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After Ataturk. He did not have ten or 15 years more. Since his teens he had been drinking and whoring, searching, without finding, some personal peace. He tried marriage once in 1922 to Latife, the daughter of a Smyrna shipowner, but was soon divorced. In 1938, exhausted by periodic debauches and drinking bouts, undermined by diseases, he died. The timing was just right. Kemal Ataturk had held the Turks by the hand just long enough to help, not long enough to crush.
The day after Ataturk's death, he was succeeded as President, legally and peacefully, by his handpicked successor, forceful soldier-administrator Ismet Inonu. For the next dozen years, the Inonu regime tried to maintain the Ataturk pattern. The people were kept on short rein, given few civil and personal liberties, and those grudgingly. But the momentum of progress continued.
In 1946, the Ataturk-Inonu party, the Republican People's Party, won reelection, but only by using shabby tactics. It was the last time. A new, politically conscious opposition had grown up. Ataturk had unleashed forces greater than he; he had made so many new Turks that there was bound to be a new Turkey. In 1950, 88% of the voters went to the polls and swept out the Republican People's Party which had held power uninterruptedly for 27 years. Inonu yielded gracefully. The newborn Democrats took over.
Their President was unspectacular Celal Bayar, an able banker and one of Ataturk's ministers for five years, his Premier for one. This peaceful transfer of power was not the millennium, but it was the closest approach to it in the Middle East. Ataturk's 15 years of ruthless education and preparation had paid off.
"Black Danger." The new regime put an end to excessive state regulation of business. Ataturk had tried to industrialize Turkey through a cumbersome form of state socialism that he labeled étatisme. He developed some industry, but stifled it in red tape and scared away foreign investors. Now, under Bayar, Turkey is one of the few nations in the world heading towards more, not less free enterprise. Foreign investors are encouraged. There have been other reversals of Ataturk policy. Many emancipated Turks now fear "the black danger," the resurgence of the once powerful mullahs. Religion is strong today in Turkey. The country is 98% Moslem. Ataturk relaxed the grip of a reactionary and decadent church, but he could not destroy the faith of his people. Just as Ataturk had taken the best from them, discarded the rest, the Turks are showing a talent for preserving what they think best in his teaching.
Turkey today is still far from Ataturk's goals: 80% of its 21 million people live in mud huts in isolated villages, in half of which there are no primary schools. The currency is soft; inflation has doubled food prices. Much of the land is unfertilized and carelessly utilized. The Turk is poor: he gets a third of the meat that a meat-starved Briton received under austerity; only one in 2,000 owns an automobile. But Turkey's spirit is good, the country is stable, its directon is sound.