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Stranger in a Not-So-Strange Land: Teaching and Living the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in Turkey*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Russell L. Johnson
Russell L. Johnson
Affiliation:
University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand (formerly of Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey)
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Extract

Images of Turkey in the United States during the Gilded Age were generally not flattering. For the most part, Turks appeared in Gilded Age serious journals and popular press as “blood-thirsty,” “savages,” and “the most brutal outcasts of the human race,” who were merely “camping in Europe” – albeit for five hundred years – but not a part of it. A “pitiable imbecility” was said to characterize the Ottoman Empire, with the Turks having shown an “utter incapacity for just, enlightened, progressive government.” Looking at Turkey in 1877, an American army officer concluded that in order “to reform Turkey” it would be necessary first “to abolish the Turks.” At the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, according to historians Gail Bederman and Robert Rydell, the location of the Turkish village on the Midway clearly placed Turkey among the “barbarous” nations of the world; at the Turkish village, as Bederman puts it, “unmanly, dark-skinned men cajoled customers to shed their manly restraint and savor their countrywomen's sensuous dancing.” Even Mark Twain quipped that “I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a little – not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the place again without a divining-rod or a diving-bell.”

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 1 , Special Issue 4: Teaching the GAPE Internationally , October 2002 , pp. 330 - 346
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2002

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References

1 “The Eastern Question,” Putnam's Monthly Magazine 13 (April 1869): 456 [“bloodthirsty”] and 458 [“outcasts”]; ‘Turk and Indian,” The Galaxy 24 (November 1877): 695 [“savages”]; Anderson, Thomas M., “The Irrepressible Conflict in the East,” The Galaxy 24 (November 1877): 690Google Scholar [“camping”] and 693 [“abolish”]; Woodman, C.H., “The Suicide of the Ottomans,” Appleton's Journal 2 (June 1877): 553Google Scholar [“pitiable” and “incapacity”]; Bederman, Gail, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago, 1995), 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mark Twain Quotations, ‘Turkey,” <http://www.twainquotes.com/Turkey.html> [originally appeared in Twain, Mark, Innocents Abroad (Hartford, CT, 1870Google Scholar)]. See also Rydell, Robert W., All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago, 1984), 38–71.Google Scholar I hope to explore in more detail the various ideas about Turkey in the United States – and the United States in Turkey – in a future project.

2 Students in Turkey are not permitted to be formal members of political parties, but parties do funnel money to student organizations. In the spring 1998 student government elections at Bilkent (the first I witnessed), the ATA Group, affiliated with the Nationalist Movement (or Action) Party (MHP), won control of the student government and won each election I witnessed thereafter, including the 2002 election under the new name Grup Gunes (Sun Group).

3 Despite being on the list of U.S. history Fulbright positions for each of my five years at Bilkent, we had a Fulbright scholar for exactly one semester during my five years at Bilkent. In 1996–1997, the year before I arrived at Bilkent, there was a Fulbright scholar for the full academic year.

4 If a course is cancelled for lack of students, the faculty member will be assigned to teach something else – whether they are qualified to teach it or not. Frequently that “something else” has been the Department of History's History of Civilization (HCIV) course, where class sizes range from thirty-five to fifty first-year students (with English language skills somewhere between excellent and nearly non-existent) and a handful of students who failed the course in previous semesters. Needless to say, for most the incentive to avoid teaching HCIV is strong.

5 The Making of America, website urls: <http://wmoa.umdl.umich.edu/> and <http://library5.library.cornell.edu/moa/> The websites contain searchable full texts for numerous nineteenth and early-twentieth century popular and serious journals, ranging from Catholic World to the North American Review to Scientific American. For example, all of the primary sources cited in the first paragraph, except the Mark Twain comment, were found at one of the Making of America websites; specific urls for the articles are available upon request.

6 Ulupinar, Gülben, “The Failure of the U.S. Reservation Policy for the Native Americans: The Navajo at Bosque Redondo, 1864–1868” (M.A. thesis, Bilkent Univ., 1999)Google Scholar; Çorlu, Aksel, “The Seattle General Strike and the I.W.W.: A Discourse Analysis” (M.A. thesis, Bilkent Univ., 1999)Google Scholar; Atabay, Piril, “Philanthropy and Race Relations in 1920s Chicago” (M.A. thesis, Bilkent Univ., 1999)Google Scholar; Gürsel, Bahar, “Jefferson's Republic: The Declaration of Independence, Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and the University of Virginia” (M.A. thesis, Bilkent Univ., 2000)Google Scholar; and Demir, Zennure, “The American Perception of the Ottomans in the Nineteenth and the Beginning of the Twentieth Centuries” (M.A. thesis, Bilkent Univ., 1998).Google Scholar Also Selected Works of Thomas Jefferson, <http://www.constitution.org/tj/tj-categ.html> and American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University.

