzimat.

“Riding for a Fall”: Foreign and Communal Schools in the Age of Nationalist Educational Reform In March 1924, the regime passed the law on “Unification of Education,” which would radically alter the educational landscape of Turkey. The law primarily targeted medreses, the traditional institutions of Islamic learning, but the overall prohibition of religious instruction was to have dire consequences for the schools of the remaining non-Muslim minorities and the foreign schools run by Protestant missionaries or Catholic clergy. Many of these latter institutions were already gone from Anatolia by 1924, as a result of the wartime persecutions that had all but wiped out the Ottoman Christian populations, leaving only a few remnants of the vast network of schools operated by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The situation was different in the former imperial capital. The Treaty of Lausanne had compelled the Turkish government to exempt the Greek-­ Orthodox community in Istanbul from the forced swap of populations with Greece. Together with Istanbul’s Armenian community, also left in place as there was no foreign state willing to accept them in a population exchange, the Greeks still made up a sizable portion of the city’s total 700,000 residents in 1924.21 While many had fled Istanbul out of fear of 19  Anonymous editor, Son Sa’at, May 9, 1925, quoted in Harold L. Scott, “Foreign schools in Turkey, 1914–1926”, term paper in Education 309, Teachers College, January 1927, p. 2; Robert College Records; Box 53, Folder 12; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 20  Rifat N. Bali, “The politics of Turkification during the Single Party Period”. In Hans-­ Lukas Kieser (ed.), Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Towards Post-National Identities. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013, 46. 21  In 1924, the Greek-Orthodox population numbered almost 300,000 and the Armenians around 80,000, which at the time was roughly half of the city’s total population. Alexis

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Turkish reprisals after Smyrna’s fall, and were refused re-entry by the nationalist regime, the remaining Christian and Jewish inhabitants were still a presence in the local trades and business communities, frustrating Turkish nationalists railing against foreign influence. The Lausanne peace treaty guaranteed the “non-Moslem nationals” of Turkey the right to practice their religion and use their native tongues freely, without discrimination, as well as retaining control over their own family laws, schools, and charitable institutions. This meant that the nationalist authorities did not have free rein to impose their will on them as they had with the medrese and the Muslim minorities that were not recognized by international treaty—at least not initially. There were, however, ways to work around the obstacles imposed by the agreement reluctantly signed by Ismet Pasha, the head of the Turkish delegation to Lausanne. Much of the Kemalists’ newfound secularist zeal was due to their desire to rid themselves of the last vestiges of Western Great Power tutelage. Only if Turkey agreed to introduce a European civil code, such as the one speedily adopted in 1926, would the Western signatories to the Lausanne treaty accord the Ankara government full sovereignty and relinquish their supervisory powers over Turkish tribunals after the abolition of the Ottoman-era capitulations.22 The introduction of the new legal codes enabled the nationalist regime to make the argument that since secular statutes, which guaranteed equal civil rights for all citizens regardless of faith, had replaced the old Muslim law, there was no longer any need for the separate laws concerning the personal and family status granted to the non-Muslim minorities. Couched in a similar language of republican egalitarianism, the Ministry of Education at Ankara revived the centralizing educational policy adopted by the CUP during the Great War, whereby the teaching of Turkish language, history, and geography was made compulsory in all schools throughout the country from the fall term of 1923, including those of the recognized minorities and, from 1924, foreign private schools as well.23 To foreign observers, such as Harold Scott of the Robert College faculty, this unified national curriculum made sense as a means to integrate young members of the Christian and Jewish Alexandris, The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek-Turkish Relations, 1918–1974. Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies, 1992 (1983), 142. Ekmekçioğlu 2016, 98. 22  Kieser 2013, 25. 23  According to a report in The New  York Times, March 27, 1923, the decree affected ninety-nine foreign schools and 525 Greek, Armenian, and Jewish institutions. Cited in Guckert 1968, 160.

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communities into the nation-wide educational system and mainstream society.24 However, these subjects had to be taught in Turkish by “reliably” Turkish teachers, appointed by the Ministry of Education. Directors of foreign and communal schools had no influence over these appointments, and it soon became evident that non-Muslims did not qualify as reliable Turkish patriots and hence were excluded from such teaching positions. Furthermore, these new teachers were to be paid by the schools themselves at salaries set by the Ministry of Education, which were often higher than those of other teachers.25 Scott, who saw these new Turkish colleagues as little more than parasites on the already strained budget of the American colleges, complained bitterly that ministry officials treated these appointments as places of refuge for needy friends and relatives. “In many cases the appointees are the penniless army officers or civil officials of the retired list, wholly unfitted to serve as teachers.”26 For many minority schools lacking the donors of the American colleges, the financial burden of the Turkish teachers became overwhelming, forcing them to close, while those that remained were under the scrutiny of government-­ appointed Turkish vice-directors, stifling whatever autonomy was left to them.27 Another way to push through the Turkification of the education offered to non-Muslim minorities supposedly protected under the Treaty of Lausanne was through presenting schools with a purportedly free choice with regard to the language of instruction in subjects not taught by the newly appointed Turkish teachers. While this did not primarily affect the Christian communal schools, where Greek and Armenian respectively were the long established language of instruction, the policy exposed Turkey’s Jewish minority and the schools run by the Alliance Israélite Universelle. The Alliance, an anti-Zionist organization working for the emancipation of Near Eastern Jews on the model of French Jewry, with French as its language of instruction, was presented with the choice in June 1924 either to adopt Turkish as the teaching language, or the “mother tongue” of the Jews, which the Ministry of Education decided was Hebrew. As Aron Rodrigue points out in his study of the Alliance, this  Scott 1927: 27.  Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling, 1860–1925. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990, 162-63. 26  Scott 1927: 28. 27  Ekmekçioğlu 2016, 78, 124-25. See also Alexandris 1992 (1983). 24 25

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was a clever move as almost all the Sephardic Jews living in Turkey spoke Judeo-Spanish as their mother tongue, although it was long neglected as a language of learning, and few were familiar with the spoken Hebrew recently revived by Zionists. Since French was now displaced as the language of instruction and the Alliance schools ordered to cease all contact with the organization in Paris, Jewish community leaders and school principals had little choice but to adopt Turkish as the primary language of instruction in their elementary schools. By the end of the 1920s, these institutions were following the national curriculum, with the exception of a few hours devoted to Jewish religious education; that is, until 1936, when a ban on all religious elements in schools was introduced in the name of secularism and unity. This completely nationalized the Jewish schools.28 The foreign schools fared somewhat differently, as their fate involved diplomatic concerns that affected Turkey’s international relations, but here too the notion of strict secularism was used as a means to bend recalcitrant headmasters and, by extension, foreign governments to Ankara’s will. For the CHP government, the issue of religious symbols in school buildings became a matter of challenging the educational influence of French schools that had functioned as an extension of French foreign policy in the Near East since the days of the Second Empire. These schools were run by Jesuit priests in close cooperation with the French state despite the showdown between the Vatican and the Third Republic over secular education. Now the Turkish nationalists turned the French Republic’s principle of laïcité on itself. Although the Catholic schools in Turkey, acting under the Pope’s instructions, agreed to remove images of the Holy Virgin and the saints from their buildings, they refused to yield to nationalist demands that the cross must go too. The result was that on April 7, 1924, the Ministry of Education closed thirty-six French schools in Istanbul with 13,000 pupils, and twenty in Anatolia with 3000 pupils. This also affected a few Italian schools that had refused to comply with the ban on crucifixes, and whose association with Italian imperialism in the Eastern Mediterranean earned them the suspicious enmity of the Turkish nationalists. The fate of the Roman Catholic schools was the subject of a protracted diplomatic crisis between the governments of France, Italy, and Turkey, which lasted late into the autumn of 1925. As Harold Scott noted in his term paper on foreign schools in Turkey, the outcome of the dispute  Rodrigue 1990, 157-66.

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was a complete victory for the Turkish government, the Catholic schools “finally complying with its demands in every particular.”29 The Protestant schools, particularly those operated by American missionaries and philanthropists, were in a somewhat different position, as they were not as closely associated as their Catholic counterparts with the European colonial powers whose interests collided with those of Turkey in the Aegean (with the Italian Dodecanese off the Anatolian coast), in Iraq, and in Syria. Many opted to comply with Ankara’s new regulations and removed elements of religious instruction that might provoke the ire of Turkish-Muslim opinion. Nonetheless, they were beginning to feel the ever-encroaching presence of the Turkish state in their affairs. While Harold Scott appeared to think that the Catholic schools had their own intransigence over classroom crucifixes to blame for their demise, he admitted that Protestant schools also found it difficult wholly to avert the suspicions of the Turkish nationalists. He complained of a climate of “emotional intoxication produced by too heady a draught of nationalism,” in which “perverted or false accounts of events occurring in schools were published in Turkish newspapers in a way to stir up animosity against these institutions.” The extreme example cited by Scott was that of the American St. Paul’s College at Tarsus, which was temporarily closed by the Turkish authorities in 1924 on charges ranging from a Muslim student’s possession of Bible cards to the blue and white paint of a building (the colors of the Greek flag) and the fact that one of its teachers of Turkish was an Arab instead of a “pure-blood” Turk.30 Throughout 1924 and 1925, as the government campaign of secularization raged and the showdown between Kemal and his opponents loomed, an atmosphere of fearful anticipation descended upon the American school communities in Turkey. “If we cannot obtain a more constructive policy in our dealings out here, I fear that the institutions will be riding for a fall,” wrote teacher Edgar Fisher of Robert College in his diary. “And it is certainly true that we ride or fall together.”31 At the time of writing, Fisher had found himself in the eye of a storm threatening the very existence of the American colleges in Istanbul. It is to this affair and its implications for international education in Turkey that we turn in the following section.  Scott 1927: 23.  Ibid.: 24. 31  Edgar Fisher, Diary, entry for August 6, 1925; Edgar J.  Fisher Papers; Box 16; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Ohio State University. 29 30

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Three Men and a Donkey: Robert College and the Edgar Fisher Affair of 1924 The coming of Turkish nationalist rule also had profound repercussions for Robert College. The college newsletter reported on the panic that prevailed among the students when they realized that the Allied occupation was about to end and that the nationalists would assume control of Constantinople. Within three months of the capture of Smyrna and the armistice of Mudanya in late 1922, about 200 out of the total 600 college students enrolled that year had fled the country. Most of these students were Ottoman Greeks and Armenians who were afraid of being drafted into the notorious labor battalions of the Turkish army.32 Among those who left were also several Greek and Armenian members of the college faculty. Although parents from these minorities continued to send their children to the American colleges in the years to come, the era of Christian domination of the student body was over. It was clear to everyone that a difficult time of adjustment lay ahead. At the time the Turkish Republic was proclaimed, Caleb Frank Gates had served as president of Robert College for twenty years—see Image 3.1. Coming from a missionary background, he had acquired some proficiency in Turkish and over the years learnt to navigate the perilous waters of late Ottoman politics. He had made and cultivated acquaintances with leading CUP men during the war, even after the United States and the Ottoman Empire broke off diplomatic relations in 1917, and kept himself and the college at arm’s length from the British troops occupying Constantinople until 1923. The image he presented to the Turkish authorities and the American public was one of the American colleges’ benevolent neutrality, an impression also cultivated during the Greco-­ Turkish war. “Throughout all the turmoil of the World War, these institutions were the only stabilizing force in the Near East,” claimed an editorial in the college newsletter, echoing Gates in the spring of 1922, which stressed the difference between the arrogance of European colonialism and the spirit of American democratic institutions. “They served all and were the friends of all … They are serving the people among whom they work, with no arrogant assumption of superior knowledge, but with

 News Letter 3:4 (December 1922): 6.

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Image 3.1  Caleb Frank Gates, President of Robert College between 1903 and 1932. Source: Near East Colleges Newsletter, 13:2 (October, 1932), Robert College Records, Box 50, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Reproduced with permission from Robert College, Istanbul

brotherly sympathy, with co-operation, finding out their needs and wants and then striving to satisfy them.”33 The course that Gates selected in order to secure Robert College’s continued existence was to demonstrate its usefulness to Turkey in its frozen relations with the United States. Mirroring the public mood of isolationism and hostility against the perpetrators of the Armenian atrocities affecting parts of the American electorate, attempts to have the US Congress  “Developing Self Help in the Near East”, News Letter 3:2 (April 1922): 3.

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ratify the Treaty of Lausanne had stalled. The American Embassy was still in operation, with Admiral Mark Bristol representing the US government in the capacity of High Commissioner, but as long as the United States abstained from participation in the Conference of Lausanne and refused ratification of the resulting treaty, there was no formal recognition of the Turkish Republic. Without US recognition, Bristol and Gates agreed, the prospect of American influence in the Near East would be severely crippled, to the detriment of business ventures and educational institutions alike. Admiral Bristol attended the Conference as an unofficial observer, along with Gates as his adviser. Present in Lausanne was also a Turkish faculty member of Robert College by the name of Hüseyin Bey (Pektaş), who served in the Turkish delegation as secretary and interpreter to Ismet Pasha, Mustafa Kemal’s right-hand man. As noted in Chap. 2, Hüseyin (1884–1970), the son of a low-ranking official and grandson of a sheikh of the Bektaşi dervish order, was the first Muslim to graduate from Robert College in 1903, where he also taught Turkish for a few years. He studied abroad and worked as a military censor under the wartime CUP regime before rejoining the faculty of Robert College, eventually becoming head of its Turkish department.34 Fluent in English and French, with important connections, he was Gates’ most important adviser in dealings with the new government in Ankara. Apart from counseling the American High Commissioner and using Hüseyin as an intermediary with Ismet, Gates argued in public for a new American foreign policy toward the new Turkey. This was a formidable task to accomplish, as those among the American public most inclined to show an interest in the Near East were the Evangelicals involved with Protestant mission, charity, and humanitarian work. These were the men and women who raised funds for the American Near East Relief, tending to the needs of orphaned Armenians and other Ottoman Christians victimized by the Young Turks. Gates sought to persuade his fellow Evangelicals through the media of the college newsletter and regular newspapers that ratification of the Lausanne treaty had nothing to do with the “condoning of any violent measures of the Turks” against their Christian subjects during the war. “It would simply mean the resumption of diplomatic relations and the ordinary friendly intercourse between nations which are not at war. The question, therefore, is this—is it better 34  Orlin Sabev, Spiritus Roberti: Shaping New Minds and Robert College in Late Ottoman Society (1863–1923). Istanbul: Boğaziҫi University Press, 2014, 266-67.

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for the United States to have normal relations with Turkey or to continue indefinitely the suspension of diplomatic relations which took place in 1917[?]” Signing the treaty would give Americans in general, in addition to those living and working in Turkey, “the good will of the Turks instead of their ill-will.” Making the case that the new leaders of Turkey were not the same people as those responsible for the Armenian tragedy, Gates argued that they at least deserved the benefit of the doubt: The value of this treaty will depend largely on the character of the new Turkey and as with every other treaty, on the spirit and manner in which it is carried out. The Turks say that they have turned over a new leaf, that they are rid of the old despotism and have introduced a democracy which has taken the name of the republic of Turkey. They claim that they are going to establish a government worthy to be received into the sisterhood of the nations. It would seem a wiser policy to retain an opportunity for influencing for good the leaders of the new government than to cut ourselves off from all intercourse with them and allow them to go their way without any advice or help from us. It is to be hoped that the American public will carefully and quietly consider how best they can help us in the cause of international concord and peace.35

Back at Robert College itself, President Gates undertook measures to comply with the new regulations, in consultation with Hüseyin Bey. In February 1924, a few weeks before the law on the Unification of Education was passed, Gates ordered Edgar Fisher, the head of the History Department, to scour the textbooks hitherto used in history teaching for passages and language that might be perceived as offensive to Turkish national sentiment.36 Despite all these tokens of compliance, it would soon emerge that Robert College was no more shielded from the harassment of government officials and hostile nationalist press than other foreign schools. The first incident to occur seems to have been the case of Robert Crozier Stuckert, the young Head of the Mathematics Department at Robert College, who, in the spring of 1924, was given twenty-four hours to leave the country by the Turkish authorities. The stated reason was a letter Stuckert had sent to 35  “Turkey a Republic with Capital at Angora: Dr. Gates Asks Ratification of Lausanne Treaty; Hopes Difficulties Will Be Solved”, News Letter 5:1 (December 1923): 1-2. 36  Guckert 1968, 153-54.

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his parents in Texas containing critical comments on Turkey, which was then published in a local newspaper. In what appears to be a cruelly calculated way to speed his departure, the teacher and his wife, Bertha, were initially told that since their infant daughter Jean, who had been born in Constantinople the previous year, was not listed on her parents’ passport, she would have to be left behind. Only at the last minute was Bertha Stuckert allowed to board her husband’s ship with their child. Stuckert’s case has left few traces in the records of the college and only a passing mention in the literature chronicling its history, meaning that the circumstances surrounding it remain obscure.37 Apparently, President Gates felt that little could be done to protect this employee and his family, save for providing help in securing their safe passage out of the country; however, the next time that the Ministry of Education called for the dismissal of a faculty member would be different. The faculty member in question was Edgar Fisher, his trusted dean, whose case would preoccupy Gates for almost half a year; the controversy has left a vast hoard of documentation that sheds considerable light on the complicated negotiations between the American college and the new Turkish regime—see Image 3.2. At the time that the controversy erupted in April 1924, thirty-nine-­ year-old Edgar Jacob Fisher had been teaching history at Robert College for eleven years, serving as dean since 1917. The available facts about his career and personal life appear unremarkable. Born in Rochester, NY, he had studied at Columbia University and written a doctoral thesis on the colonial administration of New Jersey on the eve of the American Revolution, before taking up his teaching position in Constantinople. He was married to Elizabeth (Betty) Fehr Fisher, who taught home economics at the Constantinople Woman’s College and with whom he had a child, Edgar Jr., a boy of five at the time.38 Private and published writings testify to a deep religious commitment, which he shared with other American members of the college faculty.39 Judging from the correspondence of his superiors, as well as student magazines, he was considered efficient and 37  Freely 2012 (2009), 237. See also Herbert Lane, The Robert College Story, typescript; https://www.ancestry.com/genealogy/records/robert-crozier-stuckert-24-16gpg8. Accessed July 24, 2021. 38  Obituary for Edgar J. Fisher Jr. (1919–2005), Richmond Times-Dispatch, December 12, 2005, https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/timesdispatch/name/edgar-fisher-­obituary? id=5401240. Accessed August 19, 2021. 39  For example, Edgar J. Fisher, “Summering on the Heights”, The Association Quarterly 3:2 (July 1915): 177-81.

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Image 3.2  Robert College faculty, 1923. Front row, center: Caleb Gates. Seated front row, second from right: Abraham Hagopian, Professor of Armenian and later Psychology. Second row, first from left: Edgar J. Fisher. Also in the second row, third from right: Hüseyin Bey (Pektaş), Head of the Turkish department. Source: News Letter, 5 (June, 1923), Robert College Records, Box 50, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Reproduced with permission from Robert College, Istanbul

well liked. An avid photographer, he documented everyday life on the campus, family vacations, and the beautiful scenery of Constantinople, projecting the latter on lantern slides in lectures about the old imperial capital and its antiquities that he gave to visiting American tourists from time to time. The diaries that he kept, in which he sometimes commented on the dramatic political developments outside campus, reveal little in terms of strongly held opinions before the incident arose in 1924. There is, however, evidence of Fisher’s growing concern over the interference of Turkish authorities in his teaching of European history and what compliance with the dictates of the Ankara government would mean for scholarly standards. There was generally little coverage of Near Eastern and Turkish history in the standard American textbooks—something Fisher regretted—but there were fears about statements made about Islam and the Seljuk Turks in the chapter covering the First Crusade. He dutifully

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carried out the task of weeding out potentially incriminating passages in the text, but confided grave misgivings both to his superiors and to his diary: This morning I gathered in the Freshman and Sophomore History textbooks, and they are to be “censored” over this monthly holiday. The Robinson and Robinson and Beard text-books that we are now using in History are remarkably fair in all their statements, but Dr. Gates and Hussein Bey desire to play exceedingly safe, so that the text-books, when they are sent in for government inspection, will contain no passages that may wound the sensibilities of the Turks at the present time. I have told Dr. Gates and Hussein Bey that the obliteration of the passages decided upon is, and that this has been deemed needful[,] more derogatory to the Turks than letting the text stand as it is.40

The attack on Fisher came but a few months after the textbooks had been sent to the Ministry of Education for inspection. In late April 1924, two weeks after the closing of the French schools, the college administration received a curt note from Savfet Bey, the Ministry’s local director, conveying an order for Fisher’s immediate dismissal on the grounds that Fisher had given a lecture to tourists on board the steamer Reliance on March 7, 1924, in which he reportedly had said “many things belittling to our nation,” which made his continued work as a teacher in Turkey impossible.41 Since Gates was away on a trip to Syria and the American University of Beirut at the time, it fell to the vice-president and acting director, George Huntington, to respond to the government’s demand. In letters addressed both to Savfet and to his superior in Ankara, Minister of Education Vassif Bey (Çınar), Huntington claimed that the charge against his colleague was based on a misunderstanding. He listed a series of arguments in defense of Fisher, whom he presented as somebody who knew Turkey well and had been a strong advocate of its interests in the United States. Stressing the non-political nature of Fisher’s lecture, Huntington suggested that he might in fact have been confused with another American lecturer present on board the Reliance on the date in question, a certain 40  Edgar Fisher, Diary, entry for February 14, 1924; Edgar J. Fisher Papers; Box 16; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Ohio State University. 41  Savfet Bey to the Direction of Robert College, April 22, 1340 (1924), translation; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 10; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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Dr. Wirth, who was known to have made “violent remarks” about the Turks. In any case, the acting director added in a concluding warning, dismissing Fisher would harm the PR campaign Robert College was making in America on behalf of the new Turkey.42 After Huntington’s letters were sent, nothing was heard from the Turkish authorities regarding the Fisher incident for several months. The silence was interpreted as acquiescence that no wrongdoing from Fisher’s part could be proved and that the case was closed. In June, however, a Turkish police officer showed up at the campus to inquire whether Fisher was still employed at Robert College, yet nothing came of that either.43 This occurred shortly after the sudden expulsion of Stuckert, but Gates reassured Fisher that their cases had nothing in common, and that he would rather have the college closed than yield to an unjust demand.44 Since the Ministry of Education remained silent, Gates assumed that he could leave the city for the summer holidays, apparently on the suggestion of Hüseyin Bey who agreed to stay at his post over the summer to counsel the Latin professor, Floyd Black, acting director in the absence of the college president and vice-president Huntington, in case of any emergencies. While Gates vacationed in Switzerland, the Fishers left Turkey and went on a family holiday to Vienna.45 On July 31, a second letter arrived at Robert College, signed by Ahmed Hilmi, Savfet Bey’s replacement as director of the Ministry of Education’s Istanbul office. The Turkish official, in response to Huntington’s April letter, claimed that the government’s “repeated investigations” had proved Fisher guilty of having publicly insulted the Turkish nation by “projecting pictures against the Turks to an American audience,” which made his service as a teacher in Turkey impossible. He now ordered the college to offer

42  George Huntington, cover letter to Savfet Bey, and to Vassif Bey, Minister of Public Instruction, April 28, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 10; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 43  Caleb Gates, “Statement on the Fisher case concerning the demand of the Minister of Public Instruction that Professor Edgar J. Fisher, Professor of History in Robert College, should be dismissed from its service”, September 22, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Cf. Guckert 1968, 156. 44  Edgar Fisher to Caleb Gates, September 23, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 45  Ibid.

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proof of Fisher’s dismissal within three days.46 A panic-stricken Black wired his boss in his Swiss vacation resort for instructions on how to handle the situation. Gates’ initial reaction to the ultimatum was defiance. In his view, the regime was sabotaging his campaign to mend relations between Turkey and the United States, and he was in no mood for compromise. “I should like it distinctly understood that I do not mean to yield to this demand, even if they close the College because of my refusal,” he responded in a letter to Black. “Our conscience would not allow us to do this and public opinion in America would condemn us for doing it … I quite realize that the case is a serious one, but I have had it on my mind for a long time and have quite made up my mind that we cannot yield to this demand without disgracing the College.”47 Gates also wrote to Albert Staub, the director of the Near East College Association’s New  York office, to ask for the support of the Board of Trustees. As he explained the situation, he believed that the whole affair was due to the personality of Vassif Bey. He added that he had been told by a friend of his adviser Hüseyin in the Ministry of Education that Vassif was treating the charges against Fisher as a matter of his personal prestige. “Vassif Bey is hot headed and impulsive and he wants to show his authority. I would concede anything but a matter of principle, and this seems to me clearly such a matter.” Yet he simultaneously toned down the seriousness of the situation by suggesting an appeal to Vassif’s superior Premier Ismet Pasha who, he was convinced, would give Fisher a fair hearing, if Hüseyin Bey wrote a full statement explaining the case. “The Turks know that to close the college on such a charge would hurt them greatly and strengthen the [US] opposition to the [Lausanne] treaty.”48 According to Fisher’s own account, he had offered his resignation in April in order to safeguard the institution, but Gates was having none of it at the time.49 To him, the attack on Fisher was a test of his determination to defend the autonomy of Robert College, and he deemed it as worthy an occasion as any other to confront the new 46  Ahmed Hilmi to the Director of Robert College, July 31, 1924, translation; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 10; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 47  Caleb Gates to Floyd Black, August 2, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 10; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 48  Caleb Gates to Albert Staub, August 2, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 10; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 49  Edgar Fisher to Caleb Gates, September 23, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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regime head on. According to Fisher, Staub in New York had reassured him that closing the college was a risk worth taking, in order to “gain our point with the Turks. We shall never have a better case to defend than the present one.”50 However, acting director Floyd Black was of a different opinion. Upon the advice of Hüseyin Bey, seconded by the US High Commissioner Admiral Bristol, Black argued in favor of a tactical retreat whereby the college would comply with the Turkish demand and then leave the matter to be fought through the official diplomatic channels. Black related the information imparted to him by Hüseyin, gathered from Hüseyin’s contacts inside the Ministry of Education, that the officials of its Istanbul branch were in fact favorably inclined toward Fisher, but had to carry out the orders of their superiors in the new capital. “It is the Angora [Ankara] people who are unyielding,” Black informed Gates. It seemed that Fisher had been unwittingly caught up in a dispute between different Turkish authorities in the old imperial city and the new republican capital, and that those in the latter were determined to close the college if the demand were not met within the next few days. Black and Hüseyin argued that the case was rather one of “personal spite” against Fisher from some unknown accuser than an attack at Robert College as an institution, but that the threat to close the College was grave enough to warrant acquiescence on the part of the administration. The government’s drastic action might be aimed at the college, but since the charge presented had nothing to do with Fisher’s duties at the school, they would have to assume that it concerned the dean as an individual rather than the institution he worked for. “Once we have yielded to the demand the college would be clear and the way will be open for the embassy to take up the matter on the ground that an American citizen has been wronged without the semblance of a trial,” Black assured Gates. “To me the action to be taken by the embassy is very clear. It should demand that the accused be confronted with the accuser in the presence of a competent body of judges; that he present witnesses and the pictures to which they object … We believe here that this is the very thing which they are trying to avoid.”51 50  Quotation in Edgar Fisher to Betty Fisher, September 27, 1924. Cf. Albert Staub to Edgar Fisher, August 18, 1924; Edgar Jacob Fisher papers; Box 2; Hoover Institution Archives. 51  Floyd Black to Caleb Gates, August 2, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 10; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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Meanwhile, the grace period of the ultimatum had expired, and on August 4, another note from the Ministry arrived at Black’s office, stating bluntly that the college was closed since no notification of Fisher’s dismissal had been received.52 Feeling powerless to do anything else, Black succumbed to pressure and was on the same day rewarded with a new note stating that the school could resume its work. In a letter to his boss, he explained that without any definite instructions from him and, fearing for the welfare of the entire college community, he would not take responsibility of seeing Robert College closed, especially after learning from Admiral Bristol that he could not take any action on Fisher’s behalf without Gates’ authorization.53 To further press his point, he presented his boss with a statement, signed by himself, Hüseyin Bey, and Harold Scott, urging Gates not to let the Fisher incident get in the way of a promising relationship with the new regime. “The part yet to be played by the College as an educational institution in the Turkish Republic is only beginning. If we now close in protest, we shall win the hostility of the government and the officials and the distrust of the people.”54 Faced with a fait accompli, Gates saw no other course of action than to uphold his acting director’s decision. “I was prepared to close the college rather than yield, because the charges are rank injustice and if we submit we are at the mercy of the caprice of the minister,” he wrote from his Swiss resort. “Tomorrow he may demand the dismissal of Huntington or myself. Nevertheless, I see the force of your reasoning. My principle is that when I leave a man in charge he is responsible, and it is my duty to support him; I therefore accept your decisions.”55 The matter was now in the hands of Admiral Bristol, who allegedly would bring it up in a meeting with Ismet Pasha in Ankara. In the meantime, Black made inquiries into the exact nature of Fisher’s supposed offense and his accuser, as Turkish authorities had not deigned to specify the charge. Black had himself been on board the Reliance on March 7, 52  Ahmed Hilmi to the Director of Robert College, August 4, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 10; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 53  Floyd Black to Caleb Gates, August 5, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 10; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 54  “A Statement of the Action taken in the Fisher Case and the Reasons for it recapitulated”, August 9, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 10; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 55  Caleb Gates to Floyd Black, August 8, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 10; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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and had listened to Fisher’s lecture to the American tourists on the seemingly harmless subject of the sights and antiquities of Constantinople. During his talk, Fisher had shown a slide picturing some smiling local men and their donkey against the backdrop of the ancient city walls. The picture, entitled “Three friends,” was the cause of general merriment among the tourists listening to Fisher’s lecture, but there was also a group of Turkish students and staff from the American colleges in the audience, some of whom, it was said, had taken the picture to mean that Turks were donkeys.56 In a subsequent letter, in which he also told Gates of the ABCFM’s decision to cease all teaching of the Bible in its remaining mission schools for fear of government reprisals, he noted that Hüseyin felt that he could do no more to help Fisher, and that the case from now on should be solely handled by Admiral Bristol.57 By that time Gates had decided to return to Constantinople and take matters into his own hands. A frosty exchange between him and the Vali (governor) of the former capital, Raşit Bey (Bıgat), on August 23, of which a transcript survives, seemed to confirm Black’s impression that the whole affair revolved around a simple misinterpretation of Fisher’s intention with the donkey slide. “He has insulted our nation,” said the Vali. “It is an insult to compare us to any animal and especially to a donkey.” To Gates’ objection, that it was an innocent joke and that Fisher would not have treated any foreigner standing next to the donkey differently, he responded, “A man who has been eleven years in our country ought to know the character and mentality of the Turks better … Had he been a lesser man we would have let it pass, but he is a man of reputation which makes the insult worse.” Gates tried a different tack, protesting against the procedure by which the accusation had been conveyed and pointing out the potential harm it would do to Turkey’s interests: It is a habit, a method of procedure of the Angora Ministry to issue an order without adequate investigation of the circumstances and it leaves a bad impression. Our teachers are very much discouraged. They say, Tomorrow some one may say something against us and the Ministry will order our dismissal without giving us a chance to say anything in our defence. Moreover this leaves a very bad impression in America. We have assured our 56  Floyd Black to Caleb Gates, August 12, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 10; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 57  Floyd Black to Caleb Gates, August 16, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 10; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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friends there that the Turks will treat our College fairly, but this treatment is unfair and unjust. If Professor Fisher goes to America and exhibits that picture, and says because of this picture I was sent out of Turkey, all America will laugh.58

To this, the Vali responded curtly that it had no importance, and that Fisher could not return to Turkey. Stonewalled by Raşit Bey, Gates took comfort in the very different view presented to him by Fuad Bey, Hüseyin’s contact in the local office of the Ministry of Education. Fuad acknowledged that the action taken against Fisher was a mistake, which he blamed on the Minister of the Interior, while assuring Gates that “in the future very different methods would be employed.”59 Both government officials, Raşit and Fuad, responded positively to an invitation to come and see for themselves the work carried out at Robert College, which would convince them that his institution had nothing to hide. With this promise of future cooperation with government inspectors, Gates left the local officials. His next move was to see if he could somehow blunt the impression caused by the “Three friends” picture, the original slide of which he was now in possession, and shift the perceived insult elsewhere. In April, Huntington had tried to shift the blame for any insulting remarks against Turks onto the other American lecturer, who had introduced Fisher to the audience at the Reliance, one Dr. Wirth; apart from working for the tourist agency Wirth was also associated with the Near East Relief and therefore could be suspected of harboring an anti-Turkish bias. That had not helped Fisher’s case at all, Hüseyin had told him. Gates therefore tried to see if an appeal to racial prejudice shared by Turks and Westerners would do the trick. “From a careful study of this photograph any one at all acquainted with the peoples of Turkey will clearly see that the men associated with the donkeys are not Turks but Gipsies,” he instructed Admiral Bristol, with the latter’s visit to Ankara and Ismet Pasha in mind. “Both their faces and their costume show this plainly.”60 58  “Memorandum of a Conversation between Rachid Bey and C. F. Gates,” August 23, 1924; Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 2; Hoover Institution Archives. 59  “Memorandum of an Interview between C. F. Gates, President of Robert College, and Fuad Bey, Under Secretary in the Department of Public Instruction of the Turkish Republic”, August 19, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 10; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 60  Caleb Gates to Admiral Mark Bristol, August 28, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 10; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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Meanwhile, the controversy over Fisher was receiving coverage in the Turkish press, feeding into the domestic debate about the government’s arbitrary way of running the country which, a few months later, would cause Rauf (Orbay) and his supporters to defect from Kemal and form their own Progressive Republican Party. In early September 1924, two newspaper editorials defending Fisher appeared, one in Vatan (Fatherland), the other in Cumhuriyet (Republic), which had not yet become the unquestioning mouthpiece of the regime. The opinion pieces were written by Ahmet Emin (Yalman) and Zekeriya (Sertel). Born in Salonica, of Dönme and Jewish origins respectively, both were supporters of the Turkish nationalist cause, but at the same time strongly inclined toward America, where they had studied journalism at Columbia University.61 Both were also prominent members of the Istanbul press whose opinions were believed to carry weight by Gates and Fisher, with the latter expressing his delight that “my friend, Ahmed Emin Bey, has put his oar in on the right side.”62 Their intervention in the Fisher affair forced the education minister Vassif Bey to respond in public. Particularly angered by Zekeriya’s article in the otherwise government-friendly Cumhuriyet, Vassif alleged that, in addition to the donkey comparison, Fisher had praised the “Heroisms of Byzantium Civilization,” meaning the cultural achievements of the Greek enemy nation, at the expense of the city’s Turkish-Islamic landmarks. In response to criticism that the charge against Fisher rested on flimsy evidence, he added with wounded pride that, “not the Ministry [of Education], but those who, in order to defend the foreigner, write articles without knowing the matter, made themselves ridiculous.”63 Vassif’s additional accusation that Fisher had mouthed Greek propaganda against Turkey was likely intended for domestic consumption, and might not have been added to the charge sheet had not prominent Turkish publicists with nationalist credentials questioned the wisdom of a government policy destined to alienate a potential foreign ally. It did, however, offer Gates and Fisher welcome ammunition, as they could argue that this 61  Zürcher 2009 (1993), 403, 405-6. Like many other journalists, Ahmet Emin was swept up in the arrests of 1925 and had his paper Vatan closed, while Zekeriya resigned from government service and his post at Cumhuriyet in protest against the censorship rules imposed under the Law on the Maintenance of Order. 62  Edgar Fisher to Caleb Gates, September 15, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 63  Vassif Bey, quoted in Vakit, September 8, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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was a demonstrably false account of what had happened, whereas the donkey picture remained open to misinterpretation. “The object of my lecture was not to glorify any particular people or period of history, and I did not do it,” Fisher explained in a letter, adding that he had consciously avoided any discussion of modern Turkish history. “As an historian I was giving a general survey of Constantinople’s history, and what might be seen in the city: I dealt with the facts of history, and I had to take them as they were.”64 After all, referring to the Hagia Sophia mosque as a church was not historically inaccurate, which Raşit Bey, the Vali of Istanbul, grudgingly conceded in a new meeting with Gates. He agreed to drop the Greek propaganda charge, but remained unyielding about the insulting character of the donkey picture.65 The back and forth exchange between the Turkish authorities and the president of Robert College reverted to a disagreement of what was really being pictured on the photograph: was it three men and either several donkeys or just a single one, or was it, as Vassif Bey had it, six men and six donkeys? Gates had had the original “Three friends” picture taken out of Fisher’s private safe and copies made for Admiral Bristol and Ismet Pasha; it clearly depicted three smiling men, one of whom was sitting atop a donkey, while another donkey was grazing in the background—see Image 3.3. Despite the continued intransigence on the part of the Ministry, Gates sensed that Vassif was on the defensive and looking for a way out of the whole affair. He therefore devised a plan that would allow the minister to save face, by having Fisher apologize in writing for having unintentionally wounded the feelings of the Turkish people.66 Meanwhile, Edgar Fisher had taken up residence in Sofia, Bulgaria, while his wife and son returned to their Istanbul home.67 The New York office had dispatched a substitute teacher, Laurence Moore, to teach his courses at Robert College, but also ordered him not to return to America, 64  Edgar Fisher to Caleb Gates, September 12, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 65  Caleb Gates, “Statement on the Fisher case”, September 22, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 66  Caleb Gates to Edgar Fisher, September 12, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 67  Before leaving Vienna, he chanced upon Admiral Bristol on a museum visit, but found the vacationing High Commissioner unwilling to discuss his case. Edgar Fisher to Caleb Gates, September 14, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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Image 3.3  “The picture which made all the trouble for Fisher,” as Caleb Gates’ handwritten note accompanying the copy he had made of the “Three friends” slide reads. Source: Robert College Records, Box 29, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

for fear of publicity that might damage fundraising and Gates’ campaign for ratification of the peace treaty.68 In his Bulgarian exile, he kept up an almost daily correspondence with his boss at Robert College. Unsurprisingly, he found the idea of apologizing to Vassif Bey degrading, as he admitted to having done no wrong. He wanted to have his name cleared to the students of Robert College, and somewhat naively implored his boss to ask them to step forward in his defense as a token of gratitude to the schools they were attending. His wife Betty believed that the accusation against him had emanated from a group of spiteful Turkish girls from her home economics class, and Fisher, with his strong belief in fair play, therefore thought that an appeal to the students would resolve the matter:

68  Laurence Moore to Edgar Fisher, August 29, 1924, and Caleb Gates to Edgar Fisher, September 8, 1924; Edgar Jacob Fisher papers; Box 2, Hoover Institution Archives.

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The College Administration knows most of the Turks who were on board the “Reliance” and heard my lecture. Is it not time to go to some of them, and ask them to come out on the subject? Some of them have had what we regard as the advantages and benefits of several years training at one or the other of our Colleges in Constantinople. They ought to take a stand one way or the other and let us know where they are … Mrs. Ogilvie, in her article on Turkish Women points to one of them with pride as a typical leader in social service and as the product of American education. Is it not fair to ask them to go on the record one way or the other for us?69

Gates, on the other hand, saw no reason to drag adolescent students into a quarrel with the nationalist government. As Fisher noted in a subsequent letter to his wife, Gates “[told me that] I did not understand the mentality of the men with whom he had to deal. That may be so, although I am willing to reserve final judgment until a later time.”70 He therefore had to agree with Gates’ request for a letter of apology, although he managed to water down the draft letter that his boss had written on his behalf, with its reference to the three men being Gypsies, into mere regret at having been misunderstood: Excellency: It is with great sorrow that I have learned that I am said to have wounded the feelings of the Turkish people [in my lecture]. I certainly did not intend to hurt the feelings of any one, and if I have done so, I desire most sincerely to beg pardon of all whom I have offended through you as a representative of the Turkish people. Respectfully yours, Edgar J. Fisher71

Fisher was particularly pleased with the phrasing of the letter. “This two sentence statement is as diplomatically and carefully worded as critical passages in some international peace treaties,” he told Betty. “I could sign it with honesty and without mental reservation, which I did not feel was the case with Dr. Gates’ previous draft letter, and I hope that the Minister of 69  Edgar Fisher to Caleb Gates, September 12, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 70  Edgar Fisher to Betty Fisher, September 27, 1924; Edgar Jacob Fisher papers; Box 2; Hoover Institution Archives. 71  Edgar Fisher to Caleb Gates, September 25, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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Education will find in it the means of backing down from the peculiar position he has been taking.”72 With that letter in his hand and with Hüseyin Bey by his side, Gates traveled to Ankara at the beginning of October, where he met with Ismet Pasha, second-in-command to the “Great Gazi” Mustafa Kemal. In a meeting with his cabinet, Ismet overrode his Minister of Education and decreed that Edgar Fisher be reinstated as a professor of History at Robert College.73 On October 4, Gates issued two telegrams that heralded the end of the affair: one addressed to the New York office of the Near East College Association (“Fisher reinstated.”), and another one to his stranded dean in Sofia, stating only the word “Come.”74 Gates had apparently managed what no other director of a foreign school had done during the tumultuous year of 1924: successfully face down the Ministry of Education. But why did Ismet agree to getting his minister to back off when he did not hesitate to let the row over the Catholic schools grow into a full-blown crisis with France and Italy, both among the signatory powers of the Lausanne peace treaty? It was most likely not because of any vigorous diplomatic pressure on the part of Admiral Bristol, a seasoned cynic in favor of realpolitik over humanitarian concerns in his country’s approach to Turkey. Fisher noted bitterly in one of his letters to Betty that she was right in her misgivings “about putting any reliance in the High Commissioner for getting justice.”75 The available sources afford no insight into the reasoning of Ismet Pasha with regard to the Fisher affair, but it seems likely that the final decision to let the American professor off the hook was influenced by the timing of another unfolding diplomatic crisis. Since the armistice of 1918, the British army had been occupying the old Ottoman city and province of Mosul, with its important oil wells, which the Turkish nationalists still claimed as a part of the Turkish homeland. Unsurprisingly, the British claimed the territory on behalf of the nascent Kingdom of Iraq and showed no inclination to walk away from their lucrative oil concessions there. The League of Nations, of which Turkey was not yet a member, took up the 72  Edgar Fisher to Betty Fisher, September 27, 1924; Edgar Jacob Fisher papers; Box 2; Hoover Institution Archives. 73  Freely 2012 (2009), 237. 74  Caleb Gates to Edgar Fisher, October 4, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 75  Edgar Fisher to Betty Fisher, September 27, 1924; Edgar Jacob Fisher papers; Box 2; Hoover Institution Archives.

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issue for discussion in September 1924. Meanwhile, British and Turkish troops were engaged in skirmishes to the north of Mosul, which threatened to escalate into full-blown war until London issued an ultimatum in early October, forcing Ankara to back down.76 Clearly, this was not the time to risk alienating American public opinion, which would jeopardize the efforts of Bristol and other pro-Turkish forces to normalize relations between the United States and the internationally isolated new republic. Unlike Fisher, Gates had fewer illusions about the nature of the nationalist regime, and was convinced that the donkey incident was invented as an excuse “by a group of people who desire to have all foreign schools and education wholly in the hands of the Turks.”77 Still, he appears to have believed that there were reasonable and well-meaning officials in the government hierarchy to whom he could appeal, going over the heads of Vassif Bey and his ilk. The purges of the following year may have robbed him of that impression, although he maintained that Turkish nationalist opinion might soften over time. Albert Staub, in a public statement on the Fisher affair, which had been mentioned in American newspapers, claimed that its outcome had restored “the confidence of those who are interested in the progress of the new governments of the Near East,” reassuring him of the regime’s “desire to deal fairly with foreigners.”78 Despite this optimism, the happy conclusion to the donkey incident in 1924 appeared more of an exception than the rule, for accusations against American college faculty would continue to flare up, causing bad blood between the colleges and the Turkish authorities. As for Fisher himself, the experience appears to have shaken his confidence in his superiors, whom he felt had used him cynically to challenge the regime and then yielded at the earliest possible moment in August, severing his fate from that of the college by leaving it in the hands of Mark Bristol.79 To him it was also a gamble with his career as he had recently turned down a job offer at Columbia University in favor of what he described as a lifelong commitment to Robert College. But the episode had also strengthened his determination to devote his work to bringing peace and tolerance into the “desert of discord” that the Near East had  Zürcher 2009 (1993), 201.  Caleb Gates, “Statement on the Fisher case”, September 22, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 78  Albert Staub quoted in “Fisher Reinstated to Post at Roberts College; Turks Admit Error in Dismissal”, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, October 9, 1924, 25. 79  Edgar Fisher to Betty Fisher, September 27, 1924; Edgar Jacob Fisher papers; Box 2; Hoover Institution Archives. 76 77

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become in the past few decades. As he explained to Gates, the well-­ meaning characterization of him as pro-Turkish that Ahmet Emin (Yalman) and Zekeriya (Sertel) had made in his defense really missed the mark. “In the commonly accepted meaning of being pro-this nationality, or pro-that one, I dislike having the term used about me. I have sought to think and act justly toward all the nationalities in the Near East or in any part of the world.” He reflected on the series of lectures he gave at Columbia University and elsewhere in America back in 1922, when Greek and Armenian audiences had accused him of being a Turkish agent. This reflection functioned as an introduction to his internationalist credo and a declaration of his educational ambition for the multinational student body of Robert College: “I have sought to lead people of different and of rival nations to be tolerant and just in their thinking and in their actions, and more and more I have been regarding it as a definite duty and part of my work to encourage and help all influences that would introduce reason and justice in the thoughts and actions of people toward one another.”80 Naturally, there was a sense of bitterness, given that the injustice he had suffered at the hands of Turkish authorities “may have been caused by some of my own pupils and supposed friends,” but he tried not to think too much about it, seeking comfort in his Christian faith. “I bear no ill-­ will toward anyone, and only wish that those who have wronged me may ultimately see the error of their way, and act more justly in the future … I hope that I may always have strength to live and work in the spirit of Him, whose emblem is the Cross. He went about doing good.”81 Although he did find it odd that the summons for his dismissal on both occasions, in April and July, had come when Caleb Gates was away from the college,82 he does not appear to have seriously considered the possibility that they had both been played for fools by someone closer to them than the students. In his August letters to Gates, acting director Floyd Black had been full of praise for the services of Hüseyin Bey, with his important connections inside the Ministry of Education, who counseled him to sever the case of Fisher from the college and let the diplomats 80  Edgar Fisher to Caleb Gates, September 12; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 81  Edgar Fisher to Caleb Gates, September 14; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 82  Edgar Fisher to Caleb Gates, September 23; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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handle it. “He is a sage adviser,” he wrote.83 When Gates gathered the college staff in September to explain his course of action, and the faculty offered a unanimous vote of confidence in Fisher’s integrity, Hüseyin hastened to give the appearance of deep solidarity with the exiled dean. Huntington, who wrote of the occasion in a letter to Fisher, found it remarkable that the “ayes” included Hüseyin Bey, “who you know does not vote in the Faculty meetings, but who, I personally observed, took the greatest pains to raise his hand in this vote.”84 In any event, Fisher was a marked man in the nationalist press, where his name would remain associated with grievous insults against the national honor of the Turks for years to come. Furthermore, as later developments would show and, from what it appears, unbeknownst to himself, he had a number of enemies in the faculty of Robert College itself, quietly biding their time.

From Tug-of-War to US-Turkish Rapprochement, 1925–1927 An uneasy truce reigned in the relations between the college and the Turkish authorities in the year following the donkey incident. No new attempts were made to remove Fisher, nor were there any further complaints regarding his conduct. Gates took great precautions not to allow anything that could be construed as an offense to occur. When Fisher was invited to give a lecture at Columbia University on “Policies of the New Turkish Republic,” Gates told him that the subject was too dangerous to address in public as long as he was connected to Robert College.85 Having to adjust to the reality of self-censorship, the dean kept himself busy with work on a new outline for the history courses that he taught, as the Ministry of Education did not approve the continued use of the previous textbooks despite the alterations he suggested. Cooperation with the government inspectors sitting in at the students’ final examinations appears to have taken place without major incidents, although Harold Scott testifies to a sense of frustration on the part of American college officials and 83  Floyd Black to Caleb Gates, August 12, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 84  George Huntington to Edgar Fisher, September 29, 1924; Edgar Jacob Fisher papers; Box 2; Hoover Institution Archives. 85  Edgar Fisher, Diary, entry for December 16, 1924; Edgar J. Fisher Papers; Box 16; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Ohio State University.

