Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  Source: CIAA Files, U.S. National Archives.

  The U.S. government left nothing to chance, hiring anthropologists, according to Kluckhohn, to serve in “Military Intelligence, the Department of State, OSS, Board of Economic Warfare, the Strategic Bombing Survey, the Military Government, Selective Service Organization, Office of Naval Intelligence, the Office of War Information, the FBI, … the medical branch of the Army Air Forces and Chemical Warfare Division.”16

  SIL, with its growing expertise in linguistics, proved equally useful. “The U.S. Government,” Cam announced to SILers in November 1943, “has asked the Summer Institute of Linguistics to give its courses to one hundred army and navy officers, beginning May 1st.… The Government will pay $1,000 a month for the instruction.” Cam hoped for a quid pro quo. “May we not expect that some of the officers will become Bible translators after the war?”17

  THE LACONDÓN CHALLENGE

  While Cam’s SIL was being drawn into Rockefeller’s orbit, Cam’s old friend, Frank Tannenbaum, remained true to John Collier’s progressive wing of the Indianist movement. As if in response to Tax’s 1942 expedition, Tannenbaum joined archaeologist Franz Blom and Mexico’s J. E. Palacios in their own expedition to the Lacondóns in 1943.

  Blom was an old hand. He had first entered the jungles of southern Mexico in 1919 when oil, not Indians, was his primary concern. Intrigued by the Mayan ruins he found, Blom gave up oil and took up archaeology. He was the first man to map the Lacondón area as part of a 1925 ethnographic survey of the Maya.

  The results of Blom’s current expedition belied SIL’s raison d’être among the Lacondóns. The Lacondóns, the expedition found, were living under better conditions than when they were last studied by the government in 1936. Now crops were in evidence, and the whiskey that reflected the exploitation of lumber and gum in the mountains was gone. And, most important, Spanish was now widely spoken.18

  Cam nevertheless thought that Bible translators were needed for the Lacondóns. His belief was confirmed when Ken Pike returned with the good news from Peru. Cam showed his followers that, for SIL at least, more was at stake with the Lacondóns than their souls. As Tax began his second Rockefeller expedition to the Lacondóns in 1944, Cam traveled to the end of the Lacondón jungle, to the Bulnes family’s Finca El Real, and sought out its owner, Jaime Bulnes.

  Jaime’s mother was an American named Mannie Flanagan, a claimed relative of the McCormicks, Nelson Rockefeller’s cousins and owners of large henequen plantations in the Yucatán. Bulnes & Company had some unused land19 that Cam wanted. It was a choice parcel. Called “Yashaquintala,” or “where the green water flows,” by local Tzeltal Indians, it was a beautiful site beside a large river that led into the Lacondón forest, perfect for canoeing and camping. It also had enough cleared land for a landing strip for the airplanes Cam still envisioned crossing the jungles.

  Jaime Bulnes was at first reluctant to sell. But Cam soon convinced Bulnes to travel with him back to Mexico City. Whomever Cam took Bulnes to see was persuasive: Bulnes not only gave Cam a long-term lease, but built huts for SIL’s first training session. These huts constituted the Main Base. Deeper in the jungle, and barred to outsiders, was the crux of the operation: the Advance Base.

  The new recruits would call it Jungle Camp when they arrived the following year. But it was really SIL’s boot camp, a grueling initiation rite into a closed society where mostly young recruits from suburbs and small towns were thrown on the mercies of SIL leaders for survival. Trainees were put through endurance swimming, steering down rapids in dugout canoes, and an intensive physical workout each day. At night they were required to take turns giving testimony to their surrender to the Lord. As the physical training exhausted their bodies, lectures and confessions around nightly campfires exhausted their emotions. The only respites were evenings spent alone in the black jungle, suspended in hammocks under trees alive with howls and gnats, or with one of the Tzeltal families whom Cam had recruited into a network of language informants for the trainees to use for linguistic drills. Hikes were arranged to visit Lacondón homes, among whom Cam had already placed two translators; to help Tax and Blom excavate a Mayan pyramid; or to help mahogany lumbermen survey a river valley so that more of the Lacondóns’ forest could be cut away.20

  Like U.S. Marine recruits at Parris Island, trainees forged personal bonds that would last a lifetime; unlike U.S. Marine recruits, however, SILers seldom experienced anything in the future as punishing as Jungle Camp.

