Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  Cam did not question the tenets of C.A.M.’s founder, Cyrus Scofield, a former Indian hunter turned preacher among Texas land boomers and merchants. Scofield and his Reference Bible prophesied that the Millennial Kingdom of peace and justice would come only after Christ’s Second Coming, not before, as millennialists had traditionally taught. This meant that scriptural commands to give up the pursuit of wealth also applied only to that distant Kingdom, when the Lord would rule, and not before. Thus Scofield preserved for his donors as well as his missionaries the central thesis of the Puritan ethic: By living one’s life according to the Book, one could avoid social reform and still win both riches and the keys to heaven. Social reform was deemed impossible in a world ruled by Satan and “Man’s Fallen Nature,” so why try? Wealth became not only God’s reward for a holy life in a sinful world, but a sign of His grace for answering in one’s chosen work some particular “calling” in His Great Plan.

  Cam wondered why such a powerful message in the Bible should be useful only to those already assimilated into Euro-American culture, not full-blooded Indians living in the more remote, traditional villages.

  Spanish-language Bibles were useless to most of the Indians, who spoke their own native tongues. To reach them with God’s Word, a missionary had to learn their languages and reduce them to some written form so that the Bible could be translated into words and cultural terms the Indians could understand.

  Thousands of highland Indians who worked seasonally in the plantations along Guatemala’s Pacific coast had been overlooked by missionaries in favor of their mixed-blood ladino overseers. Cam was raising a new church, an Indian church, on the four pillars of linguistics, education, health reform, and economics.

  In health care, Cam discovered a direct means of supplanting the authority of traditional Indian healers. When he first arrived in Guatemala, he traveled along the route of the sanitary cordon established by the Rockefeller Foundation’s doctors ural environment, not the crude competition of “the survival of the strongest” championed by the social Darwinists of the imperial Victorian age. The strongest, as the dinosaurs’ extinction proved, were not always nature’s fittest.

  Using Sapir’s approach, Cam soon grasped that the tone, inflection, and grammatical structure of the Cakchiquels’ language was as purposefully specialized as the colors and pattern in the clothes worn in each of their villages. The language was incredibly rich and sophisticated. Unlike English, the possibilities of combinations to express different meanings and subtle nuances were much more complex. Ideas, such as time, location, the number of subjects, and types of actions, could be collapsed into a single verb. The possible combinations of ideas were staggering. Cam estimated that one verb could be conjugated into 100,000 forms, not even counting compounds.

  Cam combined his new understanding of linguistics with his limited knowledge of Jerome’s translation of the Gospel of St. Luke gained from his college course on New Testament Greek. He worked hard to render as accurate a translation of Mark as possible into Cakchiquel. When he finished four chapters, Elvira typed them, following each page of Cakchiquel with its Spanish equivalent. The Townsends had adopted bilingual education.

  This was a decidedly political act, an announcement of Cam’s commitment to the assimilation of the Indian into the culture and political life of the Spanish-speaking minority who ruled Guatemala. It won him the immediate support of many ladinos, including the mayor of Antigua.

  But it was through economics that he probably won the most adult male converts. Cam founded a coffee cooperative. This project was also the result of his ability to call upon American resources, in this case a St. Louis coffee company owned by a mission-minded Baptist, Alexander E. Forbes. Moved by Cam’s call in the Christian Herald for help in economically uplifting his Indian converts, Forbes had a ready solution. His family fortune had been built on processing coffee into liquid concentrates and soluble powder for “instant” coffee. Forbes had been buying coffee from Guatemala since at least 1890. He therefore suggested that if Townsend could persuade his converts to grow and pick their own coffee and combine their harvests into a cooperative, he would donate a sheller and a turbine; all he asked in return was the Indians’ coffee. He got it.

  THE MISSION’S BURDEN

  It was precisely Cam’s success by such unorthodox ways that had whipped both Catholic clergy and his fellow Fundamentalists into a jealous froth. His quoting the good deeds of the Rockefeller Foundation to mission magazines; welcoming Indians into his home (originally a cornstalk house, like the Indians’); wearing their costumes; departure from mission policy by fund-raising among local merchants; commitment to training a native clergy by setting up the Robinson Bible Institute (named after a close missionary companion); and, above all, intention to perpetuate the culture of the backward Indian by having his Cakchiquel translation of the New Testament put in print had inspired angry protests to the mission’s home office.

