Süreyya Ağaoğlu and the emerging liberal order in early Cold War Turkey

Abstract

This article discusses the life, career, and associations of Süreyya Ağaoğlu, Turkey’s first female lawyer, in the years leading up to Turkey’s watershed 1950 election, in order to understand Turkey’s liberal opposition. Considering her writings and experiences reveals not only the contested nature of liberalism in this period but also ways in which postwar liberalism was intertwined with the networks undergirding the emerging American-led Cold War order. Not only did she interact in her professional life with champions of liberalism from around the world, but she was also connected through her family to important figures in Turkey’s own liberal tradition. Her experience as a both a product of the ‘Kemalist’ state-building project and a critic of its excesses helps us think about the nature of political opposition during Turkey’s late 1940s democratization.

In recent years, historians of Turkey have begun to look closely at the nature of opposition in the late Ottoman Empire and the early republic. This newfound interest is not simply an effort to challenge old certainties by highlighting voices of dissent against the authoritarian tendencies of the ‘Kemalist’ regime. That sort of ‘post-Kemalist’ scholarship is giving way to a different research agenda, which looks beyond the early republic to make sense of Turkey’s historical development.¹ This shift is occurring because, in the first place, the critique of Kemalism has been co-opted by present-day politicians who use it to justify their own repressive style of rule, and, in the second, because many of the alternative voices to Kemalism have themselves been discredited.² As a result of this shift in thinking, recent considerations of opposition voices have been more circumspect than earlier accounts. In her book on the author Refik Halid Karay, for example, Christine Philliou describes opposition (muhalefet) in the 1910s and 1920s as ‘a space of resistance within the constitutionalist establishment …And yet …also a stance that is, at the end of the day, complicit with the bedrock contradictions of the Turkish Republic.’³ A generation later, with the election of 1950, representatives of a similar resistant-yet-complicit opposition would become rulers of Turkey. Among the several, competing intellectual currents driving this opposition was liberalism.

During the late 1940s, the Republic of Turkey experienced profound changes. Its single-party regime gave way to a multiparty political system, its economy became integrated into American-dominated systems of trade and finance, and its armed forces became tied to American-designed security agreements. While these transitions have often been depicted as a betrayal of the independent stance of the interwar years, there was, in truth, no golden age to return to. The conditions that had enabled state-led development and multi-polar foreign policies no longer existed.⁴ In the aftermath of the Second World War, with Germany defeated and the Soviet Union seeking to extend its influence, Turkish leaders chose to ally with the distant superpower rather than the nearby one. The new system that emerged following the war was a ‘liberal’ one, but what this liberalism consisted of was ambiguous. Not only was the term itself changing around the world in these years, but in Turkey, the elites who embraced it were still working out the actual policies that might constitute it in practice. This article considers the ambiguous liberalism of 1940s Turkey by looking at the life, career, and associations of Süreyya Ağaoğlu, Turkey’s first female lawyer and an active participant in the liberal associations of the period. Considering her writings and experiences reveals not only the contested nature of liberalism in this period but also ways in which postwar liberalism was intertwined with the networks undergirding the emerging American-led Cold War order.

Süreyya Ağaoğlu’s life is a particularly illustrative guide for us during these years. Not only did she interact in her professional life with noted champions of liberalism from around the world, but she was also connected through her family to important figures in Turkey’s own liberal tradition. Her father, Ahmet, was an influential intellectual during the last years of the Ottoman Empire and early years of the republic; her younger brother, Samet, was a leading member of the Democrat Party (DP), the main political opposition during the late 1940s and, following its electoral triumph in 1950, Turkey’s ruling party for a decade. While, for reasons discussed below, Süreyya was not an active member of the DP, she was an important participant in the larger political ferment whose energies the DP sought to harness. Her experience as both a product of the ‘Kemalist’ state-building project and a critic of its excesses helps us think about the nature of political opposition during Turkey’s late 1940s democratization.

The Ağaoğlu family and Turkey’s liberal tradition

Süreyya Ağaoğlu came from an intellectual family, deeply involved with the founding of the republic but also critical of how it had developed. Her father, Ahmet, was an émigré from Russian Azerbaijan, who had formed friendships with leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress while studying in France. Upon his arrival in the Ottoman Empire in 1909, he become involved with the Unionist organization alongside other Turkic émigrés from the Russian Empire.⁵ Following the Ottoman loss in the First World War, he was imprisoned for his involvement in the wartime regime. Upon release, he moved to Ankara to support the resistance movement led by Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk].⁶ During these final years of the empire and initial years of the republic, he edited newspapers, worked in the state administration, served in parliament, helped draft the 1924 constitution, and participated in Turkish nationalist cultural associations.

In the first decade of the republic, as governing elites sought to define the nature of the regime they were creating, Ahmet emerged as a staunch supporter of Mustafa Kemal, but also as a leading advocate of liberalism, both in terms of abstract, spiritual freedom (hürriyet) and a more contractual, economic freedom (serberstiyet).⁷ As these two forms of freedom were not always a priority for the leaders of the early republic, he became embroiled in political debates. Many followers of Mustafa Kemal, for example, sought to use the state to liberate people from traditional forms of social control – feudal, religious, and patriarchal – and replace these with a sense of national solidarity. Believing that such large-scale state intervention impinged on people’s freedom of conscience, opposition parties advocated for a degree of religious toleration that more radical members of Mustafa Kemal’s coalition derided as religious ‘reaction’ (irtica). Though supportive of Mustafa Kemal, Ahmet also opposed these more radical forms of nationalism, arguing that individuals were ineradicable parts of the nation and that the most successful European nations were those composed of strong individuals. The legacy of the Liberation War, he argued, should be to free citizens of the republic from foreign exploitation, not to subordinate them to the will of the state.⁸

As Süreyya recalls in her memoir, her father’s commitment to standing on principle won him the respect of Mustafa Kemal, but his willingness to be a gadfly eventually wore thin. In 1930, Kemal personally asked him to join the Free Republican Party (SCF), a regime-sanctioned opposition party led by former prime minister Fethi [Okyar]. Ahmet threw himself into the effort. When the party came under attack from factions within the government and was forced to close, he did not return to the ruling Republican People’s Party (CHP). Instead, he left Ankara and returned to teach in Istanbul. After a short break from writing, he resumed publishing critical pieces about the government in the newspaper Akın (Torrent). One column in particular infuriated Kemal, who personally read it out to Ahmet at an evening gathering and demanded an explanation. Kemal declared that ‘it wasn’t right for a guy [zat] to both teach at the university and criticize the government’ and reminded Ahmet of his status as an undesired dependent (sığıntı) in the country. Though he told Kemal that ‘with those words you are plunging a sword into the heart of Turks’ and received an apology, he also ceased publication of Akın. Ahmet’s reduced income and poor relations with the government came at the same time as the death of his wife. Although a friendly editor at the major daily newspaper Cumhuriyet (Republic) gave him a job as a columnist, Ahmet spent the last six years of his life embittered toward the regime.⁹

The entire interaction is suggestive of the Ağaoğlu family’s position in the country, then and later. Neither Ahmet nor Kemal was born in the territory that became Turkey. Their claim to participation in the nation-state building project was an ethnic one – and yet, even here, Kemal perceived a distinction.¹⁰ Indeed, as Shia Muslims from the Russian rather than the Ottoman Empire, the Ağaoğlu family differed from the republic’s typically Sunni founders, most of whom had been born in western regions of the Empire.