  But SILers came out of it well prepared for the worst, perhaps too well prepared—their cultural insularity was actually reinforced. And with few exceptions, they also came out loyal to their new Wycliffe “family,” even to the point of accepting SIL’s censorship of their letters used as circulars to friends and family back home who financially supported the missionaries.

  Christmas 1944 saw the Townsends at Al Johnson’s spacious Hollywood home, where Cam set to work on a biography of Cárdenas. On December 23, just as Cam and Elvira were climbing into bed, Elvira collapsed in Cam’s arms gasping for air. Within twenty-four hours, she was dead. Cam’s hectic pace had finally exacted its toll.

  At the Johnson-paid funeral in Glendale, California, Cam was too shattered to speak. He had written an eloquent speech, but it was more about himself than his wife and ended in a passionate call not for Elvira, but for his own crusade. Dawson Trotman read it for him:

  If I have permitted hardships, dangers, pleasures, and the powerful chords of human love to swerve me at times from full obedience, henceforth, “none of these things shall move me.”…

  This pledge is not taken lightly. It has been burned into my soul, and though the branding processes have not been easy, the pain now seems like nothing as I visualize the fruit and joy of a truly all-out effort for my Savior and the unevangelized tribes that need Him so.

  The task of giving God’s Word to all the peoples of the earth can be finished in this generation.21

  Elvira was then lowered into her grave.

  Cam would remarry within a year and a half, this time to one of his young recruits, a strong woman half his age who, his biographer would affirm, “never questioned his leadership.”22

  Like all his recruits, she followed him into the Green Hell.

  10

  THE SHINING DREAM

  THE RUBBER PLOY

  At the end of 1941, Berent Friele, the CIAA man in Brazil, received a letter from Brazil’s agricultural director for the Amazon. It was a rapturous description of the immense riches of the Amazon:

  petroleum at the sources of the Juruá; rubber at the head of the Madeira river, north of Mato Grosso; gold in the bowels of the formation of our Amazon archaean … as well as in the virgin lands of Rondonia; fibers for coarse textiles, from the archaean to the quartenary lands of the Amazon valley; meat of every sort to be obtained from the transformation of the forests of the low Amazon into ever green pastures; coal in the Pennsylvanian canals of the Amazon Basin; aluminum, in the form of an island, facing Maranhao; vegetable oils, fish, entomotoxic plants throughout the whole region—everything that can represent the wealth of an immense empire is kept intact waiting for the elements of man and capital in order to be transformed in utilities for civilization which today clamors desperately for American action.1

  Not that Nelson needed to be seduced. The vast Amazonian region had caught Nelson’s attention in 1940. With Japanese armies overrunning the rubber plantations of French Indochina and British Malaya, Brazil’s president Getúlio Vargas saw an opportunity to earn badly needed foreign exchange by reviving rubber production in the wild rubber forest of the Amazon. By the time he paid a personal visit to the Amazon in October, however, his vision for Amazonian development extended far beyond rubber.

  “I did not come to the Amazon region as a tourist who finds here so many reasons to be dazzled and overcome,” he told an audience in Pôrto Velho, rubber capital of the Madeira River Valley. “I came with the purpose of learning th
e practical possibilities of putting into execution a plan for the systematic exploitation of the riches of the great valley and its development.” Vargas’s plan consisted of two parts—sanitation and colonization—and he promised free land and farm tools to the homesteaders he had transported from Brazil’s impoverished Northeast.

  But his most surprising announcement was that he planned to “intensify industrial exploitation” of the Amazon by American corporations. “To that end there are already arriving at the government’s invitation North American industrialists interested in collaborating with us in developing the Amazon region, where their capital and technical resources find a continuing profitable application.”2

  This was a new turn for a leader who had been considered a fascist sympathizer. Vargas had come to power in 1930 with an aura of intense nationalism, leading an army of gauchos from the south and enjoying the support of Brazilian Germans and disgruntled homesteaders who had been squeezed out of the São Paulo-led export-oriented economy by the world depression.