  But the fact was that Townsend was the Central American Mission’s success story. Despite his youth, Cam had, in a remarkably short period, acquired, by risk and hard work, an unparalleled breadth of knowledge of Indian conditions throughout the interior of Central America. He had traveled through jungles, swamps, and mountains and had visited the Indians where they worked in mines and plantations and where they lived in the high altos. He had won their respect and even their assistance and counted 2,000 of them as converts. He was friendly with the U.S. ambassador and with Guatemala’s president, who had helped the Protestant missions thrive by deporting Catholic priests. The mission board not only voted in Cam’s favor by a majority of six, but the following year named him administrative secretary of C.A.M.’s central district.

  Now, five years after his first confrontation with his Fundamentalist elders, the maverick missionary was back, promoting his new idea of flying missionaries into the Amazon jungle. Here, he urged, were a thousand Bibleless tribes roaming a green hell. Cam owed this dark vision to L. L. Legters, a former Presbyterian missionary to the Comanche and Sioux Indians who had surveyed Mexico and the Amazon as a director of Philadelphia’s Pioneer Mission Agency. Hoping to set up a neutral missionary agency for Indians that might transcend the Fundamentalist-modernist schism, Legters had won backing from John Mott’s Committee of Cooperation in Latin America. Impressed by Cam’s work in Guatemala, Legters sent Cam pictures he had taken of “fine, stalwart, naked Indians” bereft of God’s Word in the isolated Xingu River Valley of the Brazilian Amazon. These, he told Cam, were only a few of the thousand tribes who waited for brave young men like Townsend.8

  Cam was more than ready and willing. In fact, he was desperate. Pioneering a new exotic field for Bible translation with modern airplanes was far more exciting than administering C.A.M.’s missionary routines in Guatemala.

  Cam’s inspiration for planes was less spiritually inspired: the U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. For the first time in its relations with Latin America, the United States used warplanes in attempting to crush the resistance forces of General Augusto Sandino. In January 1927, while two American destroyers arrived off the shores of Nicaragua, American warplanes also landed in Guatemala City. Cam was on hand to greet them. The planes were on a “goodwill” flight of navy pilots to demonstrate American aerial might in Latin America and, according to the secretary of war, to test amphibian airplanes for the War Department.9

  Cam introduced himself to the commander, Major Herbert Dargue, and told him about his mission work among the Indians. He asked the major for cost estimates for an aviation program in a jungle area. Cam was already dreaming beyond Guatemala.

  Dargue promised to put together some facts and figures. Months later, Dargue’s reply came, outlining a program that required much more than the missionary had anticipated: a jungle airstrip with a hangar, an outpost, three amphibian airplanes, pilots, mechanics, radio operators, repair facilities, posts, fuel, insurance, and medical personnel. And that was before operations could safely begin; three years of operati
ng expenses would cost another $134,000.

  With that kind of expense, Cam’s proposal for the Amazon’s tribes was doomed before it echoed off Moody Church’s stately walls.

  But the Townsends refused to give up. At the church’s Missionary Union, they spoke of their dream and of the power of airplanes to reach it. Cam asked them for permission to use the mission’s name to raise money for a plane in northern Guatemala. His vision could not be dimmed, and he showed it. “The jungles and rivers there are like Amazonia,”10 he explained.

  MUTINY IN THE MISSION CHURCH

  Carrying the mission’s reluctant endorsement, Cam returned to the Guatemalan highlands the Cakchiquels called home. The village elders welcomed Cam “as a beloved brother. The old men poured out their grievances to him as they couldn’t to the Spanish-speaking missionaries.”11 The Indians wanted to assume responsibility for their church “because the mission had everything.” They “wanted their own organization.”12 Cam sympathized with the Indians’ aspirations, but he knew that the attitude of his colleagues at the Central American Mission would not be so kind. He advised the Indians to surrender authority over the church to the C.A.M. mission. “You can do better working with them than against them.”13 Because the Indians trusted him, they acquiesced.