Their father’s shabby treatment by the single-party leadership was not the only source of the family’s discontent. Süreyya’s brother Samet also smoldered with resentment. Six years younger than Süreyya, he felt pressure to follow in their father’s footsteps by studying law despite his passion for literature. After finishing an initial degree in Ankara, he traveled to the University of Strasbourg for an advanced education, but he was forced to end it early when Ahmet’s financial difficulties mounted. Ahmet used his remaining influence to secure Samet a post in the ministry of economy in the mid-1930s.¹¹ Over the coming decade, he rose through the bureaucracy, even as – in his recollection – the ‘disorganization’ of the state and its political leadership was causing popular consternation and actually provoking shortages and high prices.¹² Nonetheless, by the early 1940s, he was actively looking for ways to join this leadership. The 1943 elections, however, left him frustrated: while the leader of one faction within the CHP sought to place him on the candidate list, another blocked his candidacy and, instead, offered a place to another Ağaoğlu sibling, Tezer Taşkıran.¹³

Frustrated with this outcome, Samet set about publishing a book called Kuva-yı Millîye Ruhu (The Spirit of the National Forces), which recalled the early successes of the parliament (before, implicitly, it went astray under single party rule). In 1946, he would resign from government and join the newly established Democrat Party. Samet’s frustration with the single-party regime might appear a matter of self-interest rather than principle, but this would be to misread the calculation of exit, loyalty, and voice made by members of Turkey’s elite. In fact, following Atatürk’s death and İsmet İnönü’s ascent to the presidency in 1938, many opponents from the mid-1920s and the SCF were allowed participate in politics again.¹⁴ In general, elites were willing to work grudgingly within the system. As Süreyya’s example illustrates, the system offered many opportunities.

Coming of age in the early republic

In comparison with her father’s ultimate marginalization and brother’s failure to receive the posts to which he felt himself entitled, Süreyya’s own experience of the single-party era was often a positive one. Yet the indignities they were subjected to (and the regular ones that she, as a woman, also experienced) encouraged her to look on the system with a skeptical eye. She was the eldest of Ahmet’s five children and, as the first-born, attracted both Ahmet’s support and his irritable rages.¹⁵ Born in Baku in 1903, she was brought to Istanbul as a child. Even at a young age, she came into contact with the leading women in Ottoman politics. After initially studying at a French school, she was moved to the Union and Progress Girls Industrial School, whose director, Nezihe [Muhiddin], worked with Süreyya’s mother, Sitare, on the Ottoman Turkish Women’s Protection Society.¹⁶ In addition to Nezihe, who was young but already influential, the novelist Halide Edib [Adivar] was a frequent visitor and Nakiye [Elgün], a leading educator, was an instructor. While Halide Edib and Nezihe would find themselves marginalized by the Kemalist regime in the years to come, Nakiye would go to become one of the first women elected to parliament.¹⁷

When the Unionist school was closed amid political tensions, Ahmet insisted that Süreyya attend a ‘Turkish school’. She tested into the prestigious Bezmi Alem Girls School and its offshoot Selçuk Hatun Girls School.¹⁸ Though she does not mention it in her memoirs, it was at this school that she first became involved on political activism. She was nearing graduation in 1920 when the Allied forces occupied Istanbul, arrested her father, and sent him off to Malta with other members of the Unionist leadership. According to her brother Samet, when a British officer and his entourage toured her school, Süreyya stood up and shouted, ‘Down with the English!’¹⁹ Though officials sought to win her over rather than punish her following her declaration, this outburst (and, one assumes, subsequent statements) marked her in British official eyes as a problem. As late as 1947, British Foreign Office profiles of her noted ‘continual emotional outbursts against aspects of British policy’ and student years in which ‘she played a prominent part in various forms of subversive undergraduate activity’.²⁰ These references were mostly likely to the agitation at the Istanbul University campus in 1922 against professors who criticized Mustafa Kemal and his Ankara-based nationalist movement.²¹

Süreyya was attending Istanbul University as part of the first cohort of women admitted to the law school – a reform that only occurred after she herself convinced the administration to allow it. Her passage through the program and subsequent internship on the way to becoming Turkey’s first female attorney reveal that male leaders of the late Ottoman and early republican systems were open to – but still uneasy with – a greater role for women in public life. The law faculty president approved her request but insisted that she find three peers to join her, thereby justifying the opening of separate women-only classes. She promptly rounded up three friends. As for her father, while he was not opposed to it, he wrote from Malta that he ‘preferred’ that she study history and literature.²² In contrast, Mustafa Kemal and his wife were supportive. Süreyya even recalls them praising her accomplishments to Prime Minister İsmet [İnönü] at a garden party. Yet İsmet was uninterested. Or, perhaps, more than uninterested: when Süreyya’s courses came to an end in 1925, she was offered a three-month scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation to study at the Paris Institute of International Law. Her trip had the support of the current minister of education, Hamdullah Suphi [Tanrıöver] (who also happened to be a close friend of her father’s from nationalist organizations like Turkish Hearth), but it was opposed by İsmet. Hamdullah Suphi told her that the prime minister was opposed to giving such an opportunity to ‘Ağaoğlu the nationalist’s girl’. Instead of the dream trip to Paris, Süreyya and another of her female classmates were given an internship in Ankara at the Ministry of Justice, which was run by another Turkish Hearth member, Mahmut Esat [Bozkurt]. In this post, she and her classmate became the targets of gossip for their efforts to eat at Istanbul Lokantası, the most popular restaurant of Turkey’s (at the time all male) parliamentarians. Ultimately, however, they found strong support from Mustafa Kemal, who directed his wife and several ministers to eat there as well, thereby giving mixed gender dining his seal of approval.²³

In 1928, she passed the Ankara Bar and became Turkey’s first female lawyer. Initially, she worked in the office of a prominent local lawyer, Cemal Hazım [Görkmen], and part-time as a lawyer representing the Soviet oil company Neftsendikat. Soon, however, her father informed her that Prime Minister İsmet did not want her working for ‘a communist institution’. Her father suggested she enter government employment; she found a post at the State Council (Devlet surasi) in its Organization Department (Tanzimat Dairesi). Yet here, she clashed with superiors – all male in these years – and had to fight to keep her job as İsmet maneuvered to push her out. Again and again, she was finding her professional opportunities limited by shifts in elite factional politics such as that between the prime minister and liberals such as her father. By 1931, İsmet and his allies had gained the upper hand: the government launched a more statist industrial development program and non-state organizations associated with opponents were closed or absorbed. The Turkish Hearth branches, for example, were closed and repurposed as ‘People’s Houses’, cultural centers run by the ruling party. In 1932, Süreyya left state employment, following her family to Istanbul after her father’s falling out with Mustafa Kemal. She began working in the offices of a lawyer whom she had been introduced to by her father’s political ally Fethi [Okyar].²⁴

Although her father’s network furnished Süreyya with the initial opportunities that she needed to pursue her career, her connection with Ahmet, and by extension his liberal views, often served to limit her professional horizons. Yet, if Süreyya had grown up in a family associated with ‘liberalism’, what did that liberalism consist of beyond abstract calls to ‘freedom’ and/or ‘liberty’ (depending on how one chooses to translate hürriyet)? As Ozan Özavcı argues in his intellectual biography of Süreyya’s father, there was a diversity of liberalisms and the ways in which advocates like Ahmet understood and articulated them changed over time. Over the course of the 1920s, Ahmet expanded on the vague liberalism of the regime – ‘a much limited version of political liberalism …confined to opposing oppressive monarchical rule and upholding the rule of reason and ordered and selective individual and collective rights’ – and ‘added, with reservations, limited power, freedom of thought, freedom of movement, transparency and, perhaps most importantly, the moral emancipation of the individual’.²⁵ This liberalism was principled in so far as it led Ahmet and others to clash with İnönü and other powerful figures in the government at a real cost to their careers, but it never led to a wholesale denunciation of the regime. For Süreyya as well, liberalism provided a vocabulary for critiquing the more oppressive tendencies of single-party rule but not a full rejection.

Engaging with the wider world

While Süreyya’s attempts to venture abroad in the 1920s had been blocked by her father’s opponents, she would travel widely in the decades to come. On one level, these trips would mix business and pleasure, but, on another level, it is clear that the distinction was rather meaningless: making new connections and tending to previously established ones through these adventures was essential to maintaining her elite position in Turkish society. Likewise, through these journeys, she developed relationships with champions of liberal internationalism in the postwar years. As we will see in this and the following sections, however, while the elite nature of her social connections served her well in business, the elite nature of the liberal organizations with which she interacted meant that the movement was never very closely connected to the broader Turkish public.

