Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  But when it came to Maes’s proposals for improving Indian diets, Nelson flatly refused. All John Collier’s arguments about improved wages and better nutritional standards increasing markets for U.S. and Latin American products* may have had some interest for Nelson before Pearl Harbor. After war was declared, however, Nelson tried to stay in line with Washington’s preoccupation with immediate military goals. If he made an exception, it was to pursue his own goals or the White House’s, not the postwar political goals of New Deal Democrats like Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes or John Collier.

  The elder Collier had tried unsuccessfully to appeal directly to Nelson’s worries over Nazi propaganda among the Indians.

  Then Ickes tried, fitting his beliefs within the War Department’s myopia: “In many Latin American countries, the long range hopes for democracy lie in the Indian population … [which is] more than 28% of the entire population of Latin America. It is 80% in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia; 75% in Guatemala; more than 50% in Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and El Salvador; 44% in Paraguay.”28

  The appeal failed,29 and would continue to be rejected until President Roosevelt intervened.

  Charles Collier was aware of Rockefeller’s lack of interest when he called to ask what was being done to protect the Amazonian Indians from the revival of the rubber business. Collier received a typical bureaucratic runaround, but, wise to the ways of Washington, would not be put off.

  He had learned from the Department of Agriculture that there had been no discussion of the status and conditions of the Indians. He asked whether that was true.

  It was.

  Confirmation that Rockefeller was planning to use Indians merely as rubber gatherers deeply disturbed Collier. The last time Amazonian Indians had been used as labor for rubber gathering, they had been enslaved and killed.

  THE WOOD THAT WEPT

  An estimated 2 million Indians lived in Brazil at the time Columbus landed in the Americas. By 1900, 90 percent had “disappeared,” lured by Portuguese missionaries or dragged at gunpoint from the interior to clear the forests or work the coastal sugar and cotton plantations. As the Indians died of disease, floggings, enslavement, and despair, they were replaced by black slaves brought over from Portugal’s African colonies. It was not until 1888 that Brazil abolished slavery, the last country to do so in the Western Hemisphere. Slavery nevertheless continued.

  What Eli Whitney’s cotton gin had done to revitalize slavery in the U.S. South, Charles Goodyear’s vulcanizing of rubber in the United States now did for de facto slavery in Brazil. As the evil-smelling liquid was bled from the jungle and passed down the Amazon through Belém to foreign markets, the former slave town awoke from its slumber. The blood of the Indians’ cahuchu, “the wood that wept,” attracted ravenous companies from across the seas. Armies of pistoleiros (hired guns) and workers again swept up the Amazon, probing its furthermost tributaries in the heart of the continent.

  The Indians soon became targets of slavers who were armed with the same Winchester “repeater” rifles used to kill Indians in the U.S. West. Flesh and trees alike were gashed, blood and latex so intimately mingled that the rubber workers became known as seringueiros, the “blood-letters” of the jungle. Battalions of these impoverished men were commanded by respectable businessmen serving the tire and rubber-hose industrialists of the United States and Europe, where the real fortunes were made for men with names like Firestone and Goodyear and, unknown to most, Rockefeller.30

  For over a quarter of a century, Indians were exploited without any censure by the government. Manaos, the central port on the Amazon, named after the “vanished” Manao Indians, became a boomtown. Rubber barons sent their shirts to London to be ironed, installed the first trams in South America, imported Sarah Bernhardt for their listening pleasure, and offered Enrico Caruso a small fortune to travel from Italy for a single night’s performance in their gilded opera house, Teatro Amazonas (he refused).31

  It was behavior like this, past and present, that infuriated Indianists like the Colliers. Nelson, for his part, was careful to avoid controversy, perhaps learning a few lessons from his father. He did not personally respond to any of the Colliers’ concerns; he merely sent their remarks on to his aides. But he knew he had to be careful.

  Nelson’s silence did not ease the Colliers’ concerns, but the long socioeconomic report from Maes in June 1942 did.