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f­aculty. “These [inspectors] are for the most part, typical government functionaries who … lack the vision and imagination necessary for constructive educational leadership,” Scott wrote somewhat despairingly in his term paper on the foreign schools in Turkey. “They devote themselves too zealously to harassing school directors over trivialities, and a good share of the time and energy of the directors is spent in the effort to settle misunderstandings regarding small matters which would never have arisen but for pettifogging officials.” Nevertheless, the educator hastened to distinguish between the officious ill-will of the local bureaucrats and the “intelligent leaders of the New Turkey,” whose appreciation of the foreign schools and what was referred to as “their spirit of fair play” had made it possible to surmount the obstacles and avoid the pitfalls of “this difficult period of adjustment to the new situation.” Apparently, Scott was under instructions not to give offense or throw any doubt on the good intentions of the country’s new rulers, even when addressing a small audience of fellow educators at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Despite his criticism of petty-minded bureaucrats, he added that this should not “be construed to signify that most of these local officials are not well meaning, honest and industrious.” They, as well as the schools they inspected, were to be understood as victims of a highly centralized system, where every matter of importance (and many of no importance) had to be deferred to Ankara.86 The truce, however, could at any moment be imperiled by actions such as those described above. In early May 1925, an incident occurred at the Constantinople Woman’s College which had an eerie similarity to the charge brought against Fisher the previous year. Again, the circumstances surrounding the case are clouded by the discretion with which the administration of the colleges handled the matter. The victim was a certain Miss Smith, a teacher who was accused of allowing a school play in which a student dressed as a fez-wearing donkey had allegedly appeared as a comic aside. The government-loyal press in Istanbul caught wind of the event and presented it as yet another grievous insult implying that Turks were being viewed as jackasses. “Queer people are these Americans,” declared a Turkish editor. “They don’t seem to have envy of others’ countr[ies], they seem to have devoted themselves to industry, commerce, science, and to good; they help the poor and the orphan[ed] of every country, they open schools and aid in other ways. But a moment comes when they cancel off  Scott 1927: 24-29.

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all the good they have done.”87 Inevitably, suspicion fell on Fisher and Robert College, although the government inspectors put to “investigate” the case could not prove his involvement, to the obvious dismay of several editors in the press.88 A summary order for the immediate dismissal of the offending teacher duly followed. “Miss Smith has resigned from her post at Constantinople [Woman’s] College,” Fisher wrote in his diary. “Or rather the Constantinople College authorities have easily yielded to her dismissal by the Turkish Government, and expressed regret that the Turks were wounded.” The dean of Robert College expressed his deep sympathy for his colleague and friend as well as his dismay over how her superiors and the American diplomats had abandoned her. “What our institutions will be driven to is more than one can foresee.”89 As well as demanding that scripts for school plays henceforth be sent to Ankara for inspection and approval, the government officials clamped down on many of the extracurricular student activities so integral to American college life. Scott attributed this to a misunderstanding of the precise nature of college fraternities and certain customs in the United States, which “must seem quite mysterious and outlandish to the Oriental mind.”90 A more pertinent explanation for the inspectors’ hostility in this regard is the experience many of them had of the komiteci; the clandestine societies or “committees” from which the Armenian and Bulgarian revolutionaries and the Young Turks themselves had emerged to unite in opposition to the rule of Abdul Hamid II. To them the existence of clubs and literary societies at schools where so many of the students belonged to minorities with a troubled history of political separatism represented a direct challenge to the state’s authority. For much the same reason, Caleb Gates rejected initiatives from students and from faculty members like Fisher to form debating societies, on the grounds that anything that

87  “The Consequences of a Horse-play”, Karagöz, May 13, 1925; translated extract; Box 59; Robert College Records; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 88  For example, “The truth about the incident at Robert College”, Son Saat, May 3, 1925; “The incident at Robert College”, Vatan, May 4, 1925; “The incident at the American College”, Akşam, May 4, 1925; translated extracts; Box 59; Robert College Records; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Even the Armenian daily Haghtanak reported about the incident and Fisher’s alleged involvement. 89  Edgar Fisher, Diary, entries for July 23 and August 6, 1925; Edgar Jacob Fisher Papers; Box 16; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Ohio State University. 90  Scott 1927: 24.

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smacked of political activity was bound to draw retaliation from Ankara and the education minister’s local minions. The issue of the Christian minorities caused the greatest friction between the regime and the American colleges on the Bosporus in 1925. Both Robert College and its sister institution took pride in their Greek and Armenian language departments, which dated back to the nineteenth century. In March that year, they were informed that these departments must close, in the name of republican egalitarianism. “Being forced to take this step brings pain and regret to us,” Fisher noted in his diary, as they had been an integral part of the college since its foundation and to him represented the spirit of brotherhood and tolerance that he wished to instill in his students. “The influence of this measure will be watched with eager interest.”91 It was a major turning point in the history of the American colleges, as implied in the annual report of Kathryn Newell Adams, Mary Mills Patrick’s successor as head of the Constantinople Woman’s College: According to the new regulations issued by the Ministry of Education, the College will not be allowed to offer courses in Armenian or in Greek to the students of those nationalities. The Bulgarian language, however, we shall still be allowed to teach on the condition that the Bulgarian students take up Turkish history and geography. Neither shall we be allowed to have any national literary societies such as we have had heretofore in the college, for the government is much desirous of breaking down all national differences and treating all its citizens as Turkish rather than as belonging to various races. We are therefore asked not to group our students by nationalities but according to citizenship. All who are citizens of Turkey are classified as Turkish; those who are citizens of other countries may be recognized or classified according to nationality.92

Meanwhile, the Turkish department at Robert College was growing more significant than ever before, under the aegis of Hüseyin Bey (Pektaş). In an interesting report that was included in a survey of the college’s development since the Great War that Fisher put together in 1930, Hüseyin told the history of his department, which apart from its factual 91  Edgar Fisher, Diary, entry for March 24, 1925; Edgar Jacob Fisher Papers; Box 16; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Ohio State University. 92  Kathryn Newell Adams’ report for the academic year 1924–1925, quoted in Freely 2012 (2009), 239.

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contents offers a rare glimpse of his mind and the experiences that had formed him.93 In his opinion, the Turkish language and its literature had long suffered from neglect at the hands of the school’s Ottoman Christian faculty. “I remember my student days when an Armenian teacher used to take all the Turkish classes. We used to go up to the desk and recite, and then bargain for a high mark, while the rest of the class were having a fine time.” Things improved when the college administration offered the position to a Turk, Tevfik Fikret Bey, who became Hüseyin’s mentor, and for whom he worked as an assistant professor after graduating in 1903. At that time, Turkish was only an elective course, but when the CUP government made the study of Turkish language and Ottoman history compulsory during the war, the department grew and more teachers were hired. Yet the defeat in 1918 had dealt a severe blow to his efforts as Tevfik Fikret’s successor, as the Armistice was believed to herald not only the collapse of the Ottoman Empire but also that of Robert College’s Turkish Department. Indeed, Hüseyin described the Armistice years as a period in his life that was “very painful to remember.” In his account, the “different elements present” at the school—another way of saying the Greek and Armenian students compelled to study Turkish—had been so sure of Turkey’s imminent dismemberment that they had refused to work. “At the beginning of the Armistice, not a single non-Turk volunteered to take Turkish, but later on, when their heads cooled down and they began to realize that Turkish would be of some use to them in their business, they one by one began to elect Turkish.”94 Here, a hint of contempt for the Christian students is discernible in Hüseyin’s narrative, which contrasts their lack of serious interest and effort with the devotion of the Muslim Turks. The nationalist victory and the end of the Allied occupation entailed a new challenge to the Turkish Department. As Turkish was made compulsory again in the academic year of 1923–1924, the few Turkish teachers were faced with teaching language and literature to 700 students instead of the handful they had been used to. During the Armistice period, the number of Turkish language instructors had dropped to three, including Hüseyin. In the following years, their number increased to twelve, in 93  “Report of the Head of the Turkish Department, Hussein Bey”, in “A Brief Survey of the Development of Robert College since the War”, September 27, 1930; Edgar Jacob Fisher papers; Box 2; Hoover Institution Archives. 94  Ibid.

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addition to the two men sent to the college by the Ministry of Education to teach Turkish history and geography. The department which Hüseyin headed was, in other words, the fastest growing milieu at Robert College, a success that came at the expense of the Greek and Armenian departments. Meanwhile, the costs of hiring these new teachers strained the budget of the American colleges, which were struggling to make ends meet in the postwar economy, with a drop in student enrollments in the aftermath of ethnic cleansing and the hesitancy of US donors in view of the uncertain future. This may have been a powerful motivation for Hüseyin to make room for his expanding department. If Robert College’s student body were to swell with new Turkish recruits in place of the Christians who had fled—something that both Hüseyin Bey and Caleb Gates expected—there would be a need for new teachers, positions that he would fill with people of his own choice. In the report he wrote for college dean Fisher, he gave the appearance of sharing his American colleagues’ dislike of the history and geography teachers foisted upon the college by the Ministry of Education in Ankara, while at the same time stressing the difficulty of finding suitable Turkish teachers for the American institution. “As some of them [the government appointees] were not at all desirable, we had to fight for better men.”95 Considering the part played by Hüseyin in the donkey incident, one is bound to ask if, by “fight for better men,” he was implicitly referring to something or someone other than the allegedly undesirable Turkish history instructors. This hypothesis will be further explored in Chap. 6. In the eyes of Caleb Gates, the uncertain status of American institutions in Turkey, due to lack of full diplomatic representation, remained the main obstacle to Robert College’s postwar success. Apart from trying to shield his college and its sister school from the suspicion and sudden attacks of the Turkish authorities and nationalist opinion, his top priority was to secure US recognition of the Turkish Republic. He therefore doubled down on his and Bristol’s efforts to get ratification of the Treaty of Lausanne past the stubborn resistance in the US Senate. In April 1926, over one hundred American residents of Istanbul signed a petition in favor of ratification, arguing that without a treaty American interests would have no official standing in Turkey and would be exposed to governmental

 Ibid.

95

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discrimination.96 There was a palpable fear that failure to win the Senate’s approval would be interpreted in Ankara as a hostile act and lead to retaliation against the colleges, although Gates did his best to reassure the American public and the college donors of the regime’s benevolent intentions, praising Mustafa Kemal’s determination to modernize his country.97 Above all, he tried to dispel any misgivings caused by the Fisher affair and similar incidents. The outward truth was that they were due to simple cultural misunderstandings, which had been cleared up by both parties acting in good faith. “I have found that there is a general impression in the United States that the exigencies of the government make it impossible to carry on the work of our colleges in any satisfactory way,” Gates wrote to the Board of Trustees. “This is not at all the case; on the contrary I am inclined to say that we have an enlarged opportunity. There is in Turkey a freedom of thought and of inquiry such as have never been known before. There is the keenest desire for education.”98 To the initial alarm of Istanbul’s American community, the Senate did not ratify the Lausanne treaty in 1926; however, neither did the much-­ dreaded retaliation of the Turkish government materialize. Instead, the regime was eager to show signs of favorable treatment to American interests in the hope that public opinion in the United States might be swayed. A long-standing request for permission to transfer the titles of lands and buildings held in the name of individuals to the corporate name of Robert College, which had been left in limbo pending ratification of the treaty, was finally granted as a token of gratitude for Gates’ lobbying efforts. From the fall term of 1925 onward, student enrollment was on the rise, not least because of an agreement with the Turkish government, which nominated a number of Turkish students who were to attend the Engineering School of Robert College.99 No new incidents appear to have occurred in this period, likely because the regime, belatedly realizing the propaganda value of Robert College, did not allow them to gain publicity. In the American press, Gates continued his relentless campaign for ratification and recognition of the new republic throughout 1926 and 1927, claiming “that the present government … was the best he had known 96  “Americans in Turkey for Lausanne Treaty”, The New  York Times, April 7, 1926, 6. Cited in Guckert 1968, 164. 97  “Dr. Gates Pleads for Turkish Treaty”, The New York Times, April 20, 1926, 12. 98   Caleb Gates’ report for the academic year 1925–1926, quoted in Freely 2012 (2009), 240. 99  Guckert 1968, 165; Freely 2012 (2009), 242-44.

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during the forty-six years that he had been engaged in educational work in Turkey.”100 He was duly rewarded for his services, in anticipation of a new vote of ratification in the US Senate. In late September 1927, Gates received news from Ankara that Robert College was now allowed to choose its own Turkish teachers instead of having to accept whomever the Ministry of Education sent its way. Fisher described it as “a great occasion for joy” in his diary. “This lack of control over the appointment of our Turkish teachers has been one of the most discouraging features of the recent year or two at the College, and the news of a change in this respect is most welcome.”101 The tokens of appreciation that the government of Turkey now showered on the American colleges seemed a vindication of Caleb Gates’ adopted course of action—as well as that of Hüseyin Bey, who as Head of the Turkish Department and President Gates’ trusted adviser is likely to have been left in charge of appointing the new Turkish teachers. By the end of 1927, a new era appeared to be at hand in terms of relations between the United States and Turkey, as well as between the American colleges in Istanbul and the government in Ankara. Earlier that year, in May, the appointment of a new US ambassador to the Turkish Republic, Joseph C. Grew, to replace High Commissioner Mark Bristol, was announced. Grew had served as a secretary to Admiral Bristol at the Conference of Lausanne and was well acquainted with both Gates and, more importantly, Ismet Pasha. The Ankara press reportedly rejoiced at his appointment, which was interpreted as marking “a break in the American tradition of Jewish ambassadors.”102 Reeking as it was of anti-­ Semitism, the allusion to the former US ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Henry Morgenthau, was unmistakable to anyone familiar with the recent past. The diplomat, whose memoir Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (1918) had done so much to bring attention to the wartime annihilation of the Armenians and to tarnish the international reputation of the Young Turks, was a reviled figure in the new Turkey. Relations between the two countries had come a long way in the decade that had passed since the United States entered the war that would make the world “safe for democracy.”  “Praises Turkish Leader”, The New York Times, November 19, 1927, 17.  Edgar Fisher, Diary, entry for September 30, 1927; Edgar J.  Fisher Papers; Box 16; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Ohio State University. 102  “Turks Will Welcome Grew’s Appointment”, The New York Times, May 20, 1927, 5. Quoted in Guckert 1968, 167. 100 101

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Gone were the concerns for “starving Armenia” and the image of “the terrible Turk,” which men like Mark Bristol, Joseph Grew, and Colby M. Chester had worked hard to erase from the American public’s mind. Joining their ranks were educators like the former missionary Caleb Gates, arguably more concerned about the survival and future prosperity of the American colleges than the oil and railroad concessions that motivated Chester and Bristol. Among the advocates for the new Turkey was also Edgar Fisher, who was henceforth encouraged to give lectures about the current political situation in the Near East during sabbaticals in America: that is, within certain bounds. In these lectures, Fisher would stay clear of the messy infighting among the Turkish nationalists and the unrest plaguing the Kurdish east, choosing instead to highlight the progress being made in a rapidly changing country.103 This is the point in time where John Cecil Guckert chose to end his study about the adaptation of Robert College to its Turkish environment, as glimpsed through Fisher’s diaries. “By conforming and continually readjusting to the dynamic nationalism of the Republic of Turkey, Robert College was able to gain the respect of that nation,” Guckert concluded; furthermore, they had achieved “relative security in Turkey by having once more an ambassador, respected by the Turks, to intercede for their cause of advancing and disseminating knowledge in the Middle East.”104 Typical of the tradition of blinkered scholarship in thrall to the US-Turkish Cold War alliance, Guckert never asked the difficult questions about what this adjustment really meant and what it was that American educators hoped to achieve in the new Turkey, besides merely existing. It is to these matters we turn in the following section.

“A Cure for War”: The New Secular Mission of the American Colleges Now that Turkey had lost nearly all its Christians, how would the Near East colleges find a new purpose? Robert College was founded by devout Protestants who, despite the school being non-denominational, made no 103  For example, “Turks Want Sons Taught Newer Ways. Western Ideas Permeating Country, Declares Dean of Robert College”, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, July 9, 1928, 16. “Turkey Going Ahead Fast, Says Teacher, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, January 14, 1929, 19. 104  Guckert 1968, 167, 181.

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secret of its Christian character. The Constantinople Woman’s College began as a mission school for Armenian girls. Gradually, especially after 1908 and the downfall of the Hamidian regime, along with its ban on Muslims attending Christian schools, the colleges had received Turkish-­ Muslim students in greater numbers, but these were still a small minority in 1914. The Great War had been devastating to those foreign schools reliant on Ottoman Christian recruits, but the Armistice and the Allied control of Constantinople held out the promise of a return to the peaceful coexistence of Muslims, Christians, and Jews on which the American educators’ vision of a modernized Near East was premised. Even in late 1923, when the Greco-Turkish “population exchange” of minorities living outside Istanbul was in full swing, the college newsletter carried upbeat stories and photographs about personal friendships between Turks, Greeks, and Armenians flourishing on American campuses—see Image 3.4. Mary Mills Patrick even expressed a belief that the Near East was on the verge of a “spiritual awakening, each nation on the basis of its own religion,” in which religious prejudices would give way to an “attitude of tolerance and appreciation.”105 It was, in a sense, as if nothing had happened that would be detrimental to the spirit of the colleges and the educational work carried out in Turkey. Nevertheless, the American educators were acutely aware that the days of religious instruction were numbered. For the Near East colleges on the Bosporus the transition to strictly secular education was eased by their non-denominational nature from the outset. In fact, the “secularist turn” of the ABCFM itself had been decades in the making, as non-Protestant students’ protests against mandatory attendance at chapel services had forced the missionaries to retreat.106 The battle for religious liberty at Robert College had already been fought by Armenian students in the 1870s, while the increasing influx of Muslim students after 1908 paved the way for the relaxation of the requirements on Bible study, morning prayers, and chapel service, for fear of antagonizing their parents.107 Yet, while avoiding too-overt reference to Christian doctrine, American missionary schools and colleges still insisted on “moral education,” meaning teaching rooted in Protestant morality. Even in a society that seemed to  Mary Mills Patrick, “An Oasis of Peace”, News Letter 5:1 (December 1923): 3.  Hans-Lukas Kieser, Nearest East: American Millennialism and Mission to the Middle East. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010, 71. 107  Sabev 2014, 95-112. 105 106

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Image 3.4  “An oasis of peace in a desert of discord”: The image of inter-ethnic friendship, cultivated in the college newsletter. Source: News Letter, 3:4 (December, 1922), Robert College Records, Box 50, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Reproduced with permission from Robert College, Istanbul

reject religious education, as well as religion itself, it was believed that moral education of the Protestant brand would appeal. Overall, the turn toward secularism in the early twentieth century, noted by scholars of Protestant mission and American education in the Middle East, reflected developments at institutions of learning in the United States during the Progressive Era, when the nineteenth-century notion of Christian restoration gave way to the idea of civic commitment. The primary purpose of

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education was thus not to turn students into believers in the Gospel, but to produce morally responsible citizens who were ready to participate in a modern, democratic society. In that sense, the formerly Protestant colleges did not appear incompatible with the goals of the self-avowedly secular Turkish Republic—at least, not in the minds of American educators. In a piece written for the college newsletter, the outgoing president of Constantinople Woman’s College, Mary Mills Patrick, sought to convince friends and donors of the schools that they still had a vital task to perform—see Image 3.5. Using Biblical metaphors, she presented an image of the Near East as a “desert of discord” ravaged by war, poverty, and epidemics, misfortunes which were contrasted with the natural riches of the region that might transform it into a paradise: The Constantinople Woman’s College furnishes an oasis of harmony in this desert of discord and an object lesson of what might be accomplished on a much larger scale. The conditions in the oasis are not impossible ones. We may call the College an oasis of peace in a desert of discord, because the same problems present themselves in the oasis and in the desert. If peace is possible in the one, why not in the other?108

The cause of discord that Patrick identified lay not so much in religious differences as in the polyglot character of the former Ottoman Empire. The lack of common language meant a lack of a common basis of understanding, which could only be remedied by the use of a neutral lingua franca. This secondary language, Patrick argued, would ideally be English, which had the advantage of being easy to learn and offered a “rich and pure literature that would surely become a strong element in national development.” Her college demonstrated that the twenty-odd national and ethnic groups represented in the student body could live in peace and mutual tolerance united by English, while simultaneously keeping their national traits and being encouraged to study their native languages. Only a few years later, the closing of the Greek and Armenian departments at both colleges imposed by the Kemalists demonstrated a different way to eradicate distinction between citizens of the new Turkey. Only the Bulgarian department remained in operation—shielded by its association with a neighboring nation-state the Ankara regime deemed somewhat less offensive than Greece, and by the lack of any sizeable Bulgarian minority  Mary Mills Patrick, “An Oasis of Peace”, News Letter 5:1 (December 1923): 1.

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Image 3.5  Mary Mills Patrick, President of Constantinople Woman’s College between 1890 and 1924. Source: News Letter, 5:1 (December, 1923), Robert College Records, Box 50, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Reproduced with permission from Robert College, Istanbul

in Turkey—but Bulgarian students would be obliged to take courses in Turkish language and history. By that time, Mary Mills Patrick had gone into retirement, although her fellow educators maintained an appearance of optimism. After all, Turkish had not replaced English as the dominant language of instruction, meaning most of the courses could be taught as usual. More important than language was the practical “training in citizenship” provided by the colleges. Patrick presented her school as a “miniature republic” in which students elected their own officials and made their

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own laws. Nearly always, she noted, students elected their officers according to merit and “not on the basis of national prejudice” or social rank. Here was an element which seemingly tallied with the professed egalitarianism of both the American and the Turkish republics. The college president illustrated this point in an anecdote about the aristocratic Russian émigrés fleeing the Bolshevik revolution who attended the American colleges in large numbers. Among them had been a Georgian princess, who allegedly had announced to a student government officer that she was of royal blood and hence not subject to the rules governing other students. In “true republican spirit,” Patrick wrote approvingly, the officer had responded, “We have no princesses here and everybody must keep the rules.”109 The parallel with Turkish attitudes toward the exiled House of Osman was evident. Besides the practical skills in nursing, stenography, and home economics being taught to girl students, many of whom Patrick acknowledged had to provide for families wherein the men were unable to find work, training in the duties of citizenship was the most vital lesson. In the weekly student forum at her college, topics for discussion ranged from “The Best Form of Government” to “Should Women Follow the Fashions?” Along with performing the practical responsibilities of electing their own representatives and making and carrying out the laws of the student government, these debates were of far greater value than any “class-room statements on theories of government,” according to Patrick. The most important contribution of American education to the new Near East was the principle of democracy and freedom of thought. Nothing reassured American educators and public opinion so much as the Kemalists’ apparent embrace of new gender roles. “Emancipation of women in the Near East is taking place rapidly,” wrote Mills Patrick as she noted the progress toward women’s suffrage being made in Romania and Greece. In Turkey, women were not granted the right to vote in national elections or made eligible for office until 1934, but the prospect already seemed promising by the mid-1920s.110 The Swiss civil code introduced in 1926 granted women inheritance rights, while the ban on polygamy suggested the idea of marriage as a companionship of equals. Urged to shed their veils, and dress like their Western counterparts, women were enrolled

 Ibid.: 4.  The right for women to vote and run for office in municipal elections was granted a few years earlier, in 1930. Ekmekçioğlu 2016, 149. 109 110

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in education and recruited as teachers.111 A widower who fathered no children, Mustafa Kemal himself adopted several girls and young women, as a way of promoting the public visibility of women, as did Miss Turkey’s win in an international beauty pageant in 1932.112 However, as pointed out by a number of feminist scholars of the Kemalist reforms—cited by Joan Wallach Scott in support of her argument that the notion that secularism is synonymous with equality of the sexes has obscured the historically unequal gender relations inherent in Western modernity—they tended to be a reconfiguration of patriarchy rather than a break.113 The much-lauded new civil code also included asymmetrical treatment of men and women in matters of divorce and adultery; in the latter case women were punished more severely, whereas rape was considered a violation of a male property-­ holder’s right rather than of the female individual’s. As sociologist Deniz Kandiyoti remarks, the “double standard of sexuality and a primarily domestic definition of the female role” left Turkish women “emancipated but unliberated.”114 To the educators of the Constantinople Woman’s College, or the American College for Girls as it would later become, such afterthoughts were not an issue in the interwar years, as the courses they offered to their female students—home economics and other practical subjects—emphasized the complementary role of women to men, meaning a different set of potential professions. What mattered most to them was the encouraging signs of public acceptance manifest in the Turkish elites’ newfound interest in American education. As noted above, the Ministry of Education sent selected students to be trained at Robert College’s Engineering School from 1925 onward. Soon, others started to send their children to the American colleges. In April 1927, the government inspector Savfet Bey informed Kathryn Newell Adams, the new president of Constantinople Woman’s College, that Mustafa Kemal himself was sending two of his adopted daughters to her school. To her apparent disbelief in this sudden good fortune, as she told her New York superiors in a letter, the express 111  For an analysis of implementation and popular reactions to Kemalist policies in this regard, see Sevgi Adak, Anti-Veiling Campaigns in Turkey: State, Society and Gender in the Early Republic. London: I.B. Tauris, 2022. 112  Cf. Ekmekçioğlu 2016, 152. 113  Joan Wallach Scott, Sex and Secularism. Princeton and Oxford. Princeton University Press, 2018, 115. 114  Deniz Kandiyoti, “Emancipated but Unliberated? Reflections on the Turkish Case”, Feminist Studies 13:2 (1987): 324. Quoted in Scott 2018, 116.

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wish of the Turkish leader was for the girls to “commence as soon as possible in order to have them have as much of the American influence as they could.”115 This and other tokens of appreciation in the wake of the US-Turkish rapprochement from the rulers of the new Turkey suggested a country ripe for the benign influence of American education. As Harold Scott wrote the conclusion to his survey of foreign schools in Turkey, presented as a term paper to Columbia University’s Teachers College in early 1927, he expressed the cautious but unmistakable optimism felt by the administration and faculty of Robert College. Despite the obstructionism of “pettifogging” local officials, he stated his conviction that “Mustafa Kemal and his colleagues are trying to bring Turkey into line with the enlightened nations of Western Europe and America with respect to education and are preparing a way for a genuine advance along western paths.” From that followed that foreign educators could make a valuable contribution to further “this progressive educational policy” and help transform the country into a modern nation. While recognizing a deeply ingrained suspicion of the West and the fear on the part of Muslim parents that their children would turn into rootless cosmopolites in the American institutions, he took heart from statements published in the Turkish press that suggested that something of an equilibrium might be attained. “We are in the stage of nationalism,” an editorial quoted by Scott had stated in 1923. “Our educational aims will be humanitarian but at the same time very nationalistic. In the place of an artificial education, a civilized and liberal education; in place of the cosmopolitan elements, a modernized gentleman Turk.”116 To Scott this indicated the possibility of foreign influence that over time would blunt the worst excesses of Turkish nationalism. If the Turkish authorities could be convinced that American education would not undermine the loyalty of the Turkish youth to the nation by exposure to a “propagandist education of a definitely anti-­ Turkish bias,” future gains would be secured. Scott believed that the American colleges had now found a modus vivendi with the Kemalist regime. The tokens of appreciation bestowed upon them also seemed to suggest that the spirit of compromise was based on mutual trust rather than the one-way imposition of Ankara’s authority that had characterized their initial encounter. Despite the purges of the anti-Kemalist opposition, 115  Kathryn Newell Adams to Albert Staub, April 13, 1927. Quoted in Freely 2012 (2009), 246. 116  Anonymous editor, Tanin, March 30, 1923, quoted in Scott 1927: 2.

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Scott repeated almost verbatim the optimistic opinion of Caleb Gates in the 1926 annual report to the Board of Trustees, hinting at Turkey’s democratic future: Present conditions indicate that the foreign educators have learned the nature of the terms on which the Government of the Republic is willing to accept this collaboration, and that they have not found these terms unacceptable. The Government of the people of Turkey on the other hand are rapidly acquiring a truer appreciation of the worth of the education offered by foreign institutions and the attitude of suspicious reserve is less manifest. With this growth of understanding and sympathy on both sides, the schools will be less handicapped by official interference and their educational contribution will thereby [be] more valuable. A sign of a happier future is found in the indisputable fact that the Nationalists Turks [sic!] are much less narrow, unaccommodating, and uncompromising in their Nationalism in this year 1926 than they were in 1924, and that in spite of factional strife in politics there is a general freedom of thought and inquiry, and a spirit of tolerance, such as has never been known before.117

The belief that the American colleges and the nationalist regime had finally reconciled their differences offered hope that another long-­standing concern was about to be resolved. Protestant missionaries and educators of the late Ottoman era had hoped that the Young Turkish revolution of 1908 would result in the transformation of the Empire into a federation, in which the different Near Eastern peoples would live in peace and harmony with each other. The Balkan Wars and the subsequent Great War had dealt a devastating blow to that dream, but some were still convinced that the long-awaited “spiritual awakening” was at hand, if only American institutions kept their focus on this task. Contributors to the college newsletter reminded readers that Turkey and its Balkan neighbors remained as unreconciled as they had been in 1914. “Scarcely anything in the program for world peace is more important than the appeasement of national hatreds and jealousies among these states and the settling of their disputes,” argued one contributor in late 1925. The best interests of the peoples inhabiting the region would be a “Federation of Balkan States, which every student and well-wisher of those nations hopes for.” But this would require the “will to peace” on the part of the Balkan peoples themselves. “And the only chance of a changed atmosphere of good-will and  Scott 1927: 32.

117

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neighborliness is to educate the children and youth of the Balkans in the practice of good-will and good neighborliness.”118 The core mission of the American colleges was to provide a “cure for wars.” If the religious character of these institutions had to be sacrificed in the age of secularism, the preaching of a secular peace gospel might provide the colleges with a new sense of purpose. By presenting education for peace, devoid of Christian denotations, as something useful to the modern Near and Middle East, the American colleges might salvage something of their old “moral education” and the legacy of Protestantism. The US-Turkish rapprochement and the new “spirit of tolerance” allowed educators like Edgar Fisher to hope that the worst part of adjustment to the republican order was over and that an alternative future beyond the “desert of discord” was possible. What this education for peace and international understanding meant in practice will be examined in the following chapter.

References Adak, Sevgi. 2022. Anti-Veiling Campaigns in Turkey: State, Society and Gender in the Early Republic. London: I.B. Tauris. Alexandris, Alexis. 1992 (1983). The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek-Turkish Relations, 1918–1974. Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies. Bali, Rifat N. 2013. The politics of Turkification during the Single Party Period. In Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Towards Post-National Identities, ed. Hans-­ Lukas Kieser, 43–49. London: I.B. Tauris. Dündar, Fuat. 2013. The settlement policy of the Committee of Union and Progress 1913–1918. In Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Towards Post-National Identities, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser, 37–42. London: I.B. Tauris. Ekmekçioğlu, Lerna. 2016. Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-­ Genocide Turkey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Freely, John. 2012 (2009). A Bridge of Culture: Robert College—Bogă ziçi University: How an American College in Istanbul Became A Turkish University. Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitetisi Yayinevi. Gates, Caleb Frank. 1940. Not To Me Only. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

118  “Cure for Wars in the Balkans: Dr. Graves Points to American Colleges as Only Effective Means of Pacifying that Region”, News Letter 6:4 (November 1925): 6.

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Guckert, John Cecil. 1968. The Adaptation of Robert College to Its Turkish Environment, 1900–1927. Unpublished PhD thesis. Columbus: Ohio State University. Kemal Atatürk, Mustafa. 1963 (1927). A Speech Delivered by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 1927. Istanbul: Ministry of Education Plant. Kieser, Hans-Lukas. 2013. An ethno-nationalist revolutionary and theorist of Kemalism: Dr Mahmut Esat Bozkurt (1892–1943). In Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Towards Post-National Identities, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser, 20–27. London: I.B. Tauris. ———. 2018. Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Patrick, Mary Mills. 1929. Under Five Sultans. New  York and London: The Century co. ———. 1934. A Bosporus Adventure. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rodrigue, Aron. 1990. French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling, 1860–1925. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Sabev, Orlin. 2014. Spiritus Roberti: Shaping New Minds and Robert College in Late Ottoman Society (1863–1923). Istanbul: Boğaziҫi University Press. Scott, Joan Wallach. 2018. Sex and Secularism. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Üngör, Uğur Ümit. 2011. The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zürcher, Erik Jan. 2009 (1993). Turkey: A Modern History. London: I. B. Tauris. ———. 2010. The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey. London: IB Tauris.

CHAPTER 4

“A Moderate and True Nationalism”: The Philosophy and Practice of Internationalism and Peace Education at Robert College, c. 1927–1933

With the United States’ belated recognition of the Turkish Republic and the establishment of permanent diplomatic representation in Ankara in the form of Joseph C. Grew as the first US ambassador, an era of calm seemed to dawn on relations between the American colleges and the Turkish authorities. Under the stewardship of its president, Caleb Frank Gates, Robert College had survived the years of transition with much of its integrity intact, where other foreign schools had been forced to close. This success was largely attributed to Gates’ relentless lobbying efforts to have the US Congress ratify the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, which recognized the new republic as the successor to the Ottoman Empire. The apparent benevolence adopted by the nationalist government toward the college could be interpreted as a reward for Gates’ services, proof that his policy of compromise had been wise. Free from the harassment of the Turkish Ministry of Education, the faculty of Robert College could now focus on its core mission to educate. The second half of the 1920s witnessed a flurry of new initiatives and activities on the campus on the hill above Rumeli Hissar as the social studies curriculum received a thorough overhaul and students were encouraged to engage in extra-curricular work which familiarized them with the international issues of the day. At the center of it all stood Edgar Fisher, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Sjöberg, Internationalism and the New Turkey, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00932-7_4

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Head of the History and Political Science Department and Dean of Robert College. In a report to the Board of Trustees of the American Near East Colleges on the progress made at Robert College since the Great War, written in October 1930, Fisher stated his conviction that the aim of education must be to instill “world-mindedness” in the students. “In this age of intense and bitter nationalism, the training of men who can take a broad and sane view of international problems and preach a moderate and true nationalism in their various countries, is most important.”1 The “intense aggravation of national hatreds during the war and the years immediately following” made the task of educating for peace and international understanding in the Near East all the more urgent. But apart from lofty declarations, what did “world-mindedness” entail in the setting of Robert College? What did internationalism look like in theory as well as in practice? The central question addressed in this chapter is: What did a modern education for peace and international understanding mean in a post-­ Ottoman context? Clues to answering this are found in the content of lectures and study outlines in the social sciences, as well as in the practice of extra-curricular activities in which students encountered internationalism, as far as these encounters can be reconstructed from teacher notes, correspondence, and reports in the school paper. As the statement by Fisher quoted above implies, nationalism was held to be both an obstacle to and a necessary requirement for “world-mindedness.” Special attention is consequently paid to this paradoxical relation, and in particular to how American educators and college officials understood Turkish nationalism.

To End All Wars: Education for Peace and Internationalism After the Great War In order to understand the internationalism espoused by Fisher and like-­ minded educators at Robert College, one must first ask what it meant at an international level or, more precisely, in the North American and Western European debates that shaped their views on world affairs and education. Put briefly, internationalism signified the spirit of cooperation between nations which its proponents hoped would act as a counterweight to nationalism and war. While the notion of internationalism has its origins in the eighteenth century, it chiefly gained currency as a result of the Great  “A Brief Survey of the Development of Robert College since the War”, September 27, 1930, Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 2, Folder 11, Hoover Institution Archives. 1

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War. The weariness of the general public with total warfare and the widely felt abhorrence at the senseless slaughter of an entire generation on the battlefields of Europe paved the way for a movement aimed at preventing future wars. The 1920s witnessed a number of international conferences organized under the auspices of the League of Nations or at the initiative of former belligerent states that were intended to secure a lasting peace. The “spirit of Locarno,” which took its name from the series of treaties between France, Great Britain, and Germany signed there in October 1925, was widely believed to secure Franco-German reconciliation, while the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928, sponsored by the United States and France, renounced the use of war as a means to settle disputes between states. These agreements were made outside the framework of the League of Nations, which in its turn initiated an international conference on military disarmament, scheduled for 1932. Although the Locarno treaties did little to reassure Eastern European states of Germany’s willingness to respect the postwar territorial settlements imposed by the Paris Peace Conference—while the Kellogg-Briand pact, much like the League of Nations itself, lacked any enforcement mechanism to compel compliance from signatories—the peace movement hailed them as important milestones in the quest for world peace. Apart from the international treaties and other initiatives at government level, several non-governmental organizations furthered the cause of internationalism during the 1920s, many of which, including the International Peace Bureau and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, had been operating since the decades before the war. Right from the beginning education was an important focus for the people and organizations involved in the peace movement. The groundwork had been laid in the nineteenth century by Quakers and other religious pacifists, who viewed teaching of the young as the key to peace and brotherhood among the nations.2 The more secularly oriented peace movement, which grew out of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 and organized several universal peace conferences during the 1890s, repeatedly criticized education that glorified war and fostered nationalism, calling instead for teaching materials that emphasized the need for international conciliation. In the United States, The American School Peace League (ASPL), founded by Boston school teacher Fannie Fern Andrews in 1907, organized lectures, 2  Aline M. Stomfay-Stitz, “A History of Peace Education in the United States of America”, Encyclopedia of Peace Education, Teachers College, Columbia University 2008, 1-10, accessed December 14, 2020: http://www.tc.edu/centers/epe/.

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essay contests, and study circles for teachers interested in peace education, and also initiated an annual celebration known as Peace Day, held on May 18, the opening date of the first international conference on armament restrictions at The Hague in 1899. The crowning achievement of the ASPL was the first comprehensive peace education curriculum, published in 1914 as A Course in Citizenship. Largely based on the progressive education theories of John Dewey (see below), the curriculum aimed to transform the study of civics and social sciences, sometimes referred to as “citizenship education,” with a shift from a national to an international perspective. To this end, the peace curriculum contained lessons on tolerance and cultural diversity intended to further international understanding and an appreciation of the United States as a melting-pot, a nation of immigrants. Framed as an aspect of good citizenship, education for peace and international understanding was defined as standing in opposition to militarism, rather than patriotism per se. Internationalism was thus firmly placed within the confines of civic nationalism. The outbreak of the Great War, however, put the faith of the peace educators to the test, as loyalties to internationalist principles and to their own respective countries clashed. The ASPL was swept along by the patriotic fervor surrounding the United States’ entry into the war in 1917, and in 1918 published a new version of its curriculum, now titled A Course in Citizenship and Patriotism. The new edition was designed to support President Wilson’s call to arms, downplaying the previous emphasis on peace, as the word “pacifist” increasingly became a byword for “unpatriotic” and “un-American.” After the war, the ASPL even dropped the word “peace” from its name. Reincarnated as The American School Citizenship League, the organization languished throughout the interwar years and was finally dissolved in 1939.3 Other organizations were nonetheless able to build on the work of the ASPL, most notably The International Federation of Teachers’ Association and The World Federation of Education Association. The 1920s in particular witnessed a plethora of international teacher conferences dedicated to peace education and the fostering of internationalist sentiment. Finally, the League of Nations itself took some initiatives pertaining to peace education toward the end of the decade, despite an initial 3  Charles F.  Howlett, “American School Peace League and the First Peace Studies Curriculum”, Encyclopedia of Peace Education, Teachers College, Columbia University 2008a, 1-4, accessed December 14, 2020: http://www.tc.edu/centers/epe/.

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reluctance to meddle in the educational policies of individual states. The most important and promising initiative, in the eyes of peace educators, was the establishment of the Moral Disarmament Committee during preparations for the Geneva international conference on military disarmament in 1932. The purpose of the committee was to prepare an international convention banning, for example, war propaganda and military training in primary and secondary education, which would accompany a convention reducing and limiting armaments that the League of Nations hoped to accomplish. However, the issue of moral disarmament in education petered out along with the World Disarmament Conference, as Germany, now under Nazi rule, left the negotiations and the League itself in 1933.4 Apart from organizational efforts, certain public intellectuals played an important part in promoting education for peace and international understanding. A case in point was the pragmatist philosopher and psychologist John Dewey (1859–1952), the leading star of the so-called progressive education movement in the United States in the early twentieth century. Dewey was himself drawn into peace education as a result of his support for the American war effort in 1917, which he had argued was a justified intervention to bring about a democratic world order. He was challenged by one of his former students, Randolph Bourne, who in an article titled “Twilight of Idols” accused him of a morally blind instrumentalism which miscalculated the relation between war and democratic values, as well as of an excessive optimism which overestimated the power of intelligence and underestimated the force of violence and irrationality.5 Stung by Bourne’s rebuke, Dewey engaged with the ideas of peace educators in the postwar years, writing on how progressive education could advance international understanding and a non-violent world.6 4  Elly Hermon, “The International Peace Education Movement, 1919–1939”. In Charles Chatfield and Peter van den Dungen (eds.), Peace Movements and Political Culture. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press 1988, 127-37. Ingela Nilsson, Nationalism i fredens tjänst: Svenska skolornas fredsförening, fredsfostran och historieundervisning 1919–1939 [Nationalism in the Service of Peace: The Swedish School Peace League, Peace Education and History Teaching, 1919–1939]. Umeå: Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Umeå University 2015, 86-96. 5  Randolph Bourne, “Twilight of Idols”. Seven Arts (October 1917): 688-702. Cited in Charles F. Howlett, “John Dewey and Peace Education”, Encyclopedia of Peace Education, Teachers College, Columbia University 2008b, 1, accessed December 14, 2020: http:// www.tc.edu/centers/epe/. 6  Charles F. Howlett, “John Dewey and Peace Education”, Encyclopedia of Peace Education, Teachers College, Columbia University 2008, 1-5, accessed December 14, 2020: http:// www.tc.edu/centers/epe/.

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Dewey’s main argument, developed in much-acclaimed works from The School and Society (1899) to Democracy and Education (1916), was that the educational process must be built upon the interest of the child, that it must provide opportunity for the interplay of thinking and doing in the child’s classroom experience, that schools should be organized as miniature communities, and that the teacher should be a guide and co-worker with pupils rather than a rigid taskmaster assigning a fixed set of lessons and recitations. The goal of education is the growth of the child. He then applied these principles to the task of creating educational instruments promoting internationalism as opposed to the patriotic or even chauvinistic propaganda which he felt was being doled out in traditional textbooks. History and geography were identified as subjects especially well-suited to promoting international understanding. In Dewey’s view, teachers of geography ought to stop “worrying about the height of mountains and the length of rivers” and instead introduce their students to the study of peoples and their societies.7 This would entail a detailed investigation of various peoples: their habits, occupations, arts, and their societies’ contributions to the development of culture in general. The objective was to help students gain insight into both nature and society that they could apply to their study of current social and political problems. Similarly, he suggested that the teaching of history ought to focus less on the study of dates and famous battles and more on what Dewey referred to, in instrumentalist terms, as the social meaning of history. “History is not the story of heroes,” he stated in one of his lectures, “but an account of social development; it provides us with knowledge of the past which contributes to the solution of social problems of the present and the future.” Present-day international problems, such as wars, should be studied in their historical context in order “to determine the origin of the problem; examine past efforts to deal with the problem; find out what sort of situation caused it to become a problem.”8

7  John Dewey, “Education and American culture”. In Joseph Ratner (ed.), Intelligence in the modern world: John Dewey’s philosophy. New  York: Modern Library, 1939, 725-28. Quoted in Howlett, “John Dewey and Peace Education”, Encyclopedia of Peace Education, Teachers College, Columbia University 2008, 2, accessed December 14, 2020: http://www. tc.edu/centers/epe/. 8  Quoted in John Dewey, Lectures in China, 1920–1921. Translated from the Chinese and edited by Robert W. Clopton and Tsuin-chen Ou. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1973, 277.

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Dewey’s views on the usefulness of the past in solving present problems were largely informed by the social science approach of James Harvey Robinson’s “New History.” Robinson, author of widely used textbooks on European history—the very ones that Edgar Fisher had used at Robert College until 1925—was a Professor of History at Columbia University who, together with Dewey and fellow historian and textbook co-author Charles A.  Beard, founded the New School for Social Research in New York City in 1919. An advocate of American liberalism and progressive teaching methods, he called for a more comprehensive approach than the traditional emphasis on political and military history, one that treated history as one of the social sciences. This approach to history was interdisciplinary, drawing particularly on anthropology, sociology, and psychology to aid in studying the past. Applying Robinson’s New History thinking to an education program designed to promote peace and international understanding, Dewey called for a curriculum which would explore the themes of war and nationalism in an international context. War, he argued, is not a part of human nature but an institutionally acquired habit which thrives because no-one is taught to question contemporary values and beliefs. As he wrote, We need a curriculum in history, geography and literature which will make it more difficult for the flames of hatred and suspicion to sweep over this country in the future, which indeed will make this impossible, because when children’s minds are in the formative period we shall have fixed in them through the medium of the schools, feelings of respect and friendliness for the other nations and peoples of the world.9

Enlightenment’s Belated Offspring: John Dewey and the New Turkey As we will see in the following discussion, Dewey’s and Robinson’s ideas provided a blueprint for Edgar Fisher and like-minded colleagues as they designed a curriculum in the social sciences which was taught from 1927 onward. There was, however, a more direct connection between American progressive education and the new Turkey. In 1924, John Dewey was himself invited as a consultant to the Turkish Ministry of Education. 9  John Dewey, “The Schools as a Means of Developing a Social Consciousness and Social Ideals in Children”, Journal of Social Forces 1:5 (1923): 516.

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Having already spent two years lecturing at universities and advising government officials in China, Dewey was no stranger to foreign educational systems and accepted Ankara’s invitation with enthusiasm. He arrived in mid-July and spent the following two months touring the country and interviewing school administrators and ministerial officials in Ankara, Istanbul, and Bursa, before returning to the United States on September 18, 1924. At the time of his departure, Dewey submitted a brief memorandum on his recommendations to his hosts and, a few months later, a full evaluation, which was eventually published by the Ministry of Education in 1939.10 In these reports, he was mostly concerned with advice on the proper training of teachers and the setting up of schools which, especially in rural districts, were envisioned as becoming centers of community life. International literature on pedagogy should be translated into Turkish and teachers should be sent abroad to learn from the educational systems of other countries. Furthermore, Dewey recommended that the Ministry of Education should cooperate with foreign private schools, such as the American colleges operating in Turkey, and encourage them to experiment with a variety of progressive pedagogical methods, as well as with their curricula. True to his educational philosophy, considerable emphasis was put on the idea of schools as miniature communities which must be allowed a degree of independence in order to best serve the nation’s needs. “Too much and too highly centralized activity on the part of the Ministry [of Education] will stifle local interest and initiative, prevent local communities taking responsibilities which they should take, and produce too uniform a system of education not flexibly adapted to the varying needs of different localities,” Dewey cautioned, adding that “any centralized system” ran the risk of becoming “bureaucratic, arbitrary and tyrannical in action.”11 Only by bringing decision-making to the local level could the Turks be educated in a truly democratic manner, and be prepared for participation in democratic government. There has been some disagreement among scholars of Turkish education as to the impact of Dewey’s recommendations and overall philosophy. 10  Published as John Dewey, Türkiye maarifi hakkında rapor [Report about Turkish education]. Istanbul: Devlet Basimevi, 1939. Selahattin Turan, “John Dewey’s Report of 1924 and his recommendations on the Turkish educational system revisited”, History of Education 29: 6 (2000): 543-55. 11  John Dewey, “Report and recommendation upon Turkish education”. In Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983, 281.

