The Lost Boys

by Gina Perry

  It was the period of the final dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of nationalisms within the disintegrating empire. The rise of Turkish nationalism, which fascinated me as it did all other youngsters of my generation, resulted in the new Turkish Republic, born against great odds, against obstacles created by colonial powers …

  I was profoundly affected as a young boy when I witnessed the serious business of transaction between human groups. It influenced me deeply to see each group with a selfless degree of comradeship within its bounds and a correspondingly intense degree of animosity, destructiveness and vindictiveness toward the detested outgroup — their behavior characterized by compassion and prejudice, heights of self-sacrifice, and bestial destructiveness. At that early age I decided to devote my life to understanding and studying the causes of these things.

  How strange that he finally broke his silence about his past in a textbook. I have been struck each time I read this passage by what it doesn’t say as well as by its abstract language. Sherif positions his boyhood self as an observer and a witness, rather than as a participant. There’s no hint of exactly which groups of compassionate-one-minute, brutal-the-next people he was referring to, let alone to which of them he belonged. By using abstract language and avoiding detail, he has reduced the turmoil and trauma of war to an abstract and intellectual problem — one he would ‘devote his life’ to studying.

  Given he was revealing this information in an academic book, the fact that he didn’t dwell on the personal and merely related the facts of his experience in a clinical, impartial manner is hardly surprising. It was the norm for social scientists writing in that context at the time. But it made me wonder why he mentioned his background at all, particularly at this time in his career. Perhaps he thought connecting the research more explicitly to his life would be more appealing to readers? Yet it seemed odd to me that someone who prided himself on his objective science, and especially someone so reluctant to discuss the past with his family and friends, would include it in a book. And even though Sherif frames it as part of the story of his ‘intellectual development’, what he describes is in fact profound personal history. Why was it that he wanted these formative personal experiences on the public record, that he wanted it known that he had a reason for his research that went beyond the professional? I had the feeling that he was both revealing and hiding himself in this account of his past.

  On the walls of the Izmir Atatürk Museum, photographs attest to the transformation of what were presented as the primitive and backward ways of the Ottoman Empire to the modern and westernised Republic of Turkey. Workers toiling in fields or riding donkeys dissolved into images of machines pumping in factories and groups of young women doing calisthenics and jumping jacks.

  In one glass case, Atatürk’s elegant kid gloves, golfing cap, and highly polished spats are on display, as a celebration of his sophistication. But the display is more than a tribute to his taste; his European clothing was a symbol and a powerful message to the citizens of the new Republic. There is a photo of him parading down a village street in a pale linen suit wearing a panama hat, swinging a cane, while on the other side of the street, going in the opposite direction, an old man dressed in a traditional long robe, wearing a turban and full white beard, gapes as Mustafa Kemal, as he was then known, strides by. I guessed it was taken during his 1925 trip to Kastamonu, in northern Turkey, as part of his campaign against the fez. It was famed as a conservative town, where the idea of adopting Western headgear was akin to a betrayal of religion. In his book about the outlawing of the fez, author Jeremy Seal wrote how during Kemal’s brief stay in the small town, the national hero kept returning to his rooms to change outfits, and used the streets as a ‘catwalk where he previewed a radical show called the twentieth century’.

  With the breaking up of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal’s government began homogenising the previously multiethnic, multireligious, and otherwise diverse groups of people who had comprised Ottoman subjects. Citizens of Turkey needed a new identity, something that would cement the disparate groups now living in the region — many of them people with Turkish origins repatriated from other parts of the Empire such as Greece — into a whole. They had to learn what it meant to be Turkish.

  Intent on banishing the Ottoman past and what the new government saw as its obsolete and reactionary values, Kemal embarked on a series of radical social reforms to forge a new national identity, making citizenship of the Republic the bond that would unite citizens. The people would embrace the term ‘Turk’, with its pejorative connotations from Imperial times, and use it as a term of pride. In the secular Turkish Republic, people would dress the same; read, write, and speak the same language; and behave in ways that distanced them from what the revolutionaries saw as the backward and superstitious ways of the Ottoman Empire. But for many, whose lives had been governed by tradition and God, the new Republic identity involved difficult moral choices. For some citizens, for example, abandoning the fez in favour of western headgear was a form of apostasy. But resistance or criticism of the new reforms were dealt with by force and sometimes violence. Those who continued to wear the fez were arrested and jailed, and some were hung.

  It was the job of young nationalist intellectuals such as Muzafer Sherif and others like him to help bring about acceptance of the changes that came with the new Republic using not force or violence, but the latest science. And for that, he would have to travel to America.

  On every street corner, at busy intersections or on quiet streets, Atatürk’s face stared down from banners and flags. The wind flapped the flags bearing his face in a strange kind of game of now-you-see-him-now-you-don’t. Sometimes he was depicted wearing a black wool hat, wider at the top than at the bottom, and a military uniform; in others, he looked suave in tails and a wing collar — Ottoman officer and military man one minute, suave westerner the next. Perhaps it was my growing discomfort at being here in a kind of disguise myself, but I felt as if those blue eyes were watching me wherever I went.

