Opponents of Kemalism in Turkey's Single Party Era, 1919-1950
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University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2017 The Republic Of Others: Opponents Of Kemalism In Turkey's Single Party Era, 1919-1950 James D. Ryan University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Islamic World and Near East History Commons Recommended Citation Ryan, James D., "The Republic Of Others: Opponents Of Kemalism In Turkey's Single Party Era, 1919-1950" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2735. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2735 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2735 For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Republic Of Others: Opponents Of Kemalism In Turkey's Single Party Era, 1919-1950 Abstract This dissertation seeks to answer to this question: what was the nature and significance of political and cultural opposition in the Kemalist single party state? It examines the careers and output of several key members of the Turkish literary and political elite who enjoyed significant popularity throughout this period, were supportive of some form of Turkish nationalism, but ultimately found themselves at odds with the state establishment, and silenced, suppressed or exiled by the time multiparty politics opened up in Turkey at the dawn of the Cold War. Many of these figures offered alternative visions of Turkish nationalism and modernity inspired by international movements to the left of Kemalism, some of them espoused liberal economic views or a friendlier attitude towards religious conservatives, some of them offered ultranationalist visions infused with racism and inspired by Nazi Germany. By recovering these narratives through state archives, private archives, published and unpublished memoirs found in Turkey, the United States, and Europe, as well as a close reading of the political press in this period, it provides a clearer picture of how contentious the Turkish democratic project was during the single party era, and what types of political voices found themselves on the outside looking in once the first successful opposition party, the Democrat Party, came to power in 1950. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group History First Advisor Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet Keywords Dissent, Intelligentsia, Kemalism, Opposition Movements, Turkey, World War II Subject Categories History | Islamic World and Near East History This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2735 THE REPUBLIC OF OTHERS: OPPONENTS OF KEMALISM IN TURKEY’S SINGLE PARTY ERA, 1919-1950 James D. Ryan A DISSERTATION in History Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2017 Supervisor of Dissertation ______________ Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History Graduate Group Chairperson _________________ Peter Holquist Ronald S. Lauder Endowed Term Associate Professor of History Dissertation Committee Eve M. Trout Powell Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of History Warren Breckman Rose Family Endowed Term Chair, Professor of History Mustafa Aksakal Associate Professor of History and Nesuhi Ertegun Chair of Modern Turkish Studies, Georgetown University . THE REPUBLIC OF OTHERS: OPPONENTS OF KEMALISM IN TURKEY’S SINGLE PARTY ERA, 1919-1950 COPYRIGHT 2017 James D. Ryan This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ For the Turkish academy and journalists in Turkey. May the day come soon when you can lift your pens again without fear of violent or legal reprisal. Your persistence and courage in the face of attack has inspired this work. Kaleminize iyi sağlik. iii Acknowledgments At critical points along the way, parts of this dissertation received crucial support in the form of fellowships and forums to research and workshop parts of the dissertation from a number of organizations and institutions including the Penn Humanities Forum, the Penn Program in Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism, the Middle East Center at Penn, the American Association of the Teachers of Turkic Languages, the Middle East Studies Association, the Tarih Vakfı, the International Relations and History Departments at Bilkent University, the Department of History at the University of Manchester, and the French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences in Prague. In the final years of writing, I benefitted enormously from a generous grant provided by the Institute for Turkish Studies, and another from the Bradley Foundation; I extend my sincere thanks to Sinan Ciddi and the staff at ITS for their tireless work in support of Turkish Studies in the United States and around the world, and to Walter McDougall for selecting me for the Bradley award. The very first seeds of this dissertation were planted in my brain while leading a group of intrepid