Mustapha Kemal Sets the Styles
I
No aspect of Mustapha Kemal’s remarkable career is more worthy of note than his reform of the clothes of his people. Once firmly in the saddle, and with his political reorganization accomplished, he turned to the question of dress. Realizing, like the Pope, the important bearing of dress upon morals, he prepared to grant, or to impose upon, his countrymen the charter of their sartorial freedom, to call in the hatter, the haberdasher, and the tailor to free his fellow Turk from the Asiatic encumbrances around his person, preparatory to freeing his mind from the Asiatic involutions of his thoughts.
A new mentality could, perhaps, only be achieved with a new generation. But if the savior of his country, despite the power of his office and the energy of his forty-three years, could not change the inside of Turkish heads, he could do something at least with the exterior. To a Turk the ‘unspeakable significance of dress’ had its epitome in the fez that crowned the male believer’s person. It stood as the symbol of his manhood and his religion. It distinguished him from the infidel during his life; after his death its replica in stone stood till the judgment at the head of his grave. The fez, first imposed a century before amid the grumblings of his subjects by a reforming Sultan in place of the unwieldy turban, as being an approximation to the top hat of civilized Europe, had long ceased to be a mark of liberalism. Rather the reverse, and in 1908, indeed, the young Turks, by adopting the kalpak of astrakhan in its place, dissociated themselves from the political chauvinism that the fez had come to typify.
In spite of this, the fez remained the essential badge of Turkish pride of race, and any Turk who discarded it risked his liberty, possibly his life. Whenever political excitement ran high in Constantinople, the first to suffer from the mob were the despised unbelievers in hats, and the entry of Nationalist troops into the old capital in 1923 was accompanied by brutal outrages on behatted pedestrians. Though the movement among the intelligentsia against the fez (of which the kalpak was only a variation) had been gaining momentum, so late as 1924 a student newly returned from Germany suffered arrest in Stamboul for continuing to wear his German hat.
Mustapha Kemal’s decision to abolish once and for all this ritual head-covering has been adjudged as his boldest measure. Cautiously he began with the army, where the inconvenience of the traditional brimless kalpak, which offered no shade to the eyes, had been experienced in many campaigns. Knowing he could rely on the fidelity of the Republican Guard, he had them served out with kepis, care being taken to point out to the men that when they said their prayers all they had to do was to turn the peaks to the back. Not a murmur was raised. The example of the picked corps of the army was quickly followed by the rest, of the fighting forces of the Republic, and by the early summer of 1925 every Turkish soldier, sailor, and gendarme was wearing the headpiece previously identified in the racial consciousness with Christians and infidels.
This was the thin end of the wedge. When in early September the Ghazi Pasha, attired in a lounge suit and a panama, made an official visit to Kastamuni, a little town near the Black Sea notoriously entrenched in its conservatism, he slit the accepted conventions of male attire from head to foot. And he did not simply wear the despised hat. At public functions he remained bareheaded and obliged the other functionaries to follow an example that ran counter to every dictate of pious and respectable behavior.
He did more. By adding precept to practice, he pointed the moral of the change. In the most quoted of all his speeches he declared that the dress common to all civilized peoples was perfectly suited to the Turks. ‘We will wear,’ he said boldly, ‘boots and shoes, trousers, shirts, waistcoats, collars, ties. We will add brims to the coverings we place upon our heads — or to speak more plainly,’ and here he used the accursed word, ‘we wall wear hats. We will dress in morning coats and lounge suits, in smoking jackets and tail coats. And if there are persons who hesitate and draw back, I will tell them they are fools and ignoramuses.’
An historic utterance — and he tacked on the fez the troubles they had so long endured, the fez which stood as the symbol of the backwardness of their ideas and the sterility of their lives. The fez typified the enemy — it was the enemy. ‘We have only saved ourselves in the course of these past years, thanks to the change in our outlook. We cannot stop now. We must go on and on. The nation must learn that civilization turns to dust and ashes everything which remains indifferent to its advance.’ Thus did the President cry ‘Excelsior’ to the astonished townsmen of dusty little Kastamuni.
