During World War I and the Turkish War of Liberation that followed American missionary educators of the American Board of Foreign Commissioners (ABCFM) tended to be pro-Greek, anti-Turkish nationalist, and, at times, anti-Muslim. By the end of the Ataturk regime in 1938 many of these same missionaries were admirers of Ataturk and the Kemalist reform program, yet missionary opinion was not monolithic regarding Ataturk. With the establishment of the Republic, the missionaries negotiated with the Kemalist government over issues such as Bible teaching, religious holidays, and centralized control over the curriculum. Examination of missionary experiences during the 1920s and 1930s, predominately at the American Collegiate Institute in Izmir and the American Girls School in Bursa Girls’ School with implementing state-sanctioned curricular changes, school policies and regulations, state-mandated student participation in local and national commemorations (e.g. Republic Day) as well as their reactions to the republic’s national mourning of Ataturk’s death yields a variety of perspectives ranging from Ataturk as an “upstart” to Turkey’s “savior.” These varied attitudes, as expressed in school reports, letters home, and correspondence with mission headquarters such as those written by Edith Parsons, Olive Greene, Paul Nilson, Edith Sanderson and others, both shaped and reflected their efforts to adapt to the changing role of missionaries in a secular Turkey as illustrated in part by responses in Turkey and the U.S. to the trial of teachers at the Girls’ School in Bursa who were charged with proselytizing, an act outlawed in Turkey and in in opposition to mission rules.

The U.S. YMCA's experiences in Nationalist Turkey showed how some missionaries could accept the Turks and support the new government's nation-building efforts, but ultimately failed to overcome lingering racism at home and resistance on the ground. In the wake of Turkish Nationalists’ victories over the Allies in 1921 and 1922, the American YMCA staff in Turkey faced a stark choice. Their Association in Smyrna was a smoking ruin and many of their Christian members had fled or been killed. Now the Y staff could attempt to work with the new government or leave the country. Trusting the Turks after years of violence did not come easily. Some Y staffers also struggled to come to terms with turning to a Muslim base and stepping back from proselytizing. Ultimately, however, the YMCA staff declared their willingness to stay on. Their newsletters and publicity materials soon began touting the reforms and progress made by the new Turkish government. Two controversial proposals show how the U.S. YMCA navigated their new relationships with Turks and the Nationalist government. First, Asa Jennings, the hero of Smyrna, proposed a collaborative venture with the Turkish Ojak (Hearth) association. He argued that the YMCA should help fund and staff new Ojak sites that would carry out many similar programs for education, character training, and cultural enrichment as standard YMCA Associations. This proposal garnered reluctant support from YMCA leaders, but the Turkish government ultimately seized control of the project. The second plan came from D.A. Davis, the head of the Istanbul Association, and provoked a hearty debate among leaders of Associations across the United States. Davis reported that local members faced considerable social and political pressures against working with American Christians. He had to work closely with American diplomats to fend off rounds of attacks from local newspapers and navigate new Turkish laws regulating foreign organizations. For some American missionaries, the prospect of trusting Turks to run their own Association and develop their own version of character training remained outlandish and uncomfortable. In the end, however, a new 1939 law against foreign organizations forced their hand. The American YMCA in Turkey became a Turkish one shortly thereafter. The struggles YMCA staff members went through during the preceding years, however, are important to show how missionaries perceived their new Muslim audience and understood the new politics of nationalism.

In 1898, Joseph Booth, native of Utah, was called to be a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) and proselyte among the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire’s provinces of Aintab, Aleppo, and Adana. He spent over 17 years in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world working with a group of Mormon Armenians from 1898-1909 and 1922-1928. Booth kept a daily journal of his time in the Middle East totaling over 600,000 words! This ego document records much of his personal struggles and faith, but also captured interactions with local officials and other Western missionaries and much about the local communities and ways of life that are mostly lost to history. His is the unique perspective of the events leading up to the destruction and dismemberment of the empire, the Armenian Genocide, and their direct impact on the Mormon-Armenian community. He was pulled out of the Ottoman Empire in 1909 in the wake of the Adana Massacres and was not able to return until after the Great War. Upon his return to the new Middle East in 1922 he found what was left of his community in ruins concentrated in Aintab. With the settling of the Turkish War of Independence, the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, and the granting control of Aintab to the newly formed Republic of Turkey, Joseph Booth decided to move his congregation from Turkish-held Aintab to French controlled Aleppo in the Syrian Mandate. Booth and his community’s rapid exodus came out of fear that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's new government would continue the wholescale destruction of Armenians within the newly formed Turkish Republic. This presentation investigates the state of the Mormon-Armenian community in the wake of the Armenian Genocide and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, especially in light of the rise of the Republic of Turkey and its policies towards minority populations. Notwithstanding the promises of the Treaty of Lausanne to protect Christian minority populations, the Mormon-Armenians of Aintab chose to become refugees and flee to Aleppo in what they hoped would be a safer environment under French Mandate protection. This choice to flee (self-referenced as Exodus) represents the fears of a traumatized community, Judeo-Christian tradition of the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt, and deeply held Mormon precedent that a community must flee overwhelming persecution and find shelter elsewhere as they fled the United States to Mexican territory (Utah) in the 1840s.

In the scramble to adjust to the new education laws in the Turkish Republic, the women educators at the American College for Girls in Istanbul had to adapt quickly to numerous changes; moreover, their long-time president, Mary Mills Patrick, had retired abruptly in 1924. Patrick, however, had already laid the groundwork for a secular college and she had long touted the superiority of “non-sectarian” education and boasted of the many Muslim students whom she had enrolled, the most well-known being nationalist heroine Halide Edib. Thus, when the new Turkish Republic emerged, the College could present a strong public show of support for Atatürk and claim its place as premier educator of girls and women in the city it was quickly learning to call Istanbul. Confident of its position, the College threw itself behind Atatürk’s plans for the education and emancipation of women. While the missionaries to the Ottoman Empire had aimed to transform the Near East spiritually, these American women educators in Istanbul now presented themselves as pioneers of progressive feminism, education, democracy, and world peace. But what did the College’s supporters back home in America think about this newly secularized, ex-missionary institution? In the 1920s and 30s the American College for Girls underwent an energetic public relations campaign in order to help Americans accept and support its new purpose as educator of Muslim women, a role it had already begun to assert in 1908 with the Young Turk Revolution. The paper will explore the image of the American College for Girls in American publications, showing how the College carefully balanced its Christian past with its modern American identity, and claimed the role of premier educator of Muslim women in Turkey. Autobiographies, travel books, articles, and lectures by College personnel and others promote it as an ambassador of education and feminism, dedicated not only to supporting American-style democracy and female emancipation, but also to erasing the missionary past and creating new bonds between the U.S. and Turkey.