by Gerard Colby
The Rockefeller Foundation, headed by the astute Raymond Fosdick since 1921, was at the vanguard of turning Latin America into this “open field.”
Guatemala was at the center of Rockefeller attention. Standard Oil had begun exploratory drilling in this mostly Indian country, whose border with Mexico was the focus of concern over the spread of diseases both political (revolution) and viral (yellow fever). Enlisting the assistance of the commander of Guatemalan troops along the border, Rockefeller’s International Health Board (IHB) succeeded in getting revolutionary Mexico quarantined on health grounds. A cordón sanitario allowed martial law to be imposed on the restless towns and sugar and coffee plantations along the route of United Fruit Company’s International Railways.
From its reported success in the coffee fincas and plantations in now-“eradicated” Guatemala, IHB launched campaigns against the other great mosquito-carried disease, malaria, throughout Central America. The foundation’s antimalaria campaign would eventually spread to some forty-five warm-climate countries and territories around the world.
The eradication of hookworm had also become a worldwide campaign, again, first in Guatemala, where $165,000 was all it took to examine more than 227,000 people and treat 132,000. It remained one of Senior’s great medical bargains for spreading goodwill. And it gave him a foothold in the region.
The political content of the foundation’s work in Latin America was never stated publicly, but in private correspondence it was blatantly expressed. The IHB’s Dr. E. I. Vaughn considered the people of Guatemala “the cream of Central America,” where “the unfortunate mixture of negro blood so common in Spanish countries is almost nil.” The white population were “direct descendants of the original Spanish colony … A large percentage of the better classes are blonde and of decidedly Basque facial characteristics.” The racist myth of Nordic superiority, championed by the early eugenics movement and Frederick Gates, lingered among Anglo-Saxons in the Rockefeller employ and shaped their political hopes for Latin America. Guatemala’s military dictatorship had recently been overthrown, and the white propertied minority was enthusiastic about the future: “The general feeling among the whites is that a nightmare has passed and now is the psychological time to make Guatemala the leading country in Central America.”
And what of the vast Indian majority? “The Indian is beginning to realize that he is something better, and intended for something better, than a beast of burden,” continued Vaughn, “and he has only been able to express his primitive soul by clamoring for education for his children and becoming a mild Bolshevik. I am confident that the seed cast by the International Health Board has fallen on fertile ground, and I can make only one recommendation, and that is Patience.”10
Patience, however, was a luxury few Indians could afford. The aggressive expansion of plantations growing cash crops for export disrupted the Indians’ traditional land tenure and the subsistence agriculture of village life, increasing malnutrition and susceptibility to disease. Company-owned shantytowns seldom had adequate sewer and sanitation systems, intensifying the hookworm infestation. The spread of communicable diseases and mosquito-bearing fruit trains and ships along the new commercial trade routes and railroad towns of coastal Latin America only aggravated the chronic health problems in densely populated areas.
The Rockefeller Foundation’s projects in sanitation, health, and medicine attacked these symptoms, but not their social causes. They were designed to ease the human suffering that accompanied the dramatic socioeconomic changes brought about by American corporate investment and the expansion of the commercial market system into the interior. The goal of healthy workers combined moral imperatives with the businessman’s concern for productivity.
To modernist liberals, Rockefeller’s measures in Latin America seemed infinitely preferable to the “Big Stick” of Theodore Roosevelt. A post-World War I movement to change the methods and style of U.S. intervention from gunboat diplomacy to dollar diplomacy was led by Raymond Fosdick and other Wilsonian liberals who had supported the League of Nations and were now associated with the Rockefellers’ Council on Foreign Relations. Through their efforts, Latin America became a sort of laboratory to test strategies for future foreign policy toward the Third World in general.
Rockefeller-sponsored cooperation between formerly competing Protestant missions in Mexico (top) established a successful standard for penetrating “heathen” lands, and was soon applied to Guatemala (above).