The country reechoed to his words. Everywhere on this provincial tour the Ghazi Pasha, now wearing a panama, now a homburg, and displaying on his well-knit figure the latest examples of the art of Savile Row, braving the fanatic’s dagger and delivering his message even at the street corners, carried on his propaganda, so that clothes became the one subject of conversation for a people only recently emerged from a life-and-death struggle. The newspapers wrote of nothing else, and grave men discussed the fashions with feminine intensity. Almost every educated Turk became a Fortunatus, who by donning a bowler or a boater desired to annihilate time and leap over the centuries that Europe had gained in the race.
Once again Mustapha Hemal, confident in his idealism, seemed to have carried the day. On his return to Angora he was greeted by crowds in hats of every shape, size, and color, and when the ministerial fiat went forth that all civil servants should henceforth discard the fez, it looked as if his moral influence would be enough to make the rest of the population achieve a similar capital emancipation. With the fez also went the salaam, that salutation of Oriental servility by which an inferior makes the gesture of picking up dust and placing it upon his heart, lips, and forehead. In future the superior was to be greeted — so ran the order — by a slight inclination of the head, or out of doors by the raising of the hat two finger-breadths from the cranium. And when the chief religious functionary laid it down that the uncovering of the head was a universal mark of respect, a sign of civilized mentality, which should not be denied to Allah, it looked as if Mustapha Kemal had killed the most sensitive nerve in the monster of inertia against which he was battling.
II
But the fez proved to be something more than a ‘petrified idol.’ Example was not enough to overthrow it. On the contrary, when a deputy introduced a bill to make the coiffure of civilization obligatory, General Nour-ed-Din Pasha, commander of the army corps which was the first to enter Smyrna, declared that such an enactment was a violation of the articles in the Republican Constitution referring to the rights of personal liberty. The objection of this sincere and pious Moslem roused the revolutionary temper of the House. How could the Constitution, asked one, itself a product of civilization, be violated by adopting hats, which were the very symbol of civilized peoples? Who ever heard of a Parliament in any civilized country discussing the question of hats? asked another. And Nour-ed-Din Pasha found only one other member to support him in his opposition to a bill so thoroughly Asiatic in its contempt for individual freedom.
It was not, however, to be enforced without the first exhibition of the ruthlessness of Turk against Turk that the Republican Government has borrowed from the old regime. At Erzerum and Sivas, those cradles of the Nationalist movement, demonstrations took place in favor of the fez; walls were placarded in the night with incitements to disobedience; the mosques buzzed with excitement, and all the familiar machinery of opposition in an Eastern country which does not enjoy the clemency of British rule was brought into play. Public opinion had been brought near the revolution point; in some cases it actually boiled over.
But traditional conservatism, however angry, was no match for the cool determination of the Ghazi Pasha and the machine he controlled. All the odds — the troops, the warships, the intelligentsia, the timeservers, and the ‘desperadoes’ who surrounded the President Pasha — were on the side of the hat, and the hat won easily. The Tribunals of Independence passed the harsh and hasty judgments which are often the kindest in the end. Anyone wore a fez at the peril of his life. Ten years’ hard labor was not an uncommon sentence for those who continued to cover their heads as their fathers had done and as the Prophet had ordered. Even the plea that the accused had tried to buy a hat only to find the local hatter sold out was no defense, and unless the Ghazi Pasha has exercised his right of pardon — an improbable contingency — many educated Turks still linger in Turkish jails for having feared to catch cold or to lose their dignity by going bareheaded.
It need hardly be said that Mustapha Kemal had no intention of confining his charter of clothes to the male citizens of the Republic. The very cornerstone of his reforms was the complete emancipation of women from their immemorial bondage, of which the veil stood as the symbol. So long as no man, except husband or near relation, could look on a Turkish woman’s face without shame or sin, it was hopeless ever to pretend that Turkey belonged to the enlightened and scientific twentieth century. True, it would be doing Turkish ladies an injustice to suppose that they had never the wit to slip through the bonds which masculine tyranny placed upon them. Readers of Pierre Loti’s romances know how the beauties of Stamboul found opportunities of showing themselves daughters of Eve, and it required no Gallic standard of gallantry to notice in the Stamboul of an earlier generation that the gentle-born lady managed to triumph over the ‘glaring impotence of dress,’ and despite the veil and cloak to prove that she was fair, and even, it may be, to establish those parallels along which run the well-worn paths of amorous intrigue.