Following her mother’s death in 1933, Süreyya traveled to Romania in search of ‘a consoling change’.²⁶ In the capital, she stayed with family friend Hamdullah Suphi [Tanrıöver], who had been sent abroad by the government as a means of distancing him from active politics. She also spent time with Nebil Süreyya [Akçer], the consular representative for the city of Constanta. The son of a high-ranking official during the reign of Abdulhamid II, Nebil Süreyya would later become consulate general in France and the UK.²⁷ In 1939, following her father’s death, she again took a trip as a means of altering her surroundings, this time to England and France. She arrived on the eve of the Second World War and recalls that the French public seemed dispirited while the British were already preparing for war with rationing, blackouts, and propaganda campaigns calling for vigilance. The outbreak of war months later did not put an end to her travels. In 1941, she traveled to Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt. In Palestine, she describes a sharp contrast between Muslim-majority Jaffa with its ‘flies and filth’ and nearby Jewish-majority Tel Aviv, which was like ‘a little European city’. While the comparison may seem harsh and, perhaps, Orientalist, it bears considering that her contrasts with Europe were not always intended as praise for the West. When she compared Cairo to Paris, for example, she meant that both had a disconcerting ability to offer high culture side-by-side with abject poverty. While certainly a criticism of a Middle Eastern city, it was hardly unalloyed praise for European ones, with their willingness to tolerate extreme inequalities.²⁸

Whatever admiration Süreyya might have had for European culture, it was not unquestioning. She was particularly disturbed by the illiberal policies of Nazi Germany and the ways in which she saw the regime influencing Turkey. While Turkey ultimately declared war on Germany in 1945, when its defeat was all but certain, İnönü’s government maintained neutrality for much of the war. During the early years of the conflict, when Germany seemed unstoppable, the Nazi regime was an inspiration to many in Turkey’s government and intelligentsia. In 1942, for example, the government implemented a ‘wealth tax’ (varlik vergisi), which was directed at members of Turkey’s minority religious communities. Süreyya represented several clients from these communities. In at least one of her cases, a Jewish client was sent off to a labor camp at Aşkale, where he developed a life-long infirmity. For her efforts in such cases, she found herself mocked by the architect of the tax, Prime Minister Şükrü Saracoğlu, who told her that ‘If the state of Israel is established, you can go there and be prime minister.’²⁹ Looking back on the era, she concluded that, ‘If the Germans had won the war, our Government would likely have done some actions in parallel with Hitler.’³⁰

Whereas German victories encouraged emulation, German defeats from 1944 onwards empowered those in Turkey who favored liberalism, socialism, and communism. People with connections to the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union suddenly found themselves with a political advantage. Süreyya was particularly well-prepared. Unlike her siblings, who had studied in France and Germany, she was able to speak English, which enabled her to establish close relations with political elites in the United Kingdom and United States. In September 1942, for example, she was invited to several events in Ankara with Wendell Willkie, the de-facto leader of the Republican Party in the US. The former presidential candidate was on a goodwill tour of the Middle East and China, partially to avoid political squabbles in the states and partially to tout his brand of liberal internationalism.³¹

Willkie promoted a vision of liberalism in which the state encouraged open markets and free enterprise rather than paternalistically shielding people (or the markets themselves) from foreign competition. It accorded well with the stains of liberal thought that were influential in Western Europe. For example, the German economists William Röpke and Alexander Rüstow (both of whom, as it happens, had taught in Turkey during the 1930s) argued that ‘States had to regulate markets tightly; in particular, they had to break up monopolies and ensure – even, if necessary, engineer – economic competition.’³² This conception of the state as a tool for promoting rather than restricting the individual influenced the vision of liberalism forming in the minds of young elites like Süreyya and Samet.

Formal opposition parties in Turkey began to take shape in 1945. While defenders of the CHP and İnönü argue that a transition to multiparty democracy had been the goal all along, and their critics argue that the regime was forced to reform in the face of popular pressure, the reality is likely more contingent.³³ Sudden demands from the USSR for territorial concessions, coupled with the end of the Second World War and the accompanying rhetoric of human rights encouraged İnönü and his regime to send signals as to which ‘side’ of the emerging postwar order they were on and, thereby, make it more difficult for the US and other countries to ignore Turkey’s calls for assistance. The internal CHP opposition that emerged in the summer of 1945, led by former prime minister Celal Bayar along with Refik Koraltan, Fuat Köprülü, and Adnan Menderes, drew on the language of the UN charter. İnönü reiterated his support for a democratic system on the 1 November opening of parliament, just a day before the US proposed a multilateral discussion of Soviet demands on Turkey, thereby inserting itself into the two countries’ international relations.

Despite their frustrations with the regime, neither Samet nor Süreyya was involved in the initial organizing of the DP, which mainly involved established politicians and Bayar’s allies in the financial sector.³⁴ Since childhood, however, they had been familiar with Bayar and Köprülü. Eager to join the DP organization, Samet wrote to Bayar in late December 1945 and received a favorable response. In the summer of 1946, with the country heading toward early elections – a CHP maneuver to catch the DP off guard – Samet was formally invited to join the party. He accepted and ostentatiously resigned his post in state service (as was required of all candidates save for university professors).³⁵ In an election marred by widespread voter fraud, he was among the DP candidates who failed to win a seat. Without a job, he turned to private law practice and partisan journalism. These incomes were supplemented with a position as a DP party inspector in which he traveled through western Turkey, giving speeches to local organizations. By January 1947, he was elected to the party’s Executive Board.

Süreyya was less eager to join. Though she had frosty relations with President İnönü and positive feelings toward Bayar, she was distrustful of another DP founder, Fuat Köprülü, remembering his role in berating her father at Atatürk’s dinner table. On one occasion in the late 1940s, she recalls running into Menderes and Köprülü. Menderes asked if she thought the DP would win. She said, ‘Yes,’ but then turned to Köprülü and added, ‘But I don’t believe you’ll be a democrat. Your ideas were never democratic.’³⁶ Thus, while her brother threw himself into party politics, she remained aloof and devoted her energies to her legal work and to participation in various ostensibly nonpartisan organizations focused on children’s welfare, women’s rights, and liberalism. Her views and those of the activists with whom she interacted in these years give us a sense of the liberal internationalist world view that had taken root among elites following the Second World War, facilitating Turkey’s transition to democracy.

What Süreyya saw in London

Though not explicitly political, Süreyya’s writings from the 1940s give us some sense of her political views. In late 1945, she traveled to London with her younger brother Abdurrahman, who was visiting on business.³⁷ While there, she made connections with the Foreign Secretary and prominent female lawyers as she considered establishing her own law practice in the city. Upon returning to Turkey, she published Londra’da Gördüklerim (The Things I Saw in London) a small book recounting her travels. The book does not seem intended for a popular audience, but rather a narrow elite. There is frequent name-dropping of dignitaries she encountered and Turkish officials who helped her along the way as well as anecdotes designed to burnish her image as a talented representative of Turkey at its best – perhaps someone whom readers might want to represent their legal interests in London some day in the future! To the extent that the book is intended as a means of impressing readers, it may reveal as much about their political values as it does about Süreyya’s.

A central concern running through the book was that British people knew nothing about Turkey, and that it was the duty of Turks (like her) to make the country known. Again and again, Süreyya encountered people who could not point Turkey out on a map or had the most retrograde assumptions about the country. In particular, she noted that her British interlocuters assumed Turkish women had few rights compared to men. In these interactions and in her speeches and interviews, she declared, ‘In our country, men and women possess completely the same rights in all fields. There is no difference between us. We [both] simply have the rights of citizenship …Kemalism hasn’t just been the savior of the country, it’s been the savior of Turkish womanhood.’³⁸ While her focus on formal legal equality obscures the ongoing inequality experienced by most women in Turkey at the time, these statements to foreign audiences were primarily intended to emphasize Turkey’s accomplishments – especially given the fact that few European countries provided better legal protections and rights to female citizens.

