by Gerard Colby
Junior and the Center’s executives had chosen black and gray stone for the lobby to convey conservative dignity. To Rivera, the lobby looked like a tomb. Upon his return from Italy, he had rediscovered the “great force and genius” of pre-Columbian Indian art and was influenced by the “barbaric” colors found on the walls of Mayan and Aztec pyramids.15
After a few days of self-restraint, he could bear it no longer. Suddenly, the giant wall sprang alive with colors and sweeping shapes, causing a sensation in New York’s art world. Hundreds of artists and students came to watch the Mexican paint his great allegory of the world war and the Roaring Twenties. Nelson, never one to let an opportunity for promotion pass, issued about a hundred tickets a day. One day in April, Abby came by and climbed up the metal scaffold to watch the artist work. She was enthralled.
Whatever Nelson’s initial feelings, his opinion changed after an article appeared on May 3 in the New York World Telegram under the headline, RIVERA PAINTS SCENES OF COMMUNIST ACTIVITY AND JOHN D. JR. FOOTS BILL. The Telegram attacked the mural for vividly depicting “poison gases used in war” and “prostitutes infected with venereal diseases so placed as to indicate them as the results of a civilization revolving around nightclubs.” The reporter saw red everywhere, “red headdress, red flags, waves of red,” and “iron-jawed policemen, one swinging his club” at what the reporter described as “a Communist demonstration.”16 The article created the impression that the Rockefellers had been duped.
Nelson responded immediately—to Rivera. He wrote Rivera that while visiting “Rockefeller Center yesterday viewing the progress of your thrilling mural, I noticed that in the most recent portion of the painting you had included a portrait of Lenin. The piece is beautifully painted but it seems to me that his portrait appearing in the mural might very seriously offend a great many people.” Nelson asked him “to substitute the face of some unknown man where Lenin’s face now appears.”17
A figure of Lenin had been included in Rivera’s earliest sketches. Nelson’s sudden turnabout convinced the artist that something terrible was afoot. His response was to work at a frenzied pace. He wanted to finish his painting before it could be aborted. He offered to add a portrait of Lincoln surrounded by abolitionists and the slave-revolutionary Nat Turner. But he would not destroy any part of his painting, including the portrait of Lenin. It had been there for a month without any previous objection by Nelson or his mother and represented to the artist a prophecy of an anti-Nazi alliance between Russians and Americans.
Nelson was not amused. He pressured Rivera with personal pleas, but Rivera kept painting.
A week later, matters were taken out of Nelson’s hands. Rivera received a letter from Hugh Robertson, executive manager of the Center, insisting that there had been “not the slightest inclination either in the description or in the sketch that you would include in the mural any portrait or any subject matter of a controversial matter.”
At 9 P.M. the next night, a messenger scurried up the scaffold with a smug smile and summoned Rivera, still working, to Robertson’s office. There Rivera was handed a check for the $21,500 contract and ordered to leave. Demonstrations immediately broke out in front of the RCA building, demanding that Rivera’s art be saved. The Rockefellers promised that “the uncompleted fresco of Diego Rivera will not be destroyed or in any way mutilated.”18 But the public was not allowed to view it, nor were photographs permitted. A drab canvas was draped over the entire wall, like a shroud. Most understood its meaning.
Almost a year later, at the lonely hour of midnight, February 9, 1934, workmen appeared under orders to chip the painting off the wall. In its place, a politically safer mural in sepia was done by José Maria Sert. This time, it was Robertson who did the hiring.
BIRTH OF AN ALIAS
For a time, the specter of the Rockefellers destroying Rivera’s mural haunted the embassy in Mexico City, casting a shadow over Mexican-American relations. But one day, U.S. Ambassador Josephus Daniels greeted two Americans “who were quite interesting and unlike any other visitors I had had since I have been here.”
