by Gerard Colby
*In 1948, Nelson had taken his eldest son, Rodman, with him to visit United Fruit’s agricultural school in Honduras and was apparently considering asking the Boston firm to lend an expert to inspect IBEC’s operations. The Rockefellers’ Chase National Bank, with his brother David in charge of Latin American operations, was already involved in Ecuador’s banana plantations through its client, Standard Fruit Company. Chase also had an interest in United Fruit and was represented on United Fruit’s board by Chase’s chairman, John J. McCloy.
21
THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS
THE NEW CRUSADES
High above midtown Manhattan, in the hushed nerve center of the Rockefeller financial empire in Room 5600, the decision to quietly support Billy Graham had not been reached without apprehension. Prominent mainline pastors were worried that Graham’s appearance would help a revived Fundamentalist movement lay siege to the country’s media capital and largest city. Christian churches feared that the crusade would “reinforce and deepen a reactionary period in American life, moving us toward greater conformity and more coercive religion.… Fear is the largest factor in evangelistic conversion, and fear is no basis for creative religion.”1
Christian Century magazine warned that
the narrow and divisive creed which the churches rejected a generation ago is staging a comeback. Through skillful manipulation of means and persons, including a well publicized association with the President of the United States, fundamentalist forces are now in position aggressively to exploit the churches. If their effort succeeds, it will make mincemeat of the ecumenical movement, will divide congregations and denominations, will set back Protestant Christianity a half century.2
Liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, vice president of Union Theological Seminary, struck a similar, but deeper historical chord:
Graham’s evangelism is in the tradition of America’s frontier evangelical piety.… What makes it potent is that the gifts of a very personable young man and gifted public speaker, representing a very charming embodiment of an old tradition, are related to all the high-pressure techniques of modern salesmanship.… All the arts of “Madison Avenue” (the advertising center of America) are practiced by the Graham entourage in the “Billy Graham Crusade.”3
But it was precisely these arts that made Graham attractive to the hierarchy of New York’s mainline Protestant denominations. And it was to these men that Junior listened. Key support for Graham came from Robert J. McCracken, Rev. Harry Fosdick’s successor at Riverside Church; Union Theological Seminary President Henry Pitney Van Dusen, a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation; and mining scion Cleveland E. Dodge. Junior had backed a similar ten-week “campaign” conducted by evangelist Billy Sunday forty years earlier, at the dawn of the United States’ entry into World War I. Then, like now, New York’s modernist Protestant leaders sought to use the appearance of a famed evangelist to restock the flocks of their own churches. Even earlier, in 1876, they had done likewise with Dwight Moody’s “preaching missions.” In each case, it was Fundamentalism, not a science-informed faith, that gained.
Rockefeller aides, despite the grimmest modernist prophecies, could not resist attending Graham’s grand-opening dinner in New York. Lindsley Kimball, Dana Creel’s predecessor at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and now an executive of the Rockefeller Foundation, asked Creel if he had “a sufficiently hardy constitution” to help fill two tables he was “stuck” with at Graham’s opening dinner, offering cocktails as a bracer. “I feel sure Billy will not provide cocktails, but I would like to.… How about it?”4
John Rockefeller 3rd attended the dinner, even though he rejected Chase chairman George Champion’s request that he join the Crusade Committee.* Nelson, his mind set on winning some elected office in New York, declined any association with Graham—financial or otherwise—that might become public. He could not ignore the anti-Fundamentalist convictions of downstate Catholic and Jewish voters and upstate mainline Protestants. But who could argue with the support for the United States’ influence in Southeast Asia given by Graham’s film, Eastward to Asia, or his assertion at a University Club luncheon thrown by Champion in February 1957 that the revival of religion was necessary to assert the United States’ moral leadership in the Free World?5
Nothing prevented Room 5600, again under Nelson’s control, from silently throwing its weight behind Graham. Since returning from Washington, Nelson had resumed the presidency of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. This prominent connection of his name ruled out any donation from the fund. But it did not rule out Nelson’s top aide at the fund, Dana Creel, from encouraging Junior to contribute.
