by Gerard Colby
This divine calling had never seemed more certain than during the second camp for prospective Bible translators, now called Camp Wycliffe, in honor of John Wycliffe, the sixteenth-century translator of the Bible into English. At the suggestion of a visiting lecturer from the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, Cam was leading his students in prayer for an “open door” to Mexico for Protestant missionaries. For a full, aching morning, the faculty and students knelt. And no sooner had they risen at noon for lunch than “someone arrived from town to report” that the local radio station had announced that President Cárdenas had fired his entire cabinet. Elated, the students were eager to follow “Uncle Cam” into Mexico that autumn. God, it seemed, had answered their prayers with a miracle. What better sign could there be that Cameron Townsend’s vision had the Lord’s blessing?
Cam did not tell the youths that the news was only late in arriving at Sulphur Springs. Cárdenas, in fact, had fired his cabinet weeks before, shortly after former president Plutarco Calles critcizied Cárdenas’s pro-labor policy on June 12. The news had already been printed in the national press. Why it was not reported in Sulphur Springs until that miraculous day of prayer was never discovered.
When his students followed Cam to Mexico City that September, they thought that the “fanatical atheists” were out. They were wrong. Rafael Ramírez, the atheist who had succeeded to Moisés Sáenz’s old post as director of rural education, was still in. This situation was actually to Cam’s benefit. Cam had cultivated Ramírez as his means of boring into Mexican officialdom. It was Ramírez, in fact, who wrote Townsend the previous June of an earlier cabinet shake-up: by June 1935 the anti-religious education minister, Narciso Bassols, had already been removed.29
CAM’S “LINGUISTIC INVESTIGATORS”
A few months later, Cam and his recruits were in Mexico City to attend the seventh Inter-American Scientific Congress at the Palace of Fine Arts. The missionary, spotting Ramírez, worked his way through the crowd and, in front of everyone, embraced him like an old friend. Ramírez, apparently taken aback, responded cordially. But he did introduce Cam to three powerful officials in the Cárdenas government: the secretary of labor, the secretary of the Congress’s Division on Indians, and the director of the Mexican Institute of Linguistic Investigation.
Although these men came from three separate fields—labor, anthropology, and linguistics—they were all dedicated to pursuing Cárdenas’s interest in setting up a Department of Indian Affairs along lines originally proposed by Moisés Sáenz: educating and integrating the Indian into modern Mexican society. A key component of this process was linguistics. When Cam heard from the officials that the Mexican government was interested in pursuing linguistic studies among the Indians, he leaped at the opportunity. He presented his followers as “linguistic investigators,” rather than missionaries.30
If this linguistic cover was not deep (since the Mexicans already knew of Cam’s interest in Bible translation), it at least carried the option of plausible denial for Mexican officialdom. So did Cam being invited to join the Linguistic Society of America, a small organization founded the year before by the father of modern anthropology, Franz Boas. Cam immediately saw the advantage of membership in the society and put it to use: The society became the official sponsor of Townsend’s group and the financial conduit for donations from Legter’s Pioneer Mission Agency.31
Years later, the Inter-American Scientific Congress would be described by Townsend’s followers as the birthplace of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). It was also the birthplace of SIL’s active collaboration with Rockefeller allies. Here Cam gained entrée to the Rockefeller-funded world of indigenismo, an international movement of liberal anthropologists and other social scientists in the Americas.
Foremost among the movement’s Mexican adherents was Moisés Sáenz. Sáenz was aware of the recommendations of the 1926 survey of American Indian conditions that had been funded by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Released in 1928, Lewis Meriam’s The Problem of Indian Administration grasped a central truth: The fundamental grievance among America’s restless Indians was the loss of their lands. Meriam called for the curtailment of leasing Indian land to white settlers, repeal of the Dawes Allotment Act that had seized and parceled communal land, and revolving loans to help Indians buy back lands and administer their resources with government aid.32
At the same time the Meriam report was circulating among indigenistas in North and South America, Sáenz was exploring the return of Indian village communal lands, or ejidos, to their original owners in Mexico. He had discussed these policies with Frank Tannenbaum when the latter was doing his survey of Mexican conditions in the late 1920s, and he had exchanged ideas with John Collier during the latter’s visits to Mexico in 1930 and 1931. In 1934, Collier, by then Roosevelt’s commissioner of Indian Affairs, invited Sáenz to Washington to participate in a conference devoted to overhauling a corrupt BIA with major social and economic reforms.33 After consultations with leading social scientists in the Rockefeller funding orbit, Collier devised the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which included, among its most far-reaching reforms, the restoration of tribal lands, Indian self-government, and the creation of economic cooperatives.