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One scholar argues that most of the report’s suggestions were implemented, pointing to the foundation of teacher training schools and the translation into Turkish of some of Dewey’s central works in the 1920s— among them School and Society and Democracy and Education—as evidence of serious engagement with progressive ideas.12 Others have been more skeptical as to the value of the report itself and to claims of its lasting impact, arguing that Dewey’s progressive ideas were simply too alien to the mindset of the Turkish leaders, who never had any intention of relinquishing central control in favor of local initiatives.13 Dewey’s invitation had been issued during the tenure of Safa Bey (Özler) as Minister of Education, but the one who received him was Safa’s hawkish successor, Vassif Bey, the very minister who ordered Fisher’s expulsion on account of the donkey incident. According to Robert M. Scotten, a diplomat at the United States High Commission in Istanbul who acted as an interlocutor between Dewey and his Turkish host, Vassif “showed himself quite willing to answer Professor Dewey’s questions, but by no means anxious to elicit or even receive Professor Dewey’s suggestions. It was apparent that the Minister had clearly in his mind his own program for education in Turkey and he was not particularly interested in ascertaining the views of an ‘advisor’ foisted upon him by his predecessor.”14 There were certainly some recommendations in Dewey’s report that made sense from the regime’s perspective, such as using the schools in campaigns for the improvement of public health, introducing a “practical course in hygiene” that would be compulsory for all students,15 or drawing on the technical expertise of Robert College’s Engineering School. Furthermore, Vassif Bey’s successor, Mustafa Necati, serving as Minister of Education from late December 1925 until his death on January 1, 1929, gave the appearance of putting the American educator’s suggestions into practice, occasionally referring 12  Sabrı Büyükdüvencı, “John Dewey’s Impact on Turkish Education”, Studies in Philosophy and Education, 13 (1994–95): 393-400. 13  William Brickman, “The Turkish Cultural and Educational Revolution: John Dewey’s Report of 1924”, Western European Education, 16: 4 (1984–85): 3-18; Joseph S. Szyliowicz, Education and Modernization in the Middle East. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973. 14  Robert M. Scotten, “Letter of transmittal for preliminary report on Turkish education”. In Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983, 418-20. 15   Charles Dorn and Doris A.  Santoro, “Political Goals and Social Ideals: Dewey, Democracy, and the Emergence of the Turkish Republic”, E&C/Education and Culture, 27: 2 (2011): 12-13.

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to the report in his public speeches.16 Nonetheless, much of this has been dismissed as window dressing. Scholars like William Brickman and Joseph S. Szyliowicz have noted Dewey’s cultural and political ignorance of the region, which enabled the Kemalist regime to promote the illusion of democracy by using the language of progressive education without the corresponding actions. Other scholars of education have interpreted the discrepancy between Dewey’s idealism and the Turkish reality as reflecting a difference in approaches to the concept of democracy, rather than the former’s gullibility or the Kemalist regime’s despotic resistance to truly progressive ideals. According to the latter interpretation, democracy simply meant something else for Kemal than for the American philosopher; hence, no-one was really at fault.17 The disagreement referred to above begs the question of what Dewey knew and understood about the country, as this also pertains to the situation that the American colleges in Istanbul were facing. Aside from his report, intended for the Ministry of Education in Ankara, he made public his views on Turkey and its prospects of becoming a “modern” society in a series of articles published in The New Republic magazine. Essentially, these essays were a declaration of faith in the republican regime. For him, Kemal’s nationalist movement was a force for progress, a “belated offspring of the principles of [1789],” which carried on the struggle against religious obscurantism instigated by the radical French Enlightenment and its revolutionaries.18 The nationalists’ policy of secularizing education by taking it out of the hands of Islamic preachers appeared to vindicate his own pedagogical ideas about the futility of memorizing things of no practical value, in this case Quran recitation. Dewey’s optimism about Turkey’s evolution along progressive guidelines was manifest in his report on the new capital in the Anatolian interior, conceived of as a fresh start in the

 Büyükdüvencı 1995: 396-97.  Dorn and Santoro 2011: 3-27. While rightly pointing out the different meanings that concepts like “progress” have, the authors themselves appear to take the notion of Turkey as a Western democracy at face value when they argue that “[both] Atatürk and Dewey advocated passionately for democracy” and seem to agree on the purposes of schools in a modern democratic state. The result is an unconvincing analysis. 18  John Dewey, “Young Turkey and the Caliphate”. In Joseph Ratner (ed.), Characters and Events: Popular Essays in Social and Political Philosophy by John Dewey, vol. 1. New  York: Holt, 1929, 324-29. Originally published as John Dewey, “Secularizing a Theocracy: Young Turkey and the Caliphate”, The New Republic, September 17, 1924, 69-71. 16 17

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ancient Turkish heartland, far away from the memories of faded imperial greatness on the Bosporus. As he wrote, There are various kinds of old age. And if the age for which Constantinople stands is that of decay, of a world steeped in the belief that as things have been so must they ever be, it may be that those are right who say that the old age of Anatolia conserves the pristine virtues of an unspoiled peasantry, as energetic in the civil arts of peace as they are vigorous and enduring in a war for independence.19

Somewhat paradoxically, the peace educator seemed to suggest that the war the Turkish nationalists had recently fought had been an invigorating or even rejuvenating experience, a reflection of how public opinion had been shaped in the Entente countries and the Central Powers alike at the outbreak of the Great War. Overall, Dewey had very little to say about Turkey’s involvement in the conflict that had started in 1914. Nonetheless, he knew that the American public had an unfavorable perception of the Turkish nation on account of the deportation and massacres of Ottoman Armenians, which he must address if that impression was to be overturned. In an essay on “the Turkish tragedy,” he argued that the war had been “a tragedy with only victims,” meaning that all populations in the former Ottoman Empire had suffered indiscriminately, and that no-one in particular could be held accountable for the bloodshed save the European Great Powers. “One becomes disgusted with the whole affair of guilt,” he wrote. “Pity for all populations, minority and majority alike, engulfs all other sentiments – except that of indignation against the foreign powers which have so unremittingly and so cruelly utilized the woes of their puppets for their own ends.”20 The real culprits of the atrocities were, according to Dewey, Russia and Great Britain, abetted by the Christian minorities which they had supposedly taken under their protection: Few Americans who mourn, and justly, the miseries of the Armenians, are aware that till the rise of nationalistic ambitions … the Armenians were the favored portion of the population of Turkey, or that in the Great War they traitorously turned Turkish cities over to the Russian invader; that they

 John Dewey, “Angora, the new”, 334.  John Dewey, “The Turkish tragedy”, 335.

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boasted of having raised an army … to fight a civil war, and that they burned at least one hundred Turkish villages and exterminated their population.21

In stating this, Dewey was parroting the narrative presented to him by his Turkish interlocutors, which claimed that the Armenians as a whole had caused their own destruction by fomenting an armed insurrection against their lawful government and the Muslim majority. It is possible that his understanding of the events in 1915 was colored by his own impressions of Bursa, a city that had been under Greek occupation in 1920–1922, and of the harrowing account of Greek para-military activities in that region observed by the British historian and Manchester Guardian correspondent Arnold Toynbee, which highlighted the suffering of Muslims and Christians alike.22 This context of two nation-states engaged in mutual war crimes was then projected onto the different circumstances of the earlier Armenian atrocities. Yet Dewey’s self-professed point was not so much to apportion blame as to convince his American readers that the prospect of an independent Armenia under the protection of a Western power was a lost cause, mainly for practical reasons. The Turks were, after all, the dominant group inhabiting Anatolia, a fact to which everyone would have to adapt “as surely as, say, immigrants in America have to adjust their political aspirations and nationalistic preferences to the fact of a unified national state.” Convinced that the new Turkey was moving away from militarism toward a peaceful democratic future, Dewey urged that Americans “ceased to be deceived by propaganda” on behalf of policies bound to bring “death and destruction impartially to all elements, and which are nauseating precisely in the degree that they are smeared over with sentiments alleged to be derived from religion.”23 In his articles, he kept coming back to the need for Americans not to dwell on the recent past, but instead embrace the new and encourage the progress being made in turning Turkey into a modern country. To that end, they would have to refrain from any criticism which might antagonize Turkish opinion and risk a backlash that would further alienate the nationalist regime:

 Dewey, “The Turkish tragedy”, 338.  See Arnold Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilisations. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1922. 23  Dewey, “The Turkish tragedy”, 339. 21 22

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Any marked change in the present régime of Turkey, other than its own natural evolution, would be a calamity from the standpoint of all those who have a philanthropic and educational interest in the country, even if they are discontented with the present situation. For it would signify an arrest of a movement which is in the direction of progress and light; it would mean a return to corruption, intrigue, ignorance, confusion, and their attendant animosities and intolerances. It would be a horrid thing if a too vivid memory of old histories led well-intentioned foreigners to withhold their sympathies from just those forces in Turkey which are bound to put an end to mediæval Turkey.24

Dewey stressed the urgent need to gain Turkish trust in order to secure Western (preferably American) influence in the region. This was something that would have to be accomplished primarily by the American educational institutions operating in the country. Here, the philosopher noted, was a legacy of mistrust, which was rooted in the growth of mutual misunderstandings. While the fact that the United States had never joined the European Entente powers in declaring war on Ottoman Turkey gave the American schools an advantage over their British and French counterparts in the new republic, they were still subject to suspicion with regard to their perceived pro-Christian bias. The fact that Americans had tended to the education of Greeks, Armenians, and Bulgarians—that is, to those elements of the Ottoman population which Dewey presumed “were always the tacit and often the open enemies of Turkey”—made it “humanly impossible that … the memory of this fact should not make the Turkish government doubtful about the value to the nation of American schools.”25 It was this experience of favoritism to Christians that was at the heart of the recent donkey incident, with which Dewey was familiar, although no explicit mention was made of either Fisher or Robert College. Arbitrary as the temporary exclusion of a professor accused of Greek propaganda would seem in the eyes of the American public, there were perfectly understandable reasons behind the seemingly inexplicable animosity shown by Turkish authorities. In Dewey’s assessment, the American schools faced the choice of clinging on to their missionary past, thus making themselves irrelevant in a country now deprived of its Christians, or making themselves useful in the modernization of Turkey. The latter option would be on the condition that “they devote themselves primarily to education of  Dewey, “Young Turkey and the Caliphate”, 329.  John Dewey, “America and Turkey”, 349.

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Turkish young men and women,” which would mean “the complete subordination of Christian religious aims, and the surrender of the schools, in spirit as well as in outward form, to secular, social and scientific methods.” Only by making their local colleges completely secular could Americans hope to influence Turkey and, by extension, the entire Muslim world, which would be of “immense import to the future peace of the world.”26 To further advance his case, Dewey referred to a conversation he had struck up with a Turkish-Muslim graduate of one of these colleges—most likely Robert College27—who claimed that if that institution had done as much for Turkey as it had done in the past for Bulgaria, if it had turned out “four hundred men trained to be leaders in Turkish schools and civil administration,” the country would have been at a far more developed stage than it was. In fact, claimed the same informant, the American schools were in a way responsible for causing the harm done to the Christian minorities and Muslim majority alike, by bringing modern education only to the former: It was an indispensable condition of peace, mutual understanding and harmony that all factors in the population should either have remained on the same level of ignorance or else should have progressed together. But American schools had developed democratic ideals among the Greeks and Armenians in Turkey, had given them modern ideas, aroused their initiative and equipped them with the tools of modern life, while the Turks had been left practically in their mediæval state of mind. The result was two-fold. The Greeks and Armenians were naturally stimulated to work for their political independence, which in turn created the hostility of the Turks, and the Turks, seeing themselves outstripped in industry and commerce because of the modern education of Greeks and Armenians, were roused to envy and hatred which easily were fanned into  Dewey, “America and Turkey”, 350.  It is quite probable that the anonymous interlocutor referred to by Dewey was Hüseyin Bey (Pektaş), Gates’ trusted adviser and the kind of poster boy for American educational success the administration would present to visitors of the college. The information Dewey had on the alleged Armenian rebellion in 1915 reflects the talking points of Ottoman wartime propaganda in publications like Aspirations et agissements révolutionnaires des comités arméniens avant et après la proclamation de la Constitution Ottomane (Istanbul, 1917), a work with which the former military censor Hüseyin would have been familiar. For a discussion of this propagandistic literature, see Talin Suciyan, “Can the Survivor Speak?” In Hans-­ Lukas Kieser, Pearl Nunn & Thomas Schmutz (eds.), Remembering the Great War in the Middle East: From Turkey and Armenia to Australia and New Zealand. London: I.B. Tauris, 2021, 263-80. 26 27

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the flames of war and massacre. I shall not forget the earnestness with which he assured me that if all the factors in the population had remained in the same condition of ignorance and backwardness, the various nationalities would still be getting along reasonably well together.28

The American educators were thus held accountable for the woes of late Ottoman society, just as the Christian minorities were made culpable for choices made and actions taken by the Young Turks, who remained curiously deprived of agency in Dewey’s interpretation of Turkey’s recent history. In almost all of its components, this was the interpretation of the Turkish government officials who were his informants, which he uncritically adopted as his own, arguing that “it behooves the foreigner, especially the newcomer, to listen” without the interference of preconceived opinions.29 The result was a series of articles pandering to the Ankara regime. In hindsight, it is easy to see the ways in which his judgment erred. One must, however, understand the context in which these claims were made, and on whose behalf. Dewey’s point about the perceived historic shortcomings of the American colleges and missionary schools was made in a discussion of what these institutions were to be and do in the future. From a pragmatic perspective, it made sense to focus on the reality at hand, and not to pursue causes already lost, even if it meant turning a blind eye to injustice. Dewey was in this respect merely a spokesman for Caleb Gates, whose interest lay in calming worried donors to the American Near East colleges and securing the United States’ recognition of the Treaty of Lausanne. Both men remained convinced that the historic achievement of “enlightening and liberating non-Turkish elements” could be turned to the colleges’ advantage, as “proof of what they can do for Turkey if they make it their main business to … educate, irrespective of religious belief, the able Turkish young men and women who are to be the intellectual and social leaders of future Turkey.”30 What this training for future leadership meant in practice is addressed in the following section.

 Dewey, “America and Turkey”, 350-51.  Dewey, “Young Turkey and the Caliphate”, 329. 30  Dewey, “America and Turkey”, 351. 28 29

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Practicing World-mindedness: Extra-curricular Activities in the Service of Peace at Robert College While the Dewey report to Ankara did not broach the subject of education for peace and international understanding in Turkish schools, his ideas, along with those of historian James Harvey Robinson, influenced the curriculum taught by Edgar Fisher at Robert College, although there is no indication of the two men ever having met in person. Dewey’s visit to Turkey in 1924 coincided with Fisher’s expulsion on account of the donkey incident, which the former knew about from his conversation with American college officials in Istanbul and made passing reference to in his Turkish travelogue. Nor is there any trace of contact between them in Fisher’s correspondence. Still, there is, arguably, evidence of ideas derived from “progressive education” in the material related to Fisher’s teaching that is kept in various archives. This influence is especially evident in the curriculum outline for an introductory course in the social sciences, which is addressed in further detail below. But there were other arenas for the dissemination of the “peace gospel” than the classroom, namely, the extra-­ curricular activities that were an integral part of college life. These included the Debate Society, the annual Peace Day exercises under the auspices of the faculty-led Peace Forum, and Fisher’s own creation, the Political Science Forum. It is to these activities that we must turn first, since these to some extent predated the overhaul of the history curriculum mentioned in the previous chapter. According to Fisher, the interest in international affairs emanated from the students themselves as much as from the faculty. Shortly after the Armistice in October 1918, he had by his own account organized a discussion group called the Political Science Forum, with between twenty and thirty students attending. This forum was, however, discontinued in 1923 on the grounds that it might provoke suspicion in the new Turkish regime of clandestine political activities. A group of students from Fisher’s classes then petitioned the faculty to set up a League of Nations association in 1924, which would stimulate student opinion in favor of the internationalist principles behind the League. At that time, and for the same reason as the Political Science Forum was shut down, President Gates rejected the petition as “unwise.”31 This caution extended to the use of the very words 31  Edgar Fisher to Caleb Frank Gates, “Statement concerning the Department of History and Political Science, and the Political Science Forum”; September 30, 1930; General cor-

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“international” and “internationalism,” which Gates shunned for years, on the grounds that since “Turkish opinion is so strongly against internationalism, and … so bent upon developing a peculiar Turkish nationality” it would not be expedient to use them.32 For almost five years, Fisher wrote in a report to Gates in 1930, “there was no student organization or group through which their natural and abundant interest, especially in the post-war conditions, could find expression.”33 With the improved relations with the Ministry of Education in the latter half of the 1920s, however, the prospects of internationalism at Robert College were looking ever brighter. When Fisher received Gates’ permission to reconstitute the Political Science Forum and issued a call for its first meeting in October 1928, the student response was said to have been lively. “There is a very considerable amount of interest on the part of the students in the forum,” claimed Fisher, “and my chief difficulty is to restrain them in the number of meetings which they wish to have.”34 Little is known about the activities of this resurrected student club, and even less about its predecessor in the Armistice years; however, Fisher’s own correspondence with his superiors and brief accounts of its meetings in the school paper offer some glimpses of its proceedings, and thus a window onto the practice of internationalism among students of Robert College in the late 1920s and early 1930s. From them we learn that Edgar Fisher held the chairmanship of the association, assisted by an advisory committee made up of a selected group of older students, but the organization was described as “most informal.” Active membership in the Forum was limited to thirty-five members, drawn from both college and Engineering School classes, with a number of students on the waiting list. Regular meetings were held once every three weeks, ordinarily on respondence, 1930–1932; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 15; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. See also Edgar Fisher, Diary, entry for May 14, 1924; Edgar J. Fisher Papers; Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Ohio State University. 32  Caleb Gates to Edgar Fisher; April 17, 1928; General correspondence, 1930–1932; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 15; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. This assessment was made in connection with Fisher’s request to add “Professor of International Relations” to his job title. 33  Edgar Fisher to Caleb Frank Gates, “Statement concerning the Department of History and Political Science, and the Political Science Forum”; September 30, 1930; General correspondence, 1930–1932; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 15; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 34  Edgar Fisher to Albert Staub; November 27, 1928; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 13; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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Wednesday afternoons from 4.45 pm to 6.15 pm, with additional special meetings when prominent visitors were invited to the college. These meetings were open to anyone who wished to attend, although disappointment was occasionally expressed by active members that few of their fellow students took advantage of this opportunity35; there was, nevertheless, a long waiting list for membership. Strict rules for attendance were therefore enforced, meaning that absences without reasonable excuse were to be deemed a lack of interest leading to forfeiture of membership, thus sifting out any “aimless and shifty droppers-in.”36 At the meetings, students presented topics according to a previously arranged program. After the presentation, there would be a period for questions and discussion lasting around half an hour, which students regarded as particularly valuable if Fisher’s report is to be believed. To some extent, the Political Science Forum mirrored the practices established by the corresponding Debate Union, whose choice of topics and membership tended to overlap with the Forum.37 As with similar debating clubs at liberal arts colleges in the United States, upon which the American schools in Istanbul were modeled, the purpose of its existence was not to offer students a forum in which they could freely vent their own opinions about matters that interested them specifically, but rather one where they could learn how to speak in public—which in the case of most Robert College students meant mastering the use of spoken English—and to make a convincing case, whether one believed in it or not. These exercises took the form of mock debates between different debating teams—Juniors vs. Seniors, Sophomores vs. Freshmen, or College students vs. Engineers— championing causes assigned to them, such as when “the Hitlerites” debated the “Followers of the great people of the political world” on the subject “Resolved: That the Versailles Treaty should be revised” in November 1930. This was one of many staged exchanges which took place in front of an audience consisting of the entire student body, with  “The Political Science Forum”, The Robert College Herald 2:8 (June 16, 1932): 20.  Petlitchkoff, “The Political Science Forum”, The Robert College Herald 1:2 (December 15, 1930): 3-4. 37  In 1932, the Debate Union counted twenty-five members. Topics chosen for debate included “Resolved: That disarmament is necessary for world peace”, which evidently bore the mark of Fisher’s internationalist agenda. He is also listed as one of the judges of this particular debate, alongside the Turkish faculty member Hüseyin Bey (Pektaş). Hagop Touloukian, “Activities of the Debate Union”, The Robert College Herald 2:4 (January 14, 1932), 9. 35 36

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members of the faculty sitting in as judges, sometimes assisted by visiting scholars and American-educated editors of the local Turkish press.38 What the judges evaluated was the contestants’ proficiency in English and their skill in making or refuting an argument, which presented great obstacles to many. “Our students are considerably at a disadvantage in rebuttal because they are thus required to think entirely in a language which is not their own,” as Fisher remarked in one of his letters to Albert Staub at the New  York office. “In the cases of many students this is a very difficult thing to do when using their own maternal tongue, but when we think of doing it in a foreign language, it becomes a very formidable task indeed.”39 Nonetheless, participants in these student debates were not only interested in learning to speak better English. Hagop Touloukian, a Turkish-­ Armenian student and secretary of the Debate Union, praised the free expression of ideas that the discussions enabled, while Nejat Ferit, the Turkish-Muslim president of the society, pointed to the exercise in maturity and confidence offered by debating: “You have every opportunity to stick out your chest, lift up your head and speak out your ideas.”40 While the Debate Union and the various inter-class debates were grand college events, in which participants vied for championship status, and their performance was judged by a faculty-led committee, the meetings of the Political Science Forum were of a less formal nature. As already mentioned, the sessions commenced with a general background to the subject at hand, delivered either by a student or Fisher himself, after which one  “On Debating”, The Robert College Herald 1:1 (December 1, 1930).  Edgar Fisher to Albert Staub; November 27, 1928; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 13; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. The anonymous critic who reviewed a debate in the school paper made a similar observation, albeit phrased it sarcastically. “After the debate [between Freshmen and Sophomores on the subject of the death penalty] any judge would have ‘Resolved, that the debaters be subjected to capital punishment for murdering the English language.’” (The Critic), “The Freshman-Sophomore Debate”, The Robert College Herald 2:4 (January 14, 1932): 10. 40  Nejat Ferit, “Learn to Speak”, The Robert College Herald 2:3 (December 16, 1931): 7. Hagop Touloukian, “Activities of the Debate Union”, The Robert College Herald 2:4 (January 14, 1932): 9. By the early 1930s, student debates were also being held in Turkish, under the auspices of the Turkish Society at Robert College. The subjects of these debates, to the extent that they are known, tended to revolve around the benefits of modern science and co-education, rather than the international affairs that were prominent on the Debate Union’s program. The Turkish debates also tended to get poor reviews in the school paper, which highlighted the contestants’ lack of preparation. For example, “The championship Debate”, The Robert College Herald 2:9 (June, 1932): 26; “The Freshman-Sophomore Debate in Turkish”, The Robert College Herald 3:4 (January 12, 1933): 7. 38 39

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student presented the arguments in favor of the position that was to be discussed, while another presented a criticism of the proposition made. Only after both sides of an argument had been heard did open discussion begin. The purpose of the exercise appears to have been to introduce a multi-perspectival way of thinking into the students’ minds rather than to imbue them with fixed opinions. In this way, students got into the habit of attempting to understand the viewpoints of different national governments while acquainting themselves with the international issues of the day. A telling example of this was the model conference organized by the Forum in the spring of 1932, which in three subsequent sessions emulated the contemporaneous World Disarmament Conference held in Geneva. On this occasion, the student Hagop Touloukian played the role of Arthur Henderson, President of the Geneva Conference, with Edgar Fisher as Sir Eric Drummond, Secretary General of the League of Nations; nineteen student members represented the participating states, while the rest of the Forum membership joined in the informal part of the discussions.41 This was essentially the forerunner of post-1945 United Nations’ role-plays, an educational practice developed in the 1920s by non-governmental organizations in order to promote international understanding. One of these organizations, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, also listed the Political Science Forum as one of its International Relations clubs and sponsored it through donations to a so-called International Relations Bookshelf in the college library, consisting of books and pamphlets on the League of Nations. Although eschewing the use of “international” in its official name—on the insistence of Caleb Gates—the Forum followed the same type of program and discussion as the Carnegie-­ sponsored International Relations clubs in the United States.42 There was, however, an important difference between the discussion group at Robert College and its Americans counterparts, one that had to do with the legacy of the Great War, which made the question of reconciliation more urgent than in the tranquil setting of an all-white New England college. The students at the American schools in Istanbul came from  “The Political Science Forum”, The Robert College Herald 2:9 (June, 1932): 20.  Edgar Fisher to Caleb Frank Gates, “Statement concerning the Department of History and Political Science, and the Political Science Forum”; September 30, 1930; General correspondence, 1930–1932; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 15; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Edgar Fisher to Albert Staub; November 27, 1928; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 13; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 41 42

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societies scarred by war and mutual distrust, which meant that education for peace was a practical matter of making young people of diverse ethnic backgrounds get along with each other. The members of the Political Science Forum were drawn from all the major nationalities and ethnoreligious groups represented at the college, a diversity that, as Fisher liked to point out in his correspondence, offered proof that Turks, Greeks, and other Near Eastern peoples could engage in civil conversation. This diversity and the perceived impartiality of its American instructor were also listed among the Forum’s strengths by some of its student members. Petlichkoff, a Bulgarian student writing for the school paper, thus described the association as a “great brotherhood of Balkan nations” in miniature: The chief aim of the Forum, unquestionably, is to stimulate a desire on the part of its members for a better, an impartial, and a more rational acquaintance with the great international tendencies and events, and the adopting of a sane view of these last as promoting the desire of peace and international conciliation. It goes without saying that most of the difference of opinion springs from ignorance of the facts. So in our way of procedure the discussion is always preceded by an impartial presentation of the facts of the case in question. And this is the very way in which the purpose of the Forum is being achieved. A group of students come together and discuss questions in an enlightened and friendly way, thus paving the way for an understanding among the Balkan peoples. The Forum, therefore, has to be heartily congratulated as giving expression to a certain extent of the views and purpose of our College. If in the past Robert College has done great service to some particular nation as such, it has now a broader view and a greater service in the bringing together of the Balkan nations in a great brotherhood, and the Forum undoubtedly is one way – and a successful one – in which it expresses its humanitarian desire to help us, the peoples of the Near East.43

The Political Science Forum was thus regarded as a bridge builder, a practical way in which representatives of former enemy nations could come together and sort out their differences for the common good. There is, however, scarcely any evidence that regional affairs, involving conflicting interests between the Balkan states, were being discussed in the Forum debates. The topics chosen for discussion or presented in lectures by 43  Petlitchkoff, “The Political Science Forum”, The Robert College Herald 1:2 (December 15, 1930): 3-4.

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visiting scholars and statesmen, or by Fisher himself, which can be glimpsed in his letters and the school paper’s coverage of college activities, were typically world-stage events: the Kellogg-Briand pact on the outlawry of war, the Hoover moratorium on war indemnities, the Geneva disarmament conference, and the Sino-Japanese conflict in Manchuria. Important as these topics were for an understanding of current international affairs, neither the students nor their respective countries had any apparent stakes in them. Perhaps this emphasis on matters far removed from the Turkish and Balkan reality was a precondition for the Ankara government’s acceptance of the Forum’s activities, which also made it easier to avoid heated exchanges between the different parts of the college’s student body. Nevertheless, there was another venue in which relations between the Near Eastern states and peoples could potentially be addressed. That was the annual Peace Day celebration on May 18, held in commemoration of the first international conference on armament restrictions held at The Hague. Originally an initiative of the ASPL, the so-called Peace Day exercises were adopted and first observed by Robert College in 1923, in anticipation of the Treaty of Lausanne. At that time, the program consisted merely of brief speeches on the Hague conferences and the League of Nations by two of the students, with introductory and concluding remarks on the “Progress toward Permanent Peace” by Fisher, after which “peace songs” were sung.44 The topics addressed in these speeches and in lectures by invited American scholars over the following years were of a seemingly harmless, apolitical nature so as not to raise the suspicion of the Turkish authorities, although Gates, as we have seen, decided to play things safe by rejecting the proposition made by Fisher’s students to have a permanent League of Nations association. In 1926, a Peace Forum was organized by a group of staff members from Robert College and its sister institution at Arnavutköy, the Constantinople Woman’s College, which was to take charge of the Peace Day exercises. The members were men and women interested in international politics and the promotion of world peace.45 No students appear to have been admitted into the ranks of the forum, although its activities aimed “to keep before the student body the idea of 44  “Annual observance of Peace Day at Robert College”; May 13, 1927; Robert College Records; Box 32, Folder 32; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. See also Edgar Fisher, Diary, entry for May 14, 1924; Edgar J. Fisher Papers; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Ohio State University. 45  “Statement on the Robert College Peace Forum”; October 22, 1930; Robert College Records; Box 32, Folder 32; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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international peace and good-will, and to stimulate practical interest in this field.”46 To this end, from 1927 an essay contest was held in conjunction with the annual Peace Day celebration, conceived of as an “opportunity to students to express their constructive suggestions for world peace.”47 As an inducement, small sums of money were awarded to the first and second prize winners (10 and 5 Turkish liras, respectively), paid out of contributions by members of the Peace Forum. The students who opted to participate in the contest submitted their essays under a pen name a few weeks before Peace Day. Only after a committee of three judges had selected the winners would the identity of these be revealed. The students awarded first and second prize would then read their essays to the assembled college community as part of the Peace Day program. The topics suggested to the students reflected the abhorrence at war and enthusiasm for ongoing international efforts to ban the use of arms as means to solve disputes between states, as seen in essay titles such as “The Futility of War” and “The Outlawry of War.”48 Some raised philosophical questions (“Must History Repeat Itself?”) or analytical ones about human nature, such as “The Psychology of Peace” or the award-winning “Evolution and the Decline of War” (second prize in 1927). Others focused on practical matters closer to home, as seen in the essay titles “Education for Peace,” “What Can a Student Do to Promote Peace?” and “What Can We Do at Robert College to Promote Peace?” Students could also choose topics not included on the list of suggestions, as was the case with the essay titled “Peace in the Balkans,” submitted by a member of the Political Science Forum, one Nikolaos Theodorides, which was awarded first prize in 1929.49 46  “Annual observance of Peace Day at Robert College”; May 13, 1927; Robert College Records; Box 32, Folder 32; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 47  “Peace Essay Contest”; March 4, 1929; Robert College Records; Box 32, Folder 32; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 48  Interestingly, the instructions for the 1929 Peace Essay Contest included a choice between “armaments” and “disarmament as a condition of peace.” It was thus possible to make the argument that military armaments could indeed deter states from going to war, which implies a pedagogical desire on the part of Fisher to demonstrate that a complex issue could be approached from different perspectives. 49  This appears to have been the only essay to address the regional dimension of world peace: that is, reconciliation between the Balkan nations with which the majority of Robert College students presumably identified in the period 1927–1929, the only years from which records survive. It is, however, possible—indeed probable—that more students chose this topic as the prospect of Balkan cooperation was floated in the next few years.

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Unfortunately, the contents of these essays and the reasons for why they were awarded remain unknown, as none of them were kept on record. Only a single essay survives in the College archives, which gives us some idea of how education for peace was understood by one of the students who took part in the contest.50 Written in the form of a short story, the Engineer student Yannis Abadjoglou’s essay presented a scene in the aftermath of war. In an unnamed city of an unspecified nation people rejoice in the streets at the news of their enemies’ defeat and the prospect of territorial gains. “Now they were to get millions of gold as indemnity, they would annex their [enemies’] territory and colonies, they would get the hegemony in commerce and industry and at last they were to have no more war which to them, although a most honorable act, was at times quite a nuisance.” The student then introduced a point-of-view character, a man who, having lost his two sons on the battlefield, refuses to join the jubilant crowd in their celebration of what is bound to become a hollow victory. In a rambling speech which makes up the bulk of the short story, the old man vividly describes the horrors of the war, the economic ruin and the human misery in its wake, before he castigates his fellow country-men as shortsighted fools. There will come a time when the vanquished enemy will rise up in pursuit of independence and the war shall have to be fought anew, the narrator predicts; only this time more ferociously. Most of all, he urged them not to be deceived about the perceived material gains or the supposedly noble motives for which wars are fought: You light-minded mob; you have got to learn that war is futile, that war is the curse of humanity. You have got to think for yourselves so that you may [not] be shifted from one thing to the other, like a ship without a rudder, according to the will and pleasure of others. You must learn that war will never profit you as a whole; it will cause you your economical death while it will give your riches to only a small part of other men [sic]. You have to visualize that mutilated limbs cannot come back, and that [the] dead cannot be restored to life.51 50  The reason why the essay was kept on file, despite not being among those awarded either first or second prize, appears to have been the consternation it caused among the judges of the contest. It turned out that its author had submitted two essays, using different pen names, in an attempt to improve the odds. The judges decided to throw the other essay out of the competition, on the grounds of its excessive length, with a recommendation to clarify the rules in future instructions for the essay contest. 51  The Laughing Death (Yannis Abadjoglou), “The Futility and Horrors of War”, April 1929; Essays written for Peace Day Essay Contest, 1927–1929; Robert College Records;

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Abadjoglou’s essay echoed themes and views that were prevalent in Edgar Fisher’s lectures to American audiences as well as in the course outline for his teaching in the social sciences (see below). Among these was a conviction that Germany had been treated unfairly when forced to cede territories—thereby leaving too many Germans on the wrong side of the new national borders—and pay indemnities to the victors of the Great War, as well as disgust at the European powers’ scramble for colonies.52 This was particularly manifest in the part of the essay in which the narrator predicted that the inhabitants of the annexed territories would revolt against their new masters and begin a new and vicious cycle of bloodshed. Although never specific about the war in question, the short story could be read as a parable applicable to any of the Entente powers still left standing in 1918. It could also be read as an allusion to the Greco-Turkish war, with the Greek-Orthodox student Abadjoglou hinting at the hopes once associated with the Greek Megali Idea (Great Idea), which had ended disastrously—much as the old man foretells of the vindictive peace terms of the story. The cautionary tale could leave no-one in doubt about its moral: wars are harmful to all nations, with no victors except a few shadowy profiteers. There seems to be a world of difference between this afterthought and the type of short stories celebrating martial virtues which students had written and published in the college school paper less than a decade earlier, at the height of the war in Asia Minor,53 a testament to the impact of education for peace at Robert College. Not everyone involved in the activities of the Peace Forum was convinced about the merit of the views expressed in some of the student essays. While two of the judges in the 1929 Peace Essay Contest were of the opinion that most of the submitted essays were of satisfactory worth, and some of them showing “a commendable amount of original thinking Box 32, Folder 32; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 52  In an address to the Rotary Club of Jersey City, NJ, Fisher specifically singled out the establishment of the Danzig corridor, which granted Poland a port on the Baltic Sea while simultaneously separating East Prussia from the rest of Germany, as a mistake. For a press account of the event, see “College Head Sees New Danger Zone: ‘Tinderbox’ Has Shifted from Balkans to States of Central Europe”, The Jersey Observer, September 1, 1933. 53  See especially the short-story “You are a hero, you are forgiven” by the signature G.M.T. in the September issue of The Robert College Record, 1921, which celebrates sacrifice on the battlefield in a way reminiscent of the oft-quoted line from one of Horace’s Odes (III. 2. 13), “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“It is sweet and fitting to die for the fatherland”).

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and real sincerity,” a third judge complained that none of the papers possessed “outstanding distinction,” and that all were “extraordinarily similar in content.” There was, thus, a feeling among some that students were simply parroting phrases and feigning lofty ideals. Fisher himself admitted that after talking with some of the competitors, he was left with the impression that the prize money was “a very definite influence in encouraging students to participate in the contest” and that “they do not usually spend a great deal of time in preparation of the essays.”54 Very few students participated in the annual essay contest: nine in 1927, six in 1928, and twelve in 1929, several of them being contestants from the previous year, apparently having another go at the ten liras promised as first prize. Most of these participants were members of the Political Science Forum from 1928 onward, which implies at least some interest in internationalism or, alternatively, the desire to be in Fisher’s good graces. As in the case of this discussion club, the contestants were fairly evenly divided between the nationalities or ethnicities represented at the college, although students of Christian denomination appear to have dominated. For Fisher, it may not have mattered that the essay contest failed to attract large numbers of students, as he seems to have preferred small, intimate groups. It was also in line with the elitist ethos of Robert College, from which few of the enrolled students ever graduated, meaning that those who did were held to be the cream of their age cohort and the future leaders of their countries.55 This was also the thinking that permeated the third pillar of Fisher’s internationalist project at the close of the 1920s: the cooperation of Robert College with the Geneva School of International Studies. Headed by British scholar and Labour politician Alfred Zimmern (1879–1957), the latter institution organized an annual summer school which brought together a selected group of college students and recent graduates from a host of countries, in order to become acquainted with the work of the League of Nations and to discuss international current affairs.56 It was the brainchild of James Henry Causey 54  Edgar J. Fisher, “Statement Concerning the 1929 Peace Essay Contest”, May 10, 1929; Robert College Records; Box 32, Folder 32; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 55  Sabev 2014, 158. The main reason why so few graduated was that the purpose of study in the eyes of many students’ parents was merely for their sons to learn sufficient English, math, and business skills to prepare them for a career in commerce. 56  “Robert College Students at Geneva”, Near East Colleges News Letter 12:1 (March 1931), 8. “Zimmern, Alfred (1879–1957)”, UNESCO Archives AtoM Catalogue, accessed December 14, 2020, https://atom.archives.unesco.org/zimmern-alfred-2.

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(1872–1943), an American businessman and philanthropist with an interest in international education.57 Causey had visited Istanbul in 1928 and held talks with Robert College officials about his plans for the summer school in Geneva, expressing his desire to enroll a small group of the brightest students of Robert College, the American University of Beirut, and “if they can be found, one or two men from the Turkish University and from the National Bulgarian University.” Ideally, this would be “young men of the leadership type rather than of the mere student type,” as one college official related of his conversation with Causey in a letter to Caleb Gates. He added, The idea is to have a very select group to spend two months at Geneva for inspirational facing of international problems. This group will then go back to their colleges where as Seniors they will be able to bring back inspiration from Geneva to inoculate under-classmen with larger international vision … [Causey] is determined to do all he can to inoculate our colleges with a larger desire to develop the international understanding without which world peace cannot come.58

Despite Causey’s initial request that only two of the Junior students be selected, Fisher was able to secure scholarships for nine of the most promising students and alumni, several of whom were members of his Political Science Forum. The group from Robert College thus became the largest from any single university or college to participate in the Geneva School’s summer sessions of 1930, as he boasted in a report, proudly adding that its director, Dr. Zimmern, had been unreserved in his praise of these graduates.59 If nationalism was the illness that plagued the Near East and hindered its progress, these students were to be the cure, a vanguard ready to 57  Unsigned letter to Caleb Gates; February 21, 1929; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 13; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. “Causey, James Henry (1872–1943)”, Jane Addams Digital Edition, accessed December 14, 2020, https://digital. janeaddams.ramapo.edu/items/show/. 58  Unsigned letter to Caleb Gates; February 21, 1929; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 13; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 59  Edgar Fisher to Caleb Frank Gates, “Statement concerning the Department of History and Political Science, and the Political Science Forum”; September 30, 1930; General correspondence, 1930–1932; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 15; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. See also “Robert College Students at Geneva”, Near East Colleges News Letter 12:1 (March 1931): 8.

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inoculate their juniors with internationalism and to build a better future. “Look forward, not backward,” as Caleb Gates urged them in his graduation day address in June 1932, his last before retiring. At the same time, however, Robert College officials could not entirely ignore the reality of nationalism in the region and the fact that their alumni were to take part in the forging of new nation-states. “Remember also that you belong to your country, your nation, and perform well your part as a good citizen.”60 To Fisher and like-minded college officials and instructors, “world-mindedness” was a matter of adopting “a moderate and true nationalism” as opposed to an intense and bitter one. But what did this really mean? How was internationalism true nationalism? In order to grasp how the tenets of international understanding were to be reconciled with the local reality of a new, assertive Turkish nationalism, we now turn to the content of the curriculum taught by the American educators.

The Internationalism That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Teaching on the Problem of Nationalism Important as the extra-curricular activities aimed at the brightest students were, regular and mandatory courses in history and political science remained the core of the internationalist project at Robert College. The pressure applied by the Ankara government after 1923 had forced an overhaul of the curriculum, as the history textbooks used hitherto came under scrutiny for sensitive passages that might provoke accusations of slighting Turkish national sentiment. But in this crisis there was also opportunity. Ever since Fisher first took up his post as Assistant Professor and, from late 1914, Head of the Department of History, he had felt that the required history course was insufficient to the “needs of the Near East,” and that the study program offered too little opportunity for the older students to take elective courses in history and political science in their final year. The need to reorganize the curriculum gave him an excuse to implement some long overdue changes aimed at improving standards in Robert Academy and preparing its students for college work. From 1924 onward, they began required history courses in their final years at the academy, which allowed for studies at a more advanced level in the college. In the sophomore year, all students were required to take a course called “Introduction to the Social Sciences,” which spanned the academic year, before moving  Caleb Frank Gates, “To the seniors”, Robert College Herald 2:9 (June 1932): 4.

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on to elective courses in the junior and senior classes. The latter courses, all taught by Fisher, included “Comparative Government,” “International Law,” “Contemporary International Politics and Diplomacy,” and “The New Europe” which, with a class of fifteen students in 1930, made it the most popular elective.61 As the titles imply, these courses reflected the dean’s interest in internationalism, which also explained why the name was changed from the History Department to the Department of History and Political Science— the latter in lieu of “International Relations” which Gates vetoed for fear of a Turkish nationalist backlash. Evidently, “political science” was believed to be a more acceptable term to the Turkish authorities who were wary of challenges to their national ideology. The objective stated in the course description of the “Introduction to the Social Sciences” did not refer to either internationalism or education for peace, claiming its goal as being “to assist in a better understanding and appreciation of the importance of social relationships.”62 Looking at the actual content taught in the course, there is no doubt that the spirit of internationalism was hiding in plain sight. As mentioned above, the course drew heavily on the approach to teaching suggested by John Dewey and James Harvey Robinson, which combined the study of history with anthropology, psychology, and sociology, understood as sciences “dealing with the life of human beings,” with the aim of solving “concrete, practical problems.” No textbook was used. Besides lectures and some assigned readings—mostly press articles and book excerpts—students were expected to find relevant material on their own, in line with Dewey’s ideas on learning by doing. Emphasis was put on discussion and written reports on assigned subjects—the first of which, carrying the title—, “A Descriptive Sample of Human Society,” is extensively addressed in the following chapter, as well as guiding students in the use of historical materials, “encouraging them to investigate special topics and to grow in independent work and thought.” Instructors included Laurence Moore, a professor in sociology, whose teaching emphasized self-reflexivity and learning to spot the difference between news and propaganda. Another key instructor was Abraham Hagopian, formerly 61  Edgar Fisher to Caleb Frank Gates, “Statement concerning the Department of History and Political Science, and the Political Science Forum”; September 30, 1930; General correspondence, 1930–1932; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 15; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 62  “Introduction to the Social Sciences: Syllabus of Lectures”; Edgar J. Fisher Papers; Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Ohio State University.

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professor of Armenian at Robert College but, since the government’s ban on the teaching of minority languages, employed as a teacher of psychology. Pressured by the Turkish authorities to dismiss Hagopian, Gates evidently believed that he could shield him for a few more years until he could be safely retired by having him teach a seemingly harmless subject. The bulk of the subjects included in the course, from anthropology and history to political science and international relations, were taught by Fisher himself, thus making him the instructor most exposed to opprobrium from the Ministry of Education in Ankara and Turkish nationalist opinion. The unpleasant experience of the donkey incident in 1924 had taught him to weigh his words carefully, however, and to exert caution in choosing what to teach. To some extent, overt clashes with the national curriculum could be avoided by simply staying clear of topics that the government deemed important in fostering nationalistic sentiment. Since 1923, the teaching of national Turkish history at Robert College was the preserve of Selim Nüzhet Bey, whose office in Hamlin Hall was the informal meeting place of Turkish faculty and student members of the Turkish Society. Selim was a prominent member of the People Homes’ (Halk Evleri) central committee, the CHP loyalist organization that replaced the Turkish Hearths movement for popular education in the early 1930s, and one of the authors of a series of textbooks on “Turkish civilization” commissioned by the Turkish History Society.63 The history course that Fisher taught was a general chronological survey of world history, which essentially meant the progress of Western civilization, though allegedly “with special reference to important periods to Eastern European and American History.”64 Exactly which these important periods were is not clear, but it seems likely that the course touched upon developments in the Balkans related to the Serbian, Greek, and Bulgarian movements for national independence, although the history of what was now Turkey proper remained off-limits. Starting with a lesson on anthropology and the evolutionary theories of Darwin, Lamarck, and Alfred Wallace, Fisher would move on to a large sub-course called “the Stream of History,” which covered all periods from antiquity right up to the present, postwar world. The most 63  “Selim Nüzhet: Teacher – Journalist – Historian”, Robert College Herald 3:5 (March 3, 1933): 4. 64  Edgar Fisher to Caleb Frank Gates, “Statement concerning the Department of History and Political Science, and the Political Science Forum”; September 30, 1930; General correspondence, 1930–1932; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 15; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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recent century—from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars up to 1918—was especially well equipped with opportunities for discussions on nationalism. The lesson plan for this period was divided into five units. Four addressed the growth of liberal democracy and the chief political movements of the era, with particular attention to the development of modern nationalism as well as modern imperialism, covering “its meaning, causes and impact” in various parts of Asia and Africa, and “the Great War as the fruitage of the imperialistic spirit,” before rounding off with a fifth unit on “Thoughts and Ideals in the Growing world.”65 Yet, despite his meticulous planning, Fisher could not prepare for the sudden decisions thrust upon him by the Turkish Ministry of Education. In late 1931, the government abruptly decreed that the subject of history was henceforth only to be taught by Turkish instructors with proper nationalistic credentials. This devastating blow to Fisher’s educational ambitions is addressed in Chap. 6; here, attention is due chiefly to the practical implications for his teaching. While greatly concerned by this infringement on Robert College’s academic freedom, it appears that Fisher initially believed he could work around the ban by adding some components of the history curriculum to the syllabus of political science, economics, and international relations, the status of which remained less clear in the government’s decree. Robert College was granted a temporary exemption from the required changes, as these had been announced in the midst of the academic year with no time for adjustment. A revised syllabus for the Introduction to the Social Sciences was effective from the new academic year commencing in September 1932. In this, Fisher had omitted most of the lesson units relating to the emergence of nationalism in the nineteenth century, but kept the unit on “Thoughts and Ideals in the Growing World,” covering developments in science and invention, religion, and current “social tendencies and ideals.” To the latter, he now added “political tendencies” and the headline “Danger Spots!”—which apparently referred to so-called tinderboxes where antagonistic nationalisms could potentially lead to international conflicts. In this way, students would be able to study the role played by nationalism in current international affairs and learn something about the historical background to some of the conflicts under scrutiny, while avoiding the appearance of history instruction. 65  “Introduction to the Social Sciences: Syllabus of Lectures”; Edgar J. Fisher Papers; Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Ohio State University.

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The clearest indication of how Fisher explained the difference between “true” and “bitter” nationalism to his students was in a political science lecture on nationalism as a problem. Beginning with definitions of “nations” and “nationality” and the distinction between nation and state, the instructor stressed that nationalism was fundamentally cultural by nature. The most important factors in the development of nationality— identified as geography, language, historical tradition, race, and religion— are non-political and hence unproblematic. The bulk of the lesson content, however, focused less on positive aspects of patriotism than on what he described as “Faulty tendencies in Political Nationalism.” Listed among these flaws were the “appeal of slogans and phrases,” the “Idea that Nationalism is the highest form of development,” and an overall “overemphasis upon questionable assumptions.” Among the latter, Fisher pointed to the erroneous “belief in the inevitable conflict of ‘Kulturs.’” This idea had been prevalent in a strain of German philosophy dating back to Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (1808) and more recently expressed in the wartime writings of German intellectuals, which in many contemporary observers’ eyes had paved the way for the public’s acceptance of warmongering propaganda in the 1910s.66 Yet Fisher’s criticism of this account had wider implications as an implicit indictment of the racism underpinning claims to white (in this case European) supremacy. Although the American educator was never explicit in his views on this topic—and certainly made no mention at all of the grim reality of Jim Crow discrimination in the American South in his musings on US democracy—important clues emerge from his lessons on anthropology and European colonialism. Like many contemporaries, Fisher acknowledged the scientific validity of racial categories in his teaching, but stressed that “civilization” or “culture” were “more important than racial variants.” In other words, no inherent national traits or racial characteristics prevented any given group of human beings from acquiring the education or developing the skills and institutions of a “modern” society. While there never was any doubt that “modern” society or “civilization” implied a Western/ American culture superior to its “traditional Oriental” counterpart—and some students also resented what they perceived as Anglo-­Saxon political, cultural, and linguistic imperialism, in part embodied by Robert 66  Svante Nordin, Filosofernas krig: Den europeiska filosofin under första världskriget [The Philosophers’ War: European philosophy during the First World War]. Nora: Bokförlaget Nya Doxa, 2002, 227-36.