  Once in office, President Vargas initiated a series of drastic measures that not only restored Brazil’s economy, but enhanced Germany’s participation in its growth. After 1934, Hitler made Brazil Germany’s leading trade partner in South America.3

  Germany, which replaced the United States as Brazil’s top source of foreign trade, was not alone. In 1934, Mussolini sent the longest and largest flight of military planes in history to Rio de Janeiro to flutter the hearts of the Brazilian military. This performance was outdone in 1938 by a greater display of machismo affection: he launched his son, Bruno, fresh from aerial heroics over defenseless Ethiopian villages, on a trans-Atlantic flight. When Bruno at last descended on an anxious Rio, he donated his plane to Vargas’s “New State,” triggering a delirium of enthusiasm.

  Vargas’s romance with the Axis powers suddenly turned sour when the fascist Integralista party tried an insurrection in 1938. If this attempted coup was a splash of cold reality, American dollars soon provided the fount of warmer relations, with the development of the Amazon high on Vargas’s list of priorities.

  Up to that point, the only significant American investment in the Amazon was Ford Motor Company’s failed Fordlândia rubber plantation, covering 7,943 square miles along the east bank of the Tapajós River, a tributary to the Amazon River in the northern state of Pará. The terrain was too steep to allow easy operations, and the local soil was deemed unreceptive to the Hevea brasiliensis rubber tree. In fact, the clearing of the rain forest had removed the plant and animal diversity that had allowed most rubber trees to survive attacks by insects and disease, particularly dothidella vlei, commonly known as South American leaf blight. Overconcentrations of rubber trees made them too vulnerable to survive in the Amazon. After his first plantation was almost destroyed, a second 800,000-acre tract was carved out of the jungle ninety miles downriver at Belterra, but Ford could not find enough men who were willing to work for low wages. The only labor sources were Indians and descendants of runaway African slaves who had intermarried with the Indians. Although they were good workers, a U.S. Embassy report in 1938 reviewed by the CIAA noted that “life is sustained at their jungle homes with so little effort that employment for wages is not attractive.”4 The blight struck again, and Ford had all but abandoned the plantations when World War II created rubber shortages, convincing him to hold on, claiming patriotic reasons, not the hope of recovering the $9 million he had already invested in the Amazon venture.

  At first, Rockefeller showed little interest in either the Amazon or the rubber crisis, even after Japanese invasions and U-boat sinkings of Allied shipping disrupted rubber supplies to the United States. He left the matter to Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace, who got a $500,000 appropriation to send rubber technicians to Latin America. But when CIAA aide Earl Parker Hanson brought news that Vargas was seriously proceeding with his Amazon development plan, Nelson suddenly made rubber—and development of the whole Amazon valley—a priority. He adopted Hanson’s suggestion that Berent Friele should “ask his Brazilian friends if they want a major survey.… Get together a hell of a big party or even organize a corporation, jointly with Brazil immediately.”5

  Friele was the perfect man to present the Amazon development program to the Brazilians. He had been president of the Brazilian-American Association of New York and, not coincidentally, of the American Coffee Corporation as well. He represented the largest American company engaged in the largest American trade with South America’s largest country.

  Nelson wrote a four-page memorandum in September 1941 for Friele to circulate in Brazil, offering to cooperate “in the development of the Amazon along the lines suggested by the Brazilian Government”6 and proposing a survey of the Amazon basin’s resources and problems. Friele passed it on to the U.S. Embassy for review and held his breath.

  The response from Ambassador Jefferson Caffery, one of the State Department’s top troubleshooters in Latin America, was wary:

  Survey findings would, indirectly at least, be critical of many existing conditions in the Amazon, and recommendations as to solutions of existing problems would, in many cases, inevitably arouse the antagonism of established interests and officialdom. The survey, if undertaken, should therefore be handled as a joint project, and should have as a prerequisite the full backing of the Brazilian Government.7

  Nelson had no such intentions. Joint sponsorships, yes; joint control, never. Besides, Nelson had submitted his proposal to Brazilian Finance Minister Arthur de Souza Costa and President Vargas and had gotten their approval. The Rio newspapers were already full of approving editorials and headlines.