In a word, the Turkish woman of the upper and middle classes chafed at the shackles which unjustly bound her, and to show her resentment often wantonly broke through them. She had already gone a long way to achieving her freedom. Even Abdul Hamid, for all his jealousy of power, which turned his rule into a sombre tyranny obnoxious to every generous impulse, had ideas about the education of women and recognized the evils that lurked in the system of the harem. Emancipation was in the air, and after the Revolution of 1908 a movement began to discard the veil, which gained impetus under the economic strain of the war, when in Turkey, as in other belligerent countries, women had to do the work hitherto performed by men.
Mustapha Kemal, directly he had saved the country from its foreign foes, left no doubt of his ideas or intentions. His courtship of Latife Ilanem broke through the old traditions, and they were married, too, as any European couple might be, the bride not only taking part in the ceremony, but appearing unveiled. She continued to show her Western ways and, as the Ghazi Pasha’s wife, accompanied her husband everywhere dressed in the latest modes from the Rue de la Paix. But while the emancipated Madame Mustapha Kemal Pasha had been to school in England, and Paris had put its cachet upon her, the majority of her sisters were not so fortunate, and these feared to make evident their lack of chic, their inexperience of the polite world, by going freely into mixed society. It became evident that Mustapha Kemal, as usual, would have to put his shoulder to the wheel and help it out of one more rut.
In that same September, therefore, when he wore the panama hat in Kastamuni, he gave a dance to the Moslem beau monde of Smyrna, an occasion that, is a landmark in the social history of Turkey, for to the old-fashioned Oriental nothing was more immoral in the behavior of Europeans than their lascivious manners in the ballroom. Thanks to the brief schooling he had received in the salons of Sofia, the President of the Republic was able to lead off the ball with the daughter of the Governor and to acquit himself without discredit in the fox-trot that gave the final blow to the proprietary notions which inspire the Oriental seclusion of women, and showed that henceforth the sexes were to enjoy a social, as well as a terpsichorean, equality. But their new-found freedom momentarily embarrassed them, and Mustapha Kemal, acting as master of ceremonies with the same energy that he showed on the battlefield or in the Assembly, had to order the young officers who stood sheepishly round the doorways to advance boldly on the fair unpartnered belles. These, being soldiers, obeyed, and his loudly expressed opinion that no Turkish lady would refuse to dance with those who wore the national uniform conquered the comprehensible shyness of the ladies.
Owing to the impetus given by the President, whose balls at Angora became a regular feature of social life, the inhibitions of the professional and official classes were overcomo, and ‘dancings,’ thanks to the gramophone, which played an important part in this revolution in all the larger cities, enjoyed such a vogue that young men with social talents found lucrative openings as dancing masters.
Women also were able to draw material profit from the fashion, as the advertisement in the local paper of Eski Shehr proved. The dance club in that town languished for lack of lady members, so that remuneration was offered to Turkish girls who could dance, the other qualifications being that they should be strong in body, have no physical defect, be able to play some musical instrument, and to talk clearly without stuttering.
A good many there were who stuttered, if only metaphorically. Not that Mustapha Kemal supposed the battle of women’s freedom could be won to the rhythms of syncopated music, or that Turkish women would at once become accomplished conversationalists. The habits and prejudices of centuries offered a mass of inertia not easily to be moved. Old Turkey still dreamt its dreams in many a quiet country town; hundreds of thousands of Turkish citizens still thought it impious to depict the human or animal form, and to the last degree sinful that the passions should be subjected to the temptations of the ballroom, which sometimes inflame even the cold natures of Northern peoples. The dead hand of the most puritanical religion that has ever held mankind in subjection still lay over the mouldering little cities, which had sunk deeper into decay now that the Armenians and the Greeks leavened them with their energies no more.