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College67—Fisher nonetheless linked his castigation of “faulty” nationalism to a critical view of Western colonialism. In his lesson plan, militarism (“the theory and practice of force”), jingoism, and imperialism, whether materializing in the European exploitation of overseas territories in the name of the nation-state or through mandates under the League of Nations, were all facets of the same problem, labeled “Perversions of Political Nationalism.” Together the twin evils of militaristic nationalism in Europe and the European powers’ scramble for colonies in Africa and Asia were presented as the main causes of the Great War, an analysis which Fisher and other pacifist-minded liberals shared with their socialist counterparts and Bolshevik revolutionaries like Lenin. The aversion to Western imperialism—which in this case implied European rather than American—evident in Fisher’s lecture notes sometimes spilled into the discussion topics of the college debating contests. A case in point was one held in the early 1930s on the subject “Resolved, that India should be given Dominion status within the British Empire.” On this occasion, two student teams discussed the pros and cons of Indian home rule of the same kind earlier granted to Canada, Australia, and other white settler societies, meaning the first step toward emancipation from colonial rule by Britain. True patriotism and internationalism implied the rejection of excessive nationalism and imperialism alike but it is not obvious that the students understood the lesson that way. The debating team arguing against Indian dominion status did so on the grounds that India, in order to be fit for self-government, must first become “a unified country in religion and nationality.”68 This argument, which in a South Asian context spelled disaster, as the 1947 Partition would demonstrate, reflected the Kemalists’ preoccupation with national homogeneity rather than any lesson on the need for tolerance between different creeds and ethnic groups inhabiting the same land. The rejection of European imperialism that guided Fisher’s internationalism was also a component of nationalism in developing countries of the non-Western world, albeit not for the same reasons. Nonetheless, the belief that there was common ground in antiimperialism arguably informed his and other American educators’ 67  For example, (Anonymous), “Educational needs in the Near East”, The Robert College Record 2:2 (February 1920), 50. Vahram Kouyoumdiyan, “What is wrong with the English Speaking Rule?”, The Robert College Herald 1:9 (April 1931). 68  Joseph Dimitroff, “The Sophomore-Freshman Debate”, The Robert College Herald 1:4 (January 12, 1931).

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understanding of the nationalist movement in Turkey as well as the prospects of influencing it in the long term. How the former understood the latter was to some extent a matter of how the former understood themselves, and thus which self-image they projected onto the new Turkey, a matter further analyzed in the following section.

“This Particular Dream”: American Exceptionalism, Turkish Nationalism, and the Notion of Turkish-American Kinship It was no secret that relations between the American colleges and the emerging Turkish nationalist movement had been uneasy at best for years. Several college officials, mostly devout Christians with missionary backgrounds, had either publicly or in private correspondence during the Armistice period expressed hopes that the United States would take either the Armenian provinces or the whole of Turkey as a mandate under the League of Nations.69 After 1923, Washington’s refusal to do so retroactively turned to the Near East Colleges’ advantage, or at least, this was what Caleb Gates and others believed. Since America had never taken part in the European powers’ designs for the partition of Ottoman Turkey, it could not be held accountable. This meant that the American institutions operating in the country were better placed to gain the trust of the nationalists now in government, and indeed the Turkish people as a whole, than their now discredited British and French counterparts. While this might have been attributed to happenstance in the eyes of Turks who may not have distinguished between one Western power and the next, some American observers set the coming of “progress” in the Near East against the backdrop of a deeper affinity between the national character and historical experiences of Turks and Americans. One of these observers was Paul Monroe, a leading scholar of international education at Columbia University’s Teachers College and a frequent visitor to the campus at Rumeli Hissar and Fisher’s Political Science Forum, who eventually succeeded Gates as president of Robert College. An address given to the students of this institution effectively illustrates the assumption or rhetorical strategy of Turkish-American kinship. 69  For example, Mary Mills Patrick, “Fourteen Reasons for an American Mandatory over Turkey”, August 11, 1919; Memos regarding sensitive materials, 1961–1986; Robert College Records; Box 59; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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Departing from his initial question—“Why should there be a Robert College in Turkey, or, in fact, any similar American institution in any foreign land?”—Monroe argued that the education provided by American colleges in foreign lands could “bring a distinct contribution to the … nationalistic development of the people whom they serve.” He then invoked the myth of the American frontier made popular by the historian Fredrick Jackson Turner (1861–1932), which held that American democracy, and hence the national character, was formed by the westward expansion along a moving frontier that released American settlers from European mindsets and stifling traditions. “All of the particular attributes which in general are thought of as American, owe their existence very largely to the fact that the American people have lived for most of their existence on the frontier of a cultural advance.” This idea of America turning its back on former colonial masters and the Old World itself was then projected on the country that hosted Robert College: The dominant characteristics of the Turkish people, and in fact of the various groups of the Near East population, may undoubtedly be traced back to the fact that they also have existed and developed under frontier conditions. In the Near East the people have lived on the frontier between Asia and Europe, on the frontier between Islam and Christian cultures, on the frontier between Asiatic and European peoples, on the frontier between the great political powers of western Europe and the land of Western or Central Asia which the European powers sought to control or to exploit. Undoubtedly this has been a determining factor in shaping the racial, national or group traits of the peoples of the Near East. The self-reliance, the initiative, the individualism, the adaptability, the energy, the practicality, the materialism, and the self-assertion which ­constitute the American traits par excellence are due to this continued existence on the frontier of a wilderness peopled at first by savage men and wild beasts.70

The images of life on the frontier in Monroe’s address seemed calculated to reinforce Young Turkish and Kemalist self-conceptions as the importers of modern civilization into an Anatolian hinterland populated by sometimes hostile “savages.” Who the savages were was a topic that the American educator did not investigate; his main point was to stress how 70  Paul Monroe, “Why American Colleges in Foreign Lands?”, Near East Colleges News Letter 11:1 (February 1930): 1.

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the American pioneer experience could inspire the new Turkey to evolve along a similar trajectory toward characteristics deemed fundamental to American education and civil society, namely, “democracy, equality, and universality.” There was, in Monroe’s view, no contradiction between nationalistic attachment to one’s own country and a larger internationalism which saw progress as the result of the contact between different cultures. The Turkish state’s adoption of foreign role models in its modernization, especially the emancipation of women, was seen as an encouraging sign of openness toward the new, which spoke of shared values with the American frontier nation: The American system has provided for the education of women of all ages, of all classes, in all types of education. In the pioneer life the women bore a part equal to that of men. When the time came to share some of the rewards of pioneer hardship, hers was to be a part also equal to man’s. The development of the free public school system at the same period has, as one of its features, the equal treatment of boys and girls alike. While the education of women is no part of the plan of Robert College, its sister college on the adjacent hill develops from the same motive, and the democracy of the idea of Robert College is the same. There was a time not far in the past when it would not have done to emphasize the democratizing function of the college, but the fact that it is possible now to stress this possible contribution of a democratized education not only for Turkey but for the entire Near East is an indication of how rapidly the Near East has changed.71

Education of the American kind was key to the democratic future of Turkey, according to Monroe. Here a clear distinction was drawn between the old European system of education, with its “emphasis on knowledge for knowledge’s sake” catering to the privileged few, and American education for all and sundry, focusing on practical knowledge or “science for life’s sake.” There was no doubt in Monroe’s address that the cause of both the Great War and the Russian revolution lay in the deficiencies of this old, European education, stuck in the past, bent on passing on “the cultural inheritance of the race” to the student, by which was meant the glorification of war and things deemed irrelevant to modern life. American education, by contrast, “looks to the future rather than towards the past.” Its guiding creed, which could indeed be the motto for Robert College, was “the idea of adjustment to a constantly changing civilization.” Precisely  Ibid.: 2.

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because of this allegedly egalitarian and forward-looking nature of America, born out of the frontier where all the privileges and inequalities of feudal Europe counted for nothing, American progressive education was the natural choice for the new rulers in Ankara. In Turkey, observers like Monroe and Dewey recognized or conjured up an image of America as a country supposedly without a burdensome past, or at least a country that they believed had liberated itself from the twin evils of religious dogmatism and European colonial domination. This belief in the inherent good of all things new was also the reasoning that guided progressive educators sympathetic to the vast social experiment that the Bolshevik authorities carried out in the Soviet Union.72 There were of course elements that blurred the picture of progress, even in the minds of these educators, or what might be called the fellow travelers of Kemalism. They could not entirely close their eyes to the nature of the Ankara regime and the nationalism that it fostered. As implied, the attitudes of American observers and educators toward Turkish nationalism were ambivalent. On the one hand, they viewed it as menacing the very existence of American interests in Turkey: testy, forbidding, excessive, and occasionally just plain ridiculous.73 On the other, it was thought of as the necessary force for good which would make progress 72  Apart from John Dewey, these included Henry Ward, a British-born, naturalized American scholar of education, theology, and social justice issues, who made extended trips to Russia in order to study the Soviet education system in the early 1930s. Ward was one of the guests at Robert College’s Political Science Forum in the spring of 1932, where he gave a lecture in praise of the Soviet reforms of education and society. Fisher confided his skepticism about his guest’s “exceedingly favorable” presentation of conditions in the Soviet Union to Albert Staub at the New York office of the Near East College Association. “Dr. Ward, though confessing that there are dark sides to the Russian picture avoids these and picks out only the bright spots about which to talk.” Edgar Fisher to Albert Staub; April 20, 1932; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 15; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. One might add that Robert College officials and faculty were engaged in a similar practice with regard to conditions in Turkey. 73  The ridicule with which the American instructors at Robert College viewed some of the expressions of the new Turkish nationalism is particularly evident in a letter to Fisher, in which Laurence Moore referred a speech delivered to the students by one of their Turkish colleagues. “His speech was ‘Vatan, Vatan, Vatan’ [Fatherland, Fatherland, Fatherland] and so on ad infinitum and roused the people. He used the incident of the Titanic ad libitum (or something like that) when he asked ‘What was the last song which was on the lips of the heroes who went down with the Titanic’? ‘The national anthem’ and that worked in wonderfully!” Laurence Moore to Edgar Fisher; June 21, 1931; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 15; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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possible and eventually open Turkey and adjacent countries in the Near East to the benign influence of American democracy and internationalism. Dewey described nationalism as a disease currently having Turkey in its grip, but argued that it would abate if only Americans refrained from criticism and showed good faith.74 In order to convince himself and others that this was the case, Turner’s frontier thesis and the idea of Turkish-­ American kinship was useful, as “it is not for one whose ancestors left a civilized and formed country to go out into the wilderness and build a new country to question what the present leaders of Turkey are doing.”75 His perception of conditions in the Turkish Republic was, furthermore, informed by his analysis of the successful national unification of Germany in the previous century, a historical experience he wished to use in schools in order to develop “a new movement in education to preserve what was socially most useful in the national heritage and to meet the issue of the emerging international society.”76 The real key to Dewey’s peace education program, as noted by Charles F.  Howlett, was transforming the notion of nationalism into a more transnational perspective.77 In that sense, it was regarded as a phase, a preamble to greater things. “Nationalism has its evils,” Dewey argued in his Turkish travelogue, “but its loyalties are at least less dreadful than those of dogmatic religious differences.”78 By approaching authoritarian nationalism as merely a teething problem, a passing inconvenience, the progressive educator was able to reconcile its existence with his belief in a future triumph of internationalism. There was seemingly no doubt in his mind that the American virtues of democracy, equality, and universality would flourish in the new Turkey. “The impression may turn out only a dream,” he added as a caveat. “But in a Europe where most dreams are but nightmares, I claim for myself the right to cherish this particular dream as long as it is possible to keep it alive.”79 Edgar Fisher, who unlike Dewey had years of experience in working under the watchful eyes of the Turkish government, was more reserved in his assessment and perhaps less prone to Old World fatigue. Even if Europe  Dewey, “The Turkish Tragedy”, 339.  Dewey, “Angora, the new”, 334. 76  John Dewey, quoted in Howlett 2008, 3-4. 77  Howlett, “John Dewey and Peace Education”, Encyclopedia of Peace Education, Teachers College, Columbia University 2008, 3, accessed December 14, 2020: http://www.tc.edu/ centers/epe/. 78  Dewey, “Young Turkey and the Caliphate”, 328. 79  Dewey, “Angora, the new”, 334. 74 75

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in his eyes was not quite the stuff of nightmares and Turkey not exactly the progressive liberal’s dream of the future, he nevertheless found grounds for optimism. He saw promising signs of a new dawn in the relations between Turkey and its former foes in the Near East which convinced him that peace and international understanding were a shared concern for Turkish nationalists and such internationalists as himself alike. Perhaps Turkish nationalism really could be harnessed for the greater international good. It is to this hope and to the impact of his teaching on his students and the way they understood the society they inhabited that we turn in the following chapter.

References Bourne, Randolph. 1917. Twilight of Idols. Seven Arts (October 1917): 688-702. Brickman, William. 1985. The Turkish Cultural and Educational Revolution: John Dewey’s Report of 1924. Western European Education, 16: 4 (1984-85): 3-18. Büyükdüvencı, Sabrı. 1995. John Dewey’s Impact on Turkish Education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 13 (1994–95): 393-400. Causey, James Henry (1872–1943). Jane Addams Digital Edition: https://digital. janeaddams.ramapo.edu/items/show/. Accessed December 14, 2020. Dewey, John. 1923. The Schools as a Means of Developing a Social Consciousness and Social Ideals in Children. Journal of Social Forces 1: 5. ———. 1929a (1924). Young Turkey and the Caliphate. In Characters and Events: Popular Essays in Social and Political Philosophy by John Dewey, vol. 1, ed. Joseph Ratner, 324-29. New York: Holt. ———. 1929b (1924). Angora, the new. In Characters and Events: Popular Essays in Social and Political Philosophy by John Dewey , vol. 1, ed. Joseph Ratner, 330-34. New York: Holt. ———. 1929c (1924). The Turkish tragedy. In Characters and Events: Popular Essays in Social and Political Philosophy by John Dewey, vol. 1, ed. Joseph Ratner, 335-39. New York: Holt. ———. 1929d (1924). America and Turkey. In Characters and Events: Popular Essays in Social and Political Philosophy by John Dewey, vol. 1, ed. Joseph Ratner, 346-51. New York: Holt. ———. 1939. Education and American culture. In Intelligence in the modern world: John Dewey’s philosophy, ed. Joseph Ratner, 725–728. New  York: Modern Library. ———. 1973 Lectures in China, 1920–1921. Trans., ed. Robert W. Clopton and Tsuin-chen Ou. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

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———. 1983. Report and recommendation upon Turkish education. In John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Southern Illinois University Press. Dorn, Charles, and Doris A.  Santoro. 2011. Political Goals and Social Ideals: Dewey, Democracy, and the Emergence of the Turkish Republic. E&C/ Education and Culture 27 (2): 3–27. Hermon, Elly. 1988. The International Peace Education Movement, 1919–1939. In Peace Movements and Political Culture, ed. Charles Chatfield and Peter van den Dungen, 127–137. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Howlett, Charles F. 2008a. American School Peace League and the First Peace Studies Curriculum. Encyclopedia of Peace Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1-4: http://www.tc.edu/centers/epe/. Accessed December 14, 2020. ———. 2008b. John Dewey and Peace Education. Encyclopedia of Peace Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1-5: http://www.tc.edu/centers/ epe/. Accessed December 14, 2020. Nilsson, Ingela. 2015. Nationalism i fredens tjänst: Svenska skolornas fredsförening, fredsfostran och historieundervisning 1919–1939 [Nationalism in the Service of Peace: The Swedish School Peace League, Peace Education and History Teaching, 1919–1939]. Umeå: Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Umeå University. Nordin, Svante. 2002. Filosofernas krig: Den europeiska filosofin under första världskriget [The Philosophers’ War: European philosophy during the First World War]. Nora: Bokförlaget Nya Doxa. Stomfay-Stitz, Aline M. 2008. A History of Peace Education in the United States of America. Encyclopedia of Peace Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1-10: http://www.tc.edu/centers/epe/. Accessed December 14, 2020. Suciyan, Talin. 2021. Can the Survivor Speak? In Remembering the Great War in the Middle East: From Turkey and Armenia to Australia and New Zealand, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Pearl Nunn, and Thomas Schmutz, 263–280. London: I.B. Tauris. Szyliowicz, Joseph S. 1973. Education and Modernization in the Middle East. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Toynbee, Arnold. 1922. The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilisations. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. Turan, Selahattin. 2000. John Dewey’s Report of 1924 and his recommendations on the Turkish educational system revisited. History of Education 29 (6): 543–555. Zimmern, Alfred (1879–1957). UNESCO Archives AtoM Catalogue: https:// atom.archives.unesco.org/zimmern-­alfred-­2. Accessed December 14, 2020.

CHAPTER 5

Wonderful Changes, Broken Unity: Modernity, Ottoman Past, and National Belonging in the Essays of Robert College Students “This Broken Unity”: Ottomanism for the Post-Ottoman World By the end of the 1920s, the peaceful coexistence between former belligerents in the Near East that American college officials had hoped for seemed to be at hand. Whereas the beginning of the decade had been marked by war and uncertainty as the Ottoman Empire lay dying, its closing years saw important developments in Turkey itself and in its international relations. The feverish pace of the nationalist government’s modernization program had impressed foreign observers, especially those with a long experience of the country. The signs of Western civilization and progress were to be seen everywhere, claimed Caleb Gates in 1929: improvements ranging from roadworks enabling automobile travel in the remote Anatolian interior to instruction in the new Latin alphabet. “No one can review impartially the development which Turkey has made within the last ten years, and especially the last five years, without feeling that it is one of the most remarkable events of the past decade.”1 Prospects also appeared promising in the field of foreign relations. The prudence of the new Turkish leaders stood in sharp contrast to the adventurism of their  Caleb Frank Gates, “The Development of the Turkish Republic”, Near East Colleges Newsletter 10:1 (April 1929), 4. 1

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Unionist predecessors, who had dragged the country into war in 1914. “The Turkish Republic is animated by peaceable intentions,” Gates mused. “Their one desire is to be let alone by other nations in order that they may work for the development and improvement of their own country, and they are honestly desirous of settling all problems which might threaten their amicable relations with other peoples.”2 Gates’ professed belief in the benevolent intentions of the Ankara regime, which he set in the context of its radical break with the past, was widely shared among other observers at the time. There seemed to be grounds for this optimism. In neighboring Greece, a landslide electoral victory carried the former Premier Eleftherios Venizelos back into office in 1928 after nearly a decade of political turmoil. Once the architect of the victorious but brief coalition of Christian states in the First Balkan War, as well as the ill-fated Greco-Turkish War, Venizelos concluded that nothing was to be gained from continued hostility with Turkey, and took steps to mend relations between the two republics. The rapprochement culminated in a friendship treaty signed in Ankara in October 1930, with the Greek side agreeing to drop all claims for economic compensation on behalf of the formerly Ottoman Greeks expelled from Asia Minor as a token of goodwill (along with Venizelos’ ultimately unsuccessful nomination of Mustafa Kemal for the Nobel Peace Prize).3 The reconciliation between Ankara and Athens was part of a wider effort promoting cooperation between the Balkan states in which Turkey played an important role. It was, in part, a response to shared security-­ political concerns over Italian influence in the Balkans, but it also offered a forum for discussions on economic cooperation and the sensitive question of minority rights. For observers with ties to the American colleges, this seemed like a departure from the national hatreds which had spawned the Great War, something that might even pave the way for their old dream of a “Federation of Balkan States which every student and wellwisher of those nations hopes for.”4 Edgar Fisher, who covered the annual conferences of the Balkan states’ representatives in the college newsletter between 1930 and 1932, commended the new Turkey for her role as  Ibid.  Alexis Alexandris, The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek-Turkish Relations, 1918–1974. Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies, 1992 (1983), 174-81. 4  “Cure for Wars in the Balkans: Dr. Graves Points to American Colleges as Only Effective Means of Pacifying that Region”, Near East Colleges Newsletter 6:4 (November 1925), 6. 2 3

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mediator among the Ottoman Empire’s quarreling successor states. “She is not actively concerned in the rivalries of the Balkan States and her chief desire is to have a satisfactory agreement between and with them.” The historical symbolism of seeing the delegates convene in the throne room of Dolmabahçe Palace and at nearby Yıldız Palace, the old seat of Abdul Hamid II, was not lost on the Head of Robert College’s History and Political Science Department: This is a very interesting historical development. A number of the delegates to this Balkan conference were former Turkish subjects, or were born within the confines of the Old Ottoman Empire. The separation from the Ottoman Empire came because certain fundamental rights of the non-Turkish subjects had not been sufficiently recognized or respected. What was so clearly realized during the decades when the Balkan States were struggling for their independence was that after all the Ottoman Empire represented a natural economic and geographical unity. The Balkan States have now had some years of independent existence, have erected barriers against one another, and have developed bitter rivalries with one another. Their development has brought clearly into view the broken unity and the Near-Eastern area. The present Balkan movement is an attempt to restore this broken unity.5

Unlike Caleb Gates and other contemporaries, Fisher did not see the coming of peaceful cooperation between former foes as resulting from a radical break with the past, but more as a restoration of the things that held the old Ottoman world together, the “broken unity” lost on the way to modernity. A similar view regarding the other multinational empire destroyed by the Great War emerges from his correspondence with fellow students of international relations: “If only the old Austro-Hungarian Empire had been able to unite the economic units of Central Europe politically, as nature did economically, recent European and world history might have been very different.”6 For all their flaws, the old empires represented a natural order disrupted by the advent of nationalism, with its petty grievances and narrow outlook. A few decades into the twentieth century, and only a dozen years since the Paris Peace Conference, the

5  Edgar J. Fisher, “The Balkan Conference”, Near East Colleges Newsletter 13:1 (February 1932), 2. 6  Edgar Fisher to Ralph Lutz; September 8, 1932; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 15; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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Wilsonian order of national self-determination in Central and Eastern Europe appeared exhausted in Fisher’s eyes. This did not mean that the subject populations of the old empires had lacked legitimate grievances. Indeed, in his view, the main cause of their dissolution was the failure of the imperial rulers to recognize the fundamental political rights of subjects not belonging to the majority population or the national or religious group with which the rulers identified themselves: in the case of the Ottomans those subjects belonged to the “non-Turkish”—that is, non-Sunni Muslim—millets. There were echoes of the debates on Ottomanism of the Tanzimat era and Second Constitutional period here, blending in with interwar period internationalist ideals. In a way, Fisher’s plea for international cooperation in the Balkans might be labeled Ottomanism for the post-Ottoman world. If the economic and geographical unity of the Balkans and Near East could be restored on some kind of weak political basis, at the same time as the individual nation-states maintained their “justifiable, individual national life,” economic hardship and future wars might be averted. The main obstacle was, as in the Ottoman past as well as in the European present, the question of minorities that had ended up on the wrong side of the new national borders, an issue which had to be solved “reasonably soon,” so that “a real basis for effective cooperation and union among nations may be had.”7 In his private correspondence Fisher admitted that he might be over-­ optimistic in this matter, but at the same time argued that there was no reason to be cynical.8 Despite some misgivings, the future appeared promising.

Recovering Perceptions of Students: Aims and Material As we have seen in the previous chapter, Fisher and like-minded officials at the American Near East Colleges liked to view their institutions as the “cure for war in the Balkans,” and their brand of education as “the only effective means of spreading the attitude of brotherhood and good-will”

7  Edgar J. Fisher, “The Balkan Conference”, Near East Colleges Newsletter 13:1 (February 1932), 2. 8  Edgar Fisher to Helen Deering; December 14, 1931; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 15; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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among the children and youth of the region.9 But how did students respond to Fisher’s internationalism and education for peace? The central question addressed in this chapter is how those on the receiving end of Fisher’s teaching understood the notions of modernity, peace, international goodwill, and brotherhood and what they meant for the national communities or ethno-religious minorities to which they themselves often belonged. How did adolescents attending Robert College make sense of the Ottoman past and the rapid transition into the republican or post-­ Ottoman present? What were their views on minorities, ethnic or religious Others, who shared the imperial past and with whom, in some cases, they continued to coexist in the new reality of nation-states. This is an admittedly difficult task to accomplish. Rarely do we encounter the impressions, views, or even the writings of the students, apart from occasional memoirs composed several decades after graduation.10 From the 1920s and early 1930s, some student publications with brief runs have been kept among the Robert College records (many of which were Fisher’s personal copies) and offer glimpses into the minds of young individuals and how they perceived the internationalist teachings allegedly adapted to the needs of the Near East. One contributor to this corpus was a Bulgarian student named Petlitchkoff, class of ’32, an editor of the school paper and a member of the Political Science Forum, who wrote approvingly of the changes that the college had undergone in recent years. “If in the past Robert College has done great service to some particular nation as such, it has now a broader view and a greater service in the bringing together of the Balkan nations in a great brotherhood, and the Forum undoubtedly is one way—and a successful one—in which it expresses its humanitarian desire to help us, the peoples of the Near East.”11 Other articles in the school paper attest to Fisher’s popularity among (at least a portion of) his students, which suggest that his teachings found a responsive audience.12 9  “Cure for Wars in the Balkans: Dr. Graves Points to American Colleges as Only Effective Means of Pacifying that Region”, News Letter 6:4 (November 1925), 6. 10  For example, “Memoirs”, years at Robert College Boarding School (1938–1946) by Ali Neyzi, composed in 1986; Robert College Records; Box 54; Folders 23-25; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 11  Petlitchkoff, “The Political Science Forum”, The Robert College Herald 1:2 (December 15, 1930,) 3-4. 12  For example, Nejat Ferit, “An Answer to Our Questionnaire by Dr. Fisher”, The Robert College Herald 2:3 (December 16, 1931), 6; “The Political Science Forum”, The Robert College Herald 2:8 (June 16, 1932), 20.

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The problem with statements like this, however, is the way that they tend to reflect what the student thought that his teacher wanted to hear, right down to the parroting of certain phrases used by the tutor (“the adopting of a sane view … promoting the desire of peace and international conciliation”), rather than providing evidence of the writer’s deeply held convictions. Fisher himself noted a sometimes rather shallow interest in the annual Peace Essay Contest among certain students, who participated mainly because of the prize money and consequently did not spend a great deal of time in preparing the essays.13 Every analysis must take into account the gap between the intended and the perceived curriculum, meaning that what the teacher believes about the impact of his teaching does not always correspond with impressions on the part of the student. Writing about a later period in the history of Robert College, Orhan Pamuk notes in his lauded account of a childhood in Istanbul that his American teachers often took their Turkish students “to be far more innocent and wide-eyed than we were.”14 This might have applied to some of Fisher’s students as well, most of whom were preparing for careers in business and because of that, arguably, saw little use for the internationalist idealism that he sought to instill in them. Hans-Lukas Kieser has made this argument with regard to the male students attending the missionary schools run by the ABCFM, noting the prevailing instrumentalist view of education among young men which meant that internationalist teachings about good neighborliness appeared unattractive to them because not professionally promising.15 Nonetheless, the apparent popularity of Fisher’s extra-curricular Political Science Forum, which with a fixed total number of thirty-five members had to turn down applicants, suggests otherwise, or at least attests to an earnest commitment to internationalism among parts of the student body—see Image 5.1. Recovering the views of students remains a difficult undertaking for the simple reason that most of the preserved source material is written by college officials or appears in the sometimes heavily edited school paper. One is justified in asking if it is at all possible to say anything about what 13  Edgar J. Fisher, “Statement Concerning the 1929 Peace Essay Contest”, May 10, 1929; Robert College Records; Box 32, Folder 32; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 14  Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories of a City, translated by Maureen Freely. London: Faber and Faber, 2006, 281. 15  Hans-Lukas Kieser, Nearest East: American Millennialism and Mission to the Middle East. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010, 81.

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Image 5.1  The class of 1932. Caleb Gates, seated front-row center. Seated to his immediate left, second and third from the right are the students Hagop Touloukian and Nejat Ferit, both members of Fisher’s Political Science Forum. Source: Robert College Herald, 11:9 (June, 1932), Robert College Records, Box 49, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Reproduced with permission from Robert College, Istanbul

students learned or thought at Robert College, given the scarcity of historical material in the college records. Fortunately, however, a collection of student research essays survives that sheds some light upon the questions raised in this chapter. Kept among Fisher’s personal papers at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution Archives, the eighty-six, mostly handwritten, papers were produced between 1928 and 1931 as an assignment for the course “Introduction to the Social Sciences,” given in the second (sophomore) year.16 Under the heading “A Descriptive Sample of Human Society,” the assigned task was to choose a national or ethnic 16  Robert College file, 1917–1932; Essays by students, 1928–1931; Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives.

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group (e.g., “Turks,” “Kurds,” “Armenians,” “Bulgarians,” “Jews,” “Albanians”) or a subcategory thereof (e.g., “The Gypsies of Turkey,” “The Greeks of Constantinople,””, “Turks: Malatya and its inhabitants”), and account for the nature of that particular society or group. This was to be done with the help of subheadings such as “Geography and population,” “Social organization,” “Family relations” (including the status of women), “Politics and government,””, “Physical and mental characteristics of the people,””, “Living conditions” (including architecture, health, and sanitary conditions), “Animal life,” “Economic conditions,” “Food,” “Clothes,” “Popular amusements,” “Traditions” (including superstitions, folklore, and marriage customs), and “Cultural conditions” (meaning the state of literature and fine arts, if applicable). Many of the students struggled when writing in English, which together with the structure of the assignment itself might have acted as constraints. It is also impossible to follow any progression in the students’ learning, since the essays are mere snapshots into their minds at an early stage of their college education: random artifacts from Fisher’s teaching, which for unknown reasons he retained. Nevertheless, they offer a rare glimpse of internationalist education at Robert College during the interwar period as seen from students’ perspective. Written in the midst of rapid modernization, the essays also enable precious insights into how the Kemalist transformation of Turkish society was perceived by young people at the time. Many of these students belonged to the ascendant Turkish-Muslim middle class which stood to benefit from the new order, but among them are also the voices of Turkey’s vanishing ethno-religious minorities including Istanbul’s Christian bourgeoisie who had either lost or were about to lose the economically privileged position they had enjoyed in Ottoman times. Some of them are likely to have lost family members to the wartime persecution of their communities. Others might themselves have later become victims of the punitive wealth tax (varlık vergisi) introduced by the CHP regime in 1942, ostensibly aimed at wartime profiteers but in reality at traders belonging to the small non-Muslim minorities.17 The papers thus represent a cross-section of different groups inhabiting the new Turkey, including many whose views are seldom seen or heard in the historiography of this period. It is to these views we turn in the following section. 17  Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History. London: I.  B. Tauris, 2009 (1993), 199-200.

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“Wonderful Changes Have Taken Place”: Modernity vs. Tradition The bulk of the essays reflect the sense of pride in the accomplishments of the new republic, and the optimism about the future noted by Caleb Gates and other observers. “Since the expulsion of the sultans and the establishment of the Turkish Republic some wonderful changes have taken place,” wrote one student.18 Everywhere the signs of “progress” were visible, from the architectural style of houses being built to the “European” dress code of men and women. “New, and more beautiful and comfortable buildings begin to be erected, and sooner or later, the old-fashioned houses will be substituted with the houses made in the European fashion,” wrote another, expressing his belief that his hometown of Malatya would join “the progressive cities of the world in the near future.”19 The government’s efforts to improve sanitary conditions and combat diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis were praised, as were the introduction of the Latin alphabet and other outward signs of Western civilization. All in all, an image is conveyed of a dynamic society catching up with modernity. One of the most eye-catching developments in post-Ottoman Turkey’s transition to “modern” society was the emancipation of women. With the introduction of the Swiss civil code in 1926, religious marriages were abolished and women were encouraged to enter the professions and dress like their Western counterparts. This was one of the most auspicious changes that Turkey underwent in the eyes of American educators, who clung to the belief that there was common ground between the secularism of the Kemalists and the progressive teachings of the Near East colleges. It is therefore not surprising that the issue of emancipation is touched upon in virtually all the essays. “Nowadays a Turkish woman can’t be distinguished from a European woman,” claimed one of the Muslim students, noting that the former were given the right to vote, to study at universities, to work “in any office,””, to “attend all the amusements,” and to “dress like a European lady of the present time.”20 Another praised the new system of education and the new laws of “the Great Gazi” which had 18  Mahmed Satil, “Turks in General” (October 1930); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 19  Hadjaoglu Shereffidin, “Turks: Malatia and its inhabitants”; Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 20  Ahmed Rustam, “The Turks”; Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives.

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liberated women from bondage: “Today they are free as much as men.” With a great deal of national pride he noted that a certain Miss Wilson of the League of Nations, who had been invited to lecture the boys at Robert College, had remarked that “the Turkish women were behind the Egyptian women before the war, but now the Turkish women left the Egyptian women behind by the progress they have done during these few years.”21 Not every student agreed on the virtues of Parisian fashion and the loosening of family bonds allegedly ushered in by the new Western orientation. A student of Rûm origins lamented the impact of this version of modernity upon the Greek-Orthodox community of Istanbul and the perceived loss of traditional morals, especially rebuking those women who, in his opinion, slavishly followed the dictates of fashion. “[Most] of the women do not care at all neither for their food nor for the health of their children, so long as they … are able to dress in the latest fashion. Indeed, this vice is spread to such an extent that nowadays fashion has become an incurable desease [sic] by which all Greek ladies are constantly attacked.”22 This, however, seems to have been a fairly isolated opinion among the students, Christians and Muslims alike, who generally equated emancipation with progress, meaning a welcome break with the past. For some of the latter, the liberation of women could even be construed as something distinctively Turkish, which set the ruling majority population apart from the backwardness of the Kurds, thereby underlining the Turkish mission civilisatrice in eastern Anatolia (see below): The Kurds, being an uncivilized people, consider women inferior to man. Women very rarely take part in the amusements performed by men. Women are subject to many kinds of injustice and ill-treatments. They are treated like serfs by their husbands. They are obliged, however, to work in the fields with their husbands, brothers, and sons. In short, the Kurds look upon the women as merely means by which they satisfy their animal or sensual desire.23

21  Ali Feridun, “The Turks of Constantinople” (October 28, 1929); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. Miss Wilson is likely to have been Florence Wilson, a representative of the European Centre of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who took a keen interest in Fisher’s Political Science Forum. 22  John Dimaratos, “The Greeks of Constantinople” (October 28, 1929); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 23  Selaheddin Oğuz, “The Kurds”; Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives.

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Others pointed out the obstacles that would still have to be overcome with regard to women’s rights in the new Turkey. Even among Turks themselves, men still reigned supreme as the head of the family, and the “firmly believed idea that women are mentally weaker than men is not yet totally abandoned.” This was said to be especially true of the Anatolian interior, still largely untouched by cultural contact with Europe. In fact, noted Nejat Ferit, an editor of the student magazine Robert College Herald and a member of the Political Science Forum, one must distinguish between two parallel societies in Turkey: first, “up-to-date or Europeanized society,” and second, “the society which still adheres to the customs and traditions of their forefathers. The first cannot be described without the other and vice versa. The two are merely parts of the same thing, opposite sides of a coin.”24 So how did students describe this other side of the coin, that is, the traditional society from which the Turkish Republic had emerged? In general, those students who opted to write about “the Turks” started their essays with an account of the republic’s establishment in 1923, the official Year One of the new Turkey. Very few ventured into the distant past, and those who did tended to bypass the Ottoman centuries in favor of a myth of Turkic ethnogenesis in Central Asia. This was an understanding of national history that reflected the Turanist musings of CUP ideologue Ziya Gökalp, which would in a few years’ time find its historiographical expression in the so-called Turkish History Thesis (see Chap. 6). To the extent that the history of the Ottoman Empire and its rulers was addressed, it was usually presented as a negative counterpoint to present conditions. “Until the finish of the War of Independence Turkey was governed by unable Sultans,” wrote one student. “Under such conditions Turkey has made very little progress and has remained far behind the other nations in civilization and culture.”25 The Ottoman legacy was foremost to be found in the widespread “religious superstition” that most of the TurkishMuslim students identified as the main obstacle on the path to modernity. In this, they were simply aligning themselves with the nationalist regime, which was contemptuous of an Islamic tradition it held responsible for the country’s backwardness, as well as seeing in it a dangerous rival for the 24  Nejat Ferit, “Turks” (October 28, 1929); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 25  Ferouk Ismail, “Social Sciences—The Sample of Human Society: Turks” (October 1931); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives.

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loyalty of the populace. Yet, despite the Kemalists’ self-identification as spiritual heirs to the French republican tradition, their secularism was not a repudiation of Islam as such; after all, being a Muslim remained the basic criterion of belonging to the Turkish national community. The problem was, in their view, not Islam, but rather that a once pure religion had been corrupted by the misguided teachings of religious quacks and turned into a popular superstition at odds with modern science. Dissolving the medrese (religious schools), severing the links with Arabic and Persian culture, and bringing worship under the control of the single-party state was seen as a necessary means to restore the ancestral religion to its pristine origins, supposedly more in tune with modern nationalist ideals. Some of the students took pains to wed this belief in authoritarian modernity to the emphasis put on the fostering of critical thinking at Robert College, understood as learning to think for oneself: The religion of the Turks is Islam. It was a simple and logical religion. Later this simple religion has been left unchecked in the hands of a few uneducated (Hodjas) who have pretended to preach from the Koran, the contents of which they in fact ignored. The Hodjas had even schools of their own in which nothing but some passages from the Koran were given to the students to be memorized. Then the idea became prevalent that the Koran was a universal compendium of knowledge, and that the Hodjas should exercise a dominating influence in all matters, not merely religious but intellectual and political as well. So men ceased to think for themselves preferring to be told what to believe. The present Turkish Republic has met these difficulties by closing the religious schools; dismissing the uneducated Hodjas; and leaving the religious matters into the hands of honest, respectable and highly educated men.26

Pointing out the modernization of religion and the value of secular education was not the only way in which Turkish-Muslim students attempted to reconcile nationalist doctrine with Fisher’s internationalist teachings. As one of them remarked, among the reforms launched by the republican government in order to mend “the abuse of the Sultans” was its policy of avoiding war by making trade agreements with its neighbors and, by hosting the Second Balkan Conference, encouraging disarmament

26  Nejat Ferit, “Turks” (October 28, 1929); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives.

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and the preservation of international peace.27 Another student, Nejat Ferit, made the connection even more explicit when he condemned the hampering effect that war and the Islamic tradition had had on the cultural progress of the Turks. “During times of [peace] and prosperity, when thinkers had leisure to think and were unhampered by artificial religious restrictions the cultural conditions made great strides. During and after wars, in periods of severe religious dominance and intolerance, the cultural conditions made little progress.” War was thus inextricably linked with religious intolerance, while the cultural dimension of national life had suffered from long-term neglect as a consequence of the Turks being “one of the most warlike nations,” a deficiency now allegedly recognized by the Turkish Republic’s engaging in the task of building the country and educating the people.28 Overall, there is a noticeable absence of references to Turkish military exploits in these essays save for the occasional mention of the Great War and the Greco-Turkish war that preceded the establishment of the republic.29 Not even the defense of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles in 1915, on which much of Mustafa Kemal’s reputation for martial prowess rested, received any mention, perhaps because students knew that Fisher discouraged the glorification of war. In this respect, Fisher’s peace education might have had an impact, although this can be explained as a case of omission rather than active critical engagement with the darker aspects of the past. After all, “religious intolerance” was only mentioned in the context of religiously motivated aversion to modern science and a failure to match the cultural and technological achievements of the West, never in reference to the persecution of religious minorities. The views the Turkish-­ Muslim students held with regard to religious communities other than the Sunni Muslim one is difficult to discern, since, with a few notable exceptions, they go unmentioned in their essays on past and present Turkish society. 27  Ferouk Ismail, “Social Sciences—The Sample of Human Society: Turks” (October 1931); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 28  Nejat Ferit, “Turks” (October 28, 1929); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. The history course of Fisher’s syllabus for the Introduction to the Social Sciences contained a lesson on the Reformation in early modern Europe which stressed that “violent religious intolerance leads to war,” a lesson that the student in question evidently transferred to Turkish history. 29  For example, Ahmet Habuk, “The Turks (general)”; Shakir Redjeb, “The Turks in Salonica” (October 21, 1928); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives.

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The praise for modernity was in some cases of an ambiguous kind. While no student openly questioned the necessity of Kemal’s reforms, some expressed regret for the things that had been or were being sacrificed in the process. These ranged from nostalgia for the old wooden houses of Istanbul which were being razed and replaced by modern structures, to mourning the loss of the Ottoman literary heritage written in the Arabic script.30 While many Turkish-Muslim students ridiculed the old “religious superstition,” others expressed concern or disapproval over the neglect of Muslim piety in the age of secular reform, meanwhile seeking to distinguish between the “corrupted” version of Islam eradicated by the regime and the desirable moral values and sense of community inherent in traditional religious practice. While the secularizing laws were lauded for removing the preachers standing between God and man, “the bad side of the new principle is that the religion is neglected a lot so that many people even do not visit the mosque even once in their lives.”31 Sometimes the nostalgia for the simple ways of pious Muslims—which often went hand in hand with an idealized image of rural life at odds with the gratuitous scorn for popular superstition—spilled into political commentary. Students were aware that this was potentially dangerous territory, judging by their efforts to appear unpolitical and at peace with the new order. “People are rather reluctant in occupying themselves in politics for they have passed many stormy and heavy days during the time of the Sultans,” one of them confided to Fisher in his essay. While many were said to be politically interested, they remained on guard against meddling in such affairs: “They know what it tastes like.”32 References to political tensions and very veiled criticisms of the Kemalist order did, however, emerge, especially in the autumn of 1930, when the Introduction to the Social Sciences course coincided with the political drama of the Free Republican Party, a brief experiment with liberal opposition initiated and then quickly terminated by Kemal, “the Great Gazi” (see Chap. 6). “Misunderstanding of the real aims of the [ruling party] caused a great deal of confusion when the Liberal Republican Party was founded by Fethi 30  For example, Ali Feridun, “The Turks of Constantinople” (October 28, 1929); Ahmed Rustam, “The Turks” (October 1930?); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 31  N. Reoline Rahit, “The Turks” (December 2, 1931); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 32  Ahmed Rustam, “The Turks” (October 1930?); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives.

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Bey in 1930,” stated student Ahmed Rustam. “People in the whole is not aware of the goal of the present government and thus many unconscious criticisms are made.”33 The renewed purges of civil society in the wake of the aborted attempt at democratic reform added to the overall confusion reflected in the contemporaneous essays, since the persecution targeted individuals and organizations with seemingly impeccable republican credentials. One effect of the purges was that nationalist movements such as the Turkish Hearths (Türk Ocakları), which sought to educate the masses through its clubs, lectures, and exhibitions, were now fair game for those critical of certain aspects of modernization. At least two of the students observed that the communal spirit, once nourished in places of worship where people were able to congregate, was gone. “Now we don’t have social clubs for people to get together and discuss the matters. The mosque has lost its importance and … the ‘Tekkes’ have been closed.”34 The secular substitute which was supposedly to take the place of the tekkes was found wanting. For all their deficiencies and the “corrupting” influence of the clergy, the tamed or abolished religious institutions had previously fulfilled a democratic function of sorts by offering an arena for the exchange of ideas and opinions, similar to the classrooms and debating clubs at Robert College which were so integral to its ideal of civic education. “Today there are practically no societies … where people can get together … The ‘Türk [Ocakları]’ founded with the view of bringing together the youth and reviving the old but sound and manly morals … of the very ancient Turks can not be said to have succeeded in its goals.”35 The two latter extracts seemed to suggest that the national project had gone astray. Old hierarchies, the two students argued, had been replaced by new class divisions in the republic, belying the rhetoric of egalitarianism. Under the guise of condemning the perceived failure of the Turkish Hearths, the two students seemed to suggest that not all the “wonderful changes” of the past decade had been for the better. There was a gap between theory and practice with regard to the social and political realities of the new Turkey. On the subject of government, one of the two students 33  Ahmed Rustam, “The Turks” (October 1930?); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 34  Mahmed Satil, “Turks in General” (October 1930); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 35  Zihni Haldun, “Turkey” (October 14, 1930); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives.

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spoke with almost bold openness as the Free Republican Party drama was nearing its climax: Theoretically, ever since 1923 Turkey is a republic. Nevertheless, Turkish government is a very peculiar institution or at least it was so, until about two months ago. The members of the Grand National Assembly, though constitutionally meant to be chosen by the male population, have been nominated and appointed by the president of the republic and his [Premier]. It is only recently that a liberal party has been reformed, saving the president from the scandal of being called a dictator.36

This was a fairly explicit rebuke of CHP rule and “the Great Gazi”— known to have resented any allusion to his heading a dictatorship—which seems strangely at odds with an otherwise positive portrayal of the regime’s modernization program. At times, one wonders how much the students really grasped of what they were writing about and the potential consequences thereof. As mentioned earlier, it is difficult to ascertain the extent to which the students’ writings really reflect personal conviction as opposed to merely cooperating with each other or plagiarizing opinion pieces in the press, ending up with sometimes very inconsistent essay content. Nevertheless, there are signs of an uneasiness in some of the essays about certain aspects of modernity and especially about how to reconcile the internationalist ethos at Robert College with the tenets of Turkish nationalism, and the civic education taught by American teachers—emphasizing the critical thinking regarded as integral for citizens of a modern democracy—with authoritarian society outside the college. All the students writing about Turkish society mentioned the republican constitution and the right to vote, at the same time pointing out that there was only one party from which candidates could be elected. Arguably, few if any of the boys had personal recollections of the multi-party system that existed during the Second Constitutional period (1908–1913) and again in the Armistice years preceding the establishment of the republic. However, the existence of a relatively free press in Istanbul and an opposition party as recently as 1925 cannot have figured too distantly in their memories. The reference to the dissolved tekkes as arenas of debate, 36  Zihni Haldun, “Turkey” (October 14, 1930); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. The student in question was later elected president of the Turkish Society at Robert College. “The Turkish Society”, The Robert College Herald 3:2 (November 7, 1932), 25.

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uncertainty about the present government’s true intentions, and wariness about participating in politics—knowing “what it tastes like”—all suggest that students were not uncritical disciples of Kemalism; they knew that there had been alternatives to its version of a modern society. Apolitical as the essays appear on the surface, and as Fisher may have intended his instruction in the social sciences to be, they illustrate some of the potentially perilous implications of his educational project. There were others, too, that are addressed in the following section.

Ourselves and Others: Perceptions of National Belonging and Ethnic Minorities The rapid transition to “modernity” alerted some of the students to questions of national identity or, more precisely, to matters of “race” or national “essence.” One student, writing on the subject of “The Turks of Constantinople” pointed to the difficulty of capturing any particular Turkish essence in the multiethnic city. As “an international city,” where “different nations living in the same place” had mingled and adopted each other’s cultural traits, Constantinople/Istanbul was something of an anomaly, where nothing distinguishably Turkish was to be found. The geographical proximity to “civilized Europe,” according to student Ali Feridun, had had the unfortunate effect of alienating the Turks of the city from their origins, with the result that “most of the Turkish [customs], superstitions, habits died away perhaps for ever [sic].”37 There is, thus, a paradox present in the essay, although only implicitly addressed by the student, namely, the lament for a national essence perceived to be lost through the influence of “civilized Europe” on the one hand, and the positivist republican ideals of the new Turkey holding that Turks must emulate Western Europe in order to be a modern nation, on the other. A similar paradox is to be found in the essay of another Turkish-Muslim student, who emphasized the “modernity” of the Muslim commercial elite in late Ottoman Salonica, before the First Balkan War in 1912. The merchants of that lost Turkish homeland were said to have been “modern people” like the business elites of “any European commercial city,” who sent their sons and daughters to French schools, and led a “modern society life in every respect … just like the American Community here in 37  Ali Feridun, “The Turks of Constantinople” (October 28, 1929); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives.