  I had come to Turkey looking for the personal origins — if that was not too strong a term — of Sherif’s tribal war and peace research, and I was attuned to these echoes of history. The more I read about the events that led to the founding of the Republic of Turkey, and particularly those around Ödemiş and Smyrna, the more I could see the notions of friendship and betrayal, the dissolving of group loyalties, and the forming of new alliances and identities as central themes in the country’s history at this time. But how did this history intersect with Sherif? How was his own sense of selfhood altered and reformed during this time? Did members of his family share his nationalist zeal and embrace the change, or did they resist it? And how did he feel about it?

  I realised, as I was preparing to leave Izmir, where the city of Smyrna seemed little more than a place of my imagining, that I would never really know how events might have shaped Sherif — all I had were documents and glancing accounts, inferences and hints. Perhaps the idea of a thread from past to present is fanciful, as if you can ever really plumb history, or the people who dwelt in it. Who knows. Even if I had more to go on, an autobiography perhaps or a cache of letters, who is to say he was any more of a reliable narrator of the past than I have been?

  But now I was too far into the story of Sherif and the lost boys to abandon it. I was heading to America and as I watched Turkey dwindling below me out of the plane window I began to think that America may provide more of a clue — or at least, a conclusion to the narrative I was pursuing.

  12

  America and Back

  When he arrived at Harvard in 1929, Muzafer Sherif knew little about the university, except that one of his heroes, psychologist William James, had studied there. Harvard was exclusive, wealthy, upper class and, having been at the forefront of the eugenics movement, it had until relatively recently been teaching its students the science of racial superiority.

  Sherif’s expecta
tions of America would have been shaped by the films he saw in Istanbul’s movie houses — glamorous women, sophisticated nightclubs, limousines, jazz. But a month after he started classes in September 1929, the stock market crashed and he articulated into a very different world.

  Muzafer Sherif’s Harvard teachers and classmates noted that he had strong opinions and thought nothing of sharing them. He probably inherited this trait from his father, who was known for his single-mindedness. Serif Effendi started life as an illiterate farm boy, but taught himself to read and write as an adult and transformed himself into a landholder and then a successful businessman. He was an intelligent man used to getting his way. Sue Sherif told me that while he ruled over his family with an iron fist, he also provided all his children, including his daughter, with a university education and supported them financially in their studies overseas, even after it became clear that none of them were going to obey his wishes to become medical doctors, a highly prestigious occupation in Turkey at the time.

  The fact of his children’s university education in what was an agricultural community was extraordinary, and even today makes the family a local legend. Muzafer Sherif’s daughters found that at their grandparents’ gravesite at Birgi, a small town near Ödemiş, coloured strips of cloth fluttered on the fence, tied there by pregnant women so their prayers for children as well educated as Serif Effendi’s would be answered. With the weight of his family’s and his country’s expectations on him, it wasn’t surprising that Muzafer Sherif demanded a great deal from himself.

  But I wondered if this perception of Sherif at Harvard as blunt and outspoken could also have been a clash of cultures. Listening to recordings of him, Sherif’s heavy accent and emphatic way of speaking, even when it was about something light-hearted, often made him sound more forceful than perhaps he was.

  Sherif arrived in the United States unnoticed by immigration authorities. According to his daughter Sue, he boarded a freighter in Egypt that travelled via the Canary Islands and through the Caribbean. For reasons the freighter’s captain didn’t explain, he bypassed officialdom and sailed past New York, stopping instead at Providence, Rhode Island, where all the passengers disembarked. It was 9 August 1929, and he had just turned twenty-four.

  He might not have had much money, and his arrival in America was unobtrusive, but Muzafer Sherif made up for it with his conviction that he was destined for great things. He was a privileged, well-educated young man, already marked out as a future candidate for his country’s intellectual elite. In his years at college in Smyrna and then at university in Istanbul, his teachers saw great promise in him, wrote him glowing recommendations to American diplomats in Turkey, and used their influence and connections to get him a Harvard scholarship.

  But after he left for Harvard, the letters I’ve read that crisscrossed the ocean between his supporters in Turkey and his mentors in America hinted at problems of ‘temperament’, as if he needed careful handling. From what I could gather, in America Sherif experienced intense emotional highs and lows, alternating between soaring ambition and crushing self-doubt.

  On the face of it, when he arrived at Harvard in 1929, Sherif fitted in. Photos of him taken in Cambridge at the time show him looking handsome in his suit, tie, and crisp white shirt, his black hair brushed back from his high forehead. He was self-assured, and quickly made friends with fellow student Hadley Cantril, who had powerful connections: at Dartmouth, Cantril had shared a room with Nelson Rockefeller. Over 6 feet tall, Cantril — who had abandoned his first name, Albert, for his more distinguished-sounding middle name — was, with his intense blue eyes, good-looking, charming, and ‘pathologically ambitious’.

