by Gerard Colby
In 1926, these leases—and particularly the new oil leases—were the focus of escalating attacks by John Collier and his chief ally in Congress, Rep. James A. Frear. Frear called for a joint congressional investigation of the BIA’s support for the Indian Oil Bill that attracted speculators like “a cloud of buzzards obscuring the sun.” Then the two men conducted their own survey of twenty western reservations, traveling over 4,400 miles by car. They found that the conditions were worse than they had feared: For example, the Sioux were starving, and 25 percent of the Crow Indians were in danger of being blinded by trachoma. The BIA, Collier insisted, was destroying the Indians because it still had a “hangover” from the “original military policy which regarded the Indian as an outlaw and danger to society.”21
By this time, Junior had returned from the West and concurred with Fosdick that support for the conservative Indian Rights Association had been an error. The missionaries’ attacks on Indian traditions were counterproductive; worse, one of the Indian Rights Association’s most strident officials, Clara D. True, who previously had been sued by the federal government for misappropriating BIA funds, had been indiscreet about the Rockefellers’ funding.22
If Baptist missionaries could no longer be relied upon to prevent violence or scandal from looming over the Rockefeller horizon, then Junior had little choice but to turn to other, more scientifically objective sources.
Fortunately, Rockefeller money had already ensured that those sources were on hand. Interior Secretary Work, sensing that he was losing the initiative to John Collier and hoping to forestall a congressional investigation of the BIA and its Navajo oil leases, invited the Brookings Institution for Government Research to conduct a survey of Indian conditions, a survey independent of the BIA, but beholden to the Rockefellers to the tune of $125,000.
This time Junior had made a safe bet. The Brookings Institution’s board of trustees included Raymond Fosdick and Jerome Greene, two members of Rockefeller’s inner legal circle, along with such familiar names as Carnegie Institute president John C. Merriam (who had advised Junior on his Western itinerary).
Under Lewis Meriam’s direction, the report of the survey, The Problem of Indian Administration, was widely hailed when it was published in 1928. But as Collier had feared, the Meriam Report spared the top BIA officials from criticism for the conditions it described. Instead, it chose to follow the BIA’s and missionaries’ line that Congress was to blame for the Indians’ misery. Congress, for its part, conducted its own investigation, holding hearings that led to the resignation of BIA Commissioner Charles H. Burke. For a brief while, it appeared to Collier that the reign of big money and missionaries over Indian affairs might be over.
He was wrong. In 1928 the American people, beguiled by the prosperity of the twenties and the promise of a “chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” had elected conservative Herbert Hoover president. To lead the BIA, Hoover appointed Charles J. Rhoads, a wealthy banker and treasurer of the Indian Rights Association, who did address grievances, but not with protective legislation or Indian empowerment. But the Indian Rights Association had received its last funds from Junior. From then on, the Rockefellers would increasingly turn away from the Baptists. They preferred more secular missions at home and abroad as they took command of the age of oil.
3
RETHINKING MISSIONS
IN SEARCH OF A MISSION
In these early years, Nelson Rockefeller did not understand the global implications of the “Indian Problem” confronting his father’s generation. As a sixteen-year-old on his first trip west in 1924, he had been little more than a rapt observer of Indian life. By the summer of 1929, when he and his brother Laurance joined missionary doctor Sir Wilfred Grenfell on one of his famous expeditions to the Eskimos, his childlike wonder had faded into cynicism. “The natives … just sit around and go fishing when the spirit moves them.… Why, if any of them were half way ambitious he could make some money. But I suppose there is no use getting excited about it. Perhaps they get more out of life that way than we do rushing around.”1
Nelson’s letter to his parents revealed the same conflict between conservatism and liberalism that tormented his father. His disdain for the rural native’s lack of ambition reflected America’s Calvinist thinking since the landing of the Pilgrims: One’s success in life is measured by the amount of money one has made and the property one has acquired. But no sooner had Nelson’s own words of contempt spilled onto paper than he checked himself, as if nudged by some silent moral mentor to keep an open mind. Two motivations—profit and humanitarian—would war within Nelson as he followed his father into the rough-and-tumble of world power.
For a time, an uneasy truce had reigned between Nelson and his father. At Dartmouth, Nelson even managed to charm Junior when he wrote his economics thesis on Standard Oil. Junior was delighted by the shameless apology, drawn heavily from an unpublished biography of Senior that Junior had commissioned.
But it soon became obvious that the world of business did not hold the same lure for Nelson that it did for other Rockefellers. “I only hope that I shall grow up and live a life that will be worthy of the family name,” he wrote from France one summer after inspecting the restoration work at Versailles and Rheims that his father had financed. “I’m sure [brother] Johnny will because he already thinks and acts exactly like you, Pa.… But as for myself—well, I’m a lot different and I don’t think the same way.”2
When senior year and graduation approached, he was even more explicit. “Frankly, I don’t relish the idea of going into some business.… Just to work my way up in a business that another man has built, stepping from the shoes of one to those of another, making a few minor changes here and there and then, finally, perhaps at the age of sixty, getting to the top where I would have real control for a few years. No, that isn’t my idea of living a real life.”3
Such zest for life had been the attribute most often associated with his mother. Abby Rockefeller was the opposite of her husband, imbued with a fearless sense of adventure. She refused to allow her compassion for the less fortunate to be hardened by the Rockefeller obsession with the “correct” Puritan stewarding of wealth. Her greatest gift to Nelson was a quiet but enduring resistance to the sterner Rockefeller tradition.