Throughout her account, Süreyya makes note of how few women are present in the upper echelons of British political life. A few members of parliament (in the House of Commons), a few female lawyers (several of whom she met), but not much beyond that. Frequently, she observes that her presence at an event as a woman, let alone a Turkish woman, is notable. Here and in her other writings, Süreyya presents her own accomplishments as achievements for all Turkish women. There is no overt consideration of the possibility that her position as part of Turkey’s ruling elite has given her privileged access to the positions that she claims are available to ‘all’ women in Turkey. And this resistance to considerations of class is clear in her analysis. While she talks of ‘the English’ and ‘Turks’, she does not give much attention to divisions among these groups. In evaluating the accomplishments of the Labour Party in its early months in government, she is particularly impressed that it had sided against striking dock workers, thereby ‘preventing anarchy’.³⁹ When speaking with Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, she declared that she was ‘neither communist nor fascist. I don’t even see a difference between them. The result is the same: an individual’s freedom is taken away.’ Bevin was quick to assure her that he was no communist either and the two moved on to discuss the benefits of a new trade deal between their countries and how she might set up an office in London.⁴⁰

The Foreign Secretary was not the only influential figure she formed connections with during her travels. On multiple occasions, she met with Wyndham Deedes, one of the leading British authorities on Turkey and the post-Ottoman Middle East. As a young man, he had learned Ottoman Turkish, served in the Gallipoli campaign, and helped develop the Palestine mandate as a Jewish homeland. Thereafter, back in England, he had become involved in social work and local politics while also helping the Turkish government establish a People’s House cultural center in London and producing Turkish-language broadcasts for the BBC.⁴¹ During her visit, Süreyya both recorded a radio interview with him and gave a speech titled ‘The Role of the Modern Turkish Woman’ at the People’s House, where she met various other notables.⁴² With Deedes’s help, she also visited poor areas of the city like Poplar. Here, she noted the large number of students and lawyers volunteering in addition to the Citizens Advice Bureau, a non-governmental organization started during the war years with aid from the larger National Council of Social Service, in which Deedes was a leading figure.⁴³ In these and other anecdotes, rather than rejecting a role for the state in assuring social welfare, Süreyya emphasized the efforts of individuals in England as volunteers and the state’s role in protecting the individual.

These examples reflect her preference for a social order in which people were able to able to achieve their full potential, helped perhaps, but not restrained by the state. This balance was a point of intense debate in the UK at the moment of her visit. It was only three months since the Labour government had come to power with a platform promising nationalization of key industries and the creation of a national health care system. In the former case, Süreyya assured readers that the English government was being ‘careful and prudent …continuing to go about business protecting the good of individuals’.⁴⁴ As for the medical system, she visited Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital and concluded that ‘in all assistance efforts, individuals have a share as does the state’.⁴⁵ She made a similar assessment of the juvenile justice system and the wealthy patrons who played leading roles in it. Afterwards, she wondered ruefully ‘which of the rich among us [in Turkey] would take the lead of such an institution’.⁴⁶ Her reflection was part of a larger message running through the book that people in Turkey should take a more active role in their society. Putting her money where her mouth was, the proceeds from her book went to education for indigent children in Turkey.⁴⁷

Her emphasis on private charity rather than state intervention would be repeated when she reported back from her next major trip. In late 1946, she traveled to the US to attend the International Assembly of Women conference. Because of various complications, she arrived too late to participate. Instead, she spent the following two and a half months traveling in the northwestern United States under the sponsorship of the Young Women’s Christian Association and Department of State. (The involvement of the latter organization suggests that the US government had identified her as a member of the Turkish elite worth cultivating.) Upon returning to Turkey, she published an article discussing her trip in the paper Tasvir (Depiction), run by the anti-communist, liberal journalists Ziyad Ebüzziya and Cihad Baban, both of whom would serve as DP parliamentarians.⁴⁸ She emphasized the religiosity of Americans and, as with the UK, their lack of knowledge about places like Turkey. To the extent Americans had any idea about Turkey, it was the image of the harem and chador (çarşaf). Those more informed about Turkey were focused on issues that reflected poorly on Turkey such as the ‘Armenian issue’ and Turkey’s neutrality during the war. From her own perspective, the most distinctive aspect of the US was the ease of middle class living. From vacuum cleaners to dishwashers, ‘everything has been made for the ease of people’. Though she implied this ease made women in the labors of women in Turkey all the more impressive, she emphasized that American women did hard work in other ways: working outside the home, joining various organizations, and remaining active into their sixties. By comparison ‘our high class’ women needed to do more.⁴⁹

She certainly did more. During the late 1940s, she was frequently in the news as she moved back and forth between England and Turkey. Sometimes, it can be difficult to see the line between her self-promotion and national boosterism – or whether she even saw a meaningful distinction. In her book and speeches, she drops the names of the highly placed officials in both the Turkish and British government whom she has met. Moreover, she repeatedly emphasizes that there is a need for Turkish people in London with a strong knowledge of English and commerce. Even during her short visit in 1945, she explains, there were ‘quite a few delegations’ from Turkey, but on account of them lacking the requisite skills, she suspects they were getting unfavorable terms in their deals.⁵⁰ Likewise, in a speech given to the BBC in 1947, she both recounted how she set up her London practice and emphasized the business opportunities available to Turkish merchants in England.⁵¹ Even more explicit was an article in the Kadını Gazetesi (Woman’s Gazette), which reported in January 1948 that Süreyya would be traveling to London to talk with British officials about exporting Turkish cigarettes and that it was also ‘possible that [she] would attend the congress of liberals meeting in Amsterdam’.⁵² The close link between public diplomacy and private interest facilitated the reconsolidation of political and economic order in the postwar era.

Liberals and the ‘transition to democracy’

From 1945–1950, Süreyya spent half of each year working in England, but she remained active in organizations in Turkey.⁵³ One project she became involved in was the Hür Fikirleri Yayma Cemiyeti (Society for the Spread of Free Ideas). Though limited in terms of concrete accomplishments, the society brought together some of the country’s most prominent liberals and champions of multiparty politics. Like Süreyya, they were typically products of the single party state, but frustrated with its limitations. They were reformers of the system, not radical critics. Many of the founders – six of the sixteen – were members of the DP. Yet two formally nonpartisan members stand out: Ahmet Emin Yalman, the owner of Vatan (Homeland) and Ali Fuad Başgil.⁵⁴

Much like Süreyya’s father, Yalman had begun his career as a supporter of the Unionist regime, writing for its publications and teaching at Istanbul University alongside leading ideologues like Ziya Gökalp before becoming a critic of the Kemalist regime, repeatedly prosecuted and banned from publishing.⁵⁵ He was highly supportive of the DP in the late 1940s – even coining the party’s name according to one DP leader.⁵⁶ But Yalman’s support was conditional on the party’s defense of liberal values, especially journalistic freedom and economic liberalism.⁵⁷ Başgil, a professor of constitutional law at Istanbul University since the early 1930s, was less consistent in his liberal stances. Throughout that decade, Başgil had championed state authority. In the words of legal scholar Joachim Parslow, Başgil’s ideas have been taken ‘as the quintessential doctrinal expression of the [CHP]’s most authoritarian tendencies’.⁵⁸ As the political winds shifted, however, so did Başgil.⁵⁹

The Society was announced on 10 October 1947 with the publication of its founding charter in Vatan and an article titled ‘Turkish liberalism [liberalizm] establishes intellectual front’.⁶⁰ According to Süreyya, its early meetings were held in a room paid for ‘out of my pocket’.⁶¹ The Society launched itself with a series of talks at the Eminönü People’s House.⁶² The first, titled ‘Citizen, Freedom, and Assurance’, was by Başgil himself and focused on the need for a freedom tempered by ‘conscious discipline’, founded on a democracy, but also on adherence to the law. It was a limited and constrained conception of freedom that nonetheless rejected the ‘totalitarian systems’ of left and right. What precisely Başgil was arguing for remained vague. According to Yalman’s Vatan, the speech attracted a ‘distinguished group of listeners’ including university and high school educators, students, and ‘men of ideas’.⁶³ Indeed, the Eminönü People’s House was among the single-party regime’s premier cultural institutions since, unlike more provincial branches, it could easily draw on professors from the nearby university.⁶⁴ That the CHP allowed a meeting of its critics suggests that they were not viewed as a threat in late 1947.

