Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  There was only one remaining obstacle, and for most young Americans it might have been insurmountable. Pike was of draftable age, and Mexico’s antimissionary sentiments had made ordination—and clerical exemption—impossible. Although Cam’s personal appeal to Ambassador Daniels had helped spare the young man of army duty, Pike could not travel to South America during wartime without getting Washington’s approval. And that meant getting the OK of the man who ran Washington’s cultural relations with Latin America, Nelson Rockefeller.

  Cam was confident of Pike’s chances. Pike had helped write textbooks for the CIAA to teach English to Latin Americans, part of Rockefeller’s response to a burgeoning political crisis.

  By 1943, some 200,000 Mexican agricultural workers had crossed the border into the American Southwest to fill jobs left vacant by workers drafted into the war. Their sudden arrival, however, triggered racial backlashes and rioting.

  If Nelson Rockefeller had learned anything from Lincoln School, it was that education has the power to break down cultural barriers and isolation and bring people into the active mainstream of American life, a prerequisite to building loyalty. Education in English further ensured the isolation of Mexican Americans. To encourage an alternative, Rockefeller turned to one of America’s most distinguished linguists, Charles Fries. With $20,000 in CIAA funds approved in August 1942, Fries’s English Language Institute hurried the preparation of new textbooks.1 Fries’s right-hand man was Kenneth Pike.

  Fries’s word carried weight in Washington. Armed with an introduction from Fries, Pike went to see the head of cultural relations for inter-American affairs to get approval to travel to South America.

  “Your passport has to come across my desk,” the official said. “When it does, I will okay it.”2

  BUILDING THE ARMY OF THE LORD

  Pike’s collaboration with Fries had already been valuable to Cam. It was through their association that Cam had escaped the Ozarks for the limelight at the University of Oklahoma at Norman. Oil money had built Norman’s land-grant college into a university, and by 1940 it was poised to become the leading educational institution in the Southwest east of the Rockies.

  This oil-fired growth was accompanied by the militarization of the campus as war approached. By 1942, the U.S. Navy had taken over the airfield for training navy pilots. Within two years, even Norman coeds were being recruited into the Sooner Squadron of the Army Transport Command, while Latin American coeds were paying hospitality visits to officers from South American armies being trained at nearby Fort Sill.

  Into the middle of this wartime fervor marched Cam’s missionaries. The recruiting officer for the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) was Roy Temple House, Norman’s most promising professor of modern languages. House’s ambition was to make Norman the linguistic center for the study of American Indian languages. In 1940, he finally got permission to offer a course in Cherokee—if he could find a teacher. He sent a colleague on an odyssey into the rarefied world of linguistics. She quickly found SIL and Ken Pike. House offered to find room at Norman for SIL sight unseen, along with college credit for students. To Cam, it all sounded like the horns of Jericho, tumbling the walls of anonymity. He immediately grasped the significance of what Norman offered SIL: academic respectability.

  The following summer, Cam and Pike traveled to Oklahoma and into success. They taught more than 130 students. With its Bible Belt location in the middle of a population sympathetic to Fundamentalism, Norman doubled SIL’s enrollment in a single year.

  Cam now moved rapidly to stake his claim for independence. Having already been pressed by the Pioneer Mission Agency to handle his own funds, he took the occasion formally to proclaim the dual identity of his organization. He worked out a delicate formula whereby those who supported his evangelical goals but were less keen on a scientific emphasis could be reconciled with those who supported SIL’s work but were leery of a scientific organization focusing on the Bible. Cam’s solution was simple: two organizations, both incorporated in California, one retaining SIL’s name and 1937 constitution, the other adopting intact the old doctrinal statement of the China Inland Mission and the name Wycliffe Bible Translators. The organizations would have the same members and interlocking boards, but they would also offer the membership and its supporters two faces, one turned toward science, the other toward God.

