Missionary Capitalist: Nelson Rockefeller in Venezuela

By Darlene Rivas

The first work to draw on Nelson A. Rockefeller's newly available personal papers as well as research in Latin American archives, Missionary Capitalist details Rockefeller's efforts to promote economic development in Latin America, particularly Venezuela, from the late 1930s through the 1950s.

Rockefeller's involvement in the region began in 1936 with his investment in Creole Petroleum, the Venezuelan subsidiary of Standard Oil. Almost immediately, he began trying to influence North Americans' individual, corporate, and government relationships with Latin Americans. Through his work developing technical assistance programs for the Roosevelt administration during World War II, his business ventures (primarily agricultural production and food retailing), and his postwar founding of the nonprofit American International Association, Rockefeller hoped to demonstrate how U.S. capitalists could nurture entrepreneurial spirit and work successfully with government agencies in Latin America to encourage economic development and improve U.S.-Latin American relations. Ultimately, however, he overestimated the ability of the United States, through public or private endeavors, to promote Latin American economic, political, and social change.

This objective account paints a portrait of Rockefeller not as the rapacious, exploitative figure of stereotype, but as a man fueled by idealism and humanitarian concern as well as ambition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Apr 3, 2003
• ISBN: 9780807860496

Darlene Rivas

Darlene Rivas is associate professor of history at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California.

Book preview

001

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

ILLUSTRATIONS

Acknowledgements

ABBREVIATIONS

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 - The Oil Man’s Heir Goes to Venezuela

To Be a Rockefeller

Venezuela and Oil

Beyond Oil

CHAPTER 2 - Mr. Rockefeller Goes to Washington

The Good Neighbor Policy

Hemisphere Economic Defense

Cultural Relations, Propaganda, and Blacklists

Commercial Policy

Economic Development

Assistant Secretary

CHAPTER 3 - Private Diplomacy

Rómulo Betancourt and the Trienio

Johnny Ten Cents Returns

Negotiating Development

The Lessons of Private Diplomacy

CHAPTER 4 - Rocky Road

Phantom, Tiger, or Gangster?

The Fall of Acción Democrática

CHAPTER 5 - The Venezuela Basic Economy Corporation

Organization and Management

Productora Agropecuaria Compañía Anónima

Pesquerías Caribe Compañía Anónima

Compañía Anónima Distribuidora de Alimentos

Industria Láctea de Carabobo

The Demise of VBEC

Continued Operations of IBEC in Venezuela

VBEC’s Development Objectives: Success, Failure, and Ambiguity

CHAPTER 6 - The American International Association

Founding the AIA

CIDEA

The CBR

The CBR and Rural Development

The Role of Supervised Credit in Agrarian Reform

Contract Negotiations: Working with Difficult Partners

Assessment of the AIA

CHAPTER 7 - Mr. Rockefeller Goes to Washington, Again

The Origins of Point Four

In Room 5600

Point Four Flounders

The Brain Trust and the Gray Assignment

IDAB

CONCLUSION

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

THE LUTHER HARTWELL HODGES SERIES ON BUSINESS, SOCIETY, AND THE STATE

William H. Becker, editor

001

© 2002 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by April Leidig-Higgins

Set in Aldus by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Portions of this work appeared earlier, in somewhat different form, in Boxing with Joe Louis: Nelson Rockefeller in Venezuela, 1945-1948, in Empire and Revolution: The United States and the Third World since 1945, edited by Peter L. Hahn and Ann Heiss, copyright 2000

Ohio State University Press, reprinted by permission.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rivas, Darlene. Missionary capitalist : Nelson Rockefeller in Venezuela / Darlene Rivas. p. cm.—(The Luther Hartwell Hodges series on business, society, and the state)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2684-7 (cloth: alk. paper)

eISBN : 97-8-080-78604-9

ISBN 0-8078-5350-X (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Rockefeller, Nelson A. (Nelson Aldrich), 1908-1979.

2. Economic assistance, American—Venezuela—History—20th century. 3. Investments, American—Venezuela—History—20th century. 4. Venezuela—Economic policy.