What Cam found in Mexico was strikingly similar. President Cárdenas intended to go beyond Sáenz’s proposals; he advocated not only the greater return of ejidos, but also granting Indians control over their agricultural and industrial production and a larger share of their revenues. By breaking up haciendas and redistributing land, the government could also give the Indians some measure of economic power, perhaps enough to facilitate their entry into local and national decision-making circles on a more equal basis.
At the Inter-American Scientific Congress, Cam got his first look at Lázaro Cárdenas, a husky, big-boned man with dark brown hair and a short bushy mustache. Cam whispered to his students that Cárdenas was called “the ‘Peasant’s President.’ He shocked the Mexican aristocracy by moving from the presidential palace into a middle class home.”34 Sáenz, however, was not at the Congress. (He was serving as Cárdenas’s Mexican ambassador to Ecuador.) The mantle of indigenismo leadership in Mexico had fallen on the shoulders of Dr. Manuel Gamio, a man long associated with Rockefeller-funded institutions.
Gamio’s record was impressive. During the 1920s, he completed a monumental study of the Mayan civilization and its descendants in Yucatán, inaugurating an interdisciplinary approach by integrating archaeology, history, anthropology, and sociology. He subsequently renewed his association with the University of Chicago, for which he undertook to study the conditions of Mexican immigrant workers in the United States, funded by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund. Gamio’s next foreign study was a trip to Japan in 1929 to examine soybean production on the invitation of the Rockefeller-funded Institute for Pacific Affairs.35
Now, under Cárdenas, Gamio’s star was again in ascendance. Within a few years, as wartime head of the Inter-American Indian Institute, he would play an important role in the growth of Cameron Townsend’s influence in the hemisphere.
The Inter-American Scientific Congress was a turning point in Cam’s life. It provided him with contacts and scientific insights about assimilating Indians that few of his missionary peers possessed. This exposure to social science would give his SIL followers a scope and depth of knowledge unique within the Fundamentalist mainstream, helping ensure their status as the crème de la crème of American Fundamentalist missionaries.
Another great unseen but felt authority over the congress was Dr. Robert Redfield of the University of Chicago. Redfield had pioneered the Mexican field for American anthropology, first, as a compiler of oral histories of Mexican immigrants and then as an investigator of Tepoztlán, a village south of Mexico City. Since his arrival there in 1926, Redfield had witnessed the painful effort of its people to return to normalcy after the civil war that followed the revolution of 1910. Redfield realized that as the pace of change quickened with Euro-American
expansion into Third World countries, so would the need for individuals who could accommodate themselves to—rather than resist—the change.
The implications of all these factors for the indigenous nonwhite majority of the world were enormous. The penchant for social engineering, whether exercised by “enlightened” missionaries like Cameron Townsend or future foreign policy architects like Nelson Rockefeller, would never be fully overcome.
Peaceful integration, respect for Indian culture, reforms in education—these made up the heady brew Cam gulped down at the congress. Kenneth Pike, his most promising young translator, was deeply impressed. The would-be missionary had already decided to say good-bye to his fellow Camp Wycliffe students when they left for home and to proceed south to the mountains of Oaxaca to study the language of the Mixtec Indians.
For Townsend, there would be less isolation from the seat of power and more collegial comfort. He had been advised at the congress to start his work in the Aztec village of Tetelcingo, sixty miles south of Mexico City. Tetelcingo was described as one of the most “backward” Indian villages in Mexico, a euphemism for those traditional communities that were less assimilated into the national culture and its political consensus. In fact, it was a hotbed of Zapatism in the most revolutionary valley in rural Mexico, Morelos.