  There was another obvious boon to the Janus-like identity: The religious face, Wycliffe, could be turned toward Fundamentalist donors in the United States; the scientific face, SIL, now officially sanctioned by a major American university, could simultaneously turn toward Latin American governments that had to coexist with powerful Catholic bishops.

  For the first time, Cam was not worried about money. He had recently won over Al Johnson, a retired Chicago millionaire, who, approaching Heaven’s Gate, offered Cam financial support. Better still, one of Cam’s oldest backers, citrus king Charles Fuller, had just helped establish a powerful new organization, the National Association of Evangelicals.

  Cam’s ambitions were afire. “Who will open Tibet, or claim the last acre of the Amazon, the hills of central India, the jungles of Borneo, the steppes of Siberia—the merchant or the missionary?” he challenged his followers. “When the war is over, let us take up the Sword of the Spirit and march.”3

  The military atmosphere of those days permeated the young organization. Terms like occupation, to describe the entry of missionaries into a land, were revived with vigor. Cam’s new Translation magazine would soon encourage supporters in 1944 to pray “to weaken the enemy, enabling us to take his long-prepared and well-fortified positions.… Your praying for us should be so fervent and so concentrated and continuous that the enemy may be blasted out of the positions that we are preparing to take: in all the tribes of Mexico, in the continent of South America, and beyond.”4

  Adding flesh to the vernacular were the Navigators, an organization of Fundamentalist servicemen founded by Dawson Trotman, a Long Beach, California, evangelist. One of Trotman’s converts had joined SIL in 1940, and the Navigators underwrote his translation work among the Yaqui Indians of Mexico. Through Trotman, Cam could have access to a huge number of women and men with skills in everything from nursing and mechanics to flying, providing SIL with a practical balance to the academic talents of less worldly men like Pike.

  Cam dashed off a letter to Trotman, inviting him to come down to Mexico that fall to see SILers in operation and minister to them. Trotman arrived in time to attend the annual meeting and left a member of Wycliffe’s board. The harvest of Navigators would be rich for Cam, including five future SIL pioneers who would go on to Cam’s first beachhead in the Amazon: Peru.

  The twin pillars of SIL’s growth, the university and the military, were now in place. Cam next set up his own permanent organization with a home board where his largest donors were, in southern California. The $2,400 per month minimum that Cam projected SIL as needing was easily met by heaven. “As a matter of fact,” he cheerily announced to his followers, “God is sending in through the Glendale office and direct to our workers well over $4,000 a month.”5 All that remained was for Peru to extend an invitation.

  An invitation from Peru was no longer as simple as it once had seemed. Moisés Sáenz had returned to Peru as Mexico’s ambassador after hosting the Pátzcuaro Conference. But Sáenz had died unexpectedly in the fall of 1941, leaving the missionary without an avenue to Lima’s higher circles.

  The American Bible Society’s request to Pike in 1943 to go to the Andes, therefore, seemed a bolt from the hand of God. It left Cam breathless with praise for the Lord—and soon for Nelson Rockefeller as well.

  By late 1943 Pike was in Lima standing nervously before Education Minister Enrique de la Rosa. But his association with the CIAA, where the Peruvian president’s son worked, again cast its spell. He spoke of the bilingual education program in which he and Fries were involved and then told de la Rosa of the University of Oklahoma’s SIL. De la Rosa was impressed. H
e invited Pike to give a series of lectures to all teachers of high school English in Peru and then did one better: He suggested that SIL enter Peru to work with the jungle tribes.

  Cam was overjoyed. After two frustrating decades, the Amazon was at last beckoning.

  He now allowed himself to return to an idea he had proposed to L. L. Legters many years before: a jungle training camp. The Amazon was no quiet Indian village in Mexico. The tribes there were armed and resisted intruders to the point of hunting heads. The jungle they lived in was a seething mass of poisonous snakes, insects, and wild animals, including jaguars that still ran off with children. If his young recruits were to have any chance of surviving, they would need training in more than linguistics—and in more than an academic environment.

  Cam needed a jungle.