Within a year of its foundation, the Society launched a magazine called Hür Fikirler (Free Ideas), which mixed new articles by the organization’s members with translations of articles from foreign publications. In his introductory editorial, Başgil set ‘free ideas’ against authoritarianism, arguing that ‘to develop and persist, tyrannical regimes weed out free ideas. Religious and secular fanaticisms are created among the people.’⁶⁵ Nowhere did he mention the word ‘liberalism’ or ‘liberal’. Neither did Yalman in an article linking the European revolutions of 1848 with Turkey in the year 1948.⁶⁶ Those revolutions, he argued, had been about ‘freedom’ against ‘tyranny, reaction, and foreign occupation’. The ‘seeds sown by 1848’ bore fruit in the ‘individual enterprise system’, lack of ‘corruption’, and ‘social and economic security and peace’ enjoyed in contemporary northern and western Europe.⁶⁷ The notion of freedom and liberty (hürriyet) expressed by both authors was vague. They pointed to people who were ‘lovers of freedom’ in the abstract, but they did not point to a clear program. How the spirit of 1848 led to the contemporary free enterprise system was not elaborated.

Writers for the magazine were also unclear on the role of the state in promoting freedom. Some contributors even seemed to advocate a strong role for the state in economic affairs. The featured article on economic matters (‘Plan or Planlessness in Economics’) was penned by Osman Okyar, a young economist whose father, Fethi, had been leader of the short-lived SCF opposition party. In it, Okyar defended Keynesian economics and argued that its essence was a focus on results: ‘maximum production, stability, and social justice’. Whether there was a formal plan or not, the goal was to provide for people’s ‘individual enterprise and freedoms’.⁶⁸ Again, however, the term liberalism itself went unmentioned. It would not appear until Süreyya’s own contribution, a translation of ‘Liberalism in America’ (Amerika’da Libralizm) by the historian Massimo Salvadori, who argued that many people in America called themselves ‘liberals’ but wanted to increase the role of the state because they did not appreciate the freedoms of the US as much as a newly arrived immigrant like he himself did.⁶⁹

Salvadori was pointing to the confusion in America over the meaning of liberalism, but a review of Hür Fikirler shows that the confusion was present in Turkey as well. A modest degree of central economic planning was championed alongside the cautious words of Salvadori, who seemed to share Süreyya’s concern with infringements on individual freedom. How these competing tendencies should be reconciled was not addressed. The lack of specificity in their program made it easy for politicians, especially in the DP, to speak vaguely and signal to Yalman, Cihad Baban, and other prominent champions of liberalism that they shared a set of values. But such talk did not translate into consistent political commitments. In power, Süreyya’s brother Samet and the other DP leaders did briefly encourage freedom of the press, religion, and commerce. But in each case, there was a catch: DP governments quickly redirected state advertising to pro-DP newspapers; trade imbalances led to new restrictions within three years; and religion remained a concern for leaders, who were seldom as radical in their visions as the voters whose support they sought.

Rather than maintain a united front and press the DP to realize its electoral promises, liberals like those in the Society became divided. Some, like Yalman, turned critical early on, worried by the growing influence of religious activism at the local level. Some, like Başgil, remained supportive of the DP for much of its time in office – and, even after he became critical of the party itself, he remained supportive of the policies it championed, becoming the presidential candidate of its successor, the Justice Party (AP), in 1961. And others, like Osman Okyar, grew increasingly critical of the DP, ultimately breaking with the party and joining the CHP.⁷⁰

Süreyya looked back on the Society’s gradual loss of dynamism with fatalism, lamenting that its initial enthusiasm followed by decline justified the old admonition, ‘start like the Turk, finish like the English’ (meaning that, unlike the British, Turkish people could not remain focused on projects.)⁷¹ Yet her attention had also migrated elsewhere. In 1949, she was busy establishing the Friends of Children Society (Çocuk Dostları Derneği) to help needy kids in Istanbul’s Tophane neighborhood, as well as attending conferences in Los Angeles. The following year included the establishment of a national Soroptimists branch and a University Women organization along with international liberal meetings in Holland and Germany. Through the 1950s, she would continue to play important roles in women’s organizations, the crowning achievement being her efforts to have the International Women’s Organization hold its 1952 congress in Istanbul and her election as its president.⁷²

She would also cease to split her time between Turkey and England, once again making Turkey her primary residence. Though she offers no explanation for this decision, it may be that the opportunities for business and philanthropy increased once her brother’s party was in power.⁷³ Yet, despite being closer to the center of power, personal pettiness still limited her activities. Her criticisms of DP founder Fuat Köprülü meant that, during the five years he served as foreign minister, she was not invited to diplomatic functions. Personal bitterness and factional pettiness had passed through the transition to democracy unscathed.

Conclusion

Turkish liberals in the late 1940s may have supported the DP, but the DP was not a liberal party; at most, liberalism was but one of many ideological currents flowing within it. As this account of Süreyya Ağaoğlu has shown, the liberal movement was full of active, educated, well-connected people, but those connections were not grounded in the broader society. Liberals like Süreyya traveled to conferences in Western Europe and America, and met with like-minded, similarly enthusiastic people, but their ideas were being shared with one another rather than the society at large. The contrast with the elites involved in the British Labour Party is illuminating: despite their positions of power, people like Bevin and Deedes spent a great deal of their energies working with unions, the poor, and other groups. For Süreyya, active as she was, charitable work was a pastime rather than a profession.

In associating themselves with liberalism, Süreyya, Yalman, and other prominent Turkish liberals were aligning themselves with the dominant postwar ideology of the United States rather than that of Western Europe, where socialism and variants of ‘Christian democracy’ were more popular. Yet postwar American liberalism was in a state of flux. A recession in the late 1930s and the experience of the First World War had altered its preoccupations: to be an American liberal was to be an anti-Communist and an advocate of consumption-focused fiscal policies (such as increased government-spending in economic downturns).⁷⁴ Likewise, the liberalism Süreyya championed was less concerned with removing the state than it was with altering the role of the state. Rather than being a constraint, the state should enable people to achieve their full potential. This was her own experience in the sense that she cheered the opportunities that the republican regime had afforded her and decried the many ways in which it had limited her. This was a self-interested form of critique, but it was not selfish: in pushing for admittance to Istanbul University Law School, for example, she had won the opportunity for all women.

Yet selective championing of the state proved to be a dilemma for Turkey’s small community of liberals as the Cold War and efforts at democratization progressed. Despite her influential connections, a liberal like Süreyya was unable to exercise decisive influence over her brother’s political activities – let alone the party leaders to whom he answered! As a result, liberal ideas and rhetoric were frequently ignored in favor of majoritarian, populist appeals and authoritarian policies. At one point in her autobiography, Süreyya recalls visiting her old colleague Ahmet Emin Yalman in the prison hospital where he was being held in 1960, following a conviction for publishing material critical of the DP government. The two discussed how ‘the Turkish Courts could block such events if they wanted’. Yet, aside from complaining about how her brother Samet and the DP were subject to criticism from the CHP (now the country’s main opposition), she never moves beyond abstraction to explain how influential liberals like herself might play a role in achieving such improvements.⁷⁵

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the supportive community at Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies (SUITS), including Paul Levin, Jenny White, and Kimberly Michelle Parke. I would also like to thank several other people who have been supportive in the writing process: Hasan Kayalı, Michael Provence, Charles Silverman, Jenepher Reeves, and Özlem Yılmaz.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In the introduction to their edited volume, Post-Post-Kemalizm: Türkiye Çalışmalarında Yeni Arayışlar [Post-Post-Kemalism: New Investigations in Studies on Turkey] (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2022), İlker Aytürk and Berk Esen have called for increased focus on the years after 1945, inclusion of political actors beyond the early republican elite, and consideration of how parties changed internally and in relation to the electorate (pp.16-17).

