Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  This crusade for productivity was complemented by the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission’s extraordinarily successful drive to eradicate the mysterious cause of the South’s notorious “germ of laziness,” hookworm. Armed with science and the Standard Oil fortune, the Rockefeller campaigns swept away all opposition.

  THE ARMS OF THE OCTOPUS

  But the ground they broke in southern agriculture also held the hot coals of rural resentments. After World War I, the cultural battle rolled over into the field of economics and politics, where farmers had forty years of bitter experience with Standard Oil’s manipulation of rail freight charges. Fertilizer companies and farm machine giants, such as International Harvester, had increased the productivity of acreage so much that the agricultural markets were flooded, and prices were lowered. Although much more than the Rockefellers were responsible, they were easily identifiable targets for populist organizers of small farmers who could not afford to purchase the expensive machinery, fertilizer, or more land.

  At the same time, the government’s postwar red scare resulted in bizarre allegations against the family. It was during these years that the Rockefellers were transformed in the minds of many rural Fundamentalists from the ogres of monopoly capitalism into secret financiers of an international communist conspiracy. The germ of this remarkable metamorphosis lay in the Fundamentalists’ confusing the centrally planned publicly owned economy, promoted by socialists (and later by communists), with the centrally planned privately owned economy, promoted by many corporate leaders. Given the limited access to information about the critical differences in the programs (both of which, after all, came from the hated big cities of moneyed elites) and the farmers’ own bitter experiences with the all-powerful corporate trusts, it is understandable that the frustrations and fears of rural people were so easily channeled by demagogues posing as populists and that this confusion was actively encouraged by even sincere populists.

  Rev. William Riley, speaking at Moody Memorial Church in Chicago, charged the Rockefeller family with “standardizing” religion, just as it had the oil industry. Within the space of only a few years, Fundamentalist distrust of the Rockefellers evolved into a near-pathological conviction that the Rockefellers were not religious at all, but promoters of a vast communist conspiracy to seize control of their churches and impose atheism on their schools. Riley claimed that the culprit was William R. Harper, president of the University of Chicago, and his theories of “progressive education.”

  “If it were American education only, the situation would not be so bad, but our foreign denominational schools are feeling the pull of these same coils and are rapidly being converted into the flesh and blood of Modernism through the Harper-Rockefeller movement.” America, claimed Riley, was being threatened by an “Octopus of unbelief.”4

  Rockefeller’s General Education Board established farm demonstrations throughout the South between 1904 and 1914, extolling virtues of machinery, fertilizers, crop rotation, and other techniques. Rockefeller investments in International Harvester and fertilizer companies also occurred during this period.

  Source: Abraham Flexner, The General Education Board, 1902–14.

  Rockefeller secular missions soon expanded beyond their social laboratory in the American South to overseas lands where Standard Oil was active.

  Source: Alan Nevins, Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), p. 393.

  Despite all Junior’s philanthropic efforts to clear the family name, the tainted legends surrounding his father’s rise to power would continue to haunt his own children. Worse, Senior would soon find out. Junior had heard that Fundamentalists had scored an unprecedented victory at the recent Northern Baptist Convention in Des Moines. An anonymous gift of $1,750,000 was accepted by the Baptists in return for a pledged adherence to the Fundamentalist creed by recipient lay missionaries and ordained ministers. Few were fooled by the donor’s insistence on anonymity. Milton Stewart, brother of Lyman Stewart, the founder of Union Oil of California, had recently financed a tour of Protestant missions in China by Fundamentalist leaders and had imposed identical conditions for receiving Stewart’s donations.

  If anything could waken the ire of Senior, it was the Stewarts. Not only did they fund the Rockefellers’ most vehement Fundamentalist critics, but they were the biggest thorn in the side of his favorite offspring from the oil trust, Standard Oil of California. Since 1904, when Lyman Stewart’s son, W. L. Stewart, beat out Standard Oil for the crude oil of independent producers in the San Joaquin Valley, Union Oil had proved to be a powerful competitor.5 The Stewarts held a personal grudge against the Rockefellers as well, having been among the independent producers of Titusville, Pennsylvania, that succumbed to the Standard Oil Trust.

