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"Rockefeller, Nelson"
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Thy Will Be Done
A \"blistering exposé\" of the USA's secret history of financial, political, and cultural exploitation of Latin America in the 20th century, with a new introduction ( Publishers Weekly ).
What happened when a wealthy industrialist and a visionary evangelist unleashed forces that joined to subjugate an entire continent? Historians Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett tell the story of the forty-year campaign led by Standard Oil scion Nelson Rockefeller and Wycliffe Bible Translators founder William Cameron Townsend to establish a US imperial beachhead in Central and South America.
Beginning in the 1940s, future Vice President Rockefeller worked with the CIA and allies in the banking industry to prop up repressive governments, devastate the Amazon rain forest, and destabilize local economies—all in the name of anti-Communism. Meanwhile, Townsend and his army of missionaries sought to undermine the belief systems of the region's indigenous peoples and convert them to Christianity. Their combined efforts would have tragic and long-lasting repercussions, argue the authors of this \"well-documented\" ( Los Angeles Times) book—the product of eighteen years of research—which legendary progressive historian Howard Zinn called \"an extraordinary piece of investigative history. Its message is powerful, its data overwhelming and impressive.\"
eBook
Medellín Is \Fantastic\: Drafts of the 1969 Rockefeller \Report\ on the Catholic Church
Since the 1970s, both foreign and U.S. opponents of U.S.-Central America policy have cited the 1969 Rockefeller Report on the Americas: The Official Report of a United States Presidential Mission for the Western Hemisphere as the beginning of U.S. government efforts to eradicate liberation theology. During the 1980s, progressive Catholic press accounts in the United States and abroad emphasized the similarities between the Report and President Ronald Reagans approach to Central America. But critics' charges are misplaced. The Report supported the Church's leftward turn, and Nelson Rockefeller was the reason. Early report drafts and Rockefeller's comments reveal that he enthusiastically welcomed the Medellín documents. It was family planning that preoccupied Rockefeller, not communist subversion.
Journal Article
Missionary capitalist : Nelson Rockefeller in Venezuela
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.
eBook
Defining Rockefeller Republicanism: Promise and Peril at the Edge of the Liberal Consensus, 1958–1975
This article examines Rockefeller Republicanism and its status within the Republican Party by looking at the evolution of Nelson Rockefeller’s support for social welfare policy between 1958 and 1975. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller regularly appears in histories of modern conservatism as the embodiment of the liberalism that conservatives rejected, but these works rarely account for the entirety of Rockefeller’s career. Rather than focus on Rockefeller’s challenges to the national Republican Party in 1960 and 1964, which results in an incomplete representation of Rockefeller Republicanism, this article reassesses moderate Republicanism’s perceived dominance and Rockefeller’s advocacy for liberal domestic policies and commitment to racial liberalism in New York. A full account of Rockefeller’s struggles to find common ground with conservative New York Republicans and adoption of conservative positions related to law enforcement and welfare reform thwarted one of the GOP’s best opportunities to assemble a multiracial and cross-class constituency.
Journal Article
A Wild Idea
A Wild Idea shares the complete story of the difficult birth of the Adirondack Park Agency (APA). The Adirondack region of New York's rural North Country forms the nation's largest State Park, with a territory as large as Vermont. Planning experts view the APA as a triumph of sustainability that balances human activity with the preservation of wild ecosystems. The truth isn't as pretty. The story of the APA, told here for the first time, is a complex, troubled tale of political dueling and communities pushed to the brink of violence.
The North Country's environmental movement started among a small group of hunters and hikers, rose on a huge wave of public concern about pollution that crested in the early 1970s, and overcame multiple obstacles to \"save\" the Adirondacks. Edmondson shows how the movement's leaders persuaded a powerful Governor to recruit planners, naturalists, and advisors and assign a task that had never been attempted before. The team and the politicians who supported them worked around the clock to draft two visionary land-use plans and turn them into law. But they also made mistakes, and their strict regulations were met with determined opposition from local landowners who insisted that private property is private.
A Wild Idea is based on in-depth interviews with five dozen insiders who are central to the story. Their observations contain many surprising and shocking revelations. This is a rich, exciting narrative about state power and how it was imposed on rural residents. It shows how the Adirondacks were \"saved,\" and also why that campaign sparked a passionate rebellion.
eBook
Cultivating Arid Soils in Libya and Brazil during World War Two: The Two-fold War between Colonial and Neo-colonial Experiences
This paper compares two schemes of agrarian transformation that occurred during World War Two in Libya and northeast Brazil, undertaken by the Italian fascist regime and US private and governmental officials respectively. Although developing different historical trajectories, these
similar efforts aiming to convert desert and semi-arid areas into productive fields intertwined with military services and reflected colonial and post-colonial appropriations in the Global South. The article demonstrates how both Libya and Brazil represented militarised environments and contested
spaces well beyond the WW2 timeframe and how the colonial expansion projects that preceded and resulted from WW2 combined military campaigns and mastery over nature. Our analysis builds upon Italian and US primary sources and scholarly publications in environmental history.
Journal Article
“Enlightened System” or “Regulatory Nightmare”?: New York’s Adirondack Mountains and the Conflicted Politics of Environmental Land-Use Reform During the 1970s
This exploration of the politics of land-use reform in New York’s vast Adirondack Mountains provides a revealing window onto the ambiguities, evolution, and importance of environmental liberalism during the 1970s. A distinctive set of circumstances, featuring forceful advocacy by Governor Nelson Rockefeller and propitious political timing, led to the creation in the early 1970s of one of the most ambitious state-level environmental reforms in modern American history. But implementation during the mid- and late 1970s proved challenging. Environmental management by a new regional agency that possessed powerful regulatory authority over all public and private lands in the region produced discontents, distrust, and organized opposition among both developers and property-rights advocates on the right and environmental advocates on the left. The result was an uneasy, enduring legacy: the new regulatory institution and key environmental planning ideas of the early 1970s and the later, wide-ranging discontents would coexist in similar forms for decades to come.
Journal Article
“The Attila the Hun Law”: New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Making of a Punitive State
In 1973, New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller responded to panic about soaring heroin use by renouncing his aggressive treatment programs and enacting the most punitive drug policy in the United States. His \"Rockefeller Drug Laws\" mandated sentences up to life in prison for selling any narcotics. These punishments, comparable to the penalties for murder, served as models for subsequent \"War on Drugs\" policies enacted across the nation. This article explores the ideological and political work accomplished by this high profile legislation— for policy makers, for members of the general public who clamored for \"get tough\" strategies, and for the drug users targeted by the statutes. The laws were a repudiation of liberal treatment programs and specialists' expertise, and provided a forum to remake the much-maligned welfare state into a stern, macho vehicle for establishing order in society. Increasingly punitive policies constricted the rights of drug users by rhetorically constructing \"addicts\" and \"pushers\" as outside of the polity and as the antithesis of full citizens. Therefore, the Rockefeller Drug Laws not only had devastating effects on drug offenders, but also were instrumental in the profound renegotiation of the state's role and responsibilities.
Journal Article