The Costs of US Mineral Needs in Latin America

Undermining Sovereignty: The Costs of U.S. Mineral Needs in Latin America

by Nicholas Alexandrov

B.A. in Literature, May 2008, Yale University

A dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

May 15, 2016

Dissertation directed by

James G. Hershberg Professor of History and International Affairs

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Nicholas Alexandrov has passed the Final Examination for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy as of January 13, 2016. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

Undermining Sovereignty: The Costs of U.S. Mineral Needs in Latin America

Nicholas Alexandrov

Dissertation Research Committee:

James G. Hershberg, Professor of History and International Affairs, Dissertation Director

Peter F. Klaren, Emeritus Professor of History and International Affairs, Committee Member

Cynthia McClintock, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Committee Member

iii

Abstract of Dissertation

Undermining Sovereignty: The Costs of U.S. Mineral Needs in Latin America

This dissertation assesses the costs of U.S. mineral needs in Latin America during the first half of the 20th century, focusing mainly on the 1940s. During this period, the

U.S. used protectionist policies to boost its domestic industrial sector, which was dominated by private firms. These firms required massive amounts of copper, manganese, tin, tungsten, zinc and other minerals—and due to deficiencies in the U.S. geological endowment, many of these minerals had to be acquired from Brazil, Chile,

Mexico and other foreign countries, both in Latin America and on other continents.

Foreign procurement of minerals became particularly crucial during World War II, when the U.S. exploited a range of metals to sustain its military efforts, and then after the conflict, as minerals made the postwar boom and emerging “permanent war economy” possible.

In developing strategies to acquire foreign minerals, planners in Washington assumed they could adapt the land, laws, and people of other countries to U.S. needs.

U.S. planning had nothing to do with promoting self-determination abroad, in other words, and instead expected foreign countries to conform to the needs of U.S. industry— and of the industrial lifestyles U.S. citizens enjoyed.

Table of Contents

Abstract of Dissertation ...... iv

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1: Mining ...... 44

Chapter 2: Copper ...... 60

Chapter 3: Manganese ...... 106

Chapter 4: Tin ...... 154

Chapter 5: Tungsten ...... 199

Chapter 6: Zinc ...... 244

Chapter 7: The Environment ...... 286

Conclusion: The Role of Mining in U.S. Foreign Policy ...... 314

Works Cited ...... 339

Introduction

The argument

This dissertation is about the ways U.S. mineral needs shaped Washington’s foreign policy, especially in the 1940s but also throughout the first half of the twentieth century. It focuses largely on the plans U.S. officials developed to secure these minerals, many of which were found in Latin America, where they were controlled by private companies. Since these companies were in charge of extracting minerals that were essential, often irreplaceable, ingredients in industrial production both for U.S. wartime needs—military transportation, ammunition, plenty more—and for the day-to-day lives of U.S. residents, I make the modest proposal in this work that private firms need to be considered as central actors in U.S. foreign policy.

But I also suggest that the business of mineral procurement is inherently disruptive, impacting far more than just the site of extraction itself, and entailing—in the ideal scenarios U.S. planners envisioned—a range of changes to the land, laws, and people in the countries where mining takes place. Regarding land, I will explain that

U.S. planners kept running up against a fundamental problem—namely, that Mother

Nature did not have humans in mind when depositing minerals throughout the world.

This means that the most desirable mineral sources are often difficult to reach, if not inaccessible, given existing infrastructure. Roads thus had to be built, and rails laid, for extraction to proceed. Their public pronouncements celebrating self-determination notwithstanding, U.S. officials simply assumed Latin Americans would be directed towards these construction ends, thus facilitating mineral exports from the region to satisfy U.S. industrial needs.

And as I will also explain in the coming chapters, U.S. officials considered a country’s legal architecture as crucial as its physical infrastructure where mining was concerned. Laws had to be shaped in such a way to grant sufficient rights, as U.S.

Americans conceived of them, to foreign firms operating in mineral-rich territories.

Laws also had to guarantee that taxes would remain low for these foreign firms, ensuring high profits while limiting their social obligations to workers. Again, against the common assumption that U.S. officials were concerned with promoting democracy abroad, reviewing the legal aspects of Washington’s mining policy suggests that Latin

American self-determination was anathema to U.S. officials. I will explain how in

Brazil, for example, Washington’s representatives discussed changing Brazil’s constitution in accordance with the desires of mining firms, as one way of getting around the problems the country’s mining laws posed. And an examination of other U.S. legal objectives in the region reveals a similar preoccupation with getting Latin American laws to conform to U.S. industrial needs.

Latin Americans themselves, in the eyes of U.S. officials, posed the final barrier to extraction that I will discuss in this dissertation. By this I mean not only that the men in Washington, or stationed at diplomatic posts throughout Latin America, were concerned with the productivity of the men in the mines—though this issue was certainly a major concern. But I also mean that, more generally, U.S. officials discussed the need to cultivate the mentality of the wage laborer, as opposed to that of the peasant or subsistence farmer, among Latin Americans, particularly the indigenous peoples of

Bolivia and Peru. Such a mentality was seen as a desirable way to insure mining, as well as the related infrastructure development described above, could proceed rapidly, with an

2 adequate labor supply. Latin Americans had to want to rent themselves out on the labor market, in other words. One could no doubt trace parallels between this aspect of U.S. planning, and that of, say, Washington officials preoccupied with reeducating North

American indigenous populations during the era of territorial expansion westward. And insofar as U.S. officials spoke of the need to “convert” Latin Americans from peasants to wage laborers, one could also make a connection between Washington’s project, and that of Spanish imperialists in the region centuries earlier.

By discussing these changes—to infrastructure, the law, and to people—U.S. planners wished to effect beyond the site of extraction, in order to enhance corporate exploitation of the region’s resources, I hope to suggest that Washington’s mineral policies were a form of intervention or interference abroad. By this I mean that U.S. foreign policy is not interventionist strictly when, say, the Marines are sent into Central

American, or when the CIA helps orchestrate a coup in the Southern Cone. These are simply the most egregious, militaristic forms of U.S. interventionism, occurring in addition to a more persistent form, implemented by Washington in collaboration with the private firms that control and profit from mineral deposits, and existing to fulfill U.S. industry’s most basic needs. Because this form of interference serves such a fundamental purpose for the U.S., it can be considered a constant feature of U.S. foreign policy.

That is to say that, while one could make the case that the U.S., as an industrial powerhouse, might have survived had Árbenz or Allende been permitted to complete their terms, it is much less certain that U.S. industrial might could have survived without exploiting—for decades—Brazilian manganese, Chilean copper, Bolivian tin, Mexican zinc, or any number of other Latin American minerals. Manganese is a crucial input in

3 steel production, and zinc essential for steel’s protective coating; steel, in turn, underpinned the lifestyles of U.S. Americans, who traveled in steel-made cars and along steel-made rails, and worked in steel-made buildings. They also communicated via copper wires, which threaded through the walls of their homes, apartments and office buildings to provide electricity.

To fulfill these most basic of U.S. needs, as well as to meet the ramped-up mineral demands wartime conditions imposed, Washington officials planned to procure immense quantities of foreign minerals throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

Successful implementation of these policies would have entailed the disruptive effects— in terms of infrastructure development, legal overhauls, and the promotion of a wage- earning mentality among indigenous peoples and other self-sufficient Latin Americans— outlined above. And, by their accounts, U.S. officials managed to meet many, though not all, of the extractive objectives they set. But while these policies were central to

Washington’s foreign policy throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and especially during World War II, they have received little close attention from diplomatic historians.

Instead, scholars working on the 1940s focus largely on the ideological aspects of U.S. foreign policy during that decade, asserting that Washington promoted democracy—its default position—during the war, but then panicked at the prospect of burgeoning Soviet power by the end of the decade, abandoning its pro-democracy inclinations in order to support whichever Latin American entities, however unsavory, would best curb Communist influence.

I turn now to this historiography, and will look first at how U.S. historians have written about Washington’s Latin America policy during the 1940s. The reader will no doubt note that, in this review, there is virtually no discussion of U.S. mineral policies.

The topic’s neglect alone makes it a worthy topic for scholarly examination. But as will also become clear over the course of the dissertation, a study of Washington’s mineral procurement plans helps challenge the prevailing view of U.S.-Latin American relations in the 1940s, which I discuss in the first historiography section below. It does so by suggesting that there was a fundamentally undemocratic, disruptive and interventionist aspect to U.S. conduct in the region throughout the first half of the 20th century, and most definitely throughout the 1940s. In other words, and contrary to what U.S. diplomatic historians have asserted for decades, the year 1947—or the start of the Cold War—may well not represent the dramatic shift in U.S. foreign policy that scholars believe it to be.

After assessing the U.S. historiography on Washington’s Latin America policy during the 1940s, I will then consider how Latin American historians have addressed the same topic. Again, while many of these works do not address mining directly, the assumptions they make—and many of them identify continuities running through 20th- century U.S. foreign policy—can be weighed in light of the discussion of Washington’s mineral needs in this dissertation.

Following my review of Latin American scholarship, I will then examine how historians have discussed the topic of U.S. interventionism more broadly, indicating that it has been discussed largely in militaristic terms—thus leaving a void, insofar as it fails to consider day-to-day corporate interference, for scholars to fill. Finally, I will conclude

5 this introduction with an assessment of the different ways academics have studies

Washington’s foreign mineral needs.

Historiography I: U.S. Historians on 1940s U.S.-Latin American Relations

The typical U.S. scholarly account of the 1940s goes something like this: World

War II, and the post-war period especially, marked an era of U.S.-Latin American cooperation, hemispheric solidarity, and general goodwill. These positive relations lasted until the Cold War began, at which point everything was ruined. The situation took a turn for the worse because Washington surrendered its usual objectives—democracy promotion, economic policies intended to raise living standards—to the effort to combat the Soviet threat (or perceived threat, as some scholars put it). In other words, the Cold

War imposed extreme conditions on the U.S. government, leading it to pursue extreme policies that departed from standard procedure.

It would be difficult to overemphasize the firm grip this interpretation of events has had on the minds of U.S. scholars. It seems every major survey of Washington’s relations with its southern neighbors, whatever its overall assessment of these relations, is faithful to it. This is equally true whether we consider monographs more celebratory of

U.S. policies—those by Robert N. Burr (Our Troubled Hemisphere, 1967) and Lester D.

Langley (America and the Americas, 2010) are good examples—or those quite critical of the same strategies. Recent studies by Greg Grandin (Empire’s Workshop, 2006) and

Stephen Rabe (The Killing Zone, 2012) are in the latter vein. It seems inaccurate, therefore, to argue that one camp of U.S. scholars has gotten the picture “more right” than

6 another. Instead, it appears nearly all of them examine in a similar way the crucial, mid-

1940s period when the United States became the major world power.

Indeed, it almost seems as if assumptions underlying this position—regarding how powerful states act, in brief—have changed little since Samuel Flagg Bemis offered his assessment of Washington diplomacy in 1943. Discussing U.S. imperialism, Bemis asserted “that it was never deep-rooted in the character of the people, that it was essentially a protective imperialism”—“an imperialism against imperialism”—and that

“[i]t did not last long and it was not really bad.”1 This passage may well strike today’s reader as a blatantly absurd rationalization. And it would be easy from our vantage point seven decades after Bemis’ book appeared to dismiss it as transparently apologetic.