I. Title. II. Series.

HC237.R569 2002 338.987’009’045—dc21 2001053068

06 05 04 03 02 5 4 3 2 1

FOR MIKE

ILLUSTRATIONS

Rockefeller with Venezuelan boy who is transporting milk 31

Rockefeller with Harrison, Jamieson, and McClintock 46

Rockefeller with Latin American diplomats at the 1945 San Francisco

Conference of the United Nations 66

Rockefeller with Friele, Mendoza, and Pérez Alfonso 84

Map of VBEC operations in Venezuela, November 1949 93

Rockefeller with Betancourt 105

Planter on a VBEC farm 121

Rockefeller tours Pesquerías Caribe pier at Puerto La Cruz 124

CADA supermarket 134

CIDEA calendar page 147

Rockefeller with Venezuelan peasant farmer 154

Rockefeller tours National Agrarian Institute project in Turén 158

Rockefeller models the role of the good neighbor 183

Rockefeller with Truman and the members of IDAB 194

Venezuelan child holding a carton of pasteurized milk 223

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book relies on documents in the Truman and Roosevelt libraries, the National Archives of the United States, and various libraries and archives in Caracas, Venezuela. Most important, it relies on the extensive collection of the Rockefeller Archive Center in Tarrytown, New York. The personal papers of Nelson Rockefeller, opened by stages since 1990, enrich the book by providing an intimate glimpse of his and his associates’ ideas and activities. I am grateful to all the archivists who assisted me throughout this project, with special heartfelt thanks to Harold Oakhill and Thomas Rosenbaum at the Rockefeller Archive Center. In addition, I much appreciate financial assistance provided by the Harry S. Truman Library, the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, and Vanderbilt University. The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations supported my research by awarding me the W. Stull Holt Dissertation Fellowship.

Several individuals graciously permitted me to interview them. I thank Margot Boulton de Bottome, Dr. José Maria Bengoa, Jonathan Coles, Edgardo Mondolfi, Dr. Alfredo Planchart, and Connie Moure, all of Caracas, for allowing a stranger to probe their memories of these events at the middle of the last century. In addition, I am grateful to Nelson’s youngest brother, David Rockefeller. John Camp answered my questions in a formal interview and later kindly assisted me in identifying individuals in photographs.

In addition to their careful reading and critical suggestions, Thomas A. Schwartz and Marshall Eakin offered unfailing encouragement. Stephen Rabe and Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman read the manuscript and made insightful comments. Harry and Sara Hodges, my favorite agronomist and my favorite home economist, deserve recognition for inspiring my interest in what might seem an unusual subject for a diplomatic historian. Finally, I thank Mike, Rachel, and Michael, who have shared this journey through joys and setbacks. They have encouraged me, pestered me, and celebrated with me, but most of all, they have loved me.

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

Nelson Rockefeller was deeply moved. The drama he witnessed at a remote clinic in Haiti one day in 1943 brought to his mind one of the biblical stories of Christ’s healing. . . . The roads were choked with the believers, as you might say, being carried, riding on donkeys, hobbling on crutches, coming to this little hut which was the center of this clinic. Once there, almost 2,300 of the faithful received injections to combat yaws. Three Haitian doctors administered the medication. These local physicians had recently replaced a health mission staffed by North Americans, which had established the antiyaws campaign, funded jointly by the U.S. and Haitian governments. One of the doctors rose to thank the United States for its benevolence. As he finished his speech, a great cheer went up from the people. . . . Really, it was just like the healing by the waters, in the old days in the Bible.¹

Nelson Rockefeller approached life with an exuberant self-assurance, confident of his own and his country’s abilities and future. His early career coincided with high noon of the era Henry Luce would call the American Century. Born into the third generation of an American business and philanthropic dynasty, Rockefeller possessed unique means and opportunities to transform his ideas about U.S. foreign relations into action. In the 1940s and early 1950s, he hoped to influence the respective roles of the state and private individuals in the economic development of Latin America and, more broadly, the entire developing world. His story is one of many that spring from the evangelistic, nation-building impulse that moved the United States to play a leadership role in global modernization during the twentieth century.

