by Gerard Colby
Daniels was alarmed and promptly dispatched the leaflet to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Then the climate got uglier. Ex-president General Plutarco Elias Calles returned from an expedition to southern California, charging that Mexico was going communist. Cárdenas appeared confident before Calles’s charges, but by the end of December it was clear that he was facing a crisis.
A month later, on January 21, 1936, Cam was plucking a chicken for dinner when two black limousines pulled up to Tetelcingo’s square. People immediately gathered around a tall man with dark hair and a mustache leading four companions toward the schoolhouse. Cam recognized the man and hurriedly worked his way through the crowd and extended his hand.
“Buenos días, Señor Presidente,” Cam said. Cárdenas turned and looked him right in the eye.
“Buenos días, Señor Townsend.”
Cam was stunned.
They talked for more than an hour. Cárdenas appreciated Cam’s report to Ambassador Daniels, as well as his articles praising the rural school system in the Dallas Morning News. He was glad that Cam’s bilingual Aztec-Spanish primer had just been printed. (Cam’s new friends from the Scientific Congress had arranged for its publication by the Ministry of Education and the University of Mexico as “an early demonstration of their linguistic programs for Indian education.”)42
“Will the young people you want to bring do this type of thing for other Indian towns?” Cárdenas asked while inspecting Townsend’s garden.
“I can assure you that they will. We read in the Bible that ‘the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister.’ The linguists we bring will follow His example by carrying out practical projects for the benefit of the people in the communities where they live.”
“Then bring in all you can get!”43
A strange friendship, with unforeseen dire consequences for tribal peoples around the world, had begun.
EXPANDING WITH AMERICAN HORIZONS
When Cam returned to Mexico from the third Camp Wycliffe in September with ten young translators, he found President Cárdenas in good spirits. Cárdenas’s drive to build a loyal Indian constituency by improving their lives had won international acclaim.
His popularity soaring, Cárdenas was also able to prevail against Calles, who on April 10, 1936, found himself driven under armed guard to the airport and sent into exile to the United States.
Cárdenas invited Townsend and his group to lunch at Chapultepec Castle, the palace that Emperor Maximilian had built on the site where young Mexican cadets were slaughtered by U.S. forces during the Mexican-American War. Arriving in their Sunday finery, the translators were treated to a nine-course banquet. Cárdenas then offered modest salaries for eight of the translators. Cam was delighted, but two of the translators were not. They had gone to Camp Wycliffe to become Bible translators, not employees of a self-declared “revolutionary” government. They were uncomfortable with the emphasis Cam gave to their linguistic, rather than their missionary, goals.
The youths had already been recruited into the Mexico mission when Cam formalized this seeming duplicity with a new name that sounded more scientific than religious. Legters had told Cam that the board of the Pioneer Mission Agency wanted him to set up his own committee to accept their funds, rather than continue behind the facade of the Linguistic Society of America. Cam was happy to oblige. He called his group the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a name less pretentious and less alarming, he explained. And to make sure he was not under Pioneer’s control, he informed the agency that SIL was a “field committee,” controlled by its members in the mission field. By placing the director (who would, of course, be himself by reason of experience) under an executive committee and having both the director and the committee periodically elected at an annual business conference of the membership, Cam won over the students. What Pioneer had always feared was finally taking shape: Cameron Townsend was setting up his own mission, and under what appeared to be false pretenses.
If that was not bad enough, his recruits were being told that they were working for the Mexican government, and under an alleged Communist party sympathizer, at that. For two of them, it was too much to take. “Uncle Cam, we cannot do it,” they told him, and resigned.44 The rest accepted Cam’s dual-identity strategy and fanned out to tribes across Mexico.