But a closer examination, in my view, reveals that Bemis’ argument is fundamentally similar to the one summarized above, and which U.S. scholars still advance. Like Bemis, they argue that imperialism—influence over Latin American affairs or control of its resources, disregard for Latin American sovereignty, etc.—“was never deep-rooted in the character of the” U.S. government, at least post-1945; it was the

Cold War climate that drove Washington to these policies. Similarly, the notion that interventions in Latin America stemmed from the confrontation with the Soviets is similar to the claim that the U.S. pursued “an imperialism against imperialism;” U.S. interventions in Latin America increased as the U.S., rightly or wrongly, sought to combat the evil empire’s influence, according to the standard version.

I urge the reader to avoid concluding that I see myself as challenging every aspect of U.S.-Latin American diplomatic history scholarship. That is not the case. As stated

1 Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Latin American Policy of the United States: An Historical Interpretation (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1943), 385-6.

7 above, I am interested strictly in the 1940s, and will now review the existing literature on this decade, in an effort to highlight how uniformly it treats the transition from the “hot”

Second World War into the Cold War.

While there has been some general discussion of Washington’s efforts to influence the development of Latin America after the war, for example by securing the rights to military bases, these narratives are embedded within a framework that sees the

U.S. government generally supportive of Good Neighbor aims until a crisis swept in with the Cold War, leading Washington to adopt extreme policies. In this version of events, the U.S. does not undertake long-term planning, and mainly reacts to events abroad.

An early example of this narrative can be found in a 1960 study written by the

School of Inter-American Affairs at the University of New Mexico, and included in

United States-Latin American Relations, a Senate publication. Its authors assert that

“U.S. policy objectives in Latin America were achieved during World War II,” and that the most important of these “was cooperation,” achieved with every country except

Argentina. Washington continued to support “democratic principles” in the years after the war, but “with the coming of the cold war the achievement of U.S. policy objectives

[became] increasingly difficult,” since “the United States increasingly insisted that the security of the hemisphere against the Communist threat must be the major consideration in a common foreign policy,” while “Latin Americans were more concerned with their internal socio-economic problems.” The situation had reached an impasse by 1947, when, “in the face of repeated aggressive moves by the U.S.S.R.”—Washington does not plan; it reacts—“the United States felt itself obliged to concentrate heavily on

8 containment of the Communist threat.”2 Containment, rather than cooperation, became the chief aim of policy, in this interpretation.

In 1967, Robert N. Burr published a study with the Brookings Institution that told the same story. The World War II period was characterized by an “aura of good feeling” between the North and South, which “provided an appropriate atmosphere for the establishment of a formal American international system through which the United States might…maintain friendly relations with the Latin nations of America. The new system took form before and during World War II in a series of conferences and foreign ministers’ meetings”—apparently via established diplomatic channels and a series of formal exchanges; never behind closed doors in Washington—and only collapsed after

1948, when the Cold War “place[d] a strain upon the United States’ relations with Latin

America.”3 Before this happened, presumably, the “aura” persisted, and was never tarnished by, say, Washington’s efforts to sharply delimit Latin American sovereignty.

Cole Blasier had little to add to this account in his 1976 work, The Hovering

Giant, in which he asserts that “[t]he great divide in the international scene was the year

1947, the beginning of the Cold War,” which served “to distort the judgment of U.S. leaders,” leading eventually to harsh “responses to the Guatemalan and Cuban revolutions and the Dominican revolt.”4 Had it not been for the Cold War, Washington officials’ judgment would have remained clear-eyed, we can assume, and they certainly never would have contemplated disruptive interventions in Latin American affairs.

2 The School of Inter-American Affairs, University of New Mexico, “Post-World War II Political Developments in Latin America,” in United States-Latin American Relations, Prepared Under the Direction of the Subcommittee on American Republics Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1960), 91. 3 Robert N. Burr, Our Troubled Hemisphere (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1967), 65-6. 4 Cole Blasier, The Hovering Giant: U.S. Reponses to Revolutionary Change in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976), 68.

Walter LaFeber took a somewhat different approach in his Inevitable Revolutions

(1983), which argued that official indifference from U.S. policy-makers “meant that

South and Central America received little attention politically,” and that “their political stability was assumed and accepted.” LaFeber also seemed to adhere to the view that military officials can derail foreign policy by overpowering their civilian counterparts; he claimed that while “U.S. military officials moved to dominate postwar military planning in the hemisphere,” they initially “encountered strong opposition from the State

Department.” But the Cold War helped the Pentagon get its way in early 1947, when

“North American Cold War requirements outranked Latin American needs,” and the

State Department doves were muscled aside.5

As I will explain in this dissertation, however, this split between military and civilian planners can be seen as largely illusory, at least where the question of natural resources was concerned. Minerals were essential both for civilian and military purposes, in other words. Furthermore, LaFeber seems to define U.S. meddling in Latin American affairs narrowly, in terms of military intervention. But as I will also review in the coming chapter, the far-ranging, disruptive effects mineral procurement entails—and which one could argue constitute a form of Washington interventionism—were overseen to a significant extent by State Department officials.

Returning to the literature, we can note that Lester D. Langley’s 1989 work reinterpreted the 1940s in such a way as to blame Latin Americans for a host of problems. For example, he claimed that they “expected a more just economic, social, and political order, but they could not agree on the means or, ultimately, on the social and

5 Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (New York: Norton, 1983), 46-8.

10 political price they were willing to pay to achieve it”6—had in not been for these internal squabbles, Washington would surely have been happy to help the South achieve these ends, we can assume. Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough, for their part, argued in 1992 that “the United States clearly played an important role in the democratization of Latin

America at the end of the Second World War,” albeit indirectly, though they also asserted that direct, pro-democracy pressure from Washington “undoubtedly played its part” in this process as well. “But after 1945-6,” they continued, “little was actually done to promote or even defend democratic principles and practices in Latin America,” and then

“from 1947…there was a marked shift in U.S. attitudes. Dictators received fewer expressions of disapproval,”7 and this narrative barely diverges from those in the aforementioned works.

I will end this survey with a brief discussion of four of the more recent, well- regarded studies of U.S.-Latin American diplomatic history, each of which takes a critical look at the last few centuries of Washington’s policies. The first of these, Peter H.

Smith’s Talons of the Eagle, asserts that “[a]s World War II drew to a close, Washington seems to have envisioned a continuation of (or reversion to) the Good Neighbor policy,” which he argues contained an “assertion of hemispheric hegemony.” Still, Smith argues that, around the time of the founding meeting of the Organization of American States

(OAS) in Bogotá in 1948, “the United States continued”—implying it had done so in the preceding years as well—“to forswear the use of force in its relations with Latin America and to cultivate cooperation in the name of hemispheric unity.” Around this time,

6 Lester D. Langley, America and the Americas: The United States in the Western Hemisphere (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 53-4. 7 Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough (eds.), Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War, 1944-1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 34-40.

11 unfortunately, “the Cold War came to the Americas, and the United States braced itself to contend with communist threats,” reluctantly resigning principles to which it had held fast in the preceding years.8

In Beneath the United States, Lars Schoultz explains that Washington, “at the height of its power” in the mid-1940s, “decided to use that power to encourage democracy in Latin America,” as “U.S. officials simply preferred democracy to dictatorship,” and thus “began to encourage a transition to democracy in Latin America.”9

If all of this is true, it is well concealed in the State Department records at NARA. Greg

Grandin, for his part, believes that “there was no region more willing to give up a degree of sovereignty and submit to Washington’s leadership than Latin America” in the postwar period, and that while Washington “first backed [Latin America’s] process of democratization at this time,” around “1947 Washington began to send signals that its preference for democrats over autocrats was not contingent on political stability.” There were two main reasons for “the turnaround,” in his view: the Cold War, during which

“Washington found that it greatly preferred anti-Communist dictatorships to the possibility that democratic openness might allow the Soviets to gain a foothold on the continent;” and business interests, which became a factor in the wake of “a wave of strikes.”10 Grandin, therefore, like the authors of the 1960 University of New Mexico report, seems to believe that Washington does not formulate long-term plans—or at least that it did not in the mid-1940s—but merely responds to changing conditions as they

8 Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.-Latin American Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 45-6. 9 Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 55-6. 10 Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 42-3.

12 develop. Only as Communism emerged did the political orientation of Latin American countries become an issue; only when faced with militant labor activity did business interests start to influence U.S. policy.

And finally Stephen Rabe, in a study—The Killing Zone—published in 2012, maintains that “the Roosevelt years” were a period in which “the United States and Latin

America embraced the Western Hemisphere ideal,” which “assumed a compatibility of interests between the powerful United States and its southern neighbors.” “During the

Cold War,” however, “the United States would turn against Latin American nations who did not accept the U.S. perception of the external threat of the Soviet Union and the internal danger of Communist subversion;” the the golden years of the Western

Hemisphere ideal soon passed, as Washington’s obsession with anti-Communism intensified.11 The close parallels between this version of events and most of the others discussed should be fairly obvious by this point; they indicate not only that U.S. scholars have thus far largely ignored the story of 1940s planning on the part of U.S. officials, but also that these false accounts are, for the most part, inaccurate in highly similar ways.

Finally, these accounts pay virtually no attention to the subject I will examine in the following chapters, namely the minerals Washington had to secure not only to wage the war in the first place, but more fundamentally to sustain its residents’ industrial lifestyles.

But to more thoroughly understand how scholars have analyzed Washington’s

1940s policies, it is necessary also to review the contributions Latin American historians have made to the study of this period. As we will presently, their views largely differ from those of their U.S. counterparts.

11 Stephen G. Rabe, The Killing Zone: the United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 50-2.

Historiography II: Latin American Historians on 1940s U.S.-Latin American Relations

In general, the distinction U.S. historians draw between a pre-Cold War period of hemispheric cooperation, and the subsequent unraveling of this system as Communism came onto the scene, is largely absent from many Latin American monographs. The authors discussed in this section, whose works represent a range of political views, devote more time to discussing the continuities in U.S. policies over the decades—which one can infer derive from the ongoing pursuit of a set of objectives, and are informed by careful planning to achieve these objectives—than do U.S. historians. Again, though these works typically do not dwell on the issue of Washington’s mineral needs, an analysis of these needs can be used to examine whether, as U.S. historians tend to assert,

1947 really did mark an abrupt shift in the course of U.S. foreign policy.

There are, to be sure, several Latin American accounts—like a like a 1946 book by Peruvian historian Rafael Larco Herrera, and a 1949 work by Ulpiano Navarro

Andrade, an Ecuadorean scholar—that viewed the 1940s the same way U.S. scholars do.

Larco Herrera, for example, takes it for granted that the main threat to Latin American sovereignty after World War II was the lingering power of the Axis; insofar as he detects no threat coming from the State Department at this time, he has something in common with U.S. scholars.12 Navarro Andrade, for his part, argued that the ideal of hemispheric cooperation reached much of its glorious potential in the post-war period, ushering in a period of peace and Latin American independence from the European powers.13

But other scholars, like Argentina’s Jorge Julio Greco, took a far more critical

12 Rafael Larco Herrera, América en las trincheras de la democracia (Lima: Empresa editorial Rimac: 1946), 79. 13 Ulpiano Navarro Andrade, Unión de las naciones americanas; la política del buen vecino sustituye la doctrina Monroe por el panamericanismo de Bolivar (Quito: Imp. de la Universidad: 1949), 81.

