by Gerard Colby
The slaughter of the Navajo herds would haunt Collier for the rest of his life and might have shattered his ability to continue had it not been for his success in implementing a wide range of health and economic reforms on the reservations. His “Indian New Deal” of 1934 won acclaim throughout Latin America and enhanced the prestige of the Roosevelt administration. Most of the delegates to the Inter-American Indian Conference knew and admired Collier’s work.
Eighteen other governments had sent delegates, and forty-seven Indians were there representing tribes in the hemisphere. Seventy-one social scientists also were on hand, ready and willing to promote indigenismo with an ideological enthusiasm. From such Rockefeller-endowed centers of learning as the University of Chicago, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins came a new school of anthropology and linguistics that proclaimed its dedication to incorporating the Indian peoples into the mainstream of Western society through their tribal cultures, not despite them. Gone were the overt expressions of white supremacy.
All these people would do most of the work of spreading Collier’s “ethnic laboratory” beyond the United States and Mexico to the rest of the hemisphere. Ethnic diversity was central to his Darwinist understanding of the successful evolution of humanity as an adaptable, culturally mutating social animal. He was convinced that through the Indians, diversity would blossom in Western societies, not despite conscious cooperative planning, but because of it.
But only a few of the delegates could play coordinating roles as inter-American leaders of Indian assimilation. Men of such international stature as himself, Moisés Sáenz, and Manuel Gamio were obvious candidates. A balding American Fundamentalist missionary named Cam Townsend was not.
The Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), significantly, was the only large missionary delegation present. Yet, even though it lacked the prestige that comes with advanced degrees or official recognition of one’s government, Cam’s group had direct access to some of the highest officials in Mexico, an influence of which few non-Mexican delegates were aware.
THE DAWN WITHIN THE DUSK
Ambassador Daniels, who hosted Collier at the embassy, was an exception. He had watched the number of Townsend’s linguists grow to thirty-seven by 1940 and he had never seen the missionary commit a diplomatic blunder. Cam took the success of his mission too seriously to allow the Fundamentalist proclivities of his followers to jeopardize it by proselytizing or criticizing the Cárdenas government. Instead, at every opportunity, Cam heaped praise on the Mexican president.
Although he was an unabashed promoter of Cárdenas, Cam demanded “strict neutrality” on government policies from his followers in an effort to silence dissenters. “After all,” he wrote his translators, “who called us to pass judgment upon rulers? Are we not commanded to obey and pray for them?” Cam finally arrived at the bone of contentious debate within SIL: “There is too much at stake for this [criticism] to continue. Twenty million Indians in Latin America wait to see the spirit of the Gospel demonstrated in a way they can comprehend and to read the Word in a language they can understand.” He characterized the criticism of Cárdenas as “half-cocked” and “unbecoming of us who have received so many-courtesies from the government of Mexico.” He asked them to trust God and “recognize your mistake.”21
A few could not, convinced they were being asked to trust Cameron Townsend, not God. They left.
Yet in the conference’s rosy dawn of Pan-American Indianism, even these losses seemed endurable. Seventy-two resolutions were drafted, laying the foundation for a hemispherewide Indian policy covering bilingual education, cultural survival, rural medicine, schools, and the setting up of national Indian institutes. And, of central importance to SIL’s future, an Inter-American Indian Institute was to be based in Mexico City to carry on the hemispheric work, to serve as a clearinghouse for information, and to convene future Inter-American Indian conferences. The Institute would also publish a bimonthly Boletín Indigenista and a quarterly America Indígena to spread the secular good cheer of Indian administration as an experiment in social action research—and benevolent control—that would turn all Latin America into a vast laboratory of ethnic relations.
Cárdenas provided the top personnel, proposing an eight-person executive committee composed of two Mexicans and six men from countries with large Indian populations. There remained only the crucial ingredient of U.S. financial and technical support for the many programs Collier envisioned. Standing in the way of that support was the unresolved issue of the properties of Standard Oil and the other American companies.
