by Gerard Colby
Against this mood of dread, the buoyant steps of these young Westerners were a relief. The woman, tall and thin, seemed caught in two eras: While dressed conservatively, she wore her brown hair in the short fashion of the Roaring Twenties. She held her back straight and head high, much like the British aristocrats Gandhi had recently had to face in negotiations. She had, in fact, been raised on an estate that was given to her family by King George III.
Her escort seemed more convivial, perhaps even brash. He returned stares with an easy smile. Introduced to the wizened man, he spoke English with the flat nasal tone of an American from New York. Gandhi recognized the name immediately: It symbolized immense wealth and power. But he only nodded his bald head while his fingers continued to work the cotton on the spinning wheel before him. Monday was Gandhi’s day of silence, reserved for meditation and restoring internal peace. His spinning spoke for him, an eloquent protest against cheap British cloth that used India’s cotton to ruin its own village textiles. To set an example for reviving local weaving to restore the economy and self-respect of the rural villages, Gandhi had assigned a daily quota to himself. This commitment, like his vow of silence, was not to be broken for anyone, even this couple. Instead, he scribbled a note and handed it to the young man: “Come back tomorrow. I’ll talk to you.”1
Nelson Rockefeller was not used to having his presence treated so casually, let alone dismissed. Kings, presidents, prime ministers, industrialists, bankers, scholars, poets, religious leaders—all had welcomed him warmly during this global honeymoon. All seemed to respond to his father’s name as if it could work magic. Even Lord Irwin, viceroy of India and Gandhi’s powerful opponent, had shown the Rockefellers the courtesies due their august station, seating Mary “Tod” Rockefeller beside him at the royal banquet at the new Viceregal Palace.
The seriousness of resolve he sensed around Gandhi was in marked contrast with the expensive week-long festivities he and Tod had participated in, celebrating the opening of New Delhi’s vast government forum. Gandhi had denounced “the waste of money on architectural piles” that had no relation to India’s villages, the source of Indian identity. His colleague, Jawaharlal Nehru, had been more blunt; he condemned the “elaborate show” and derided the Viceregal Palace where Nelson and Tod dined with Lord Irwin and eighty others as “the chief temple where the High Priest officiated.”2 Now, in this simple courtyard, Nelson stood before a half-naked old man who held the loyalty of millions of Indians.
Nelson agreed to return. For the first time in his twenty-two years, he was personally witnessing a fateful confrontation in world affairs, one that controlled the prospects for peace—or mass violence—for a whole subcontinent. He was fascinated.
Nelson had been a boy during World War I, and his family’s enormous wealth had insulated him from the harsher realities of the world. Dartmouth had not altered this innocence. Nestled in the green hills of New Hampshire far from the challenge of urban life, Dartmouth was one of the more sheltered Ivy League schools. But now that he had graduated and married, Nelson Rockefeller was determined to see more of the tumultuous side of life.
THROUGH THE TWILIGHT OF COLONIALISM
From the beginning, it was not as Nelson and Tod had expected. From the day that one of Junior’s chief aides saw the newlyweds off at the railroad station with a bouquet of flowers, the couple found themselves shadowed by people associated with Rockefeller interests or entranced by the power of his grandfather’s name.
Nelson quickly learned that Rockefeller was more than a famous name; it was a symbol of something deeper, almost mysterious. In his eagerness to join the adult world, he had plunged into marriage without understanding the enormity of his inheritance. It was only on this trip that he was introduced to the first and most obvious reality of his name: that his life, his destiny, was to be bound to an empire from which there was no escape. At almost every stop or port of call from Hawaii to Manchuria, the newlyweds were greeted by officials of Standard Oil or by doting representatives of the railroads and steamship lines they used. And through most of their honeymoon, they were shepherded by a distinguished-looking white-haired man and his wife.
The older couple were charming and informative, but it was obvious that the man was more than a traveling companion. George Vincent, until the previous year president of the Rockefeller Foundation, had a mission. The Rockefeller fortune and its philanthropies had changed course, toward the Third World. This decision would profoundly influence the future not only of Nelson Rockefeller, but of the world.
Their trip was more an inspection tour by visiting royalty than a honeymoon. Like suffering royalty, the newlyweds endured the heavy schedule of up to seven events a day, racing through an endless series of visits to heads of state, educators, and scientists. After a brief escape through a typhoon to the Philippines, they steamed south into the Dutch East Indies, where Nelson bought his first piece of primitive art, a portentous knife handle shaped like a shrunken head. Standard Oil of New Jersey was here, too. The company had recently used State Department pressure on Holland to obtain the rights to 625,000 acres, a refinery for its oriental markets (then, one-third of all its foreign sales), and a joint marketing subsidiary with Standard Oil of New York.
Junior may have hoped that this trip would deepen Nelson’s appreciation of his heritage by giving him a sobering taste of the non-European world, but it accomplished the opposite. In Bangkok, the new U.S. ambassador, a veteran of Latin America, was trying to warn his fellow diplomats that time was running out for colonialism. Shortly after the Rockefellers arrived, he threw a Christmas party on the embassy grounds, which drew a large crowd of Siamese children. The ambassador personally served American ice cream and showed Hollywood movies.