14 view. In his 1965 work, he drew attention to the continuities in Washington’s Latin

America policies over the decades, and argues that the inter-American system, and notions of hemispheric solidarity, served largely to divert attention from the fact that the

U.S. government continued to pursue its own interests in the southern hemisphere.14 The

Chilean historian Hernán Ramírez Necochea made a similar argument about U.S. policy, attempting to demonstrate that the U.S. government’s position as the major world power in the mid-1940s coincided with efforts to secure firmly its interests in Latin America.15

This narrative also seems to be fundamentally in line with the view of history that emerges from the State Department material. Ecuador’s Manuel Agustín Aguirre, in a

1970 study, focused specifically on Washington’s military planning, but traced continuities from the pre-war into the post-war periods; by focusing on how U.S. desires to secure access to Latin American bases can be seen as early as 1938, and remained intact through the war years, he is able to demonstrate that U.S. militarism at the time was not the result, as LaFeber seemed to believe, of Cold War-era policies that suddenly allowed the Pentagon to have its way, but rather the result of consistent, methodical planning with the aim of securing long-term goals.16

Similar views of U.S. policy can also be found in the works of Antonio Montilla

Saldivia, a Venezuelan whose 1988 book argued that the U.S. came out of World War II with a clear sense of the role it wanted to play in the world, and consequently set about formulating economic policies—creating suitable investment climates, ensuring unity

14 Jorge Julio Greco, La agresión permanente contra América Latina (Buenos Aires: Editorial Política Internacional, 1965), 63. 15 Hernán Ramírez Necochea, Los Estados Unidos y América Latina (Santiago, Chile: Editora Austral, 1965), 56-7. 16 Manuel Agustín Aguirre, Imperialismo y militarismo en América Latina (Bogotá: Editorial Latina, 1970), 59.

15 would prevail over labor strife in Latin America, etc.—in accord with its self-interest;17

Cuba’s Enrique Meitín, whose 1989 monograph made an argument comparable to

Montilla Saldivia’s, and also looked at the period from 1933 to 1953 as one in which the

U.S. government dealt with economic depression, war, and the eventual rise to unparalleled power, while constantly pursuing a well-defined set of objectives; and

Chile’s Luis Vitale, who argued in 1991 that U.S. policies were fairly consistent both during and after World War II, insofar as they were focused on controlling Latin

American militarization—an effort that compromised Latin American sovereignty.18

Thus there seems to be a striking difference between U.S. histories, with their focus on a major policy shift circa 1947, and the aforementioned Latin American histories, which admittedly sometimes do identify such a shift, but in other instances—as discussed in the last paragraph—focus more on the continuities in Washington’s policies throughout the 1940s. And again, of particular relevance to this discussion is the fact that many Latin American historians have rejected the notion that the U.S. government acted as a force for democracy in the period leading up to the Cold War. These historians’ arguments, as I have tried to indicate, seem to agree fundamentally with an argument I put forth in this dissertation, which is that there were continuities in U.S. foreign policy throughout the 1940s, as well as throughout the first half of the 20th century. For this reason, I think both the primary material discussed in the coming chapters, along with

Latin American secondary sources, could serve as useful correctives for what appears a be a deeply-rooted, poorly-supported narrative in U.S. histories of Washington’s Latin

17 Antonio Montilla Saldivia, Estados Unidos, América Latina y el Caribe: continuidad histórica de una política de dominación (Caracas: Consejo de Desarrollo Científico y Humanístico, Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1988), 80. 18 Luis Vitale, Siglo y medio de intervenciones yanquis en América Latina (Santiago: Centro de Estudios Políticos Latinoamericanos Simón Bolívar y Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos, 1991), 80-1.

America policies in the 1940s.

Historiography III: U.S. Interventionism

A review of U.S. mining policies in Latin America could also be brought to bear on debates within U.S. diplomatic history regarding the extent to which said policy can be considered interventionist. Many working in this field have defined “interventionism” narrowly, as something that occurs only with U.S. military incursions.

Consider, for example, the recent study by Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold

War. In it, he suggests that, during the Good Neighbor era, “U.S. officials…swore off the right of intervention that Franklin Roosevelt’s cousin Theodore had claimed in his

1904 corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, and encouraged U.S. corporations to contribute to the economic well-being of their host nations.” In other words, U.S. officials “swore off the right of intervention” in terms of militaristic incursions, but continued supporting

U.S. corporations in Latin America. Was this business activity not a case of U.S. intervention in the region’s affairs, and if not, why not? Again, one of my goals in the dissertation is to suggest that the disruptive policies U.S. officials hoped to implement in

Latin America, in order to secure supplies of essential minerals, can be considered a form of interventionism.19

Grandin, in Empire’s Workshop—a book that offers a far more critical look at

Washington’s diplomacy than does Brands’ study—also defines U.S. interventionism largely in terms of militarism. “It took decades of mounting Latin American anti- imperialist resistance, including armed resistance, to force Washington to abandon its

19 Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 12-13.

17 militarism. But abandon it it finally did, at least for a short term,” he writes, describing the Good Neighbor era. President Roosevelt “promised that henceforth the United States would…renounce its right to engage in unilateral interventions,” Grandin adds. Adhering to the standard view of the late 1940s as a major turning point, he later notes that

Washington’s “rearming” in the region, at the start of the Cold War, meant that during the latter 20th century “Latin America once again became a school where the United

States studied how to execute imperial violence through proxies.”20 The presumption, again, is that “unilateral interventions” are something a government does with its militaries, and not that, say, a private firm does in pursuit of resources.

For a striking example of how U.S. historians see U.S. corporate activity abroad as a policy entirely distinct from interventionism, consider Edward O. Guerrant’s

Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy. “Not, however, until the Roosevelt Administration did the United States bind itself legally to a non-intervention treaty whereby this Nation abandoned even the right to intervene in behalf of American citizens,” he writes. Citing a classic example, he notes that, “On March 18 [1938], Mexico seized the properties of

American, British, and Dutch oil companies and precipitated a controversy with the

United States that lasted for nearly four years.” In other words, the presence of a U.S. or

British company in Mexico did not entail U.S. or European intervention in Mexican affairs. The threshold for intervention can only be met, it seems, when government—not corporate—actors involve themselves in the affairs of another nation.21

Or consider The Dismantling of the Good Neighbor Policy, by Bryce Woods. As

20 Grandin 3-4. 21 Edward O. Guerrant, Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1950), 105-106.

18 he writes, “The Good Neighbor policy of the 1930s, with its absolute prohibitions against intervention and interference, was a denial of the imperialism that had marked U.S. policy since the war with Spain.” In his view, it was not until well after the war’s conclusion that the policy was, in fact, abandoned: “Beginning with Guatemala, the

United States gradually dismantled the Good Neighbor policy, and with it the political features of the OAS and the inter-American system.”22

But in his more perceptive The Making of the Good Neighbor Policy, Bryce

Wood adopts a more nuanced view of the concept of U.S. interventionism. He begins, like Brands and Grandin, by assessing Roosevelt-era policy in militaristic terms, writing that his book focuses on “the origins and consequences of the formal and unreserved abandonment of the use of force by the United States in its relations with Latin American countries.” But he proceeds to point out that considering nonintervention in strictly militaristic terms entails adopting a definition Washington officials crafted for their own purposes: “By the policy of nonintervention,” he writes, “the government of the United

States meant that it would not employ its armed forces in support of its objectives in

Latin American, particularly Caribbean, countries.” He then notes that Latin American nations adopted a far more expansive definition of intervention, and “could not consider the United States as a Good Neighbor until it accepted the elimination of what they regarded as an equally offensive interference in their internal affairs [besides militarism], namely, that measure of support from Washington that would enable certain types of

North American business enterprise to maintain the power and status they had secured

22 Bryce Wood, The Dismantling of the Good Neighbor Policy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 198-199, 209.

19 before 1933.”23

And Fredrick B. Pike makes a similar point in FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy, writing, “When the Democrats took over in 1933, most State Department officials tended to give the narrowest possible meaning to nonintervention in hemispheric affairs. To them it meant simply not using military force in persuading Latin Americans to do what

Americans desired them to do. To Latin Americans, however, nonintervention meant

Americans should not use any means to push them into doing what they really did not want to do.”24

Thus, much in the same way that U.S. historians share a perspective on the

1940s—as ushering in an ominous new era in U.S. foreign policy—that their Latin

American colleagues have not necessarily adopted as well, it seems U.S. historians share a perspective on interventionism, defined largely in terms of militarism, that diverges from the broader understanding of intervention that Latin Americans had. As Wood and

Pike indicate, Latin Americans considered intervention not only in terms of militarism, but also in terms of corporate influence, thus considering the full spectrum of policies

Washington pursued in the region, whether these were undertaken by the U.S. government, or by major firms either based in the U.S., or with parent companies located there. Again, it is this latter type of U.S. interference in Latin American affairs that will be the subject of my focus throughout this dissertation. Let us turn know to the ways in which scholars have assessed the issue of U.S. mineral needs.

23 Bryce Wood, The Making of the Good Neighbor Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), vii, 136, 162. 24 Fredrick B. Pike, FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy: Sixty Years of Generally Gentle Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 166.

Historiography IV, Part I: Mining—Economic Geology

Scholars working in a range of disciplines have examined U.S. mineral needs and policies over the years. Economic geologists have produced one of the richest bodies of literature on these topics. Many of their works date from the interwar period, when there seems to have been heightened awareness of U.S. industry’s growing mineral appetites.

In 1920, for example, J.E. Spurr’s edited volume, Political and Commercial

Geology and the World’s Mineral Resources, was published. Spurr explained that his book aimed “to shed light upon the vast importance of commercial control of raw materials by different powers, or by the citizens of those powers, through invested capital. The question of domestic and foreign governmental policies of the United States is closely involved,” he added. But in his view, officials in Washington had “never grasped the vast political significance of commercial domination, and especially of the control of mineral wealth [.]” Meanwhile, several “other more seasoned nations had done so, and [had] thereby affected the interests of America and her policy very deeply, without her being aware of the circumstance.”

Spurr felt that U.S. policymakers’ neglect of issues related to mineral control stemmed from the fact that “our own vast mineral wealth” was “so abundant that not till recently has American capital and enterprise found it necessary to adventure into the outside world, as the European nations had long ago done.” Washington planners had taken it for granted that, by relying on the rich metal deposits within their own borders, they could sustain their country’s domestic industries. Still, as Spurr explained in his concluding chapter—titled “Who Owns the Earth?”—serious fears of U.S. decline in

1920, resulting from Washington’s neglect of foreign mineral policy, would have been

21 premature. The country still “control[led] more of the world’s mineral wealth than any other nation,” with “Great Britain…a close second,” he noted.25

Edward Sampson’s Mineral Resources and International Strife, from 1938, resembles Spurr’s book in its analysis of geostrategic aspects of mineral control, though it updated this discussion to account for global changes in the period leading to World War

II. “On the whole those countries which have the best mineral deposits will be in an advantageous position for many years to come,” Sampson argued, explaining that U.S. and British Imperial power was based, to a significant extent, on control of a wide range of key resources. But there were challengers to Anglo-American supremacy in this field.

“Both the Soviets and Germany had made extraordinary—almost desperate—efforts to achieve economic independence,” Sampson noted, explaining that the Germans had “bent every effort” to exploiting low-grade mineral deposits, particularly in an attempt to compensate for “[t]heir greatest deficiencies”: in “petroleum, iron, copper, tin, aluminum ore, the ferro-alloys, and sulphur for sulphuric acid.” In the Soviet Union, by contrast,

“large regions were largely unexplored geologically,” and efforts were thus geared towards assessing the scope and limits of the area’s mineral endowment.26

Several studies by economic geologists then appeared during the war, in 1943.