To try to stir these foes of reaction into life, and to awaken their women to the opportunities of their freedom, Mustapha Kemal, enlisting the services of the efficient Turk-Ojac, sent round companies of strolling players to propagate the new ideals. Some of the conservative ladies, discovering that a preliminary to this awakening was their sitting side by side with men, often left the theatre in disgust before the curtain rose. Others endured the unwonted proximity of the male stranger only to be driven away by the depraved gestures and licentious acting of their sisters upon the stage, who were holding up the mirror to a world in which women played their parts as doctors, lawyers, and even typists.
A shocking business, they decided, as they put on their now-forbidden veils and wrapped their cloaks around them. If in the wake of the players came a visit from a Tribunal of Independence, the rumor of its approach might cause the veils again to disappear and the baggy Turkish trousers of the 100 per cent male to vanish until these dreaded gentry left the neighborhood. Things could then return to their comfortable ways. The foreign skeptics pointed out that the Western current, which ran strong in the centre and on the surface of the stream, lost its force in those deeper waters, which remained stagnant as before. But not quite, perhaps, as before, for the old spirit of fatalism had been inoculated with doubt, and the President of the Republic looked to the next generation, which had not been exhausted by ten years of war, to harvest the reforms that he was giving to his people.
He looked to the younger generation that would be more ready to imbibe Western ideas and Turkish nationalism. And he consistently favored the TurkOjac, a cultural organization going back to the days of the first Revolution of 1908 and now grown to be of nation-wide extent. With its imposing headquarters in Angora, the TurkOjac has become a sort of universal aunt to the Republic, using every device of the missionary technique — the school, the dispensary, the spoken and printed word, the talkie and the movie — to convert the youth of the country to the new ways.
III
If the Ghazi Pasha nursed no illusions about the difficulties of his task, he did not allow discouragement to weaken his driving power. He had created a new social atmosphere among the directing classes. The next step was to establish a new social fabric upon the solid basis of law. For some time the question had occupied him and his government. At the Lausanne Conference, Ismet Pasha admitted that abolition of the Capitulations must be followed by a complete modernization of Turkish law, and in 1924 the old theocratic conceptions by which law was a question of religion, not of nationality, had been swept away with the Caliphate. This cleared the ground for theEuropeanCodesthatwere toform the legal framework of the Republic.
The murmurs at the immense innovation which a Western civil code — the Swiss was that chosen as a model — would introduce into Turkish administration caused him to explain once more that the sovereignty of the people brooked no opposition. ‘The brigands of the press’ could not be tolerated, and if intellectuals profited by their liberty to interfere with the peaceful development of the country, summary treatment would be theirs. In particular he trounced the lawyers who, with their pretended knowledge, had opposed his constitution which consecrated the sovereignty of the people — the lawyers educated in Europe, pretending to be enlightened liberals, who had long after the proclamation of the Republic continued to be partisans of the Caliphate. Against such obscurantism he would have no mercy. And he proceeded to lay down once more—for it could not be repeated too often — the general principles guiding the secular and republican state.
’The new Turkish régime,’ he said, ‘rejects in their entirety the old superannuated methods of government. The common bond which unites the national elements and ensures their permanence has abandoned its religious character and taken a national form. We now admit science and civilization as a principle of life and strength in the domain of international struggles. The country now, as the result of the modifications which have been made in its structure and thought, regards a laic mentality as the single factor of existence.’
Needless to say, the opposition crumbled before this vigor, and the Assembly, in the course of a single sitting and without even a division, adopted the Swiss Civil Code, modified in certain minor details, as the law of the land. Thus polygamy, which continues to exist in Iraq and Egypt, passed out of Turkey, and the privileges of personal status that the Sheriat conferred on Moslems as belonging to the dominant religion, still enjoyed in other Islamic countries, were lost in the equality which all Turkish citizens now enjoy before the law. This example of an Islamic nation adopting a European Code in the place of the traditional law that reposes upon the sanctity of the Koran and on the commentaries of the doctors of the faith marks a step toward the Westernization of Asia which is bound to have the greatest possible influence on other Moslem countries. It has been described as a deathblow to Islam. It is something more, for it strikes at the theocratic conceptions of government common to all Asia outside China; it strikes at those ideas of morality that spring from the supposedly superior status and sanctity of the male, ideas coloring both Islam and Buddhism, from which have derived the customs of child marriage in India, of ‘marriages for a night’ among the Shiahs of Persia, ideas and notions that throughout Asia give to the husband marital rights and privileges denied to the wife.