Cam attempted to surmount this barrier by writing a straightforward defense of Cárdenas to President Roosevelt. He used the occasion to castigate the oil companies and their “insidious anti-Mexican propaganda” for creating “a very dangerous situation.” He incorporated the letter in The Truth About Mexico’s Oil, which his newly created Inter-American Fellowship sent to every member of Congress. This gave the letter—and him—a prominence beyond the actual limited role he was playing in the international debate. It was a brilliant tactic.
But there was also a desperate tone in Cam’s pamphlet that may have been prompted by angry reactions in the American colony to the recent decisive breakthrough in the oil crisis. On May 1, Sinclair Oil accepted $8.5 million in a separate agreement with Cárdenas.
Standard Oil was furious. So was Secretary of State Hull, who had publicly intervened on April 3 to prevent just such a settlement. Standard’s reasons were obvious. Ambassador Daniels had conveyed them to Roosevelt as early as 1939. The oil companies were “waiting for two elections … in the United States and in Mexico. They hope you will be succeeded by an apostle of the imperialistic Old Stick, and that the successor of Cárdenas will be a rightist who would undo the policies of President Cárdenas.”22 To Cam’s and Daniels’s great relief, the Mexican and American elections of 1940 ended any hope that Standard Oil held for the return of the Mexican oil fields. General Manuel Ávila Camacho won. Cárdenas stood firm for constitutional succession and was confident that Camacho could return the oil wells only at the risk of his head. The Mexican people would simply not allow it.
Then Franklin Roosevelt was elected to an unprecedented third term in November. As evidence of his support to the Mexican government, he sent Vice President-elect Henry Wallace to join Daniels in toasting Camacho’s inauguration. It was one of the few times that the teetotaler Daniels lifted a glass of champagne.
Cam sensed that as a new era was opening, another had closed. There was no sudden light on a road to Damascus turning him toward the Amazon, or even particularly Peru, his next destination. Rather, there was a growing uncertainty in Mexico, as the guiding lights that had led him so far so quickly faded on the stage of power.
Cárdenas’s influence was diminishing rapidly as Camacho consolidated power. Mexico’s “Great Commoner” betrayed a deep sense of bitterness and foreboding in a final message of congratulations to the reelected President Roosevelt:
“As a citizen of a country which has lived a constant tragedy under the pressure of an international capitalism which aspires to control of national, public, and private economies, I also hope that the policy of your government will be affirmed in the sense of a just attitude toward the American countries which have felt themselves crushed under the same pressure.”23
A year later, Cárdenas was physically removed from the political scene when he accepted President Camacho’s appointment to head Mexico’s coastal defenses from a headquarters in Baja California.
The U.S. Embassy was also undergoing a change. Daniels wanted to return home because of his wife’s health. Before he left, the ambassador tried to ease the transition for friends, including the Townsends. He had the missionaries over for dinner, attended a luncheon Cam threw on the roof garden of Hotel Ontario for Mexican officials, and even agreed to take up with Washington Cam’s request for draft exemption for his male translators. Then Daniels was gone.
Cam was approaching
a new stage in his life. And Moisés Sáenz was leading the way, pointing him toward the next field of battle for the Lord. Sáenz had been appointed Mexico’s ambassador to Peru, a land of fabled riches and naked Amazonian warriors who knew none of the borders white men drew on maps.
As his yearnings turned toward Peru’s Bibleless tribes and the wider opportunities offered by the Inter-American Indian Institute, Cam also turned away from the political sympathies that Cárdenas represented. In 1937, he and Cárdenas had visited the site of Zapata’s assassination. The group photograph Townsend took that day shows the grimly determined president surrounded by proud peasants. In his letter to Roosevelt on behalf of SIL’s Mexican benefactor, Cam had spoken freely of the monopolistic nature of the trusts, of “privileged interests that had established strangleholds upon those lands when they were minors … dissidents [who] possess such great financial power that they have been able not only to challenge the very sovereignty of these lands but also to wield a disproportionate influence over our press, our people and our legislators.”24
He would never utter such words again.