W. R. Jones sought, in Minerals in Industry, to educate the broader public about the many purposes minerals served at the time. He detected “little interest in minerals” among his target audience, “largely because facts concerning them have been confined to scientific and technical literature written in terms unfamiliar to the general reader.” And he felt,

25 J.E. Spurr, Preface and “Who Owns the Earth?” in J.E. Spurr (editor), Political and Commercial Geology and the World’s Mineral Resources; A Series of Studies by Specialists (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1920), v-vi, 541. 26 Edward Sampson, Mineral Resources and International Strife (Princeton: Herbert L. Baker Foundation, Princeton University, 1938), 12-13, 16-17.

22 like J.E. Spurr, that Washington policymakers were particularly unconcerned with minerals—and that they “become really interested only when there is a shortage of supply of minerals needed for essential industries,” since in times of abundance “the demand [for resources] is met as the result of the activities of mining engineers and geologists, who are more concerned with delivering the goods than with publicity.” His book proceeded to discuss the properties and industrial uses of a wide range of minerals.27

T. S. Lovering’s Minerals in World Affairs was also published in 1943. “The part minerals have played in world affairs—their influence on social and economic conditions that breed wars and that affect decisions in these wars—may not be immediately apparent, but it is often real and profound,” he observed. His book, unlike Jones’ but recalling the work of Spurr and Sampson, devoted its first half to an analysis of the roles minerals have played throughout history, both in shaping diplomatic relations between nations, and in motivating the interventionist campaigns of major powers seeking resources abroad. Much of Lovering’s discussion focused on the industrial era:

“Minerals are…the foundation of the modern manufacturing industry and the thews of transportation,” he emphasized, adding that “[t]hey are also vital to agriculture, since mineral fertilizer is essential to the continued productivity of farm land.” The second half of his book, like Jones’, reviewed a range of key minerals and their industrial uses.28

The third relevant work of economic geology to appear in 1943 was the

Brookings Institution’s World Minerals and World Peace, written by C. K. Leith, J. W.

Furness, and Cleona Lewis. As they explained, their book aimed to challenge entrenched

27 W. R. Jones, Minerals in Industry (New York: Penguin Books, 1943), 9. 28 T. S. Lovering, Minerals in World Affairs (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1943), v, 7.

23 understandings of geopolitics. This field’s “essential thesis,” they noted, “was originated by Friedrich Ratzel, a German, and Rudolf Kjellen, a Swede,” who argued that “control of the great land masses of Eurasia and Africa, with adjacent islands, called the World

Island, would make it possible to control the seas and thus the world.” This argument had a far-ranging influence—Hitler wrote about it in Mein Kampf, for example, and it was “supposed to have influenced his plan of campaign in the present war,” Leith and his co-authors observed.

But they proceeded to argue that this conception of geopolitics was outmoded— that “potential world control is not necessarily afforded by control of any of the great land masses,” which instead “lies in the control of mineral resources, wherever they are, backed up by control of the air and the sea.” As with the other works of economic geology cited above, this Brookings work identified “the combined mineral resources controlled by the United States and the British Empire” as dwarfing those of their enemies, thus “afford[ing] a much broader and more powerful base for world control, both for peace and war.”29

This argument about the irrelevance of territorial control—supplanted by the need to control, instead, key mineral deposits—seems relevant to analyses stressing the

“informal” character of Washington’s political, economic and military influence abroad.

Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, for example, in their recent study The Making of Global

Capitalism, argue that Washington’s “informal empire constituted a distinctly new form of political rule. Instead of aiming for territorial expansion along the lines of the old empires, US military interventions abroad were primarily aimed at preventing the closure

29 C. K. Leith, J. W. Furness and Cleona Lewis, World Minerals and World Peace (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1943), 3-4.

24 of particular places or whole regions of the globe to capital accumulation.”30 Their book contains no substantial discussion of U.S. interest in foreign minerals, though it seems addressing this topic would enrich the familiar argument they advance.

C. Addison Hickman’s The Future of Western Hemisphere Strategic Material

Industry appeared in 1944, the year after the studies by Jones, Lovering, and the

Brookings Institution were published. Hickman’s study showed that a concern with postwar questions was emerging before the war’s official end. “The government of the

United States has attempted in various ways to reduce the vulnerability of the United

States as to strategic materials,” he explained, before suggesting one means of strengthening the U.S. position with respect to resources. He argued that working towards “the development of strategic materials production in the other nations of this hemisphere” was the most sound, long-range policy Washington could undertake in the second half of the 20th century. “With enormous quantities of copper, nitrates, tin, manganese, vanadium, and scores of other vital materials being imported from Latin

America and Canada since the start of the war, wartime contributions of the other hemispheric nations have been impressive,” he added, stressing that “heavy United States purchases of strategic materials…would magnify the role of the United States in those areas of the hemisphere already slanted in our direction.” By gaining greater control over

Latin American resources, the U.S. would thus not only acquire materials essential to its domestic industries, but also expand its presence in the region.31

In the decades after the war, economic geologists turned increasingly to assessments of the long-term viability of U.S. mineral policies, and of the immense

30 Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (London: Verso, 2013), 11. 31 C. Addison Hickman, The Future of Western Hemisphere Strategic Material Industry (n.p., 1944).

25 industrial use of strategic metals. In Raw Materials in the United States Economy: 1900-

1952, Vivian Eberle Spencer and Charles A. R. Wardwell wrote in 1954 that “by present

United States standards, the aggregate materials requirements of previous generations seem meager indeed. During the last half-century raw materials consumption in the

United States has more than doubled, and per capita consumption has increased by nearly

30 percent.” Given the tendency of U.S. industries “to use more and more raw materials from the rest of the world,” the authors emphasized that “national security is involved” in procurement efforts, which could “be matters of tedious and difficult international negotiations in settings dominated by the many conflicting currents of world politics.”32

Percy Bidwell’s 1958 book for the Council on Foreign Relations, Raw Materials:

A Study of American Policy, also addressed “the nation’s increasing dependence on foreign sources of supply.” He argued that the shift “from a position of relative self- sufficiency in industrial materials to that of the world’s greatest importing nation deserves to be regarded as a major event in modern economic history.” And he emphasized that “for the seemingly insatiable demands of our manufacturing industries, we use between 35 and 40 percent of the Free World’s output of basic materials.” As he also stressed, mineral procurement was by no means a problem only in wartime: “The continuous supply of materials, at minimum costs, is an essential condition for the peacetime expansion of manufacturing industries and for the continued growth of the

American economy. Failure to obtain supplies would threaten the maintenance of our standard of living.” Bidwell proceeded to review Washington’s efforts to ensure it had adequate supplies of the minerals it could not produce in sufficient quantities at home,

32 Vivian Eberle Spencer and Charles A. R. Wardwell, Raw Materials in the United States Economy: 1900- 1952 (Washington: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, 1954), 1, 27, 29.

26 and he outlined the industrial uses of lead, copper, nickel, manganese, tungsten, and other metals.33

James F. McDivitt’s 1965 study Minerals and Men explained that the U.S. had

“some 6 percent of the world’s population” but used “about one quarter of the minerals”—“in part because we have been fortunate enough to have major deposits of most of the essential minerals within our border and in adjacent friendly countries.” He noted that, where the question of this ongoing, massive use of minerals was concerned, many in the U.S. held that it was best “to get the bulk of their supplies from the cheapest sources, which in many cases is abroad. Foreign producers, who in many cases are

American companies with foreign production, would agree to this.”34

In 1979, Alfred E. Eckes, Jr. addressed these same topics in considerable detail in

The United States and the Global Struggle for Minerals. The 1973 oil crisis had renewed interest in natural resource issues, as Eckes explained. “The events of 1973-1974 appeared to reveal two underlying perils to the American economy—resource exhaustion and supply disruptions,” he elaborated. His book thus examined “how natural resource considerations have influenced American foreign relations since World War I. Too often historians have neglected this important theme,” and Eckes proceeded to demonstrate

“how underlying material difficulties contributed to German, Italian, and Japanese expansionism, and a resulting global war” in the late 1930s; how “[s]trategic resources shaped the conduct and outcome of World War II in ways that political and military historians often neglect;” and how “America’s mineral deficiencies dictated an

33 Bidwell, Raw Materials, 1-2, 9, 13-14. 34 James Frederick McDivitt, Minerals and Men; An Exploration of the World of Minerals and Its Effect on the World We Live In (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965), 151-152.

27 internationalist foreign policy during the Truman presidency,” among other topics.35

Eugene N. Cameron’s 1986 At the Crossroads: The Mineral Problems of the

United States, also confronted the question of resource exhaustion. “The development of our industrial civilization is an enormous achievement, but it has its price,” he acknowledged. “The price is a continuing dependence on the availability of large amounts of minerals. The needs of industry must be met. If they are not, industry will die, and civilization as we know it will collapse,” Cameron warned. He emphasized that the Second World War “was a turning point in the mineral history of the United States,” since “from 1939 to 1974 U.S. consumption of nonfuel minerals increased more rapidly than production. The result was a large increase in the absolute amounts of imports and an increasing excess of imports over exports,” a pressing problem for U.S. planners, given the country’s immense metal requirements.36

The works of economic geology described above deal with a range of issues related to U.S. industry’s appetite for minerals, but all share a few traits. For example, many of them contain detailed lists of the minerals U.S. industry requires to continue functioning, as well as charts indicating which foreign countries are the main providers of these resources. Reviewing the latter information makes it clear how extensive U.S. interests are beyond the country’s borders, and diplomatic histories would benefit from incorporating this data into discussions of, say, Washington’s ostensible isolationism, or its imperial ventures abroad.

But diplomatic histories often devote only scant attention to minerals, focusing

35 Alfred E. Eckes, Jr., The United States and the Global Struggle for Minerals (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), vii, ix, 57, 89, 173. 36 Eugene N. Cameron, At the Crossroads: The Mineral Problems of the United States (New York: Wiley, 1986), viii, 164, 166-167.

28 instead on, say, U.S. economic policies more broadly, or on national security. The latter preoccupied Samuel Flagg Bemis. “From the Era of Emancipation to the Second World

War, the Latin American policy of the United States has reflected constantly the vital necessities of national security and the idealism of the American people,” he wrote in The

Latin America Policy of the United States, published in 1943. “Of these two elements,” he elaborated, “national security has always been uppermost. It is natural and understandable that this should be so, for without national security there could be no

American idealism, no so-called ‘American mission.’” As Eberle and Spencer argued in their 1954 study, Washington’s national security concerns can be considered in light of

U.S. mineral requirements, but this idea did not filter into Bemis’ study. He restricted his discussion of minerals to a brief review of the “series of preclusive bilateral purchasing agreements, for strategic war materials,” that the U.S. forged with Brazil, Bolivia,

Mexico, and Chile in the first years of World War II.37

Greg Grandin’s recent Empire’s Workshop, a survey of U.S.-Latin American relations far more critical than Bemis’, also pays little attention to minerals. Grandin writes that “Latin America may not have been the most politically important or most economically profitable region” for the United States after World War II. But “the hemispheric alliance system” linking that region to the U.S. effectively was “a flexible system of extraterritorial administration” permitting Washington “to structure the internal political and economic relations of allied countries in ways that allowed it to accrue more and more power and to exercise effective control over the supply of oil, ore, minerals,

37 Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Latin American Policy of the United States (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1943), 368-369, 384.

29 and other primary resources—all free from the burden of formal colonialism.”38

Grandin’s argument here resembles the Panitch-Gindin description of the U.S.

