Before moving on to discuss Daniel Lerner’s famous text, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, I want to mention one scholar who may have been more important for establishing precedents in the U.S. understanding of Turkey than either Daniel Lerner or Bernard Lewis. That figure is Lewis V. Thomas, who was charged with running Arabic language studies at Princeton’s Near East Studies Department after WWII, but then also took over Turkish-language studies following Walter Livingston Wright’s untimely death in 1949. (1) The juncture is crucial.
At the end of WWII the U.S. leadership, now under the Harry Truman administration after Franklin Roosevelt’s sudden April 1945 death, expected to cooperate in some manner with the Soviet Union in establishing a world political system that could maintain peace. As the months passed, through the July 1945 Potsdam Conference and then continuing negotiations between the two sides, slowly U.S. officials came to the conclusion that they would not be able to trust the Soviets, and that they would have to devise an approach to deal with a world in which Moscow was not an ally. By early 1946, President Truman had decided to begin taking decisions without reference to Soviet input. (2)
1946 was also the key year for Turkish-U.S. relations. Even though some State Department figures had, by summer 1945, perceived that Turkey could potentially be highly important to U.S. global interests, it wasn’t until the crises of early 1946 turned U.S. official attention to potential anti-Soviet allies overseas, that Turkey attracted more serious study. In August of 1946, after further ominous Soviet diplomatic communications to Turkey, the highest levels of the U.S. leadership decided that Turkey was essential to U.S. geo-strategy and needed to be supported. The problem was how to go about doing that. (3)
The reason U.S. officials felt hesitation on providing aid to Turkey was the domestic political situation. By the waning months of 1945, the Truman administration had come under intense political pressure. Cooperation with Congress was extremely difficult, and public opinion ran against giving aid to overseas states. Fortunately for Truman, the British came to his aid by dropping a hot potato — responsibility for Eastern Mediterranean security — in his lap in February 1947. The resulting political crisis provided the impetus to convince Congress to provide aid to Greece and Turkey, announced in the famous Truman Doctrine speech of 12 March 1947. A precedent was established, and Turkey came into U.S. public consciousness in the context of anti-Soviet trepidations.
However, not all U.S. political actors were convinced that Turkey should receive U.S. largesse, and U.S. aid to Turkey was opposed by figures on both sides of the political divide in the run-up to the 1948 presidential election. Former U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace, for example, who ran as the left-wing Progressive Party candidate, strongly criticized U.S. aid to Turkey on the grounds that Turkey was not a democracy. Even though Turkey was not a vital issue for the 1948 election, it was still a topic of debate amongst the U.S. political classes as FDR’s New Deal liberals split into pragmatically moderate and idealistically radical camps. The pragmatists largely supported aiding Turkey despite the “unknown” of its political system. Wallace was one of the idealists, and it was his dramatic failure to attract votes in 1948 that signaled the end of the New Deal’s left-wing as an important force in U.S. politics. (4)
This was the domestic U.S. political atmosphere that gave rise to a new intellectual trend: pro-Turkish polemical writing disguised as neutral, academic studies. The liberal pragmatists (identifiable as realists) who supported aiding Turkey in the early Cold War years discerned a need to propagate their reasoning amongst the U.S. political literati. Concurrently, U.S. policy-makers also needed information about the various overseas societies that the flow of history had brought them into close contact with. Thus a need for “experts” was born, and there began to appear institutions, producing a stream of Turkey-friendly academic books and articles, that were often funded through U.S. government support.
One form of these institutions was think-tanks. The first such organization devoted to the Eastern Mediterranean was the Middle East Institute, founded in 1946 by a group of political and academic figures. The institute also began publishing the Middle East Journal, “the first scholarly journal to focus exclusively on the region,” in 1947. (5)
Another type of institute devoted to creating knowledge about the Eastern Mediterranean was academic programs or departments focused on the region. Princeton’s Near East Studies became the preeminent program of the era, and money began to flow indirectly from the U.S. government to it in order to stimulate research and knowledge on an area of the world that U.S. policy-makers knew next-to-nothing about. At that moment in time, what Princeton scholars said about Turkey could be considered the authoritative statement on how the U.S. government should understand that new, unknown ally on the other side of the world.