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Constantinople.” Having noted this, however, the student proceeded to dismiss that community on the grounds that it “was just like the modern communities all over the world” and therefore uninteresting. Instead he turned to a lengthy account of living conditions among the traditional eşraf (landowners) and the “honest” common people, defined as “the workers, small shop keepers and Hodjas.”38 It was as if it were among these latter categories that the real Turks were to be found. The contradictions on the subject of internationalism/modernity as opposed to culture rooted in national and religious tradition in these essays reflect a paradox inherent in the Kemalist project. This may be understood as a pretense of superiority over non-Muslims bound to feelings of inferiority. Falih Rıfkı (Atay), a prominent Turkish nationalist who served under Talaat Pasha and later Mustafa Kemal, put these feelings into words when he mused about the wanton destruction of Armenian living quarters during the deportations of 1915 and later the capture of Izmir/ Smyrna in 1922. “This was not [done] by pure destructiveness. All that appeared to be European was like Christian and strange, and therefore strictly and fatefully not ours.”39 After all, the transfer of the new Turkey’s capital from Istanbul to Ankara was described as a rejection of the enfeebling legacy of foreign influence in the sultans’ city, a chance to build national culture anew in a more decidedly Turkish environment in the heart of Anatolia. The celebration of traditional rural society as a repository of genuine national culture was in itself an aspect of modernization that the Turkish nationalist project shared with its European counterparts. As we have seen, however, this valorization of supposedly pure Turkish culture went hand in hand with contempt for the backwardness of traditional society and everything that smacked of “the old religious superstition.” All of this pointed to a larger set of questions looming over the essays about the new Turkey: Who were the Turks and what did it mean to be Turkish? Concomitantly, who were the non-Turks and what was their place in the new Turkey? This is a set of questions that has engendered a vast debate and often fierce disagreement among students of modern Turkish history. The debate pertains to the cultural and educational policies of the Young Turk 38  Shakir Redjeb, “The Turks in Salonica” (October 21, 1928); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 39  Cited in Hans-Lukas Kieser, Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018, 360.

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movement: its intentions, meaning, and consequences for Turkey’s ethnic minorities. Some scholars have argued that Turkish nationalism under Atatürk was in fact inclusivist and beneficial.40 Rather than being biological, defining Turks as members of a particular race, it is first and foremost to be understood as cultural, as bent on the assimilation of others into an overarching Turkish identity. This was the purported view of the Turkish Society operating at Robert College, whose constitution welcomed “all Turkish subjects, regardless of race, to join.”41 Several of the celebrated intellectuals of the Turkish Republic were members of religious minorities who had embraced republican nationalism, Turkified their names, and propagated the exclusive use of the Turkish language, like the Jewish Kemalist ideologues Munis Tekinalp (Moiz Kohen, 1881–1961) and Avram Galanti (1873–1961), and the Turkish-Bulgarian-Armenian linguist and Robert College graduate Agop Dilâçar (Hagop Martayan, 1895–1979).42 Taken at face value, the writings and statements of leading Young Turk politicians and intellectuals, following the cue of the nationalist philosophy of Ziya Gökalp (of Kurdish descent himself), appeared to reject a biological/racial definition of Turkish identity in favor of cultural socialization. “Do you want a Turkishness based on race and blood?” Hamdullah Suphi (Tanrıöver) rhetorically asked at the congress of the Turkish Hearths in April 1924. “Are you going to draw blood and send it to chemists for analysis, they will say that it consists of 5% Armenian, 16% Russian, and who knows what percentage Circassian, Albanian, and Turkish blood. You have to choose one of the two paths. Either you accept race, or culture.”43 In theory, therefore, the Turkish nationalism espoused by the Kemalist intelligentsia was open to anyone willing to comply with the tenets of republican ideology. While several of the essays written by Turkish-Muslim students at Robert College tried to pin down the physical 40   For example, Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 (1962); Michael Winter, “The Modernization of Education in Kemalist Turkey”. In Jacob M.  Landau (ed.), Atatürk and the Modernization of Turkey. Boulder: Westview Press, 1984, 183-94. 41  “The Turkish Society”, The Robert College Herald 2:2 (November 17, 1931), p. 16(?) 42  Umut Uzer, An Intellectual History of Turkish Nationalism: Between Turkish Ethnicity and Islamic Identity. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2016, pp. 114-116; Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016, 120-21; Kieser 2018, 289. 43  “Türk Ocakları Kongresi, Hakimiyet-i Milliye, April 30, 1924. Quoted in Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 181.

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or racial characteristics of the Turks, some bear the imprint of Hamdullah Suphi’s pragmatic approach to the definition of Turkishness, dismissing the idea of a Turkish race. The Turks were to be understood as an amalgam of different peoples, the result of centuries of intermarriage between the groups inhabiting a multinational empire. “As you know,” one essayist explained, “in the Great ‘Otaman Empire’ [sic], all the subjects were considered as Turks, and [the Quran] does not object for marrying a Christian wife; so it has been a custom to marry Greek, Serbian, Hungarian, Çerkes [Circassian] etc. … woman you could find all sorts of nationalities in Turkish harems. So I conclude that Turks do not have a special type of physic [sic].”44 It was a view of the nation as a melting pot, which tallied with Fisher’s emphasis on culture as more important than race. Other scholars, often belonging to a younger generation more in tune with postcolonial studies and the human rights paradigm, have criticized the approach described above for its Turco-centric bias, and reproached its scholarly defenders for whitewashing the crimes perpetrated by the regime in the process of nation-building and the symbolic violence inherent in its system of cultural domination. They argue that Young Turk/Kemalist assimilationist policies were exclusivist and racist toward non-Turks, despite their inclusionary rhetoric. Drawing upon Frantz Fanon’s account of French education in colonial Algeria in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) to explain the feelings of inadequacy that minorities experience in a society permeated by Turkish cultural nationalism, they stress the loss of native identity under an imposed alien culture. As a result of being constantly held in contempt and their native culture denigrated, the minorities develop an inferiority complex which prompts them to imitate the codes of “Turkish-nationalist cultural colonialism.”45 The historian Uğur Ümit Üngör argues that most Young Turk nationalists treated Turkey’s Muslim minorities as human raw material, only fit for assimilation into a homogenous and allegedly superior Turkish culture, although what the latter really was remained elusive. It was far easier for Kemalist luminaries to define what Turkishness was not than pinpoint what the concept meant and who was to be included in the Turkish national community. Turkish nationalism therefore depended on clearly identified “enemies of 44  N. Reoline Rahit, “The Turks” (December 2, 1931); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 45  For example, Welat Zeydanlioğlu, “Kemalism’s Others: The Reproduction of Orientalism in Turkey”. Unpublished PhD thesis, Anglia Ruskin University, 2007.

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Turkishness.” “The incipient definition of Turkishness was based primarily on exclusionary criteria, which were much clearer in the Young Turk mind than the ambivalent and uncertain inclusionary criteria that required more precision and further crafting.”46 Samples of the student essays from Robert College provide effective illustration of this argument, as many of the Turkish-Muslims opted to write about the ethnic minorities (Kurds, Laz, Circassians) that the government had marked out for cultural assimilation. As with the portrayal of women’s rights, there was an emphasis on the minorities’ perceived lack of cultural refinement, which highlighted the essayist’s sense of superiority as one of a select few trained to become the future elite of the new Turkey. “[The] Turkomans … are in serious savage conditions. They need good education, morality, and above all, as the rest of the world, they need men of power, of spirit in order to lead them in the right way,” one student wrote.47 Another asserted of the Circassian minority that “they are the most lazy people in the world,” interesting “as far as primitive characters are concerned but for an educated man who wants to get in contact with satisfactory people they are pure annoyance, and being parasites they seem to be [a] nuisance to the society.”48 There were exceptions to the prejudice on display in these essays. While some students wrote extensively about the superstitious ignorance and wretched hygiene of the minorities, down to picking on their table manners and eating habits, others defended them by pointing to positive examples based on anecdotal evidence. “Circassians are not at all superstitious,””, claimed one student, in marked contrast to the others writing on the same topic. “Health and sanitary conditions are  Üngör 2011, 181.  Kafadar Turgut, “The Turkomans around Aintab” (October 28, 1929); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. Perhaps as a result of the emphasis on (Protestant) morality in the teaching at Robert College, the student writes at some length about the perceived ethical deficiencies among the people he has chosen as his topic. “Generally, the Turkomans are known as having no morality … but for my part they are good persons to some extent. They love one another much [and] run to help those who need it … On the other hand, many of them are thieves … They are lazy, do not seem to work hard. In sexual conduct, they are loose. They do not pay any particular attention to morality, because they really do not know much about it.” In this manner, the Sunni Muslim bias against the Alevi sect, to which the Turkomans belonged, blends with the Kemalists’ contemptuous paternalism and homegrown Orientalism, and the ‘secular Protestantism’ of the American educators; each influence reinforcing the other. 48  Reshad Saim, “Circassians” (date unknown); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 46 47

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almost excellent … I have very rarely heard of a Circassian who has become frequently sick, and has died of Tuberculosis. They are all healthy people … the most polite and obedient people in Turkey if not the whole world.”49 Attitudes toward particular Muslim minorities seem to have been shaped to some extent by events in recent history, when the group as a whole or members of the group were perceived to have either served or betrayed the Turkish state. The Laz minority, although “considered to be the least intelligent people in Turkey,””, were praised for being “faithful followers of [the Prophet] Mohammed” who had shown great valor and patriotic fervor during the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922), in official discourse known as the War of Independence.50 Essays about the Laz community repeatedly stressed their apolitical nature. They were seen as having no interest in politics and governmental affairs and, thus, presumably not opposed to being ruled and “civilized” by the Turkish state. This may have been a conscious strategy by some of the students to shield their chosen minority people from any suspicion of subversion by presenting them as docile or “obedient,” as posing no threat to Turkish national unity and ripe for cultural assimilation. One of the students writing about the Laz even pointed out that there “are many of them in our college,” although he did not claim to be one of them.51 The Circassians, on the other hand, were a community which to some extent bore the stigma of national treason, because of events dating back to the recent Greco-Turkish war. During the Greek army’s occupation of the Marmara region, the band of Circassian Muslim irregulars led by Ethem Bey had switched allegiance from the Turkish nationalists to the Christian enemy in pursuit of some kind of autonomy under Greek protection, which reflected badly on the community’s reputation in the eyes of the majority society.52 While none of the students writing about 49  Ressai Ali, “Circassians in Turkey” (date unknown); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 50  Şükrü Raif, “The Lazes” (October 10, 1929); see also Emin Salim Sapha, “The Lazes” (October 14, 1930); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 51  Şükrü Raif, “The Lazes” (October 10, 1929); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 52  Ryan Gingeras, Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity and the End of the Ottoman Empire, 1912–1923. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. See also Arnold Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilisations. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1922.

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Circassians explicitly mentioned Ethem by name, there were several references to the group having rebelled against Turkey.53 The Circassians, originally refugees (muhacir) from the northern Caucasus region that Ottoman authorities had settled in northwest Anatolia, were described as a primitive tribe by one student who firmly stressed that “as long as they stay in Turkey they have to be under Turkish control and Turkish law. They have to amalgamate and cannot [be allowed to] form separate societies.”54 It is against this background that the efforts of sympathetic students to depict them as faithful Muslims, “the most … obedient people in Turkey,” are likely to be understood, as a way of shielding them from implicit and explicit assumptions of disloyalty toward their new homeland.55 The Kurds presented a problem of a different magnitude to the Turkish-­ Muslim students who opted for them as their essay topic. Being a population of far greater numbers than the Circassian and Laz communities, and with a recent history of open rebellion against Ankara (Sheykh Sait’s uprising in 1925), Kurdish culture was perceived as a national threat by the CHP dictatorship. Making the students’ choice of topic all the more remarkable, by the mid-1920s, the very mention of Kurdish identity as separate from Turkishness was becoming a sensitive issue,56 while an aggressively colonial, assimilationist discourse on the need to Turkify the predominately Kurdish eastern provinces prevailed in the Turkish Hearths. By the early 1930s, as unrest was spreading anew in the east, and the CHP was tightening its grip on civil society, the discourse had hardened into overt racism. This was manifest in the series of articles that Cumhuriyet, the official mouthpiece of the single-party state, ran in the summer of 1930, which maintained that Kurds were a rabble guided by animal instincts “and therefore can only think crudely and foolishly … there is absolutely no difference between African barbarians and cannibals and these creatures.”57 It is against this background noise of hardening cultural and racial prejudice that the bulk of Robert College students’ statements with regard to 53  Reshad Saim, “Circassians” (date unknown); Halil Aydin, “Circassians” (October 18, 1930); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 54  Reshad Saim, “Circassians” (date unknown); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 55  See Ressai Ali, “Circassians in Turkey” (date unknown); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 56  Üngör 2011, 241-42. 57  Cumhuriyet, July 30, 1930, p. 4. Quoted in Üngör 2011, 184.

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the Kurds can be better understood, though there are also interesting exceptions. To be sure, there is considerable emphasis on the supposedly primitive, childlike nature of the Kurds, and an abundance of calls for education and firm guidance into “modern civilization.” “They have very little intelligence, or we might say their intelligence is not developed, because of the illiteracy and the fanaticism in which they are brought up.”58 Nonetheless, they were presented as “rightful citizens of a nation which gave them all the possible rights of a civilized human being.”59 Turkish republican rule was presented as a civilizing influence beneficial to Kurds in general, although with cautious reference to government suppression of local revolts in recent times. Without explicitly mentioning the brutal quelling of Sheykh Sait’s 1925 uprising, essayist Selaheddin Oğuz whitewashed the event, in which the traditional elites were crushed, as one of social liberation of the Kurdish masses, in a narrative that reads like a curious echo of contemporaneous Bolshevik discourse on the “dekulakization” of the Soviet countryside, the parallel project of authoritarian modernization in the region during the interwar period: Until 1925 there was a class among the Kurds which considered itself superior to all the rest of the Kurds. This class was named the Agas …, meaning in English the feudal lords and the rich land owners. The peasant Kurd suffered tremendously under these cruel Agas who made the poor Kurds work on his fields, giving him only enough food to keep body & soul together. By 1925, The Turkish Republic abolished all these medieval class distinctions among the Kurds under its control and gave every individual Kurd the right to own the lands which he worked on up to that time.60

In contrast to the contemporary luminaries of the Turkish Hearths, who claimed that “the Kurds have no history” or any semblance of culture,61 Selaheddin Oğuz and one of his fellow students maintained that the Kurds were in fact an “ancient race,” descendants of the ancient Medes 58  Selaheddin Oğuz, “The Kurds” (date unknown); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 59  Orhan Kashkinoglou, “The Kurds” (October 22, 1928); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 60  Selaheddin Oğuz, “The Kurds” (date unknown); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 61 ̇  Ishak Refet (Işıtman) in Türk Ocakları Üçüncü Kurultayı Zabıtları. Istanbul: Kader, 1927, p. 225. Quoted in Üngör 2011, 231

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and mentioned in Assyrian sources.62 Furthermore, the Kurds were said to have a rich folklore, being fond of telling stories about “Persian kings and heroes,””, although these were not to the student’s liking (“They have too much bravery and heroism in them”). Even more remarkable is the statement made by Selaheddin Oğuz, himself a leading member of Robert College’s Turkish Society,63 about Kurdish literature, considering the CHP regime’s policy of erasing all traces of non-Turkish culture in the eastern provinces: Since there are books written in Kurdish, it becomes rather difficult to deny the Kurdish literature. It is certain that the Kurds had men of letters and that many books were translated from Persian and Arabic, in addition to the books written in the Kurdish itself. But unfortunately, it is almost impossible, now, to find transcripts of such books. Many Europeans, however, have made investigations in Kurdish and in 1879 a French-Kurdish dictionary was published under the auspices of the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg. In 1872 a grammar and vocabulary of Hakkari dialect was published by Samuel Rhea.64

Evidently, Selaheddin Oğuz possessed an above average knowledge about his subject, culled from English encyclopedias in the college library as well as from observations by his father, who had traveled widely in the Kurdish regions. It is possible that his father was a CHP functionary or worked with the “Eastern inspector” conducting ethnographic research in the eastern provinces as well as confiscating or destroying non-Turkish books and manuscripts on behalf of the Turkish Hearths.65 This would explain Selaheddin Oğuz’s seeming familiarity with Kurdish literature, and possibly his explicit reference to the Kurds as a nation. But while he seemed to recognize a separate Kurdish identity, rooted in a long history, he saw no future for it besides assimilation into a Turkish national culture that he deemed superior. “It is very doubtful as to whether a nation, which scarcely has one educated man out of one hundred, will be likely to maintain its 62  See especially Orhan Kashkinoglou, “The Kurds” (October 22, 1928); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 63  “The Turkish Society”, The Robert College Herald 3:2 (November 7, 1932), 25. 64  Selaheddin Oğuz, “The Kurds” (date unknown); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. The grammar referred to is Brief Grammar and Vocabulary of the Kurdish Language of the Hakari Dialect by the Protestant missionary Samuel A. Rhea of the ABCFM, published posthumously in 1869. 65  Üngör 2011, 226.

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independence even if it is granted to it.”66 Toward the end of his essay, even he abruptly changed his tune and fell back on colonialist tropes about the Kurds lacking morals and ethics. Despite positive statements and the occasional nuance in the portrayal of certain Muslim minorities, none of the essays written by Turkish-­Muslim students challenged the Young Turks’ core assumptions about the nonTurkish populations as inherently inferior in terms of culture: noble savages, at best, whose fate was to be elevated through national education and turned into Turks. One of the key concepts of Kemalist thought was that civilization was synonymous with Turkishness, from which followed a conception of non-Turkish people, especially in the East, as living in the Middle Ages. In light of this, the historian Ussama Makdisi has characterized the Young Turks’ attitudes as “Ottoman orientalism” which “implicitly and explicitly acknowledged ‘the West’ to be the home of progress and ‘the East’, writ large, to be a present theater of backwardness.”67 It is clear that the writers of the papers mentioned thus far identified themselves as modern Turks, belonging to the educated elite, even though occasional references were made to Circassian descent or a mixed heritage that rendered the quest for ethnic or racial origins meaningless.68 To do otherwise would, of course, have carried certain risk. The fact that some dared to address controversial topics, such as the Kurdish question, is remarkable in itself, even if this was done in an ever so circumspect fashion. Many students opted for safer topics, such as the politically harmless Gypsies.69 What self-ascribed members of the Muslim, non-Turkish communities thought of themselves and their place in the post-Ottoman Turkey is therefore hard to ascertain from these essays. However, there is the notable exception of the Christian minorities, which were well-represented in the Robert College student community, to which we turn in the following section. 66  Selaheddin Oğuz, “The Kurds” (date unknown); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 67  Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism”, The American Historical Review 107:3 (June 2002): 768-96. 68  For example, Halil Aydin, “Circassians” (October 18, 1930); N. Reoline Rahit, “The Turks” (December 2, 1931); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 69   For example, Athanasios N.  Tryantaphyllides, “The Gypsies of Constantinople” (October 25, 1928); Safi Ferdi, “The Gipsies in Turkey” (October 28, 1929); Mahmoud Gokwa, “Descriptive Sample of Human Society: The Gypsies (Constantinople)” (October 28, 1929); Necdet Zubeir, “The Gypsies of Turkey” (October 28, 1928); Adil Selim, “Gypsies of Scutari” (date unknown); F. Petrides, “Gypsies” (date unknown); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives.

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Minority Voices: Self-representations Among Turkish-Greek and Armenian Students In theory, the new Turkey was a society of equals, in which the boundaries that separated citizens according to religion had either disappeared or were about to disappear. The Ottoman millet system, which granted certain groups the privilege of religious autonomy to some degree but denied civic rights to individuals, had been abolished by the republic, which assigned certain rights to individuals but not to groups. One of the individual rights guaranteed by the constitution was the liberty to worship freely. While most Turkish-Muslim students made no reference at all to the historic or contemporary existence of Christians and Jews, a few of those writing about conditions in Istanbul, the only place in Turkey where substantial numbers of non-Muslim minorities still resided, commented on their lingering presence. One Ibrahim Zehi noted persistent religious divisions between the city’s Muslims, Christians, and Jews, but insisted that all of these communities “have equal rights in everything.” Adding that openly displayed piety was no longer as common as in the past, he maintained that anyone could still worship without fear of persecution. “Most of the people say that they are Moslems at heart and that they do not have to show it by action to others. The Christians are free to carry out any practice; and everybody is free to choose any branch to belong to.”70 There were, however, elements in the essays of Turkish-Muslim students that belied the image of benevolent blindness to religious differences. Despite the condescending tone in references to Islamic tradition, being a (Sunni) Muslim was central to their understanding of Turkish identity. Religious interlopers were treated with suspicion, as demonstrated in an essay on the Persian community of Istanbul by Orhan Fikri, one of the editors of the school paper, The Robert College Herald, and secretary of the school’s Turkish Society. “They seem very religious but nobody knows what they are in reality. I think, they give up even that for money. I know of one Persian who became a Christian to marry a Bulgarian woman who was likely to help him financially.”71 The student’s puzzlement at this example of hybrid identity reflects the overall confusion in 70  Ibrahim Zehi, “Constantinople Turks” (date unknown); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 71  Orhan Fikri, “Persians in Constantinople” (October 14, 1930); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives.

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definitions of Turkishness that permeated public debates in the press and the Turkish Hearths throughout the 1920s, in which conceptions of race and religion fed into understandings of an allegedly secularized nation. As the historian Marc Baer has noted, the arrival of the Salonican Dönme (descendants of the followers of the seventeenth-century Jewish mystic and self-anointed Messiah Sabbatai Zevi, who converted to Islam and formed their own tightly knit community) in the wake of the 1923 population exchange with Greece prompted a public controversy about the newcomers’ claim to Turkish nationality. The Dönme were accused of being secret Jews posing as Muslim Turks in nationalist press: “parasites” who had hoarded their wealth while “real” Turks had fought and bled for their country. The only choice given to Dönme “foreigners” was between leaving or renouncing their separate customs and assimilating into Turkish majority culture.72 This row over the religious (and racial) identity required for inclusion in the Turkish nation begs the question of what conditions were like for the remnants of the Christian communities still living in the country. What was their place in the homogenizing nation-state? Would it be possible to be a Greek or an Armenian and at the same time a Turk? Unlike the Dönme and other Muslim minorities, such as the Kurds, the Circassians, and the Laz, only the Greek and Armenian communities of Istanbul and its surroundings were recognized as having any semblance of group cultural rights, guaranteed by international treaty. The minority clauses of the Lausanne peace treaty stipulated that the non-Muslim communities would have the freedom to conduct their religious affairs, use their mother tongues, maintain their own press and schools, and be able to follow their own customs in personal status law. None of this had ever been the intention of Kemal’s nationalist movement, many of whose leading cadres had served under Talaat Pasha and were deeply implicated in the Armenian genocide and other policies to cleanse Turkish soil of its “alien” native non-Muslims. The exemption of the Armenian and Greek-­ Orthodox Patriarchs and their flocks in Istanbul from the expulsion of Anatolian Christians was a grudging concession made to the Western powers in exchange for ending their occupation of the old imperial capital and the Straits. Article 88 of the constitution adopted by the Grand National Assembly in 1924 thus stated that the “people of Turkey, regardless of their religion and race shall, in terms of citizenship, be called 72  Marc Baer, “Turkish nationalism and the Dönme”. In Hans-Lukas Kieser (ed.), Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Towards Post-National Identities. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013, 67-73.

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‘Turk’.”73 As the historian and student of Armenian feminism Lerna Ekmekçioğlu argues, definitions of Turkishness and Turkish citizenship were deliberately kept vague in order to pave the way for the future exclusion at will of those Christians recognized as citizens of Turkey by the Lausanne treaty. The Greek-Orthodox Rûm and the Armenian Christians of varying denominations remaining in Istanbul were henceforth the “step-citizens” of the republic, or what Ekmekçioğlu terms “secular dhimmis”: hypothetically equal citizens of a modern nation-state but effectively imperial subjects granted a degree of protection not as a constitutional right but as a favor bestowed upon them by their Muslim rulers in return for their obedience.74 The issue of citizenship rights and the marginalization of Greeks in the new Turkey was the dominant topic in essays written by students of Greek-­ Orthodox background at Robert College.75 While some adhered to the official line that Greeks enjoyed the same rights as Turks, including suffrage,76 others offered fairly bold critiques of the discrimination suffered in the republican era. “The Greeks in this part of the world are under the Turkish yoke, pay tribute to the Turkish government and do not enjoy the same privileges and rights the Turks are enjoying,” wrote one. “Some years ago they enjoyed some of these privileges but now they were deprived of them.”77 Several essayists pointed out that although Greeks could vote and were obliged to perform military service and pay various taxes, they were barred from public office and the legal profession.78 That the Greek 73  Text given in A.  Gözübüyük and Z.  Sezgin, 1924 Anayasası Hakkındaki Meclis Görüşmeleri, Ankara 1957, 441. Quoted in Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016, 105. 74  Ekmekçioğlu 2016, 105-9. 75  A few students of Greek ethnicity attending Robert College who came from Greece or the diaspora communities around the Black Sea opted to write about less sensitive topics unrelated to conditions in Turkey, for example, Leonidas Scouloumbrides, “Roumanians” (October 28, 1929); Demetrius C. Panopoulos, “The Greeks of Carpenissi” (October 27, 1929); Georgiades, “The Maniates (Greeks of Mani, Peloponnese)” (date unknown); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 76  For example, Alexander Vafiades, “The Greeks of Constantinople” (October 25, 1928); George Zombiades, “The Greeks of Constantinople” (October 25, 1928); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 77  N. Courtessis, “Essay: The Greeks of Constantinople” (October 28, 1929); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 78  Ibid.; John Dimaratos, “The Greeks of Constantinople” (October 28, 1929); Ketselides, “The Greeks of Constantinople” (October 28, 1929); John Vafopoulos, “The Greeks of

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“subjects” of Turkey—the term “citizens” was rarely used in these self-­ descriptions by Turkish Greeks—had enjoyed more rights in the Ottoman past did not escape the students’ attention. A particular grievance mentioned in these essays was the restriction on movement imposed on Turkish-Greek citizens by the government in 1925, which prohibited them from travels to the Anatolian interior. As Alexis Alexandris notes in his study of the Greek minority, the effect of the travel ban was that Rûm entrepreneurs with commercial establishments and property outside Istanbul were more or less forced out of business, thus becoming more inclined to emigrate.79 Nearly all the Constantinopolitan Greek students mentioned the dramatic decline in the demographics of their community after the end of the Allied occupation. In 1924, the Greek-Orthodox population of Istanbul had numbered almost 300,000, out of a total 700,000 city residents, while in 1927 that number had dropped to between 80,000 and 100,000.80 Nonetheless, some glimmers of hope penetrated the gloom that permeates the essays. Among those Greek students who insisted that the Turkish government should grant them rights equal to those of the “real” Turks, the growing “influence of European civilization” and the Kemalist emancipation of women gave cause for cautious optimism.81 “The [Turkish-­ Greek] women by and by become more and more independent,” noted one George Bastounis. “Perhaps in the future they will be completely Constantinople” (October 28, 1929); A. M. Afendoulis, “The Greeks of Constantinople” (date unknown); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 79  Alexandris 1992 (1983), 139-43. 80  Alexander Vafiades, “The Greeks of Constantinople” (October 25, 1928); George Zombiades, “The Greeks of Constantinople” (October 25, 1928); A. M. Afendoulis, “The Greeks of Constantinople” (date unknown); N. Courtessis, “The Greeks of Constantinople” (October 28, 1929); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. Alexandris 1992 (1983), 142. 81   There is a discernible divergence between essays in the assessment of the Constantinopolitan Greeks’ rights as citizens of Turkey, one seemingly dependent on the year they were written. While those that were submitted in October 1928 tend to express a more optimistic outlook, essays handed in the following year, that is, October 1929, are more reserved or negative in tone. This may reflect the dramatic developments affecting the community, from the devastating fire in, and subsequent Turkification of the Greek-­ dominated neighborhood of Tatavla—renamed Kurtuluş, Turkish for liberation, adding insult to the previous residents’ injury—in January 1929, to the closure of the Greek-­ language newspaper Chronika on the charge of insulting “Turkishness,” in July of the same year. Alexandris 1992 (1983), 140-42.

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independent, and work as men work, and mix also [in] politics.”82 Modernity was the name of the Messiah that would deliver the embattled minority. Indeed, in the eyes of some students, the dire conditions of the Constantinopolitan Greeks were not primarily the result of restrictions imposed by the Turkish authorities, but more the stifling conservatism of the community itself. Since the Kemalist regime had dismantled all the secular institutions of the city’s Greek community after 1923, the only permissible channels for Greek cultural expression and social bonding that remained were the Church and the family. One student, Ketselides, wrote at some length about the crowded churches on religious feast days and the unity of the family, praising these elements for preserving “the national spirit”; yet he also pointed out the intergenerational tensions that easily arose within families, as the elders “do not give the liberty that the youth ought to receive.” Perhaps speaking from personal experience or out of fear of what his own future held in store, Ketselides wrote of how Greek boys had no say in choosing whom to marry, and were groomed for a life in the service of the family business, where cultural refinement counted for little. “[A] merchant is supposed to know all about his business and it does not matter if he is in the dark about everything else … I can say that it is impossible to find a Greek in the whole city … that is interested in philosophy or literature … Fine art for them is the … cinema. They would never think of taking the trouble to visit the antiquities of the city.” Ketselides concluded his essay with a plea for communal reform and the embrace of modernity. “All the Greeks are backward as compared to other people and the only solution to solve this problem would be to become more liberal … The only hope for the future is that they try to get away from their old customs.”83 One route of escape from the stifling grip of one’s local community was through emigration; the other possibility was assimilation into the Turkish majority society. “Close down your schools, renounce Armenianness, and accept the Turkish culture and then we will call you ‘Turk!’” as Hamdullah Suphi (Tanrıöver) rhetorically put it in the Grand National Assembly’s debate on the citizenship clause in the draft of the 1924 constitution.84 82  George Bastounis, “The Greeks of Constantinople” (date unknown); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 83  Ketselides, “The Greeks of Constantinople” (October 28, 1929); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 84  Quoted in Ekmekçioğlu 2016, 104.

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Despite the minority rights guaranteed by the Lausanne treaty, the minorities were under constant pressure from the Turkish authorities to renounce their “privileges” in the name of republican equality. After the 1924 Unification of Education act, government-appointed teachers of Turkish, as well as Turkish co-directors, were forced upon the remaining Greek and Armenian schools, which had to pay their salaries from their own meager funds, just as was the case with the Turkish state teachers at Robert College.85 From the late 1920s onward the non-Muslim minorities were also targeted by a movement originating among nationalist university students which, under the slogan “Citizen, Speak Turkish!” (vatandaş Türkçe konuş), campaigned for a ban on speaking any language other than Turkish in public places. As Senem Aslan points out in her analysis of the campaign, its brunt was born primarily by the Judeo-Spanish-speaking Jews who filled the postwar void left by their former Christian competitors in Turkey’s economy, but the hostility inevitably affected the few remaining Greek and Armenian-speakers as well.86 Some prominent members of the minorities, such as the aforementioned Jewish Kemalists Avram Galanti and Munis Tekinalp (Moiz Kohen), joined the campaign and urged their co-religionists to assimilate. Among Istanbul’s Armenian community, the regime loyalists organized themselves into the Society for the Elevation of Turks and Armenians, while in the Greek community that role was performed by followers of Papa Eftim, a maverick priest of Cappadocian origins who sought to set up a Turkish-Orthodox Church in opposition to the Greek-Orthodox Patriarchate.87 In 1935, these groups would join forces in an “association of lay Christian Turks,” which, with the blessing of the CHP, called for the closing of all minority schools, the abandonment of their Greek and Armenian mother tongues, and full integration into Turkish mainstream society. “Since it is impossible for us to live as minorities,” they argued, “let us declare once and for all our readiness for fusion.”88 There is scarcely any evidence that the policies proposed by regime loyalists enjoyed widespread support in the Greek and Armenian communities, and none at all in the essays of Robert College students belonging  Alexandris 1992 (1983), 190; Ekmekçioğlu 2016, 124.  Senem Aslan, “‘Citizen, Speak Turkish!’: A Nation in the Making”, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 13:2 (2007): 245-72. 87  Ekmekçioğlu 2016, 109-14; Alexandris 1992 (1983), 183-84. 88  Quotation in Alexandris 1992 (1983), 184. 85 86

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to the Christian minorities. Nevertheless, the secularizing message of Kemalism appears to have held some appeal among members of those groups. Hagop Touloukian, a Turkish-Armenian student and a member of the Political Science Forum, expressed optimism about the prospects of his fellow Armenians, whom he claimed to be “on the way of progress of self-cultivation.” The main obstacles to this that he identified in his essay were the narrow national and religious focus of most Armenian publications, which “consequently … become quite uninteresting to the somewhat educated who looks out for European or American papers [instead],” and the “false & superstitious conceptions” which bound the people to the Church.89 Although not explicitly endorsing Kemalism, Touloukian appeared to be in tune with some of its basic tenets, notably its praise for the education and emancipation of girl students. As in the case of the Constantinopolitan Greek, Ketselides, modernity itself seemed to be the answer to the current woes of the community, whether this was the cosmopolitan civilization of the West or the more national modernity on offer in the Turkish Republic. Lerna Ekmekçioğlu has argued that Kemalism, for all its Turco-centrism and discrimination against minorities, held promise for Armenians in Turkey, some of whom may very well have felt genuine enthusiasm for the new order. The professed secularism of the republic, the introduction of Western dress codes and the uncovering of Muslim women—at least in Istanbul—brought “unanimity and thus anonymity,” enabling “non-­ Muslim women to cover their difference.””. As long as Armenians kept quiet, they might be able to blend in and thus retain a place in the new Turkey. “In short, Kemalism promised an easier way ‘to pass’ as Turkish without necessarily turning into one, an ideal solution for Armenians who themselves did not aspire to become Turks anyway.”90 To this observation can be added that Turkish-Armenian students at Robert College developed strategies for writing about their community, or Armenians in general that involved aligning themselves in some ways with official Kemalist truths, while sometimes implicitly challenging them. Some sought to write the Armenians into the Turkish national narrative by stressing their contribution to Turkish culture. “Armenians have been the father of Turkish national theatre,” wrote Aram Balayan. “This is 89  Hagop Touloukian, “The Armenians” (October 28, 1929); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 90  Ekmekçioğlu 2016, 118.

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recognized to be so by Turks who know something about it.”91 The above mentioned Hagop Touloukian referred to the craftsmanship of Armenian goldsmiths and other artisans, whose masterpieces had once belonged to sultans and could now be readily admired in Istanbul’s museums.92 A third student even ventured to point out the prominent role that Armenians had played in politics and public office in recent Ottoman times: “Armenians have given many political men to Turkey and twenty years ago Armenian ministers were found in the Turkish cabinet.”93 This, however, was a very risky subject to address, given the stigma of the treason attributed to the Ottoman Armenian politicians of Dashnak and other Armenian parties of the Second Constitutional period, who, up until the outbreak of war in 1914, had advocated reforms that would have granted the eastern Armenian provinces a degree of autonomy. The ruling Young Turks had viewed such demands as disloyalty to the Ottoman fatherland and the prelude to foreign intervention and Armenian independence. As mentioned above, the remaining Christians in Turkey were explicitly barred from holding public office in the Republic; consequently, most Armenian students at Robert College refrained from too-overt mentions of Armenian involvement in politics. Instead, they stressed the common ground between their community and the modernizing ethos of Turkish nationalism. Perhaps in an effort to show that the Armenians once inhabiting the Cilician town of Maraş (whence they were deported in 1915) were not so different from modern Turks, and thus compatible with the new republican order, H. Kassourian wrote approvingly of gender progress and the rejection of tradition. “The status of women were … near equality [among] Armenians; the women wore no veil, and polygamy was considered a sin, as condemned by the Bible.”94 Others still presented a narrative of gender equality as something inherently Armenian that had existed in ancient times and in the Middle Ages, but had been lost during the Ottoman centuries when the Armenians came under the influence of the “eastern idea

91  Aram Balayan, “The Armenians” (date unknown); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 92  Hagop Touloukian, “The Armenians” (October 28, 1929); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 93  Kasbar Papazian, “The Armenians” (October 26, 1931); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 94  H.  Kassourian, “The Armenians in Marash—1900 A.D.” (October 26, 1928); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives.

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that men were superior than women.”95 The recent emancipation of women was cast as a token of how Armenians were returning to the fold of Western civilization, much as the whole of Turkey was now moving away from the Orient and onto the path of “progress.” The Armenian experience was thus held up as a mirror to the Turkish nationalists’ embrace of modernity, suggesting that the two peoples could share the future together, just as they had shared the Ottoman past. There were, nonetheless, severe constraints on what could be written about the Armenian minority and its role in Turkish history, even in the shielded environment of an American college. Several of the Armenian students therefore opted to write their essays on Soviet Armenia, which was the closest thing to fulfillment of the national aspirations that the Young Turks had denied them.96 Lying outside of Turkey’s national boundaries, it was a topic that could be construed as less threatening to Turkish sensibilities, given that the spirit of détente with Moscow meant that the Soviet authorities curbed any hint of Armenian irredentism. Interestingly, Soviet Armenia served as a counterpoint to Turkey in the Bolsahay (Istanbul Armenian) students’ essays. The existence of this supposedly autonomous territory in the Caucasus meant that there was a separate Armenian road to modernity (albeit under Moscow’s tutelage) that did not appear so different from the Kemalist project, with its campaigns against “religious superstition” and everything else standing in the way of “progress.” The main difference between the two countries pointed out by these students lay in the treatment of minorities. In Soviet Armenia, noted one Vahram Azarian, the Turks, Kurds, Georgians, and Azeri who lived there alongside the Armenian majority population enjoyed the right to read and write in their own languages, with financial support from the government. “Every race is free to act as it please,” claimed Azarian, as long as no attempt was made to overthrow the Soviet regime, with the result that “there is no minority question” threatening to sour intercommunal relations.97 The alleged freedom of minorities in Soviet Armenia 95  Vahakn Caracashian, “The Armenians” (October 25, 1931); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 96  For example, Kasbar Papazian, “The Armenians” (October 26, 1931); Vahram Azarian, “The Armenians” (date unknown); Vahakn Caracashian, “The Armenians” (October 25, 1931); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 97  Vahram Azarian, “The Armenians” (date unknown); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives.

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thus served as an implicit comment on conditions in Turkey, reminding the reader, by way of contrast, of what things were not like, without openly stating it.

The Shadow of 1915: Memories of Violence in Students’ Essays In general, the students refrained from writing anything about the Great War or what wartime conditions had been like in Turkey, save for a passing mention in some of the essays. Whether this was because Fisher actively discouraged the choice of topics which might either work against the spirit of his education for peace or affect the wellbeing of his students, or simply due to the students’ own sense of self-preservation, is difficult to tell. Those belonging to non-Muslim minorities tended to avoid making any statements on sensitive topics which might incriminate them. The taint of alleged treason was not easily removed, which in itself was an incentive for Christians not to draw unwanted attention to themselves or to past events which had seen the different communities inhabiting the former Ottoman Empire pitted against each other. Oblivion was in this case to be considered bliss. Nonetheless, there was an elephant in the room which could not easily be ignored, no matter how hard students struggled to do so. Armenian students at Robert College found it especially difficult to write about their community without touching upon its terrible fate in 1915, despite the damnatio memoriae surrounding this event. Some, like Hagop Touloukian, stated openly that “a good number” of the two million Armenians who had lived in Turkey before the Great War had been massacred, but without addressing the circumstances, only noting that “other nations” had sought to “scatter and sweep them off as a nation.” The subject, however, kept resurfacing in his essay, as he could not address the reasons for intra-­ communal cleavages without mentioning wartime developments. While referring to the confessional divisions among Armenians, he noted that some had converted to Protestantism and Catholicism for fear of persecution during the war, denying their identity as Armenians. Evidently, this was an allusion to the initial exemption of Armenian Protestants from orders for the deportation of Ottoman Armenians in 1915, made as a concession to the Young Turks’ German allies. This, Touloukian added, was the reason why the Gregorians, that is, members of the Armenian

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Apostolic Church, looked upon these converts as “men of weak character and cowards, but fortunately these distinctions are waning as years go by.”98 Nothing was said on the subject of the Armenians who had converted to Islam as a means to escape certain death, a topic vastly more sensitive in the new Turkey than the quarrels between Christians of different denominations. Others broke the silence—whether intentionally or not—by their very choice of topic. H. Kassourian, mentioned above, opted to write about a community no longer in existence, namely, the Armenian inhabitants of Maraş, one of the many Anatolian towns which had seen its Christian population wiped out by the deportations and massacres in 1915. Judging from a note to Fisher in the essay, Kassourian seems to have been initially discouraged from addressing the topic, but since he claimed to have failed to find sufficient information about his second option, Soviet Armenia, he had no other choice but to fall back on his first. The writing was awkward. Presenting a snapshot of Maraş in about 1900, he wrote that a third of the population was Armenians who congregated in six Gregorian, one Catholic, and three Protestant churches, as well as several schools, hospitals, and orphanages built by Western missionaries. At no point was there any mention of what had become of the town’s Armenian community after the turn of the century, only vague statements on Armenians in general, in which the student chose his words with great caution: I shall not be condemned, I hope, if I say that Armenians are keen and inventive, quick to adapt themselves to new conditions; an everlasting passion for national freedom, and unability [sic] to obtain it, has been their chief sorrow. They have also many defects, and serious ones; disunity, the cause of many national losses, quick temper, and a great volubility of speech with threats, decisions, and promises, and little of the practical mind to carry any of them into effect; added to these may be their too readiness to accept foreigners as their unselfish friends.99

This passage is illuminating both for what is said and what is not said. Kassourian took great pains to avoid direct references to the mass violence that targeted the Armenians, only hinting at “national losses” and the 98  Hagop Touloukian, “The Armenians” (October 28, 1929); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 99  H.  Kassourian, “The Armenians in Marash—1900 A.D.” (October 26, 1928); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives.

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sorrow of thwarted attempts to gain national freedom. The Turkish perpetrators are wholly absent from the narrative; instead, disunity and lack of resolve among the Armenians themselves and a misguided trust in foreign powers were blamed for any misfortune. Kassourian and some of his fellow students may have taken a risk when writing of the Armenians’ national aspirations, but they might have assumed that the notion that every nation aspires to national independence was neutral, and since Armenians were not seen as members of the Turkish nation, they were a nation in their own right. Official Kemalist discourse did not deny the existence of an Armenian nation per se, only that it had any rightful claims to Turkish lands. Yet there was, as yet, no established way of writing or talking about the deportation and massacres of the Ottoman Armenians in republican Turkish historiography, as the CHP regime saw no reason to draw attention to its own origins in the internationally discredited Unionist movement (CUP).100 Statements by Turkish officials which touched on the subject ranged from recognition that something undesired had happened but that the Armenians were themselves to blame for abusing their privileges and conspiring with foreign powers, to outright denial that there had ever been any discord between Turks and Armenians.101 This was also the line adopted by the Turkish-Armenian and CHP loyalist Society for the Elevation of Turks and Armenians, which in one of its pamphlets put the blame for the tragedy of 1915 squarely on the activists of Armenian revolutionary parties. These, the pamphleteers alleged, had foolishly provoked 100  For a longer perspective on the subject of denial in Turkey, see Fatma Müge Göçek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789–2009. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 101  An example of the former assertion is to be found in one of Mustafa Kemal’s speeches to the Grand National Assembly at Ankara in December 1919: “Whatever has befallen the non-Muslim elements living in our country, is the result of the policies of separatism they pursued in a savage manner, when they allowed themselves to be made tools of foreign intrigues and abused their privileges. There are probably many reasons and excuses for the undesired events that have taken place in Turkey. And I want definitely to say that these events are on a level far removed from the many forms of oppression which are committed in the states of Europe without any excuse.” Quoted in Erik Jan Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey. London: I.B. Tauris, 2010, 201-2. For an illuminating example of the later assertion, see the statement made in 1937 by Minister of the Interior Şükrü Kaya (1883–1959), one of the key perpetrators in 1915: “Turks and Armenians, forced to pursue their true and natural interests, instinctively felt friendliness towards each other. This is the truth of the matter … From our perspective the cordiality expressed by the Armenian nation towards us has not diminished.” Quoted in Üngör 2011, 220.

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the wrath of the Turks by acting as pawns of European imperialist powers bent on the destruction of the Ottoman Empire. The wholesale deportation of the Armenian population was defended as a justified act of selfdefense in a text meant to emphasize that those Armenians who remained in the new Turkey would not accuse Turks of any wrongdoing.102 The prerequisite for present and future coexistence was, thus, the burial of the past in a shroud of half-truths and outright lies. The collectively sanctioned silence surrounding the wartime events, to which Turkish-­ Armenians had to adapt, was also helped by the fact that no coherent master narrative of the once-infamous Armenian atrocities had yet been produced among Armenians outside of Turkey. Soviet-Armenian historiography suppressed any public utterance which might jeopardize the Soviet Union’s relations with Turkey well into the 1960s, whereas the political organizations of the world-wide Armenian diaspora were focused on the quest for Armenian independence, thwarted by Bolshevik intervention in 1920, rather than the remembrance of the Ottoman Armenians’ destruction five years earlier. It would take until 1965 and the fiftieth anniversary of the deportations before an international discourse on what was now called the Armenian Genocide emerged, triggered by the impact of renewed attention to the Holocaust of the European Jews and the writings of Raphael Lemkin who had coined the term used to describe the willful attempt at the annihilation of a certain ethnic, national, or religious group.103 If the Armenian students at Robert College were forced to be circumspect about what they wrote on this subject, their Turkish-Muslim counterparts enjoyed a somewhat greater leeway. One of the most remarkable essays was written by a certain Kerim Kerimoff. Unlike most other students, who chose one national, ethnic, or religious group, or a smaller community within that group such as “Turks of Constantinople,” with scant attention to how it interacted with other communities, Kerimoff chose as his subject the inhabitants of the entire Caucasian region, from Georgia to Azerbaijan, corresponding to the short-lived Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. The student, whose name suggests  Ekmekçioğlu 2016, 110-11.  Ronald Grigor Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015, 367-74. For an account of intra-Armenian debates in the interwar period and early Cold War, see Vahagn Avedian, Knowledge and Acknowledgment: The Politics of Memory of the Armenian Genocide. Lund: Lund University, Department of History, 2017. 102 103

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Azerbaijani descent, presented a supra-national collective, the Caucasians, which encompassed a multitude of ethno-linguistic and religious groups. Addressing the recent history of “Caucasia,” he mentioned the relative religious freedom that its inhabitants had enjoyed under Czarist Russian rule, the short-lived experience of Armenian independence from 1918 to 1920, and the refusal of the United States to accept a mandate over the region, finally offering a gloomy account of present-day Bolshevik rule: At present the Soviet government has complete control, and Caucasia has seen how vain is the attempt to get freedom, he [the Caucasian] is so stunned that there is no more spirit left in him, & does not care for anything but bread. Russia seems invincible, so what is the use of struggling? Better suffer without moaning, let us kneel to the inevitable—this is the present unhappy attitude of the Caucasian.