Nelson was impressed at “this unheard of contact with the masses.” He had begun to have a different view of European diplomats since his wide-eyed tours during college vacations. American diplomats aping British ways looked less impressive in the Third World, where Victorian arrogance won few friends and much enmity. Nelson bristled at this narrow-mindedness of American businessmen, and the disinclination he already felt toward a business career stiffened.
“I’m sorry to say,” he wrote his father from Sumatra, “that seeing and hearing so much about … business doesn’t make me very keen to go into it. It seems to squeeze all other interests out of the men’s lives that are in it.”3
It was in the realm of politics that the honeymoon probably had its greatest impact on Nelson’s life. The trip awakened his interest in foreign affairs and developed his sensitivity toward nationalist feelings. Nelson saw the inglorious side of European colonialism and was particularly disturbed by the racial discrimination of expatriates toward the people of their host countries. On a boat ride up Burma’s Irrawaddy River, for instance, young European aristocrats on board loudly mocked the Burmese. Nelson winced when even the captain of the boat, trying to fend off the arrogance they directed at him, joined in, calling his Burmese crew “worthless” and claiming that they constantly needed his discipline. Members of the crew, he assured Nelson and Tod, were not allowed in the captain’s office unless they removed their shoes.
Nelson was mortified, and he showed it. His sympathy for the crew may have saved his and Tod’s lives. At Bhamo, a small town at the northern tip of their trip, “we were walking on shore when one of the crew ran to tell us to turn back because there was plague in the village.… It was a very decent thing for him to do.”4
Nelson could not help contrasting the thoughtful behavior of nationals with the arrogance of British colonialists, especially when he and Tod discovered “that the British considered us as colonials.”5
He also witnessed the sad indignity of U.S. foreign officers mimicking the attitudes and practices of their British mentors. “All of these things left a very strong impression,” he confessed, “and one which we felt boded little good for future relations with those countries. It was evident we were not handling ourselves as a people a
broad in a way that developed confidence or respect.”6
Nelson found nationalism sweeping Asia, where local communists were willing, with alarming frequency, to take personal risks to lead anticolonial movements into broader social revolutions. Yet it was Gandhi, a pacifist, who gave young Rockefeller his most stirring experience with the growing power of anti-colonial movements.
THE GANDHI ENCOUNTER
At the time of their visit, Gandhi had just been released from a British jail. In contrast to American businessmen and their Tory mentors, Britain’s new Labor government was offering valuable lessons in a more modern method of colonialism in the Third World. The MacDonald government was attempting to implement Indirect Rule. Since the murderous debacle of World War I had stripped Europe of its aura of moral superiority—along with much of its treasure—the British Empire’s subject populations had proved less willing to be made over in the image of white Europeans.
Diehard colonialists, like characters in E. M. Forster’s recent A Passage to India, could still seize the arguments of social Darwinists for the need for firm guardianship over, rather than “sentimental” compassion for, the “children of the dark world.” But the higher echelons in the Labor government had come to realize that such an attitude, although sufficient to motivate British colonial officers in the field, could no longer work as an effective colonial policy. They desperately wanted to end the huge civil-disobedience campaigns being led by Gandhi.7 Britain was “anxious to retain the cooperation of moderate politicians at least in creating the new constitutional structures which it hoped would be the buttress of a new imperial order. Consequently the British did a deal with Gandhi. They resurrected their old technique of alliance with a notable who could bring his followers with him, and in so doing reinforced his continental standing.”8 Within two years, they would discard Gandhi, choosing to repress the 1932 civil-disobedience campaign and refusing to deal with him.
Nelson was prepared to sympathize with Gandhi. He gained an invitation through a visit to Ambalal Sarabhai, one of the many Indian textile manufacturers who hoped to gain control over India’s economic policies by funding the nationalist movement, believing that Gandhism was the only alternative to communism. Accompanying Sarabhai’s family on the train to Delhi, Nelson and Tod were again confronted with British racism. “We created quite a stir on the way as it seems the English don’t exactly travel in company with Indians,” he recalled. “Something like our colored situation—and, of course, we ate with them in the diner.”9
Nelson’s meeting with Gandhi, which had to be delayed for two days because of the tense negotiations and conferences with other Congress leaders, left a strong emotional impression.
“Gandhi came out looking pretty tired, but very cheerful,” Nelson wrote home. The Mahatma had just completed his most critical meeting with the British viceroy, Lord Irwin, at two o’clock that morning and gotten to bed at 4 A.M. only three hours before the Rockefellers arrived. They drove to an old Mogul fort at the edge of Old Delhi, where Gandhi liked to walk. A dark bank of clouds had rolled over the city; Indra, the ancient Hindu god of war, began thundering her drums in the heavens.
“We have finally come to our agreement with the Viceroy,” Gandhi said, his eyes shining behind gold-rimmed spectacles. “There will be one more conference later today to arrange all the details.”10 It had been a critical meeting, one that would cement Britain’s most important colony to an indefinite future, but under Indirect Rule.