  Cam eagerly awaited the arrival of his Cakchiquel New Testament. He found the Bibles buried in the archives of Guatemala City’s post office, all eighteen copies of the American Bible Society’s advanced shipment long overdue. He caressed the leather-bound books, marveling over their beauty, then hurried to make sure that one man in particular heard the message first. This man was not an Indian, but one of their oppressors: the new dictator, General Jorge Ubico.

  Ubico had come a long way since getting his first political break in 1918, when lightning struck in the form of the Rockefeller Foundation anti-yellow fever campaign. As military overseer of the campaign, he often subjected the Indians to extreme measures of disease eradication, including burning their homes “as the only way out.”14 Ubico was now the third largest landowner in Guatemala and president to boot, having recently seized power by overthrowing the latest dictatorship.

  Late in the afternoon of May 19, 1931, General Ubico received Cam Townsend, the Caribbean secretary of the American Bible Society, and Trinidad Bac, a Cakchiquel who helped Cam with his tribe’s language and was now an evangelical preacher. Cam had the Indian formally present the book, then made a short speech himself and had Ubico pose with them for a picture for a front-page story in the next day’s newspaper. It was a scene Townsend would repeat many times with dictators in years to come.

  Now that the translation was done, Cam’s vision expanded. “The tribes of South America will have the Bible. And North America, Africa and Asia also.”15

  Cam was thinking of airplanes and of specially constructed steamboats that would haul missionaries up and down the great Amazon of South America. “There is surely some Christian oil man who would give us a plane,” Cam’s brother Paul pleaded in a Presbyterian newsletter,16 but there was only silence and Cam’s swelling frustrations.

  Then one day Cam noticed a stranger taking pictures in Panajachel, a resort town west of Guatemala City on Lake Atitlán, where he ran a small school for the Cakchiquel. The man introduced himself as Moisés Sáenz from Mexico.

  A BEACON FROM MEXICO

  Cam recognized the name immediately. Moisés Sáenz had gained quite a reputation for himself heading Mexico’s rural education program, the first concerted effort to bring education to Mexico’s Indians. Like many educators after the Mexican Revolution, Sáenz was a Protestant, in fact, a Presbyterian like Townsend. Sáenz had graduated from a private Protestant secondary school in Monterrey and from Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Coyoacán, a fashionable suburb of Mexico City. He was also American trained, having done postgraduate work at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania before returning to his homeland, then in the throes of revolution. This liberal educator also believed in Protestant evangelism.

  Cam took Sáenz on a tour of the Cakchiquel, visiting the school and the mission at San Antonio. Sáenz was delighted when the children sang in both Cakchiquel and Spanish. He was also impressed by Cam’s books and curriculum and the medical clinics Cam had established in other villages. The Maya people here were linguistically similar to some of the Indians in his own country. Sáenz invited his fellow Presbyterian to come to Mexico. After he returned north, he sent a letter from his office repeating the invitation, as Cam had requested. That simple letter, written on official Mexican stationery, was to prove fateful for Cam and tribal peoples the world over.

  The road Cam had been searching for suddenly flashed before him. If he was not immediately drawn to Mexico, he was at least aware that there were horizons beyond the elusive Amazon.

  And beyond the Central American Mission. The mission’s executive committee sent him a disappointing Christmas present in 1931. He was to remain in the Cakchiquel work until “adequate leadership” could replace him.

  “What they mean is missionary bosses,” he told his wife, Elvira. “They should let the Cakchiquels themselves take over. They have enough well-trained leaders, and more being turned out every year. They have the New Testament. Why do they need American overseers?

  “And they want me to do ‘occasional exploration into unoccupied fields.’ How can I do that, when 500 tribes in Latin America await God’s word?”17

  A few weeks later, Cam suffered another blow. Word arrived from California that his mother was dead. She had been fighting cancer for months, but he had been sure that Jesus would heal her. His mother had always had faith in him. Now he had to make the greatest decision of his life—whether to leave Guatemala—without her advice.