Walter Livingston Wright, former headmaster of Istanbul’s Robert College, was the person who should have established the long-term understanding of Turkey amongst the U.S. political elites through his oversight of the Turkish studies classes at Princeton. Wright, however, died prematurely in 1949, and the person most immediately suitable to take over Wright’s position was the Ottomanist Lewis V. Thomas, who had also taken up a teaching position at Princeton. Biographical information on Thomas is difficult to find, but Thomas, too, had apparently worked at Robert College, which was also where he met Wright. Thomas would remain at Princeton until his death in the mid-1960s. (6)
In the five or so years after he took over the Turkish studies classes at Princeton’s Near East program under his wing, Thomas produced a series of articles and book chapters on Turkey that should be re-examined for the themes that apparently originated with them, and many of which continue nearly unchanged today. Consider this passage, which begins an article Thomas published in the Winter 1952 issue of the Middle East Journal, in the same time-frame in which Turkey officially joined NATO, and less than two years after the Turkish Republic’s first democratically-elected government sent soldiers to Korea:
Nothing which has happened in Turkey since the end of World War II has attracted more attention than that country's emergence as a functioning multi-party democracy. The implications of this development for Turkish-American relations are self-evident, and are the more impressive against the background of the current deterioration of relations between the United States and various other Muslim states.Turkey's newly attained practice of democracy, however, is of course not without its own problems. It is particularly involved with a series of recent developments in Turkish Islam which some observers believe portend the rise of serious Muslim reaction within Turkey. Since a change of this sort would inevitably have repercussions in Turkish- American relations, an enumeration and appraisal of recent developments in Turkey's Islam must have due consideration in keeping American attitudes toward Turkey informed and up-to-date. (7)
Even at that point, the Islamic Threat was front-and-center in Thomas’s consideration of Turkish society. However, this attitude is somewhat mystifying since at that point the U.S. had little experience with Turkey. Today, Turkish society is understood as having been largely pro-American until the end of the 1950s, and in 1952 the U.S. military presence had not elicited strong religious reaction from Turkish society. What was there for Thomas to be so concerned about?
NOTES
(1) http://etcweb.princeton.edu/CampusWWW/Companion/near_eastern_studies.html
(2) The debate over who should be held responsible for the Cold War has launched a thousand books, and probably will never be definitively settled except in the minds of polemicists. Suffice to say that while both sides should share the blame, the reality was that the U.S. was militarily far more powerful than the USSR until Moscow attained nuclear bomb capacity in 1949. For the two main sides to the debate, refer to John L. Gaddis’s The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 and Melvyn P. Leffler’s A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. For readers who are too young to remember the Cold War, be thankful that you are.
(3) The key study for this issue is Melvyn P. Leffler’s Journal of American History article from 1985, titled “Strategy, Diplomacy, and the Cold War: The United States, Turkey, and NATO, 1945-1952.” This article is probably the single most important study written on Turkey-U.S. relations.
/4) For more information on the transformation discussed in this paragraph, refer to Alan Brinkley’s The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. Brinkley’s study is essential to understanding the fundamentally important socio-political changes that occurred in U.S. society between the 1930s and 1950s, and is one of the most impressive scholarly studies that I’ve encountered. Another book that readers may find interesting is Richard H. Pells’s The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s.
(5) http://www.mei.edu/brief-history-middle-east-institute
(6) http://etcweb.princeton.edu/CampusWWW/Companion/near_eastern_studies.html. Thomas’s preface to his portion of The United States and Turkey and Iran, a foundational text that I’ll discuss in the next article, also suggests that Thomas had a close working relationship with Wright in Istanbul; see: Thomas, Lewis V. and Richard N. Frye. The United States and Turkey and Iran (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1951), p. 3.
(7) Thomas, Lewis V. “Recent Developments in Turkish Islam.” Middle East Journal. Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter 1952), p. 22.