  INTRIGUE IN THE JUNGLE

  Far to the south, in Mexico along the border of Guatemala, was just such a place, a tropical rain forest botanically almost an extension of the Amazon. Here, in the state of Chiapas, where more than 80 percent of the population was Indian, lived the mysterious Lacondóns, a small tribe of robed, long-haired descendants of the Maya who burned incense and prayed to homemade clay figures of Mayan gods. This isolated tribe lived within a rich mahogany and chicle forest whose harvesting the Camacho government wanted to control.

  Chiapas had always been a scene of Indian suffering. Bishop Bartolomé de Las Casas had waged his famous campaign for Indian survival in this state, only to see his efforts steadily undermined. Over the succeeding four centuries, landowning criollos, who considered themselves direct descendants of the conquistadores, thought they had a right to outdo their forebears when it came to exploitation. Other Mayan tribes also came under the Spanish yoke. But the Lacondóns never surrendered. Instead, they retreated deeper into the rain forest of their Mayan ancestors, inspiring still one more legend about a lost tribe of Israel.

  It was in 1944, the same year that Kenneth Pike suddenly chose to study Mayan languages, that Cam decided to search the Lacondón forest for a suitable site for SIL’s jungle training camp. And in this effort, as in so many other things, his way was paved by the Rockefellers.

  Nelson Rockefeller had encouraged U.S.-sponsored archaeological expeditions into Latin America during the war. These expeditions generated useful data on local customs and resources, as well as headlines complimentary to the United States.

  In 1942 Nelson took an interest in Chiapas that extended beyond the intellectual. The area was reported to be a hotbed of Nazi spies. German-owned fincas had dominated coffee production in the area, just as they had in neighboring Guatemala, one of the first non-Axis countries to recognize Franco’s fascist Spain.

  “German interests in Chiapas almost broke up an Indian Congress called by the Mexican Department of Indian Affairs,” an official of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) had reported to Rockefeller in December 1941, “and continue to impede the Government’s program in that native region.… Friction among the natives along the borders of Guatemala and Mexico is reported as foreign inspired. Falangist periodicals such as ‘Reconstruction,’ ‘Hispanidad,’ ‘El Sinarquista’ and others have given considerable attention to the Indians.”6

  Rockefeller believed in fighting propaganda with propaganda. He arranged a screening of The Road to Mayapan for President Roosevelt at the White House. The film depicted the Lacondóns as a lost tribe that had built a Mayan “Lost City.” Mayapan, however, was in the Yucatán peninsula, far to the north and east of Chiapas, and the filmed city actually turned out to be the well-known ruins of Tonalá, on the Pacific Coast east of the Sierra Madre mountains and far from the Lacondóns.

  The film was nevertheless purchased by the CIAA to stir public interest in the Lacondón Indians. It provided a scientific rationale for American presence in their jungle, just as the first of three American expeditions within a period of two years penetrated the Lacondón forest.

  Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the first expedition was led by Sol Tax, one of five members of the Anthropology Advisory Committee to the new National Indian Institute funded by the CIAA. Before the expedition even set off, however, its leader was mired in controversy.

  Tax had recently astounded colleagues by claiming that there was no racial problem in Guatemala’s treatment of Indians. “The ‘race problem’ had solved itself,” he asserted, through intermarriage.7

  In denying the Indians’ racial identity, Tax was providing a scholarly rationale for undermining their untitled land claims and hastening their assimilation as a cheap labor force. His position offended many Indianists, chief among them BIA Commissioner John Collier. Collier accused Tax of speeding up the disappearance of Indian culture, whitewashing the Indians’ annihilation by accepting the destruction of their cultures as inevitable. He, on the other hand, advocated the preservation of Indian culture through nation-building, a role Collier hoped the Inter-American Indian Institute would embrace. Denying the Indians their unique identity, in Collier’s view, was racism pure and simple.