“informal” empire quoted above. Recall that these authors also view the U.S. not as a formal colonialist power, but instead as one working to keep different world regions open for capital accumulation. Like Panitch and Gindin, Grandin devotes essentially zero attention to the issue of minerals. But as the Brookings Institution suggested in 1943, the geopolitical aims of major powers may have shifted in the early 20th century. Whereas initially these powers sought to control huge land masses, by World War II, the

Brookings study argued, the important thing was to control only the most strategic land parcels—those with valuable minerals beneath the surface. It seems a discussion of the role minerals played in the “flexible system of extraterritorial administration” Grandin describes would have helped him delineate this system’s nature more fully.

Historiography IV, Part II: Mining—Dependency Theory

But Grandin’s work does raise a crucial point economic geology tends to neglect—namely, that U.S. foreign policy has an effect on “the internal political and economic relations” of countries with rich metal deposits. Dependency theorists, to an extent, have dealt with the repercussions Washington’s resource needs have for the countries supplying the U.S. with raw materials.

“The effects of Latin American export-economies were the subject of controversy for several decades after the 1950s,” Edwin Williamson observes. “It was argued that the export-economies depended excessively on the more developed nations of Europe and

38 Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: How Latin America Saved the United States from Itself (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 39-40.

North America,” for example, and that this relationship of “dependence condemned Latin

America to economic ‘backwardness’ or ‘underdevelopment’ because foreigners controlled all the crucial economic levers, thereby preventing national governments from implementing policies that would benefit the nation as a whole.” As Williamson further notes, “structuralist dependency theory” effectively “challenged the classic liberal doctrine of comparative advantage, which had for so long provided a rationale for the export-economies.” Instead, the emphasis was placed on the historical developments creating these export-economies, and relegating them to the status of raw materials suppliers.

Later, Williamson notes, “New Left theorists took the reformist notions of economic dependency…and used them to recast the Leninist theory of imperialism.”

This iteration of dependency theory held that “international trade was inherently imperialistic, for the European powers had been able to accumulate the capital required for their own development by exploiting the human and material resources of Latin

America ever since the Conquest”—a pattern of exploitation that persisted after Latin

America’s independence. Imperialism in the region, from the 19th century on, “was reinforced by an international division of labor which integrated the Latin American countries of the ‘periphery’ into the world economy by gearing their agricultural and mining resources for export to the ‘metropolis’ in return for higher-value industrial goods.”39

Louis A. Pérez, Jr., in his analysis of dependency theory, explains that the concept

“established the relationship between development and underdevelopment as the context

39 Edwin Williamson, The Penguin History of Latin America (New York: Penguin Group, 2009), 281, 333, 354.

31 in which to examine relations between the United States and Latin America. The United

States (the center or metropolis) flourished at the expense of Latin America (the periphery), and the impoverishment of the latter was a function of the prosperity of the former.” Scholars working under these assumptions analyzed “the means and mechanisms by which dependent relationships were established and subsequently maintained,” and more recently have focused on “how the operation of multinational interests that routinely over-rely on capital-, energy-, and chemical-intensive technologies contribute to the depletion of the natural resources of Latin America by way of deforestation, soil erosion, and air pollution.”40

Andre Gunder Frank explored dependent development as it related, in part, to mining in Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. Discussing Chilean history, Frank wrote that “Chile’s economy is increasingly dependent on and vulnerable to the interests and vagaries of the metropolitan economy. Foreign metropolitan interests, through their ownership and control of Chile’s copper export sector, now exercise a greater degree of economic, not to speak of political, influence on Chile than did their predecessors.” As a result, Frank argued, “Chile’s economy and its potential for economic development suffer increasingly from the contradictory development of the capitalist economy, interdependent with and dependent on the metropolitan-directed world capitalist economy.”41

And Ronald Chilcote, in his critical synthesis of dependency scholarship, argued that, though the field “is eclectic in nature,” a number of shared assumptions unite its

40 Louis A. Pérez, Jr., “Dependency,” in Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson (editors), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 166-167. 41 Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 127.

32 varied output. For example, “it is generally believed that dependency theory provides a framework for explanations of underdevelopment and development;” that it “offers a foundation for analysis of class struggle and strategies to promote class struggle in the interest of resolving societal contradictions and problems;” and that “an understanding of dependency and the adoption of certain strategies to break dependency leads to the restructuring of societies, a restructuring which limits capitalism and promotes socialism in the seeking of a new and better society.”

Still, despite dependency theory’s efforts to describe the effects foreign powers, through their mining and other economic policies, have on the structures of Latin

American economies—and recall that this is an issue economic geology tends to ignore— dependency scholarship does suffer from its own shortcomings. Chilcote identified one of these in his review of the literature. “There has been little effort to empirically verify the assumptions of dependency theory,” he conceded, after discussing a wide array of camps operating within the broad dependency framework—the majority of which apparently developed without empirically assessing their basic assumptions.42

Dependency theory’s emphasis—on abstract discussion over concrete analysis of the impacts the theory aims to describe—is roughly the opposite of my approach in this dissertation. The reader will note throughout the following chapters that I try to evaluate, in as much detail as possible, the ways in which Washington’s domestic policies strengthened its national mineral industries, and how U.S. firms, boosted by this protectionism, subsequently gained control of Latin American mineral deposits—major prizes that could be exploited with cheap labor. As I explain further, the conditions for

42 Ronald H. Chilcote, “Dependency: A Critical Synthesis of the Literature,” Latin American Perspectives 1, no. 1 (March 1974), 7, 21.

33 those in the mines were overwhelmingly grim, and the environmental impacts of mining in Latin America consistently grave. These are my main concerns, rather than whether the effects of U.S. mining policy in the abstract conform to a particular theoretical model.

Historiography IV, Part III: Mining—The “New Left”

More concrete discussion of U.S. resource needs can be found in what might be termed “New Left” studies of Washington’s foreign policy, which strike a more critical stance than their counterparts in economic geology. In Monopoly Capital, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy argued that “what really interests the giant multinational corporations which dominate American policy…is monopolistic control over foreign sources of supply and foreign markets, enabling them to buy and sell on specially privileged terms”—and more broadly “to favor this country or that depending on which has the most advantageous tax, labor, and other policies [.]” Such control allows multinational firms to “do business on their own terms and wherever they choose. And for this what they need is not trading partners but ‘allies’ and clients willing to adjust their laws and policies to the requirements of American Big Business.”43

“Overseas expansion is not just important to the American economy, it is vital,”

Michael Klare wrote in War Without End. “This can be seen by considering the case of raw materials,” he continued. “The Pentagon maintains a list of strategic and critical raw materials (as a guideline for its stockpiling program) that are vitally necessary for the production of war materiel,” and also for “many items used in everyday life. Eighty to

100 percent of the supply needed by this country of more than half of these strategic

43 Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (New York: Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1966), 201.

34 materials must be obtained abroad; for 52 of the 62 materials on the Pentagon list, at least

40 percent has to be secure abroad.” For these reasons, Klare argued, “[e]xpansionism is not a matter of choice for capitalist America: it is the way of life of this society.”44

In The Age of Imperialism, Harry Magdoff gathered evidence supporting the view

“that the Vietnam War was part of a more general United States strategy composed of several elements,” including concerns regarding raw materials. He argued, for example, that in the industrial era, “[t]he new industries, the new technology [e.g., electrification, steelmaking, etc.] and the rise of competition among industrialized nations gave a new importance to the role of raw materials.” He further explained that “the shift of the

United States from a ‘have’ to a ‘have-not’ nation has…resulted in an intensification of the urgency to obtain and control foreign resources,” including a number of strategic minerals—these efforts were part of what he termed “the new imperialism.”45

Gabriel Kolko, in Main Currents in Modern American History, linked

Washington’s foreign mineral procurement strategies to its booming industrial economy.

“The Third World countries may be poor, but in the last analysis the industrial countries need access to their resources far more than impoverished nations need foreign markets that in any case never eliminated their poverty,” he argued. “This larger dependence became a foundation and motivation of United States foreign policy after World War

Two that has only grown with time,” he elaborated. “Despite the large United States domestic output of raw materials,” he further noted, “its share of almost half the world’s total consumption of copper, lead, zinc, aluminum, and steel in 1948-1950 made it early

44 Michael Klare, War Without End: American Planning for the Next Vietnams (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 10-13. 45 Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review, 1969), 7, 31, 47.

35 in the postwar era much more dependent on foreign suppliers, many of which were increasingly found in the nations of a Third World which the tides of revolution and nationalism were profoundly changing.”46

Richard Barnet drew attention to these same issues in The Roots of War. He considered “the single strongest argument for the proposition that the American economy cannot survive without the American empire” the fact that the “United States is in many crucial respects a ‘have-not nation.’ Americans constitute 6 per cent of the world population and consume each year more than 50 per cent of its resources. Many of the most critical resources are no longer produced in abundance within the continental United

States,” he pointed out. The country, “which in the 1920s used to be a net exporter of minerals, has in the postwar period been forced to import an increasingly major portion of its critical mineral requirements.” He cited as one example the “heavy dependence on copper” due to electrification. “The United States consumed in 1967 about 18 pounds per person while world-wide per capita consumption was 3.2 pounds. Although the

United States is the world’s largest copper producer, it is a net importer of this crucial metal since domestic production costs are so high,” he explained, linking the sort of analysis typifying economic geology to New Left preoccupations with U.S. imperialism.

Barnet further argued that, while U.S. consumption of minerals derived in part from its capitalist economic structure, its massive appetite for resources stemmed from deeply-rooted features of its economy that even thoroughgoing change might not curb. It was industrialism, rather than capitalism, that motivated U.S. mineral policies, in other words. “It is often assumed in Marxist writings that a socialist America would be less dependent upon strategic raw materials from abroad,” he observed. “But any

46 Gabriel Kolko, Main Currents in Modern American History (Pantheon Books: New York, 1976), 383-384.

36 government, whatever its political ideology and whoever owns the means of production, will face the same choice as the present one. A society dedicated to growth will make the same demands on resources whether it is capitalist or socialist,” he argued. “One can argue that it was capitalism that created the unbridled appetites we now associate with civilization, and that the profit system through advertising helped to make consumption the prime civic virtue. But the socialist world is now also committed to ever-expanding growth,” he noted, adding that, “in the Soviet Union, conspicuous consumption is a badge of social achievement.”47

Eduardo Galeano also highlighted U.S. resource needs in Open Veins of Latin

America. “Bullets are needed to kill Vietnamese, and bullets need copper: the United

States buys abroad one-fifth of the copper it uses,” he wrote. “Shortages of zinc cause increasing anxiety: over half comes from abroad. Planes cannot be built without aluminum, and aluminum cannot be produced without bauxite: the United States has almost no bauxite,” he continued. “This growing dependence on foreign supplies produces the growing identification of the interests of U.S. capitalists operating in Latin

America with U.S. national security,” Galeano concluded. “The internal stability of the world’s greatest power is closely linked with its investments south of the Río Grande.

About half of those investments are in the extraction of petroleum and minerals, indispensable for the U.S. economy in peace and war.”48

But these New Left works, like the dependency literature and economic geology studies, deal with mining at a level where miners’ experiences vanish into statistical

47 Richard J. Barnet, The Roots of War: The Men and Institutions Behind U.S. Foreign Policy (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971), 216-217. 48 Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), 134-135.

37 tables and charts. For a better understanding of the human impacts of mining, we can turn to books that have confronted this issue directly.