In only two years, Cam had established a beachhead in Latin America. To protect it, he would have to be of service to his current benefactors, Ambassador Daniels and President Cárdenas. When he paid a courtesy call to Cárdenas before leaving for the fourth summer session of Camp Wycliffe, the president was again in a crisis with the United States. The issue was a familiar one in Mexican-American relations: oil. The combatants were Mexico’s striking oil workers and foreign-owned companies that, explained Cárdenas, “refuse to submit to our courts.”45 The most powerful of these companies was Standard Oil. Perhaps there was some way Cam could help.
*Cam was less candid. He described himself as having been “in South America” as well as Guatemala “for some time.” According to Daniels, “Mr. Townsend told me he was present when Geronimo died and buried him.” If Townsend’s South American residence was fanciful, his presence at Geronimo’s death must have been miraculous; Geronimo died at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1909, when thirteen-year-old Cam had yet to venture beyond Long Beach, California.
*A few examples: a Russian spy who never actually existed; an international communist conspiracy in Guatemala and El Salvador when Stalin and the Comintern had written off Central America as lacking the proper revolutionary conditions; and Cam’s own ignoring reports by a fellow Central American missionary in C.A.M.’s bulletin of atrocities by the Salvadorian army, including the machine-gunning of 300 men and slaughter of 400 boys in the town of Nahuizalco. Some 2,500 died in this town; the total slaughtered has been estimated from a low of 8,000 to as many as 40,000 people, most of them Indians.
6
GOOD NEIGHBORS MAKE GOOD ALLIES
THE LEARNING CENTER
Nelson watched, amazed, as Texas Congressman Dick Kleberg flipped a silver dollar up, quickly pulled out his gun, and shot it out of the air. Nelson had come to Texas only because his uncle, Winthrop Aldrich, wanted him there. The dapper chairman of Chase National was on a bankers’ tour of the country. The United States was a vast buyers’ market in December 1934, and the Rockefellers were one of the few families who could still afford to be big buyers. Chase, now under Rockefeller leadership, was about to back oil in a big way, in both the United States and Latin America, and Aldrich was shopping for bargains in the depressed economy. He had just inspected Standard Oil’s huge oil strike on the Klebergs’ 2,000-square-mile King Ranch. Dallas reporters sensed a story in Nelson Rockefeller’s accompanying the banker.
Aldrich tried to downplay Nelson’s presence. “We just brought him along to see the country.”1
Nelson had reason to be wary of reporters. Since the Diego Rivera debacle, his name had become a focus of controversy. The midnight destruction of Rivera’s mural sparked an international furor, and charges of “cultural vandalism” would dog Nelson for the rest of his public life. It was a bitter lesson. “Mother’s museum,” he later put it, was where “I learned my politics.”2
Rockefeller Center was the workshop of Nelson’s stormy apprenticeship. After the draping of Rivera’s mural, Nelson took a month-long “vacation” in Mexico trying to make amends with Rivera’s fellow artists by dispensing checks for their paintings for Mother’s museum.3 He returned not to his Special Work office, but to the family office, which Junior had recently moved from the Standard Oil building on lower Broadway to Rockefeller Center in midtown.
Nelson had become interested in assuming greater responsibilities. The Special Work office was now running smoothly and required little attention from him. He wrote Junior: “I hope that I will be able to be of distinctly more assistance to you.… For the immediate future, my plan is to become more familiar with all phases of your real estate interests and
to avail myself of every opportunity to get acquainted with your oil, coal and banking interests.”4
Nelson quickly learned that the Rockefeller holdings in real estate, oil, coal, and banking were more than extensive. They constituted an empire.
Nelson’s deepening involvement in Rockefeller real estate interests also led him into a closer relationship with the family bank, Chase National, and its president, his uncle Winthrop Aldrich.
Aldrich had been selected to run Chase when Junior decided it was necessary to save the Rockefeller-controlled Equitable Trust bank from the depression’s tidal waves of loan defaults. In 1930, the Rockefellers’ Equitable took shelter within the much larger Chase National.