William Cameron Townsend and L. L. Legters arrived at the embassy. As Cam had done with the dictator of Guatemala, he presented the ambassador with a copy of his Cakchiquel translation of the Bible. Here, Legters found it unnecessary to hide their intention to proselytize Mexico despite its anticlerical laws. He freely identified himself as the field secretary of the Pioneer Mission Agency, whose “settled point of mission is to translate the Bible into the Indian tongues.”19*
Daniels was a North Carolinian with strong Fundamentalist leanings. He was moved by the miracle of faith. When he asked Townsend and Legters where the money came from to pay their expenses and the “expenses of other translators,” Legters did not mention Pioneer’s primary role as a financial conduit for missionaries. Legters replied only that “We do not trouble about money; the Lord will provide.”
“I have not seen so great faith,” Daniels wrote, “no, not in Mexico,” and added wistfully, “I wish I could have as undimmed faith as they seemed to have.”20
Townsend’s and Legters’s faith in the divine origin of their mission was real. The previous November, Cam and Elvira had traveled to Dallas for a rendezvous with Legters and his wife at the headquarters of the Central American Mission. From Dallas, Cam went on a speaking tour in Wichita Falls. There he met an Episcopalian rector who was fascinated with the Aztec religion and wrote on a card an introduction to the Episcopalian dean of Mexico City “to put you in touch with some influential people.”21
It was the break Cam needed.
He would not be delayed. Even Elvira’s ailing heart could not dissuade him. He sent Elvira home to her family at the Moody Church in Chicago. By the middle of the month, he and Legters were trying to cross the border at Laredo, but were stopped by suspicious customs officials. Only by producing his dog-eared letter from Moisés Sáenz, the Mexican director of rural education he had met in Guatemala, did Cam persuade them to wire Mexico City for instructions. The response from Mexico’s director of immigration was cautious. The government had learned of the Americans’ missionary goal from an article Cam had recently published, and proselytizing by foreign missionaries was against the law. The two men were permitted entry on the condition that they would neither preach nor study Indian languages. They agreed.
That evening Townsend and Legters pulled into Monterrey, the Protestant stronghold of northern Mexico. The men spent an anguished night battling doubts with comforting passages from the Bible; the next morning they continued south over the uncompleted Pan-American Highway. Along the way, Cam noticed that the Indians working beside the road were similar to those in Guatemala: poor.
But there the similarity ended. The political conditions in Mexico and Guatemala were very different for American missionaries.
Mexico was then at the height of its antipathy toward foreign missions, and every missionary Cam had spoken to in the capital confirmed that residence visas were impossible to get.
There was more bad news. Moisés Sáenz was no longer on hand to help. Since 1932, Sáenz had come under increasing pressure to match his ideals as Mexico’s rural educator with a commitment to use his schools as a means of changing the economic system that exploited the Indians. Even the appointment of Moisés’s brother, Aarón, as superintendente, or mayor, of the Federal District of Mexico City could not save Moisés’s position. In January 1933, citing philosophical differences, Moisés resigned as director of rural education.
By the time Cam arrived in Mexico City the following November, Aarón Sáenz’s political future was also being rapidly eclipsed by the rise of General Lázaro Cárdenas. Aarón Sáenz was committed to the growth of a native Mexican capitalism; Cárdenas was committed to the laboring classes, the increasingly ignored backbone of the Mexican Revolution.22
With the Sáenz family out of favor, Cam fell back on his only hope for an entrée into Mexican high society: his card of introduction to the Episcop
alian dean. The next Sunday, Cam slipped into the dean’s service at the Episcopalian cathedral and presented his card. When the cleric heard of Cam’s interest in Mexico’s Indians, he invited him to dinner the following Tuesday to meet Bernard Bevans, an English ethnologist who was studying the Indians. At the dinner, Cam sat next to Bevans and pleaded his case. Bevans agreed to hold a small luncheon for Cam; one of the people he invited was Dr. Frank Tannenbaum of Columbia University. That luncheon proved to be one of the decisive moments of Cameron Townsend’s life.
Tannenbaum was among the many American anthropologists who had fanned out across Latin America in search of clues to unravel the mysteries of human origins. He rebelled against the persistent assumption that tribal peoples represented a “primitive” stage in the evolution of human culture that ascended, quite conveniently, to the Euro-American zenith.
Tannenbaum was impressed by the Indian campesino’s central role in the Mexican Revolution. While Mexican intellectuals had turned toward Europe and remained out of touch with the rural peasants of their country, small groups of Indians under anonymous leaders had been mounting the revolution of 1910. Without intellectuals, however, the Indian revolution was voiceless.