7 Gedeleç, Tebeta Aylin, “Coverage of the Vietnam War Antiwar Movement in Time and Newsweek, 1965–1971” (M.A. thesis, Bilkent Univ., 2000)Google Scholar; Ertürk, Sibel, “An Analysis of the Civil Rights, Feminist, and Native American Rights Movements in the 1960s and 1970s” (M.A. thesis, Bilkent Univ., 2001)Google Scholar; and Sen, Leyla, “Highway Improvement and Agricultural Mechanization: Turkish High Priority Economic Development Projects in the Framework of the ‘Free’ World Recovery Program and Their Repercussions” (M.A. thesis, Bilkent Univ., 1997).Google Scholar

8 Television and radio broadcasting in Kurdish is illegal, and schools are not even allowed to offer Kurdish language classes. Discussing multi-culturalism in Turkey is difficult because the state only recognizes three official minority groups: Armenians, Jews, and Greeks.

9 The evidence for the alleged kinship of Turks and Native Americans is spotty at best, based on general characteristics like dark skins and straight black hair, as well as on the similarity of patterns in Turkish kilims (small woven rugs) and Native American blankets.

10 To be successful, social history applicants to Bilkent must shape their letters of application according to the stated preferences. Perhaps the greatest failing of applicants for positions in Bilkent's Department of History is to ignore the preferences stated in the advertisement and send a letter such as they would send an American university, a letter stressing the race, class, and gender elements of their research – even when their research clearly isn't (primarily) about race, class, or gender. In my case, I wrote a dissertation about the social effects of the Civil War, with an emphasis on working-class formation, and argued in my cover letter how that made me a historian of industrialization with military history on the side. As a result, in Spring 1999,1 found myself teaching a graduate seminar on world economic history since the beginning of the eighteenth century. But at least I had the job.

11 See, e.g., Shaw, Stanford J., Turkey and the Holocaust: Turkey's Role in Rescuing Turkish and European Jewry from Nazi Persecution, 1933–1945 (New York, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Shaw, , The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (New York, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 A final area of student interest has been diplomatic history, even though until my fifth year Bilkent did not have a diplomatic historian as a regular member of the staff. Interest in this area arises because of Turkey's significant role in NATO and in things such as the development of the Truman Doctrine and the Cuban Missile Crisis. But since this interest has been exclusively in the Cold War period, I have not developed a full paragraph on it in the text.

13 Most of what follows in this section is based on five years of living in Turkey, observing, conversing, and reading the English-language newspaper, the Turkish Daily News (available on-line at <http://www.turkishdailynews.com/>). Kinzer, Stephen, Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds (New York, 2001)Google Scholar, confirms most of my observations and informs my analysis here. Kinzer spent several years in Turkey as the New York Times' correspondent and made a much wider range of contacts than I did. The product of his experience, Crescent and Star is an accessible, if too often didactic, survey of Turkish history, society, and politics since the end of World War I, with emphasis on the late-1990s.

14 A good example of this comes from the Republican People's Party (CHP), Turkey's oldest political party. Founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the 1930s, the CHP had been represented in the Parliament continuously until the 1999 election when it failed to meet the threshold of 10 percent of the national vote required to place members in Parliament. The CHP leader, Deniz Baykal, responded by very ostentatiously resigning his position. A few months later, Baykal was back – at his instigation, his supporters called an extraordinary party congress, ousted his hand-picked successor, and restored Baykal, who continues to lead the party.

15 It is likely that the successors to the RP, the Virtue Party (FP), which was itself banned in 2001 as a continuation of the banned RP, and its successors, the Happiness (or Contentment) Party (SP) and the Justice and Development Party (AKP), have continued this practice. Kinzer, , Crescent and Star, 66.Google Scholar

16 Though the media domination of Dogan and Uzan are obvious to anyone living in Turkey, the specific percentage in the text is from Kinzer, , Crescent and Star, 21Google Scholar; also “Inflation Slows over Exchange Rate Stabilization,” Turkish Daily News, December 4, 2001. Inflation at the wholesale level through November 2001 was 84.5 percent.