Source: (top) Interchurch World Movement, World Survey, Foreign Volume (New York: Interchurch Press, 1920); (above) Gennet Maxon Emery, Protestantism in Guatemala.
Junior was open to Mott’s concerns about sectarian missions and American inflexibility to nationalist sentiments in underdeveloped countries. Nine years had passed since their last crusade, when Mott had warned hundreds of businessmen, politicians, and ministers that they must move beyond old sectarian principles and denominational rivalries if they were to defeat the specter of revolution.
“Some of us were in Russia shortly after the outbreak of the Revolution,” Mott told the group, “where we saw the beginning of that fell influence that has swept over the world and that we now speak of as Bolshevism. We recognized its menace, but little did we realize that so soon it would spread like some great disease from nation to nation.” In the Russian Revolution, Mott saw an internationalist force that went beyond being just another case of nationalist uprising in an underdeveloped, oppressed land.
“The object of Lenin, as I see it, has been not to divide the peoples vertically into compartments [national states], but to cut a great horizontal cleavage across the entire human race, arraying class against class with growing bitterness.”11
To match the international alliance of lower-class revolutionists, Mott had urged corporate leaders to close ranks in their own international Christian entente. “Against that evil,” agreed former Secretary of State Robert Lansing, “the churches should battle as they battle against every evil that flows from the devil.”12
Now, nine years later, America’s Protestant lay leaders who had not listened to Mott’s original warning seemed more receptive. The stock market had crashed just two months before, in October. Antagonism between the classes would grow again in the United States, just as nationalist resentments were already reappearing abroad. Christ’s message of love was needed for all. Mott was right. It was time to act.
THE MANIFESTO
But not in public. Junior did not wish to rekindle Fundamentalist fires. He convened a gathering of well-heeled northern Baptists at his Manhattan town house on January 17, 1930, to allow Mott to make his pitch. They decided to include other mainstream northern Protestant denominations in a formal interchurch commission to oversee the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry. And Junior, of course, agreed to pick up the entire tab, which by the end of the year came to $320,000.13
The Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry sent out its survey team to Asia in September 1930. It returned nine months later and issued its report, Rethinking Missions, in 1932.
“Rumors were abroad that things were not well on the foreign field,” a spokesman explained at the report’s formal presentation. “There were ominous stories of trouble in China, and in India and in Japan. Students were uprising, communism was rampant; missionaries themselves were disturbed, and the Boards did not seem to know how to direct their own efforts and activities.”14
Rethinking Missions recommended reforms that few Fundamentalists could accept: an end to segregation from Asian cultures and appreciation of elements in Asian faiths that were kindred to Christ’s message; more quiet lessons of examples and programs in education, medicine, and agriculture and less evangelical proselytizing; more cooperation and efficiency to reduce the wasteful overlap of programs; and, most important, a gradual transfer of power to indigenous churches.
The report was a bombshell, running through ten printings in six months. Junior read sections of the manuscript before it was released. �
��I have done so with a lump in my throat,” he wrote the commission’s members, “and with a fervent song of praise in my heart.”15
Those who were deep in the ranks of Fundamentalism openly criticized the report. Dr. Nelson Bell, a medical missionary in north Jiangsu province in China, rejected the report’s argument that “the use of medical or other professional service as a direct means of making converts … in wards and dispensaries from which patients cannot escape is subtly coercive and improper.” To Bell, it was “the preaching of the Cross, the Gospel of redemption from sin through faith in the shed blood of the Savior, which is the power of God.”16
Bell’s heavy emphasis on “the Word,” the literal Bible, to convey the message of Christ was symptomatic of the entire Fundamentalist movement. With Bell, it would have a powerful voice through his editorship of Christianity Today and through his son-in-law, Billy Graham.