A vision of global missions persuaded Junior to OK a $50,000 donation. It was done quietly, without press releases or fanfare, a secret affirmation that helped make the New York Crusade “a turning point in Graham’s American ministry.”6 It also was a turning point for Fundamentalism, ending its isolation on the fringe of American religious life and giving the movement the second wind it needed to make its postwar revival a durable mass phenomenon.
Nelson kept silent throughout Graham’s appearances in Manhattan. John 3rd donated $1,500, and Laurance sent fifty shares of one of his favorite defense holdings, Airborne Instruments Laboratory, worth about $2,500. Graham’s receipts totaled $2.8 million, more than $1 million of which was spent on television. The crusade generated a $217,000 profit; the Protestant Council of New York City gave Graham’s organization $150,000 and kept the rest.7
Six “special offerings” had been collected. One was for the Wycliffe Bible Translators.8
Billy Graham’s enormous success with Manhattan’s business elite in 1957 signified that the U.S. Christian Fundamentalist movement, like the United States herself, was at the edge of a major transition. Graham’s organization gave the movement a new corporate cohesiveness; his moderate evangelizing of modernist Protestants set the tone for the movement’s future success. This success, in turn, fed upon a United States that was in cultural discontinuity with the old order. In the 1950s, the era of small-business ethics finally gave way in mainstream America to the march of the modern corporation and its big-business ethic of efficiency and conformity within a mass culture.
Billy Graham’s New Testament of a living, forgiving God, now projected on television screens in millions of homes, offered solace to the lonely, the alienated, the guilt stricken, and the powerless. His predecessor, Dwight Moody, had attacked satanly labor unrest and sinful cities and stoked millenarian hopes among hard-pressed smallholders for the Second Coming and an end of the world that was ruining them; in so doing, he had married his career to the solid citizens of the industrial trusts who were bringing this corporate world into being—families like the Rockefellers. His own son-in-law, Rev. Arthur Packard, even ended up working for Nelson’s father in Room 5600. Eight decades after Moody’s first triumphant “campaign” in New York, it was left to Billy Graham to usher into the corporate culture the last vestiges of the rural population that had migrated to the new corporate suburbias.
For those who did not have to face the bulldozer or eviction, the changing face of Manhattan itself, from grimy brick to gleaming steel, seemed to reflect the promise of endless bounty. Corporate growth was now accepted as “the American way.” Whole neighborhoods of ethnic communities that were revered in earlier melting-pot theories were being demolished, sleek glass and modernist arches sprouting in their place.* It was as if the creators of these buildings—the supremely wealthy men who commissioned these structures—needed to transubstantiate their power into something more tangible, something bigger than one man’s lone ambition, something that could command respect.
BUYING INTO THE SHINING DREAM
The Waldorf-Astoria, Manhattan’s most famous hotel, was glowing with New York’s confidence in January 1956, when the president of Brazil arrived amid a flurry of excitement. Inside the grand ballroom, scores of dignitaries, led by New York’s aristocratic governor, Averell Harriman, greeted Juscelino Kub
itschek with the dignity due the new leader of the largest nation south of the Rio Grande. But one man offered a specially warm welcome, joining the president at his table with the familiar ease of someone who is used to rubbing shoulders with the powerful.
Kubitschek was no stranger to Nelson Rockefeller. As Governor of Minas Gerais, he had inherited a successful supervised credit program set up by Nelson’s American International Association for Economic and Social Development (AIA) in 1948. Now he was seeking loans and investments, including financing for the realization of Nelson’s “shining dream,” the conquest of the Amazon. Unlike Vargas, Kubitschek had no qualms about taking in American corporations as partners. “The Vargas group, which Kubitschek succeeds, left Brazil in bad shape, chiefly because it inflated the currency violently,” Adolf Berle briefed Governor Harriman before the banquet that night. “At the same time it refused to permit foreign companies to develop Brazil’s oil resources and was unable to develop them itself. The issue is ‘hot.’ Kubitschek is looking for a viable compromise.”9
IBEC’s Operations in Brazil (Late 1954)
Source: Wayne G. Broehl, United States Business Performance Abroad: The Case Study of the International Basic Economy Corporation.