Exceptional among his Muslim peers, Kerimoff also addressed the subject of the demographic decline that had occurred in the region since 1914, “due to massacres, poverty and epidemics,” noting that “the Armenian population has decreased by one fourth, while the Moslem population has also decreased somewhat.” At this point, the essayist apparently found it difficult to write about these data without referring to the overall context in which this demographic calamity occurred, and the reasons for it. He therefore ventured to set the record straight regarding the violence that marked the end of the Ottoman and Romanov Empires, as he saw it: Now let us clear a point. People condemn the Mohammedans and Christians of Caucasia for the terrible massacres of 1896 & of the Great War. The Moslem is really very tolerant. The Moslems used to invite Christians to dinner, & give alms both to Moslems and Christians. This was the same with most Christians. All the different religions were tolerated, and one wonders why the massacres took place when the people didn’t hate each other. If one knows the real conditions, he cannot help but see Russian policy, which is one of the worst and most foolish policies of the world, to stir up trouble. The[y] sent agents to stir up trouble. The hungry mischief-seeking lower classes, hungry for lust and bloodshed, only [sought] for an excuse to kill, murder, and rob. The ignorant people, roused by one or two religious fanatics (which are a danger to human society as is proved here) burned & destroyed each other’s villages & houses, without knowing why. But in gen-

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eral it was not the members of families who took part in these massacres, it was the hungry mob, soldiers and brigands, urged by an external power, of [whose] motives they never even so much as dreamed.104

Kerimoff was clearly conscious of the reality of the grave atrocities both prior to and during the Great War which had targeted Armenians disproportionally and left a stain on Turkish and Muslim honor in the eyes of Westerners. His attempt to make sense of this trauma thus exonerated Ottoman authorities and local Muslims from the Armenian massacres by claiming that the violence had been instigated by Russians and carried out by the ignorant “lower classes,” acting under the influence of a few “religious fanatics,” rather than respectable family men. Exactly who these religious fanatics were was never spelled out in the text, which created the impression of a civil war between Christians and Muslims, engaging in mutual killings and other forms of reciprocal violence with a strange lack of agency. The historical background about which Kerimoff only hinted was the Hamidian massacres of Armenians in the eastern provinces in 1894–1897— largely carried out by local Kurdish irregulars who wished to appropriate lands held by Christian neighbors—as well as clandestine Ottoman efforts to foment a Muslim uprising in the Russian Caucasus and northern Iran in the months leading up to the formal declaration of war against the Entente in November 1914. The latter campaign was carried out by the CUP’s Special Organization (Teşkilât-i Mahsusa), which sent bands of armed irregulars across the border with orders to attack Armenian villages and rally local Muslims with calls for jihad and plunder.105 These bands were often made up of ex-convicts, that is, the sort of men whom in Kerimoff’s narrative were identified as “mischief-seeking lower classes,” looking for “an excuse to kill, murder, and rob.” The Turkish historian Candar Badem, offering a corrective to official Turkish historiography, argues that the CUP regime, far from acting in self-defense against Russian aggression, was in fact the aggressor in a war of extermination in pursuit of an expanded, Turkish-dominated empire in the Caucasus, preferably one without Christians, which was the direct precursor to the genocidal 104  Kerim Kerimoff, “Caucasians” (October 28, 1929); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives. 105  Kieser 2018, 196-210.

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campaign against the Ottoman Armenians a few months later.106 As the fortunes of war changed in the course of the Great War and its aftermath, local Muslims were sometimes the victims of acts of vengeance. However, in Kerimoff’s narrative, both the complexity and the sequence of events were obscured and reduced to a matter of a few bad seeds, unwittingly acting under the influence of a malicious foreign power and unidentified religious fanatics which, after the abolition of the caliphate in 1924, had joined the pantheon of bogeymen in the Kemalist mind. His emphasis on current (Soviet-) Russian oppression in the Caucasus additionally served to reinforce an impression of the Turkish Republic as the only place where Turkic-speaking Muslims (and, presumably, Christians too) could live freely, a framing which also emerged in other essays. If the supra-national collective identity that Kerimoff envisioned ended up whitewashing the atrocities against the Armenians, unable to challenge or overcome the interpretative framework laid down by Turkish state nationalism, there was nonetheless one Turkish-Muslim student who cast doubt upon the official truth. In an essay with the title “The people of Aintap (Turks),””, Djemil Ekhashoglou presented an account of living conditions in the south-eastern Turkish town of Aintab, present-day Gaziantep, near the border with French-controlled Syria. Despite the title’s focus on Turks, the essay contained numerous references to the recent multi-religious character of the town implied by buildings including a synagogue, a Catholic church and several Protestant churches. Before the Great War, Aintab had a sizeable Armenian population which dominated the local trades, to which Ekhashoglou readily attested. Yet, starting in August 1915, the town’s Armenians were deported to the Syrian deserts by Ottoman authorities responding to demands from local Muslim notables and CUP functionaries, who eagerly seized the opportunity for enrichment as Armenian “abandoned property” came up for grabs. After the Armistice in 1918 and the subsequent flight of Talaat Pasha and other CUP luminaries, the Aintab region, along with Cilicia, was initially ceded to the future French mandate in Syria, and Armenian survivors made their way back to reclaim their former homes and businesses. Largely to protect their spoils of war, as historian Ümit Kurt has shown, Aintab’s Muslim 106  Candar Badem, “The War at the Caucasus: A Matrix for Genocide”. In Hans-Lukas Kieser, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Seyhan Bayraktar and Thomas Schmutz (eds.), The End of the Ottomans: The Genocide of 1915 and the Politics of Turkish Nationalism. London: I. B. Tauris, 2019, 47-66.

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elites rallied behind Mustafa Kemal’s call to arms and joined the Turkish nationalist forces engaged in warfare against the French regime of occupation. After the French agreed to withdraw in 1921 and it was evident that Aintab would remain in Turkish hands, the Armenian returnees were forced to leave again, this time finally.107 Ekhashoglou referred to these episodes of violence as “the local fight” and, although never explicit about what had happened, regretful comments about the outcome of the war kept appearing in his text. Among the results referred to was a legacy of violence. “Immorality, stealing, crime are very common,” he wrote. “[Especially] after this local fight every body learned how to use armguns [sic] and similar weapons. Killing of a person is not regarded so important among uneducated people.” Added to this violent legacy was a shortage of educated men and women after the Armenians departed. “There were many really educated Armenians before the local fight. But now only 20 percent of the people is educated.” The Armenians represented a modern and cosmopolitan way of life, the loss of which Djemil Ekhashoglou lamented, in a manner that seemed to repudiate the Turkish nationalist project, things had changed not for the better but for the worse: I can conclude that the people need some real leaders, who will form a link between realy [sic] civilized persons (no matter to what nationality they belong [my emphasis]) and the people of the city. I personally saw the good results of this experiment in the Armenians before the local fight. Some good leaders formed this link between Armenians and the Americans.108

This is an exceedingly rare utterance of regret about the disappearance of the Armenians on the part of the Turkish-Muslim students at Robert College. It is the clearest evidence of “the attitude of brotherhood and good-will” that Fisher sought to instill in his students, or what might be called Ottomanism for post-Ottoman Turkey, based on the friendly coexistence of different national and religious communities and the condemnation of war. It is, however, also the only evidence encountered in the student essays. This need not mean that students were wholly 107  Ümit Kurt, “From Aintab to Gaziantep: The Reconstitution of an Elite on the Ottoman Periphery”. In Hans-Lukas Kieser, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Seyhan Bayraktar and Thomas Schmutz (eds.), The End of the Ottomans: The Genocide of 1915 and the Politics of Turkish Nationalism. London: I. B. Tauris, 2019, 287-319. 108  Djemil Ekhashoglou, “The people of Aintab (Turks)” (October 24, 1928); Edgar Jacob Fisher papers, Box 3, Hoover Institution Archives.

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unresponsive to Fisher’s teaching. The writing assignment was completed at a relatively early stage of their college education and early in the Introduction to the Social Sciences course, before the political science lessons that covered the problematic aspects of modern nationalism in greater detail. As mentioned earlier, it does not say anything about their later progress. Nevertheless, the scarcity of evidence suggesting any major impact of internationalist ideas, as well as the overall silence about the violent past, indicate larger problematic issues which are discussed in the concluding section of this chapter.

Concluding Remarks: The Near East and the “Great Brotherhood of Nations” The fact that so few students addressed the existence of other communities than their own, or how different groups interacted with each other in the present as well as in the past, highlights the inherent problems in Fisher’s approach to internationalism and the education for peace. To a great extent, it was a conundrum shared by contemporaneous Western educators who, in a similar vein, sought to foster peace and intercommunal understanding among young people of different faiths and nationalities in the Near and Middle East. The English schools run by Anglican missionaries in Palestine during the British mandate offer an interesting comparison with Robert College. The British educators sought to diminish the threat of antagonistic nationalisms among their Jewish and Arab students by offering a “curriculum for unity,” which aimed at the creation of an overarching “Palestinian” identity (understood as a regional marker, as opposed to its present-day national meaning). Just as in the case of Robert College, the solution to mutually exclusive national identities in Palestine was thus a shared, regional, geographically defined identity, with English as the lingua franca, that at the same time encouraged the study of native languages. However, as historian Maria Småberg points out, this did not mean the teaching of local languages to pupils with other native languages, for example Arabic to Jewish pupils and vice versa.109 The result was that students in neither Jerusalem nor Istanbul learnt much about each other’s cultures, as the essays discussed here have illustrated.

109  Maria Småberg, Ambivalent Friendship: Anglican Conflict Handling and Education for Peace in Jerusalem, 1920–1948. Lund: Lund University, Department of History, 2005, 301.

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Compounding this problem was the matter of the discrepancy between the lofty idealism of Western educators and the lived reality of the students and the societies of the post-Ottoman world. Furthermore, Småberg notes an awkward awareness among British educators in Palestine of the anomalies of teaching the virtues of Western democracy and national self-­ determination without referring to the colonial nature of the British mandate.110 Robert College, being an American institution, lacked this connection to European colonialism in the formerly Ottoman lands, but there was a local context of state authoritarianism whose values were fundamentally at odds with those of Fisher and like-minded faculty. No matter how hard he sought to instill internationalism in his students, Fisher could not ignore the dominant presence of Turkish nationalism steadily encroaching upon the American colleges. He claimed to have adapted the teaching of history to the needs of the Near East which, among other things, meant omitting passages in American world history textbooks which could be perceived as offensive to Muslim Turks. But this adaptation to local needs and conditions also meant that certain topics had to be avoided, subjects with the potential to disrupt student harmony, as well as relations with the Turkish authorities. There was, thus, a flaw in Fisher’s approach to peace education that no amount of good faith and wishful thinking could mend. How could one teach conciliation and the overcoming of national differences, if one could not address the causes of hostility and the basic facts about what happened in the Great War? Yet, despite some misgivings about the nature of Turkish nationalism, Edgar Fisher held onto his belief that the internationalism he sought to foster in the minds of Turkey’s future elite was not incompatible with the regime’s ultimate goals. As we have seen, the Balkan conferences of the early 1930s and the role of regional peace-broker played by the Ankara government fueled his optimism. He attributed this change to a growing realization across the region that the policies of nationalism and ill-treatment of minorities had been misguided; however, Fisher overlooked a crucial factor. One of the main concerns of the states involved in the Lausanne treaty’s population exchange was to disentangle the different nationalities—that is, ethno-religious groups—of the former Ottoman Balkans and Anatolia from each other, thus removing any future casus belli or threats toward regional stability by eradicating cultural and linguistic differences, assimilating minorities, and forging homogenous nations.  Småberg 2005, 326.

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This meant that a great number of minority peoples who had been either too weak to carve out their own states from the crumbling empires or had ended up on the wrong side of the new borders were slated for cultural extinction in the Near Eastern “great brotherhood of nations.””. It would, however, be unfair to dismiss the internationalist project at Robert College as a naively pacifistic fantasy with no prospects of long-­ term success. Fisher’s classroom and the Political Science Forum offered students an opportunity to express themselves and, however cautiously, formulate opinions of their own that would have been impossible in state schools, as some of the essays clearly demonstrate. The nature of the written assignment underlying the essays, no matter how neutral its conception, in itself proved radical in the hands of some students who, intentionally or not, challenged some of the silences of Turkish society, while at the same time endorsing other aspects of Kemalist modernity. That would in the long run prove fatal to Edgar Fisher’s educational project as the regime tightened its grip on civil society and the American colleges operating on Turkish soil.

References Alexandris, Alexis. 1992 (1983) The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek-Turkish Relations, 1918–1974. Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies. Aslan, Senem. 2007. “Citizen, Speak Turkish!”: A Nation in the Making. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 13 (2): 245–272. Avedian, Vahagn. 2017. Knowledge and Acknowledgment: The Politics of Memory of the Armenian Genocide. Lund: Lund University, Department of History. Badem, Candar. 2019. The War at the Caucasus: A Matrix for Genocide. In The End of the Ottomans: The Genocide of 1915 and the Politics of Turkish Nationalism, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Seyhan Bayraktar, and Thomas Schmutz, 47–66. London: I. B. Tauris. Baer, Marc. 2013. Turkish nationalism and the Dönme. In Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Towards Post-National Identities, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser, 67–73. London: I.B. Tauris. Ekmekçioğlu, Lerna. 2016. Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-­ Genocide Turkey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gingeras, Ryan. 2009. Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity and the End of the Ottoman Empire, 1912–1923. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Göçek, Fatma Müge. 2014. Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789–2009. New  York: Oxford University Press.

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Kieser, Hans-Lukas. 2010. Nearest East: American Millennialism and Mission to the Middle East. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ———. 2018. Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Kurt, Ümit. 2019. From Aintab to Gaziantep: The Reconstitution of an Elite on the Ottoman Periphery. In The End of the Ottomans: The Genocide of 1915 and the Politics of Turkish Nationalism, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Seyhan Bayraktar, and Thomas Schmutz, 287–319. London: I. B. Tauris. Lewis, Bernard. 2001 (1962). The Emergence of Modern Turkey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Makdisi, Ussama. 2002. Ottoman Orientalism. The American Historical Review 107 (3): 768–796. Pamuk, Orhan. 2006. Istanbul: Memories of a City. Trans. Maureen Freely. London: Faber and Faber. Småberg, Maria. 2005. Ambivalent Friendship: Anglican Conflict Handling and Education for Peace in Jerusalem, 1920–1948. Lund: Lund University, Department of History. Suny, Ronald Grigor. 2015. “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Toynbee, Arnold. 1922. The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilisations. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. Üngör, Uğur Ümit. 2011. The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Uzer, Umut. 2016. An Intellectual History of Turkish Nationalism: Between Turkish Ethnicity and Islamic Identity. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press. Winter, Michael. 1984. The Modernization of Education in Kemalist Turkey. In Atatürk and the Modernization of Turkey, ed. Jacob M.  Landau, 183–194. Boulder: Westview Press. Zeydanlioğlu, Welat. 2007. “Kemalism’s Others: The Reproduction of Orientalism in Turkey”. Unpublished PhD thesis, Anglia Ruskin University. Zürcher, Erik Jan. 2009 (1993) Turkey: A Modern History. London: I. B. Tauris. ———. 2010. The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey. London: I.B. Tauris.

CHAPTER 6

Internationalism Defeated: The Downfall of Edgar Fisher

In 1932, the long tenure of Caleb Gates was finally coming to an end. Having worked in the Ottoman Empire and its Turkish successor state since 1881, serving as president of Euphrates College in Harput and of Robert College since 1903, Gates was retiring in view of his seventy-fifth birthday. During his twenty-nine years as president, the school had been transformed. From an institution which, allegedly, tended first and foremost to the educational needs of Christians, Robert College had become Turkified in the sense that Turkish Muslims now made up the bulk of enrolled students, with Greeks and Armenians coming in at a distant second and third. An important reason for this was the establishment of the Engineering School, which Gates liked to think of as his crowning achievement. It seemed as if the college was moving toward greater public acceptance after the wartime ordeals and the rocky transition to the Turkish republican era. In his final report to the Board of Trustees, the outgoing president wrote of how deeply touched he was by the expressions of regard for the work of Robert College uttered by Premier Ismet Pasha and his ministers during his last visit to Ankara.1

 John Freely, A Bridge of Culture: Robert College – Boğaziçi University: How an American College in Istanbul Became a Turkish University. Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitetisi Yayinevi, 2012 (2009), 262. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Sjöberg, Internationalism and the New Turkey, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00932-7_6

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As Gates’ successor for the presidency, the Board had chosen Paul Monroe, a world-renowned authority on education and adviser to governments in developing countries from China to the Middle East that were modernizing their educational systems. In neighboring Iraq, he had recently led the so-called Monroe Committee tasked with examining the state of education in the Hashemite kingdom. The commission issued a withering rebuke of the earlier pedagogical emphasis on Arab nationalism, and advocated a decentralized curriculum with minority education in the Kurdish language in northern Iraq, among other things.2 As Fisher saw it, Monroe was a man who seemed cut out for the job of steering the American colleges in Istanbul, and whose presence boded well for the future of international education in Turkey. The friendship treaty signed in 1930 between erstwhile foes Greece and Turkey appeared to vindicate the spirit of Locarno, and thus the project of educating for peace. Despite the financial hardship suffered in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, prospects seemed bright, at least on the surface. It would soon become apparent, however, that Gates’ departure marked the end of an era in a more profound sense than was at first realized. Until the beginning of the decade, Robert College had been an oasis of relative academic freedom. The signs that this state of tolerance would not last indefinitely were already noticeable during the last years of Gates’ tenure, but he and Fisher seem to have remained cautiously optimistic. Yet, within fifteen months of the retirement of the man who had shielded him through the 1920s, Fisher was dismissed in circumstances clouded by secrecy, and his internationalist educational project lay shattered. This time the decision was final. Fisher would never return to the school where he had taught for twenty years, and Robert College would embark on a path contrary to the one he had envisioned. The main question which this chapter addresses is why the internationalist education project at Robert College ultimately failed. The reasons for this rupture have long been obscured owing to the low-key approach adopted by college officials at the time and the policy of restricted access to any files relating to Edgar Fisher instigated by the custodians of the Robert College archival records, a restriction lifted only recently. The 2  Sara Pursley, Familiar Futures: Time, Selfhood, and Sovereignty in Iraq. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019, 84-89. Ussama Makdisi, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019, 155.

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documents that have come to light reveal a story of painful choices and bitter recrimination among the college staff. In order to make sense of what may at first glance seem an isolated case, one must set it against a background of larger developments in Turkish society at the time, notably the tightening repression ushered in by the single-party state, as well as the impact of the Great Depression and foreign policy considerations. The chapter therefore commences with the power struggles within the Kemalist establishment and their repercussions throughout society before turning to the microcosm of Robert College.

The Domestic Political Context: The Free Republican Party and the Turn Toward Totalitarianism As the 1930s set in, the worldwide economic crisis was beginning to bite and, like many other governments at the time, the rulers at Ankara were at a loss for solutions. When the crash came in late 1929, Turkish industry was still recovering from the damage caused by the mass expulsion of the Christian minorities (save for the few remnants left in Istanbul). Agriculture was by far the largest sector of the Turkish economy, which meant that the country was particularly hard hit as the price of wheat and similar crops plummeted on international markets. As Erik Jan Zürcher has put it, the one subject that dominated Turkish politics and public opinion in the 1930s was the economy.3 This meant that arguments about economic policy became the venue in which the hegemony of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) was challenged for the first time since the purges of 1925. The dire situation in 1929 was compounded by the authoritarian nature of the Kemalist regime. Government control of the press and a lack of civil liberties meant that there was little room for discussion of competing ideas within the ruling party, and no room at all for popular discontent. It was becoming clear that, below the surface, there was widespread resentment with the rapid modernizing reforms, the favoritism of party cadres, and the inevitable corruption enabled by the lack of transparency, although the regime had no real means of gauging the scale of popular discontent or managing it, apart from suppressing its expression. Tensions were also 3

 Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A modern history. London: IB Tauris, 2009 (1993), 195-197.

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slowly building up within the CHP leadership, notably between the president and the prime minister. In the early 1930s, Kemal had begun to withdraw from the day-to-day running of the country, leaving it in Ismet’s hands while he pursued his pet projects, such as alphabet and language reforms. Nonetheless, Kemal remained the undisputed master of Turkey, which meant that, influenced by his own close friends and advisers, he could overrule decisions made by Ismet’s government any time he chose. A potentially dangerous rift was beginning to appear, which paved the way for confusion and vicious power struggles between different parts of the Kemalist establishment. Ironically, the initiative to challenge the monolithic single-party system came from Mustafa Kemal himself. Sensing the need to channel social discontent safely and shake up his own ruling party, he decided to open a debate on how to combat the economic challenges by allowing the establishment of an opposition party. This was to be a tame opposition, whose function would be to formulate alternatives to the government’s economic policies while simultaneously embracing the tenets of Kemalism: republicanism and secularism. The opposition leader whom Kemal had in mind was his old friend Fethi (Okyar), former premier and Ismet Pasha’s rival, who had recently delivered a highly critical report on the current state of the country and Ismet’s policies; indeed, it is quite possible that Kemal wished to put a check on his right-hand man as, after five years in office, Ismet had gradually built a power base of his own. In the summer of 1930, Kemal approached Fethi with an offer to take the helm of a new party. After agreeing that Kemal himself would remain impartial as President of the Republic, Fethi founded the Free Republican Party (Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası), while Kemal ordered some of his closest associates, including his sister, to join up in order to strengthen the party’s credentials. The experiment misfired badly. The new party was greeted with an enthusiasm more widespread than Kemal evidently had expected, and applications for membership soared. Huge crowds met Fethi during his public appearances, leading to occasional riots and police violence. Although adhering to Kemalist ideas, the Free Republicans promised more than just liberal economic policies; demands for press freedom and fair elections soon followed.4 Fethi’s liberal version of Kemalism drew support from the Christian and Jewish minorities in Istanbul which, for the first time since 1923, were invited to involve themselves actively in Turkish 4

 Zürcher 2009 (1993), 176-79.

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politics when the Free Republican Party fielded candidates for the municipal elections. While the Greek and Armenian minority issue was of relatively marginal importance in post-Lausanne Turkey, this collaboration, which seemed to echo the early days of the Second Constitutional period (1908–1913), drew the ire of many CHP loyalists. In their eyes, the Christians were still the enemies of the Turkish nation, despite the official policy of friendly relations with Greece. More worrying from the government’s viewpoint was the prospect of the new party becoming a haven for anti-Kemalist Muslim conservatives. Ismet, wary of any challenge to his authority, complained that it was providing a rallying ground for all sorts of disgruntled politicians who would never form the basis for “a really strong progressive party.” 5 The disturbances which accompanied Fethi’s public speeches and the ominous stirrings in the Kurdish east, with Sheykh Sait’s rebellion still fresh in their memories, prompted the CHP leaders to sound the alarm, forcing Mustafa Kemal to publically reassert his commitment to the ruling party. Fethi openly accused the Republican People’s Party of electoral fraud in the aftermath of the municipal elections in October 1930, in which the opposition secured a small number of council seats, much to the surprise and dismay of the government. CHP hardliners, in their turn, accused the opposition party and its leader of high treason. At this juncture, Kemal decided to heed the warnings of his prime minister, Ismet, and ordered Fethi to stand down. Unwilling to challenge the Gazi, the latter felt that he had no choice but to dissolve his Free Republican Party in mid-November 1930. The brief experiment with controlled opposition was over, although Kemal sought to maintain some semblance thereof by reserving a small number of parliament seats for independents in the “elections” of 1931 and 1934. Only a month after the abolition of the new opposition party, another incident shook the confidence of the Kemalist establishment. In December 1930, a group of dervishes unfurled the green banner of Islam in the small town of Menemen, calling for the restoration of the caliphate and beheading a gendarme officer sent there to enforce their surrender. The rebellion was immediately quelled, but it fueled the fears of the governing party as the indifference of the onlookers in Menemen was interpreted as tacit support for the enemies of the republic. Martial law was proclaimed and thousands of arrests were made, among them many former supporters of the 5  Alexis Alexandris, The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek-Turkish Relations, 1918–1974. Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies, 1992 (1983), 182-83.

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Free Republican Party, whose loyalty to Kemalism was called into question. Executions duly followed, just as in the earlier persecution of real and perceived foes in 1925–1926. The events of 1930 marked the introduction of an even more repressive climate, in which the Republican People’s Party tightened its grip on state and society. A draconian press law was passed in 1931 which closed down the last newspaper in Turkey that dared criticize government policies. The extent of the resentment and opposition to the regime laid bare by the Free Republican Party episode and the Menemen incident was a deeply unsettling experience for Kemal and the CHP hardliners. Determined not to let something similar happen again and to face down the twin threat of Westernizing liberalism and homegrown religious conservatism, they set about bringing the entire social, cultural, and academic life of the country under their direct control. Over the next five years, a number of civil society institutions and hitherto independent cultural organizations were either shut down or brought under rigid party supervision. Unlike earlier purges in the 1920s—involving the religious orders, for example—this new wave of repression targeted organizations which shared the basic tenets of the Kemalist modernization project, that is, nationalism, secularism, and a belief in education and emancipation. The first such organization to be attacked was the Turkish Hearths (Türk Ocakları), founded in the CUP era and revived under republicanism by Minister of Education Hamdullah Suphi (Tanrıöver); in the early 1930s it had some 30,000 members and hundreds of clubs across Turkey, organizing lectures, courses, concerts, and exhibitions. The Hearths were closed down in 1931 and replaced in 1932 with the People’s Houses (Halk Evleri), which had a similar program but were entirely controlled by CHP officials. Organizations such as the Masonic lodges and the Turkish Women’s Union were also forced to dissolve. In 1933, it was the turn of one of the last vestiges of Ottoman higher learning in the former capital, the House of Sciences (Darülfünun), which was closed down and reconstituted as the University of Istanbul. In the process, two-thirds of its teaching staff were purged from office, leaving only staunch CHP loyalists in tenure.6 It was the first of many purges to shake Turkish academia and a harbinger of things to come for Robert College.

6

 Zürcher 2009 (1993), 179-81.

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“Anti-foreignism” and the Turkish History Thesis The early 1930s also witnessed a shift in the content of Kemalist nationalism toward a narrow and increasingly xenophobic understanding of Turkish identity. What college officials like Paul Monroe would refer to as “anti-foreignism,” for lack of a better term, is perhaps best understood as a politically sanctioned hostility to things foreign that Turkish nationalists perceived as reflecting an anti-Turkish mentality.7 Anti-Western and anti-­ Christian sentiment was nothing new in Turkey, but it was arguably fueled by the recent backlash against the Free Republican Party, Fethi’s flirt with the minority vote, and his enthusiasm for foreign investment and laissez-­ faire liberalism. This anti-foreignism expressed itself in different ways over the subsequent years, most dramatically in the pogroms against Jewish shops in Thrace in 1934, while the authorities had all Jews forcibly deported from the strategically sensitive border near Edirne and the Straits. It was also to be found in the recurring campaign known as “Citizen, Speak Turkish!” (vatandaş Türkçe konuş), which urged members of the minorities to abandon their native languages and only speak Turkish when in public places.8 The campaign did not translate into law, but many non-Muslims were harassed in the streets when caught speaking another tongue, and sometimes fined for having insulted Turkishness, a notoriously vague yet punishable offense.9 Textbooks distributed by the Ministry of Education and made mandatory in all schools, including the foreign ones and those of the minorities, depicted the Greek and Armenian communities as enemies of the Turks.10 Finally, an aspect of economic nationalism materialized when Ankara enacted legislation in June 1932 to 7  Paul Monroe, “Memorandum to the Trustees of Robert College On the Attitude of Government Officials And Turkish People Towards the American Colleges”; January 5, 1934; Box 59; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 8  On the origins of the “Citizen, Speak Turkish!” campaign, see Umut Uzer, An Intellectual History of Turkish Nationalism: Between Turkish Ethnicity and Islamic Identity. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2016, 115. 9  Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016, 116. Alexandris 1992 (1983), 183. Furthermore, the surname law of 1934, which forced all Turkish citizens to adopt a family name, had the effect of eradicating traces of linguistic difference, as members of minority groups were obliged to adopt Turkish-sounding family names. 10  The 1931 edition of a textbook on citizenship education thus included a section called “Bad People,” in which non-Muslim citizens were vilified as usurers, swindlers, and profiteers. Ekmekçioğlu (2016), 125.

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exclude foreigners, meaning non-Turkish nationals, from a number of trades and professions. Presented as a measure to protect Turkish jobs during the Great Depression, it was to be enforced gradually, commencing on December 1, 1933. The new law mostly affected those Greeks of Istanbul who held Greek citizenship—the largest single foreign community at the time and well represented in the professions now reserved for Turks—but had implications for the staff at foreign schools such as Robert College.11 The worldwide economic crisis and the ill-fated attempt at economic-­ turned-­political reform thus played into the hands of those advocating increased Turkification of the economy, as well as other sectors of society which Kemalist nationalism had not yet penetrated. It became particularly visible in the emphasis on linguistic purism and a new theory on the origins and achievements of the Turkish race launched at the First Turkish Historical Congress in Ankara, in early July 1932. This was the notorious Turkish History Thesis (Türk Tarih Tezi), which was to exert its influence over Turkish historiography and history teaching for decades to come. According to the theory, Central Asia, the original homeland of the Turkish “race,” was the cradle of human civilization. Forced out by hunger and drought, the white Aryan inhabitants of the region, the putative ancestors of the Turks, had migrated to China, Europe, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia, where they had created all the major world civilizations. Claiming the Sumerians, the Hittites, and other ancient peoples as proto-­ Turks, the thesis pushed the origins of Turkish history back to the Bronze Age, thereby establishing that the Turkish nation-state was firmly rooted in Anatolia since time immemorial. Together with the so-called Sun Language Theory, which held that the Indo-European and Semitic languages had evolved from a Turkic proto-language, the Turkish History Thesis aimed to instill a sense of national pride in the past and present exploits of the nation and to render the current regime legitimate. Like the alphabet reform of 1928, it had the perceived benefit of severing ties to the more recent Ottoman past, presenting instead a mythical ethnogenesis free from the taint of later cultural contacts with Arabs and Persians.12 11  Alexandris 1992 (1983), pp.  184-185. Transcript of Law No. 2007 re. Trades and Professions reserved for Turkish Citizens in Turkey; General correspondence 1930–1932; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 15; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 12  As Hamit Bozarslan notes in a perceptive analysis, the Turkish History Thesis and the Sun Language Theory also signified that the Kemalist revolution was no longer to be under-

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“The Turkish nation begins with Creation itself,” expounded regime loyalist Falih Rıfkı (Atay) in an editorial.13 “The new history will be the beginning of an important historical revolution for the Turkish people, and will prepare coming generations for their responsibilities in the future,” exulted another press contributor and member of the Association for the Study of Turkish History (Türk Tarihi Tetkik Cemiyeti), set up in 1931 to prepare a new series of history textbooks. “The Great Gazi who brought to pass the success of the Turkish revolution is giving to History a leading place in his plans for the spread of Culture.”14 The thesis, which had been over a year in preparation, was credited with opening the eyes of the public to a glorious national history supposedly suppressed by Ottoman imperial historiography: Ottoman History is full of insidious suggestions and imputations made with the intention of causing the Turkish name to be forgotten; the idea to be implanted that there was no Turkish history nor nation prior to the Ottoman rulers … Our historians have been so swallowed up by the old misrepresentations that they have not seen the need for giving in their books even the favorable testimony to the Turks found in foreign books.15

The editors of the regime mouthpiece Cumhuriyet hinted ominously, in the days after the First Historical Congress, at the coming purges within the Istanbul university community: stood as indebted to any foreign tradition, either the French Revolution or Western Enlightenment philosophy. Turkish civilization was thus portrayed in sui generis terms, the source from which other human civilizations had evolved rather than the other way around. Hamit Bozarslan, “Kemalism, westernization and antiliberalism”. In Hans-Lukas Kieser (ed.), Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Towards Post-Nationalist Identities. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013 (2006), 32-33. 13  “Turkish History”, by Falih Rifki Bey, Hakimiye Milliye, August 21, 1931; Extracts in regard to the new basis for Turkish History—translated from various Turkish papers; Robert College Records; Box 52, Folder 14; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 14  “The Revolution in History”, by Hassan Djemil Bey, Cumhuriyet, September 31, 1931; Extracts in regard to the new basis for Turkish History—translated from various Turkish papers; Robert College Records; Box 52, Folder 14; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 15  “Turkish History”, by Falih Rifki Bey, Hakimiye Milliye, August 21, 1931; Extracts in regard to the new basis for Turkish History—translated from various Turkish papers; Robert College Records; Box 52, Folder 14; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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Those who attended the History Congress at Ankara, or who followed the reports in the papers were impressed by the fact that the University professors who took part in the Congress seemed to have little or no conception of the new point of view in regard to Turkish History … With the exception of one person who has done much to advance Nationalism and Turkism, the other professors seemed to have made not even the slightest contribution … to this national work produced by the History Commission. The only words uttered by these men, whom we had believed to be specialists …, were either by way of irrelevant criticism [of] some minor point, or were limited to praise of the careful way in which the history book had been written, at the same time that they showed little trace of having analyzed and grasped the main thesis of the book. However, we do not doubt that those professors have returned from the Congress with the decision to advance this national thesis. But a far more important consideration than the attitude of these University professors toward their own future, is the thought of the importance of this new movement in national education. Therefore it can be said, that from now on, the aim that is to motivate history teaching is the thought that study of past events should be made in a form most calculated to produce a future in harmony with national interests and progress. On our part, however, we must confess to grave doubts that these University professors, who have shown no interest nor power in explaining this national thesis during the past three years, and who in place of assuming leadership, have been bound by tradition – will be able to lead their students in a right direction.16

The adoption of the Turkish History Thesis thus meant that those who were “bound by tradition” or in any way stood in the way of “national interests and progress,””, as the regime loyalists saw it, must go. Among the professors sacked when the purges reached the old House of Sciences at Istanbul in 1933 were Zeki Velidi (Togan), who had criticized the alphabet reform of 1928 for severing cultural continuity with the Ottoman past, and, ironically, the Pan-Turkist nationalist Hüseyin Nihal (Atsız), later the founding father of the Grey Wolves, who, along with Zeki, had been mildly critical of some of the views propounded in the new historiography.17 However, the purges did not stop there. The central role that 16  “The Istanbul University and National Turkish History”, by Ali Sureyya Bey, Cumhuriyet, July 17, 1932; Extracts in regard to the new basis for Turkish History—translated from various Turkish papers; Robert College Records; Box 52, Folder 14; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 17  Uzer 2016, 102-3, 127.

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history—or what passed as history—now played in the Kemalist national imagination demanded the erasure of alternative approaches to the past. “Since history is the basis of national education, it is inevitable that it must be viewed with our own eyes,” argued an editor of Cumhuriyet. “If Turkish History is not presented from such a national angle, we shall be deprived of a powerful dynamic in the creation of ideals that will cultivate the youth of Republican Turkey.”18 In other words, the new ambitions of the regime struck at the very heart of international education, as the subjects targeted for Turkification—history, civics, and geography—were the very ones that Edgar Fisher had taught since 1913.

“The Injustice of This Business”: The Second Fisher Incident, 1933 For the latter part of the 1920s, Robert College appears to have remained relatively shielded from developments outside its campus. Adjustments had been made with consideration to the regime, but the Turkish authorities did not further interfere with the curriculum or college activities. In the early 1930s, there were, however, signs of darker times ahead. In January 1931, shortly after the dissolution of the Free Republican Party and the Menemen incident, Caleb Gates received a request from the Ministry of Education at Ankara to dismiss Abraham Hagopian, formerly Professor of Armenian and one of the longest serving members of the faculty. The charge against him was the fact that he had served on the Armenian National Committee in Paris in 1919, which sought to draw the world’s attention to the fate of the Armenians during the Paris Peace Conference, thus making him a traitor in the regime’s eyes. Gates defended him as having been “a restraining influence among the Armenians at that time” who had “never engaged in any movements hostile to the Turks.” Evidently, someone at Robert College had informed on him, Gates concluded in a letter to Albert Staub of the Board of Trustees in New York City.19 Similar charges of treason during the Armistice years were also 18  “After the Congress”, by Ali Sureyya Bey, Cumhuriyet, July 15, 1932; Extracts in regard to the new basis for Turkish History—translated from various Turkish papers; Robert College Records; Box 52, Folder 14; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 19  Caleb Gates to Albert Staub; January 29, 1931, cited in Freely 2012 (2009), 256. It is not clear what course of action Gates took with regard to Hagopian, but in the cited letter, he expresses his hope that he will be able to keep the Armenian professor employed until the end of 1931, before sending him into retirement.

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brought against prominent members of Istanbul’s Armenian community,20 old “sins” resurrected, in all likelihood, for the sake of punishing the minorities for their recent support of Fethi (Okyar). In the following years, the impact of Kemalism’s totalitarian turn made itself felt in different ways at Robert College. In the fall term of 1932, the Turkish members of the faculty complained that they were “deprived of all opportunity of bringing to bear upon the Turkish students the influences of the new Turkish movement.” The president of the American colleges at that time, Paul Monroe, agreed to their demands, “in order to preserve the effective unity,” by instituting a biweekly college assembly in Turkish, controlled by senior members of the Turkish staff.21 However, the attempts at nationalistic indoctrination of the Turkish students at the college did not stop there. Of far greater significance were the plans made public by the Ministry of Education in the fall of 1931 that from the following academic year, all courses in history, geography, and civics must be taught in Turkish by Turkish teachers. Fisher himself was acutely aware of the danger that the plans for Turkish control over the teaching of history posed to Robert College, as he wrote in a letter to Albert Staub, dated in October 1931. “This new situation, it seems to me, strikes more fundamentally at the character and spirit of our work than anything which has previously been done by the government.”22 It seemed a devastating blow to the “world-­ mindedness” he had worked to instill in students for the past decade or more. At this time, Fisher realized that his work as Head of the History Department at Robert College had become “something of a dangerous occupation,” considering the “deepening spirit and character of Turkish nationalism.”23 He asked President Gates if he really could continue to bear the title Professor of History in this climate, but received reassurances that he would not have to resign as head of the department. This meant that he carried on as the nominal superior of his Turkish replacement, although not involved in the teaching of his subjects. It appears that he was able to continue his work with the Political Science Forum and the  Ekmekçioğlu (2016), 153.  Paul Monroe to Henry Sloane Coffin; November 2, 1932, cited in Freely 2012 (2009), 267. 22  Edgar Fisher to Albert Staub; October 28, 1931; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 15; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 23  Edgar Fisher to Henry Sloane Coffin; February 8, 1934; Robert College Records; Box 59; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 20 21

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Peace Day exercises, extra-curricular activities which were seemingly beyond the influence of the Ministry of Education. Meanwhile, he followed the preparation of the new Turkish history books closely, gathering what information he could on the Turkish History Thesis. Reading the letters in which he informed friends back in the United States about the new historiography, one is struck by the restraint in his account of its, mildly put, “astonishing claims.”24 Yet, despite his precautions, this correspondence was to provide the immediate background to the second Fisher incident. The attack came in September 1933. Just before the beginning of the school year, President Monroe was informed that the Ministry of Education had expressly forbidden Fisher to continue his work at Robert College. The reason given was an article published in the July issue of the American educational magazine School and Society, in which its author, Walter Woodburn Hyde, a scholar of Greek and ancient history at Pennsylvania University, wrote critically of the Turkish History Thesis. The scholar in question was an acquaintance of Fisher’s who had visited Istanbul and Robert College in 1929, an occasional correspondent who received the circular letter which the latter from time to time sent to his friends in the United States to keep them updated about his work and the situation in Turkey. Especially damning was the footnote in which Hyde mentioned Fisher’s assistance in obtaining translated extracts from the new Turkish history textbooks that were under scrutiny in the piece. As Hyde would later admit, he had thought it prudent to acknowledge Fisher’s kindness, without giving much thought to what the Turkish government’s reaction might be.25 Yet this mention of him—in a context that could be portrayed as an attack on the Kemalist regime and a disparagement of the Turkish nation’s historical achievements—was in fact a welcome excuse for anyone who had an axe to grind with the college or its dean. Just as in the case of the previous donkey incident, the move against Fisher came while he was away from Istanbul and could only communicate with some delay with college officials. This time, however, the order for his dismissal did not arrive in writing but was presented verbally, which 24  Extracts from the New Series of Turkish History Textbooks and from a circular letter by Edgar Fisher; January 22, 1932; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 21; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 25  Walter Woodburn Hyde to Albert Staub, undated letter, and to Edgar Fisher; November 17, 1933; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 18; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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suggested that there might be room for underhand negotiations.26 Believing that the Turkish authorities had no wish to damage its relations with the college by making the affair a matter of public knowledge, Monroe cabled Fisher, who was onboard a trans-Atlantic steamer bound for Turkey, ordering him to disembark in Athens and await further instructions. There he met with the Fishers, arranged for their temporary accommodation, and outlined a strategy for dealing with the Ministry of Education. The basic approach opted for by Monroe was to demonstrate the college’s willingness to comply with Turkish orders, and its appreciation for the discretion shown by Ankara in avoiding publicity. While making it clear that he did not question the government’s right to ban any individual from the country—this was also the advice given by the American Embassy—he argued that the decision must be based on “some misunderstanding of the facts.” First, Fisher and Monroe distanced themselves from the article in School and Society, maintaining that the only thing Fisher had done was to quote translated extracts from an official history textbook in his circular letter, which was intended to give a clear and accurate conception of the Turkish History Thesis. Monroe drew up a memorandum and Fisher sent a letter of protest in his own name in which they stressed that no critical or derogatory comment whatsoever had been made concerning the thesis. “This article,” stated Fisher emphatically, “was entirely written by Professor Hyde, and I am thus in no way responsible for it.”27 Second, emphasis was put on Fisher’s twenty years of service, not only to Robert College but also as a sort of spokesman for the new Turkish Republic, demonstrated in newspaper clippings about his lectures on Europe and the Near East at American universities and Rotary Club evenings. The two men hoped that tokens of their support for the “promotion of cultural advancement in Turkey” and the favorable portrayal of the Turkish Republic as a both global and regional peace-broker and leader of a future Balkan confederacy would serve to reverse the decision. Monroe thus wrote of Fisher’s 26  The order was communicated verbally in a personal meeting between Paul Monroe and the Acting Minister of Education, Refik Bey, with Hüseyin Bey (Pektaş) acting as translator. See the note from Dr. Monroe’s secretary to Howland Shaw of the American Embassy; September 26, 1933; and Paul Monroe to Edgar Fisher, January 3, 1934; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 18; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 27  Edgar Fisher to Refik Bey, Acting Minister of Public Instruction; September 18, 1933; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 18; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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“very high praise to the Turkish government for its bold and intelligent leadership toward a peaceful solution to the trying situation in which the entire world, as well as the Near East, now finds itself,” adding to the flattery that Fisher was a reputable scholar in the United States whose words carried weight.28 “In all of my lectures I have given laudatory accounts of the recent developments in Turkey,” Fisher stated in his own letter to Refik Bey (Saydam), acting Minister of Education at the time, adding that “this praise of the present Turkish regime has not been time-serving, but has been sincere and earnest on my part.”29 Among other things that he thought could be used to clear his reputation with the Turkish authorities was the initiative he had taken to modify certain passages in an American textbook on medieval and modern history in “the chapters dealing with Islam and Turkey [so that they] appeared to me to be more fair, and still historically accurate, and at the same time satisfied the feelings of the Turks.”30 He added that Hüseyin Bey, the Head of the Turkish Department at Robert College, would be able to corroborate this, since he checked the suggested alterations before they were sent to the author of the textbook. Monroe duly referred to this act of removing statements considered unfair or offensive to the Turkish people in his memorandum to Ankara, adding that “Dr. Fisher is a scientific student of history and has an objective attitude toward all history and social facts.”31 There was, however, some disagreement between the two men as to the proper course of action. Monroe sought to temper some of the more combative statements made by Fisher in his own defense, arguing that it would be better to show good faith by handling the case discreetly, so as to avoid any escalation of Turkish animosity against Robert College. Fisher, wary 28  Paul Monroe’s memorandum to the Minister of Education; September 25, 1933; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 18; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 29  Edgar Fisher to Refik Bey, Acting Minister of Public Instruction; September 18, 1933; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 18; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 30  Edgar Fisher to Paul Monroe; September 22, 1933; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 18; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. The textbook that Fisher refers to in his letter is James Harvey Robinson’s Medieval and Modern Times: an introduction to the history of Western civilization. Boston and New York: Ginn and Company, 1931 (1919). 31  Paul Monroe’s memorandum to the Minister of Education; September 25, 1933; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 18; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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due to his earlier experience, argued to the contrary, claiming that a public statement of the facts surrounding the injustice done to him by the Turkish government would counter any distorted views stemming from future publicity which he deemed inevitable. To that end, he drafted a strongly worded statement for release at the proper time. “I agree with you that the Turks probably do not wish any publicity on it, and that is probably why the information was given to you in a verbal manner,” wrote Fisher in a cover letter to his boss. “However, if on a charge like this, it is possible to run out one of the oldest members of the Faculty of Robert College in point of service, then I cannot understand where there can be any safety for the College itself.”32 Nevertheless, Fisher would keep silent out of loyalty to his employer. Monroe thus proceeded with the quiet diplomacy he favored. In the memorandum addressed to the Ministry of Education at Ankara, he stressed his desire to avoid publicity on the case, which he admitted might injure the interests of the college and harm Turkey’s image in the United States. Somewhat naively, he referred to the similar case against Fisher in 1924, writing, “I could never quite understand how this incident arose [as] I have never known Dr. Fisher to speak an unkind word or to indulge in criticism of the Turkish people or of the Turkish government.”33 The case against the American professor was put down to a misunderstanding, which Monroe suggested might have been the result of slander by a student who had been disciplined by Fisher. In the end, Monroe’s memorandum was to no avail. By late September, the Istanbul papers reported gleefully on the expulsion of Fisher, portraying him as an enemy of Turkey.34 At the same time, reports about the case had already appeared in the American press as well, effectively quashing all hopes of keeping the matter a secret.35 The month of October passed without any acknowledgment from Ankara of receipt of Monroe’s plea, 32  Edgar Fisher to Paul Monroe; September 25, 1933; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 18; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 33  Paul Monroe’s memorandum to the Minister of Education; September 25, 1933; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 18; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 34  “Dr. Fisher is expelled from our country”, Son Posta, September 25, 1933; “A Turkish Enemy”, Cumhuriyet, September 26, 1933; “What Effrontery”, Milliyet, September 26, 1933; “Un ennemi de la Turquie”, République, September 26, 1933; translated extracts; Box 29; Robert College Records; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 35  “Educator Barred from Turkey for Book Criticism”, Star-Gazette, September 13, 1933. “Educator Is Banned from Turkey Due to Magazine Article”, The Ithaca Journal, September 13, 1933.