Historiography IV, Part IV: Mining—In Latin America

The volume Miners and Mining in the Americas, edited by William W. Culver and Thomas C. Greaves, resembles dependency and New Left studies when it emphasizes that “mining has severely distorted the national economies” in Latin America. But

Culver and Greaves, in the second half of their book, also examine issues these studies neglect. The chapter by Thomas C. Greaves, Xavier Albo and Godofredo Sandoval S., for example, asks a series of questions about “the peasant-to-miner transition”: “(1) What behaviors change as peasants adopt the mining way of life? (2) What attitudes and ideas change as peasants adopt the mining life? (3) What do these ideological and behavioral changes indicate about the nature of proletarianisation, and what do they indicate about the nature of miners and peasants?” In their view, there was “an underlying commonality between peasants and miners.”49

In We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us, June Nash “is concerned with the ideology of miners both as a way of perceiving and interpreting experience and as it influences actions,” and deals with some of the issues Greaves and his co-authors identify. Discussing Bolivian tin miners, she explains that they “have the reputation of being the most revolutionary segment of the working class,” and that as Bolivian tin production intensified in the 20th century, they “transformed themselves from a peasant

49 William W. Culver and Thomas C. Greaves, “Miners and mining in the Americas, an introduction,” and Thomas C. Greaves, Xavier Albo and Godofredo Sandoval S., “Becoming a tin miner,” in William W. Culver and Thomas C. Greaves (editors), Miners and Mining in the Americas (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1985), 4, 187.

38 population with a localized world view to a proletariat aware of the world market in which the product of their labor is sold and from which they buy many of their consumption needs.” Nash’s study draws on in-country field work conducted in the late

1960s and early 1970s to examine this transformation.50

In another book, I Spent My Life in the Mines: The Story of Juan Rojas, Bolivian

Tin Miner, Nash explains, “During my fieldwork in the tin mining center of Oruro,

Bolivia, I collected a number of autobiographies as a means of analyzing the development of consciousness among workers.” She further notes that, during this process, her “subjects revealed the conscious values that motivated their actions. Their usual tendency to self-censor and conform to what they assume the anthropologist wants to hear was suspended as they became caught up in the narrative aspects of their life history.” Thus Nash laid these stories, “usually not recorded by historians,” bare for the reader.51

Robert L. Smale’s “I Sweat the Flavor of Tin” also discusses Bolivian miners, though he deals with an earlier period than the one Nash covers. His focus is “the urban popular classes of Oruro and northern Potosí,” sites that now “bear the marks of poverty and economic decay,” but “presented a different panorama” in the early 20th century.

“Between 1899 and 1931 the area saw the infusion of foreign capital and the creation of massive mining enterprises,” which became “the government’s central preoccupation in the region,” Smale writes. He ultimately argues that Bolivia’s “urban popular classes” were the only group in the nation with “the ideological tools and organizational strength

50 June Nash, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 2, 4-5, 8. 51 June Nash, I Spent My Life in the Mines: The Story of Juan Rojas, Bolivian Tin Miner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 6-7.

39 to substantially alter the outline of Bolivian society,” and that “the eventual physiognomy of the 1952 National Revolution confirmed that.”52

A related book, Janet Finn’s Tracing the Veins, “is a tale of two cities: Butte,

Montana, USA, and Chuquicamata, Chile, intimate strangers, linked through their histories as the copper producing hubs of the Anaconda Company.” In her view, “Butte and Chuquicamata are connected in a labyrinthine history of political and economic intrigues that defy above-ground detection.” And her monograph, by recounting “the story of a powerful corporation that left its impress on community life from the Rockies to the Andes,” and by highlighting “the creative agency of men and women who built community and carved their own histories and futures in two isolated corners of the world,” draws attention to the consequences mining has on human lives.53

Another book on Chilean miners, Thomas Miller Klubock’s Contested

Communities, assesses “the historical experiences of the El Teniente copper miners from the beginning of the twentieth century, when the mine went into operation, to the 1950s.”

Klubock’s chief aim is “[t]o understand miners’ consciousness, culture, and politics,” and to this end he reviews “the process of class formation, the transformation of a population of itinerant laborers into a settled and trained workforce in a modern capitalist enterprise.” Understanding this transformation is crucial, given that “[b]uilding a permanent labor force in the copper mine involved a fundamental restructuring of the social relations and cultural worlds within which the men and women who migrated to the mine in search of work conducted their everyday lives”—a restructuring promoted

52 Robert L. Smale, “I Sweat the Flavor of Tin”: Labor Activism in Early Twentieth-Century Bolivia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 6, 200. 53 Janet L. Finn, Tracing the Veins: Of Copper, Culture, and Community from Butte to Chuquicamata (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 1.

“by both North American capital and the state to establish a disciplined and stable labor force in the rapidly expanding copper industry.” Workers and their families were forced

“to build new forms of community in response” to these changes, Klubock concludes.54

Historiography IV, Part V: Mining—Summary

I borrow insights from each of the above four types of scholarship in my dissertation, describing the industrial uses of the metals—copper, manganese, tin, tungsten, and zinc—discussed in each of the chapters, while also indicating the extent to which geopolitical concerns shaped Washington’s resource policies in the 1940s, for example as U.S. officials fought off Japanese efforts to control Latin American minerals during the war. In these respects my study resembles the economic geology literature.

But I also, like the New Left scholars, try to view U.S. policies critically—in moral terms—and like the dependency theorists attempt to focus on the effects mining had within Latin American countries. But unlike the latter scholars, I describe mining’s consequences not insofar as they support some overarching theory of dependency or underdevelopment, but merely in as much detail as possible—and in this respect there is some affinity between my work and the detailed anthropological accounts of, say, Janet

Finn or Thomas Miller Klubock. I believe each of the four approaches I have reviewed offers something valuable to our understanding of U.S. mineral policies. And by combining what I consider their respective strengths, I hope to give as full a sense as possible both of the motivations driving Washington’s resource-related foreign policies, and of these policies’ effects.

54 Thomas Miller Klubock, Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904-1951 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 5.

Conclusion

Scholars of U.S. foreign policy have written little about mining, and this fact alone makes the subject ripe for analysis. But an analysis of mining can also be used to examine entrenched interpretations of Washington’s conduct abroad. For example, as described above, U.S. scholars of their country’s foreign policy, when analyzing the

1940s, presume that said policy towards Latin America was democratic by default, and only drifted towards pro-authoritarianism as fears of Soviet power mounted. A review of the relevant Spanish-language work on the period suggests that this interpretation may be, at least to some extent, U.S.-specific. And an assessment of Washington’s mining policies could help determine whether the 1940s were, in fact, characterized by a sharp turn in U.S. foreign policy circa 1947, or whether U.S. policy was consistent throughout at least that decade, if not the preceding ones.

Additionally, studying Washington’s mineral needs could help determine whether the official U.S. definition of “interventionism” in the Good Neighbor era, and adopted by U.S. scholars working on Washington’s mid-20th century foreign policy—recall that this definition narrowly defines U.S. interventions strictly in militaristic terms—ought to be broadened. As Latin Americans themselves believed during the Good Neighbor period, U.S. interventionism ought to be considered as the full range of meddling activities Washington carried out in the region. These activities included not only militaristic policies, but also those undertaken by corporations. And as I will attempt to show throughout the dissertation, U.S. officials, when formulating their mining policies for Latin America, laid out a set of plans that, even if carried out only in part, would have entailed significant disruptive effects to Latin American infrastructure, laws, and

42 lifestyles. For this reason, I believe the broad definition of interventionism, including both militaristic and corporate activities, is appropriate. Furthermore, I think scholars have neglected to examine Washington’s interventionism in terms of corporate activity— which, of course, a study of U.S. mining policy can help illuminate.

Before addressing the specific policies U.S. officials attempted to implement in

Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, Peru and elsewhere throughout the early twentieth century and into World War II, I will first, in the following chapter, give some background information on the history of mining, its relationship to the development of human and industrial civilization, and its roles in U.S. history—particularly in the 1940s. This discussion, though it might seem ambitious at first, in fact has a modest aim: namely, to introduce the reader to an activity that, though it might seem obscure initially, should in fact be considered an essential human practice. I will now review the topic of mining, and in particular its functions in world and U.S. history.

Chapter 1: Mining

They came from the earth

The ancestors came from the earth. This is one story origin myths from around the world share. Discussing ancient Greece, Nicole Loraux calls the story the “ground zero of myth” for its culture, and a point on which “poets and philosophers, national traditions of the poleis, and tales of the origins of the Greek race all agree.”55 “On vase paintings, in political rhetoric, and on the tragic stage, Athenians of the fifth and fourth centuries BC boasted that they were the indigenous occupants of their land, descended from snake kings, literally born from the earth, in a word—autochthonous,” another study explains.56

Graham Parkes adds that, in Plato’s “myth of the metals in the Republic, the inhabitants of the polis are to be told that they have been ‘born of the earth’ and are to regard ‘the land they are in [as] a mother and nurse.’” Similar ideas are found in the

Timaeus myth—when “just before human souls are incarnated the divine craftsman

‘sows them in the earth’”—and in the Platonic “Statesman” dialogue, which posits that

“human beings were not generated from one another but were rather ‘earth-born’: no procreation, but only spontaneous generation from seed under ground.”57

Indigenous Americans saw their beginnings in similar terms. Those in what is now the southeastern U.S. told of how “humans were created within the earth from clay by a spirit and emerged from a precreated formlessness to populate the earth.” According

55 Nicole Loraux, Born of the Earth: Myth and Politics in Athens, trans. Selina Stewar (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 1-2. 56 Andrew Erskine, editor, A Companion to Ancient History (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 57 Graham Parkes, Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 181-182.

44 to the Choctaw, “the ancestors emerged from a mound.”58 Christopher Vecsey writes that the Nez Perce, in the Pacific Northwest, “believed that they came from the earth as a child comes from a mother,” and “conceived of themselves as deriving from the earth and depending on it for their survival.”59

Omotic communities in southwestern Ethiopia also have a myth describing “how the ancestors emerged from the earth.”60 The Angami of Nagaland, in northeast India,

“believed that they were descended from two brothers who had emerged from the earth.”61 Korean folk traditions maintain that, “a long time ago at a time when there were no humans or things, three divine men emerged from the earth,” according to South

Korea’s National Folk Museum.62 The Aranda, in Australia, believed “the earth in the beginning was like a desolate plain,” but that life existed “below the surface”—home to

“thousands of uncreated supernatural beings”—and finally broke out of its subterranean domain after a time.63 Timor-Leste’s Kemak people also felt their first ancestors

“emerged but continued to live deep within the earth, lime and earthen cave.”64

58 Tristram R. Kidder, “Transforming Hunter-Gatherer History at Poverty Point,” in Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology as Historical Process, edited by Kenneth E. Sassaman and Donald H. Holly, Jr. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011), 106. 59 Christopher Vecsey, “American Indian Environmental Religions,” in American Indian Environments: Ecological Issues in Native American History, edited by Christopher Vecsey and Robert W. Venables (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1980), 13. 60 Gunaar Haaland, “Smelting Iron: Caste and Its Symbolism in South-Western Ethiopia” in Belief in the Past: the proceedings of the 2002 Manchester Conference on Archaeology and Religion, edited by Timothy Insoll (Oxford, England: Archaeopress, 2004), 82. 61 Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 106. 62 Chung Myung-sub, executive editor, Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Literature, trans. Jung Ha-yun (Seoul: The National Folk Museum of Korea, 2014), 47. 63 Mircea Eliade, “Australian Religions: An Introduction. Part II,” History of Religions 6, no. 3 (February 1967): 209-210. 64 Andrea K. Molnar, “Darlau: Origins and their significance for Atsabe Kemak identity,” in Land and Life in Timor-Leste: Ethnographic Essays, edited by Andrew McWilliam and Elizabeth G. Traube (Canberra: The Australian National University, 2011), 99-100.