Nevertheless, for Nelson power beckoned. It was ordained not only by the august Rockefeller name, but by the heady political legend of his namesake, his maternal grandfather, Nelson Aldrich. For thirty years Nelson Aldrich had been one of the most powerful figures in the U.S. Senate, renowned for his friendships with bankers and heads of sugar companies and a political career that had started with humble resources and ended with a $50 million fortune.
By his senior year, Nelson had caught the bug. He made two feverish runs for the presidency of his class. Both were failures. As in the broader political arena to come, young Nelson Rockefeller had to settle for the vice presidency.
THE PEACEFUL CONQUEST OF THE WORLD
In December 1929, Junior received an urgent letter from one of his most trusted envoys. John Mott had just returned from a tour of Protestant missions in Asia, and he was quite agitated. Mott was a millenarian who hoped to hasten the Second Coming by evangelizing the world “in this generation.” But he was not a Fundamentalist; he believed that science was the probing of God’s mind, and the strident proselytizing he had witnessed among Fundamentalist missionaries in China deeply worried him. Unless more tolerance and social concern were shown by American missionaries throughout the Third World, the missionaries would find themselves facing the same kind of angry nationalistic reaction he had just witnessed.
After popular revolutions had broken out in both Mexico and China in 1910, Junior sent Mott to set up a China Medical Board to blend medical science and religion into a powerful new institution, the Peking Union Medical College. “If we wait until China becomes stable,” Mott told the members of Junior’s China Medical Board at the board’s first meeting, “we lose the greatest
opportunity that we shall ever have.” Mott understood that the Rockefeller fortune could shape the political future of the world’s most populous nation. “That nation will have only one first generation in its modern era,” he wrote after the proclamation of the Chinese Republic in 1911. “The first wave of students to receive the modern training … will set the standards and the pace.”4
To realize his vision, Mott became a shrewd fund-raiser among rich men like the Rockefellers. He incorporated the sales pitch of a Wall Street broker. “To ask money of a man for the purposes of the world-wide Kingdom of God is not to ask him a favor,” he once wrote. “It is to give him a superb opportunity of investing his personality in eternal shares.” Money was “so much stored-up personality,” he argued, accumulated days of human labor that survived its owners and therefore could be used after death to extend the owner’s life on earth.
This concept of the transubstantiation of money into an immortal soul bore a striking resemblance to the family’s rationale for a perpetual Rockefeller Foundation; indeed, Standard Oil was Mott’s organizational model. He incorporated the culture and methods of corporations into the missionary movement. Over the years, millions of Rockefeller dollars poured into Mott’s pursuit of a streamlined, efficient evangelism.
Two significant factors lured Mott into locking himself firmly within the Rockefeller orbit. One was the global vision of Senior’s closest investment adviser, Baptist minister Frederick Gates. The other was China and its huge potential harvest of souls, which had obsessed the mind of American Protestantism since its first missionaries boarded the clipper ships of the China trade sailing out of New England’s harbors.
Gates had been captivated by the thought of the family fortune moving into foreign markets. With Standard Oil taking the lead, he argued that the advance of the American corporation represented the Will of God. Standard Oil’s kerosene had literally lit the lamps of China since the 1890s, inspiring the company to commit its own form of blasphemy by lifting its product’s slogan from the New Testament: “the Light of the World.”
To Gates, the growing cultural interdependence of the global market and the accompanying spread of “English-speaking” Protestant missions bore evidence of “one great, preconceived plan.” A “study of the map of the world” disclosed to the cleric that the different missions were really a single “invading army,” whose “masterfulness of strategy and tactics … [was] controlled and directed by one master mind,” God.5
If Senior was put off by this unreconstructed Calvinist doctrine of predestination, Gates’s emphasis on the relationship between missionary efforts and commercial conquest had a more practical saving grace:
Quite apart from the question of persons converted, the mere commercial results of missionary efforts to our own land is worth, I had almost said, a thousand-fold every year of what is spent on missions.…
Missionaries and missionary schools are introducing the application of modern science, steam and electric power, modern agricultural machinery and modern manufacture into foreign lands. The result will be eventually to multiply the productive power of foreign countries many times. This will enrich them as buyers of American products and enrich us as importers of their products. We are only in the very dawn of commerce, and we owe that dawn, with all its promise to the channels opened up by Christian missionaries.… The effect of the missionary enterprise of the English speaking peoples will be to bring them the peaceful conquest of the world.6
Mott shared Gates’s vision, but not its complacency. Since Christian traditionalists, backed by Lyman Stewart of Union Oil, had published The Fundamentals of their faith before World War I, Mott had noticed a stiffened intransigence among Christian missionaries abroad. These missionaries drew strength from the movement of rural ministers at home, who now officially called themselves Fundamentalists and attacked Darwin’s science of evolution and the modernist Protestant currents that had converged with Rockefeller funding into the Federal Council of Churches.