Over two decades, Chase’s chairman, Albert H. Wiggin, had piloted Chase into the Caribbean, a balmy sea with a capacity for overnight turbulence. The riches of its lands seemed worth the risk. American oil companies (led by Standard) and sugar and fruit plantations were quickly displacing Spanish and German coffee haciendas. American corporations were also entering into joint ventures with British companies in mining and tobacco. The Caribbean basin, in fact, was the host for most of the initial American capital that penetrated Latin American markets after the Spanish-American War. By 1928, direct investments by American corporations had grown to $5.4 billion, larger than American corporate holdings in either Europe or Canada.5 All these investments required banking, and hungry Chase got the lion’s share.
Wiggin’s strategy was to build a powerful alliance of mining, steel, sugar, and chemical companies that could act independently of the titan of Wall Street, J. P. Morgan & Company. This strategy appealed to the Rockefellers’ antipathy for the Morgan monopoly over Wall Street. Senior had been anxious to break Morgan’s hold over corporate financing since at least 1921, when he expressed concern over Standard Oil of New York’s growing reliance on Morgan. Moreover, the Morgans were in the way of Rockefeller expansion into Latin America’s riches, particularly its oil. The House of Morgan had long-established ties with British interests, which aggressive American companies like Jersey Standard and banks like Chase and National City Bank (the old Standard Oil Trust’s bank in New York, controlled by the Stillman family and the family of John D. Rockefeller’s brother, William) wanted to replace.
By 1930, Chase had more than $2 billion in assets and the deposits of giant clients like Bethlehem Steel, the leading rival of Morgan’s U.S. Steel. Its board of directors included representatives of some of the most powerful corporate forces in America.
Equitable Trust, meanwhile, was by 1929 the nation’s eighth largest bank with some $250 million in deposits. That December, its president died. Junior, discerning the opportunity for personal control, tapped Aldrich to take the helm. Less than a year later, Equitable and Chase merged, and Aldrich was in command of what was then the world’s largest bank in assets. In 1932, the last obstacle to the Rockefellers was removed with the retirement of Albert Wiggin, who got a $100,000 lifetime annuity and a pat on the back. Within a year, however, as congressional investigators focused on bankers’ use of their depositors’ money to speculate in the stock market, Wiggin found himself abandoned by the Rockefellers. Aldrich in his testimony publicly distanced himself from Wiggin—and soon became Chase’s new board chairman.
In 1935, Nelson went abroad to work full time for Chase at the advice of family consigliere Thomas Debevoise. This was no sudden appreciation of his elders’ advice. He had met Joseph Rovensky, the head of Chase’s foreign department. A shrewd, tight-lipped man wise in the myriad ways of financing American corporations abroad, Rovensky became one of Nelson’s closest advisers. He encouraged Nelson’s interest in the Rockefeller operations overseas by giving him contacts among the leading personalities in the raw materials and oil cartels. Officially, Nelson’s job for Chase, as at Rockefeller Center, was public relations, and no financial genius was required for a banker named Rockefeller to throw successful parties in London and Paris.
What really caught Nelson’s attention, however, was oil, and in both Paris and London all the talk was about the incredible pool found beneath Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. Since the first big strikes in 1922, Dictator Juan Vicente Gómez—called El Brujo (the Sorcerer) by his countrymen—had shown himself amenable to the demands of the 100 oil companies that flocked to the lake. By 1935, predatory competition and corruption in Gómez’s court had whittled that number down to just three giant rivals: the Mellon family’s Gulf Oil, which controlled 12.4 percent of Venezuela’s crude; British-owned Shell, which owned 36 percent; and the big winner at 49 percent, Creole Petroleum. Standard Oil of New Jersey had purchased Creole from Standard Oil of Indiana following Junior’s much heralded purge of Indiana’s maverick president, who had made the mistake of building Indiana and buying huge oil reserves in Mexico and Venezuela without giving a cut of his business to his supposed competitors at the old Standard Oil Trust. Caught in the Teapot Dome oil scandal of bribes and kickbacks from raids on naval oil reserves, Indiana Standard ultimately lost both its president and its Venezuelan oil, just when the boom around Lake Maracaibo was taking off.6
Nelson got caught up in the excitement surrounding Venezuela’s oil and opted to take the plunge. He wrote his father, asking if some of the Standard shares Junior had recently used to set up a trust fund for Nelson and his brothers could be exchanged for a large interest in Creole. Junior happily agreed, and Nelson, now only twenty-seven years old, was placed on Creole’s board.