It all began simply enough

What these myths seem to recognize is that, from its inception, humankind has had a deep connection with materials brought out of the ground. Agricultural products were among these. And as the indigenous American reference to humans created from clay suggests, mined resources were also crucial.

“Any writer on mining in its general aspect is, when casting about for a starting- point, driven to express what others have said before him—that the history of mining is the history of civilization,” wrote Archibald Williams. “If we try to penetrate into the period when metals were unknown to, or at least unused by, man, all we find of his arts is a few rough scratches on a cavern wall and some stone implements of defense and offense,” he elaborated.65

“It all began simply enough,” Jessica Elzea Kogel explains in the journal Mining

Engineering. “During the Stone Age, humans fashioned tools from a variety of rocks, including flint, chert, basalt and sandstone. These materials were initially collected as loose rocks and, as demand grew, open-pit and underground mining methods were developed.” And while “early humans were motivated to mine for survival,” later it was

“discovered that certain minerals can be used to make paint,” and “artists created life-like images of bison, deer, mammoth and other Paleolithic animals” from “natural pigments, such as manganese oxide, hematite and goethite,” Kogel notes.66

Howard Hartman and Jan Mutmansky explain that “the advent of the Bronze and

Iron Ages” came as “humans discovered smelting and learned to reduce ores into pure metals or alloys, which greatly improved their ability to use these metals.” Increased

65 Archibald Williams, The Romance of Modern Mining (London: Seeley and Co. Limited, 1907), 17-18. 66 Jessica Elzea Kogel, “A look at the history of mining: From the Stone Age to Herbert Hoover,” Mining Engineering 65, no. 7 (July 2013), 6.

46 familiarity with minerals led to theorization about their properties in ancient Athens and

Rome, Kogel observes. Philosophers “proposed that the earth was a living organism,” for example, or “that ore deposits grew from seeds within the earth or that the ores were part of a vast subterranean tree system with roots that extended into the center of the earth.”67

And mining, like the development of creation myths telling of earth-born ancestors, took place worldwide. “Even if it is difficult to establish clearly and conclusively through recorded evidence as to the origins of mining in ancient India,” writes Ajoy Ghose, “there are ample indirect evidences of a thriving mining sector right since pre-Harappan times (pre-4000 BC),” and the circa-1200 BC Rigveda has references to “metals and gems,” for example.68 Australia’s National University investigated mining in Timor-Leste, determining that “local prehistoric smelting and copper manufacturing operations” existed there.69

Furthermore, “native Americans mined and used lead to make utensils and to ornament ceremonial objects.”70 Indigenous peoples also used other minerals, and

“Sebastian Cabot, in 1497, ‘saw the natives of Newfoundland in possession of copper,’ which they wore as ‘beadstones hanging at their ears.’”71 The “burial mounds, graves, and village sites in the Mississippi Valley and points east have yielded a great number and variety of copper artifacts,” and “evidence suggests that Native Americans mined

67 Howard L. Hartman and Jan M. Mutmansky, Introductory Mining Engineering (Hoboken, NJ: J. Wiley, 2002), 5; Kogel. 68 Ajoy K. Ghose, “Small-Scale Mining in India: Past, Present and the Future,” in The Socio-Economic Impacts of Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining in Developing Countries (Lisse, Netherlands: A.A. Balkema, 2003), edited by Gavin M. Hilson, 434. 69 Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, Atlas of Mineral Resources of the ESCAP Region, Volume 17: Geology and Mineral Resources of Timor-Leste (New York: United Nations, 2003), 31. 70 Metals in America’s Historic Buildings: Uses and Preservation Treatments (Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service, Cultural Resources, Preservation Assistance, 1992), 8. 71 T. A. Rickard, A History of American Mining (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1932), 3.

47 copper in this region continuously from about 30,000 B.C.,” according to Charles Hyde.72

In the region that became Arizona, “the Hohokan, or ‘vanished ones,’ were the first to exploit the vast mineral resources” there, including copper and turquoise.73 “Native

Americans had mined mica for a considerable period of time prior to European contact” as well, as evidence from “burial sites in the South, from the St. Johns River basin in central Florida, through Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina” attests.74 And argillite, used for jewelry, “was mined in Eastern Kentucky in the early 1800s.”75

While often used for decorative or artistic purposes, many minerals were so central to their respective societies that they motivated campaigns abroad. Efforts to secure resource supplies drove interventions and conquest, in other words. For example, the Romans—who, “like the Greeks, believed that the gods had chosen them to conquer, rule, and civilize the world”76—invaded Gaul in part because it was “rich in minerals.”

“Mines were everywhere beginning to be sunk, gold was being looked for underground as well as in the sands of the rivers, veins of silver were being discovered,” according to

Guglielmo Ferrero and Corrado Barbagallo.77 Strabo, in his Geography, detailed foreign mineral deposits—“a gold mine so well-suited for mining” in Aquileia “that, if one scraped away the surface-soil for a depth of only two feet, he found forthwith dug-gold,”

72 Charles K. Hyde, Copper for America: The United States Copper Industry from Colonial Times to the 1990s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 29. 73 William Ascarza, Southeastern Arizona Mining Towns (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Pub., 2011), 7. 74 Michael C. Hardy, Remembering Avery County: Old Tales from North Carolina’s Youngest County (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2007), 39. 75 Terry L. Balbridge, Eastern Kentucky Railway (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Pub. 2007), 9. 76 Sara E. Melzer, Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 49. 77 Guglielmo Ferrero and Corrado Barbagallo, A Short History of Rome (New York: Putnam, 1919), 76-78.

48 and “fine iron-works” in southwestern France.78 In Peter Garnsey’s summary, ancient

Rome “developed the capacity to feed a growing population with the fruits of conquest,” including both farmland and mineral deposits.79

The Roman Empire was hardly unique in its resource-driven foreign policy. “The quest for precious metals, of which Europe had run desperately short by the end of the fifteenth century, had been the principal driving force behind the colonial ventures” Spain undertook, according to J. H. Elliott.80 “The predominant motive of British expansion which actuated both individuals and the Government in every century was the desire to obtain markets, food products, and raw materials,” L.C.A. Knowles explains, adding that industrialization “created a demand for hitherto unheard-of quantities of raw materials, coal, and minerals.”81 The Japanese empire, from the late nineteenth century, “had depended crucially on other parts of the world for markets and raw materials”—to the point where, by World War I’s outbreak, “it had become common for Japan’s leaders to consider supplies of raw materials for heavy industry as being in a separate category from the rest, because of their strategic importance.”82 And as World War II loomed, German officials determined that “expansion had become necessary” in order “[t]o secure access to sources of raw materials,” Paul Hehn concludes.83

78 Strabo, The Geography, trans. H. L. Jones (London: W. Heinemann, 1933), http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Strabo/home.html. 79 Peter Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 273-274, 276. 80 J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain: 1469-1716 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1963), 173-174. 81 L.C.A. Knowles, The Economic Development of the British Overseas Empire, Volume 1 (London: G. Routledge, 1924), 102. 82 William G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, 1894-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 210- 211. 83 Paul N. Hehn, A Low, Dishonest Decade: The Great Powers, Eastern Europe, and the Economic Origins of World War II, 1930-1941 (New York: Continuum, 2002), 39.

Roots deep in the American experience

Mining has also played a crucial role throughout U.S. history. “In our daily lives, you and I, directly or indirectly, use minerals and chemicals from mines as the human race has done for many thousands of years,” writes Robert Horn, a retired mining executive. “Without metals,” he adds, “modern industry could not exist. To live without its benefits is unthinkable to modern humans”—especially those enjoying a certain level of material comfort—since “cars, electronic devices, machines, food imports in wide- bodied aircraft, and large heated and air conditioned houses” all require minerals.

“Without the products of mines, there would be no factories; humans would live in huts of mud and grass with no tools other than bits of wood,” Horn emphasizes.84

David and Bessie Whitten, in their business history of the U.S., explain that

“mining has roots deep in the American experience,” but that “extraction on a large scale was delayed until the late 1820s,” when “the exploitation of rich beds of anthracite coal in Pennsylvania” began. They note that “Alfred C. Chandler Jr., dean of American business historians, credits the exploitation of anthracite with sparking U.S. industrialization.”85 As Kevin Hillstrom points out, mining was particularly extensive in the western states, which contained “an estimated 90 percent of the country’s metal reserves,” and where the “reliance on mining and other extractive industries was well established by the turn of the century.”86 And Caroll Ann Hodges, in the journal Science, writes that circa “1900, the United States was essentially self-sufficient in most metals.

84 Robert Horn, It’s a Minefield: A Prejudiced View of the Mining Industry from the Inside (Victoria, BC: FriesenPress, 2015), Kindle Edition. 85 David O. Whitten and Bessie E. Whitten, The Birth of Big Business in the United States, 1860-1914: Commercial, Extractive, and Industrial Enterprise (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 109. 86 Kevin Hillstrom, “Origins and Developments,” in The Industrial Revolution in America: Mining and Petroleum, edited by Kevin Hillstrom and Laurie Collier Hillstrom (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007), 21.

Legal codes, notably the General Mining Law of 1872, and technological innovation fostered exploitation of the land’s mineral wealth so rapidly and successfully that it was widely presumed North America possessed a unique abundance of minerals.”87

But Percy Bidwell, in a 1958 study for the Council on Foreign Relations, argued that this was a false presumption, and that in the 20th century the U.S. underwent a

“transition from a position of relative self-sufficiency in industrial materials to that of the world’s greatest importing nation”—“a major event in modern economic history,” he emphasized, since it signaled “the transformation of the United States from an underdeveloped to a highly developed industrial economy.” Reviewing the events culminating in this transformation, he explained that “rapid industrial expansion of the country after 1900 drained our natural mineral resources at an extraordinary rate,” to the point where “consumption of all basic materials in the 50 years 1900-1950 was equal to the accumulated consumption of all previous years of our national history.” Throughout this period the country’s “best mineral deposits were depleted: the iron ore of the Mesabi range, the copper of Michigan and the lead ores of Missouri.” Exhaustion of domestic deposits coincided with and motivated hunts for foreign resources—“lead and zinc in

Canada and Mexico,” for example, and “copper in South America and in Africa. Much of the development abroad was undertaken by American firms and financed by American capital."88

Bidwell also explained which foreign minerals were crucial to the U.S. as it exploited more and more deposits beyond its borders. As he wrote, “about 80 percent of

87 Caroll Ann Hodges, “Mineral Resources, Environmental Issues, and Land Uses,” Science 268, no. 5215 (Jun. 2, 1995), 1305. 88 Percy W. Bidwell, Raw Materials: A Study of American Policy (Published for the Council of Foreign Relations by Harper, 1958), 1-6.

51 the copper output of all the Latin American republics, 70 percent of their lead and zinc and 17 percent of their crude oil” went to the U.S., which also took “93 percent of

Brazil’s manganese exports and 42 percent of its iron ore. Bolivia in 1955 sent to the

United States 40 percent of its tin and more than 90 percent of its exports of lead, zinc, copper and antimony ores,” he added. Mexico sent 81% of its copper to the U.S., and

Peru did the same with over half “of all its exports of lead, copper, zinc, iron ore” and other materials.89

The oligopolistic nature of the minerals industry

As a United Nations volume on transnational corporations explains, the minerals industry is characterized both by “capital intensity”—the enormous funds needed to develop a mining site, for example—and by the “oligopolistic nature” of the firms involved. “Foreign capital has played a completely dominant role in the mineral sectors of the Third World,” the book observes. “The normal colonial pattern was for a multinational extractive company to develop a mine in a colonial territory, to treat the ore in so far as this was essential due to transport cost considerations, and to export it to the industrialized world for further processing, fabricating and manufacturing,” for example.