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meaning that the two men and the other college officials involved could only speculate as to the causes of the long silence. The timing of the whole affair seemed unfortunate, as the regular Minister of Education, Reşit Bey (Galip), had been purged from office in the summer of 1933, and no permanent replacement with whom the matter could be raised was likely to be appointed before the tenth anniversary of the founding of the republic, scheduled for October 29. It was the Acting Minister of Education, Refik Bey (Saydam), who had told Monroe that Fisher was persona non grata. Refik, Monroe knew, had other ministerial portfolios and, consequently, paid very little attention to educational matters. Yet the president of Robert College took heart in being told by the acting minister that he himself and the government he represented greatly appreciated the work that the American colleges were doing for Turkey. “I am inclined to believe that the Fisher incident is an isolated one, connected rather with incidents in Dr. Fisher’s past rather than with a general attitude towards the College,” wrote Monroe in a letter to the chairman of the Board of Trustees in New York. While he recognized that Fisher was blameless with regard to past and present allegations of anti-Turkish bias, he noted that it “seems quite impossible to break down such an unjust reputation when once gained, and the difficult position I am in is that in attempting to do so one would be apt to transfer the hostility from the individual to the College.”36 Monroe added that the American Embassy at Ankara had counseled against any further protests, which would prove detrimental not only to the interests of Robert College but also to the influence of US diplomacy. All he could do was wait for a reply. As the months went by, with the case seemingly caught up in the cogwheels of bureaucracy, Monroe began to ask himself what the deeper causes of Fisher’s banishment might be. In a letter to his exiled dean, who had now moved on from Athens to temporary quarters at the American University of Beirut, he admitted that there was “a great deal of concealment” surrounding the whole affair, “as I am constantly told by other Americans here that there is much behind this that has not yet come out, yet without my being able to discover what these things are.”37 Monroe recalled that Cumhuriyet and other Istanbul papers the previous year had 36  Paul Monroe to Henry Sloane Coffin; October 14, 1933; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 18; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 37  Paul Monroe to Edgar Fisher; January 3, 1934; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 18; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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published articles calling for the dismissal of staff at the foreign colleges guilty of possessing “the old mentality of the Capitulations,” and wondered if the move against Fisher was somehow connected to the current purges of history professors at the University of Istanbul.38 Based on what an informal informant had told him, he even speculated that Fisher’s fate had been sealed during one of Mustafa Kemal’s nightly drunken bouts. Rumor had it that “it is very customary for people who want to have something done for them to get at the leader in the evening … when he is not too conscious of what is going on, presenting cases to him, oftentimes misrepresenting them, which he disposes of with an immediate and often harsh judgment.” According to the informant, the very fact that the order for Fisher’s dismissal had never been issued in writing was an indication of what had really happened, namely, that Kemal had been presented with a misleading account of the situation, that he had reacted with a rash and vindictive decision, and that someone had seen to it that the case was never brought to his attention again once he had sobered up.39 A report from a Turkish lawyer who had made informal inquiries on Monroe’s behalf at Ankara seemed to confirm the suspicion that Kemal knew nothing about the matter, and that those who knew had been misinformed, believing that the damning article in School and Society was written by Fisher himself.40 By the end of 1933, Edgar Fisher’s patience was running out. In late November, he sent a letter to Mustafa Kemal himself, and in December he urged Monroe and the college to take more decisive action by approaching Ankara directly. From his wife Betty, who had returned to their home in Istanbul and talked to Hüseyin Bey, he learned that he had never been prevented from entering the country, just from teaching at Robert College, and that the case against him had nothing to do with the editorials in Cumhuriyet or a student’s resentment for being disciplined. “The important thing is to go at the case on the basis of the History article of Hyde’s and not to compromise, for it is compromise that will injure the College,

38  Paul Monroe to Henry Sloane Coffin; October 14, 1933; Paul Monroe to Edgar Fisher; November 2, 1933; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 18; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 39  Ibid. 40  Hazım Atif to Paul Monroe; December 6, 1933; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 18; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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and not my returning.”41 When Monroe admonished him for being too “greatly exercised,” the sorely tested dean vented his frustration at his treatment over the past months and years: If my letter of December 10th to you seemed to indicate that I was too “greatly exercised” by statements that had been made, I am sorry. I can only say what I wrote in a letter to Betty … I am wondering if I cannot be excused for being, at least once in a while, greatly exercised in view of what has happened since the beginning of last September. The injustice of this business, the exclusion from home, the ejection from a position, a work which for twenty years has claimed and I think received my loyalty and devotion, and the misinterpretation and misjudgment by the authorities of a people whose case and aspirations I have sympathetically interpreted during these trying years, -- all these are, I think, reasonable justifications for my getting at least exercised by the middle of December.42

At the end of December 1933, almost four months after receiving the order for Fisher’s dismissal, President Monroe changed tack and asked the American ambassador at Ankara to make official inquiries with the Turkish Foreign Ministry. Naturally, Monroe had already been in contact with the Embassy regarding Fisher’s case. The notes he received from US diplomats were hardly reassuring, and Fisher himself was increasingly suspicious. Made wary by experience, he spotted the signs that his boss was quietly severing the bonds between Robert College and its dean by presenting the case as that of an individual American citizen being wronged by the Turkish authorities rather than an encroachment upon the rights of an American institution in Turkey. In a letter to Monroe dated January 20, 1934, Fisher wrote that friends of his in the United States, who had written to the State Department on his behalf, had already been informed in early November by the Chief of the Near Eastern division that “the matter has been closed to the satisfaction of Dr. Monroe and others concerned.”43 Asking for clarification on the veracity of that statement, “which I am at a loss to understand,” he repeated his view that he could no longer see any harm in going public. 41  Edgar Fisher to Paul Monroe; December 10, 1933; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 18; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 42  Edgar Fisher to Paul Monroe; January 20, 1934; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 18; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 43  Ibid.

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Meanwhile, the Fisher affair was moving toward its definitive closure. From US Ambassador, Robert Skinner, Monroe learnt that the personal appeals to Kemal had never reached their destination, and that the decision of the Turkish Ministry of Education was final.44 All that was left for him to do was to justify his own course of action to his former employee. In a lengthy and deeply personal letter to Fisher dated January 31, 1934, the president of Robert College sought to explain and defend the painful choice he had made. Responding to Fisher’s concerns about his unwillingness to confront Ankara head on, Monroe presented his case as a matter of the college’s very survival: “What I realized all along is that the case is a much larger one than merely your individual welfare. In some sense the whole College is at stake. Precipitate action would have endangered the interests of the College. Your intimation that acquiescence in your case simply makes it easier in another case to take similar action may be countered by an argument of a direct contrary character.”45 To demonstrate this point, Monroe wrote about a meeting with the new Minister of Education, Hikmet (Bayur), in which, allegedly, he had made one last-ditch effort to have Fisher reinstated at Robert College. During this meeting, the minister told him about a proposal to create a new school, which would be organized on the model of the Galatasaray lycée at Istanbul but with English as its language of instruction instead of French. The implications of this proposal, if realized, were obvious to Monroe. Such a school would be entirely controlled by the Turkish regime, making it less dependent on graduates from Robert College, which eventually would become starved of new recruits. “Any evidence that the College is indifferent to their desires or their plans, or resist [sic] what they think to be their rights,” argued Monroe, “leads to the furthering of these plans which may have fatal consequences for the College.”46 There was, consequently, little else to do but graciously accept defeat in order to salvage what could be saved. This was the end of the affair. Edgar Fisher remained at the American University of Beirut for much of 1934, while his wife Betty went to Istanbul to pack their belongings and vacate their home of the past twenty 44  Robert Skinner to Paul Monroe; January 25, 1934; Robert College Records; Box 59; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 45  Paul Monroe to Edgar Fisher; January 31, 1934; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 18; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 46  Ibid.

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years. A dispute regarding who should pay the shipping expenses for his moving back to America added insult to injury, as the Finance Committee of Robert College argued that the former dean had brought about his own dismissal and was thus not entitled to reimbursement.47 Monroe, who seems to have washed his hands of the financial matters, sought to make amends by inquiring for academic positions on Fisher’s behalf at several American universities, but to no avail. In the end, Fisher was hired as assistant director of the Institute of International Education in New York City, a post that he held from 1935 to 1949, after which he became Professor of Government at Sweet Briar College in Virginia.48 Unlike Caleb Gates and Mary Mills Patrick, he never published any memoirs of his life and times in Turkey, instead confiding his thoughts to the diaries that would later end up in the archives of Ohio State University. Whether from a lingering loyalty to Robert College or as part of an agreement with Monroe in return for his new job in New York, he kept his silence, apart from a brief public statement on the grounds for his dismissal along with a muted criticism of Mustafa Kemal’s “strongly nationalistic dictatorship.”49 Throughout his life, he remained committed to the ideals of international understanding, student exchanges, and the work of organizations such as the American Friends of the Middle East and the Near East Foundation, the successor of the Near East Relief. Speaking at a memorial service for his departed brother in 1947, he reaffirmed his belief in the sort of peace education he had tried to accomplish at Robert College. “No man could think of fighting and killing a classmate.”50 He died on November 19, 1968, leaving an instruction in the short obituary for contributions to the Near East Foundation in lieu of flowers.51

47  “Memorandum on Fisher’s Shipping and Travel Case”; January 17, 1934; Edgar Fisher to Henry Sloane Coffin; February 8, 1934; Robert College Records; Box 59; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 48  Freely 2012 (2009), 270. “Dr. Edgar J. Fisher to Teach in South”, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, March 20, 1949, 36. 49  Edgar J. Fisher cited in “Aims of New Turkey”, Star-Gazette, December 19, 1934, 6. 50  Edgar J.  Fisher quoted in “Culture Held Aid to Peace”, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, May 26, 1947, 14. 51   Obituary for Edgar J.  Fisher, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, November 21, 1968, 11.

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Building Harmony: Making Sense of Fisher’s Expulsion Why did the project for internationalist education at Robert College fail? Since that project was essentially synonymous with the person who did the most to champion it, Edgar Fisher, the answer may seem evident. But why was Fisher made a public enemy of Turkey, despite his efforts to tiptoe around sensitive subjects, and even ingratiate himself by commending the regime’s reforms and foreign policy? To the extent that earlier scholars of the history of Robert College have touched upon the case of Edgar Fisher, they have written it off as based upon a misunderstanding of his actions and his character, founded in Turkish hypersensitivity to perceived slights.52 At the time of Fisher’s dismissal, however, Monroe and other parties concerned were convinced that there was more to it than that. What were, then, the deeper causes of his exclusion? Interestingly, there is a memorandum to the Board of Trustees, written in early January 1934, in which Paul Monroe gave his own evaluation of the case, along with an assessment of Robert College’s standing in Turkish society and recommendations for the future.53 The president set the Fisher incident against the wider background of the Turkish quest for national unity and independence, the transition from the discredited Pan-Islamism of Abdul Hamid II and the Pan-Turanism of the Young Turks to the “modern nationalism” of the present. Attempting to write from the viewpoint of the Kemalist leadership, Monroe identified a number of perceived threats to the “development of modern nationalism” and the ways the nationalists had dealt with them, ranging from the suppression of the Muslim clergy to the abandonment of the millet system with the expulsion of the Greek minority and “the elimination of the Assyrians and the Armenians, which occurred during the Great War.”54 He paid particular attention to the fraught relations between Turkish public opinion, as represented by the national movement, and foreign interests and institutions, such as Robert College and other international schools. Like many  For example, Freely 2012 (2009), 269-70.  Paul Monroe, “Memorandum to the Trustees of Robert College On the Attitude of Government Officials And Turkish People Towards the American Colleges”; January 5, 1934; Box 59; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 54  Monroe, “Memorandum to the Trustees”, p. 2. This was one of the very few references made to the genocide of 1915 in the correspondence of Robert College officials after the creation of the Turkish Republic. 52 53

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Americans commenting on Turkish affairs and the psychology of the new nationalism, Monroe grasped that Kemal and his followers harbored a long-simmering resentment against the privileges foreigners had enjoyed on account of the capitulations, which blended with their contempt for the old Ottoman ways. For them, the foreign educational institutions remaining in the country were reminders of the national humiliation suffered at the hands of the European great powers and their local agents, who considered themselves outside the pale of Turkish law. He could well understand the Turkish nationalists’ desire to assert themselves as masters of their own house. Nevertheless, Monroe emphasized his belief that the regime had not yet formed a consistent attitude toward the foreign schools. Instead, he noted, there was a powerful, hostile sentiment in the press and certain segments of society, notably in the student body of government institutions like the universities, as well as among politicians who sought to influence government policy. Rather than controlling or whipping up public hostility toward Robert College and other foreign enterprises, the government was itself divided on what to do. This meant that there was still room for maneuvering on the part of American college officials to stem the tide of hostility and sway the government into adopting a more benevolent attitude. That, however, entailed identifying the dominant factor shaping popular perception of the college. Religion was at the heart of the matter, according to this analysis. Monroe pointed out a paradox in that the Turkish Republic’s constitution granted freedom of religious belief while at the same time the policy of strictly secularized education clashed with the religious activities that had thitherto been habitual at Robert College, among whose American staff were several devout Christians. Although the college was never formally a missionary school, the influence and legacy of the Evangelical missionary spirit were profound, with Bible classes, prayer meetings, and Sunday church services. Paul Monroe was the first president not to have this background, which enabled him to take a different perspective on the matter. In his view, the Turkish authorities had tolerated the elements of religious instruction at Robert College out of respect for Caleb Gates, but with him gone, they expected the new administration to “do away with all these causes of misunderstanding and of misinterpretation.” Monroe was under the impression that the bulk of hostility toward the foreign schools emanated from the old Islamic elites who resented the fact that “foreigners may be allowed religious privileges which they themselves are denied,” but

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added that their grudge against the Americans was shared by secular nationalists, albeit for different reasons. At the American College for Girls, over which Monroe also presided, he reckoned this would not constitute a problem as that particular institution and the International College at Izmir had terminated all kinds of religious activities years before, but they had continued to some small extent at Robert College. He himself had abolished compulsory chapel attendance for Christian boys (Muslim students having been exempt for many years), and had seen to it that the Bible classes, which already faced an uncertain future, were strictly voluntary, so as not to give any offense to Turkish sentiments or violate the spirit of secularism. Nevertheless, there remained the matter of religious observance among the American faculty and administrative staff, who maintained their constitutional right to worship freely. “Of the members of our staff who have been long connected with the College,” Monroe observed, these religious activities were a symbol if not the chief purpose of the school’s existence. “To the Turks they constitute a symbol of defiance … of their wishes, an evidence of the continuance of the ‘mentality of the capitulations’ and the maintenance of that attitude of superiority to their people and to their culture.” While the Turkish constitution granted freedom of faith, it was in fact an obstacle to friendly relations. Monroe claimed to have realized that this had been a major factor in the Fisher incident. Edgar Fisher was a devout man who did not hesitate to remind his fellow Americans of their Christian duties. Worse still, he had engaged in conversations with students over religious matters, thus inviting the enmity of Turkish secularists. This, argued the president, called for necessary adjustments: With the elimination of compulsion in regard to attendance on classes in religious instruction, I do not believe that we will come into conflict with the authorities. But as long as we maintain any religious instruction in our institution or, perhaps, carry on religious activities of any kind, I believe we will be under suspicion, and that this suspicion may take the form of hostility to some of the most devoted members of our staff.55

Religion was, however, not the sole factor that determined Turkish attitudes toward the college. Moving from the wider context to the specifics of the Fisher case, Monroe stated clearly that the accusations of  Monroe, “Memorandum to the Trustees”, 4.

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anti-Turkish bias leveled at his former dean were untrue, and “evidently a pretext only.” Nonetheless, it was obvious that he had made powerful enemies, for reasons other than his religious interests. Monroe referred to a recent case in which Fisher, in his capacity as chairman of the disciplinary committee, had expelled a misbehaving student, who happened to be the son of a CHP deputy. The father had used his influence at the Ministry of Education to rebuke Robert College. In his memorandum, Monroe hastened to add that Fisher had his full approval on this matter, since discipline was essential if the college was to maintain its prestige and influence. In this regard, Monroe refused to kowtow to Turkish pressure. There was, however, a deep rift between the American and Turkish members of the staff. Monroe professed to having only recently become aware of it, and what he now discovered gave him cause for grave concern. As dean of Robert College, Edgar Fisher had been the immediate administrative superior of American and Turkish employees alike, and among the latter “a mass of resentments” had accumulated over the years. Apparently emboldened by the recent developments in Turkish society and Fisher’s exclusion, they had now made their views known to the embattled president. Monroe conceded that Fisher may have been “firm, not to say inflexible, in his manner of dealings with his colleagues,” but noted wider dimensions of a conflict that threatened to tear the workplace apart: At least seven of the older and more important Turkish members of our staff suggested to me that if we were to have complete harmony between the Turkish and the American members of the staff it would be necessary to get rid of a number of the older members of the American staff. I answered that I had not come out here to dispossess those who had long served the College, and that while I agreed that our aim should be to develop complete harmony between the Turkish and the American members of the staff, and to make the College a Turko-American institution, this could not be done without maintaining the American character of the institution, and hence the American staff. The reply was always that these things could not be accomplished as long as these members who shared the “mentality of the Capitulations” remained. Dr. Fisher was always mentioned in the list. There were three other members of the staff mentioned, always. They were key men in administration or in teaching. The reasons always assigned were that these men were anti-Turkish, pro-Armenian, or pro-minority, or that they were chiefly interested in religious propaganda. I am convinced that a part of this prejudice is due to the attitude of the subordinate towards

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anyone having authority over him. Part of it is anti-foreign, that is the Turk is now in such a state of exalted nationalism that he interprets the act of anyone having any authority over him as a slight on his race, or to his nationality. To that extent the attitude involves and concerns the entire American staff.56

Monroe never mentions any names in his memorandum besides Fisher’s, perhaps because he feared what might ensue if the trustees learned the identities of the former dean’s accusers. However, one member of the Turkish staff stands out in this context. Hüseyin Bey (Pektaş) had been the first Muslim Turk to graduate from Robert College in 1903, after which he was enrolled as a teacher of Turkish at his alma mater, as noted earlier. Because of his fluency in English and French, he served as secretary and translator for Ismet Pasha at the Lausanne peace conference in 1923, before returning to his teaching position at the college. Hüseyin, with friends inside the Ministry of Education, was thus well connected with the ruling circles of the country, as was his wife, Mihri Baha, herself a graduate from the Girls’ College, who in 1934 was elected a parliament deputy for the governing CHP.57 He was, therefore, thought of as an indispensable asset to the embattled American colleges—perhaps more so than Edgar Fisher, whom Monroe now recognized as a liability.58 Very little is known about relations between the two men beyond the fact that Fisher had sought Hüseyin’s advice regarding passages in the American world history textbooks that might be construed as offensive to Turkish national sentiment. There are indications in the correspondence between Fisher and Gates during the donkey incident in 1924 that the former did not quite trust Hüseyin, but whether this means that the dean saw him as a personal enemy or felt threatened by him is difficult to ascertain.59  Monroe, “Memorandum to the Trustees”, 7.  Freely 2012 (2009), 151-52, 272. Regarding Hüseyin’s connections with the Ministry of Education, see Walter Livingston Wright, Jr., “Progress in Turkey”, Near East Colleges’ News Letter 16:2 (December 1936): 7-8. 58  In his memorandum, Monroe refers to a “general belief that should Dr. Fisher return to the College through the withdrawal of the Act of Exclusion, the nationalistic spirit of the students would be worked upon so that disciplinary trouble both for Dr. Fisher, and for the College, would be fostered; so that his resumption of duty … would bring little satisfaction to himself or little value to the College. Dr. Fisher does not accept this argument … but it is an opinion very commonly held.” Monroe, “Memorandum to the Trustees”, 6. 59  Edgar Fisher to Caleb Gates; September 14, 1924; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 11; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 56 57

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On the other hand, we know that there was bad blood between the different nationalities at Robert College because of the differences between the salary levels of the American teachers and those hired locally. This question would continue to haunt faculty discussions throughout the remaining years of Robert College’s existence, without ever being resolved satisfactorily for all parties involved.60 The argument for paying the Americans more rested on the necessity to offer wages similar to those in the United States in order to attract qualified candidates for teaching positions in Turkey. Unsurprisingly, the Turkish members of the staff disagreed, as the arrangement implied that they were second-rate teachers, an impression that fed into the resentment against foreign privilege described by Monroe. Hüseyin had served at Robert College for many more years than Fisher, who, as dean, was nevertheless his superior. Since raising the salaries of the Turkish staff to match those of their American colleagues was financially difficult at the best of times, and nigh impossible during the Great Depression, when Robert College suffered from a decline in student enrollment and a special “crisis tax” imposed by Turkish authorities, other means would be required in order to level the playing field. Added to this were the nationalist concerns voiced by Turkish faculty members accusing Fisher and other colleagues of being “pro-Armenian” or “pro-minority,” which Monroe mentioned in his memorandum to the trustees. According to press reports from the early 1920s, Edgar Fisher had done work for Near East Relief during the war, and thus knew more about the wartime massacres of Armenians than he admitted in public statements.61 This prior engagement was evidently common knowledge within the college community. His continued presence at the college and his influence among students was a thorn in the side of nationalist opinion—which saw the donkey incident as unfinished business—and an embarrassment to Turkish employees in sympathy with the regime who were anxious to show their ideological mettle. The atmosphere ushered in by the purges and the prospect of imminent staff layoffs at the American colleges may have provided a further incentive to settle old scores. All this raises the question of whether Hüseyin had masterminded the whole affair that led to Fisher’s exclusion, using his connections with Turkish authorities and manipulating American college officials to remove a rival from his post. It also begs the question of whether he had been  Freely 2012 (2009), 269.  “Near East Dinner Tonight Booms Drive for $18,000”, Star-Gazette, April 9, 1920, 14.

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targeting undesirable colleagues in succession—Stuckert, Miss Smith, Hagopian, and Fisher—ever since 1924, covertly paving the way for his own friends and the Turkification of the American colleges whenever an opportunity arose. There is circumstantial evidence to support such a hypothesis, at least in the case of Fisher. It was Hüseyin Bey who had conveyed the order for Fisher’s first expulsion in 1924, and had acted as adviser to Floyd Black during Gates’ absence, counseling acquiescence to the government’s demands.62 On both occasions, in 1924 and 1933, the order from the Ministry of Education came when Fisher was abroad and thus hindered from mounting his own defense on the spot or seeking out Turkish officials in person. Likewise, President Gates had been on vacation when the donkey incident erupted in the summer of 1924, having left matters in the hands of Hüseyin Bey and the hapless Black, while important developments seem to have occurred in 1933 when President Monroe was away for medical treatment in London. This hints at inside knowledge of the whereabouts of the parties concerned on certain dates, when they would be subject to the delay of having to communicate by correspondence. Hüseyin’s standing advice to his American employer in such a situation—to dismiss the offending employee and let the Embassy take over, thus allowing time to pass—had the effect of creating a fait accompli, which made it all the more difficult to overturn the decision later. It is difficult to ascertain whether he acted under orders to devise pretexts for the removal of “key men” in teaching and administration at the American college or just seized the opportunity as it presented itself, taking advantage of his rapport with the high and mighty, several of whom he knew from the Turkish delegation to the Lausanne peace conference or possibly earlier, from his days as a military censor under the CUP regime. However, in the end the outcome was the same. Robert College was becoming a Kemalist institution. While Gates had succeeded in shielding Fisher from attempts at his removal, forcing the Turkish authorities to retreat, his successor Monroe, although on friendly terms with Fisher, lacked the bond of religious sentiment the dean and Gates had shared and seems to have been more willing to listen to complaints from his Turkish staff. Knowing that it would be difficult to fire any of the Turkish teachers owing to the fact that the government controlled their appointments, Monroe decided that the 62  Floyd Black “Return to the Straits”, manuscript in type, 161; Robert College Records; Box 53; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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American staff would have to bear the brunt of economic cuts.63 With the teaching of history and civics taken out of his hands by the government’s Turkification decree, Fisher was only useful for administrative work, even though he seems to have been intent on keeping his Political Science Forum and the Peace Day exercises going. It may also have made economic sense to Monroe to get rid of an employee who only seemed to invite trouble, thus removing an obstacle to Turkish-American harmony. Is it possible that the president made a devil’s bargain with Hüseyin Bey, by sacrificing his dean in exchange for protection from future attacks once Mihri Baha, Hüseyin’s spouse, was elected deputy? There is no way of knowing whether this really was the case. What we do know is that Monroe recognized the need to integrate Turkish staff members into the running of the college by asking them to take up administrative tasks, something that they had been reluctant to do in the past for fear of putting themselves in positions where they might have to oppose the Turkish authorities and public opinion in defense of a foreign institution. In 1935, the office of vice-president, specifically assigned to a Turkish national, came into existence, as a token that Robert College and its sister institution were now joint Turkish-American ventures. In this respect, the American colleges were emulating a practice already established at the surviving schools for the city’s Greek-Orthodox and Armenian minorities.64 Unsurprisingly, the first Turkish vice-president of Robert College and the American College for Girls was none other than Hüseyin Pektaş.65 There are of course other considerations that may have mattered more in shaping Monroe’s response to the crisis presented by the Fisher incident than staff intrigues and economic calculation. In his correspondence with the exiled Fisher, he testified to being kept in the dark about certain matters with bearing on Fisher’s case. American diplomats had hinted at greater developments behind the scene, “yet without my being able to discover what these things are.”66 This points to a larger context of foreign policy considerations and diplomatic relations between the United States and the Turkish Republic, in which Robert College, the foremost symbol of American influence in Turkey, wittingly or unwittingly played some 63  Monroe mentions cuts of up to 33% to American staff. Monroe, “Memorandum to the Trustees”, 11. 64  Cf. Alexandris 1992 (1983), 190. Ekmekçioğlu (2016), 124. 65  Freely 2012 (2009), 272-75. 66  Paul Monroe to Edgar Fisher; January 3, 1934; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 18; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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role. The relaxation in Turkish official attitudes toward the American colleges that Caleb Gates sensed in 1927 was due to the two countries normalizing their relations, with Congress finally ratifying the Lausanne treaty and the appointment of Joseph Grew as the first US ambassador to Ankara. The relations between America and Turkey were not yet the strong geopolitical bond that would emerge in the post-1945 world order, but already the significance attributed to the connection was manifest. The uncertainty in international relations following Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933 strengthened Turkey’s hand on the world stage, as Britain and France courted the Kemalist regime in search of guarantees for Turkish neutrality in the event of a European war. Ankara’s diplomacy scored important victories throughout the 1930s, culminating in the Montreux Convention of 1936, which restored Turkish sovereignty over the Straits, and the annexation of Iskenderun (Hatay) from French-controlled Syria in 1939.67 While staying clear of foreign alliances, the US State Department was doing its share of wooing the rulers of the new Turkey. In the years following the restoration of full diplomatic relations, Grew and his successor negotiated and signed a number of treaties on commerce and navigation, among other things. In 1934, shortly after Fisher’s expulsion, a claims settlement was reached on Turkish violations of American persons and property between 1914 and 1922. Essentially, American diplomats yielded to Turkish interests, failing to claim the property confiscated by the Turkish Republic from formerly Ottoman Christians who had acquired US citizenship.68 Did the Turkish Foreign Ministry use Robert College as a bargaining chip in these negotiations, and was the dismissal of Fisher part of a quid pro quo deal beyond Monroe’s influence? It is difficult to assess the impact of this factor; however, it is clear that State Department did very little to help in Fisher’s case and, to a query from his friends, merely responded that the matter had been closed to Monroe’s satisfaction in early November 1933. A similar unwillingness to jeopardize US relations with Ankara is to be found in the well-known case of State Department’s interference, upon Turkish request, with Metro Goldwyn Meier’s plans to film Franz Werfel’s novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh in

 Zürcher 2009 (1993), 202-3.  Hans-Lukas Kieser, Nearest East: American Millennialism and Mission to the Middle East. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010, 114. 67 68

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1935.69 The subject of the story was the wartime annihilation of the Armenians, which was bound to draw unwanted public attention to matters best left forgotten in the eyes of Turkish and American diplomats alike. In this context, the threat of setting up an English-language Turkish lycée on the model of the government-run elite school at Galatasaray becomes pertinent. Curiously, there is no mention of it in Monroe’s memorandum to the Board of Trustees, only in his private correspondence with Fisher. Was the plan for a new Galatasaray with English and American teachers in Turkish government service a ruse by the Minister of Education to force the president of Robert College into submission, or was Monroe lying to Fisher in order to convince him that the college’s very survival was at stake? In the memorandum, he gave the impression that he was forced to make a painful choice between the welfare of the entire college and that of one individual. “The problem for me is: shall I make every effort to have this decision set aside, with the possible result of transferring this hostility to the College, perhaps precipitating a crusade of hostile criticism in the press, and stirring up disturbances among the student body, also motivated by this extreme nationalistic sentiment?”70 Nonetheless, he indicated elsewhere in his memo the possibility that Turkish hostility had less to do with any single individual, and more to do with the content being taught at the American colleges. Graduates from Robert College were reported to suffer from discrimination at the national university on the grounds that they had attended the wrong school, meaning that their hopes for a career in government service were quashed. “The rather … insidious propaganda takes the form of … throwing discredit upon the youth who attend a foreign institution as being unpatriotic [and that] the foreign institutions have no right to attempt to formulate attitudes, mental, social or moral, of the Turkish youth.” The implications which this propaganda had for the prospect of international education were far-reaching: There is a feeling definitely expressed upon the part of many that all such subjects as Ethics, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology  – all subjects which 69  Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p.  221. For an account of MGM’s thwarted plan to film Werfel’s novel, see David Welky, “Global Hollywood versus National Pride: The Battle to Film The Forty Days of Musa Dagh”, Film Quarterly 59:3 (Spring 2006): 35-43. 70  Monroe, “Memorandum to the Trustees”, 5.

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formulate attitudes of conduct – should be taught only by Turks themselves, which is as now required of History, Civics and Geography, and for the same reason as in these latter cases. This leaves only the languages and some of the natural sciences for foreigners to teach. Officials have said to me repeatedly … that what they wanted the foreign institutions to do is to teach practical subjects and the languages, which is their way of putting the same idea, though with less offence and with less comprehensiveness.71

There thus appears to be some truth in the possibility that the Turkish government would set up a rival institution that would put the American colleges out of business. At least that is how Monroe seems to have read the situation, although he was willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt. Much of the hostility toward the foreign schools emanated from the nationalistic university students engaged in the “Citizen, Speak Turkish!” campaign and their supporters in the press, he recognized, rather than the government itself. Monroe thus understood the regime to be on the receiving end of anti-foreign propaganda rather than being its instigator. The foreigners themselves were not blameless either in this context, in the president’s opinion. He recalled that the government had conceded the right of students of Robert College and other foreign schools to take examinations in the foreign language in which they had studied their subjects, including history, civics, and geography, on the request of unspecified foreign interests. A nationalistic outcry in the press, however, had forced the government to backtrack on this concession, stating that examinations could only be taken in Turkish. Monroe’s verdict was unambiguous. “Had the foreign interests acted with greater consideration and self-restraint, we might now have had more freedom than we have.”72 What was then to be done? Monroe’s answer to the question and his overall recommendation to the trustees was, “Nothing, except that we ‘carry on.’” He was convinced that the nationalistic xenophobia which now held Turkey in its grip was only a coming-of-age matter, an immature phase that would pass. Even if it did not, there were ways in which an American presence and, eventually, influence over the country might be secured if the colleges could convince the Ankara regime of their usefulness to Turkish nation building and the pursuit of regional hegemony. Monroe’s conclusion to his memorandum is worth quoting at length, as  Monroe, “Memorandum to the Trustees”, 14.  Monroe, “Memorandum to the Trustees”, 9-10.

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it demonstrates a curious blend of internationalist idealism and cynical opportunism in the service of authoritarian nationalism: I believe that it is the universal experience borne out by the change of our own attitude in the United States itself, that a people or a government, once it becomes secure in its own stability, loses the fear and the hostility to foreign institutions and influences. I believe that in time such a change will take place in Turkey just as it has elsewhere, and that by remaining and carrying on our work we may contribute to this feeling of stability and security, and ultimately contribute greatly to their development. The second conclusion is that if Turkey takes the lead in … the formation of a pact or confederacy of the Balkan States … they may recognize that the American colleges should be of very definite assistance in developing and making effective Turkish leadership in this political movement. The Colleges would make an appeal to the various peoples of these Balkan States as no Turkish government school could. Our long history with reference to other Balkan people would here stand us in good stead and might carry over this tradition and prestige to the Turkish government. Personally, I have more faith in this second possibility than in the first one I have mentioned. Time alone will tell, but I believe the time has arrived when we should make a definite statement of the problem to the public officials, including the Minister of Education and Ismet Pasha, the Prime Minister. I think we cannot carry on much longer with a purely negative attitude on the part of the officials. If they wish the American institutions to continue they should give us some … positive assurance on this point, [indicating] to the public that they appreciate and desire the work we are doing.73

This was essentially the vision of Turkish (or to use a more recent term, neo-Ottoman) dominance in the Balkans, under American guidance, that Edgar Fisher had been advocating in articles and lecture halls around America. It was the same dream of international cooperation, minus Fisher himself and any overtures to cosmopolitanism, which Monroe hoped would appeal to the regime in Ankara, and sway public opinion in Turkey into favoring the continued presence of Robert College and its sister institution in Istanbul. In the short term, this strategy appears to have been successful. In his report for the following year, 1935, Monroe was able to declare that the long decrease in student enrollment had been checked, leading him to “safely assume that the decrease in attendance was due more largely to the influence of the economic depression than to any  Monroe, “Memorandum to the Trustees”, 14-15.

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antagonism in public opinion to the College, or to any fear that the College might be closed.”74 The future of the two American colleges on the Bosporus looked bright. The newfound success had come at a price. All talk of Robert College as a place where young people of different nationalities and religions mingled with each other and overcame their prejudices was absent from the language of the president’s annual reports, as “we are now in the process of making adjustments so that we may become almost wholly institutions for the Turkish people.”75 By giving up American control over many of the subjects taught at the colleges and adapting to the tenets of Turkish state nationalism, Monroe had averted the potential calamity to which the closing of Robert College and the Girls’ College might have led. It is difficult to say what would have happened if the college management had decided to stand its ground against the government’s exclusion of Fisher, by insisting on fair treatment and threatening a shutdown that would have damaged Turkey’s image in the eyes of the American public. Gates had threatened to do so in 1924, which may have played some role in the Turkish authorities’ reluctance to let the conflict go further. Yet there were two important differences between the donkey incident and the Fisher affair of 1933: firstly, there was no longer a relatively free, liberal press in Turkey to which the American colleges could appeal, and, secondly, the Turkish Republic had already gained diplomatic recognition from, and amiable relations with the United States and it no longer needed to worry about effective reprisals from Washington. It is easy to understand the qualms that the president and the trustees felt about the risk of destroying the livelihoods of many employees and the disruption of half a century’s work in order to defend the rights of one individual wronged by false accusations. Monroe’s dilemma was essentially this: should he choose to save the college or should he save what it stood for (or what Fisher believed it stood for)? In the end, he convinced himself that the dilemma was really about the choice between an individual and the greater good of a community. This was the reasoning permeating his parting words in the letter finally breaking the news to Fisher, but the dilemma itself would continue to reverberate for the remaining years of Robert College’s existence:

74  Paul Monroe’s report for the academic year 1934–1935, quoted in Freely 2012 (2009), 273. 75  Quoted in Freely 2012 (2009), 268.

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The whole affair is somewhat tragic in its consequences, primarily for you and for Betty, but remember also for me. The balancing of the interests and rights of yourself over and against those of the College are not only among the most difficult but among the most unpleasant tasks I have ever had to perform. My chief consolation is that I have hopes that in the long run it will work out better for you than had it not have happened, and that eventually this may be demonstrated to you. Cordially yours, Paul Monroe, President.76

References Alexandris, Alexis. 1992 (1983). The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek-Turkish Relations, 1918–1974. Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies. Bozarslan, Hamit. Kemalism, westernization and antiliberalism. 2013 (2006). In Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Towards Post-Nationalist Identities, ed. Hans-­ Lukas Kieser, 28-34. London: I.B. Tauris. Ekmekçioğlu, Lerna. 2016. Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-­ Genocide Turkey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Freely, John. 2012 (2009). A Bridge of Culture: Robert College  – Bog ̆aziçi University: How an American College in Istanbul Became A Turkish University. Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitetisi Yayinevi. Kieser, Hans-Lukas. 2010. Nearest East: American Millennialism and Mission to the Middle East. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Makdisi, Ussama. 2019. Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Pursley, Sara. 2019. Familiar Futures: Time, Selfhood, and Sovereignty in Iraq. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Üngör, Uğur Ümit. 2011. The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Uzer, Umut. 2016. An Intellectual History of Turkish Nationalism: Between Turkish Ethnicity and Islamic Identity. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press. Welky, David. Spring 2006. Global Hollywood versus National Pride: The Battle to Film The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. Film Quarterly 59 (3): 35–43. Zürcher, Erik Jan. 2009 (1993) Turkey: A Modern History. London: I. B. Tauris.

76  Paul Monroe to Edgar Fisher; January 31, 1934; Robert College Records; Box 29, Folder 18; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

CHAPTER 7

Epilogue and Conclusion

NOTICE The military camp for Robert College students will begin on Monday, June 15th, and will last until Saturday, July 4th, the examination taking place on the 6th and the 7th. Turkish subjects of the College and the Engineering Departments who have been taking the military science studies this year are required to attend … Students who are … boarders in Hamlin Hall may continue to reside in Hamlin Hall … Boarders who wish to take up residence outside the College during the period of the camp must present written permission from their parents … Boarders remaining in Hamlin Hall will be subject to military regulations governing attendance at meals, retiring hours, walk and town permissions similar to those in force during the school year. May 28, 1936 The Direction1 The friendship between our two countries was founded on solid foundations a long time ago. These foundations are the sincere devotion of the people of our two countries to the principles of freedom and democracy and their readiness for sacrifice for the safeguarding of these ideals. 1  Documents pertaining to Military Studies, 1936–1939; Robert College Records; Box 32, Folder 16; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Sjöberg, Internationalism and the New Turkey, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00932-7_7

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We are convinced that the friendship between the two countries which draws its inspiration from these lofty principles constitutes an element of stability in furthering world peace.

Extracts from the Message of General Cemal Gürsel, Head of State of the Turkish Republic, on the occasion of the Turkish-American celebration of April 18, 1961.2

Epilogue: The Long Twilight, 1934–1971 The years following Fisher’s expulsion were a period of relative calm in the relations between the American Istanbul colleges and the Turkish authorities. The program of study had undergone a complete revision and received the blessing of the Ministry of Education and it appeared that the long-­ envisaged harmony between the aims of Robert College and those of the Kemalist regime was finally at hand. As the president of the two colleges put it in his report for the academic year of 1935–1936—extracts of which appeared in the Near East Colleges Newsletter—Robert College had made “definite and gratifying progress toward realization of its aim: the provision of … education of a type thoroughly adapted to the needs of Turkey, but based upon American ideas and practice.”3 Gone were the Political Science Forum and the Peace Day exercises, now replaced by an entirely new course in military science under the firm hand of Turkish instructors appointed by the Ankara government. Paul Monroe had also left, after a tenure of only three years, in 1935. For his successor, the Board of Trustees elected Walter Livingston Wright, a young Princeton scholar—like Gates but unlike Monroe, a fluent Turkish-speaker—who expressed his gratitude for his predecessor’s revision of the educational program. Particular praise was heaped upon Hüseyin Pektaş, the new Turkish vice-president, who had been “of the greatest assistance, often in unexpected ways which showed his … devotion to his ideal of what the College may become in the life of his country.” Thanks to Hüseyin’s friendship with the local director of the Ministry of Education, which was described as warm and personal, relations between Robert College and the government were now “entirely 2  Message of General Cemal Gürsel, Head of State of the Turkish Republic on the occasion of the Turkish-American celebration, 1961; Robert College Records; Box 51, Folder 17; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 3  Walter Livingston Wright, Jr., “Progress in Turkey”, Near East Colleges Newsletter 16:2 (December 1936), 7-8.

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satisfactory,” according to Wright.4 The main obstacle to complete harmony in Turkish-American relations, according to those parts of the report presented to readers of the newsletter, was that so few American staff members had sufficient knowledge of Turkish “to aid in interpreting the Colleges and their aims to the people of the country.” Wright hoped that mandatory language courses for his fellow Americans would remedy that problem, adding, with a discreet nod to Monroe’s memorandum on the Fisher affair, that it would help “our staff to get away from the atmosphere of tension in personal relations which always develops in a tight little community such as ours has been in the past.”5 Other parts of Wright’s report were for the trustees’ eyes only. While the president commended Monroe’s course of transforming Robert College from a Christian to a secular and Turkified institution, he also pointed to a difficult future, with recurring crises stemming from a legacy of distrust. “It is a relatively easy matter to reorganize our programs of studies … in conformity with those of the national educational system, but it is an extremely difficult task to persuade Turkish officials and public opinion that we are in hearty sympathy with them and have no ulterior political or proselytizing motive, that we are no longer the perhaps unconscious focus of separatism and revolutionary developments among the Christian minority peoples.”6 No matter how careful the American educators were, or how hard they worked to ingratiate themselves, their colleges remained alien to the Turkish nation in the eyes of the ruling nationalists. Despite reassuring noises about Turkish-American friendship from government officials, this meant that it would take little to reignite simmering tensions. One such incident arose in the academic year of 1940–1941, when a student of the Engineering School at Robert College, Ercument Karacan, and two of his classmates were expelled for academic dishonesty after being caught in the act of stealing examination papers.7 The decision was overruled by the Minister of Education on the insistence of Karacan’s 4  Ibid. The director in question, Bay Emin (Erisirgil), later became a member of Robert College’s faculty after resigning from his post at the Ministry of Education. 5  Ibid. 6  Walter Livingston Wright’s report for the academic year 1935–1936, quoted in John Freely, A Bridge of Culture: Robert College—Boğaziçi University: How an American College in Istanbul Became A Turkish University. Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitetisi Yayinevi, 2012 (2009), 275-76. 7  Freely 2012 (2009), 283.

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father, and the delinquent students were readmitted on probation despite faculty protest. When Karacan was charged with misconduct for a second time, the Minister intervened once again in his favor, stating bluntly that the college had no right to deny him a diploma. This time, the administration of Robert College decided to stand its ground against the Ministry, after years of conforming to its dictates. Both faculty and administrators felt strongly that their authority would be undermined if Karacan were allowed to graduate, and claimed that they were prepared to have the college closed if necessary to maintain their standards. The case dragged on for months until the American ambassador at Ankara finally used his influence with the Turkish Prime Minister who, in 1943, overruled the decree forbidding Robert College to deny the misbehaving student a degree. Ultimately, the American Embassy granted Karacan a visa to continue his studies in the United States.8 The college authorities were left with a no doubt gratifying sense of having refused to compromise their integrity, and perhaps of having safeguarded the authority of their institution from future infringements. Nonetheless, incidents similar to the Karacan case— when parents of expelled students used their political connections and appealed to nationalist sentiment in the Turkish media in order to press their case or avenge their humiliation—would be a recurring headache for the American colleges whose administrators were not always successful in holding their ground against this external pressure. This is illustrated by the outcome of a controversy in 1960, when the Ministry of Education forced the Girls’ College to reinstate a group of students caught cheating in exams, in spite of President Duncan Smith Ballantine’s earlier threat to close the colleges.9 A factor that explains the outcome of the Karacan affair is its timing in relation to larger developments on the world stage and in US-Turkish relations which worked to Robert College’s advantage. By 1943, it was becoming clear that the United States and its allies would emerge victorious from the Second World War, and that Washington would thenceforth be far more involved globally than it had ever been before. America was now assuming the role of powerbroker in the Middle East that it had refused to take on after the First World War. At about the same time, the 8  “Memo re. Sensitive Materials in the Archives: The Karacan Case”; September 19, 1986; Memos regarding sensitive materials, 1961–1986; Robert College Records; Box 59; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 9  Freely 2012 (2009), 332.

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relatively friendly relations that Ankara had enjoyed with its northern neighbor turned sour, as the Soviet Union was demanding border revisions and unfettered access to the Straits. Sensing the chill of geopolitical isolation, the Kemalist regime saw no recourse but to ingratiate itself with Washington. The Truman Doctrine committed the United States to defending Turkey against communist aggression, but this protection came with attached conditions, which entailed the dismantlement of one-party rule. The multi-party elections held in 1950 delivered a stinging rebuke to the CHP, forcing it into opposition for the remainder of the decade. Thus began a half-century of uneasy coexistence between the Republican People’s Party and emerging political rivals, punctuated by periods of civil unrest and interventions by military strongmen acting under the pretext of safeguarding Kemal Atatürk’s secular republican legacy.10 The Cold War alliance between Turkey and the West appeared to strengthen the hand of Robert College and its Istanbul sister institution, which—seemingly—were becoming the springboard of American influence that various college presidents and educators had been talking about for decades. In September 1955, Duncan Smith Ballantine, who headed the two Istanbul colleges at the time, raised the prospect of their acquiring the status of an American university, in the same way that their sister school in Lebanon, the former Syrian Protestant College, had become the prestigious American University of Beirut. The proposition was ill-timed, coming at a moment of renewed Greek and Turkish hostility over Cyprus and just days from the most violent outburst of anti-Christian sentiment Istanbul had seen since the early 1920s. On September 6 and 7, a Turkish-­ Muslim mob rampaged through the city’s Greek-Orthodox neighborhoods on the pretext of an alleged bombing of Atatürk’s birthplace in the Greek port of Thessaloniki, setting fire to Christian-owned homes and businesses and prompting a mass exodus of the Rûm minority.11 This was effectively the end of the old, multi-religious Constantinople, despite the lingering presence of the Greek-Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic Patriarchates. Perhaps inevitably, some of the renewed anti-Christian ­hostility spilled over onto Robert College. Ballantine’s idea of an American University in Istanbul aroused an outcry in the Turkish press, with accusations of cultural colonialism which allegedly violated the Treaty of  Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History. London: I. B. Tauris, 2009 (1993), 208-18.  Alexis Alexandris, The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek-Turkish Relations, 1918–1974. Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies, 1992 (1983). 10 11

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Lausanne and threatened Turkey’s hard-won independence. The controversy dragged on for two years before a compromise was reached in 1957, whereby Robert College was recognized by Adnan Menderes’ government, not as a university in name but as a yüksek okul—an institution of higher education awarding its students bachelor and master’s degrees.12 The strong opposition to the idea of an American elite institution on Turkish soil, with its echoes of the press campaign against Fisher on account of the 1924 donkey incident and his alleged pro-Greek bias, demonstrated how connected Robert College and the memories of “Christian treason” remained in the nationalist imagination. Added to this was a growing resentment over Turkey’s perceived role as client to America, reminiscent of the “mentality of the Capitulations.” A memorandum to the trustees written by Ballantine in the academic year of 1959–1960 contained an assessment of the American colleges’ predicament and future prospects that mirrored Paul Monroe’s concerns about the problem of “anti-foreignism” twenty-six years earlier. The problem that Robert College faced, according to Ballantine, was that it was still considered foreign by Turkish authorities because of its method and philosophy of education which had been introduced by Americans, and, in the president’s view, served to discredit them in the eyes of Turkish public opinion. He believed that the environment would be much more favorable if these ideas had been introduced by Turks instead of foreigners who were not fully familiar with the local context, and pointed to the successful example set by the Middle East Technical University. Despite the prestige that Robert College enjoyed, the historical trend of growing nationalism meant that Turks would prefer to implement their own educational concepts rather than allowing Americans to continue to do so.13 Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s recollections of his American and Turkish teachers during the 1960s at Robert Academy, which prepared pupils for college work, perhaps best illustrate the difference between the concepts of ­education. Accordingly, some of the Turkish staff were “uneasy about teaching in an American school” and fearful that “spies” were informing on them, while others fell back on authoritarian methods of instruction: 12  Orlin Sabev, Spiritus Roberti: Shaping New Minds and Robert College in Late Ottoman Society (1863–1923). Istanbul: Boğaziҫi University Press, 2014, 126-27. Freely 2012 (2009), 318, 324. 13  “Ballantine report on the status of American colleges in Turkey”; Robert College Records; Box 28, Folder 60; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. See also Sabev 2014, 127.

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[Other] Turkish teachers were given to long nationalist orations and because, compared with the Americans, they seemed apathetic, tired, old and depressed, we felt that they didn’t like us any more than they liked themselves or life itself. Unlike the friendly and well-meaning American teachers, their first impulse was always to make us memorise the textbook and punish us if we didn’t, and we hated them for their bureaucratic souls.14

Despite the predicament described in the memorandum, Ballantine remained optimistic about the contribution the American colleges could make to Turkey. The fundamental aim of Robert College was, in his view, “to bring the Turkish people (and others) a certain kind of education— intellectual and moral—which we call liberal education.” He contrasted this concept, with its emphasis on discussion at all levels and upon the fostering of independent thought, with the Turkish educational system’s emphasis on practical skills and unquestioning belief in authority. Ballantine’s recommendation was to retain this liberal idea, which set Robert College apart from other educational institutions in the country, while at the same time increasing the participation of Turkish nationals in the college administration, faculty, and the Board of Trustees, until “a partnership of equals” was achieved. Essentially, this was Monroe’s vision of a joint Turkish-American institution where “complete harmony” would reign, something that Ballantine thought could be accomplished over the course of several decades.15 The harmony of which Ballantine and the presidents before him had been so hopeful remained elusive to the end. The final years of the 1960s saw student protests spread across university campuses in Turkey just as they did in France, West Germany, and the United States. The ideas of the international new left found fertile ground among students and intellectuals in Turkey as they tallied with the old Kemalist concept of a revolution from above carried out by an enlightened elite; unrest in the universities spilled out into the streets, where leftwing radicals from 1968 onward battled with rightwing thugs, known as the Grey Wolves, as well as the police and the army. During the tense build-up to the military coup and subsequent martial law of 1971, coming only a decade after the armed 14  Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories of a City, translated by Maureen Freely. London: Faber and Faber, 2006, 281. 15  “Ballantine report on the status of American colleges in Turkey”; Robert College Records; Box 28, Folder 60; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Sabev 2014, 127, 134-35.

