IN 2007, I won a writing fellowship that sent Americans abroad for two years at a time. I had applied for it on a whim. No part of me expected to win the thing. I never thought I would leave New York. I was almost thirty and my friends were coupling off and would soon be making loads of money to support their firstborn. Even as they wished me congratulations, I detected a look of concern on their faces, as if I was crazy to leave all this, as if twenty-nine was a little too late to be finding myself. I had never even been to Turkey before.
The fellowship had been created in the 1920s by Charles Crane, a Russophile and scion of a plumbing-parts fortune, whose company’s in-house magazine, Valve World, published headlines such as “King Hussein of the Hejaz Enjoys the Crane Bathroom.” After World War I, according to his biographer David Hapgood, Crane concluded that “Americans and especially American policy-makers were not well enough informed about the rest of the world,” and began sending young men abroad for sometimes as long as ten years at a time as part of his Institute of Current World Affairs (ICWA). I suspected, given the nascent imperial era in which it was conceived, that the fellowship doubled as some sort of low-grade intelligence-gathering operation. After I moved to Turkey, and Turks began calling me a spy, an American friend suggested that maybe I was a postmodern spy—a spy who didn’t know she was a spy. “Well, it’s true in a way,” he said drily. “Like all foreign correspondents, you’re sending back information that, no matter how you intended it, will no doubt be used in the worst way imaginable.”
The objective of Crane’s fellowship in truth seems more benign. “Each man will be undertaking perhaps as difficult a task as there is, namely, that of interpreting a people, or a group, to itself and to others,” one of ICWA’s early prospectuses read in 1925. “Such a task requires … something beyond hard work and good intentions, something even beyond knowledge; sympathy, insight, the mellowness of time, the gift of expression are indispensable.” In those years, the United States was not yet a superpower. Despite its occupations of the Philippines and Cuba, and its long history of slavery, its image for many abroad was still that of the anti-imperialist, rebel nation, a country that had, for the most part, resisted the worst temptations of colonialism and imperialism, instead preaching an unprecedented kind of liberation theology for the world. When President Woodrow Wilson famously argued in his Fourteen Points speech that all citizens deserved the right to determine their own political fates, he helped inspire leaders from all over the former Ottoman Empire—Eleftherios Venizelos of Greece, Sa’ad Zaghlul of Egypt, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk of Turkey—to fight for independence from foreign rule. In the 1910s, some perceived America as a messiah rescuing the world’s peoples from the evils of Europe.
Yet these foreigners overestimated Wilson’s knowledge of or interest in their part of the world. Wilson had no idea so many ethnicities and religions even existed. “You do not know and cannot appreciate the anxieties that I have experienced,” he admitted, “as a result of many millions of people having their hopes raised by what I have said.” Even forty years later, the Egyptian president and fervent nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser would remind the United States that though the Americans had forgotten the principles of Woodrow Wilson, the Egyptians had not.
Charles Crane understood those hopes. After the war, in early 1919, President Wilson had dispatched Crane and a theologian named Henry Churchill King to travel throughout the former Ottoman Empire. In the spirit of self-determination, Wilson wanted to learn what form of governance these newly liberated peoples desired for themselves. Neither Crane nor King had spent much time in the region before. In those years, the entire army of the United States was one-twentieth the size of Germany’s, and even smaller than Romania’s or Bulgaria’s, and it had no intelligence service in the Middle East, save for a single spy dispatched to Arabia during World War I as a Standard Oil speculator.
Crane and King interviewed thousands of people: Druze and Maronites, Turks and Armenians, Arabs and Jews. What they heard was that the people of the Middle East longed for independence, but they might accept the guardianship of the United States, a country about which they knew little except that it had not enslaved much of the world as had the British and the French. The great Turkish feminist Halide Edip Ad?var said to Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) that the Americans were “the least harmful solution.” Many Arabs, Crane and King reported, even lauded America’s “genuinely democratic spirit” and believed that “America had no territorial or colonial ambitions.” Everywhere people told Crane they loved the American president and some even “knew the Fourteen Points by heart.”
Crane’s was the first survey of its kind. American government officials, however, ignored the findings of the King-Crane Commission, by then fully aware that the British and French had already hatched plans for carving up the region (known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement). Syria and Iraq became countries with haphazardly drawn lines running right through well-established communities, and French and British lackeys were installed as their rulers. President Wilson likely never read Crane’s report.
The events that followed were catastrophic: the Greek-Turkish population exchange, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the dispossession of the Kurds and the Armenians, the subjugation of the Arabs, the rise of dictatorships, and more than a hundred years of turmoil that still lasts to this day. When the King-Crane report was later revealed in Editor & Publisher, the editors wrote that American policy makers’ disregard for the report’s findings was “an awesome spectacle … of how an uninformed democracy might precipitate the gravest consequences.” They went on: “Wonderment has been expressed by Turk, Greek, Arab, Armenian, Jew, Syrian, and Druze, not to mention Europeans, as to what has become of the American Mission and its report, which they all dreamed would bring tranquility and a new order to the troubled Near East.” Middle Easterners never understood what happened to this “Great Hope.”