Contemporary political polarization between Islamic and secular identities in Turkey has often reduced discussions of Turkish modernity into a simplistic binary between a unilinear Western model imposed through top-down Kemalist reform and an authentic model of religious modernity that emerged through popular and democratic resistance to the Kemalist program. This dichotomy has disguised the many other rival visions of modernity that thrived in Republican Turkey. It has also led scholars to retroactively write off one of the most enduring of these visions - that of the Democratic Party - as being somehow insufficiently alternative, or inherently unstable in its mix of secular and Islamic elements. This paper seeks to lay out a brief typology of the most important models of Turkish modernity in order to identify points of competition, convergence and transformation. First, I argue that in light of the widespread use of the concept of "alternative modernities" we should recognize the self-consciously alternative elements within Kemalist modernity rather than treating Kemalism as a monolithic rival of more "authentic" alternatives. This serves as a precedent for understanding how Democratic Party leaders identified their social and political vision as the liberal culmination of Kemalist modernization, and how they found common ground with American modernization theorists in articulating an alternative to Fascist and Communist modernities defined by consumption, piety and popular participation. In time, both Turkish villagers and American ambassadors came to embrace Democratic Party Prime Minister Adnan Menderes as the embodiment of this modernity, one where a politician could be fêted with camel sacrifices while carrying on a semi-public affair with an opera singer. My paper further explores the nature of this modernity with several brief case studies that highlight some of its most intriguing and seemingly contradictory facets: these include debates over the first widely accepted Turkish translation of the call the prayer, the Democrat Party newspaper, Zafer, where world news and prayer schedules appeared besides beside pictures of a bikini-clad Marilyn Monroe, and a series of popular history magazines where the Ottoman past served simultaneously as a site for Turkish national heroism and prurient expose. Understanding the coherent combination of high-tech, materialistic capitalism, populist piety and democracy that emerged in mid-century Turkey is important, I argue, because of its enduring popularity in the Middle East and indeed the world at large.

In 1950, more than 4 million Turkish citizens voted to unseat Atatürk’s longstanding Republican Peoples’ Party, putting an opposition party at the nation’s helm for the first time in the history of the young republic. The landslide elections were seen as a symbol of Turkey’s definitive abandonment of its authoritarian past and a sign of “true” democracy in action, and stimulated widespread efforts to think through new forms of democratic participation in Turkey—particularly ones which would serve as alternatives to the Fascist and Communist models that dominated the post-war period. This paper looks at the specific ways in which future prime minister Bülent Ecevit devoted himself to the problem of democratic participation through his engagement with the art world. Ecevit opened Turkey’s second modern art gallery in 1952, and used the gallery as a site to test out the idea that capitalism could help cultural production escape from state control. As the new administration pushed for the privatization of the national economy, Ecevit deployed “sales talk” and the example of his own art gallery to argue that the capitalist free market was a locus for the newly enfranchised masses to exert their independent purchasing power.

Scholars seeking to explain the popularity of the Democrat Party ("DP"), the first democratically elected party in the history of the Turkish Republic, have seen its strategy as an oligarchic bait and switch in which Islamic piety and social conservativism were used to distract voters from the bread and butter issues of social justice. This paper contests this view, arguing instead that a) many nonelite Turkish voters benefitted materially from the DP's policies, and b) the DP's pro-capitalist rhetoric did not appeal to the wealthy alone, but in fact elicited wide support from peasants and workers seeking a better life through market-based growth. Campaigning on promises of a "millionaire in every neighborhood" and promising to transform Turkey into a "little America" within twenty years time, the DP won overwhelming electoral victories and excited the hopes of millions. Examining the rhetoric of the party and its amazing popularity throughout the countryside through a variety of primary and secondary sources in Turkish and English, this paper argues that it was not only urban economic elites who were attracted to the DP's pro-market messages but peasants and workers as well. Offering hope for material gain for a people disenchanted with the state after years of authoritarian rule, the DP gained support not through the use of Islamic traditionalist symbolic politics alone, but also its promises of success, optimism, and modernity as well. Academic analyses all too often paint Turkish politics in binary class terms, with parties serving as the agents of elite social groups. Politicized Islam is seen as the handmaiden of capitalist oligarchy, with the Turkish workers and peasantry its guileless dupes. This paper argues for a more nuanced and accurate understanding of Turkish society of the 1950s by stressing the appeal of market rhetoric among nonelites as well as the importance of sectoral divisions between farmers, urban workers, artisans, and bureaucrats - conflicts of interest not easily reducible to dichotomies of class. Contesting the view that the DP was the vehicle of capitalist elites alone, I aim to demonstrate that the DP in fact shunted large amounts of the nation's wealth to the countryside in ways that were both redistributive and economically unsustainable, leading to inflation and debt crises. Thus, this paper concludes that populism rather than conservatism must be used to understand the DP and its popularity throughout the 1950s.

This paper examines the early representations of the "gecekondu mahallesi," the informal settlement or the shantytown in Turkish theater. First staged in 1964, the epic play, “Keşanlı Ali Destanı” can be understood as a critique of the policies of urbanization (or lack thereof) of Turkey under Democrat Party (1950-1960). Haldun Taner’s representation of the migrant as poor and wholesome—a stoic, larger than life figure—bears close resemblance to the Turkish “humanist” discourse in art and literature of the same period, which underplayed ethnic difference and aestheticized an “authentic” culture. The success that the play enjoyed in its first decade makes it relevant beyond the sphere of influence of Turkey’s left-leaning humanist intellectuals, however. Taner’s play pioneered in a new genre in mass culture, prompting a slew of new films representing gecekondu in Turkish cinema. Central to this inquiry will be the intersection of a literary topos—that of “gecekondu”—with a political geography and real urban spaces.