Turkey and Her Nationalist Leaders As Seen in the 1923 Reports of Louise Bryant1

CHAPTER THREE

TURKEY AND HER NATIONALIST LEADERS AS SEEN IN THE 1923 REPORTS OF LOUISE BRYANT1

Howard A. Reed

Few of us know about Louise Bryant’s 1923 eyewitness reports on Turkey’s people and their nationalist leaders. Th at is because her papers were lost and forgotten for decades, only to be rediscovered recently. Th e following account is mainly based on those records of Louise Bryant (1885–1936) which were long thought lost. Fortunately they had been preserved by her only daughter, Ms. Anne Moen Bullitt. Ms. Bullitt donated this collection of her mother’s signifi cant papers as well as those of her father, former Ambassador William C. Bullitt, to Yale University’s Sterling Library in 2004–2005. Th ose archives became acces- sible to researchers only the following year. As one of the fi rst scholars to use Bryant’s reporting on Turkey, it is a privilege to share some of her fi rst-hand sympathetic, yet trenchant views on Turkey in 1923. Louise Bryant seemed forgotten for decades aft er she gave up her notable journalistic career for motherhood and a new married life around 1924. She did so shortly aft er leaving Turkey, where she spent months in 1923 reporting for the International News Service. Aft er retiring from journalism, she faded from view. More recently, however, Ms. Bryant has become the subject of several biographical treatments. In 1973, Barbara Gelb published So Short a Time: A Biography of John Reed and Louise Bryant (New York: W. W. Norton & Co Inc., 1973). Th at work said little about Bryant’s time in Turkey, instead focusing mainly on her career and brief marriage from 1915 until her husband John Reed’s death in Moscow in 1920. Th e 1981 movie “Reds,” featuring Diane Keaton as Louise Bryant, was based on Gelb’s book. On the other hand, Virginia Gardner’s study, “Friend and Lover:” Th e Life of Louise Bryant (New York: Horizon

1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at a conference on Turkish-American relations co-sponsored by Boğaziçi [Bosphorus] and Harran Universities in İstanbul and Şanlıurfa, Turkey, June 5–10, 2006. 84 howard a. reed

Press, 1982) includes data on Bryant’s time in Turkey, but says virtu- ally nothing about her observations as a journalist there. In 1996, Mary V. Dearborn, who published Queen of Bohemia, Th e Life of Louise Bryant (Boston & New York: Houghton Miffl in, 1996) also shed light on Bryant’s career. But neither these books nor the movie “Reds” used Louise Bryant’s papers deposited at Yale.2

Louise Bryant’s Life

Louise Bryant was born in California, graduated from the University of Nevada, and began her career as a writer, reporter and suff ragette in Portland, Oregon, early in the twentieth century. She performed as an actress and wrote plays for the famed Provincetown Players in which she acted with her second husband, John Reed, and lover, Eugene O’Neill. Reed would become famous as the author of the classic Ten Days that Shook the World (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922) on the Russian revolution and O’Neill would emerge as a famed American playwright in his own right. In 1917, Louise Bryant was a foreign correspondent reporting on the Western Front in the First World War. Th en she and John Reed spent several months as eyewitnesses to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Th ey both interviewed Kerensky, Lenin, Trotsky, Chicherin, peasants and others. Louise met ladies such as Alexandra Kollontai, Marie Spiridovna, leading artists and dancers like Lunacharski and Stanislavski. Both traveled widely and wrote major books on their experiences in Bolshevik Russia. John Reed died of typhus just aft er his return to Moscow from Baku in October 1920 and was the fi rst of two Americans to be buried in the Moscow Kremlin. In Russia in 1921, Louise Bryant also met several important Turkish fi gures. She became acquainted with Ali Fuat [Cebesoy] Pasha, War College classmate and long time associate of Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk]. Ali Fuat had been appointed Nationalist Turkey’s Ambassador to Moscow in November 1920. He arrived at the Soviet capital in February 1921 and served there until May, when he felt obliged to quit his post in the wake of an incident in which his military attachés were accused of conducting a botched espionage operation against the Bolshevik

2 My thanks to Ms. Cynthia Ostroff , Manager, Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Library, Yale University, Mr. William Massa, and their associates for their kind help with Louise Bryant’s key papers.