by Gina Perry
But between 1941 and 1943, with a German victory looking likely, the government increased their efforts to demonstrate they were pro-German. Turanists who had adopted Nazi ideology called on the government to crack down on anti-fascist left-wing intellectuals and writers. In 1943, when Sherif published Race Psychology (Irk Psikolojisi), a book of essays based on the lectures of Canadian psychologist Otto Klineberg that debunked the idea of racial inferiority, antagonism between the right and left in Turkey was intense.
Government foreign policy shifted again in 1943 towards Britain, France, and Russia, with the defeat at Stalingrad. It became clear Germany was losing the war.
In a biography of Niyazi Berkes, a fellow student of Sherif’s in Istanbul and by this point colleague and fellow left-wing professor at Ankara, the author şakir Dinçşahin suggests that the personal friction between Berkes and Sherif sprang from Sherif’s early politics and his former enthusiasm for the racist ideology he now so bitterly opposed. He wrote that Sherif ‘had been under the influence of the ultranationalist ideologies when he was an undergraduate student … but changed his politics in the course of his graduate studies at Columbia University and became a leftist intellectual’.
I hadn’t come across the suggestion before, and it made me pause. Was Sherif’s opposition to racism in the 1940s a case of the zealotry of a new convert, or was it motivated by something deeper? I wondered if his interest in the power of groups to shape individual attitudes and judgements sprang from his own experience embracing attitudes and ideologies he later regretted? Was the Robbers Cave experiment an attempt to understand how he himself had been swayed by a group to do or say things he was ashamed of? Or, alternatively, was he using his own research to show how he had discarded his own beliefs in racist ideology, applying science to himself? That seemed gutsy to me if so.
He certainly sounded unusually provocative in his views. Even his left-wing friends felt Sherif’s goading went too far. During a railway tour of Anatolia to promote Ankara University in 1944, a prominent military veteran held forth to a crowd on the superiority of the Turkish race. In Turkey, the military enjoyed a privileged place in society particularly for their role in the War of Independence, and public criticism of them was taboo. As proof of the superiority and longevity of the Turkish race, the veteran told a crowd that the pastirma for which Kayseri Province was famed had been brought there in ancient times by the warrior tribes of Central Asia, the forebears of modern Turks. Sherif heckled him: ‘The people of Kayseri will erect a statue of you,’ he said mockingly. ‘They’ll make it from pastirma.’ Insulting a military officer in such a public way seemed particularly dangerous. Police later questioned Sherif, but no charges were laid.
Meanwhile, Sherif continued his attacks in a leading left-wing magazine, calling for the redistribution of wealth and power in Turkey and antagonising the old-guard ruling class — which included landowners, educators, government officials, and even members of his own family. Many of these individuals ‘hated and feared’ him, Carroll Pratt, an American faculty member who worked at Ankara University soon after Sherif, later recalled. The intellectual elite in Turkey was small, and such public criticism was hard to ignore. Sherif made many enemies among the influential in Turkey, and he would find that some held grudges against him for years afterwards.
After the tide of war began to turn against Germany in 1943, Marxist scholars, of which Sherif was considered one, became a target of attack by members of the far right. Prominent pan-Turkists accused the government of protecting communists and described a number of professors at the university as ‘traitors to the fatherland’. On 12 February 1944, after a student at the military academy was caught with Communist Party propaganda, the government instigated an immediate crackdown and began a mass arrest of prominent leftist intellectuals.
Despite being tipped off that his arrest was likely, Sherif seemed to think he was indomitable. Unlike his friends, he made no attempt to hide and, according to his daughter Sue, was surprised when he was arrested as he waited at a bus stop one morning on his way to the university. It’s hard to imagine how he carried this sense of immunity given the political atmosphere at the time: how he thought his independent and outspoken views would be tolerated.
Sherif was accused of promoting Bolshevism and having inappropriate relationships with female students at the university — whether this latter charge was concocted or had some basis in fact it’s impossible to tell. One of Sherif’s Oklahoma students recounted how Sherif had told them he had been victimised for stepping in to protect a female graduate student who was going to be dropped from the university’s graduate program ‘for no other reason than being a Jew’. And that Sherif, it was said, ‘warned the other professors that if they failed her he would fail all their other students’. But unlike his friends and colleagues who were taken to jail, tortured, and forced to stand trial, he was released after four weeks of detention in a former school. It was his powerful connections that saved him: his brother was a prominent member and supporter of the ruling Republican People’s Party and a close friend of the prime minister, who also came from Ödemiş. Sherif had a private meeting with the prime minister, who promised to keep him from trial if Sherif gave his word that he would leave the country.
After his release, Sherif was deeply depressed. His Communist Party friends felt betrayed and angry, and closed ranks against him. He was isolated, and suspicious of university colleagues who he thought had spied on him. He applied for a leave of absence from the university, and arranged for his former Harvard teacher, Carroll Pratt, to temporarily fill his position. He wrote to Gordon Allport, telling him that he had ‘failed’ in convincing anyone in Turkey that he had ‘anything to contribute’ as a social psychologist and asking Allport to help him find work in America.