In public memory, Nelson Rockefeller is known best as the governor of New York, perennial presidential hopeful, and Gerald Ford’s vice president. Rockefeller was a consummate politician, a cold warrior, a big spender, a frustrated almost-but-not-quite president, the epitome of a liberal Republican—a Rockefeller Republican. These phrases represent partial truths or quasitruths; none captures the essence of the man. Henry Kissinger offers an apt portrait of Rockefeller. He possessed, according to Kissinger, absolute, almost touching, faith in the power of ideas. Rockefeller longed to find, and do, the right thing. Untypical as he might seem to be, Kissinger continued, he was in a way quintessentially American in his boundless energy, his pragmatic genius, and his unquenchable optimism. Obstacles were there to be overcome; problems were opportunities. He could never imagine that a wrong could not be righted or that an honorable aspiration was beyond reach. For other nations utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is no farther than the intensity of their commitment.²

Despite Kissinger’s penchant for hyperbole and his personal friendship with Rockefeller (in an important sense, Rockefeller was Kissinger’s patron), this portrait reveals the heart and will of both the public and the private Nelson Rockefeller. As a young man, Nelson’s boundless energy and unquenchable optimism focused primarily on how he might marshal support for improved U.S. relations with Latin American nations. Beginning in the late 1930s, he attempted to influence the individual, corporate, and public conduct of North Americans with ties to Latin America. Rockefeller’s interest in U.S.-Latin American relations remained high throughout his career, but his direct personal involvement in the region peaked between 1939 and 1953, the period that is the focus of this book. In one nation in particular, he invested both vision and capital. Venezuela became the arena in which the young Nelson Rockefeller confronted his idealism and from which he emerged briefly chastened, less naive, and, sadly, less visionary.

The story of Rockefeller in Venezuela offers answers to important questions about Rockefeller’s life and career. At the same time, his story illuminates significant issues in U.S. foreign relations. Rockefeller’s involvement in Venezuela coincided with a surge in and eventual decline of public interest in Latin America. This decline corresponded with, and in part followed from, the emergence of the United States on the world scene as the greatest political, economic, and military power of the twentieth century, with far-flung interests and policies, many of which had made their debut on the inter-American stage. This context shaped Rockefeller’s initial fascination with the region and his sense of mission in trying to maintain creativity in U.S. public and private policies after World War II.

Broadly defined, U.S. relations with Latin America encompass more than public policies. In his efforts to influence inter-American relations, Rockefeller acted in both a public and a private capacity. He experimented with business and philanthropic endeavors in Venezuela, in Brazil, and elsewhere in Latin America. He also served in appointed positions in the Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower administrations. Rockefeller maneuvered between the public and private spheres and within that significant yet ill-defined space in which the two sectors overlapped more than at any earlier time in American history. He focused his energies on the economic relationship among the nations of the Western Hemisphere. The most important issue confounding inter-American relations during this period was the question of how the United States could—or whether it should—promote the development of Latin American economies. Venezuelan governments, despite that nation’s access to oil revenues, sought U.S. public and private support for their development and modernization goals. Rockefeller cooperated with public and private Venezuelan interests to assist the country’s economic development.

Rockefeller’s experiences in his official U.S. government capacities and his Venezuelan activities shaped his perception of the proper roles of public and private capital in promoting development. He supported public loans and greater collaboration between the government and private sector in planning to achieve adequate flows of capital to Latin America. Rockefeller believed that a reformed and regulated capitalism offered Latin America and the world their best chance for broad-based economic development. However, nationalist resentment of foreign corporations, particularly North American-based firms, threatened to retard what Rockefeller saw as the very basis of human freedom. Furthermore, it seemed to Rockefeller that local elites in Latin America acted in a purely self-interested manner and lacked genuine desire to advance the common good through productive investment. Believing that self-interest (in part, the pursuit of profit) was compatible with public interest, he launched a personal crusade to reform capitalist behavior by setting an example of capitalism with social objectives. He hoped to create a model based on his vision of progressive capitalist behavior that would influence both U.S. and Venezuelan investors. He was not alone in this quest. While this book is about Nelson Rockefeller, it places him within U.S. cultural trends, offering a glimpse into the thoughts and behavior of other North Americans whom Rockefeller transplanted to Venezuela. Rockefeller surrounded himself with individuals with a similar worldview, but who came from a variety of backgrounds and experiences, including business, academia, and government service. He had the wealth and drive to translate his and their ideas into organized action.