The one exception was Emiliano Zapata. An Indian of humble peasant origins, Zapata had formulated the only clear plan for agrarian reform based on the ejidos, or common lands, of the villages. Between 1911 and 1919, his forces constituted the only government in the state of Morelos, the vast valley south of the capital where expanding sugar plantations sent their product to the Colossus of the North via an American-owned railroad.
To counteract this Indian-led revolution, Mexico City’s successive regimes engaged in a war of extermination against the villages of Morelos. As late as 1923, four years after federal troops killed Zapata, Tannenbaum saw an inscription on a wall in Cuernavaca: “Rebels of the South. It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”23
From the 1920s on, the prospect of more Indian revolutions spreading through Central and South America haunted U.S.-Latin American relations. Tannenbaum was one of the first U.S. anthropologists to realize that Zapata’s challenge would continue from the grave if the misery of Mexico’s landless Indian peasants was allowed to fester.
Sponsored by the Social Science Research Council and the Brookings Institution (both Rockefeller-funded institutions), Tannenbaum conducted an intensive study of Mexico’s Indians that brought him into close contact with Moisés Sáenz.
Tannenbaum’s study decried Mexico’s 12,479 rural schools as “a fraction of Mexico’s needs” and called for land grants for community-built school buildings and vegetable gardens. The success of Mexico’s rural education program would depend on the possession of land by the villages, he argued, and the rural communities could not have a successful school unless they had ejidos to feed the population. “The rural community must support the school in the future,” he wrote with double economic and cultural meaning, “the way it supported the church in the past.”24
At the luncheon, Tannenbaum wrote an endorsement of Cam’s work for Rafael Ramírez, Moisés Sáenz’s replacement as director of rural education. From Tannenbaum, Cam learned that Ramírez would be in Monterrey on November 23.
Cam and Legters were at Monterrey when Ramírez arrived. The Mexican educator was reluctant to expose Indians to American missionaries, especially Fundamentalist Bible translators. But then he noticed that Cam was carrying Tannenbaum’s book.
“He’s a good man,” Ramírez commented. “Understands our Revolution. Most people in the States don’t.”
Cam showed him Tannenbaum’s endorsement. Ramírez’s attitude shifted.
“Tannenbaum’s word is good enough for me,” Ramírez said. “I think I’ll invite you to study our rural education, but not the Indian languages. You can visit areas where Indians live and see what we are doing. Maybe you can write some articles.”25
The missionary was happy to oblige. Following a six-week tour of rural schools in the states of Campeche, Yucatán, and Chiapas, Cam returned to Elvira in Chicago and brought her down to the warmer climate of Sulphur Springs, Arkansas, where his brother Paul was now director of the Fundamentalist John Brown Academy. From there, he wrote articles on Mexico’s expanded school system for the Dallas Morning News and School and Society magazine. He passed them on to Ramírez, who responded warmly, noting the missionary’s “deep sympathy.”
Encouraged, Cam now pressed forward with his plans to hold his first “summer training camp for prospective Bible translators.” One of the John Brown Academy’s revivalist song leaders pitched in, offering the use of a nearby farm. Cam now saw the hand of Providence at work everywhere and rushed a catalog through a printer.
The catalog was the first of its kind in the evangelical world, offering courses on Indians’ history, their customs, their psychology, and evangelization by Legters; “practical problems” by Cam’s brother Paul; and Spanish by Cam’s Cakchiquel language informant, Joe Chicol, who had followed Paul to John Brown Academy. Cam’s own ambitious courses were the core: the economic and cultural status of the Indian, government programs, translation techniques, and how to conduct a literacy campaign. Little here smacked of the old missionary approach.
Yet, to attract students, Cam had to seek support from the pillars of Fundamentalism. The new Dallas Theological Seminary approved of Cam’s decision to enter Mexico “as linguists rather than as missionaries,”26 as did Charles Fuller, director and leader of the California Orange Growers Association, a hotbed of planter reaction against collective bargaining by Mexican field workers. Another important backer was Will Nyman, a former lumber executive who had retired to California to become secretary of the Missions Committee of Lyman Stewart’s wealthy Church of the Open Door. Moody Church’s pastor, Rev. Harry Ironside, also OK’d the project.