Instead, he would set his course along that of the institute Collier and Sáenz had started. He could not foresee the tragedy that was enveloping Collier and his BIA or understand the implication of Collier’s incorporating Beardsley Ruml’s Social Science Research Council into the governing board of the institute’s U.S. section, the National Indian Institute. Alone, now without friends in high places, Cam Townsend did not know that the National Indian Institute was secretly being funded by the president’s new defense-oriented Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, Nelson Rockefeller.
II
WORLD WAR II: THE CRUCIBLE
The average man can hardly realize how widespread is the idea, even in the U.S., that the settling of South America’s interior would give another breathing spell to our civilized world.… I find myself confronted at every turn by the romantic argument that the conquest of South America’s wilderness would do for the Western Hemisphere what the conquest of the West did for the United States at a critical time.
—EARL P. HANSON, JOURNEY TO MANAOS (1938)
8
THE COORDINATOR
A DEBT UNPAID
Nelson Rockefeller owed his life to an Indian—twice. In 1939, he rented an amphibious plane and flew to a remote lake in the mountains of Alaska to hunt big game with three friends and an Indian guide. On the third day Nelson and the guide came upon two bears, a brown grizzly and a giant Kodiak. Nelson chose the larger trophy. He lifted his rifle, sighted on the Kodiak’s huge bulk, and heard the crack of his gun and the whump of a bullet striking home. The bear fell. With the grizzly fleeing into the woods, Nelson thought he was safe.
It all happened so fast that the Indian could not stop him. Nelson leaped forward to check out his prize when the beast, now all hatred and rage, sprung alive.
“Shoot again!” the Indian shouted.
Nelson did, but he was nervous and missed. The wounded bear charged. Nelson just stood there in shock watching almost a ton of claws and teeth roaring down on him. The Indian dropped on a knee to steady his aim and fired. The Kodiak collapsed.
A few days later, Nelson was pursuing easier prey, mountain goats, when he froze on a narrow cliff ledge above a 400-foot drop. Only after five minutes of reassurances was the Indian able to coax him slowly down to safety.
Less than a year later, when asked to help Indians, Nelson was reluctant. Bureau of Indian Affairs Commissioner John Collier wanted Nelson to arrange federal funding for the new National Indian Institute mandated by the Pátzcuaro Conference. Nelson, as head of Roosevelt’s new Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), refused until Roosevelt ordered him to stop stalling.1 When Collier wanted Nelson to support a nutrition study and a soybean project among the impoverished Otomi Indians of Mexico, he again declined. Only public pressure and presidential intervention turned Rockefeller around.
Nelson’s interest in Indians was expedient. He was primarily concerned with extracting the minerals and natural resources from Latin America needed by the U.S. war machine.
Nelson was “the Eager Beaver to end all EB’s,” recalled future Atomic Energy Commission Chairman David Lilienthal. But he was not alone; the Junta came with him. They frequently traveled to Washington, staying at Nelson’s large home on Foxhall Road. Almost all the top CIAA aides stayed there, too, Nelson turning the place into a kind of boardinghouse until late 1941, when Tod and the children came down to stay with him. Nelson had been dutifully productive for the family tree: There were now four offspring.