17 See, Sen, “Highway Improvement and Agricultural Mechanization.”

18 By comparison, the U.S. population was 19.8 percent urban in 1860, 39.6 percent in 1900, and 51.2 percent in 1920. The World Bank, World Development Report 1984 (New York, 1984), 260Google Scholar (Table 22); The World Bank, World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World (New York, 1997), 231Google Scholar (Table 9); and Norton, Mary Beth, et al., A People and a Nation: A History of the United States (Brief Edition), 5th ed. (Boston, 1999), A–20Google Scholar (Table: Population of the United States).

19 In the proceedings which led to the banning of the Welfare Party (RP) in 1997, Erbakan himself was personally banned from politics. No one, however, doubts that he is the de facto leader of the SP, as he was of the Virtue Party (FP) 1997–2001. On Erbakan, see also Kinzer, , Crescent and Star, 63–77.Google Scholar

20 In July 2002, as I revise this for the final time before publication, the tensions in the three-party coalition over EU accession, as well as a persistent economic crisis, have fatally undermined the government. Because the government seemed to be favoring the MHP position on the EU, about half the members of the largest coalition partner, the Democratic Left Party (DSP), withdrew from the party and the government. This forced the DSP Prime Minister, Bulent Ecevit, to bow to demands for an early election. See, e.g., Frantz, Douglas, “Air of Uncertainty Hangs Over Turkey as Government Erodes,” New York Times, July 14, 2002Google Scholar, <http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/14/international/europe/14TURK.html> and Simpson, Daniel, ‘Turkey's Premier Calls Early Elections,” New York Times, July 17, 2002Google Scholar, <http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/17/intemational/europe/17TURK.html> and “Government Loses Parliamentary Majority” and “Leaders Agree: Polls on Nov. 3,” Turkish Daily News, July 17, 2002.

21 On Alevi Muslims, see Kinzer, , Crescent and Star, 63–64.Google Scholar Politically, Alevis had been associated with the Republican People's Party (CHP), though that party's low vote tally in the 1999 election suggests that Alevis had abandoned the party of Deniz Baykal, perhaps in favor of another center-left party, Ecevit's DSP. The DSP had cleaved off from the CHP years eariier and was the leading vote getter in the 1999 election.

22 The corruption of Turkish politics is a common theme for journalists. The greatest current case is the so-called “Susurluk Scandal,” though its importance is somewhat opaque to the outsider. I've read three or four long newspaper stories purporting to explain it, plus Kinzer's account in Crescent and Star (97–99), and I'm still not sure I grasp the full significance.

23 Kinzer, , Crescent and Star, 28Google Scholar [quote]; also 24 and 232. Naturally, this view of Turkey's future greatness is most common among Turks; see, e.g., “Bahçeli Praises the ‘Strong Turkmenistan,’” Turkish Daily News, October 6, 2001, which quotes then State Minister in Charge of Relations with the Central Asian Republics Abdulhaluk Çay suggesting a ‘Turkish Century.” And see Oruç, Saadet, “Civilizations Lock Horns on Mideast,” Turkish Daily News, February 13, 2002Google Scholar – stepping into its potential role as a bridge between cultures, Turkey hosted a “joint forum” between European Union and Organization of Islamic Conference foreign ministers on February 12 and 13, 2002.

24 Although Bilkent is an exception as an English-language university, even in universities where Turkish is the primary language of instruction, courses in American Culture and Literature are routinely taught in English. Speaking English is considered part and parcel of learning the culture and literature of the United States. On the other hand, when I interviewed for my present position in New Zealand, the department said they got a lot of applications – around 30. Hence, it is apparent that language is not the major obstacle preventing American historians from moving abroad.

25 I made a conscious decision not to organize this essay around September 11, which would have been all too easy to do. Suffice it to say that Bilkent was and continues to be extremely supportive of its American community, just as the Turkish government and people have supported the United States during the crisis. As a general rule Americans in Turkey are as safe as – and in many ways safer than – they would be in the United States. Furthermore, the war on terrorism simply underscores the significance of Turkey in the twenty-first century as described in the previous paragraph.

26 Leon, Edwin De, “The Old Ottoman and the Young Turk,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 44 (March 1872): 606–13 [quote from 606].Google Scholar