An examination of Rockefeller’s experiences helps to answer a host of questions. What, to borrow Kissinger’s phrase, was quintessentially American about the ideas and activities of Rockefeller and his associates in Venezuela? What were Rockefeller’s views about the respective roles of the state and private enterprise in economic development? How did U.S. government officials or U.S. domestic interests view his version of their proper roles? Finally, what can Rockefeller’s experience, given his unique circumstances and opportunities, tell us about U.S. foreign relations in the 1940s and early 1950s?

Another important set of questions deals with the interaction between North Americans and Venezuelans. What assumptions did North Americans and Venezuelans have in common regarding development? What aspects of Rockefeller’s vision did Venezuelans accept? What impact did U.S. ideas and policies have when implemented? How did different sectors of Venezuelan society respond to his ideas and programs? What effects did economic nationalism and changes in political regimes have on the character and implementation of Rockefeller’s programs?

This book challenges general portrayals of U.S.-Latin American relations that suggest that Americans inevitably sought power and profit at the expense of other nations and that Nelson Rockefeller, specifically, was an avaricious capitalist or reactive cold warrior blinded by anticommunism. The book also challenges the notion that Latin Americans (in this case Venezuelans) were pawns in the hands of powerful U.S. interests. Rockefeller’s influence gave him privileged access to the politically and economically powerful in Venezuela, but this power was limited. Contacts with influential Venezuelans did not guarantee Rockefeller could get what he wanted, and though his arrogance often led him to believe that he knew what was best for Venezuelans, he did not seek to exploit them.

This study highlights the ambiguous and complex character of U.S.- Latin American relations, which were shaped by both conflict and common ground between U.S. and Latin American modernizers. It also speaks to characterizations of U.S. foreign investors and the consequences of their investments. Scholars and the general public regard Rockefeller with suspicion because of his family background and power (both real and assumed). Most scholarly attention regarding Rockefeller’s early years has focused on his involvement as coordinator of inter-American affairs and assistant secretary of state. While authors who discuss these wartime activities are generally sympathetic with him due to their sense that he identified with Latin American leaders and Latin American aspirations, others note his cold warrior mentality in putting together an anti-Soviet Latin American bloc at the United Nations conference or suggest that Wall Street sympathies were behind his decision to support friendlier relations with Argentina in 1945.³ Except for Elizabeth A. Cobbs’s Rich Neighbor Policy: Rockefeller and Kaiser in Brazil, there has been little scholarship on his involvement as a businessman and philanthropist in Latin America before or after World War II.

As this study shows, Rockefeller was not some stereotypical and cartoonish robber baron hiding behind a mask of liberal Republicanism. The missionary capitalist was full of contradictions—idealistic, ambitious, rash, far-sighted, concerned, callous, empathetic, and detached, among other qualities. Moreover, his ideas and activities were not isolated aberrations, but reflected a broader U.S. interest in reforming capitalist behavior and nurturing worker welfare at home and abroad, born of the depression and nurtured by the early cold war. Americans developed a vision of what they had to offer, such as respect for the dignity of individual workers and farmers, technical expertise (or know-how), capital, and values of efficiency and rationality, which they believed the people of other nations needed. This reform impulse began among an elite corporate leadership but expanded to appeal to a broad spectrum of Americans who by the 1950s envisioned a people’s capitalism. In the 1940s and 1950s, Nelson tapped into a mood favorable to people-to-people nation-building and appealed to do-gooders, who included applied scientists and business experts.⁴ Their efforts preceded the boom in studies of development by the social science community and the state. They were the Point Four, and then the Peace Corps and Alliance for Progress, vanguard.

The subject of this book, Nelson Rockefeller’s efforts to promote economic development in Latin America, specifically in Venezuela, places it at the heart of recent scholarship on U.S.-Latin American relations. Interpretations of U.S.-Latin American relations, whether historical or social scientific, have been dominated by economic and material explanations since the 1960s. Liberal social scientists developed modernization theory and radical scholars shaped New Left, dependency, and world systems approaches—all sharing the teleological notion that economic development was fundamental to the progress of Latin American nations and that the United States either promoted or stymied the achievement of such development, usually defined as sustained economic growth with wide distribution of benefits. Recently, historians of inter-American relations have emphasized culture, but they continue to focus on economic relationships because of the centrality of ideas on economic development and the emergence of consumer cultures in twentieth-century Latin American history. The cultural approach also reflects both liberal and radical perspectives, with historians such as Mark T. Berger arguing that the discourse of economic development furthered uneven power relationships between the United States and Latin America.⁵