Eight months later, in January 1945, Sherif boarded a plane for the United States. But the chill wind of the Cold War would soon be blowing in America, and it would not be a welcoming place for people with his political past.
13
Oklahoma
Sherif said when he arrived in America that he felt like Rip van Winkle, a fairytale character who goes to sleep and wakes up to find twenty years have passed and the world has completely changed. He had been cut off from America during the war years, and when he arrived back one of the biggest changes he must have noticed was the disappearance of the vibrant left-wing culture he had experienced in the 1930s — the coalition of causes, unions, and groups pushing for social change had disintegrated.
Sherif arrived in Washington in the winter of 1945 and was met by his Harvard friend Hadley Cantril, who had used his connections to get Sherif a two-year fellowship at Princeton, and proposed they write a book together. Sherif was still low in spirits, and progress on the book was slow.
When a social psychology graduate called Carolyn Wood wrote to Cantril in October 1945 asking about a job, he invited her to Princeton to talk about working as a research assistant to Sherif. In his diary after his first meeting with her, Sherif congratulated himself on not immediately asking her out to dinner.
Like Sherif, Carolyn Wood was an achiever, ambitious, and idealistic. She was a straight-A student of social psychology, a discipline she fell in love with after reading Sherif’s first book, The Psychology of Social Norms, admiring ‘its beauty and logic’. As well as being highly intelligent, she was Hollywood-starlet good-looking, musical, and outgoing. At college, she hosted a radio show, acted on stage, and sang in a quartet. Within a month of their meeting, Sherif described Carolyn as ‘the center of my universe’. By December, less than two months after meeting, they married. She was twenty-three, he was forty.
Sherif wrote draft after draft of a letter to Carolyn’s parents, attempting to reassure them about a marriage that must have seemed sudden and impulsive:
I understand fully your deep concern about her … Many times … I put myself in your situation facing this sud
den marriage of ours which naturally appears queer and appalling to you … It would be very understandable that you should think she is impetuously carried away by a fascination of [sic] things strange and foreign and that someday she will wake up to realize what a damn fool she has been to fall into such a trap. I call her attention to this possibility … I realize quite well that nothing I write or say now will eliminate your apprehensions and consternation …
Any woman Sherif married would have to be as devoted to social psychology as he was. Carolyn Wood would be just as much a scientific partner as a lover and a wife. He wrote to a friend to tell him he was ‘deeply in love’, reassuring him that Carolyn was an excellent match: as well as being ‘a mid Western beauty … she’ll share all of our enthusiasm [for social psychology] … She’ll add new sparkle to it.’ The two made plans about their future life in Turkey, where Carolyn would be able to pursue her career and teach at the university. Announcing the wedding to Gardner Murphy, Sherif said, ‘I did my very best not to give her any rosy picture about my future. In fact, I was grimly realistic.’ It’s not clear exactly what he was so ‘grim’ about, or why the letter, rather than brimming with joy or anticipation, is weighed down by melodramatic foreboding: ‘From now on, I am basing all my work, both theoretical and ideological, on my relationship with her. I shall pull through or fail utterly in my work and everything on the basis of this relationship …’
Carolyn too was looking for an equal relationship. Sherif’s reputation and his ‘fervour’ for male–female equality immediately attracted her. ‘I wanted to marry an intellectual, as well as a sexual and emotional partner, who would encourage me being a social psychologist,’ she wrote in an article about how she came to her choice of career. Muzafer Sherif seemed to fit the bill. But she would get more than she bargained for, because as Sherif’s letter hinted to Gardner Murphy, he would be dependent on Carolyn to balance his ‘craziness’ as well as being his colleague and partner.
In theory, Sherif’s new research assistant was meant to free him up from research so he could focus on writing his share of the book he and Cantril were co-authoring. But Cantril, frustrated, pressured Sherif to hurry and finish. Sherif did not take it well, writing to Cantril that such a book shouldn’t be hurried and that ‘in order not to strain our relationship and my stay in Princeton further’, he would work separately and at home.
I don’t know if Cantril spelled it out, but he was uncomfortable with Sherif’s flaunting of pro-communist views in his writing. During the war, Cantril had worked for the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency) and developed strong ties in government. Now the ever-entrepreneurial academic was positioning himself to win government funding to work on anti-communist psychological warfare. Like many of Sherif’s colleagues, Cantril, who had been a member of a number of thriving left-wing groups a decade earlier, was now careful to downplay his pre-war political affiliations and activism.
I wondered how much of this tension with Cantril was a spillover of Sherif’s worry about Turkey. He was still agitated and upset by events there, and followed the appointment of replacement faculty at Ankara closely, writing letters home describing the new appointees as ‘SOBs, fascists, Nazis, spies and blackmailers’. Despite his loathing of many of these colleagues, in January 1947, with his Princeton fellowship over and Carolyn pregnant with their first child, the couple continued with plans to return to Turkey later that year. He would have known from reports in the American press that the Turkish government was engaged in a ‘Red hunt’, and in particular was intent on ridding higher education of communists and subversives. Yet he seemed genuinely shocked in May 1947 at news that he had been sacked from his job at the university in Ankara, ostensibly because he had broken a Turkish law that banned anyone married to a foreigner from working as a civil servant. But it was more likely part of a wider crackdown as Turkey proved to its new Cold War ally, America, that it was taking its responsibilities seriously and dealing firmly with its left-wing intellectuals.