Law is the reflection of a people’s mentality, and it would be idle to pretend that the machinery of justice works in Turkey with Swiss precision. But at least the machine is there, and Mustapha Kemal has taken the best means to provide for its future efficient functioning by the establishment of a Law School at Angora, where the intellectual atmosphere is completely European, and where neither Koranic nor Marxian influences are allowed to sway the mind, or divert attention from the secular ideal that guides Turkey in its gallant struggle to wipe out the past.
Certainly human obstacles he found irksome, and when a clumsy plot to dynamite him came to light in Smyrna, he allowed the police, which the Republic had taken over en bloc from the old régime, as much rope as it wanted. As a result, some eleven persons, including half a dozen deputies, were brought to the gallows, several hundreds were tried, many sent to prison, and the ‘Three Pashas,’ at first suspected of being implicated, — though the cases against them broke down, — were driven out of public life. The gibbeted corpses of the politicians that swung in the public square at Angora might well discourage others from taking a hand in the dangerous game of party politics — a lesson driven home by the ball the Ghazi gave at Tchan Kaya at the moment this exemplary fate was being meted out to possible rivals. Did this show the callousness of a spoilt child? Or was it such a gesture as the men of the cinquecento would have understood, hard and cruel maybe, but indicative of the youthfulness that is impatient of any thing or any person standing between it and its desires? However that may be, Mustapha Kemal, after striking hard, took the opportunity to discourage future careerists by making illegal the existence of any political organization except that of which he was the leader, thus turning the People’s Party into merely another aspect of the Assembly.
Indubitably he was thorough. He cut deep. But, if we liken him to a surgeon, he had a surgeon’s faith in the skill of the nurse to bring the patient back to health. He trusted implicitly in Europa, now grown to be the tutelar genius of the Republic. Or rather, should one say, he wooed this ideal personage with a frantic devotion he had given to no woman of human clay. He found her adorable in all her aspects — even in the second-rate Viennese music that came to the cafes of Pera. ‘Oriental music,’ ran a presidential obiter dictum, ‘no longer satisfies the Turkish soul.’ For waltzes and for jazz the Turks must throw aside their own native art to which Mozart and Beethoven had paid their homage.
All the Muses were to be welcomed. When some reactionary pedagogues in Stamboul punished their pupils for having taken snapshots, — a clear infraction of the Prophet’s orders, — Kemal spoke out. ‘We will no longer tolerate,’ he said, ‘a religion that neglects the fine arts.’
Thus, without any eulogy of the Sultan who had been the patron of Gentile Bellini, or of the great builders who had raised the domes and minarets of old Stamboul, he implicitly embraced the whole of the national aesthetic traditions in his condemnation of Islam. He followed up his words by allowing statues cf the Savior of Turkey to be set up in Constantinople and elsewhere. The entire inheritance of commercialized European art was to be theirs, and the foundations of the Turkish Bohemia were laid when mixed classes studied the female nude.
IV
Most important of all was the question of language. To make Turkish into a suitable vehicle for modern thought, to purge it of its Arabic and Persian accretions, to divorce it from the elaborately beautiful but very inconvenient and unsuitable script which the Turks had taken from the Arabs with the Koran — there was a task indeed. The new Turkish should be the universal tongue over the whole geographical area of the Republic. No more should Greek, or Armenian (which few Englishmen have ever encountered outside the pages of George Borrow), or French be spoken in the land. The old modesty that allowed Arabic to have a monopoly in the mosque and Greek to compete with Italian in the market place belonged to the past. God and the foreigners would both have to learn Turkish, which should be the only language within the borders of the Turkish Republic. And those who thought otherwise might expect trouble. Trouble, in consequence, came in full measure to the European and American schools, which had long been attempting to diffuse in Turkey the light of Western learning. If the President saw the humor of the paradox, he did not show it, and he allowed no derogations from his policy. He meant to woo Dame Europa himself and to use no marriage broker in the shape of missionaries to assist him in winning the lady.