Everyone knew why. Kubitschek had just barely survived a coup plot and was seeking desperately to reassure American investors of his good intentions toward them—particularly Standard Oil and U.S. Steel, whose officials were reportedly participants in the plot.10 The inspiration for this plot, it was said, was the election of Kubitschek’s left-leaning vice president, João Goulart, who had been Vargas’s labor minister until conservative generals forced his ouster. Kubitschek was anxious to avoid a similar fate by demonstrating that his administration would not be in the Vargas vein of nationalism.
Nelson was impressed with the new president’s vision of Brazilian-American relations, so much so that when Kubitschek had approached two of Nelson’s AIA aides in Rio about expanding Minas Gerais’s supervised credit program throughout rural Brazil, Nelson decided to fly to Brazil in April for further talks. Rockefeller arrived at Belo Horizonte on April 12 to meet with Kubitschek at the nearby farm of the credit program’s director. At the last minute, however, Kubitschek canceled, chafing under critical queries by the Brazilian press about why he had arranged an “undercover meeting in Minas and above all on a secluded farm” instead of at the presidential palace. The next day, Nelson obliged, reaching an accord with Kubitschek while lunching at the presidential palace. Nelson pledged a $525,000 Rockefeller Brothers Fund grant to the AIA, reserving $100,000 per year for four years for the national program and $50,000 a year to continue the credit program in Minas Gerais. The press, unable to take issue with such a worthy project as low-interest loans to farmers, was disarmed. The AIA’s official history would later ridicule Brazilian editors for their suspicions.11
Rockefeller Credit Network in Minas Gerais (1948–1961)
After successful demonstration projects (Ο) for a farm extension service were set up in São Paulo state, Rockefeller’s AIA sponsored a network () of rural credit agencies, ACAR, in collaboration with the state government in Minas Gerais. ACAR tried to stem farm failures and politically volatile migrations to coastal cities. During the Kubitschek presidency (1956–1960), AIA’s rural credit and assistance system spread throughout rural Brazil, spurring commercial farming’s advance into the Brazilian frontier.
Source: Map of AIA-ACAR operations, AIA Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center.
If they had known what Rockefeller officials knew, however, their concerns would not have been so easily laid to rest. During his visit, Nelson had decided to invest in what one official of the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC) secretly acknowledged was “the largest single tract of private property on the frontier between Brazil and Bolivia.”12 On more than one million acres of land in western Mato Grosso, Nelson now planned to build one of the world’s largest cattle herds. The ranch already had 50,000 head of cattle, but Nelson had bigger plans, as much as five times bigger. Airplanes would soon arrive carrying Santa Gertrudis bulls from his brother Winthrop’s prize herds at Winrock Farms in Arkansas.
The AIA’s and IBEC’s agricultural experts would also appear to begin cattle breeding and feeding experiments. Their goal was to reduce to two years the length of time required to raise and fatten a full-grown steer for market.
The plans called for a modern slaughterhouse and distribution of packaged meat in São Paulo and Rio, in competition with large processors like Anglo, Swift, Armour, and Wilson, as well as smaller ranches.
Beyond profits from beef was another possibility: mining. If Nelson had learned anything from Standard Oil’s involvement with the Kleberg family’s King Ranch in Texas, it was that giant ranches often contain valuable minerals or oil. U.S. Steel had recently bought a large manganese concession to the north of the ranch near Mato Grosso’s commercial capital, Corumbá; the deposits would prove to be one of the world’s richest reserves of manganese. Corumbá was also the Brazilian gateway to Bolivia’s oil. A railway from São Paulo passed through Corumbá on its way to the Santa Cruz fields.
A recent poll indicated that Brazilians were swinging away from Vargas’s oil policy. Encouraged by Berent Friele’s interpretation that this was “the forerunner to a new economic era,”13 Nelson insisted upon an amendment to the ranch’s corporate bylaws that would allow him to participate if mineral wealth was found. Twenty years would pass before American readers of the Engineering and Mining Journal would learn, through the magazine’s reprint of radar aerial maps, that Bodoquena contained significant deposits of copper, a rare metal in Brazil.14 But they would have to look carefully, checking the keys to the maps for symbols and the size of deposits. And the Rockefeller ownership would remain a secret.