While some scholars have relied upon modernization and dependency theories developed after World War II to explain U.S.-Latin American relations, it makes little sense to analyze Rockefeller’s activities in Venezuela through the lens of any of these theories. Rockefeller’s ideas about economic development and the projects he began reflect assumptions he absorbed from both the Latin American milieu and his connections to the North American business, philanthropic, diplomatic, and scholarly communities. He attempted to synthesize ideas that later emerged as competing theories to explain economic development. These constructs emerged from the historical context in which Rockefeller thought and acted. As Nick Cullather has suggested, it is time to historicize development.⁶ Rockefeller’s story permits examination of the emergence of development as a primary interest of both U.S. and Latin American modernizers. It reveals antecedents for modernization theory in the reformist impulse of the Franklin Roosevelt administration and the progressive business community. The foreign aid programs of the Kennedy administration, including the Alliance for Progress, grew out of precedents set in the Roosevelt administration and pioneered in the private sector by Nelson Rockefeller a decade or more prior to the 1960s.

Rockefeller and his coworkers’ experiences demonstrate that the long dominant materialist/structuralist interpretation of U.S.-Latin American relations in diplomatic history is insufficient. This interpretation emphasizes U.S. economic motives, particularly the economic expansion evidenced in the U.S. search for markets and exploitation of raw materials. Nor is the interpretation adequate that largely emphasizes U.S. security concerns and tends to focus on dramatic events such as military or covert interventions, the long-term support for friendly dictators, and the impact of the cold war. Both of these interpretations emphasize conflict and disparities of power, which are indeed fundamental to an understanding of U.S.-Latin American relations. Economic and security-driven motives fuel much of U.S. policy, and the U.S. government, corporations, and private citizens have abused their power in multiple ways throughout Latin American history. Earlier liberal interpretations that suggested a harmony of interests and offered narratives centered on the development of Pan-Americanism, at the same time muting conflicts or placing blame for Latin America’s problems on Latin Americans, are less satisfactory.⁷ Still, as liberals have long noted, humanitarian and moral impulses, while often reflecting self-interest and ethnocentrism, have played a highly significant role in shaping North Americans’ actions.

Many histories of inter-American relations falter on one or more of several false dichotomies. Are these relations shaped by conflict of interest or harmony of interest? Has the United States demonstrated hegemonic and imperial behavior, or has it been a good neighbor and leader? Has the United States supported authoritarian dictators or democracy? Have U.S. business interests exploited the poorest Latin Americans, extracting wealth and profits, or promoted balanced economic development? Has the United States perpetuated poverty and inequity or promoted social and economic justice? Rather than offering a competing interpretive paradigm that answers such questions, my work suggests that the history of U.S.-Latin American relations is more multifaceted than these interpretations allow. Rockefeller and his subordinates certainly sought to extend the liberal order that the United States tried to build during and after World War II. However, the hegemon’s resources and attention to Latin America were limited, and both motivations for policies and the actual impact of policies were more complex than the current dominant theories would have one believe. The greatest weakness of these interpretations is that, for the most part, historians of U.S.-Latin American relations focus on U.S. motivations, actions, and historical sources and on the role of the state, thereby neglecting two fundamental characteristics of U.S.-Latin American relations—the significance of Latin Americans and private actors in shaping these relations.

This study, however, reveals the interplay between Latin Americans and North Americans with emphasis on the activities of U.S. nongovernmental organizations in business and philanthropy, as well as on the state. It goes beyond the deterministic tendency of many policy studies by examining not only the making of policy but also the impact of U.S. ideas and actions. It highlights the complex interaction between Rockefeller, his associates, and Venezuelans as his plans underwent scrutiny, alteration, and partial implementation. Obstacles and unanticipated challenges faced Rockefeller and his programs at every turn. Using both U.S. and Venezuelan historical sources, this study demonstrates that Venezuelans, from presidents and bureaucrats to peasant farmers and fishermen, demonstrated agency. Venezuelans made choices—rejecting, resisting, and accommodating elements of Rockefeller’s policies and programs. By paying attention to the interaction of historical actors during the implementation of policy in Venezuela, this study highlights greater ambiguity of results than scholars have long assumed.