On the question of Latin versus Arabic characters, Mustapha Kemal was undeniably right, though the magnitude of the change, the advantages of which had been recognized by his wicked but intelligent old predecessor, Sultan Abdul Hamid, might well have caused him to regard it as beyond the range of practical politics, even in submissive and power-ridden Turkey. For such a reform, besides putting out of action every printing machine and every printer’s case in the country, would temporarily reduce everyone to a common illiteracy. Yet somehow or other it all happened quite naturally. The Ghazi waited until a congress of Turkish philologists at Baku recommended an adaptation of Latin characters for the common language spoken by Turks throughout Asia; then, after quietly proceeding to learn to use the new script himself, he was ready to impose it upon his thirteen million fellow citizens.
Phonetically the guttural sonority of Arabic, loving consonants as it despises vowels, is ill-suited to Turkish, which exploits the hard palate. Not that such academic considerations were predominant in Mustapha Kemal’s mind. Cultural, rather than phonetic, advantages were what he sought in the change. He knew that, so long as Turkish was written from right to left, it could never properly diffuse the ideals of European civilization. The picturesque involutions and intricacies of Arabic script afforded a psychological background to the Oriental mentality which stood as the real enemy of the Republic; its mere difficulty acted as a barrier against the universal diffusion of reading and writing. In nothing has Turkey given a more striking lead to the Moslem world, and it behooves Arab countries to consider very seriously whether, if they wish to play a part in the Asia of the future, the Asia that hopes to free itself from European tutelage at the cost of adopting its social and political philosophy, they should not follow suit and make the change first recommended to the Egyptians in the last century by an English scholar.
The Ghazi Pasha began by writing notes to his friends in Latin script. Then ‘Turk Postolari’ appeared on the postage stamps. The paper money next bore inscriptions in Latin characters, and these were also introduced in the scientific courses at the higher government colleges. At length, in August 1928, while official Turkey enjoyed its holidays by the Bosphorus, he made a speech foreshadowing the early adoption of the new characters. All through that summer he gave up the leisure of his vacation to imparting the facility he had already acquired. The President held classes in his palace of Dolma Bagtche, at which he instructed ministers, generals, and men of letters, — unready pupils these, — who followed his demonstrations on the blackboard and wrestled with downstrokes, upstrokes, and pothooks. The only road to the presidential favor lay through the Latin characters. High officials calling on business of State were not heard until they had undergone an examination in reading and writing. Even his dancing partners were expected to make themselves proficient, and at least one official ball was interrupted while the President, calling for his chalk and blackboard, instructed both the fair and the brave in the new learning. His example proved infectious, and all Constantinople turned itself into a school, hoping, perhaps, in this way to be able to creep back into the favor of the autocrat and overcome his strange partiality for Angora.
V
‘More brain, O Lord, more brain’ — this continues to be the Meredithian prayer of the President on behalf of his people, as he traces for them the path that their footsteps should tread. He wants them to know — to know where they are, how they have got there, and where they are going to. He is the perfect anthropogogue, the man who leads his fellows by the hand. They for their part trust him with the wondering fidelity of children. They can lean on him, adore the power that is his, and patiently follow this demonic force which destiny, for Allah is now gone out of business, has imposed upon them. They can follow as best they may, or, what is better, they can sit and listen to him talking about Westernization with a sublime patience that only Orientals possess.
