University of New Hampshire University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository Master's Theses and Capstones Student Scholarship Fall 2007 Oil, honor and religion: United States foreign policy towards Turkey, 1923--1927 Aykut Kilinc University of New Hampshire, Durham Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/thesis Recommended Citation Kilinc, Aykut, "Oil, honor and religion: United States foreign policy towards Turkey, 1923--1927" (2007). Master's Theses and Capstones. 61. https://scholars.unh.edu/thesis/61 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses and Capstones by an authorized administrator of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. OIL, HONOR AND RELIGION: UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY TOWARDS TURKEY, 1923-1927 BY AYKUT KILINC B.A., Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, 2000 THESIS Submitted to the University of New Hampshire in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in History September, 2007 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 1447891 INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ® UMI UMI Microform 1447891 Copyright 2007 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. This thesis has been examined and approved. Thesis Director,QCyrk Dorsey, Associate Professor of History INr-------- Ell^n Fitzpatrick, Professor of History Thomas Schwartz, Professor of History, Vanderbilt University ------------------ Date Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis could not have been written without Professor Kurk Dorsey who served as my supervisor. He kindly and patiently supported this project throughout the production period. My thanks also to the Department of History at the University of New Hampshire that enabled me to visit the National Archives and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC by granting me the Donald Wilcox Travel Award. I would also like to thank the library staff at the University of Hampshire, as well as the Houghton Library which allowed me to use their Joseph Grew manuscripts in the thesis. Finally, I would like to thank Beth Rascoe for her love and support. iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. PREFACE The six-hundred year old Ottoman Empire came to an end after a defeat in the Great War. A new Turkish nationalist movement emerged against the Allied occupation in Asia Minor, largely made up of the Greek army, in 1919. Against the Greek occupying forces, the Turks won their War of Independence and established the Turkish Republic in 1923. This thesis examines U.S. foreign relations with the new Turkish Republic between 1923 and 1927. As an introduction, the first chapter will explain the relationship between the United States and the Ottoman Empire through the end of the Great War. The second chapter will focus on the 1922-23 treaty negotiations at Lausanne among Turkey, the U.S., and the Allied Powers, mainly Britain, France and Italy. The last chapter will study the American peoples’ reaction to the Lausanne Treaty until early 1927. This thesis primarily depends on U.S. historical resources. Without distinction, most of these resources define the Ottoman Empire and its successor state, the Republic of Turkey, as Turkey. In order to emphasize the difference, the thesis refers to these countries as the Ottoman Empire until its end in 1923, unless in direct quotation, and Turkey after 1923. The place names that were unanimously spelled the same are not translated into their modern Turkish names - the modern names did not become official until the Turkish adoption of the Latin alphabet in 1929.1 For instance, Smyrna, Constantinople and Angora are not translated into 1 This style is borrowed from Leland James Gordon’sAmerican Relations with Turkey, 1830- 1930: An Economic Interpretation. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1932). iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Izmir, Istanbul or Ankara. Since the lesser known place names were spelled differently from one resource to another, I chose to use their modern names. In order to avoid unnecessary repetition, the Lausanne Treaty is sometimes referred to as the Treaty, and the Department of State as the Department. Asia Minor and Anatolia are used interchangeably to define the current Turkish land mass on the Asian side of the country. The Near East in this work entails the entire Middle East regardless whether certain lands in the Middle East were under Ottoman control during the time of this study. The third chapter largely explains how the Turks’ massacre and dislocation of Armenians during and after the Great War affected American public opinion, and as a result how the public wanted to influence U.S. foreign policy to help the Armenians. The goal is to explore how the Armenian Genocide informed the American people’s foreign policy choices. It is beyond the focus of this thesis to narrate the Armenian Genocide or verify the accuracy of American people’s knowledge about what actually happened. The thesis operates within common American perceptions of Turks and the events that took place. v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS....................................................................................................... in PREFACE................................................................................................................................................................iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ......................................................................................................................................vi ABSTRACT................... vii INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................... 1 Historiography and Methodology.............................................................. 10 I. CONTINUITYAND CHANGE: U.S. OPEN DOOR POLICY IN TURKEY......................................15 Early Years..........................................................................................................15 The First Open Door Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire: Oscar Solomon Straus, 1909-1910............................................................................................. 17 II. KEEPING THE DOOR OPEN AT LAUSANNE CONFERENCE..................................................... 30 The U.S. Open Door Policy in the Near East during........................... 1920’s 30 Mark Lambert Bristol: An Open Door Diplomat in Constantinople................. 38 First Conference.................................................................................................45 Chester Concession Revitalized...................................................................... 52 The Second Lausanne Conference.................................................................. 55 III. AMERICAN PUBLIC’S REACTION TO THE LAUSANNE TREATY .............................................63 The Opposition to the Treaty............................................................................ 64 Support for the Ratification................................................................................ 77 The Lausanne Treaty Survives......................................................................... 82 CO N C LU SIO N ......................................................................................................................................................84 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................ 89 vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT OIL, HONOR AND RELIGION: UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY TOWARDS TURKEY, 1923-1927 by Aykut Kilinc University of New Hampshire, September, 2007 The U.S. and Turkey signed the Lausanne Treaty in 1923 and established equal relations. In 1927, the U.S. Senate rejected this treaty. The Coolidge administration, however, ignored the Senate’s rejection and activated the Treaty shortly thereafter. This study was conducted to determine why the Lausanne Treaty was rejected and how it survived. Under investigation were: the origins of the U.S. foreign policy in the Near East, the Lausanne Conference negotiations, and the American public’s