  Nelson sincerely favored joint ventures. He and Ambassador-to-Mexico Josephus Daniels had convinced President Roosevelt that more was to be gained against the Axis powers by actually helping Latin American governments to develop their resources than by insisting only on reciprocal trade agreements.

  Therefore, a series of agreements were struck. The first rubber agreement with Brazil in October 1940 pledged to assist the long-term development of Brazil’s rubber industry. In return, Brazil cut off rubber sales to the Axis powers and reserved rubber for the United States, with the U.S. Rubber Reserve Corporation acting as the purchasing agent for Firestone and Goodyear. The rubber pact was then expanded into a broader agreement on strategic materials in May 1941. According to that agreement, Brazil provided iron ore and other strategic minerals in return for more than $20 million in financing for its Volta Redonda steel project, funds that private American steel companies had refused to provide.

  Nelson pursued this dual policy of protecting American corporate markets and encouraging the diversification of Latin American economies through 1941. But after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Washington began to view economic development as either a luxury it could no longer afford or one that had to be subsumed under American war priorities.

  Brazilians now began to worry that rubber and inter-American solidarity might be used as a wedge to open their Amazon territories to American control.

  Brazil also was concerned that the involvement of other Amazon basin countries whose governments were less strong and more susceptible to U.S. pressures might result in either U.S. control or territorial claims by these governments on the Brazilian Amazon. Peru and Ecuador were at the time engaged in just such a border dispute over Amazonian lands that were believed (correctly, it turned out) to contain oil deposits.

  Amazon rubber production would indeed require cross-border operations. A young American botanist at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, Dr. Richard Evans Schultes, had recently toured Mexico (including Chiapas) for the Rockefeller Foundation’s Agricultural Survey8 and was already at work gathering seven tons of rubber seeds in the tropical Putumayo and Vaupés regions of southern Colombia—and passing on intelligence on the political sympathies of his Colombian colleagues.9 This was not out of character for the American war effort. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Nelson authorized the Department of Agriculture’s req
uest for a special $100,000 allocation to employ spies for the strategic-materials stockpile program to obtain military and naval intelligence.10

  The authorization of spying was precisely what the Vargas government feared. Since the CIAA had assisted in removing German influence from Brazil’s airlines, its intelligence-gathering and propaganda capacities were no secret. The Brazilian people were also bitter about the British smuggling rubber seeds out of Brazil at the turn of the century to cultivate plantations in British colonies in the Far East. These actions spelled Waterloo for the wild Brazilian species, triggering an economic decline in the Amazon.

  Brazil therefore tried to confine Rockefeller’s activities to supplying technicians who would be under Brazilian control. Nelson, however, was not easily deterred. He saw rubber as merely the opening wedge into the Amazon.

  THE AMAZON PLAN

  On Christmas Day, 1942, the jungle seemed a long way off as Nelson watched his children frolicking around the Christmas tree. But the Amazon suddenly burst into his thoughts when he tore open the wrappings of a small gift from Berent Friele, the CIAA’s man in Brazil. It was a copy of Journey to Manaos, CIAA aide Earl Parker Hanson’s account of his 1931–1932 trip to the Amazon.

  CIAA adviser Earl Parker Hanson used this map to help promote Amazon development.

  Source: Earl Parker Hanson, The Amazon: A New Frontier (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1944).

  Hanson believed 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.”11

  Friele knew Nelson would want to have this book. He had been alerted to it by Morris L. Cooke, who was now in Rio heading the U.S. Industrial Mission to Brazil. Cooke had proposed that a giant series of locks and canals could link the oil fields of Venezuela’s Orinoco with the Amazon basin without having to brave the German submarine wolf packs off the Atlantic Coast. The project was discussed during Nelson’s recent visit to Rio to sign a health-and-sanitation agreement with the Brazilian government. Nelson had immediately grasped the enormous economic implications and embraced the idea as a CIAA project.