  Cam reflected on his future. His Cakchiquel translation had given him enough confidence in his skills to move on to other New Testaments and other tribes, far from the dictates of his Fundamentalist elders.

  Elvira was delighted. The pace of Cam’s work had driven the small, round-faced woman almost mad. She had begun to have explosions of anger, most of them directed at Cam. Her protests escalated to violence; one day she even kicked her husband. She had never adjusted to the Indians’ culture, preferring the work among ladinos that she had expected to do when she first came to Guatemala.

  Whatever hesitation Cam felt about leaving ended when disaster struck. On January 21, 1932, the Volcano of Fire above his mission in San Antonio erupted in flames, along with the entire volcanic chain that stretched south toward Guatemala’s border with El Salvador.

  Soon after, word came from across the border of an even greater disaster. Thousands of Pipil Indians, whom Cam had surveyed for the mission in 1925, were being butchered by the military dictatorship after the Indians attempted a revolt led by local communists. The conspiracy had even spread to Guatemala, claimed President Ubico, who had the foresight to arrest and execute labor organizers in the plantations. Cam and Elvira quickly decided to move to the lowlands for their health, explaining that Cam had contracted tuberculosis.

  They spent five months there, pondering their future with the Central American Mission. Despite ongoing support from several of his supporters there, Cam knew that it would be difficult to fulfill his solemn vow “to work in perfect harmony with the Central American Mission.”18

  When Cam and Elvira left Guatemala for home in mid-1932, they discovered that Elvira’s emotional strain had a physical basis: She was suffering from heart pains. His sister Lula and her husband, Eugene Griset, offered their small Santa Ana farm to the couple. Elvira was bedridden for seven months, forcing Cam to deal with the drudgery of housework that had been Elvira’s burden. A brief career as a radio evangelist, appealing vainly for funds and translators to reach the Amazon, added to his frustrations.

  It was not surprising, then, that when L. L. Legters showed up in February 1933 Cam greeted him with a shout of joy.

  Eight years had passed since Legters had visited Townsend after comple
ting a survey of the Indians of the Brazilian Amazon for the Inland South American Missionary Union. “Look at the map,” he had said as he spread it out before Cam’s hungry eyes. “The Amazon basin covers two and a half million square miles. There must be Indian tribes all over the area.”19

  But it was not to the Amazon that Legters now wanted Townsend to go. Legters and his Commission for Indian Work in Latin America had a new target: Mexico.

  “There are at least fifty Mexican Indian tribes. I’m told there are 300,000 Mayans in Yucatán alone. Tell you what; you go, and I’ll help raise support.”20

  Cam agreed. But he saw a larger task. Linguistics was the ark of his covenant with the Bibleless tribes. There were too many tribes in Mexico and beyond for him and Elvira to take on alone. What was needed was a summer school to train young missionaries how to translate the Scriptures into native tongues. Would Legters have his fund-raising organization, the Pioneer Mission Agency, sponsor a summer school for recruits?21

  Legters immediately caught Townsend’s vision, one which would soon give birth to the Summer Institute of Linguistics. They agreed to leave for Mexico the following fall to get permission for operations from the government of the new Mexican president, General Lázaro Cárdenas.

  They prayed for guidance. A great adventure was about to begin.

  Nelson Rockefeller was also embarked on a great adventure at this time, one that would shape the lives of both these men once their paths converged in Latin America.

  5

  THE RITES OF POLITICAL PASSAGE

  PASSAGE TO INDIA

  Mohandas K. Gandhi watched the unusual couple work their way through the crowd of green-uniformed guards and his white-robed colleagues in the courtyard and approach him.

  Their friendly confidence was rare for foreigners these days, especially Westerners dressed as well as these. Only last month bomb threats and demonstrations had greeted visitors at the opening of the new British seat of government a few miles south, at New Delhi. Many Indians took to the streets to show their displeasure with an Indian legislature granted only limited powers through Britain’s “Indirect Rule.” More than 100,000 people had followed Gandhi to jail in the last year to protest British rule of any kind. And now that the tense negotiations for independence had taken a bad turn, no one could be sure that Gandhi and his compatriots would not be in prison—or worse—before the week was out.