It was a blow for Carolyn’s academic ambitions too, as the plans for her to work in Turkey evaporated. With the influx of soldiers returning after the war, opportunities for women in American academia were shrinking fast. At the same time, Sherif’s American visa had expired and unless the state department agreed to renew it, he looked like being deported. Instead of returning home with his wife and child to a relatively comfortable life in Turkey, Sherif found himself stranded, one of a wave of immigrant psychologists who had arrived in America after the war. Carolyn comforted him, writing to him when he was away visiting Yale, ‘My sweetheart … as long as we are in good health we’ll be able to take as much as stupid people can give — and can find ways of maintaining ourselves. I am with you every step of the way.’
Luckily, Yale psychologist Carl Hovland was recruiting scholars to work with him and organised a two-year Rockefeller Fellowship for Sherif. It would give him some breathing space while Carolyn tried to sort out his immigration problems.
At thirty, Carl Hovland was ten years younger than Sherif but he looked older than his years. In the portrait at Yale taken around this time, his wavy hair was already showing signs of grey. His solid body and the avuncular pose suggested someone calm and unflappable. Hovland was careful, methodical, smart; he was the antithesis of Sherif, who had big ideas and an excitable personality. But Sherif had been cut off from America and its developments in psychological research during the war, so there was a lot of catching up to do as he cast around for a new research project.
Sherif’s immigrations woes continued. He didn’t help matters. Impatient with anything that smacked of bureaucracy, he often simply ignored official-looking letters and did not return phone calls that looked like they might have something to do with red tape. Throughout 1947, he skipped appointments with the immigration department, telling them he had important business to attend to at Yale. And he’d missed letters warning about the expiry of his temporary visa.
Meanwhile, any chance of him being welcome back in Turkey was diminishing fast. At the University of Ankara, things were getting worse. Right-wing faculty and students protested against leftist teachers. Student demonstrators broke into the offices of the university’s president, demanding the resignation of three of Sherif’s friends, who were arrested and put on trial. The persecution of intellectuals seen as sympathetic to communism in Turkey continued with the murder of prominent left-wing writer Sabahattin Ali by Turkish security services. If Sherif applied for a new visa, the American government was sure to ask the Turkish authorities for a report on his politics and his allegiances: his avowed sympathy for communism was sure to come to light. In July 1949, at the time of the first summer-camp experiment, he was in the country as an illegal alien. With all this hanging over him, Sherif threw himself into preparations for his research.
Once the first summer-camp experiment was over, Sherif drafted a report for Hovland. In this first study, the twenty-four boys who began as friends turned on one another as enemies, after a competition for prizes. But there are hints that the process did not go well. Sherif was dismayed to find the camp had no electricity, so there was no way of gathering recordings, and in a letter to Hovland he hinted at a lack of staff cooperation. And while Carolyn admired the study, she referred to it in later years as ‘a mess’ and noted how the data gained from it could not be used.
Whatever happened, it had exacted a toll on Sherif. He seemed to disappear once it was over. The American Jewish Committee pleaded with him for six months to provide them with details of how the experiment had turned out. In one letter, the AJC’s Joseph Flowerman wrote that he had two theories about Sherif’s silence. Either he was ‘head over heels analysing his data’ or was ‘too unhappy to talk about it’. Clearly exasperated, he ended the letter asking for evidence Sherif was still alive. Sherif replied almost immediately, saying the letter had been like ‘shock treatment’, and that his ‘seclusion’
was due to ‘complete exhaustion’.
On top of all this, he explained, he had moved to Oklahoma. You can feel his impatience at the disruption of the move to Oklahoma at a time when he ‘was so keyed up’. Moving house, settling in, setting up an office — all these interruptions ‘made me more and more restless and caused me to lose my contact with everything else’. But now he was over the moon with the results, he told Flowerman:
This study has been the most exciting research unit for me as a social psychologist with all the background I have in the field. It has been a revelation in concrete form of what I have been thinking theoretically for several years … To use your characterization of last year, my ‘libido’ has been and continues to be directed towards this study.
What he didn’t say was that he had already written a report but it had been through several drafts on Hovland’s advice.
In his first draft, Sherif concluded that in this study, the boys’ behaviour reflected the dynamics of a competitive society that divided people into the ‘haves and have-nots’, stoked rivalry and resentment, and fostered prejudices and, eventually, violence. The report echoed the themes of both of Sherif’s books, including the one co-written with Hadley Cantril, in which he had expressed sympathy for Marxism, and admiration for what he saw as the benefits of Russian collectivism over American individualistic and capitalist culture.