Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

Cooper’s arrival was another big break for Cam. Cam needed a friend in this strange land, and his courtship of the bachelor ambassador and his mother was fast and furious. His approach was vintage Cárdenas, composing a poem of praise to the ambassador and “Mother Cooper’s winning smile” and “Queenlike charm,”5 just as he had done for the Mexican president. He even sent flowers.

  It worked. Mrs. Cooper took Cam’s young translators under her wing. Cam did likewise with her son.

  Cooper, a former governor of Tennessee familiar with the TVA-like dams envisioned by American mining companies and agribusinesses for Peru, was nevertheless a novice when it came to Latin America. He needed advice on how to sensitively implement the U.S. policy on foreign aid to Peru. The missionary was pragmatic about underlying American military and economic interests. “Expenditures made in line with the selfish reasons should be carefully directed into channels that will best serve our selfish ends,” Cam wrote Cooper. “Close ties of friendship with Latin America, and especially cooperative enterprises such as our Government’s participation in Peru and elsewhere open the doors for more American citizens … not only as business men but also as teachers, technicians, etc.”6

  And as Bible translators.

  With the embassy’s backing, Cam felt confident as his translators moved into the jungle to take their places among the tribes. A temporary base was set up at Aguaytia, just north of the former CIAA agricultural station at Tingo Maria at the foot of the Andes. The Peruvian government even gave them an abandoned hotel to use, but the location, with a suspension bridge spanning the Aguaytia River, made amphibious landings difficult for SIL’s Duck.

  At an elaborate ceremony highlighted by an aerial demonstration by Montgomery, the Duck had been rechristened Amauta, Inca for “wise man serving the people.” In a significant gesture to the growing ties between SIL and the Peruvian military, Cam dedicated the plane’s gas tanks to the Peruvian air force, which thereafter kept them full with free gasoline.

  The Amauta was SIL’s only real asset in the jungle, and Cam was eager to find it a safer harbor, especially after he almost drowned in the Aguaytia River’s swift current while trying to scout local islands for a runway. Like Nelson Rockefeller, Cameron Townsend owed his life to Indians, who saved him from being swept downriver.

  Betty Greene became the first woman to fly over the Andes when she flew Cam into oil-rich Pucallpa that December of 1946. Nearby Lake Yarina was perfect for SIL’s purposes. The lake was half-wrapped around an island that could serve as the home base with a runway, and it had a stretch long enough to handle the Duck and other amphibious planes. A road could be built to Pucallpa, and one of Peru’s most colorful tribes, the Shipibos, were close at hand for study, with most of the other tribes along the rivers within easy flying distance. Cam had found his jungle base, the first link in an SIL chain that would string God’s love along the Amazon like Christmas lights into five countries.

  THE BIRTH OF JAARS

  The Townsends, with newborn Grace named after one of his benefactors, the wife of citrus king Charles Fuller, headed back to the United States on a fund-raising drive.

  SIL’s jungle camp in Chiapas, Mexico, was the Townsends’ first stop. In the romance of the campfire’s flicker, Cam regaled the young wide-eyed recruits with tales of the Amazon. After a happy week, the Townsends boarded a rented Piper airplane. As the Mexican pilot pushed open the throttle, the plane bounced down the runway and lifted off sharply—too sharply in the humid air. The campers were still waving when the Piper suddenly lost altitude and, to their horror, crashed.

  For a moment Cam could hear nothing but the sound of dripping gasoline. The pilot was unconscious. Both Cam and Elaine were trapped in the wreckage.

  Again, as so often, it was an Indian who appeared as the savior. Cam quickly handed him Gracie through a broken window. “Take her quick,” Cam said in Spanish, “before the plane explodes!”7 By then the campers had scurried down the field and reached the plane.

  As the ignition switch was safely turned off, Cam’s mind switched on.

  “Get your movie camera,” he yelled to one young translator, Dale Kietzman, “and take pictures before they move us. People need to see how badly we need safe aviation in pioneering in the jungle.”8

  Cam, of course, was one of those who turned obstacles into advantages. The gory details captured on film worked miracles for fund-raising.