In quest of clarity and in the interests of dramatic impact, scholars who seek to show Latin American agency can lose sight of this goal despite their best intentions. For example, in Peter H. Smith’s commendable Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.-Latin American Relations, he considers the reactions of Latin Americans to U.S. policies, detailing nationalist responses in particular. His goal is to demonstrate that Latin Americans had something to say about their relationship with their strong neighbor to the north. But the metaphor that he uses to characterize the dynamics of U.S.-Latin American Relations is that of an eagle with sharp talons. This image brings to mind a helpless mouse, pierced and bloody in the fierce eagle’s talons. Venezuelans like Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso would correctly object that they were not rodents squirming hopelessly in Nelson Rockefeller’s grip. Latin Americans also initiated ideas and contacts, at times shared common perspectives with U.S. citizens, and on occasion successfully challenged U.S. actions. Scholars who generalize from the perspective of conflicts of interest and unequal power relations imply that U.S. interests consistently bullied Latin Americans into following U.S. models. As this study will demonstrate, there were Latin American modernizers with similar goals, who selectively appropriated from Rockefeller’s plans those programs and ideas they believed were suitable for their national culture; significantly, they were not solely social and economic elites. It is clear that the interplay between external and internal power struggles has led to diverse outcomes in Latin American history.

In a sense, this book serves as a companion volume to Elizabeth Cobbs’s excellent study on Rockefeller’s Brazilian projects.⁸ Taken alone, Cobbs’s work is not representative of Rockefeller’s experience. The two nations presented different challenges to him, and his Venezuelan failures had more to do with the abandonment of his efforts to carve an identity for himself as a creative capitalist than did his Brazilian success. The different case studies also demonstrate similarities and differences in what nations wanted and what worked, something U.S. policymakers and social scientists have often failed to recognize in their quest to generalize a common Latin American experience and a common path to development.

Because it examines U.S. foreign relations through the lens of an individual’s experiences, this book tells a very human story. It is the story of an ambitious and eager young man, developing a career and seeking an identity that is both consonant with family tradition and uniquely his own. It is a story of high purpose and occasional arrogance. It is a story of individuals motivated by a complex set of values, by moral and ethical concerns, by practical and professional interests. It is a story of both success and failure, unanticipated consequences, frustrated dreams, of people who wanted to make a difference in their world and who did, for good and for ill, and for somewhere in between.

CHAPTER 1

The Oil Man’s Heir Goes to Venezuela

At midlife, Nelson Rockefeller planned a book he hoped would inspire Americans to take seriously their nation’s responsibilities in the world. He sat repeatedly with two professional writers, Mr. and Mrs. James Monahan of Reader’s Digest, discussing with them his life’s experiences as they related to his views on international relations. Rockefeller knew exactly how the book should begin. He wanted an opening story, a vignette, that would offer a dramatic introduction to his understanding of the importance of personal conduct in foreign relations. The book should begin, he informed the Monahans, with the story of a woman, the wife of a North American businessman, who sat and conversed with the young Nelson Rockefeller at a dinner party in Caracas, Venezuela, in the late 1930s. She related the story of a U.S. diplomat who apparently drank too much and, on one occasion, so lost his sense of propriety that in a drunken condition he broke into the presidential palace. This shocking account made an impact on Nelson, but so did the woman’s admission that she did not speak Spanish. Upon further inquiry, Rockefeller learned that the woman had lived in Caracas for ten years and in Mexico for eight years before that. She saw no reason to learn the language of the nation in which she resided. Who would I talk to in Spanish? she asked.¹