American high school teachers on a Fulbright-funded Group Projects Abroad seminar in the summer of 2011, I would like to thank the Fulbright program and send a warm hello to all the participants in that project who helped me see a country that I had already been studying for five years through new eyes. The research and writing of this dissertation would not have been possible without the support of a few of people in Turkey and elsewhere who have allowed me access to their private collections, or to interview them about their experiences struggling through the growing pains of the Turkish republic. Chief among these is Tia O’Brien, who has opened her home, her heart, and the fascinating story of her grandparents, Zekeriya and Sabiha Sertel, to me through countless hours of discussion, family documents, and her own notes. I can only hope that this dissertation does some justice to the memory of her family. I must also thank Sevim Randall, Tia’s sister, for allowing me to interview her over the phone on a few occasions, the color and perspective of her own memory is a welcome and crucial part of that story. Additionally, I must thank Ali Fethi Okyar, who allowed me to access his grandfather’s archive of the Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası on Büyükada, and Gündüz Vassaf, who allowed me to interview him and peruse his library on Sedef Adası when this project was still in a very early stage. Gün Benderli provided me the opportunity to interview her and Gaye Petek in Budapest, and also to view correspondence with the Sertels she has kept in her private collection since the 1940s. Kemal Karpat shared his immense knowledge and experience of the single party era and as a witness to the Tan Riot with me for an afternoon in Istanbul, an experience for which I consider myself very honored to have had. Also in Turkey, I have been incredibly lucky to have numerous friends and colleagues who have in various ways commented, assisted, or facilitated my research and writing. At Bilkent, Onur İşçi not only helped me acquire a library card, but carefully read and commented on one of the longer versions of one of my chapters. Onur was also insistent during my stay there that I meet often with İlker Ayturk and Norman Stone, which I obliged and am much better off for it. Orhun Bayraktar provided me with some critical assistance at the National Library, for which I am very grateful. Marc, Rana, and Ozan Hoffman opened their home to me on several occasions, and Marc has been a persistent supporter and critic of my work for the last few years. Moreover, Figen Ereş, Kansu and Şerife Erol, and their families have allowed me to stay with them in Ankara several times since 2008, and accepted me as an adopted son – there is no greater gift that a foreigner interested in Turkey can ask for than the hospitality, warmth, and familial bond they have graciously extended to me over the last several years. iv I feel it imperative that I must acknowledge and thank the group of Turks who have endeavored to teach me Turkish and Ottoman over the years. To the extent that writing this dissertation is possible, it is a credit to their persistent and quality work. First among them is the late Neşe Devrim, whose memory will be with me always as the finest language pedagogue I have ever encountered, and whose untimely death is a loss that should be felt across our field. Hakan Özoğlu is responsible for introducing me to the Turkish language, and to the extent that my modern Turkish has become polished it is to the credit of Feride Hatiboğlu. My journey towards understanding the linguistic and paleographic diversity of Ottoman Turkish has been greatly assisted by the inexhaustible patience of two scholars – Mehmet Darakçioğlu at Penn, who was my first teacher in Ottoman, and Şükrü Hanioğlu at Princeton whose Ottoman Diplomatics seminar was a crucial educational experience. I have been incredibly lucky to receive guidance along the way from several scholars besides my dissertation committee members who have commented on my work, mapped out archives, and connected me to new sources. In this regard, I would like to thank Holly Shissler, Kathryn Libal, Samuel Hirst, İlker Aytürk, Gavin Brockett, Uli Schamiloglu, Peter Holquist, Sinan Ciddi, Aytül Tamer, Kurtuluş Kayalı, David Selim Sayers, Walter Licht, Korkmaz Alemdar, Erika Gilson, Heather Sharkey, Robert Vitalis, Lâle Can, Howard Eissenstat, Ceren Belge, Karen Redrobe, Kevin Platt, and David Kazanjian. My closest and most trusted scholastic companions of my dissertation work have been my fellow graduate students, at Penn and elsewhere. Beyond Penn, Sarah Neel-Smith, Nick Danforth, Kara Peruccio, Reuben Silverman, and Alex Balistreri have helped in ways large and small. At Penn, I could not have asked for a more encouraging, friendly, and brilliant extended cohort of colleagues both in and out of the program in History.