  Arriving safely back in the United States, he knew just who to see. Despite the disagreement of his linguists, who wanted to rely on the more-experienced Missionary Aviation Fellowship, Cam recruited two evangelical elders, Dawson Trotman, founder of the veterans-based Navigators, and Torrey Johnson, head of Youth for Christ and, like Trotman, a backer of that organization’s bright young hope, Rev. Billy Graham. Together, they formed a new corporation called the Jungle Aviation and Radio Service (JAARS). Next, Cam recruited onto the JAARS committee Clarence Erickson, pastor of Chicago’s powerful Moody Church. SIL’s translators, confronted by a fait accompli, gave in. The only question remaining was money, and here, too, Cam had an angel.

  Cherub-faced Henry Coleman Crowell had one claim to fame and power: He was the son of the renowned “breakfast table autocrat,” Henry P. Crowell, the founder of Quaker Oats. Like the Rockefellers, the Crowells had started out in Cleveland as wholesale merchants and grocers to the westward expansion. Inspired by a sermon by Rev. Dwight L. Moody, the elder Crowell had fallen to his knees with a prayer and a business deal for the Lord: “Oh God, if you will allow me to make money to be used in Your service, I will keep my name out of it so You will have the glory.”9

  God kept His end of the bargain. Crowell amassed a small fortune by speculating in Dakota lands seized from the Sioux and by manufacturing and selling kerosene stoves with the help of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil salesmen. Crowell reneged. After Moody went to the Lord, a great cathedrallike hall rose above the campus of his Bible Institute; it was named not for the evangelist, but for Henry P. Crowell.

  Henry P. died in 1946, but he left the bulk of his cereal fortune to a family trust headed by his only son, Henry Coleman Crowell.

  Despite a Yale education, the younger Crowell had followed his father into the comforting certainties of Fundamentalism. Like many shy sons of the Robber Barons, including Rockefeller, Junior, Crowell took up the cross of religious philanthropy at the urging of his mother. When introduced to Cameron Townsend in 1945, Crowell was fifty-one years old and vice president of the Moody Bible Institute.

  The heir to a great fortune was just what Cam needed. Cam persuaded the scion to share with JAARS some of the surplus government equipment that Moody had gotten from Washington. A few days later, Crowell mailed off the first of what would become regular checks for $10,000. The following year he visited Cam in Peru and came away so impressed that he donated money and equipment for JAARS’s first hangar in the Amazon at “Yarinacocha,” the Quechua word for Lake Yarina that SIL had adopted for its jungle base. Returning to Chicago, Crowell followed up Cam’s suggestion that he set up a Missionary Equipment Service (MES). Over the next ten years, MES served JAARS as a conduit for what effectively became a government-subsidy program of surplus equipment from the U.S. armed forces and other agencies.10

  No one then, or afterward, questioned whether this program violated the separation of church and state mandated by the Constitution. In the emotional exigencies of the Cold War, both institutions, no matter what the law of the land, had use for each other.

  MARSHALLING THE AMERICAS

  Nelson Rockefeller learned during the war that President Roosevelt’s army chief of staff, George Marshall, was not the kind of man to let adversity stand in his way. When Nelson needed pressure to be put on Argentina to join the war effort in 1942, Marshall did not hesitate to back Nelson’s meddling in Argentina’s internal political life. Three years later Marshall supported Nelson’s efforts at the Chapultepec conference to lay the legal foundation for a U.S.-dominated military pact in the Western
Hemisphere. Now, as delegates gathered under Bogotá’s chilly clouds in April 1948 for the Ninth Inter-American Conference of Foreign Ministers, Nelson watched anxiously from New York to see if Marshall, now Truman’s secretary of state, could carry through what had been started at Chapultepec.