  Maes pointed out that the Indians at the newer Ford plantation at Belterra were fast workers, tapping 400 trees in six hours, compared to the usual 250 trees elsewhere. “Their long experience with Amazon labor has convinced the management of this enterprise that there is no better labor anywhere if provision is made for its health and an adequate food supply.” If Rockefeller’s CIAA provided health and sanitation programs, Maes asked, could not SPI’s many posts in the rubber areas protect the new workforce against exploitation by expanding the definition of the Indian? SPI had already recommended setting up twenty new SPI posts “to control the purchase of rubber from the Indian collectors.”32

  John Collier urged Nelson to accept Maes’s proposal. “The use of this important population is essential to the success of the rubber program. The rubber program in turn is potentially dangerous to the welfare of this population.” Collier then made his pitch for the SPI, calling it “the only official Brazilian agency responsible for the protection of the Indian population.”33

  For a week there was stony silence. Rockefeller had one of his aides draft a reply the next day, but it was held for a week while Nelson went over King’s report. In it, King had ignored the dangers the rubber program held for the Indians.

  Nelson flatly rejected Maes’s proposal to use the SPI. Worse, he planned to use the Ministry of Labor as the Indians’ sponsoring authority, even though Maes had reported that this was the very agency that almost let SPI die in the 1930s.

  “While not under-estimating the fine accomplishments of the Indian Service, we are inclined to look to the Ministry of Labor first in this matter,” Nelson wrote. The rubber program planned to use workers “drafted from Ceara, where the proportion of Indian blood is not generally high.” Ignoring information to the contrary, Nelson also insisted that “the Indian Service has few, if any representatives in the high-yield rubber areas of the Amazon where it is proposed to concentrate the effort to expand production; this, of course, arises out of the fact that there are relatively few Indians in those areas.”34

  The CIAA had a map of the Brazilian Amazon giving population counts and the possible number of Indians who could be recruited from each area to tap rubber. The total was close to 10,000, or 10 percent of a grossly conservative estimate of 100,000 Indians in prewar Brazil.* Nelson recruited some well-known anthropologists into the rubber effort, including Charles Wagley, who was on close terms with SPI’s leaders, and former BIA tribal arts official René d’Harnoncourt, both of Columbia University. Harnoncourt eagerly advised Rockefeller on BIA proposals, sometimes to the detriment of Collier’s efforts at the Inter-American Indian Institute. Harnoncourt undermined Collier’s role in the institute by denying the BIA the sole authority to control the training program. It was the beginning of Collier’s eventual demise as BIA commissioner.

  Rockefeller was not without his own disappointments. He had been forced to accept a drastic scaling down of his Amazon Development Project, focused now on getting rubber out of the jungle, and his direct role was limited to health and sanitation.

  Nelson did enjoy a moment of personal triumph over Ambassador Caffery, however. The ambassador had so resented Nelson’s muscling into the Amazon rubber project that for a year he had sat on Vargas’s invitation for Nelson to visit Brazil. Now Nelson had a chance to meet prominent Brazilians, and he worked hard on a speech.

  The lunch, with forty-eight of the most powerful men in Brazil, could have been Nelson’s triumph or an American disaster. Caffery was deeply worried about what Nelson might say and how the nationalists around Vargas might react. At the last minut
e he decided to intervene. He told the Brazilian foreign ministry that he could see no reason for any political speeches and even advised the officials that it was not necessary for anyone to meet Rockefeller at the airport.

  CIAA map identifying locations of potential Indian labor supply for rubber collection.

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

  At the luncheon, Nelson found Caffery poised but defiant. As Nelson rose to speak, the ambassador created a diversion, calling loudly for cigarettes and engaging a Brazilian official in a conversation across the table. For a moment, Nelson just stood there at the lectern, his eyes fixed on Caffery. The Brazilians fell silent. Then Nelson began to talk—not about Brazil, but about Caffery. Nelson poured praise over Caffery and kept pouring it until it seemed that the ambassador would drown in embarrassment. Five minutes passed before he turned to his prepared speech. When it was over and the audience was clapping, Caffery was beaten. From then on, he stayed out of Nelson’s way—and soon, out of Nelson’s hemisphere. He was transferred with a demotion in rank to liberated France in 1944.