Gandhi walked with the Rockefellers, answering their questions. “He told us his whole background, his relation with the British,” Nelson later recalled. “It gave me the Indian point of view.”11 Gandhi spoke about the negotiations, praising Lord Irwin; he had been elated by the outcome.
As Gandhi and the Rockefellers returned to the house where he was staying, Gandhi concluded by explaining that the Indian people could never fulfill their destiny within the British Empire. Then he said good-bye and walked back to his colleagues in the courtyard.
Sunlight broke through the clouds, and Nelson was swept with the feeling that he had been privileged to witness a rare moment in history. The initiative seemed to belong to Gandhi and Lord Irwin. Through anguish and turmoil, the British had learned, in India at least, how to strike a modus vivendi with nationalist uprisings through Indirect Rule. It was a lesson not to be forgotten.
Humiliations by the British had cemented Nelson’s antipathy toward colonialism. They nurtured in him a growing conviction that Americans, with their anticolonial origins as a nation and their uncommon wealth and military power, had something unique to offer the Third World.
It was only natural, then, that having discerned in Asia the twilight of Victorian colonialism, Nelson would, on returning home, also wonder what would replace the British Empire. Was there an inheritance even larger, historically greater, and more urgent than that of his family?
FACING THE INDIAN REVOLUTION
After his return from his honeymoon, Nelson threw himself into the operations of Rockefeller Center. Derided by one architect as a “graceless bulk,” it was rising into the skies above midtown Manhattan. To many, the erection of the Center’s five buildings—particularly its seventy-two-story skyscraper—in the midst of the Great Depression was itself a travesty, the giant proportions of its architecture symbolic of the previous decade of sin. Nelson worked feverishly to attract tenants in a city that simply did not need new office space. Rumors soon began to fly of Nelson’s aggressive ways.
Junior’s misgivings grew. There had been other disagreements in the family office, including Nelson’s decision to accept a seat on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In fact, Special Work, his real estate firm for the Center, had become Nelson’s excuse for escaping the staid office and its constraints. If his older brother, John 3rd, wished to accept a life sentence, so be it. But Nelson had bigger dreams.
His mother, Abby, had always encouraged those dreams in her favorite boy. A lover of the arts and one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art, she backed Nelson’s election to the museum’s board in 1932. It was through this shared appreciation of modern art, which his father loathed, that Nelson first came in contact with Mexico’s most celebrated artist, Diego Rivera. He did not foresee that the part-Indian artist would be the catalyst for his first confrontation with Latin America’s spreading revolution.
Nelson did not come up with the idea of a Rivera mural for the Center. That suggestion came from a representative of the Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico, Mrs. Francis Flynn Paine. Through Paine’s influence, Rivera had been commissioned to paint the murals in the San Francisco Stock Exchange and Henry Ford’s Detroit Technical Institute. Impressed by the power of his work, Paine recommended Rivera to Abby, sure that his murals would conform to the orthodox version of American history and “progress as accelerated by the discovery and large use of petroleum.”12
Junior, as usual, objected futilely. Backed by his mother, Nelson prevailed. Abby was intrigued by Rivera. High spirited and possessed of a streak of bohemianism, Abby had little trouble asserting her independence from her husband when it came to art.
Nelson had reasons beyond art for selecting Rivera, business reasons. Diego Rivera represented exactly the kind of mix of controversy and quality that the new Rockefeller Center needed to draw crowds of tourists.
As soon as Rivera arrived in March 1933, a furor of speculation erupted over what he was going to paint. Day after day, Nelson would pass by the painter’s tall scaffolds in the Center’s lobby and crane his neck to watch Rivera’s assistants sketch the outline of a great scene across 63 feet of wall 17 feet high. At first it was difficult to make out the shapes. But contrary to his later claims, Nelson knew most of what would appear. In November, Abby had approved Rivera’s sketch for the mural and its accompanying synopsis. The mural was to be a salute to science, with Jupiter capturing lightning as a source of electricity and the “Man of Science” presenting “the scale of Natural Evolution, the un
derstanding of which replaces the Superstition of the past.” It was also to present a vivid political portrayal of tyranny, war, and rebellion by the laboring classes.
“My panel will show the Workers arriving at a true understanding of their rights regarding the means of production,” Rivera wrote Abby. “It will also show the Workers of the cities and the country inheriting the Earth.…
“… on the left, a group of unemployed workers in a breadline. Above this group … an image of War, as in the case of Unemployment, the result of the evolution of Technical Power unaccompanied by a corresponding ethical development.”13
The Rockefellers, of course, had another, less concrete vision: “Our theme is NEW FRONTIERS,” they wrote Rivera during the negotiations, “… Man cannot pass up his pressing and vital problems by ‘moving on.’ He has to solve them on his own lot. The development of civilization is no longer lateral, it is inward and upward. It is the culmination of man’s soul and mind, and coming into a fuller comprehension of the meaning and mystery of life.”14
It was, in many ways, a statement reflecting its time. The Great Depression was viewed as the punishment of an angry God against a decade of hedonism. Reform, personal and national, was now the order of the day, the New Frontier having become internal and spiritual, rather than external and materialistic.