  But despite looking and acting the part of a Harvard student, Sherif felt as though he didn’t belong in the rather snobbish and exclusive club that was the university. He sensed that some students and faculty looked down on him and felt he had to work hard to be taken seriously by ‘blue bloods’, whom he said had a hard time believing that ‘a Turk could read or write’.

  Certainly public opinion in America at the time was anti-Turk. The animosity had been fed by reports from missionaries in the American press of the forced marches into the desert and slaughter of Armenians. While the attitudes of American diplomats and government officials towards Turkey shifted dramatically in light of Mustafa Kemal’s zeal to ‘civilise’ the country, the press and the American public took decades longer to change. In the American imagination, Turks were often brutal savages who enjoyed killing, rape, and torture. A few years before Sherif arrived at Harvard, Turkish journalist Ahmet Emin Yalman wrote about how he and a friend travelled to Maine on holiday from New York and locals, who heard that Turks were coming, installed new locks on their doors and reinforced security at the local jail.

  One of Sherif’s mentors — Beryl Parker, an American academic in Turkey — wrote that whether the racism Sherif said he experienced was real or imagined, it had a powerful effect on him. Sherif arrived at Harvard expecting to take what he saw as his rightful place in a pantheon of the great in the field of psychology, but he was also sensitive about what he saw as his shortcomings — including his lack of background in maths and science. Yet instead of feeling embraced and welcomed, and encouraged to fill any gaps in his knowledge, he felt he had to fight to be taken seriously. Luckily, Sherif’s key mentor at Harvard, Gordon Allport, had taught in Constantinople, and he sensed that under Sherif’s arrogant exterior he was anxious about his ability to perform. In a letter to Sherif’s former university teacher in Istanbul, Allport wrote, ‘He is … inclined to work too hard, and to be too serious’. He had an ‘emotional temperament that led him occasionally to feel discouraged. He feels that he is not doing enough to justify your confidence in him. In my judgement, however, he is diligent and conscientious, making the most of his opportunities, and should in time prove that your confidence and favors were well placed.’

  But Sherif’s habit of following his interest and reading across a wide range of disciplines also brought him in conflict with some teachers, who felt that he should be focusing more exclusively on the discipline of psychological science. Sherif’s interest was already in a wide-ranging sociological brand of psychology that could be used in the service of nation-building and educational reform. What he got was an irritatingly narrow physiology- and laboratory-based science course that often involved experimenting on rats. Dismayed by the form of social psychology he found at Harvard, with its ‘fragmentary and piecemeal state’ and ‘lack of perspective’, he began casting around for an alternative framework for understanding human social behaviour. When he came across the work of German-Jewish Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin, with his interest in an individual’s interaction with their culture and context, it was as though a window had been opened on a stuffy room: ‘Lewin’s work appeared at that time like a fresh breeze,’ he wrote.

  As soon as he had finished his master’s degree in 1932, Sherif set out to return to Turkey, but on the boat he made a sudden decision to commit himself to studying Gestalt psychology and disembarked to travel to Berlin. There he could learn the German that would unlock so much of the psychological literature, as well as attend classes by Wolfgang Köhler, one of the founders of the Gestalt movement at the University of Berlin.

  He arrived in Germany broke. At Harvard, he’d had to borrow living expenses because he had spent his annual allowance — over $400 — on books, and he left debts behind. Still, he wrote to Allport, asking him for a loan to fund six months of study in Germany. ‘I think you want to help me wherever I may be,’ Sherif wrote. ‘And I hope your interest in me will continue forever.’ After Germany, he would return to Turkey, work on a PhD thesis, and then return to Harvard in a year or two and submit it, he told Allport. He would develop a new kind of social psychology: ‘Sometimes it seems to me that it will be at least as good as any existing system in social psychology. Would you say that was an assertion of a person with stupid megalomania?
’ Then, with Allport’s help, he planned to publish this work: ‘It is a nice dream in me to have a Turkish name in social psychology. Please do not think that this is the only value for me. Social psychology deeply fascinates me because I intensely love and hate man as I intensely love and hate myself.’ Exactly what he loved and hated about himself and his fellow man, he didn’t say.

  Germany had long been the training ground for Turkish academics, teachers, and military officers, and soon after he arrived he found a community of Turkish students in Berlin. He boarded with a ‘Hitlerist’ (before it was known what the extent of that term would come to mean) family, practising his German around the dinner table in the evenings, and attending classes by leading Gestaltists at the university. With no money, he wandered the streets looking for free events and gatherings, and was fascinated by the political rallies with massive crowds roaring their approval of their new chancellor, Adolf Hitler: ‘Ten days ago I went to see Hitler at the Lustgarten. There were around 100,000 men and women, a real mass meeting. Believe me, sir, my stay here is worth all the suffering I am enduring,’ he wrote to Allport. He must have wondered, as he sat at the dinner table in Berlin and his landlady served him an extra helping, how the same kindly woman could stand in a crowded square and shout her support for the hateful words of Adolf Hitler.

  It’s a sign of Sherif’s charm and Allport’s belief in him that Allport did continue to support him, sending him money and working hard behind the scenes to raise funds over the next eighteen months for Sherif’s return.