  Junior had hesitated to tell Senior about the Fundamentalists’ successes at the Northern Baptist Convention. He had never felt adequate to the task of running his father’s empire—and for good reason. Senior had not taken the time to prepare Junior for empire. “Father never said a word to me about what I was to do in the office before I began work there,” he once confessed.6 A traditional father, Senior had left the task of child rearing to Junior’s mother, Laura Spelman Rockefeller. But there was a price for being the only son of the hated John D. Rockefeller: isolation. Tutored on the Rockefeller estate outside Cleveland, where Standard Oil’s first refinery was located, Junior was fawned upon like a “Crown Prince,” as his older sister, Edith, put it.

  He was chagrined by reversals so soon on the heels of large donations to the Baptists by his father and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund. Only six months before, Senior had given $500,000 each to the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, the American Baptist Home Mission Society, and the Ministers and Missionaries Benefit Board of the Northern Baptist Convention. He had also made an unconditional gift of $100,000 to the Relief and Annuity board of the Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas.7 Junior had been one of those who encouraged his father to make the gifts unconditional. Now he felt humiliated by Stewart’s “Fundamentalist-only” gift to the Northern Baptists.

  There was no way out. Junior summoned his courage and wrote his father, acknowledging that Senior had “doubtless” been told of the Fundamentalist victories and the conditional gift. He suggested that Senior invoke a clause in his letter of bequest allowing the money to be withdrawn if it should “cease to be needed.” He ended with a shameless apology. “If I had ever dreamed that the Home Mission Society would have accepted a gift on such conditions, permanently binding its trustees to the holding of such narrow views, I would have strongly urged you not to make the gifts to it which you have recently made.”8

  Rockefeller’s reply from Pocantico makes Junior’s consternation understandable. It was a remarkable demonstration of just how much the octogenarian patriarch was still in command.

  The senior Rockefeller had no intention of retreating and suggested that Junior get his lawyers ready for action. He had decided to “get the consent of the Mission Societies for modified conditions of our gifts, possibly without delay, so as to forestall, if possible, the ill effect that their still treacherous action may have on the final carrying out of our ideas.”

  His tactic was vintage Rockefeller: the subtle approach, requesting only a change in the terms of his gifts. But the implication was clear: A refusal of his terms by the missions would jeopardize further gifts. The real substance of the tactic, however, was its breadth. Rockefeller’s request would go to all Protestant missionary organizations that had accepted his gifts, not just to the Baptists, so “that if we go about it wisely we may secure still further protection against possible inroads by the group to which you refer.”9

  The Fundamentalists had awakened an enemy far more formidable than they realized. For here was a veteran of wars more bloody and ruthless than most ministers had ever encountered. Rockefeller had built an empire by crushing stronger men than Rev. Riley. The old
warrior’s blood had been stirred, and he would, as usual, battle with all the legendary powers at his command.

  His wrath was unconcealed, but measured. Money could keep the mainstream denominations in line. And behind money was oil, still the bulk of the Rockefeller fortune. As the family began unloading its holdings in domestic agricultural firms to escape the postwar collapse of agricultural prices, oil, particularly foreign oil, would remain the source of its power. Oil’s role in the postwar realignment of power around the world would be crucial, and the Rockefellers intended to play a big part in that realignment.

  Standard Oil counsel and Rockefeller Foundation trustee Charles Evans Hughes recently had become President Warren G. Harding’s secretary of state. Hughes had initiated an era of policy and style that prompted a member of the British Foreign Office to complain that “Washington officials begin to think, talk, and write like Standard Oil officials.”10

  THE PRINCE OF MODERNISM

  On the religious front, it was left to Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, brother of Junior’s closest adviser, to fire the first shot in the Rockefeller counterattack that soon was called “the Fundamentalist Controversy.”