Bodoquena was the culmination of almost a decade of planning. Nelson’s aides had targeted western Brazil for investment as early as March 1947, only three months after IBEC was founded and its philanthropic arm, the AIA, had set up shop in Brazil. The government had already projected Goiás, the frontier state west of Minas Gerais, as the site for a new federal capital; Rockefeller aides had noted that the construction of this capital was sure to stimulate economic development in the whole western frontier.
The CIAA’s former agricultural chief in Brazil, working then for IBEC, had reported to Nelson and Friele that the “high plateau of southern and central Goiás and western Minas Gerais … has some of the finest land and timber and mineral resources in all Brazil.” The aide recommended the immediate purchase of up to half a million acres of land, its colonization with Brazilians and foreigners, and its modernization and industrialization. The Rockefellers could “spearhead a movement into the area” by investing “considerable money” to “realize its investment potential to us” instead of others. The “others” were Brazilians, namely São Paulo coffee growers “who have purchased large estates” and English land speculators.15
Nelson, however, had been wary of doing anything that could trigger adverse publicity. Room 5600 had carefully monitored the Brazilian press as IBEC and the AIA set up operations that focused more on retail services and technical assistance than on the outright ownership of land. Unlike Venezuela, where a dictatorship stifled anti-U.S. fervor sufficiently to convince Nelson that owning large ranches was a safe investment, Brazil still had a strong nationalist movement and a leader, Vargas, who, by 1950, had returned to power. Nelson had attended his inauguration as Truman’s special emissary. He had kept track of Vargas’s personal career through Friele’s friendship with the president’s daughter Alzira and her husband, Ernani do Amaral Peixoto. During the postwar interregnum between Vargas’s presidential terms, Peixoto had even attempted to become Nelson’s sales agent in Brazil. In 1950, he rode the coattails of Vargas’s successful presidential campaign to become governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro. In 1953, when Governor Peixoto and his wife arrived in Washington seeking U.S. aid, Nelson took time from his duties as
a member of Eisenhower’s transition team to throw a luncheon for the couple. Their visit gave him the opportunity for an important preparatory meeting with the Brazilian ambassador, Walther Moreira Salles.
From that time forward, Brazil would never be the same.
The ambassador was the son of João Moreira Salles, one of Brazil’s most successful merchant bankers for the coffee growers of São Paulo state. Since World War II, the elder Moreira Salles had expanded into other areas of commercial banking, including cattle, real estate speculation, and oil refining, grooming his son for a leadership role in the industrial Brazil of the future. As producers of the largest export to the United States, São Paulo’s coffee kings were powerful figures in any Brazilian government, and it was not surprising that when Vargas needed an intermediary with Washington, he chose a prince of that realm.
When Ambassador Moreira Salles and Rockefeller met in 1953, Brazil was plagued by debt and eager for assistance. Nelson, not shy about mixing government and personal business, discussed IBEC’s Brazilian investment possibilities. He also lobbied Moreira Salles on behalf of J. C. King’s old firm, Johnson & Johnson of Brazil, for relief from Vargas’s restrictions on profits leaving Brazil. He even probed to see if Vargas was willing to change proposed legislation that would give Petrobrás a monopoly over oil prospecting, development, refining, and transportation.16 Vargas’s refusal eventually earned him a financially destabilized government, Moreira Salles’s resignation, and a military coup. But his suicide over Brazil’s oil also chilled the goodwill atmosphere for investments associated with the Rockefeller name.
Traditionally a conservative lot anyway, Brazilian bankers would not give more than token support for the stock issues sponsored by Nelson’s investment bank, Inter-American Finance Corporation (IFI). Of the fourteen Brazilian banks that owned 48 percent of IFI’s stock, only two held any promise of being close collaborators and consistent underwriters of IFI’s stock offerings. When Nelson conducted his own field investigation in Brazil the following spring, he narrowed the field to one: Banco Moreira Salles was the only bank that represented the kind of clout Nelson needed. It was Moreira Salles, in fact, who interested Nelson in the huge ranch in western Mato Grosso.