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forces toppled and executed Turkey’s first elected Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, Istanbul witnessed a series of worker demonstrations, student sit-ins, and political violence, whose repercussions were also felt on the American college campuses. What united warring factions across the political spectrum was anti-Americanism, in which opposition to the war in Vietnam, the incursions of Western capital into the national economy, and the country’s perceived subservience to NATO blended with an old suspicion of things foreign and resentment at the educational influence of American missionaries. Violent clashes between leftist activists and the police erupted during visits of the American Sixth Fleet in July 1968 and February 1969, leaving several killed and injured.16 On the campus at Rumeli Hissar, students belonging to the Revolutionary Youth Organization (Dev Genç) called for boycotts of classes on several occasions, tearing down portraits of the College founders Christopher Rhinelander Robert and Cyrus Hamlin, and shouting at American staff members for addressing them in English. On the other side of the spectrum, the old regime mouthpiece Cumhuriyet ran a series of articles attacking Robert College and its alumni as servants of American imperialism, and blaming the school for the emergence of Bulgarian separatism and independence in the nineteenth century.17 With the public mood increasingly turning against Robert College and a budget deficit of over one million US dollars in 1970, college administrators and Board members realized that their institution had reached the end of the road. Meanwhile, in a final act of symbolism, which seems designed to appease nationalist opinion in a time of turmoil, the Turkish Constitutional Court on January 7, 1971, ruled that only the state possessed the right to open and maintain institutions of higher education.18 All private schools offering instruction at a college level were either to seek affiliation with a state-run university or be closed within six months, a measure which targeted both foreign schools, like the American Istanbul colleges, and minority schools, like the Greek-Orthodox Patriarchate’s theological seminary at Halki (Heybeliada) in the Prince Islands. The struggle for educational influence and control, dating back to the Tanzimat era of the previous century, was over. Three years after the unmarked passing of Edgar Fisher and less than a year after the death of Hüseyin  Zürcher 2009 (1993), 253-63.  Herbert Lane, The Robert College Story, typescript. Cited in Freely 2012 (2009), 363. 18  Sabev 2014, 128. 16 17

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Pektaş—the key figure in the American school’s Turkification, who outlasted a number of presidents and whose passing, according to John Freely, further bereaved a college community already grieving for the imminent closure of “the College that he loved”—the Board of Trustees donated the facilities on the Rumeli Hissar campus to the Turkish state. In the premises vacated by Robert College arose Boğaziçi University, which was to inherit much of the staff, traditions, and prestige of its forerunner. What remained of the century-old American institution relocated to the campus of the Girls’ College at Arnavutköy with which it merged, to be reconstituted as a co-educational high school, or lise (lycée), carrying on the name of Robert College.19 As economic crisis, social protests, and the deadly spiral of politically motivated violence and military intervention held Turkey in its grip throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, archivists in the United States were busy organizing the documents that recorded the long history of Robert College and the American College for Girls (the Constantinople Woman’s College), a corpus purchased by and transferred to Columbia University in 2006–2007. These records, they knew, contained not only the history of two American colleges, but also significant sources for the study of Turkish-American relations, late Ottoman history, and modern Turkey. But inevitably the archivists encountered troubling documents which became the subject of internal memos regarding their potentially damaging nature. In a way, their actions and concerns paralleled those of General Kenan Evren’s military regime in Turkey, which in its effort to break with the past and wipe out the memory of discord destroyed the archives of the political parties, including those of the once mighty CHP.20 At the same time as Evren and his civilian successor Turgut Özal were purging Turkey’s past in the 1980s—thereby forging a synthesis of secular and Islamist nationalism that paved the way for the future rise of the Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP) and nostalgia for the old Ottoman Empire, minus its religious diversity—archival consultants were tagging items from the Robert College records for internal discussion and eventual censorship. The files labeled with the recommendation to restrict access to outside researchers were those that threatened to further damage the college’s image in Turkish opinion. Any material that was judged to expose the awkward moments in its relations with the host country—including  Freely 2012 (2009), 364-71.  Zürcher 2009 (1993), 279.

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mentions of the Armenian atrocities, Christian morals, the Karacan discipline case, and remarks about Muslim Turks or local authorities perceived as condescending—was hidden away, leaving behind a largely whitewashed story of Turkish-American partnership. Among the things that thus vanished from public view through the policy of restricted access were nearly all the documents relating to the twenty-year-long tenure of Edgar Jacob Fisher.21

Conclusion: The (Inter-)Nationalism of Robert College This study has examined the complex interplay between nationalism and internationalism—and between opposing ideas about the meaning of modernity at the dawn of the so-called American century—through the case of an American private institution of higher education in early republican Turkey. Using a micro-historical approach, with a particular focus on one of its employees, I have argued that the study of the educational project for peace and international understanding offers a clue to a more nuanced understanding of elite nation formation in Turkey, as well as Turkish-American relations in the first half of the twentieth century. On a global level, as well as shedding light on the educational side of the 1920s’ peace movement, it also contributes to a more complex understanding of the international rise of American progressive education in the non-­ Western world, which has often been presented as a comforting liberal success story. As noted by several scholars, nationalism in the Near East was in part an unintended outcome of Western education in the nineteenth century and, thus, to some extent, a problem of the American educators’ own making.22 One explicit objective of the Near East Colleges and the schools run by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was that 21  “Memorandum on sensitive items from the Robert College Records”; “Memo re. Sensitive Materials in the Archives: The Edgar Fisher Case”; September 19, 1986; Memos regarding sensitive materials, 1961–1986; Robert College Records; Box 59; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 22  E.g. Andreas Tietze, “Ethnicity and Change in Ottoman Intellectual History, Turcica 22:3 (1991): 385-95; Fatma Müge Göçek, “Ethnic Segmentation, Western Education, and Political Outcomes: Nineteenth Century Ottoman Society, Politics Today 14:3 (1993): 507-38; Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimization of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011, 106.

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native students should receive instruction in their own national culture. The result was that Robert College and the missionary schools contributed to the national awakening of previously Turkish-speaking Christians as Hellenes and Armenians, respectively, as well as to the (re-)Bulgarization of Hellenized Bulgarians who, over the course of previous generations, had been brought up Greek in order to enter the Orthodox clergy or Greek merchant networks. By inadvertently aiding the emergence of national identities and political separatism among the Empire’s Christian minorities, the American educational institutions have sometimes been charged with undermining Ottomanism—that is, imperial loyalty regardless of faith and ethnicity—as a viable alternative to nationalism and fragmentation.23 This was, more or less, the argument made by John Dewey in his account of the role played by the American colleges in the tragedy that befell the Ottoman Empire, or, rather, the argument presented to him by a Turkish-Muslim graduate of Robert College, possibly Hüseyin Bey (Pektaş). It is an argument that underestimates the agency of the students themselves, who likely needed no American educator to tell them who they were, but it does point to the ways in which the internationalism that some of the college faculty sought to instill could be a double-­ edged sword. One could also make the reverse argument that what Fisher sought to accomplish was an Ottomanism for the post-Ottoman age, one emphasizing a larger geographic, post-imperial identity beyond an increasingly discredited nationalism. The vast population transfers during and after the wars, along with the enforced closure, in 1925, of Robert College’s Greek and Armenian vernacular departments catering to students from those minorities who still remained, had made Christian separatism an obsolete threat. While members of the Armenian and Rûm communities still made up a sizable portion of the college’s student body, along with boarders from Bulgaria, American educators reconciled themselves to the reality of a state founded on the principles of Turkish majority nationalism, and committed themselves to its future development. They liked to view their colleges, with their multinational student body and tolerant ethos, as the “cure for wars in the Balkans.” The prospect of international conciliation and disarmament under the auspices of the League of Nations convinced them that they could forge an enlightened elite that would inoculate local

 Cf. Sabev 2014, 139, 199.

23

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societies against national hatred in ways that mirrored the Kemalist concept of a revolution from above. The positive response from at least the parts of the student community flocking to extracurricular activities like the Political Science Forum seemed to vindicate this assumption. To be sure, there were inherent flaws in Fisher’s internationalist education project. The nationalist regime prohibited foreign educators from teaching Turkish history, which hampered efforts to teach about the roots of present ills; this meant that details of the violent end of the Ottoman Empire from which the new Turkey had emerged could never be addressed in the open or recognized as ills at all (though they found their way into students’ essays anyway). Perhaps the overall belief in “progress” in itself also precluded the international (and interethnic) understanding and conciliation that Fisher hoped for, as that would have required some kind of reckoning or a more profound engagement with the troublesome past than mere declarations of good faith and condemnation of “religious superstitions” as having no place in the modern world. Still, internationalist education not only offered students an opportunity to express themselves more freely than elsewhere in the new Turkey, but also invited them to examine certain problems from different viewpoints. In that sense they were given a glimpse of what a democratic society could look like. With hindsight, the American ambition of educating for peace and liberal internationalism appears to be diametrically opposed to the authoritarian, nationalistic outlook of Kemalism. To those involved with international education and the American Near East colleges, however, things appeared different. There seemed to be points of agreement with the Kemalists that were perceived as common ground on which to build. The new Turkey presented the outward appearance of a modern society, as the Americans saw it, in its determined rejection of its “Oriental” past and its embrace of foreign role models in legislation, women’s rights, and educational reform. There was a rubber-stamp parliament which hinted at the idea of representative government taking root in the near future. The existence of all these Western influences assured them that Turkey was on the road toward the sort of American liberal democracy and capitalist society that in their eyes was the yardstick of modernity, to the point that they ignored the reality of the alternative models for a modern society available to the Kemalists: Italian fascism and Soviet communism. Both American educators and Kemalists saw the development of nationalism, meaning a strong national identity supported by a “unified

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nationalistic culture,” as vital to the process of becoming modern. But whereas nationalism in the eyes of the former was a means to an end rather than the end itself, it was for the latter the very end that justified the means. This was a crucial difference that the American educators failed or refused to realize. Edgar Fisher thus made a point in his teaching of the “faulty” tendency to view nationalism as the highest form of development. Both he and perhaps to a lesser degree Paul Monroe believed that nationalism in Turkey and the Near East could and would evolve into internationalism, which they described in terms of a less aggressive and more inclusive nationalism that was moderate and “true.” The teleological view of progress and the American historical experience, as they saw it, convinced them that the new Turkey would evolve along a similar path toward a democratic future. Monroe and Dewey’s belief that American democratic culture had evolved under frontier conditions—what might be called one of the key myths or assumptions of American nationalism around the turn of the century—was projected onto the Turks, in whom they seemed to recognize a kindred frontier people equipped with the virtue of republican egalitarianism. This Turkish Turner thesis allowed them to think of Anatolia as a wilderness formerly inhabited by “savages” but now ripe for modern civilization. It also allowed them, by way of unspoken assumption, to rationalize away the atrocities of 1915 that accompanied Turkish nation building and enraged American public opinion during and shortly after the Great War. The Armenians and other minorities perceived to stand in the way of the emergent Turkish nation could thus be written off as the regrettable but perhaps necessary casualties of progress, just like the “noble but doomed” North American Indians had vanished before them. Even if a moderate version of Turkish nationalism open to the values of liberalism and international understanding did not materialize in the near future, Monroe hoped that the continued presence of Robert College would at least secure American influence in some form. The overriding objective was to persuade the Ankara government and public opinion in Turkey to accept American guidance in the continued modernization of the country, thus blurring the distinction between internationalist educational ideals and sometimes-cynical calculation in the service of American national interest. The notion that education would make native students susceptible to American influence and the argument often advanced by college representatives that Robert College was a springboard for the dissemination of

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American values and ideas evoke the thorny issue of “cultural colonialism.” This is an intricate problem that has been approached from different angles by local nationalists as well as scholars of mission history and, later, international education. In her study of Mary Mills Patrick, head of the Constantinople Woman’s College, Carolyn Goffman has analyzed the history of the school in terms of a transition from religious, Protestant proselytism to “American proselytism,” whereby native students were turned into ersatz Americans.24 Largely informed by postcolonial scholarship, Keita Takayama has criticized the “comforting histories” that glorify the pioneers of international and comparative education. In his view, the international educational consultancy in developing countries espoused by Paul Monroe and his colleagues at Columbia University’s International Institute of Teachers College during the interwar decades was a means of cultural and by extension political domination. International education is thus interpreted as an expression of American imperialism, and even “white supremacy.”25 This analysis is echoed by a number of students of American-Turkish cultural, political, and economic relations, which in their view became increasingly unequal and detrimental to Turkey’s national interests after 1945.26 It is an interpretation which seemingly tallies with concerns expressed by some Muslim parents and the Turkish authorities that students at the American colleges were losing their cultural rooting and identity as Turks by being exposed to cosmopolitanism, by which was often meant ideas foreign to the purported values of the nation. Among the students, too, rules and regulations which appeared to penalize those caught speaking languages other than English were a source of resentment. Even long after Turkish became firmly established as the school’s second official language, the presence of American staff members unable to speak it was sometimes taken as a sure sign of imperialistic arrogance.

24  Carolyn Goffman, “From Religious to American Proselytism: Mary Mills Patrick and the ‘Sanctification of the Intellect’”. In Mehmet Ali Doğan and Heather J.  Sharkey (eds.), American Missionaries and the Middle East: Foundational Encounters. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2011, 84-121. 25  Keita Takayama, “Beyond Comforting Histories: The Colonial/Imperial Entanglement of the International Institute, Paul Monroe, and Issac L.  Kandel at Teachers College, Columbia University”, Comparative Education Review 62:4 (October 2018): 459-81. 26 ̇  E.g. Ibrahim Yorgun, The Patronage of the Mightier: Ankara’s Cross-Atlantic Prescriptions from America in the 50s. Istanbul: Libra Kitapçılık ve Yayıncılık, 2019.

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It would certainly be possible to read this friction through the lens of Frantz Fanon’s writings on education as a tool of domination in a colonial context, in which native identity succumbs to an imposed alien culture.27 Those inclined toward a postcolonial analysis of the American colleges in Turkey will have no difficulty finding statements by college officials on their “civilizing mission” in the Near East that reveal Orientalist stereotypes about native peoples in need of guidance. The question is whether they reveal anything about the symmetry of power in Turkish-American relations or if they in any remarkable way differ from the condescending rhetoric—mimicked in many Robert College student essays—of the Kemalists themselves, whose symbolic violence against Kurds and other minorities was often accompanied by violence in a real sense. An emphasis on postcolonial theories of subordination and resistance in the interpretation of this case simply misses the mark, as it presupposes an asymmetry of power that, in reality, did not favor the privately owned American colleges.28 The American administration of Robert College and its sister institution was in no position to impose its will on the Ministry of Education, or go against the grain of nationalist opinion in matters of the curriculum or values taught to Turkish students. For all the economic might and military clout of the United States, the “soft power” exerted by these exclusive schools did not mean that they were automatically backed by Washington’s hard power whenever tensions arose. On the contrary, as Fisher’s case demonstrates, the State Department often tended to side with the Kemalist regime in its struggle to bend Robert College to its will. Allegations of 27  E.g. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952. Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre. Paris: Éditions François Maspero, 1961. 28  The fact that students sometimes expressed opposition to American cultural and political hegemony need not always be interpreted in terms of deep resentment. In his recollections of life at Robert Academy, the preparatory division of Robert College, in the 1960s, Orhan Pamuk notes the existence of a “timid anti-Americanism … in keeping with the nationalist, leftist mood of the time” among some of the students. This resentment, in part fueled by the Vietnam War, was mostly expressed by boys on scholarship, who “had grown up dreaming of American culture and the land of the free—most of all, they longed for the chance to study at an American university and perhaps settle in the States.” In their case, anti-Americanism was only the flipside of their idolization of American life, and had much to do with feelings of social inferiority as many of them came from poor families in Anatolia. “The Istanbul bourgeoisie and my rich-kid friends weren’t particularly troubled by all this: for them, Robert Academy was simply the first step toward the future that rightfully awaited them as managers and owners of the country’s biggest companies or as the Turkish agent of a big foreign firm.” Pamuk 2006, 281-82.

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American educators being hostile to the objectives of the nationalist government even prompted Joseph Grew, the US ambassador to Ankara between 1927 and 1932, to claim that the former would do well to regard relations with Turkish officials less as “a tug of war” and more as a matter of “rowing together in a crew.”29 Just as the archival consultants going through the college records in the 1980s were acutely aware of the stigma of cultural imperialism, which prompted them to restrict access to materials suggesting ties between Robert College and US foreign policy,30 so did earlier presidents of the American schools note the sensitive nature of their presence in Turkey. “Entirely disinterested educational work has rarely been carried on by foreigners in this part of the world,” wrote Walter Livingston Wright in his report in 1936, as an explanation for the suspicion and hostility that the colleges still encountered.31 Another factor that continued to shape public attitudes toward the college, identified by Paul Monroe among others, was the memory of the capitulations: privileges wrung from the Ottoman authorities that Turkish nationalists claimed had allowed foreigners and, sometimes, their local Christian protégés a sense of impunity. The American educators realized that if they were to have a place in the new Turkey and hope to influence its future they must at least appear to embrace the Kemalists’ secularistic and egalitarian principles. For this reason, the college founders’ emphasis on Christian teachings and traditions of religious observance were abandoned, along with anything else that might signal a claim to special treatment. By insisting that the colleges catered not to America’s interests but to “the needs of the Near East,” with adjustments being made to turn them into “almost wholly institutions for the Turkish people,” and by making themselves useful to the regime, the American educators hoped to turn the trend of hostility. The education for peace and international understanding that in the 1920s had replaced the teaching of Christian values was in the 1930s likewise abandoned. The sacrifice of internationalism in favor of compliance with nationalism may have appeared a tactical retreat at the time but, to 29  Joseph Grew, cited in Robert L. Daniel, “The United States and the Turkish Republic before World War II: The Cultural Dimension”, Middle East Journal 21:1 (Winter 1967): 58. 30  “Memorandum on sensitive items from the Robert College Records”; Memos regarding sensitive materials, 1961–1986; Robert College Records; Box 59; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 31  Walter Livingston Wright’s report for the academic year 1935–1936, quoted in Freely 2012 (2009), 275-76.

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Monroe, it held out the prospect of future gains. In his view, adapting the new, “modern,” and “progressive” education of America in order to aid the Turks in their “nationalistic development,” would eventually lead to the demise of xenophobic nationalism. While this strategy secured Robert College’s survival for a few more decades, it made no difference in the long term. Its history and foreign nature would inevitably continue to make it a convenient target, long after the Turkification of the curriculum and the school itself, and long after individuals like Edgar Fisher were gone and forgotten. The fact that the American colleges were private institutions meant that they could be chastised to score “patriotic” points by Turkish governments pandering to domestic anti-Americanism while at the same time letting the United States operate military bases on Turkish soil, whose American personnel enjoyed a far greater degree of diplomatic protection than the ABCFM had ever done under the Ottoman capitulations. For an authoritarian movement, whether yesterday’s Kemalists or today’s AKP, the need for foreign and domestic enemies will in times of crisis trump the real or perceived benefits of a Robert College or a Boğaziçi University. It is always easier to create cohesion around a negative identity, an image of who we are not, rather than a vision of who we are or want to become. Nothing that the American educators did to ingratiate themselves would change that in the end. Robert College rose and fell with the minorities, although the Americans sought to dissociate themselves from the latter even while claiming to remain true to its founding principles. “Gradually it became apparent that there was a close identity between the objectives of the College and those of the new Turkish republic,” President Ballantine claimed in 1960. “Gradually also Moslem Turks began to attend the colleges, replacing the minority populations. This was a natural and inevitable evolution, but at the same time the colleges clung firmly to a fundamental principle which had guided them from the outset—that the individual is paramount and that on these campuses distinctions of race, religion, color, or nationality have no place or meaning.”32 By the time these words were written, the internationalism in which the school took such pride had long since turned into (inter-)nationalism: subservience to authoritarian nationalism under 32  “Ballantine report on the status of American colleges in Turkey”; Robert College Records; Box 28, Folder 60; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Sabev 2014, 120-21.

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the guise of democratic, cosmopolitan idealism. With hindsight, the American educators studied in this book may appear craven or, at best, wishful thinkers akin to those of a later time and place who believed that the experience of market economy and studies at American universities would foster a new, democratically minded elite in the People’s Republic of China. It is, of course, difficult to see how college officials could have handled matters differently, apart from taking up the option of closing the institution, abandoning its students, and leaving the country to its fate. The choice between staying behind in the hope of furthering the cause of liberal ideas, at the risk of compromising them, or slamming the door, thereby destroying the prospect of meaningful dialogue, was not an easy one.33 The dilemma is perhaps best illustrated by Edgar Fisher’s note in his diary about a conversation he had with Paul Monroe during the latter’s visit to Istanbul in 1925, at a time of apprehension for what adjustment to the new regime would mean for the integrity of Robert College: I had quite a long visit with Dr. Monroe this morning, for he is so keenly interested in everything concerned with the Turkish situation. He shares my fear that in our educational work, we may be put in a compromising situation, and one which later can lay us open to a charge of hypocrisy. Perhaps there is a difference between opportunism and hypocrisy. Certainly our situation needs clear and concise thinking, but that is just what is so difficult at this time.34

References Alexandris, Alexis. 1992 (1983). The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek-Turkish Relations, 1918–1974. Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies. 33  It could be argued that the English department at Robert College in the 1960s to some extent played the role that Fisher’s History and Political Science department once had in attempting to foster critical thinking. Reading and discussing the novels of Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut often had the effect of sowing doubts about the validity of the Turkish History Thesis and other Kemalist dogmas taught by the Turkish social sciences teachers. Despite the Ministry of Education’s control over the latter subjects and the requirement of compliance with the national curriculum, Robert College, at least in its final decade, was still liberal in comparison with virtually all other educational institutions in Turkey. I am grateful to Reşat Kasaba, a former student at Robert Academy, for making this point to me. 34  Edgar Fisher, Diary, entry for August 20, 1925; Edgar J. Fisher Papers; Box 16; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Ohio State University.

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Daniel, Robert L. 1967. The United States and the Turkish Republic before World War II: The Cultural Dimension. Middle East Journal 21 (1): 52–63. Deringil, Selim. 2011. The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimization of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. ———. 1961. Les damnés de la terre. Paris: Éditions François Maspero. Freely, John. 2012 (2009). A Bridge of Culture: Robert College—Boğaziçi University: How an American College in Istanbul Became A Turkish University. Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitetisi Yayinevi. Göçek, Fatma Müge. 1993. Ethnic Segmentation, Western Education, and Political Outcomes: Nineteenth Century Ottoman Society. Politics Today 14 (3): 507–538. Goffman, Carolyn. 2011. From Religious to American Proselytism: Mary Mills Patrick and the “Sanctification of the Intellect”. In American Missionaries and the Middle East: Foundational Encounters, ed. Mehmet Ali Doğan and Heather J. Sharkey, 84–121. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press. Pamuk, Orhan. 2006. Istanbul: Memories of a City. Trans. Maureen Freely. London: Faber and Faber. Sabev, Orlin. 2014. Spiritus Roberti: Shaping New Minds and Robert College in Late Ottoman Society (1863–1923). Istanbul: Boğaziҫi University Press. Takayama, Keita. 2018. Beyond Comforting Histories: The Colonial/Imperial Entanglement of the International Institute, Paul Monroe, and Issac L. Kandel at Teachers College, Columbia University. Comparative Education Review 62:4 (October 2018): 459-81. Tietze, Andreas. 1993. Ethnicity and Change in Ottoman Intellectual History. Turcica 22 (3): 385–395. ̇ Yorgun, Ibrahim. 2019. The Patronage of the Mightier: Ankara’s Cross-Atlantic Prescriptions from America in the 50s. Istanbul: Libra Kitapçılık ve Yayıncılık. Zürcher, Erik Jan. 2009 (1993) Turkey: A Modern History. London: I. B. Tauris.

Index1

A Abadjoglou, Yannis, student, 134, 135 ABCFM, see American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Abdul Hamid II (Abdülhamit II), sultan, 36, 37, 39, 40, 94, 153, 220 Abdulmejid I, sultan, 26 Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP, Justice and Development Party), 1, 2, 243, 251 Adams, Kathryn Newell, 95, 106 Adana, massacres in, 42 Aegean, 29, 44, 71 Ahmet III, sultan, 26 Ahmet Emin (Yalman), see Emin, Ahmet (Yalman) Aintab (Gaziantep), 192, 193 Alevi (Kizilbash), 7, 18, 28, 37, 38, 171n47

Alexandris, Alexis, 180 Ali Feridun, student, 167 Ali Fethi (Okyar), see Fethi, Ali (Okyar) Alliance Israélite Universelle, 30, 69 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), 2, 6, 7, 18, 24, 25, 32–34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 46, 50, 67, 83, 101, 156, 244, 251 American College for Girls, see Constantinople Woman’s College American Friends of the Middle East, 219 American School Peace League (ASPL), 113, 114, 132 American University of Beirut, 2, 7, 11, 32, 40, 50, 78, 137, 215, 218, 239 Andrews, Fannie Fern, 113 Angora, see Ankara

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Sjöberg, Internationalism and the New Turkey, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00932-7

255

256 

INDEX

Ankara, 2, 11, 19, 51, 52, 58, 61–65, 68, 70, 71, 74, 77, 78, 81, 82, 84, 89, 90, 93–95, 97–99, 103, 107, 111, 118, 120, 125, 126, 132, 138, 140, 147, 152, 168, 173, 195, 199, 201, 205, 206, 208, 209, 212–218, 228, 230, 231, 236, 238, 239, 247, 250 Ankara pact, 152 Anti-Semitism, 37, 99 Arabs, 7, 31, 41, 45, 45n47, 71, 194, 200, 206 Armenia, 100 See also Armenia, Soviet republic of Armenia, Soviet republic of, 185, 187 Armenian Apostolic Church, see Gregorian Church Armenian genocide, 43–46, 178, 189 Armenians, 7, 18, 19, 25, 28, 32–34, 36–39, 42–48, 47n53, 50, 52, 58, 61–64, 67, 67n21, 69, 72–75, 77, 91, 94–97, 99, 101, 103, 121–124, 124n27, 140, 144, 158, 168, 169, 177–193, 188n101, 199, 203, 205, 209, 209n19, 210, 220, 223, 225, 227, 229, 244, 245, 247 Armistice, the, 18, 46–51, 57, 72, 89, 96, 101, 126, 127, 144, 166, 192, 209 See also Mudanya, armistice of; Mudros, armistice of Arnavutköy, 132, 243 Aslan, Senem, 182 Assyrians, 175, 220 Atatürk, see Kemal, Mustafa (Atatürk) Azarian, Vahram, student, 185 B Badem, Candar, 191 Baer, Marc, 178

Balayan, Aram, student, 183 Balkans, the, 37, 42, 61, 108, 131, 132, 133n49, 140, 152, 154, 155, 195, 231, 245 Balkan Wars, First and Second, 10, 42, 43, 48, 108, 152, 167 Ballantine, Duncan Smith, 238–241, 251 Bastounis, George, student, 180 Beard, Charles A., 117 Bebek, 23, 33 Beirut (city), 32 Beirut, American University of, see American University of Beirut Berlin, 30, 37, 38, 60 Black, Floyd H., 12, 79, 81–83, 91, 226 Bliss, Daniel L., 32 Bliss, Howard S., 40, 41 Boğaziçi University, 1, 2, 4, 8, 11, 243, 251 Bolshevism/Bolsheviks, 51, 61, 105, 143, 147, 174, 189, 190 Bonaparte, Napoleon (Napoleon I), 26, 27 Bosporus, 1, 2, 23, 48, 50, 95, 101, 121, 232 Bourne, Randolph, 115 Brest-Litovsk, treaty of, 45 Brickman, William, 120 Bristol, Mark L., Admiral, 74, 81–84, 86, 89, 90, 97, 99, 100 Brunson, Andrew, 3n5 Bu, Liping, 16 Bulgaria, 4, 14, 41, 45, 86, 124, 245 Bulgarians, 18, 30, 34, 36, 37, 42, 48, 87, 94, 95, 103, 104, 123, 131, 140, 155, 158, 177, 242, 245 Bulu, Melih, 2n3 Bursa, 118, 122 Bustani (al-Bustani), Butrus, 32

 INDEX 

C Caliph/caliphate, 38, 58, 62, 63, 192, 203 Canning, Stratford, 33 Capitulations, Ottoman, 19, 31, 50, 58, 68, 251 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 113, 130, 160n21 Caucasus, the, 37, 51, 65, 185, 191, 192 Causey, James Henry, 136, 137 Cemal Pasha, 45 Central Asia, 43, 65, 145, 161, 206 Central Powers, 43, 45, 52, 121 Cherokees, 24, 25, 33 Chester, Colby M., 100 China, 14, 118, 200, 206, 252 Cilicia, 51, 192 Çiller, Tanşu, 4n7 Çınar, Vassif, see Vassif Bey Circassians, 169–173, 176, 178 Citizenship, 29, 95, 104, 105, 114, 178, 179, 181, 205n10, 206, 228 Citizen, Speak Turkish! (vatandaş, Türkçe konuş) campaign, 182, 205, 230 Cold War, 5, 6, 239 Columbia University, 3, 9, 11, 11n22, 14, 47, 76, 85, 87, 90–93, 107, 117, 144, 147n72, 157, 243, 248 Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti), 10, 41–43, 45, 46, 47n53, 49, 50, 52, 59–66, 68, 72, 74, 96, 161, 188, 191, 192, 204, 226 Constantinople (Istanbul), 2, 6, 7, 10–12, 19, 23, 24, 26, 29, 30, 32, 33, 38, 40, 46, 48, 51, 52, 57, 60–64, 66, 67, 70–72, 76, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85, 86, 88, 93, 97–99, 101, 118–121, 126, 128,

257

130, 137, 156–158, 160, 164, 166–168, 177–180, 182–184, 194, 200–202, 206–208, 210, 211, 214–216, 218, 231, 239, 242, 252 Constantinople Woman’s College, 2, 4n7, 6, 25, 47, 50, 58, 64, 66, 76, 93, 95, 101, 103, 106, 132, 222, 227, 243, 248 Crete, 30 Crimean War, 18, 29 Crypto-Christians, 37 Cumhuriyet (Republic), newspaper, 64, 85, 85n61, 173, 207, 209, 215, 216, 242 Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP, Republican People’s Party), 60–62, 64, 66, 70, 140, 158, 166, 173, 175, 182, 188, 201–204, 223, 224, 239, 243 CUP, see Committee of Union and Progress (Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti) Curzon, Lord George, 52 D Dardanelles, 44, 46, 51, 163 Darülfunun (House of Sciences), see University of Istanbul Darwin, Charles, 140 Dashnak (Dashnaktsutiun, Armenian Revolutionary Federation), 42, 184 Dewey, John, 9n19, 14, 15, 114–126, 139, 147, 147n72, 148, 245, 247 Dilâçar, Agop (Hagop Martayan), 169 Diyarbakir/Diyarbekir, 47n51, 62, 63 Dodecanese, 71 Dolmabahçe Palace, 153 Dönme, 85, 178 Drummond, Eric, 130

258 

INDEX

E Ecevit, Bülent, 4n7 Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, 28 Edirne (Adrianople), 205 Eftim, Papa, see Papa Eftim Egypt, 7, 26, 27, 29 Ekhashoglou, Djemil, student, 192, 193 Ekmekçioğlu, Lerna, 179, 183 Emin, Ahmet (Yalman), 85, 85n61, 91, 237n4 Enlightenment, the, 13, 14, 27, 117–125 Entente, the, 43, 44, 46, 51, 52, 60, 61, 121, 135, 191 Enver Pasha, 65 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 1 Ethem Bey, 172 Euphrates College, 199 Evren, Kenan, 243 F Falih Rifki (Atay), 168, 207 Fanon, Frantz, 170, 249 Fascism, 246 Ferit, Nejat, see Nejat Ferit, student Fethi, Ali (Okyar), 62, 63, 164, 202, 203, 205, 210 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 142 First World War, 2, 7, 10, 10n19, 16, 18, 43–46, 49, 51, 52, 58–60, 62, 65, 68, 95, 101, 108, 112–117, 121, 130, 135, 141, 143, 146, 152, 153, 163, 186, 190–192, 195, 220, 238, 247 Fisher, Edgar Jacob, 9–11, 11n22, 17, 19, 20, 71–95, 94n88, 97–100, 109, 111, 112, 117, 119, 123, 126–132, 128n37, 133n48, 135–144, 135n52, 147n72,

147n73, 148, 152–158, 162–164, 163n28, 167, 170, 186, 187, 193–196, 199–233, 236, 237, 240, 242, 244–247, 249, 251, 252, 252n33 Fisher, Elizabeth (Betty) Fehr, 76, 87–89, 216–218, 233 Franchet d’Espérey, Louis, 57 Franco-Prussian War, 39, 113 Free Republican Party (Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası), 164, 166, 201–205, 209 Freely, John, 12, 243 Fuad Bey, 84 G Galanti, Avram, 169, 182 Galatasaray lycée, 34, 218 Gallipoli, 44, 45, 163 Gates, Caleb Frank, 11, 12, 19, 20, 36, 47, 47n53, 48n55, 49, 58–59, 72–92, 94, 97–100, 108, 111, 124n27, 125–127, 130, 132, 137–140, 144, 151–153, 157, 159, 199, 200, 209, 209n19, 210, 219, 221, 224, 226, 228, 232, 236 Gazi, see Kemal, Mustafa (Atatürk) Gaziantep, see Aintab (Gaziantep) Geneva, 115, 130, 132, 137 Geneva School of International Studies, 136, 137 Germany, Germans, 41, 43, 46, 48, 60, 65, 113, 115, 135, 135n52, 142, 148, 186 Giddens, Anthony, 13 Goffman, Carolyn, 248 Gökalp, Ziya, 65, 161, 169 Goodell, William, 32 Grand National Assembly, 61, 166, 178, 181, 188n101

 INDEX 

Great Depression, 201, 206, 225 Great War, see First World War Greco-Turkish War, 72, 135, 152, 163, 172 Greece, 31, 41, 44, 48, 52, 67, 103, 105, 152, 178, 179n75, 200, 203 Greeks, Greek-Orthodox Christians, 18, 25, 27, 28, 32, 42, 44, 48, 49, 51, 52, 58, 61, 67, 69, 71, 72, 85, 86, 91, 95–97, 101, 103, 122–124, 131, 140, 152, 160, 170, 172, 178–182, 179n75, 199, 203, 205, 206, 211, 220, 239, 245 See also Rûm (romioi, “Romans”) Greek War of Independence, 26, 30 Gregorian Church, 28, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 187 Grew, Joseph C., 99, 100, 111, 228, 250 Grey Wolves (Bozkurtlar), 208, 241 Guckert, John Cecil, 10, 47n53, 100 Gülhane edict, 26 Gürsel, Cemal, 236 H Hagia Sophia, 86 Hagopian, Abraham, 77, 139, 140, 209, 209n19, 226 Halide Edip (Adıvar), 64 Halki (Heybeliada), Greek-Orthodox theological seminary at, 242 Hamdullah Suphi (Tanrıöver), 169, 170, 181, 204 Hamidiye (Kurdish irregular cavalry), 38, 45 Hamlin, Cyrus, 7, 23, 26, 32–35, 242 Hamlin Hall, 34, 140 Hamlin, Hannibal, 23 Harput, 37, 199 Hatay, see Iskenderun (Alexandretta)

259

Hatt-ı Hümayun, 18, 29 Heller, Joseph, 252n33 Henderson, Arthur, 130 Hikmet (Bayur), 218 Hitler, Adolf, 228 “Hitlerites, the,” student debate team, 128 Hittites, 206 Hoover moratorium, 132 Howlett, Charles F., 148 Huntington, George, 78, 79, 82, 84, 92 Hüseyin Bey (Pektaş), 40, 74, 75, 77, 79–82, 89, 91, 92, 95, 97, 99, 124n27, 128n37, 212n26, 213, 216, 224, 226, 227, 236, 243, 245 Hüseyin Nihal (Atsız), 208 Hüseyin Rauf (Orbay), see Rauf, Hüseyin (Orbay) I Ibrahim Zehi, student, 177 Imperialism, 8, 28, 31, 70, 141–143, 242, 248, 250 Independence Tribunals, 63, 64, 66 India, 143 Indian Removal Act, 25 Indians (Native Americans), 24–25, 247 Inönü, Ismet, see Ismet Pasha Institute of International Education, 219 International(ist) education, 9, 9–10n19, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 71, 144, 158, 200, 209, 220, 229, 246–248 Internationalism, 1–20, 111–149, 155, 156, 168, 194, 195, 199–233, 244–247, 250, 251 International Peace Bureau, 113

260 

INDEX

Iraq, 15, 71, 89, 200 Iskenderun (Alexandretta), 228 Islam, 5, 37, 38, 62, 65, 77, 145, 162, 164, 178, 187, 203, 213 Islamism/Islamists, 3, 243 Ismet Pasha, 52, 62, 63, 67, 68, 74, 80, 82, 84, 86, 89, 99, 199, 202, 203, 224, 231 Istanbul, 1–3, 6, 7, 10–12, 17, 19, 24, 47n53, 61–64, 66, 67, 70, 71, 79, 81, 85, 86, 93, 97–99, 101, 118–120, 126, 128, 130, 137, 156–158, 160, 164, 166–168, 177–180, 182–184, 194, 200–202, 207, 208, 210, 211, 214–216, 218, 231, 239, 242, 249n28, 252 See also Constantinople (Istanbul) Italy, 42, 58, 70, 89 J Jackson, Andrew, 25 Jacobins, 65 Jerusalem, 194 Jesuits (Society of Jesus), 29, 34, 70 Jews, 18, 25, 27–29, 31, 35, 37, 69, 101, 158, 177, 178, 182, 205 Jim Crow, 142 July crisis, 43 K Kandel, Issac Leon, 9n19, 14 Kandiyoti, Deniz, 106 Karabekir, Kazim, 64 Karacan, Ercument, 237, 238, 244 Kasaba, Reşat, 252n33 Kassourian, H., student, 184, 187, 188 Kaya, Şükrü, 188n101 Kellogg-Briand pact, 113, 132

Kemal, Mustafa (Atatürk), 4, 13, 59–65, 59n3, 71, 74, 85, 89, 98, 106, 107, 120, 120n17, 152, 163, 164, 168, 169, 178, 188n101, 193, 202–204, 216, 218, 219, 221, 239 Kemalism, ideology, 59, 64, 66 Kerimoff, Kerim (student), 189–192 Ketselides, student, 181, 183 Kieser, Hans-Lukas, 7, 64, 156 Kilpatrick, William Heard, 14 Kizilbash, see Alevi (Kizilbash) Komiteci, clandestine revolutionary committee, 42, 94 Koptaş, Rober, 47n53 Kurds, 37, 43, 62, 63, 158, 160, 171, 173–176, 178, 185, 249 Kurt, Ümit, 192 L de Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 140 Lane, Herbert, 12 Latin alphabet, 58, 151, 159 Lausanne, Treaty of, 51–52, 57, 68, 74, 80, 98, 132, 179, 182, 195, 228, 239–240 Law on the Maintenance of Order, 63, 66, 85n61 Law on the Unification of Education, 67, 75 Laz, 171–173, 178 League of Nations, 89, 113–115, 126, 130, 132, 136, 143, 144, 245 Lebanon, 7, 24, 30, 37, 239 Lemkin, Raphael, 189 Lenin, Vladimir Ilich Uljanov, 143 Lewis, Bernard, 4 Lincoln, Abraham, 23 Locarno, spirit of, 113, 200 London, 43, 90, 226

 INDEX 

M Mahmud II, sultan, 26 Mahmut Esat (Bozkurt), 66 Makdisi, Ussama Samir, 31, 32, 37, 176 Malatya, 158, 159 Malta, 61 Manchuria, 132 Maraş, 184, 187 Marsovan, 34 Mecca, Sharif of, 45 Medrese, 67, 68, 162 Megali Idea (Great Idea), 135 Mehmet II, the Conqueror, 57 Mehmet VI Vahteddin, 57 Mehmet Ziya Gökalp, see Gökalp, Ziya Menderes, Adnan, 240, 242 Menemen, 203, 204, 209 Mesopotamia, 45, 52, 206 Metro Goldwyn Meier (MGM), 228, 229n69 Middle East Technical University, 240 Midhat Pasha, 36 Mihri Baha (Pektaş), 224, 227 Modernity, 5, 9, 13, 14, 16, 19, 38, 106, 151–196, 244, 246 Modernization, 4, 6, 8, 11, 17–19, 24, 27, 41, 58, 66, 123, 146, 151, 158, 162, 165, 166, 168, 174, 204, 247 Monroe, Paul, 9n19, 14–17, 20, 144–147, 200, 205, 205n7, 210–232, 220n54, 224n58, 236, 237, 240, 241, 247, 248, 250–252 Montagnards, see Jacobins Montreux Convention, 228 Moore, Laurence, 86, 139, 147n73 Morgenthau, Henry, 45, 46, 99 Mosul, 52, 89, 90 Mudanya, armistice at, 57 Mudros, armistice at, 45–46, 60

261

Muhacir (Muslim refugees), 37, 41, 173 Muhammad Ali, 26, 29 Mussolini, Benito, 58 Mustafa Necati, 119 N Nahda (Arabic Renaissance), 32 Napoleon III (Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte), 30, 34, 39 Nazism, Nazis, 65 Near East College Association, 11, 17, 50, 80, 89 Near East Foundation, see Near East Relief Near East Relief, 46, 50, 74, 84, 219, 225 Nejat Ferit, student, 129, 155n12, 157, 161, 163, 163n28 Netherlands, the, 43 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 242 Norway, 43 Nutuk (the Speech), 60 Nye, Joseph S., 6 O Okyar, Fethi, see Fethi, Ali (Okyar) Orbay, Rauf, see Rauf (Orbay), Hüseyin Orientalism, 171n47, 176 Osman, House of, 41, 105 Ottoman Empire, 4, 6–8, 6n10, 10, 15, 23, 24, 30, 31, 36, 41–46, 48, 57, 60, 64, 65, 72, 96, 103, 111, 121, 151, 153, 161, 186, 189, 199, 243, 245, 246 Ottomanism, 19, 31, 41, 151–154, 193, 245 Özal, Turgut, 243

262 

INDEX

P Palestine, 25, 45, 194, 195 Pamuk, Orhan, 156, 240, 249n28 Pan-Turkism/Pan-Turanism, 220 Papa Eftim, 182 Paris Peace Conference, 153, 209 See also Versailles Treaty Patrick, Mary Mills, 25, 47, 48, 59, 66, 95, 101, 103–105, 144n69, 219, 248 Peace Day, 114, 126, 132, 133, 211, 227, 236 Peace Forum, 126, 132, 133, 135 Pektaş, see Hüseyin Bey (Pektaş) People’s Homes/Houses (Halk Evleri), 140, 204 Persians, 162, 175, 177, 206 Petlichkoff, student, 131 Political Science Forum, 126–131, 133, 136, 137, 144, 147n72, 155–157, 160n21, 161, 183, 196, 210, 227, 236, 246 Postcolonial scholarship, 248 Progressive education, 9, 14, 17, 107, 114, 115, 117, 120, 126, 147, 244, 251 Progressive Republican Party, see Rauf (Orbay), Hüseyin Q Qing dynasty, 14 Quakers, 113 Quran, 120, 170 R Raşit Bey (Bıgat), 83, 84, 86 Rauf (Orbay), Hüseyin, 62, 64, 85 Refik Bey (Saydam), 212n26, 213, 215

Reliance, the, 78, 82, 84 Reşit Bey (Galip), 215 Revolutionary Youth Organization (Dev Genç), 242 Robert, Christopher Rhinelander, 23, 34, 242 Robert College, 2–15, 4n7, 11n22, 17–20, 23–52, 58, 59n3, 68, 71–92, 94–101, 106, 107, 111–149, 151–196, 199–201, 204, 206, 206n11, 207n13, 207n14, 207n15, 208n16, 209–232, 212n26, 220n54, 236–252, 237n4 Robinson, James Harvey, 117, 126, 139, 213n30 Rodrigue, Aron, 69 Rûm (romioi, “Romans”), 28, 32, 44, 160, 180, 239, 245 Rumeli Hissar (Rumelihisarı), 23, 34, 111, 144, 242, 243 Russia, 26, 30, 51, 121, 147n72, 190 S Sabbatai Zevi, 178 Sabev, Orlin, 4n7, 8, 12, 47n53 Safa Bey (Özler), 119 Sait, Sheikh, see Sheykh Sait uprising Salonica, 41, 85, 167 See also Thessaloniki San Stefano, Treaty of, 37 Savary, Claude-Étienne, 27 Savfet Bey, 78, 79, 106 Scott, Harold, 17, 68–71, 82, 92–94, 107, 108 Scott, Joan Wallach, 106 Scotten, Robert M., 119 Second Constitutional period/era, 154, 166, 184, 203

 INDEX 

Second Great Awakening, 18, 24 Second World War, 7, 65, 238 Secularism, secular, 3–5, 13, 18, 19, 31, 32, 35, 66, 68, 70, 101–103, 106, 109, 124, 159, 162, 164, 165, 181, 183, 202, 204, 222, 237, 239, 243 Sephardic Jews, see Jews Selaheddin Oğuz, student, 174, 175 Selim Nüzhet Bey, 140 Seljuk Turks, 77 Sertel, Zekeriya, see Zekeriya (Sertel) Sèvres, Treaty of, 52, 60 Sheykh Sait uprising, 63, 66, 173, 174, 203 Sivas, 37 Skinner, Quentin, 14 Skinner, Robert, 218 Småberg, Maria, 194, 195 Smyrna (Izmir), 24, 50, 51, 68, 72, 168 Society for the Elevation of Turks and Armenians, 182, 188 Sofia, 50, 86, 89 Soft power, 6, 249 Soviet Union, 13, 14, 147, 147n72, 189, 239 Special Organization (Teşkilât-i Mahsusa), 45, 191 Staub, Albert, 80, 81, 90, 129, 209, 209n19, 210, 211n25 Stuckert, Robert Crozier, 75 Sun Language Theory, 206, 206n12 Sweet Briar College, 219 Swiss civil code, 58, 66, 105, 159 Switzerland, 51, 79 Syria, 37, 42, 45, 50, 71, 78, 192, 228 Syrian Protestant College, see American University of Beirut Szyliowicz, Joseph S., 120

263

T Takayama, Keita, 16, 248 Talaat Pasha, 60, 64, 168, 178, 192 Tanrıöver, Hamdullah Suphi, see Hamdullah Suphi (Tanrıöver) Tanzimat, 18, 24, 26, 29–32, 36–40, 67, 154, 242 Tekinalp, Munis (Moïz Kohen), 169, 182 Tevfik Fikret Bey, 96 Thessaloniki, 40, 239 See also Salonica Touloukian, Hagop, student, 129, 130, 157, 183, 184, 186 Toynbee, Arnold, 122 Truman doctrine, 5, 239 Turkish Hearths (Türk Ocakları), 140, 165, 169, 173–175, 178, 204 Turkish History Thesis, 161, 205–209, 206n12, 211, 212, 252n33 Turkish Society at Robert College, 129n40 Turner, Fredrick Jackson, 145, 148 See also Turner thesis Turner thesis, 247 U Üngör, Uğur Ümit, 170 Unionists, 41–43, 60, 61, 64, 152, 188 See also Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti) United Nations, 130 University of Istanbul, 39, 204, 208 V Van Millingen, Alexander, 9 Varlık vergisi, wealth tax, 158

264 

INDEX

Vassif Bey (Çınar), 78, 80, 85–87, 90, 119 Vatan (Fatherland), newspaper, 85, 85n61 Vendée, 65 Venizelos, Eleftherios, 152 Versailles Treaty, 128 Vietnam War, 249n28 Vonnegut, Kurt, 252n33 W Wallace, Alfred, 140 War of Independence (Turkish), 59, 161, 172 See also Greco-Turkish War Ward, Henry, 147n72 Washburn, George, 35, 36 Werfel, Franz, 228, 229n69 Wilson, Florence, 160n21 Wilson, Woodrow, 114, 153–154 World-mindedness, 19, 112, 126–138 Wright, Walter Livingston, 224n57, 236, 237, 237n6, 250, 250n31

X Xenophobia, 230 Y Yalman, Ahmet Emin, see Emin, Ahmet (Yalman) Yıldız Palace, 153 Young Turks, 40–43, 45–48, 64, 65, 74, 94, 99, 125, 168–171, 176, 184–186, 220 See also Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti) Z Zekeriya (Sertel), 85, 85n61, 91 Zeki Velidi (Togan), 208 Zimmern, Alfred, 136, 137 Zionism, Zionists, 70 Zürcher, Erik Jan, 5, 31, 65, 85n61, 188n101, 201