2 In recent years, for example, Halide Edib Adivar, once the focus of articles that primarily emphasized her literary work and critique of Mustafa Kemal, has received heavy criticism for her role as administrator of an orphanage in Antoura that imposed Islam and Turkish language on Armenian children whose parents had died in the genocidal relocations and massacres engineered by the Ottoman state. The rapidity with which her depiction has changed can be seen by comparing works by Erdağ Göknar and Elizabeth Thompson (who engages briefly with the issue) with works by Selim Deringil and Hazal Halavut: Thompson, Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp.91–116; Göknar, ‘Turkish-Islamic Feminism Confronts National Patriarchy: Halide Edib’s Divided Self’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies Vol.9, no. 2 (2013), pp.32–57; Deringil, ‘“Your Religion is Worn and Outdated”: Orphans, Orphanages and Halide Edib during the Armenian Genocide: The Case of Antoura’, Varia Vol.19 (2019), pp.33–65; Halavut, ‘Loss, Lament and Lost Witnessing: Halide Edib on “Being a Member of the Party Who Killed” Armenians’, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol.8, no. 2 (2021), pp.313–18.

3 Christine Philliou, Turkey: A Past Against History (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021), p.211.

4 In fact, ‘independence’ had been something of a fiction for quite some time: by 1939, Turkey had become highly dependent on Germany as a trading partner, constricting its freedom of action on the eve of the Second World War (Yayha Sezai Tezel, Cumhuriyet Döneminin İktisadi Tarihi, 1923-1950 [The Republican Era’s Economic History, 1923-1950] (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, (1982) 2015), pp.210–12).

5 Ahmet Ağaoğlu’s colorful life has been the subject of numerous monographs including A. Hollie Shissler, Between Two Worlds: Ahmet Agaoglu and the New Turkey (New York: I.B. Taurus, 2002), which focuses on his ideas of nationalism, and Ozan Özavcı, Intellectual Origins of the Republic: Ahmet Ağaoğlu and the Genealogy of Liberalism in Turkey (Leiden: Brill, 2015), which focuses on his liberalism.

6 When referring to people in a context prior to the 1934 Surname Law, I generally put the last name they would adopt in brackets. The exceptions are those cases where people had already adopted a last name – for example, Ahmet Ağaoğlu, whose name was printed as ‘Ağaoğlu Ahmet Bey’.

7 As Ahmet İnsel explains, the Arabic-derived word hürriyet generally had an abstract sense (‘spiritual freedom’, ‘intellectual freedom’) rather than material one. ‘Free’ market would more likely be expressed using the Persian-derived word serbest. In other words, hürriyet was often a word used by those concerned with state indoctrination rather than those concerned with freeing people from material deprivation or heavy regulations. Berna Turnaoğlu argues that hürriyet was seen by the early 1900s as freedom to act as one wanted, constrained only by laws established by a representative government. In this sense, the term mirrors the ‘liberal’ notion of political authority as contractual and limited (İnsel, ‘Türkiye’de Liberalizm Kavramının Soyçizgisi’ [The Genealogy of the Concept of Liberalism in Turkey], in Tanıl Bora and Murat Gültekingil (eds), Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce 7: Liberalizm [Political Thought in Modern Turkey 7: Liberalism] (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2005), pp.41–42; Turnaoğlu, The Formation of Turkish Republicanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp.126–28).

8 Özavcı, Intellectual Origins of the Republic, pp.185–86.

9 Gülay Sarıçoban, ‘Demokrat Partiden Bir Siyasi Portre: Samet Ağaoğlu’ [A Political Portrait from the Democrat Party: Samet Ağaoğlu], Cumhuriyet Tarihi Araştırmaları Dergisi, Vol.9, no.17 (2013), p.83. In Süreyya’s account of this conversation, she mentions Atatürk’s use of the rather offensive term sığıntı but not the term zat, which is less rude but still rather dismissive to use toward a long-time acquaintance. In her brother Samet’s account, both are used (Süreyya Ağaoğlu, Bir Ömür Böyle Geçti [A Life Passed Like That] (Istanbul: İshak Basımevi, 1975), p. 65; Samet Ağaoğlu, Babamın Arkadaşları [My Father’s Friends] (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, (1956) 1998), p.237).

10 Erik Zürcher argues that Turkey’s founders’ lack of territorial ties to the country was a distinguishing feature of the regime (‘How Europeans Adopted Anatolia and Created a Country’, European Review 13 (July 2005), pp.379–94).

11 Muzaffer Çandır, Manisa Milletvekili: Yazar Samet Ağaoğlu: Hayatı, Sanatı, Eserleri [Manisa Representative: Writer Samet Ağaoğlu: His Life, Art, and Works] (Manisa: Çözüm Ajans, 2013), pp.25–26.

12 Samet Ağaoğlu, ‘Memur Meselesi’, Demokrat İzmir, 16 February 1949, pp.1, 4.

13 Ağaoğlu, Siyasi Günlük: DP’nin Kuruluşu [Political Diary: The DP’s Establishment], ed. Cemil Koçak, 2nd ed. (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1993), pp.28–29. Tezer Taşkıran (née Ağaoğlu) studied philosophy at Istanbul University before marrying a cancer researcher and moving to Germany. She returned to Turkey in the mid-1930s and became a teacher, working her way to the head of the prestigious Ankara Girls School. There, she caught the eye of President İnönü and was added to the candidate list in 1943. She remained in the CHP despite her siblings’ opposition and was reelected in 1946 and 1950. In 1951, however, she withdrew from the CHP and became an independent, accusing her fellow party members of treating her like a ‘spy’ because her brother’s Democrat Party now controlled the government. Gültekin, the youngest of the five siblings, became a pediatrician (Ağaoğlu, Bir Ömür Böyle Geçti, pp.85, 121; Cüneyt Arcayürek, Yeni İktidar Yeni Dönem, 1951-1954 [New Government, New Era, 1951-1954] (Ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi, 1985), p.154; Günseli Naymansoy, Türk Felsefesinin Öncülerinden Tezer Taşkıran [Tezer Taşkıran, from the Trailblazers of Turkish Philosophy] (Ankara: Atatürk Kültür Merkezi, 2013), pp.2–22).

14 Kazım Karabekir, Fethi Okyar, and Hüseyin Cahit Yalçın re-entered parliament after a by-election on 31 December 1939 (Cemil Koçak, Türkiye’de Milli Şef Dönemi, 1938-1945, Cilt 1 [The National Chief Era in Turkey, 1938-1945, Volume 1] (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları 1996), pp.179–80; John Vanderlippe, The Politics of Turkish Democracy: İsmet İnönü and the Formation of the Multi-Party System, 1938-1950 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), pp.34–35).

15 Samet Ağaoğlu, Hayat Bir Macera! Çocukluk ve Gençlik Hatıraları [Life is an Adventure! Memories of Childhood and Youth] (Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2003), p.15. Samet claims that their father desired a male first child.

16 Yaprak Zihniog˘lu, Kadınsız İnkılap: Nezihe Muhiddin, Kadınlar Halk Fırkası, Kadın Birliği [Womanless Revolution: Nezihe Muhiddin, Woman’s People’s Party, Union of Women] (Istanbul: Metis Yayinlar, 2003), pp.59–60.

17 As discussed in footnote 2, Halide Edib would be the administrator of a controversial Armenian orphanage in Lebanon. Nakiye Elgün would also play a role in designing the curriculum for schools in the region (Mustafa Özyürek, ‘Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyete Bir Eg˘itimci: Nakiye Elgün’ [An Educator from the Ottoman Era to the Republic: Nakiye Elgün], Atatürk Dergisi Vol.3, no. 2 [2004], pp.38–41).