  Marshall, like Nelson, had a big stake in the conference’s success. It was supposed to be his crowning achievement in Latin American policy. Here, the diplomatic keystone would be inserted in the arch of trade treaties supporting Europe’s traditional conduit of supplies and raw materials from the Western Hemisphere—only with American, not European, banks controlling the flow. Bogotá, however, had suddenly become the scene of murder and mayhem, rocked by assassination and riots in the streets. But Marshall had not traveled all the way to the northern Andes only to turn tail and run at the first signs of revolt. The conference must take place as planned. At stake was no less than the founding of the Organization of American States (OAS), godchild of Nelson’s diplomatic success at the Chapultepec conference.

  Marshall’s first task was to rally his Latin American colleagues, who were as wary of him as they were frightened of the rioters. The Latin American delegates had arrived in Bogotá with hopes that a new era in U.S.–Latin American relations was about to begin. They had heard talk of a Marshall Plan for the Americas, of long-overdue economic assistance to their neglected continent, of peaceful development and escape from the nightmare of military coups. These dreams, however, turned to despair with the speed of an assassin’s bullet. Jorge Gaitán, former presidential candidate of the Liberal party and its greatest hope for a modern postwar Colombia, was on his way to political triumph when a gunman struck him down. Colombia, and possibly the entire continent, lost one of its most charismatic liberal leaders.

  Rioting swept the capital, destroying much of the downtown business section; even the War Ministry was under siege. Students who had come from surrounding countries to petition the conference for economic reforms joined in the disorders. One was a young Cuban law student named Fidel Castro.

  Marshall remained calm. He ordered the Southern Command in the U.S. Canal Zone in Panama to fly in raincoats and blankets for the shivering Colombian army units that were rushed in from the warm lowland provinces. Then he demanded that the conference reconvene under armed guard. The other delegations, however, wanted more reassurances. Frightened and confused, some even suggested a U.S. invasion to save their hides.

  It took the ever-resourceful William Pawley, now Adolf Berle’s successor as ambassador to Brazil, to come up with a typically American solution. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. Peeling off $5,000, he handed the money to one of his pilots, Grady Matthews, and commanded him to fly Pawley’s private DC-3 to the Canal Zone.

  “General,” he said, turning to Marshall, “these delegations are living on army rations. They think they are in a state of siege. If I can get them some of the luxuries of life, they will settle back and vote to keep the conference here.”11

  They did. Grady returned, and Pawley drove to each delegation, leaving pots of caviar, foie gras, turkeys, and picnic hams. Heartened by their return to the good life, the delegates voted unanimously to brave on in a schoolhouse far from the center of town.

  Through it all, delegate Averell Harriman, Nelson’s arch rival at the State Department, maintained a regal poise equal to that of any Rockefeller. He was about to leave for Europe to oversee the Marshall Plan and regarded the violence in Colombia as a mere dress rehearsal for future confrontations with the Soviets. Joining him in this perspective was Major Vernon Walters, military intelligence officer at Pawley’s Rio embassy and Marshall’s interpreter. Together, Walters and Harriman easily persuaded Marshall that communists were to blame for the revolt.

  The conference itself proved that more was at the core of Latin America’s instability than any specter of international communist conspiracy. Most government leaders in Latin America knew only too well that instability reflected unmet needs. And unlike State Department diplomats who dealt mostly with government and business leaders, Americans who lived abroad, who were closer to the local people and who saw these unmet needs firsthand, understood the peril of continued neglect.

  No single group of such Americans was closer to these local needs than missionaries. And no missionary in Latin America more fully grasped the potential for both disaster and opportunity in the United States’ corporate expansion or had a better field record of sensitivity toward Latin American concerns for national sovereignty, than did William Cameron Townsend.

  Cam had called for a “Marshall Plan for Latin America.” He also had warned of Latin American resentment over the massive program of U.S. aid to Europe and Japan.