  The debate was irrelevant; Rockefeller money had already tipped the balance in favor of Tax. Tax’s claim that language was the only remaining barrier to assimilation for the Indian had gotten him named head of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Yucatán Linguistics Surveys,8 and money was sent down to Mexico to create five anthropological fellowships.

  The following year, Tax led his first column into the Lacondón jungle, successfully made contact with the Indians, and returned to Mexico City’s accolades. He spent 1943 studying his notes and lecturing as a guest professor at the National School of Anthropology under a Rockefeller grant. Another guest professor that year was SIL’s own Kenneth Pike.

  THE DRAFTING OF SIL

  By 1943, the CIAA, working with the Rockefeller-financed American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Office of Education, incorporated linguists, such as Pike and Fries, into an entrenched Intensive Language Program. The program was now militarized into courses for both United States and Latin American military officers. With the dramatic turn in the war and the eventual Allied victory in sight, the threat of invasion was removed from the Americas. Yet the training of Latin America’s military intensified, but as the beginning of what would become a postwar regional military pact.

  In November, as the CIAA reviewed the progress of an intensive English course for Ecuadorian pilots,9 SIL was asked to join in the militarization. Cam snapped up the offer. America’s traditional separation of church and state had already been compromised by the stipends and university facilities received from the state of Oklahoma. To avoid crossing over the line would have required an understanding of the republic’s foundations and of the founders’ warning against state-sponsored religion. What SIL saw, instead, was an opportunity for money and recruits, rather than a peril to the neutrality of its religious identity in foreign lands.

  This was not the first time that SIL had served U.S. government intelligence purposes during the war. In 1942, after discussions in Washington with “some men who are interested in furthering good will between our countries,” Cam specifically requested SIL’s Mexico City office to solicit reports from “any of our workers who may have observed efforts on the part of anyone to make the Indians think that Americans are not their friends.” Cam’s directive ended with a message, “Please give my regards to Mr. Lockett in case you should see him in this connection.”10 Thomas Lockett, commercial attaché, was Cam’s confidential contact at the embassy after Ambassador Daniels departed in 1941. Lockett carried out intelligence missions for Washington, identifying suspected Nazi sympathizers and their companies for Berle and Rockefeller.11 SIL was one of his intelligence sources.

  SIL had helped gather anthropological information on the Tarascan Indians that ended up in Nelson Rockefeller’s intelligence files. The files contained cross-references to reveal behavioral patterns among Indian peoples in everything from socialization (including aggressive tendencies) and personality traits, drives, emotions, and langu
age structure, to political intrigue, kinship ties, traditional authority, mineral resources, exploitation, and labor relations. Rockefeller called these data the Strategic Index of Latin America.12

  Indians in general, precisely because of their oppression and poverty, were suspected of being susceptible to both fascists on the right and communists on the left.13 The CIAA noted that “the strategic importance of the Indians has not been overlooked by friends of the Axis powers. The German courts have decreed Indians to be Aryans. Anti-American and anti-democratic propaganda addressed to or against Indian groups is widespread.… Already German propaganda among Indians has resulted in sabotage of tin production in Bolivia, and similar difficulties can be expected in other areas.”14

  The Inter-American Institute, which coordinated research with the CIAA on Indian conditions in Latin America, was to become a “clearinghouse of information” for leading anthropologists, providing “analysis on failure and success of Indian work.”15 This pragmatic approach to Indians—regarding them as objects of study to meet strategic wartime needs—coincided with the growing popularity of “applied anthropology” on both sides of the Atlantic during the war. Developed first by the British to meet the needs of colonial administrators, applied anthropology was embraced by a wide array of U.S. government agencies during World War II. Harvard anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn explained why: “If we know a culture, we know what various classes of individuals within it expect from each other—and from outsiders.” As an example, he offered the dilemma of American army paratroopers dropped in a remote jungle in Thailand. What kind of reception would they receive?

  As U.S. war industries geared up for increased extraction of South America’s natural resources during World War II, Rockefeller’s CIAA was sensitive to racial compositions of targeted South American labor force