BEHIND THE MIRACLE OF TETELCINGO
As Cam and Elvira’s Buick and trailer descended 3,000 feet into Morelos, the valley offered an imposing panorama. Blessed with a pleasant climate, thermal waters, and fertile soil with luxurious vegetation, Morelos had been called the “Site of Eternal Spring” by the Aztecs. It had been a center of Indian settlement for centuries before Hernán Cortés marched his conquistadores through the valley, attacking the Indians’ adobe villages and erecting his palace in the resort town of Aztec royalty, Cuernavaca.
Tetelcingo was one of the 5,000 other Indian villages in Mexico that still collectively owned some 45,000 square miles in 1854. Then the descendants of Spanish settlers declared themselves independent of Madrid, and in the name of liberty, equality, and a free market, civil communities were barred from holding lands. In a precedent for what would happen thirty years later in the United States under the Dawes Act, communal land was seized, subdivided, and parceled out to individual Indians. Most of the Indians of Morelos saw their lands fall into the hands of speculators and giant plantations, or haciendas. By 1910, more than 90 percent of the population was landless and desperately poor, a direct result of the spread of haciendas that made Morelos, after the new U.S. colonies of Hawaii and Puerto Rico, the third largest producer of sugar in the world.36
This was the reason the valley gave such widespread support to Emiliano Zapata. With his wide-brimmed sombrero perched above fiery dark eyes and a long, bushy mustache, Zapata was the giant of the Mexican Revolution. His program of land reform based on ejidos repossessed from the haciendas struck terror in privileged circles. Zapata became the living symbol of peasant revolution in the Third World and of the specter of Indian revolt that had always hung over the Americas. But to most of the Indians of Morelos, the illiterate Zapata was simply a son of the valley, a courageous and brilliant man who had dared to lead their resistance against exploitation and dictatorship.
For almost a decade, while the United States looked on with increasing anxiety, twice sending in forces to intervene in the civil war in the north and east, the campesinos of Morelos in the south fought back the armies of four central governments that repeatedly attacked and sacked the villages for daring to follow Zapata’s land reform.
Zapata was assassinated in 1919, betrayed into an ambush by forces loyal to President Venustiano Carranza’s “Constitutionalist” government. Carranza, in turn, was overthrown the following year by two of his top generals. One, Alvaro Obregón, became president. The other, Obregón’s chief of staff, was Aarón Sáenz. Aarón would become one of Mexico’s wealthiest sugar barons. He would also become an ally of William Cameron Townsend.
Defeated and subdued, the people of Morelos began to stream down from the hills where they had taken refuge during the war. They found razed homes, slaughtered cattle, and an annulled agrarian reform.
The memory of Zapata still haunted the valley when the Townsends arrived in 1935. The Great Depression had devastated world sugar prices for the smaller cane growers in Morelos. It also meant rising unemployment and fewer, larger refineries, with ownership concentrated in fewer hands. The real power in Morelos, Cam learned, was an American, William Jenkins, owner of the region’s largest sugar mill at Atencingo in the fertile valley of Matamoros. A rich American getting richer off Indian labor and 304,000 acres of once-Indian lands, Jenkins was a predictable target for protests. Zapatista villagers challenged his Atencingo landholdings, and soon Zapatistas in Morelos were also challenging his control over the sugar haciendas. The distribution of fertile lands had been slow, and the villagers had become increasingly militant in their demands. President Cárdenas was suddenly confronted with the prospect of severe unrest.
Once again, the seeds of Indian revolution surged through the valley. Violence was also intensifying between Zapatistas and right-wing religious fanatics. Former members of the Catholic Cristero movement of the 1920s had murdered seventy-five rural teachers in the past year.37
These were not the kind of conditions that inspired foreigners, much less a gringo with an ailing wife, to go to Morelos. But years later, Cam would claim that he accepted the Morelos challenge so Elvira’s heart condition could benefit from Tetelcingo’s climate. He seemed untroubled by those who questioned this or his other rationale, the need to bring the Bible to Bibleless tribes. But if there was any urgent need for Bible translators in Morelos, the facts did not suggest it. Illiteracy did afflict 60 percent of the population, but Morelos was more literate than twelve other states, seven of which were areas with higher Indian populations. In Morelos, in fact, just 1 percent of the state spoke only an indigenous language, whereas in other states, the need for translators was much greater. Yet Morelos became the launching pad for Cam’s success.