  Although an ordained Baptist minister, Fosdick had accepted the pulpit of a liberal Presbyterian church in Manhattan. Fosdick had already earned criticism as the “Prince of Modernism” for the liberal views on evolution he espoused in a speech before the Northern Baptist Convention in 1919 and for making no secret of his disdain for the ethnocentrism and intolerance he witnessed during a trip to China secretly funded by Rockefeller Junior. These experiences influenced one of his first sermons at the First Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, entitled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Fosdick actually appealed to Christian unity, but under a modernist banner; he argued persuasively for an educated science-based faith and liberal tolerance of other cultures in the world.

  Fosdick’s sermon might have gone unnoticed except for the intervention of Junior and Ivy Lee, the master propagandist. Lee prepared, and Junior paid for, a mass mailing of the sermon.

  The Fundamentalists took the bait and quickly overplayed their hand, launching a campaign that revealed the full vehemence of their intolerance. Led by former Secretary of State and Klan-sympathizer William Jennings Bryan, they even tried to seize control of the 1924 Northern Presbyterian General Assembly, but were cleverly foiled by a young Wall Street lawyer named John Foster Dulles. Dulles, a future secretary of state, used his formidable legal skills to shift the issue of debate from modernism to Fosdick’s connection with the Baptist church. Fosdick accepted his role as sacrificial lamb for a modern science-based Protestantism and resigned from the New York presbytery. The Fundamentalists won the battle, but lost the war of public opinion. The Rockefellers had again emerged triumphant. That was in 1925, the year that William Jennings Bryan suddenly died right after convicting John Scopes in the “Monkey trial.” With Bryan’s death, the Fundamentalist movement was decapitated and was not to reemerge as a serious political force until half a century later, when Nelson Rockefeller would be denied the vice presidential nomination after Fundamentalist intervention.

  The family’s problems with the Baptist church were not over yet. The indecisive Junior got into trouble again, this time over the conditions of Indian reservations.

  CUTTING THE LAST CORD

  In the spring of 1926, Junior was preparing for his third trip west in six years, when he received a letter from Wolf Plume, the Blackfoot leader, and Black Bull, another elder. “We are extremely under hard circumstances as we go without eating for three or four days at times.… We hope you will be able to see your way clear to aid us this spring.”

  Junior was on the fence. The Indians’ circumstances again forced him to contend with old Rockefeller traditions. He did not want to answer the letter. But his silence could be taken as insensitive by a number of people, foremost among them his sons.

  The Indians struck this tender chord themselves in their letter. How would you feel, they asked, if “you were in our state of circumstances”? Then they moved in on Junior’s soft spot: “Wolf Plume wants to know how your little son [Laurance] is getting along whom Wolf Plume christened.”11

  Typed on the stationery of the Indian Protective Association of Montana, the letter indicated that influential whites, as well as Indians, were waiting to see how Rockefeller responded, if at all.

  Since his children were involved, Junior also had to consider the feelings of their mother. Abby was a conspirator of sorts with the children against Junior’s Baptist authoritarianism and bristled at anything hinting of racial discrimination. “Put yourself in the place of an honest, poor man who happens to belong to one of the so-called ‘despised’ races,” she wrote Nelson, Laurance, and John during these years.

  Think of having no friendly hand held out to you, no kindly look, no pleasant, encouraging word spoken to you. What I would like you always to do is what I try humbly to do myself; that is, never to say or to do anything which would wound the feelings or the self-respect of any human being, and to give special consideration to all who are in any way repressed. That is what your father does naturally from the fineness of his nature and the kindness of his heart. I long to have our family stand firmly for what is best and highest in life. It isn’t always easy, but it is worth while.12

  Junior thought it might be wise to make inquiries. He passed Wolf Plume’s letter on to the BIA. Fearing more requests for aid, Junior suggested that something should be done to “strike more at the root of the matter.”13 The response was defensive, rooted as always in the Calvinist notion of self-sufficiency: “Where the Indians have invested in sheep on the reimbursable plan, they are getting along very nicely.… If these Indians will get down to business and help themselves just a little, they can get along alright.”14

  Another response to his inquiries was less quieting. One of his guides in 1924 confirmed that Wolf Plume’s band “is in a worse way now than for some time past [and] may be going hungry part of the time.” But the problem was in the Indians themselves and their culture. “The band you saw are all fullbloods, all related or mostly so and that’s the reason Wolf Plume and Big Spring may be hard up now, because they have shared with the others. Your old time fullblood will always share with his people.” The selfish individualism that accompanied property ownership had not taken root with the older Indians.