In the coffee hills of western Guatemala, however, another young Fundamentalist missionary could understand Mott’s call for indigenous control over institutions founded by foreign missionaries. And he had learned the value of the Rockefellers’ philanthropies for his own mission. In the years ahead, he would ally himself with Bell, his funder J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil Company (Sunoco), and Billy Graham to build America’s largest and most politically controversial missionary organization, the Summer Institute of Linguistics. One day he would be called by evangelicals “the greatest Apostle since Saint Paul.” He would also be Fundamentalism’s greatest paradox, inadvertently serving the interests of Nelson Rockefeller as “the Apostle of the Lost Tribes.”
His name was William Cameron Townsend.
4
THE APOSTOLIC VISION
THE ROCKEFELLER PILLARS
In May 1930, when Fundamentalist missionaries from around the world gathered at Moody Memorial Church in Chicago to attend its Annual Missionary Rally, many of them were angry about the growing power of Rockefeller-funded modernism. The unholy trinity of Rockefeller, money, and modernism was symbolized by Riverside Church’s gothic spires climbing ever higher over upper Manhattan as the church neared completion. But few were prepared for the dissent that erupted from within their own ranks. One of them, in fact, their most successful young colleague, was about to stun them with an act of rebellion unheard of in Moody’s fifty-three-year history.
Anguished over his future in Guatemala under the thumbs of Fundamentalist elders, William Cameron Townsend announced to a hushed audience that he intended to leave one of their most important missions in Latin America. At age thirty-six, he had spent thirteen years promoting God’s Work in Guatemala, and now it was time to move on. He wanted to evangelize the lost tribes of the Amazon, he explained, and he wanted to do it with airplanes.
His listeners were aghast. Oil geologists had been killed by Amazonian Indians, protested a twenty-five-year veteran of South America. “It is impossible to reach them.”1 The missionary urged Townsend to stay with the Cakchiquel Indians. “Now that you’ve finished the New Testament, your work is just beginning. You know their language and their ways. They believe in you. Go back and train more preachers.”2
Townsend already had, but not to preach as vassals under an American supervisor. He had been won over to the modernist concept of the indigenous church. He had heard all the Fundamentalist warnings about potential heresies. But he had also learned that the condescension with which mixed-blood ladino preachers regarded the Indian was undeserving of respect. His first Indian companion, Francisco Diaz, had convinced him of the value of the Indian preacher soon after he arrived in Guatemala. “He’s eager, industrious, and skillful in missionary work. What the Lord could do with a hundred like him! They could evangelize their own people in their own language.”3 It was at Diaz’s urging that Townsend had decided to leave his job as a Bible salesman for the Los Angeles Bible House and set up his first “School of the Prophets” in Diaz’s hometown, San Antonio de Aguas Calientes, just west of Antigua, Guatemala’s old colonial capital. Since then, a decade of hard work had built up a strong church with an active indigenous clergy, who did not need an American overlord.
Townsend, however, was momentarily subdued by the force of his elders’ convictions. In Moody Church’s auditorium, while a prayer meeting was under way, “I felt a chill come over my soul. The old fervor and burden for the unreached tribes was gone.” Like Dwight Moody, who once went into a crisis during a failing fund drive, Townsend shuddered and cried for the return of “the warmth of soul that has accompanied the vision of pioneering.” If purpose would return, he would go where the Lord sent him “even though the task seems impossible.” At last he felt the zeal return. “I knew that God had called,” he recalled later.4
Throughout his life, William Cameron Townsend had accepted God’s Word in the Bible without question. He owed his beliefs to his father. The elder Townsend had wrestled with poor harvests, debts, and nagging dreams of the Promised Land for years as an itinerant farmer. All had driven him farther and farther west, from Kansas to Colorado and finally to southern California. There, under the shadow of the great citrus plantations that dominated the Santa Ana River Valley, he scratched out a living growing vegetables until, deaf and aging, he met hard times again. Only this time there was no new frontier; the Pacific had put a stop to that. So he fell back on the three things he knew best: his Bible; his family; and a stubborn belief that honesty, temperance, and a prairie-born populist justice would somehow, someday, prevail. These were the values that Will Townsend drilled into his oldest namesake son, called Cam to distinguish him from his father. And Cam buried them deep in his heart and carried them to Guatemala and unparalleled Fundamentalist success among the Indians of the Mayan highlands.