These two stories seemed to Rockefeller evidence of the lack of responsibility on the part of two of the major types of representatives we have abroad. Although admitting that generalizations based on these examples would be exaggerated, Rockefeller remarked that they achieved his purposes by showing that our diplomats were largely in Latin America [as] political pay-offs and our businessmen were good at their own business, with absolutely, in most cases, no sense of responsibility to the community. He, on the other hand, was keenly aware of this responsibility. Rockefeller had a special interest in the conduct of both government and private individuals in Latin America, particularly in Venezuela. His involvement in that nation dated to 1935, when he invested in Creole Petroleum, the Venezuelan subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey. Venezuela experienced intense political, economic, and social change during the late 1930s, and it did so in the context of a growing international crisis. In these volatile, yet exciting conditions, the young, idealistic Rockefeller sought to encourage improved personal relations between North Americans and Venezuelans and to contribute to the expanding Venezuelan economy. Understanding both his family background and his early career helps illuminate the paths Nelson followed in Venezuela and in his later efforts to affect U.S. foreign policy.²

To Be a Rockefeller

Nelson’s grandfather, John D. Rockefeller Sr., made the family fortune in the late nineteenth century through a combination of ruthless and shrewd business practices that left an important legacy for his progeny. It was a time in which the U.S. government pursued a largely laissez-faire philosophy; promotion of private enterprise far outweighed regulation as the duty of the state. In this environment, Rockefeller built Standard Oil into one of the largest of a handful of great American business empires. The aggressive tactics and tremendous financial success of Rockefeller made him a natural target; some journalists, politicians, working people, and preachers blamed him and other wealthy individuals for the convulsive social and economic changes occurring at the time. Men with names such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan—and their families—became symbols of the excesses of capitalism. At the same time, to some these names were symbols of the successes and opportunities that capitalism afforded.

By the early twentieth century, both antitrust sentiment and the organizational efforts of labor reached a pinnacle, creating a public relations disaster for the Rockefeller family. The years following Nelson’s birth in 1908 were a tumultuous time for John D. Rockefeller Sr. and his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr.³ Journalists, the muckrakers, and politicians attacked bad trusts. Most important for the Rockefellers, the courts began to address the issue of business consolidation in a manner less favorable to large-scale enterprise. In 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the breakup of Standard Oil. The loss of the court appeal was more symbolic than substantive. The reorganized corporations that resulted were more efficient, retaining essentially regional monopolies, and the Rockefellers maintained controlling shares of stock in each company. However, the court battle placed Junior on the defensive, paving the way for a pivotal event in his and his family’s future.⁴

Far from New York, in the troubled mining towns of Colorado, a strike broke out in September 1913. Management fought back, eventually with the help of the state militia. Junior was on the board of directors and a major stockholder of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, the primary business concern involved in the strike. Junior publicly announced his remoteness from any real influence in the case. Privately, however, he encouraged management in its stand against labor and in its coercion of state government to support company policy. In testimony before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Mines and Mining, he insisted that the United Mine Workers, the union involved, was to blame for the conflict. He firmly believed that most men did not want to join the union or strike.⁵ Then, on 20 April 1914, near Ludlow, striking coal miners and their families faced the guns and torches of state militia. Twenty-five men, women, and children died. The public response against the Ludlow Massacre and the ensuing hostile parades and demonstrations launched against the Rockefellers as symbols of corporate evil helped motivate Junior to adopt progressive ideas about labor-management relations.⁶ Owners and managers sought to ameliorate the worst conditions of unchecked industrial capitalism by paying higher wages, providing some benefits (such as retirement pensions), and encouraging greater cooperation and communication between labor and management. Motivated out of self-interest as well as altruism, Junior, and others like him, sought to control the process and determine the nature of changing labor-management relations. Regardless of his motives, Junior, and later his sons, gradually gained a reputation for working with and supporting labor and labor organizations.

It was also during the first two decades of the twentieth century that Senior and Junior began to engage in philanthropy on a grand scale, culminating in 1913 with the establishment of the Rockefeller Foundation. These philanthropic interests cannot be seen as simply a response to poor public relations. The strict Baptist upbringing of both Senior and Junior included faithful tithing to a variety of causes. Requests for money swamped Senior until he learned to approach giving on a more scientific basis with the aid of the able Frederick T. Gates. His first great contribution went to the founding of a Baptist college, the University of Chicago, in 1881. The next major endeavor was the Institute for Medical Research, founded in 1901. The General Education Board, chartered and incorporated in 1903, combined the family’s interests in health and education. Concentrating on the South, the General Education Board promoted the establishment of public high schools and improved colleges for blacks. Its adjunct, the Rockefeller