  At Bogotá, Marshall had demonstrated his profound ignorance of Latin American relations by using precisely this European aid program as an excuse for the United States’ failure to commit large funds to its Latin American allies. “The United States is helping Europe and Asia,” Cam had written Ambassador Cooper in 1946:

  The papers tell constantly of food supplies and money being sent to the people of those lands, often at considerable inconvenience to ourselves. Everyone knows that millions and millions of dollars of what is being loaned to Europe will never be repaid, and that the inconvenience that Americans are being put to at the request of the UNRRA in order to feed Europe and Asia will not be rewarded with abiding appreciation on the part of many, should emergencies arise when we would need the help of those peoples. Latin Americans who are closer to us and have always stood by us in emergencies, can’t help but wonder why we aren’t as concerned about the undernourished poor of these lands, many of whom have less to eat and wear than do the people whom we are feeding in Europe.12

  Such warnings had little effect on the outcome of the conference. Alleviating the causes of social unrest was subsumed under the more immediate U.S. objective of bringing Latin America, politically, economically, and militarily, under the American eagle’s wings. With passage of the OAS charter, Marshall secured acceptance of a resolution that “looked [to many Latin American liberals] like the green light for power-hungry generals.”13 Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, Resolution 35 of the OAS charter hinted at something terrible beyond a pledge of respect for national sovereignty: future alliances between the U.S. government and Latin American dictators. Diplomatic relations with a government, it stated, did not imply any judgment of the domestic policy of that government.

  CAPPING WELLS AND DREAMS

  Cam watched helplessly from the sidelines as his own dreams for SIL’s future in Latin America crumbled beneath the weight of high-powered politics. Only in hindsight would he understand the enormous role that oil played in fueling America’s postwar advance through the Third World, spreading hope in one region as it sowed discord in another. For Cam’s missionaries, as well as for Latin American governments, the primary obstacle to advancement was the Middle East: As American companies tapped the great oil fields of distant deserts, they curtailed production and exploration throughout Latin America.

  Peru, in particular, was in turmoil. The country endured two years of political, social, and economic instability, until in October 1948, the minister of government and police, General Manuel Odría, seized power through a military coup. Troops fanned out across Peru, making arrests that quickly filled the jungle penal colony of Sepa.

  Through all this, Cam maintained discreet contact with the worried U.S. Embassy. Montgomery knew many of Odría’s air force officers; some had been his students when he was part of the U.S. military mission. Cam’s translators, meanwhile, kept a low profile in the jungle, where they worked among a dozen tribes. Striving to breach the barriers of culture through linguistics, they endured the hardships of the jungle and the defiance of Indians defending their lands from Lima’s colonization. Montgomery’s airflights kept SILers supplied with a steady stream of miracles from modern medicine. Influenza and other diseases brought by the white man could now be conquered, provin
g the Lord’s power over Satan and the feebleness—if not complicity—of hostile shamans. Unknown to Lima, Cam’s linguists were now openly proselytizing the ways of midwestern America, challenging the Indians’ communal traditions and their jungle-shaped cosmology with the rarefied spirit of an evangelical culture that stressed possessive individualism and exclusive property holding.

  SILers seemed to have little difficulty accepting the Odría dictatorship, although they had some misgivings about his repressive policies. Odría was certainly no Cárdenas, and SIL’s continued service to Odría’s troops as translators and pilots while the dictator tightened his grip on the nation stretched the meaning of Christian service. Ferrying Odría’s political prisoners to the Sepa penal colony eventually took its toll. Cam mastered the inner turmoil by finding passages from the Bible to use as rationales. His favorite was Paul’s more Stoic than Christian instructions to the martyred Christians in Rome: “Obey the government, for all authority comes from God.” In return for this Hail Caesar theology, Odría’s regime increased SIL’s supplies of aviation fuel and medicines.14

  In 1949, Odría convened the Second Inter-American Indian Congress at Cuzco.

  The politicization of the congress was apparent. If there were any doubts about the political meaning behind placing the congress’s interim body, the Inter-American Indian Institute, under the auspices of the new OAS, they were put to rest by both the Odría regime and the U.S. delegation. “We want the Indian population of the different American states to be part of free nations, and not continue as a foreign population in its own country,” the head of Peru’s National Indian Institute told the assemblage. “We must not forget that he who has nothing to lose has nothing to defend.”15

  Odría, addressing the conference as its honorary president, emphasized the importance of the Indians’ assimilation and “their appropriate responsibility to contribute to the nation’s development and progress.”16