Decades later, Cam offered a clue to the riddle of his appearance in Tetelcingo. After moving into the valley, he paid a visit to the U.S. Embassy at Ambassador Daniels’s request and prepared a report for Washington on the effect of Cárdenas’s programs on the Indians of Morelos.
Townsend’s four-page report reflected the ambassador’s concerns that Cárdenas, like Roosevelt, was under unfair criticism from conservative businessmen for alleged “communistic” policies.
“Certain radical elements in the Cabinet were endeavoring to use the school system for communistic and atheistic propaganda,” the missionary wrote. But now “the radical leaders had been dismissed from office and the bitter broadsides of atheism and communism with which official and semi-official periodicals have been filled before were little in evidence. There seemed to be in progress a swing back to the original principles of the Mexican Revolution and away from the extreme ideals which are Russian rather than Mexican.”
Cam was not shy about revealing his vast ambitions. “Indo-America presents a vast field for linguistic research which is almost untouched and our Institute hopes to locate five hundred trained linguists during the next two decades among primitive tribes not only of the three Americas but also the Philippine Islands, the East Indies.”38 This was Cam’s first serious attempt to impress upon U.S. government officials his usefulness as an informant on local conditions.
Washington had always relied to some extent on the political intelligence provided by travelers and missionaries, such as Townsend. On the international level, Mexico was potentially the most powerful Caribbean nation, and certainly the most avowedly revolutionary. Cárdenas, like Roosevelt, represented a chance for peaceful reform without scrapping the general framework of private enterprise.
This was true for U.S. domestic politics as well. Back in the United States, Roosevelt was trying to resist growing pressure from business and Catholic circles to intervene militarily i
n Mexico. He knew that winning allies in Latin America was contingent on a policy of nonintervention. Now he was facing a tough reelection. It helped having a firsthand report by a Fundamentalist missionary that challenged tales in the U.S. press of Mexican girls being forced to parade naked in public schools for the “sex education” of boys39 or charges that religious persecution continued under Cárdenas.
Cam, aided by gifts from the Ministry of Labor (including a truck, no mean symbol of prestige, which Cam taught villagers to drive) and by money from the director of rural education to buy plants and fruit trees, worked hard at planting a garden in the town square. With the mayor as his language informant, Cam tried to master Tetelcingo’s melodious Aztec dialect. The garden served as proof that Cam was the exception to the revolutionaries’ rule that “religious workers were parasites.”40 Even Elvira was encouraged to start a sewing class for the Indian women.
But for all their efforts, they remained gringos, living out of their trailer in the center of a town of cornstalk huts with thatched roofs. Elvira spent much of her time in bed, seldom mixing with the villagers. Cam’s vegetable garden, for all his work, was not a permanent change; it disappeared after his departure. But his vegetables had served another purpose by then: impressing Cárdenas with his earnestness, for Cam’s embassy report had reached the president, and the Protestant chief of state decided to honor the American missionary with a visit.
THE ULTIMATE MIRACLE
Behind this monumental moment in Cam’s life was the threat of a coup. After Cam called on him in early December, Ambassador Daniels toured northern Mexico with Cárdenas to show U.S. support as the president took his case for reform into the stronghold of business critics. They capped their tour with a stop at the industrial center of Monterrey, the home of the Sáenz family Right-wing demonstrations had recently ended there in violence. The political nature of these protests was clearly stated in a leaflet given to Daniels charging that “the entire people endure with profound loathing the application of the theories and principles which have converted Russia into an inferno, and which threaten to convert Mexico into the Russian branch of America.… When twelve million Indians and half-breeds scarcely removed from savagery hurl themselves on cities and towns in a wave of destruction, then it will be too late to save ourselves; now there is still time.”41