Fundamentalists were building dams of intransigence before the ever-swelling tide of anticolonialism. John Mott witnessed the upsurge of nationalism in China and predicted the impending explosion. American missionaries were sure to suffer the most, simply because of their number: Sixty-five American mission societies were functioning in China, almost twice the number of British societies.
The West had badly underestimated the strength and intensity of Chinese patriotism, and now the Chinese were insisting on a national educational system stripped of Western control. American missionaries, who between 1925 and 1928 numbered 4,000 to 5,000 out of the 9,800 Americans in China and owned property worth at least $43 million,7 were being forced to reevaluate their position. The nationalist revolution of 1910 ushered in Chinese boards that merely set the stage for the immediate nationalization and eventual secularization of the missions. Some Christian Fundamentalists, seeing evangelization as the sine qua non of a Christian education, refused to bend, increasing the Chinese resentment.8 And not without cause. Two-thirds of the 4,375 Christian missionaries in 1928 were concentrated in 176 prosperous commercial centers, where only 25 million people, just 6 percent of the Chinese population, lived.9
Modernist missionaries had recognized the crisis. They called for a cooperative approach in the rural areas, advocating health surveys, agricultural work, and bilingual education.
But the modernists’ efforts were crippled by the lack of funds and support from their colleagues. Most missionaries in the Far East were traditionalists and recent converts to the Fundamentalist cause; they preferred to concentrate on saving souls by evangelism alone, assuming the imminence of the Second Coming. Meanwhile, Chinese communists who had survived Chiang Kai-shek’s massacres at Shanghai and Canton and had followed Mao Tse-tung into the countryside were winning thousands of recruits by assisting peasants who were struggling against wealthy landlords.
Mott was shocked and concluded that time was running out for American missionaries all over Asia. He wanted Junior to convene a meeting at the Rockefeller town house to discuss the urgent need for another great mission: modernizing the worlds Christian missions to the Third World.
SECULARIZING FOREIGN MISSIONS
When John Mott made this proposition to Junior, Riverside Church was nearing completion. The concept of this church, honoring not only Christian leaders but founders of the great Eastern religions and scientists (including the despised Darwin), symbolized the Rockefeller family’s broadening, global perspective. The international power of the Rockefeller fortune was just asserting itself in the 1920s, joining the general thrust of American corporate wealth in expanding overseas.
World War I had reversed American business’s dependence on Europe for capital. From 1920 to 1929, the United States’ direct investments abroad rose $40 million, to over $600 million; trade and investment overseas grew over 700 percent.
The Standard Oil companies, of course, led the way for the Rockefellers. Besides the New Jersey company, by 1926 Standard Oil of California held 575,000 acres in Venezuela and 200,000 acres in Mexico. Standard Oil of New York had penetrated markets from the Balkans, through the Middle East, down to South Africa, and east through India and Indochina to the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies.
Standard Oil of New Jersey was growing into the oil colossus of the Western Hemisphere. Its area of new exploration was Latin America.
In Bolivia’s arid Altiplano around Lake Titicaca, the highest lake in the world, Standard Oil of New Jersey was busy refining and marketing.
Peru had been entered back in 1913. And in Colombia, where tempers still flared over the ripping away of the Panamanian isthmus in 1903 by an American-financed “revolution,” backed by nine U.S. gunboats, Standard concentrated on getting the Harding administration to pay a $25 million indemnity in 1921 to soothe Colombia’s pain. Then the company obtained a government concession to the 2,000-square-mile De Mares oil field along the Magdalena and Carare rivers, where oil seepages had been observed b
y local Indians since the days before the Spanish Conquest. Within a year after Nelson’s trip out to the West, the De Mares field had become Standard Oil’s largest foreign source of oil.
Through all these successes, the Rockefellers and their tax-free philanthropies profited enormously. The oil companies were now giant machines of human labor, pumping millions of dollars in dividends and capital gains into interlocked coffers. The Rockefeller Foundation owned stock in thirteen oil companies and nine pipelines in the United States, as well as thirty-five railroads and thirty-five other corporations that were involved in everything from steel and gas to banks and real estate. Many of these companies were doing substantial business in Latin America or the Far East by the mid-1920s.
As the oil companies expanded abroad, the family’s concern for foreign missions, both secular and religious, intensified. In Latin America, missionaries in the Rockefeller philanthropic orbit were well aware of the heightened interest by corporations in the southern hemisphere. John Mott’s Committee on Cooperation in Latin America was perhaps the most forthright, reporting in its 1919 Annual Report:
Capitalists, manufacturers, steamship directors, food economists, political leaders of nations that need an outlet for surplus goods and populations, all are planning intensive activities in these fallow, underdeveloped southern lands of promise.…
With modern agricultural inventions and the development of sanitation, the tropics are no longer uninhabitable for the white man and may be looked upon as an open field for his future activities.