The “open door to Mexico” Cam had prayed for with Legters had at last been cracked, thanks not to Fundamentalists, but to a book by a “radical” anthropologist backed by Rockefeller-funded organizations.
PROVIDENCE CALLS
In 1981, while the CIA’s contra war raged in Nicaragua, Wycliffe Bible Translators republished Cameron Townsend’s only novel. Half a century had passed since the events that inspired it, but its message was still fresh to Fundamentalist missionaries aiding the CIA’s war: A world communist plot was behind the revolutions in Central America, and the only antidote besides U.S. armed intervention was Christ’s Word in the Bible. It was a strange theme for a professed admirer of the Mexican Revolution to pen when knocking on its door.
The first summer school had so charged Cam and Elvira with expectation that in the fall of 1934 they decided to drive to Mexico to follow up the contacts he had made the previous year. Mud slides along the unfinished Pan-American Highway, however, forced them to hold up in Monterrey for two months. Cam became acquainted with the large Protestant community of that town, the home of the Sáenz family. It was here that he wrote his “autobiographical novel,” Tolo: The Volcano’s Son.
The novel purported to present an account of the Indian revolt in El Salvador that had helped persuade Cam to leave Guatemala in 1932 and argued for Cam’s own Bible translation mission as a response to similar insurgencies.
Tolo mentioned how an American Bible translator in Guatemala had long seen the danger of creeping radicalism among the Indians. In describing this missionary’s activities, Townsend offered to posterity an account of his own counterinsurgency doctrine: “Guatemala would find that in the human mass she had relegated to brute exploitations, she had prepared a pile of tinder in readiness of a spark of radicalism from across her northern frontier. The translator had labored feverishly to avoid this danger; his greatest hope was the Bible.… Through its influence, he hoped to see nuclei of newborn men and women formed in all the towns to labor in behalf of progress. These would counteract extremists, should they come.”27
Though filled with innuendos and inaccuracies,* Tolo was a useful entré
e to self-proclaimed “Christian businessmen” who were caught in the throes of their own political crises during the Great Depression. The millenarian Revelation magazine published the novel in serial form for seven consecutive months, starting in April 1936. The timing was propitious. During those months, one of Cam’s key backers, Charles Fuller, was locked in a battle with Mexican field workers who harvested his citrus plantations. Orange County’s prosperity of neat white-fenced farms and quaint Christian steeples rested on a foundation of low wages. In June 1936, 2,500 citrus workers went on strike in Orange County for a wage increase. They wanted to increase their wages from twenty-five cents to forty cents an hour. The California Orange Growers Association, which Fuller headed, refused to bargain. Supported by local Protestant clergy and the Associated Farmers of California (a growers’ organization financially backed by Standard Oil of California),28 the growers instead pointed to the Mexican composition of the workforce and the presence of Communist party members among the organizers of the farmworkers’ union. That was all they needed to justify calling in the Orange County sheriff. Four hundred armed deputies descended on the farmworkers’ shantytowns with tear gas and clubs. Men were beaten, and women and children were gassed. Santa Ana, the quiet town where Cam had biked to high school and reposed with his Griset in-laws after leaving Guatemala in 1932, was transformed into the site of a concentration camp, where 115 workers were herded into a stockade built just before the strike commenced. The strikers were then marched into court and summarily found guilty by the same Anglo judges and juries who had imposed segregation on them.
Cam kept silent on what was happening in his home state. Tolo’s anticommunism spoke for him in American Fundamentalist circles where growers like Charles Fuller could savor its political message.
In Mexico, where anger arose over the repression in southern California and the deportation of some 200,000 countrymen from the United States, Cam kept his beliefs to himself. This was not out of character with what he had already proposed—and Fuller endorsed—when he first set up his summer camp: the use of linguistics as a disguise for his proselytizing goals. The Word would be brought to the Bibleless peoples before this century was out, Cam insisted. And it was he who had been called to be the Lord’s messenger.