  He advised the Rockefellers not to send money to these “simple minded children.” He pledged “to admonish” them “not to write you in this way again.” It was “the Government’s place and duty to look after these people and not you.”15 Junior agreed.

  There is no record that Junior ever answered Wolf Plume’s letter.

  While Nelson was in France that summer, his alter ego, Laurance, was to return West with his parents and younger brothers. Junior came up with a solution. He simply decided not to include the Blackfoot reservation in their itinerary.

  But the Indians could not be so easily controlled. Their revolt was in full swing and making headlines. Taos Pueblo leaders, backed by John Collier’s Indian Defense Association, had been jailed for resisting the missionaries and the BIA, and the Indian rebellion was spreading to the Great Plains tribes and beyond, to tribes in California. The threat that the Rockefeller name would again be linked to violent repression emerged. Once more, Junior’s options seemed split between following Baptist leaders or heeding the advice of liberal aides like Ray Fosdick, the man who had encouraged Junior’s $1,000 donation to John Collier two years before.

  It had been a short honeymoon for the Rockefellers and the thin, stoop-shouldered Collier. In 1924, shortly after the BIA started leasing Navajo reservation lands to oil companies, Collier’s request to Rockefeller for an additional $10,000 to investigate Indian conditions was rejected. Instead, Junior launched his own probe—of Collier. He dispatched an aide to Washington to confer with Interior Secretary Herbert Work and BIA Commissioner Charles H. Burke. Their attack on Collier bordered on sland
er, Burke calling Collier “an agitator” and denouncing the Indian Defense Association’s efforts as “destructive.”16

  Probably the loudest criticism came from Charles L. White, executive secretary of the American Baptist Home Mission Society. Although White personally did not have much influence with the Rockefellers at the time, because of his flirtation with Fundamentalist donors, Junior wanted to keep his own power over the direction of the Baptist missions from being further eroded by Fundamentalist attacks. He listened as White severely impugned Collier’s character and even suggested that Collier had misappropriated funds.

  Those voices from the political and religious establishment were enough for Junior. He turned down Collier’s request and cut off further funding to his organization. Instead, he shifted his support to the Baptist missionary-oriented Indian Rights Association, which White had just recommended to Fosdick.17

  It was one of Junior’s greatest blunders. The Indian Rights Association had taken up the earlier unsubstantiated claim of a Fundamentalist missionary, Rev. William “Pussyfoot” Johnson, that Christian Indian converts were being forced to participate in “obscene” dances that allegedly caused the pregnancy of young girls. The missionaries demanded that all “pagan” dances end. They were also pressing for federal marshals to be sent in to seize children from Pueblo parents who had always temporarily removed their boys from BIA schools to initiate them through religious rites of passage. This custom was vital to the survival of Pueblo culture, and the missionaries knew it. The campaign by the Indian Rights Association, its president stated proudly, was designed to “make the pagan reactionary element in Santo Domingo [a center of Pueblo resistance] feel that the United States laws are to be obeyed, and that Christian progressive Indians will be protected in their rights.”18

  Meanwhile, John Collier was not silently sitting by. As far as he was concerned, both the Indian Rights Association and the BIA were bandits. The Indian Rights Association was attempting to “split the Pueblos asunder” to “paralyze” the Indians from benefiting from his organization’s legal services. And it was doing so at the very moment that the “final settlement of the land controversies” was occurring.19 Over the past forty years, Indians had lost some 40 million acres of parceled tribal lands in sales to whites and, through BIA-coerced leases, had lost the use of most of the land they still owned.20