  J. C. King had less to celebrate. He had wrapped up his work at Johnson & Johnson and had completed his brief survey of the Amazon. But Sumner Welles had never relented on Nelson’s ambitious Amazon Valley Corporation. So King opted for active military service. He asked if Rockefeller could put in a good word for him with Secretary of War Henry Stimson.35

  King’s march to the pinnacles of power in the CIA had begun.

  *Rondon’s strategy—developed within the rubber zone between 1890 and 1910—was based on the principle of keeping Indians at bay while protecting their lives. Rondon ordered his men to leave gifts on trails for Indians hidden in the jungle, and if attacked, to offer no resistance. Rondon’s success in pacifying the tribes won official acclaim in June 1910, when the Brazilian government established the SPI. The government appointed him head of the SPI and decreed that Indians could live peacefully in assigned territories and would work only of their own free will. The government further maintained that the Indians had full right to profit from their work and controlled access to SPI assistance in agriculture, hunting, and education. SPI’s new director in Pará intended to revive this tradition

  *“It is not only an important factor in our political and cultural relations with Latin America,” Collier wrote Robert G. Caldwell, chairman of CIAA’s Cultural Relations Program, in November 1940, “but it is also of supreme importance to the economic stability of the entire Western hemisphere. In addition to the untapped productive energy and material resources of these thirty million Indians, we have a great potential undeveloped market which, by educating the Indians to desire an improvement in their standard of living and by increasing their purchasing power, would relieve greatly the economic strain caused by the loss of European markets.” See John Collier to Robert G. Caldwell, November 13, 1940, Brazil—Rubber 1942–1945 folder, RG 66, Box 92, National Archives.

  *The map drew on reports by American and Brazilian anthropologists and ethnographers found in the Strategic Index of the Americas. Nor was the CIAA’s study limited to Brazil. Other countries touching the Amazon basin were also seen as sources of Indian rubber gatherers: 2,000 in Venezuela, 6,000 in Colombia, 2,500 in Ecuador, 7,000 in Peru, and 6,000 in Bolivia—over 33,000 Indians in all.

  11

  THE DANCER

  THE RED MAN’S BURDEN

  For most men of humble origins who rise to the thin air of world shakers, war is often the rocket they ride to glory; for Nelson Rockefeller, born richer than most princes on earth, World War II was merely a confirmation of destiny. Backed by loyal expertise from Rockefeller businesses and family institutions, Nelson possessed—indeed, his very name symbolized—resources that none of his rivals or allies in Washington had. This, more than any other factor, accounted for his longevity in the Democratic administration despite his inexperience and tendency toward rashness and the Republican activism of his family elders.

  Latin America’s Indians were one of Nelson’s major instruments in proving his worth to President Roosevelt in a time of cabinet shake-ups and resignations in Washington between 1943 and 1944. In his drive to extract the most strategic resources from Latin America with the least expense, he spared no means. The nutritional plight of the Otomi Indians in the Mezquital Valley north of Mexico City held little interest for him, but when the argument was framed within the context of labor productivity, light shone upon the Coordinator’s deliberations. A CIAA aide wrote:

  By reason of undernourishment, these laborers are far less effective than they would be if improvement could be made in the food supply of the Indians of the Valley. This project, therefore, has an important bearing upon the mining of strategic materials in which the United States is interested.… It is important that they not become victims of Nazi or Falangist propaganda which is apt to be most successful when applied to hopeless and hungry people.1

  Increased productivity was also the motive for the CIAA’s food and health programs in the jungles of eastern Peru, where the humble Nelson Rockefeller plowed Amazonian waters along with five other launches dispensing medicine to sick rubber workers. At an experimental agricultural station set up to look into rubber products, cash crops, and food production, the CIAA built the area’s only hospital. Smaller facilities were set up in two other towns close to the Ganso Azul oil field