18 Ağaoğlu, Bir Ömür Böyle Geçti, p.10; Mustafa Selçuk, ‘Üsküdar'dan Darülfünun'a: Kız Öğrencilerin Eğitimi’ [From Üsküdar to the Darülfünun: The Education of Girl Students], Tarih Dergisi, Vol.48 (2008), pp.65–83.

19 Ağaoğlu, Hayat Bir Macera, p.96.

20 Foreign Office, British National Archives (TNA) (hereafter FO) 424 287 (1947), p.60. Among many criticisms, the 1947 British report on Süreyya also emphasized that ‘she veers from a liberal view of racial problems to acute racism’ – which is likely a reference to Turkish chauvinism. By 1949, the assessment had moderated, and the report stated that she had ‘not lately shown signs of the violent nationalism’ previously mentioned. However, it added that she was ‘a mischievous tale-bearer’ who ‘should be treated with caution as she is said to work for the Turkish Secret Police’ (FO 424 289 [1949], p.20).

21 Ağaoğlu, Hayat Bir Macera, p.78; Bilge Criss, İşgal Altında İstanbul 1918-1923 [Istanbul Under Occupation, 1918-1923] (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1994), p.92.

22 Ağaoğlu, Bir Ömür Böyle Geçti, pp.22–3. Her classmates were Bedia Onar (whose husband Siddik Sami Onar was already an assistant at the law school); Melahat Ruacan (née Senger), who would go on to become the first female judge in Turkey’s highest court of appeal (Yargıtay); and a peer referred to only as ‘Saime’.

23 Ağaoğlu, Bir Ömür Böyle Geçti, pp.38–42. For a discussion of Mahmut Esat Bozkurt, see Hans-Lukas Kieser, ‘An Ethno-Nationalist Revolutionary and Theorist of Kemalism: Dr Mahmut Esat Bozkurt, 1892-1943’, in Hans-Lukas Kieser (ed.), Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Toward Post-Nationalist Identities (New York: I.B. Taurus, 2005), pp.20–27.

24 Ağaoğlu, Bir Ömür Böyle Geçti, pp.51–55, 66; Adil Giray Çelik, Osmanlı Darülfünun Mekteb-i Hukuk'da İlk Çiçek Süreyya Ağaoğlu [The Ottoman Darülfünun School of Law’s First Flower: Süreyya Ağaoğlu] (Ankara: Türkiye Barolar Birliği, 2018), p.180. [Adrien?] Billioti represented many foreign firms operating in Turkey, but since he was not a Turkish citizen, he needed lawyers like Süreyya to represent him in court. It is unclear from Süreyya’s explanation (‘Türk vatandaşı olmadığı’) whether he was barred from legal practice because he was not a citizen of Turkey or because he was not a ‘Turkish’ citizen. Since the founding of the republic, a series of laws had been passed to make it difficult for non-Muslims to work as lawyers. A 1924 law removing hundreds of lawyers who had cooperated with the occupation in 1920-1922 disproportionately affected non-Muslim lawyers. A 1926 law requiring would-be lawyers to serve two years as an employee of the courts, in combination with a 1924 that limited government employment to Muslims, effectively denied non-Muslims a means of joining bar associations (Ahmet Yıldız, Ne Mutlu Türküm Diyebilene: Turk Ulusal Kimliginin Etno-sekuler Sinirlari, 1919-1938 [How Happy Is One Who Can Say ‘I Am a Turk’: The Ethno-Secular Limits of Turkish National Identity] (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2001), p. 282; Murat Koraltürk, Erken Cumhuriyet Döneminde Ekonominin Türkleştirilmesi [The Turkification of the Economy in the Early Republican Era] (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2011), p.206).

25 Özavcı, Intellectual Origins of the Republic, p.158.

26 Ağaoğlu, Bir Ömür Böyle Geçti, p.70.

27 ‘Vefat’, Milliyet, 22 October 1957, p.2.

28 Ağaoğlu, Bir Ömür Böyle Geçti, pp.85–87.

29 Ibid., p.83. As Süreyya recalls, she told the prime minister that, ‘Maybe I’ll be prime minister [of Israel], but I can’t even make you the head secretary; I have no tolerance for injustice.’

30 Ibid., p.84.

31 Ibid., pp.84–90. David Levering Lewis, The Improbable Wendell Willkie (New York: Liveright, 2018), pp.225–65.

32 Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p.153.

33 Early accounts of the transition to democracy presents it as the result of CHP policy. In the words of Bernard Lewis, ‘the electoral defeat of the People's Party was its greatest achievement.’ İnönü’s role is emphasized in the work of his son-in-law, Metin Toker. These works contrast with more recent explanations by authors such as M. Asım Karaömerlioğlu, who emphasizes bottom-up pressure (Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (2nd ed, Oxford: Oxford University Press, (1961) 1968), p.303; Metin Toker, Tek Partiden Çok Partiye, 1944 -1950: Demokrasimizin İsmet Paşa'lı Yılları [From One Party to Many Parties, 1944-1950: Our Democracy’s İsmet Paşa Years] (3rd ed, Istanbul: Bilgi Yayınevi, (1970) 1990); M. Asım Karaömerlioğlu, ‘Turkey’s ‘Return’ to Multi-party Politics: A Social Interpretation’, Eastern European Quarterly 40 (2006), pp.89–107).

34 Cemil Koçak points to the role of former Business Bank officials like Yusuf Ziya Öniş in organizing the party in 1946. Öniş had been the general director DenizBank when Bayar was prime minister (1938-39), but he had been removed once Bayar lost power (Koçak, İktidar ve Demokratlar: Türkiye’de İki Partili Siyasi Sistemin Kuruluş Yılları, 1945-1950, Cilt 2 [Government and Democrats: The Two-Party Political System’s Founding Years in Turkey] (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2012), pp.132–33).

35 Ağaoğlu publicly explained his decision to resign and run as a DP candidate by publishing an announcement in the pro-DP paper Vatan on 1 July 1946 (Ağaoğlu, Siyasi Günlük, p.36).

36 Ağaoğlu, Bir Ömür Böyle Geçti, p.102.

37 Abdurrahman was the third eldest of the Ağaoğlu siblings and the first boy; as such, he played an outsize role in the internal politics of the family. He attended Galatasaray Lycée before traveling abroad to study electrical engineering at the University of Grenoble. Returning home, he worked briefly for the Istanbul Electrical Corporation before going into private business. By the late 1940s, he was representing Siemens and its Turkish partner firm, Koç (Ağaoğlu, Hayat Bir Macera, pp.16–17, 35).

38 Ağaoğlu, Londra’da Gördüklerim [The Things I Saw in London] (Istanbul: İsmail Akgün Matbaası, 1946), pp.34–35. At least in front of foreign audiences, she continued to present the situation in Turkey as one of pure legal equality. In a speech given in the early 1950s, ‘Today in Turkey women enjoy all rights …Their sex is not a handicap for Turkish women. Today a woman has complete freedom of action.’ (‘Role of the Modern Woman in Turkey’, Kadın Eserleri Kütüphanesi ve Bilgi Merkezi Vakfı [The Women’s Library and Information Centre Foundation] (hereafter KEKBMV) Archives).

39 Ağaoğlu, Londra’da Gördüklerim, p.14.

40 Ağaoğlu, Londra’da Gördüklerim, p.37.

41 H. M. Burton, ‘Opening of a Turkish “Halkevi” (people's house) in London’, Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, Vol.29, no. 2, pp.141–42; Ilgın Aktener and Neslihan Kansu-Yetkiner, ‘Sir Wyndham Henry Deedes: A Portrait of the Translator as a Cultural Ambassador’, Folia linguistica et litteraria /Journal of Language and Literary Studies, Vol.40 (2022), pp.193–95.

42 ‘Süreyya Ağaoğlu …’, Cumhuriyet, 17 October 1945, p.5; Ağaoğlu, Londra’da Gördüklerim, p.17. Süreyya mentions meeting Howard Kelly, a retired British admiral who had advised Greece during Turkey’s War of Independence and served as the UK naval representative to Turkey during the Second World War, and Lady Glenconner (Pamela Winefred Paget), whose family controlled large mining and chemical firms and whose mother, Muriel, had been active in humanitarian work.