But in spite of Cam’s lifelong reverence for the Word, his work had come under growing scrutiny by his mission elders over the past five years. Locked in battle with modernists abroad as well as at home, Cam’s Fundamentalist superiors were doubtful of his doctrinal purity.
And they had reason to be. Since sailing to Guatemala in 1917, Cam had and witnessed the foundations programs against hookworm and malaria. Soon he was campaigning for the government to drain the mosquito-infested swamps and dispensing quinine for malaria and modern chemistry for hookworm.
“The Rockefeller Foundation has found that 80 percent of the Indians have the hookworm,”5 he reported in C.A.M.’s Central American Bulletin. Armed with chenopodium and quinine, his Christian campaign against traditional Indian healers advanced steadily. Elvira Malmstrom, a Moody Church missionary whom he married, assumed the part of nurse.
“This has been a week of great blessing,” he wrote home. “Through sickness on all sides many homes continue to be opened to us.” A native healer soon succumbed to the competition. Although “still doctoring many by her magic arts,” he explained, “when she herself … gets sick she comes for Elvira. We are now being called upon to doctor many cases other than malaria.”6
Since the days of the conquistadores, disease had played an important role in the European conquest of the Americas. By inadvertently introducing European diseases, such as smallpox, a tiny minority of Spaniards overwhelmed millions of Indians and the sophisticated Aztec, Inca, and Maya civilizations that had no immunity to alien diseases. Indian tribes in Mexico watched the new white God kill Aztecs, but leave Spaniards unharmed; suddenly the Aztec gods, like the Aztec king, no longer looked invincible. The Indians allied with Spaniards by the thousands, to their later regret.7 This scenario for cultural conquest was replayed in the American West—and in the Cakchiquel hills of Guatemala through missionaries like Townsend administering the white man’s modern medicine, compliments of the Rockefeller Foundation.
Cam’s linguistics, too, had a Rockefeller connection. For his breakthrough in analyzing the Cakchiquel language, Cam was indebted to a visiting American archaeologist who warned him that he was trying to force the Indians’ oriental-sounding language into the Latin mold. The archaeologist recommended the less ethnocentric
approach of Edward Sapir, the leading linguist of the University of Chicago.
Sapir had established a new standard in linguistics by phonetically describing languages in terms of their “own genius,” rather than in ways that European culture considered important. Words spoken in any culture, Sapir maintained, evolved as having importance in a language because they allowed communication within a given perspective on the world, a perspective that might look at the universe quite differently from the way European culture did. To understand the structure of a language, therefore, you had to step out of a European perspective and accept that another perspective had given certain words status as means of communication. Important words that were keys to a language structure had status not simply because they existed, but because they could be shared by the people who used them. In language, as in most tools of a culture, it was sharing, cooperation, that was the hallmark of human culture’s success as an adapting mediation with the nat-shown hints of dangerous modernist traits, such as donning Indian clothes and showing an appreciation of Indian culture. Even his inspiration for becoming a missionary had been John Mott. Mott had delivered a passionate speech before Cam and other students at Occidental College on “evangelizing the world in this generation.” Cam, “impressed by how little I had done to witness my faith,” took up the call, asked for a draft deferment, and moved to Guatemala to sell Bibles. When he arrived, he found his superiors at the Central American Mission (ironically referred to as C.A.M.) to be unwavering in their adherence to Fundamentalist tradition.
The Central American Mission was a conservative body. Although it reluctantly agreed to collaborate with John Mott’s Committee on Cooperation in Latin America during World War I and joined other missions in dividing up Central America like pieces of cake, the mission had never forgotten its roots in the Moody Church, the cathedral of Fundamentalism.