  At this point, in 1943, the legacy of the cheery Inter-American Escadrille, sponsored by Nelson and Laurance Rockefeller two years earlier, descended upon the Amazon’s Indians like an avenging angel of progress. The Escadrille’s William Barkley Harding—the Smith, Barney investment banker who had been instrumental in the reorganization of Eastern Airlines that gave Laurance Rockefeller a controlling interest (and in the reorganization that purged Lloyd Aereo Boliviano of German influence)—now arrived to advise the U.S. Rubber Reserve Corporation’s new offshoot, the U.S. Rubber Development Corporation, on aviation in the Amazon. Harding’s recommendations, submitted to the corporation as well as to Nelson Rockefeller, required the installation of runways and wireless radio stations at key points throughout the Amazon basin to tie together the rubber producing areas of Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, and eastern Colombia. Manaus was chosen as the center of this integrated transportation and communications system, maintaining regular communication with Washington via New Orleans.

  Under the Inter-American Cooperative Health Program, CIAA health stations were set up to protect the health of U.S. armed forces and “workers on strategic products.”

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

  This was the beginning of the end of the Indians of central Brazil. With the U.S. rubber programs as the impetus, Brazil’s President Vargas established the Central Brazil Foundation to sponsor the approaching conquest of the Amazonian interior. In 1943, the “Great Expedition of Central Brazil and Xingu-Roncador” was ready to go.

  After a patriotic send-off by Vargas, the bewildered small army spent a year chopping their way through jungle and building airstrips and new roads. In 1944, they crossed the dread Rio das Mortes (the River of Deaths) and plunged into the land—and arrows—of the mighty Xavante tribe. Five times, Indians desperately charged the Brazilians’ hastily dug trenches, only to flee when a volley of gunfire was loosed over their heads. Perhaps because of the size of the Brazilian force, the Xavante relied on frontal assaults to overwhelm the invaders, rather than previously successful hit-and-run ambushes. Eight months later, facing superior weaponry and the invaders’ steady advance, the Xavante surrendered to the proclaimed love of the SPI advance team. The Indians agreed to let the expedition pass, naively believing the promise that they would then be left in peace. It was history in deadly repetition: the American West, Africa, the South Pacific, only now the means were more subtle, the emphasis on psychology rather than bullets. The goal, however, remained the same: penetration and, ultimately, conquest.

  Instead of telegraph lines, strategically placed airdromes, concre
te runways, and wireless stations and radio beacons were strung across the Amazon. Anthropological reports on the Amazon’s Indians, like its “useful” flora, were entered into the CIAA’s Strategic Index of the Americas.2 The mysteries of the Amazon were at last being unveiled.

  Colombia also surrendered her rubber trees and other natural resources to the American industrial war machine. The plight of the Indians facing this invasion, though undoubtedly felt by the CIAA men working with the rubber program, went unmentioned in their official reports to Washington. But by January 1943 Brazil’s General Rondon was so disturbed by reports on the exploitation of Indian labor that he pleaded in the Inter-American Indian Institute’s America Indigena for an extension of SPI’s techniques to the rubber frontiers of Peru and Colombia.3 To no avail. Nelson’s CIAA was concerned only with production.

  As the Amazon jungle’s Indians were left to their fate with the white man’s microbes, the Andes mountains’ Indians were left to their silicosis and other lung diseases. Rockefeller’s Servicios set up clinics for the copper and tin mines of mostly American corporations and dispensed medicines and improved food supplies, but funds to improve ventilation and working conditions in the antiquated mines of Peru and Bolivia were never put in the budget of the CIAA or any other government agency.4

  In Bolivia, however, Indians in the mines and plantations had increasingly asserted their rights—despite repression by the military regime of General Enrique Peñaranda and his claim of imminent Nazi revolution.

  THE GHOSTS OF REBELLION

  In 1942, two major events took place that would soon have a major impact on Nelson’s operations. First, under the auspices of the Federal Labor Union of Chuquisaca Workers, Andean Indians convened the First Congress of the Keschua [Quechua] Language. Representing Indian communities from the Bolivian Andean mining states, the delegates confronted the entire industrial white world with basic democratic demands: an end to child labor, evictions from the land, forced labor, price gouging, and private tolls on public roads; they asked for tenants’ rights, maternity leave, irrigation for their farms, and a government investigation of the “ridiculous” twenty cents a day wages paid on plantations.