That patience was triumphantly proved when Mustapha Kemal recounted the history of the Nationalist movement to the newly elected deputies of the People’s Party. The general elections of the summer of 1927 had resulted in the complete triumph of the Party, of which he is the leader, — an electoral victory rendered no doubt more complete since it was the only party allowed by the law, — and before the new Assembly came together he called a Congress of the Party, at which the deputies should realize their responsibilities as the spokesmen for the next triennium of the Sovereign Voice. There he made the longest speech in his career, probably the longest in the history of the world, for it lasted thirty-six hours and thirtythree minutes. During the whole of a workday week he spoke for six hours a day, reading for the most part from the manuscript at which he and his friends, Ismet, Fethi, and others, had been working the night before till the early hours, but now and then breaking off to tell some humorously derogatory story about Rauf, who stood out as the archvillain, or about that flighty cosmopolitan Refet, and the other two Pashas, ambitious Ali Fuad and Kiazim Kara Bekir, who played the violin badly and sulked when he could n’t lead the band. The follies and vanities of his opponents, however, were only an incidental indictment in what was essentially an apologia and a sober statement of facts. ‘On 19th May 1919 I landed at Samsun ’ were its opening words, and it proceeded generally on this matter-of-fact plane, worthy of the Ottoman Julius Cæsar.
The six days’ story — which suggested a Biblical parallel to foreign wits — was carefully staged, and the scene in the new Assembly building mirrored the Occidental metamorphosis that the new Turkey had undergone, the Drang nach Westen, which now drew everything in its train. In the place of the turbaned hodjas, the fezzes, the kalpaks, the bright colors, and the flowing robes which the deputies of the first Assembly had displayed on their persons, were five hundred bareheaded citizens in the sober livery of the modem man, a costume which sat in illfitting discomfort on the majority, for the rank and file could not hope to rival the elegance of the Ghazi Pasha, upon whose spruce figure there smiled from the second presidential box three of the President’s ‘wards’ —some of his adopted war orphans now grown to comely womanhood. In the President’s own box sat Fethi Bey, come specially from Paris for the occasion, and Fevzi Pasha, the dark horse of the Republic, who rarely shows himself in public, for he is considered the brains of the army and Mustapha Kemal’s most likely successor — a dangerous distinction. And in the President’s chair sat Ismet Pasha — content to serve a greater, but not a cleverer, man than himself.
As day by day Mustapha Kemal recounted the history of the previous eight years, illustrating every phase by documents and anecdotes, the deputies and the other two hundred notables of the Party, who had also been brought to the Congress in order to carry back the President’s words to the four quarters of the country, could realize the extent of the dangers through which he had steered it. Clearly enough his resolution had again and again saved the situation, his judgment had decided when the time was ripe for each move in the campaign and each step in the development of the Republic. The wisest Turk that ever was!
Thus, day by day, the Republican epic grew in dimensions and splendor as the hero fought his battles and repeated his speeches over again, not indeed for vainglory, but so that the representatives of the people should know and, knowing, understand. And by the fifth evening it had reached its dénouement with the second battle of Sakaria, the recapture of Smyrna, and the Conference of Lausanne, things to stir a patriot’s blood, the blood that he made to pulse through their veins by the axiomatic summary of the Republic’s foreign policy — that the new Turkey ‘could afford to think only of its own existence and well-being, and was unable to sacrifice anything to anyone.’
‘The characteristic of the Turk is a definite need to lean on those above him.’ How could this be better satisfied than by leaning on so strong and prescient a leader? His resource, his courage, his eloquence, were inexhaustible; only his larynx showed that he was human. On the sixth day, when he came to recount the reforms which the Republic had introduced, how the fez and turban, those symbols of ignorance and fanaticism, had been swept away, how women had been freed and polygamy abolished, how they all now lived under the equality of a scientific civil code, his voice failed him, and he could hardly be heard. But there was one thing still unsaid. Though the older generation had acquitted itself nobly, it was now tired. And the Republic was yet encompassed by enemies. All kinds of forces, political, moral, economic, were concentrated on its destruction. The future could only be assured if the youth of Turkey were worthy of its inheritance. Pulling himself together, therefore, he addressed its young men and women, its children and the unborn citizens of the Republic, in a peroration which left him and his hearers in tears.
Like most perorations it reads baldly when divorced from the atmosphere in which it was delivered. We may believe that the sublimity of patriotism lighted up its rhetoric and the passionate fervor which has been the impulse of an extraordinary career glowed through its conventional phrases. But it was not then that Mustapha Kemal struck off the Shakespearean phrase: ‘Our people cannot die: were that to happen, the world itself could not support the bier.’