But Nelson had little time for Tod and the family now. His day began at 6:00 A.M., when he rose to listen to news broadcasts while tanning himself under a sunlamp. Sometimes he raced off to a brisk match of tennis doubles with Vice President Henry Wallace against any two CIAA aides who were naive enough to mention their interest in the game. By 7:45 he had returned, showered, and inspected a lineup of the children at the breakfast table. Here the Rockefeller tradition of reading morning verses from the Bible was continued, supplemented with the innovation of Nelson reading the children articles from the newspapers. While eating, Nelson answered their questions and wrote memos. Then he was off to the office by 8:00 A.M., stuffing packed briefcases into his car and picking up as many as four assistants for a harrowing ride at excessive speed into the capital. “The rest of us were always cringing and mentally putting on the brakes,” one aide remembered. “He didn’t seem to give a damn. But he never had an accident.”2
In his large office in Harry Hopkins’s Commerce Department building, Nelson had adapted the Rockefeller Foundation’s surveys to a military style proper for a wartime commander. The briefing room had the shape of a war room. Mechanical layouts, maps, charts, and graphs recorded the progress of all projects with military precision. A large conference table was hurriedly set up, and lights and a movie projector were installed.
Staff briefings were rehearsed like Radio City musicals. By 10:30 A.M., when top CIAA personnel and representatives from other government offices and departments filed in for their daily briefing, Nelson’s show ran as slick as oil. It was like a never-ending Broadway hit, subject to instant rewriting by the director.
Even lunch offered no relief, limited to a sandwich at the desk over a bull session on ideas, with Nelson making the final decisions and giving the marching orders. The rest of the day was crowded with meetings and lobbying the Hill, offering Nelson his first look at the back rooms of the White House, Washington’s labyrinth of departments and agencies, and the congressional cloakrooms where he enlisted men like Texas’s Sam Rayburn and Rayburn’s protégé, Lyndon Johnson, on his behalf. Nelson was always pushing his ever-lengthening agenda for Latin America. Starting with the meat and potatoes of trade and culture, it soon included the exotic spices of intelligence gathering on political and economic developments, large heaps of propaganda and control over Latin America’s press, and even a liberal dash of postwar economic development. In other words, “a reorientation of the whole Latin American problem from the viewpoint of National Defense.”3
Rockefeller’s CIAA produced radio programs that were broadcast throughout Latin America during World War II.
Source: CIAA Files. U.S. National Archives.
Rockefeller’s CIAA shortwave radio programs blanketed Latin America with propaganda during World War II.
Source: CIAA Files, U.S. National Archives.
NELSON’S GRAND ALLIANCE
Within three months of his becoming Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, Nelson was suddenly threatened with eclipse by another rising star in wartime Washington, General William J. Donovan. Nelson’s senior by twenty-five years and a man of wide experience, Donovan was the president’s newly appointed Coordinator of Information.
“I think there will be a transfer of the Latin American information program from your office to ours,” he bluntly told Rockefeller.4 In desperation, Nelson suggested that t
hey see the president together to resolve the dispute. Donovan rejected the idea. The subject, Donovan announced, was closed.
Nelson was shocked. He had worked hard to build CIAA’s information division. He had expanded shortwave broadcasting facilities to Latin America. He distributed carefully selected recordings and transcripts to radio stations in Latin America for rebroadcasting. He persuaded Hollywood to deny films to theaters showing German or Italian movies and newsreels. The CIAA filled the news vacuum with its own propaganda, producing newsreels, political cartoons, and films featuring the rosier side of American culture and Latin American governments.
Rockefeller’s press division was another big hit. Every month, it saturated Latin America with news and feature stories, locking in about 1,200 newspaper publishers who were dependent on CIAA-subsidized shipments of scarce newsprint on U.S. flagships. Nelson even published his own monthly magazine, aptly entitled En Guardia (“On Guard”), with a circulation of 80,000 by the summer of 1941.
This was an opinion-molding empire Nelson Rockefeller was not about to surrender without a fight.
William Donovan, aged fifty-eight, was a formidable opponent. He had earned the nickname “Wild Bill” in Mexico while serving in General John Pershing’s 1916 expedition against Pancho Villa and had commanded the “Fighting 69th” in World War I. He was respected on Wall Street as one of its cleverest lawyers and had been the Republican party’s conservative candidate to replace Roosevelt as New York’s governor in 1932. Moreover, Donovan had won wide acclaim in intelligence circles by carrying out sensitive missions to Britain, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East in 1940–1941.