43 Ağaoğlu, Londra’da Gördüklerim, pp.31–32; Oliver Blaiklock, ‘Advising the citizen Citizens Advice Bureaux: Voluntarism and the Welfare State in England, 1938-1964’ (PhD thesis, Kings College London, 2013), pp.33–34.

44 Ağaoğlu, Londra’da Gördüklerim, p.22.

45 Ibid., p.26.

46 Ibid., p.28.

47 Ibid., p.28.

48 Pelin Helvacı describes Baban as a ‘conservative liberal’, which seems accurate considering his nationalism and hostility to socialism (‘Gazeteci ve siyasetçi kimliğiyle Cihat Baban, 1911-1984’ [Cihat Baban, His Identity as a Journalist and Politician] (PhD thesis, Galatasaray University, Istanbul, 2021), p.91).

49 Süreyya Ağaoğlu, ‘Türk Kadını Amerikada’, Tasvir, 5 February 1947, 3 (from KEKBMV Archives).

50 Ağaoğlu, Londra’da Gördüklerim, p.40.

51 ‘Türkiye İngilizlere …’, Kadını Gazetesi, 19 April 1947.

52 ‘Süreyya Ağaoğlu …’, Kadını Gazetesi, 26 January 1948. Whether Süreyya attended the Amsterdam conference is not clear from my research. About six weeks after this news report, however, she did pen an article for the gazette in which she described London and complained, ‘documents are necessary for everything. For everything, you need to wait’ (‘Bugünku Londra …’, Kadını Gazetesi, 8 March 1948, pp.1, 6).

53 The firm Süreyya worked at in London, Edwards & Edwards, represented the Ottoman Bank (Ağaoğlu, Bir Ömür Böyle Geçti, p.94).

54 In addition to Ağaoğlu, Başgil, and Yalman, founding members included Burhan Apaydın (a lawyer close to the DP); Enver Adakan (a former CHP representative from Balıkesir who would later return to parliament as a DP representative), Muvaffak Benderli (a lawyer and professor), Mehmet Ali Sebük (a lawyer and later a DP representative), Nihat Reşat Belger (a veteran of the Independence War, doctor, and later DP representative), Osman Fethi Okyar (an economist), Rauf Ahmet Hotinli (a journalist and former CHP representative), Raif Necdet Meto (a journalist and press officer for the DP), Selim Ragıp Emeç (the owner of the newspaper Son Posta and later a DP representative), Şinasi Hakkı Erel (a professor and former naval officer who had served previously in parliament), Tevfik Remzi Kazancıgil (a professor and medical doctor), Ziyaeddin Fahri Fındıkoğlu (a sociology professor), and Yavuz Görey (a sculptor) (Ahmet Emin Yalman, Yakın Tarihte Gördüklerim ve Geçirdiklerim 2 [Things That I Saw and Experienced in Recent History, Volume 2] (Istanbul: Pera Turizm, 1997), p.1410; Hüseyin Sadoğlu, ‘Hür Fikirleri Yayma Cemiyeti’ [Society for the Spread of Free Ideas], in Tanıl Bora and Murat Gültekingil (eds), Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce 7: Liberalizm (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2005), pp.307–08).

55 Aliyar Demirci, ‘Ahmet Emin Yalman’, in Tanıl Bora and Murat Gültekingil (eds), Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce 7: Liberalizm (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2005), pp.473–79.

56 Mükkerem Sarol, Bilinmeyen Menderes, Cilt 1 [The Unknown Menderes, Volume 1] (Istanbul: İnkılap, 2014), p.164.

57 In addition to running the newspaper Vatan, Yalman was also involved with his family-business, Tatko, which was the distributor in Turkey for Goodyear tires, Dodge automobiles, and Caterpillar tractors.

58 Joakim Parslow, ‘Jurists of War and Peace: Sıddık Sami Onar (1898-1972) and Ali Fuat Başgil (1893-1967) on Law and Prerogative in Turkey’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol.50 (2018), p.51.

59 Aliyar Demirci, ‘Ali Fuat Başgil’, in Tanıl Bora and Murat Gültekingil (eds), Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce 7: Liberalizm (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2005), pp.283–90.

60 ‘Türk liberalizimi …’, Vatan, 2 October 1947, pp.1, 4.

61 Ağaoğlu, Bir Ömür Böyle Geçti, p.95.

62 Five days later, the Society organized a second talk featuring Alfred Newell, a professor of international relations, titled ‘Our Era is an Era of Thinking Broadly’. Though living in London by 1947, Newell had taught for many years at Robert College in Istanbul (‘Prof. Ali Fuad…’, Vatan, 28 November 1947, pp.1, 5; ‘Küçük Haber,’ Cumhuriyet, 3 December 1947, p.2; ‘Obituary…’, The Times [London], 20 February 1976, p.16).

63 ‘Prof. Ali Fuad…’, Vatan, 28 November 1947, pp.1, 5.

64 Mahmut Kocaağa, ‘Eminönü Halkevi ve Faaliyetleri, 1935-1951’ [The Eminönü People’s House and Its Activities] (Master’s thesis, İstanbul Üniversitesi, 2015), p.34.

65 Ali Fuat Başgil, ‘Başlarken’, Hür Fikirler (November 1948), p.3.

66 Yalman was an active member of avowedly ‘liberal’ international organizations. In December 1946, for example, Süreyya’s acquaintance Peter [Derwent?] wrote to her from England to see if she would ask Yalman about attending the World Liberal Union in Oxford in April 1947. Promoted as an alternative to the Communist International, the organization backed American aid to Turkey and Greece (Dervent to Ağaoğlu, 12 December 1946, A.14.6 21 21 (from KEKBMV Archives); ‘24 Nations’ Liberals …’, The New York Times, 12 April 1947, 8; Yalman, Yakın Tarihte, pp.1397–1400).

67 Ahmet Emin Yalman, ‘1848-1948’, Hür Fikirler (November 1948), p.14.

68 Osman Fethi Okyar, ‘İktisatta Plan Veya Plansızlık’, Hür Fikirler (November 1948), p.28.

69 Massimo Salvadori, ‘Birleşik Amerikada Liberalizm’, Hür Fikirler (November 1948), pp.32–35.

70 Osman Okyar was a candidate on the CHP’s Istanbul list in the 1957 election but was not elected (‘C.H.P. nin Istanbul …’, Milliyet, 5 October 1957, p.1).

71 Ağaoğlu, Bir Ömür Böyle Geçti, p.95.

72 ‘Kadın hukukçular …’, Cumhuriyet, 11 July 1952, 1, 5; Ağaoğlu, Bir Ömür Böyle Geçti, 102, pp.113–14.

73 The archives in Turkey contain at least one document showing Süreyya, Samet, and their siblings buying a chrome mine in Manisa, the province which Samet represented in parliament, and on at least one occasion, British officials mention her calling them with a business proposition (Başbakanlık Cumhuriyet Arşivi [Prime Minister’s Republican Archive] [BCA] 030.18.01.02 134 97 18; C.B.B. Heathcote Smith to D. M. O’Brien, 5 June 1957, FO 371/130202).

74 Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), pp.265–71; Jennifer Delton, Rethinking the 1950s: How Anticommunism and the Cold War Made America Liberal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp.1–12.

75 ‘Dört gazeteci …’, Cumhuriyet, 5 July 1959, pp.1, 5; ‘72 yaşındakı …’, Cumhuriyet, 8 March 1960, pp.1, 5; Ağaoğlu, Bir Ömür Böyle Geçti, p.130. Yalman’s offense consisted of publishing translations of English-language articles by Eugene Pulliam, the publisher of The Indianapolis Star, and his wife, who both visited Turkey in 1958 and subsequently wrote articles titled ‘Vain “Dictator” Bankrupts Turkey: U.S.-Aided Ally Slips Back into “Sick Man” Role’ and ‘Turkey Premier Wastes Funds to Build Power’ (The Indianapolis Star, 1 and 2 October 1958).