It was a fateful move. In December 1935, the quarter-century-long spell of the Sorcerer was broken by his death. A torrent of pent-up aspirations poured onto Venezuela’s political stage. Much of this new popular unrest drew inspiration from the Mexican Revolution.
Creole officials remained complacent. Their Jersey Standard superiors in New York continued to invest capital as they shifted the focus of their international operations from turbulent Mexico to the more hospitable shores of Venezuela. In doing so, they cut back on operating expenses in Mexico, including wages. Like any capital-intensive industry, Standard Oil was driven by a heavy debt load and dividend-demanding stockholders into the search for an ever-rising bottom line.
It was not the first time such a quest had led to political shortsightedness, or power to arrogance. But it would be the last time for Standard in Mexico. Standard had made a tactical blunder of incalculable proportions, one that would embroil both Nelson Rockefeller and Cameron Townsend in the destiny of the entire hemisphere.
THE SPELL OF THE INCAS
The Indians had seldom seen so huge a boat on this part of the river. Venezuela’s Orinoco, though one of South America’s longest and widest rivers, was relatively unused in 1937. A ninety-foot yacht in the middle of the jungle was a rare spectacle. For a few moments the Indians sat still in their dugout canoes, their paddles out of water, their eyes fixed warily on the steamer as it glided by like some giant fish of prey. On board, white faces shone in the fierce sun, serene and seemingly oblivious to the Indians’ naked presence. The boat slipped past, slicing the gentle brown current as it pushed upriver. The colossal jungle screamed with monkey cries as the boat went by, followed by a clatter of colorful wings exploding into the sky. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the yacht was gone. A profound silence closed over the daylit forest, entrancing the Indians with the illusion of restored tranquility, even as they were forced to dip their paddles to steady their canoes, rocking in the ship’s wake.
“We have been coming down the most beautiful tropical river all day in the Standard Oil Company’s yacht,” Nelson wrote his parents that night. The steamer had laid anchor between two giant walls of black vegetation that howled and splashed with a riot of jungle noises that fascinated young Rockefeller. “We spent the last two days visiting the oil fields in the interior of eastern Venezuela in the company’s planes and then went on the boat last night.… This is low swampy country, a dense overhanging growth which changes character from time to time. The trees are full of monkeys and birds of all descr
iptions and colors, big and small. There are alligators on the banks.… But most interesting of all are the Indians. They live in little palm leaf huts along the river, wear practically no clothes and paddle around in hollowed out logs. They spend their time getting bark, from which is made tannic acid, and fishing.… The pelicans do a much better job of the latter.”7 Nelson Rockefeller’s love affair with Latin America had begun.
The Indians had captured Nelson’s interest throughout this grand tour of South America with Tod. Most of Nelson’s three-month tour—considered by many biographers a turning point in his life—had traced the route of European settlement of the continent. Along the coasts, whites or mixed-blood mestizos ruled cities that looked out upon oceans that provided commercial and cultural ties to European homelands. But in the interior, radiating from the refuge of its giant Amazonian heartland out to the surrounding river valleys and the cathedral Andes to the west, lived another America, an Indian America, whose historic presence neither European plagues nor genocidal wars had been able to extinguish.
This Indian presence was hardly ever acknowledged along the coast. Wherever Nelson went, he noticed that most government officials of Spanish descent tended to look down on the Indians. Yet it was these people who were the continent’s original inhabitants and still made up most of the population along its Andean spine and in its vast interior of jungles and prairies. And it was their pre-Columbian civilization that gave the continent its oldest and most distinctly American heritage.