And this “pattern was not much different in those developing countries which never served as colonies, or which, like the Latin American nations, became independent long ago.” The goal for these firms “is long-run profit maximization,” wherever they operate.90

89 Bidwell, Raw Materials, 9. 90 Bruce McKern, “Introduction: Transnational corporations and the exploitation of natural resources,” and Marian Radetzki, “Where should developing countries’ minerals be processed? The country view versus the multinational view,” in The United Nations Library on Transnational Corporations, Vol. 10:

The miners

These companies depend on cheap labor to maximize profits, and historically mining has been an occupation miserable for its workers and degrading to their health.

“The use of captive labor in mines was a very common practice in the ancient world and ill-treatment of miners was equally common,” writes John Temple, who cites Diodorus’ depiction of Egyptian miners “held constantly at work by day and the whole night long without any rest, and sedulously kept from any chance of escape. For their guards are foreign soldiers, all speaking different languages, so the workers are unable either by speech or by friendly entreaty to corrupt those who watch them.” Temple adds that miners, in the Roman Empire’s final centuries, had a “very inferior” position in society, insofar as most “were slaves; the mining industry is one of the few throughout the Greek and Roman era that drew its labor almost entirely from slaves.”91

“Mining remains one of the most hazardous occupations in the world, both in terms of short term injuries and fatalities, but also due to long term impacts such as cancers and respiratory conditions such as silicosis, asbestosis and pneumoconiosis,” according to a 2001 study by two scholars from the London School of Hygiene and

Tropical Medicine.92 And Robert Horn, after decades in the mining sector, has concluded that, “particularly in underground mines,” work conditions are “perilous. Miners are crushed to death by collapsing tunnels, dragged down into a mill of loose rocks to be ground to pulp, trapped in dark holes to die undiscovered of thirst and starvation,

Transnational Corporations and the Exploitation of Natural Resources, edited by Bruce McKern (London: Routledge, 1993), 3, 96-97. 91 John Temple, Mining: An International History (New York: Praeger, 1972), 13-14, 20-21. 92 Carolyn Stephens & Mike Ahern, “Worker and Community Health Impacts Related to Mining Operations Internationally: A Rapid Review of the Literature; Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development Project (MMSD).” Institute for Environment and Development, World Business Council for Sustainable Development, No. 25 (November 2001), 7.

53 suffocated with carbon dioxide, poisoned by carbon monoxide and mercury, or blasted to smithereens by methane and dust explosions,” he explains. “Lung disease related to mining,” he adds, remains “widespread today. Sickness and death from exposure to radioactive gas and dust is far greater in the mines than in nuclear reactors.” It is grim work, in many ways.93

Summarizing the discussion thus far, we can note that mining’s development has accompanied that of human civilization, and that mining underpinned global industrialization, as well as the lifestyles many of those in the industrialized countries came to take for granted. Miners suffered considerably—as they have throughout recorded history—while supplying the minerals without which industrial civilization would collapse.

U.S. mineral procurement in the 1940s

“While the armies and navies of the United Nations engage the enemy on the world’s far-flung battle fronts, a silent and bloodless engagement is being waged against the Axis powers which may well be the most decisive battle of all,” one U.S. newspaper reported in January 1942.94 This was the battle for raw materials.

As Percy Bidwell explained in his mid-century study for the Council on Foreign

Relations, “part of the raw materials problem” entailed procuring “an adequate supply of strategic and critical materials for the use of defense industries in wartime,” though sufficient raw material supplies were also “an essential condition for the peacetime expansion of manufacturing industries and for the continued growth of the American

93 Horn, It’s a Minefield. 94 “Fight for Raw Materials Will Be Decisive in War,” Lodi News-Sentinel (Lodi, CA), January 27, 1942.

54 economy. Failure to obtain supplies would threaten the maintenance of our standard of living,” he emphasized. And during the war, both aspects of the raw materials problem he identified preoccupied U.S. officials. They were, in the short term, of course concerned with winning the war—but they also planned for the postwar era as the conflict raged, attempting to determine what their country’s mineral needs would be after the Axis defeat.

Washington’s “purchases of foreign materials had two objectives” in the early

1940s, according to Bidwell: “to add to domestic supplies and to prevent the Axis powers from obtaining metals and other materials which they required for war production.” To these ends, U.S. officials signed “pre-emptive contracts” with the Mexican, Bolivian and

Brazilian governments, to buy the entirety of these countries’ strategic mineral surpluses.

These arrangements had their roots in “the Strategic Materials Act of 1939, which authorized the expenditure of $100 million over a four-year period for the purchase of strategic materials. As American participation in the European war seemed imminent, larger appropriations were added,” Bidwell noted, “so that even before Pearl Harbor the government’s commitments to acquire minerals and metals were close to $1 billion.” An end-of-war review of Washington’s mineral supplies concluded that, during the conflict, the U.S. government had not had “any really serious shortage of the raw materials essential for war purposes,” thanks to its procurement efforts.95

“A number of schemes surfaced in official Washington to treat aspects of the global supply problem” during the war, Alfred Eckes noted. Under Secretary of State

Sumner Welles, for example, “promoted a proposal for a hemisphere cartel to pool surplus production,” but his and other schemes were rejected. Washington instead

95 Bidwell, Raw Materials, 13-40.

“sponsored special legislation allowing the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to create satellite corporations for purchasing strategic materials” deemed vital to the war effort.

“Under this authority four satellite corporations were established—the Rubber Reserve

Company, the Metals Reserve Company, Defense Plants Corporation, and Defense

Supplies Corporation,” with the second responsible for organizing purchases of tin, manganese, and other minerals discussed in this dissertation. Later in the war, the

Reconstruction Finance Corporation created another satellite—the U.S. Commercial

Company—that was active mainly “in neutral European countries, like Spain, Portugal, and Turkey,” Eckes wrote, “although a few secondary operations did take place in Africa and Latin America.”96

As Bidwell explained, wartime mineral needs were merely one part of U.S. resources policy, and the 1946 Strategic and Critical Materials Stock Piling Act

“provided basic legislation for postwar activities in this field.” Its preamble stressed that

“it is the policy of the Congress and the purpose and intent of this Act to provide for the acquisition and retention of stocks of these materials and to encourage the conservation and development of sources of these materials within the United States,” though foreign mineral supplies remained crucial at this time. Ultimately this “program called for the accumulation of about $2 billion of materials over a five-year period,” and would emphasize acquisition of the most strategic commodities.97

As one analyst, C. Addison Hickman, explained, the “official definition originated by the Army and Navy Munitions Board” was that “strategic raw materials are those absolutely essential to industrial and military production but whose procurement presents

96 Alfred E. Eckes, Jr., The United States and the Global Struggle for Minerals (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), 93-94, 116. 97 Bidwell, Raw Materials, 13-40.

56 acute difficulties. In almost every instance these strategic materials are not produced in adequate volume domestically and must be imported from abroad.”98 During 1948 hearings of the House Subcommittee on Mines and Mining, it was explained that

Washington’s mineral acquisition policies were “considerably broader” after the war than they were under the 1939 Strategic Materials Act, which listed seven crucial commodities. As the Cold War began, there were “approximately 50 metals and minerals on the strategic and critical list of the Army-Navy Munitions Board,” and these were grouped into three categories according to importance.

In Group A, for example, were “those strategic and critical materials for which stock piling is deemed the only satisfactory means of insuring an adequate supply for a future emergency.” Minerals from this group included copper, manganese, tin, tungsten, and zinc—and these are the focus of my dissertation, which devotes a separate chapter to each. For comparative purposes consider that petroleum was classed in Group C, meaning “those strategic and critical materials which are not now recommended for permanent stock piling because in each case difficulties of storage are sufficient to outweigh the advantages to be gained by this means of insuring adequate future supply.”99

A note on sources

Anyone glossing over this paper’s footnotes will see immediately that most of the monographs consulted were written in English, and that I used primary material mainly

98 C. Addison Hickman, The Future of Western Hemisphere Strategic Material Industry (n.p., 1944). 99 Strategic and Critical Minerals and Metals: Hearings Before the United States House Committee on Public Lands, Subcommittee on Mines and Mining. Part 5: Stockpiling, 80th Congress 1487-1490, 1948, Exhibit 68: Activities and Accomplishments of the United States Bureau of Mines During World War II and Work Proposed Under the Stock-Piling Act.

57 from the College Park National Archives. A more complete treatment of the topic would, of course, require fuller incorporation at least of the relevant Spanish- and Portuguese- language literature, to say nothing of archival material from Latin America.

This criticism is fair—though to my eyes a second one, less apparent though perhaps more fundamental, can also be leveled at my research. That is that most of the primary sources I cite are government documents, not corporate records. Since the minerals I discuss in the following chapters were owned by large companies, their papers are another source that would flesh out an account of U.S. minerals policy. The problem is that major firms restrict access to their material, and historians must simply wait, hoping the gatekeepers will one day let them in. Business researchers, from what I understand, have no reliable means of getting around this problem—the Freedom of

Information Act applies only to U.S. governmental papers, not the private sector.

For example, in a 2002 review of Kenneth Warren’s history of U.S. Steel,

Thomas J. Misa writes that, for twenty years, “the question asked by historians of the

American steel industry was: Who has the best angle on accessing the long-closed archives of U.S. Steel? For in these voluminous corporate papers were the necessary raw materials for a definitive history of steel in the American century.” As Misa explains,

Warren “cracked the mother lode itself,” spending “three research visitations in the U.S.

Steel archives”—all the time he was permitted, it seems. Other scholars wishing to understand the company must now rely on Warren’s work.100

As an initial foray into corporate research, I reviewed Anaconda Copper

Company material at the Montana Historical Society in Helena. This archive seems to

100 Thomas J. Misa, “Book Review: Big Steel: The First Century of the United States Steel Corporation, 1901-2001,” Technology and Culture 43, no. 2 (April 2002), 443-444.

58 have been consulted mainly by business historians, or by those writing about the western

U.S.—as opposed to diplomatic historians—and frankly contained little of relevance to my topic, as I discovered. Most of its material was highly technical. There were boxes full of papers reviewing engineering problems at Anaconda’s mines, for example, and folders stuffed with expense reports. But there was some material related to early 20th- century environmental concerns stemming from the firm’s operations. And the company, just one of several with Latin American operations, has other archives—in Laramie, WY, for example—that could be worth visiting.

I raise these issues simply because diplomatic historians seem preoccupied, not without reason, with government documents, and with declassifying those still inaccessible. The issue of corporate records receives far less attention, though as my dissertation attests private firms were crucial actors in U.S. foreign policy, particularly where mining was concerned in the 1940s. I turn now to this story.

Chapter 2: Copper

Introduction

Copper serves a range of purposes. Mid-20th century U.S. residents relied on copper wires to transmit electricity, and on copper pipes for plumbing. Copper was also a crucial military metal, used in ships, guns, tanks, and planes. And while the U.S. produced substantial amounts of copper domestically in the early 20th century, wartime demands soon made it clear that foreign deposits would have to supplement what could be mined at home.

In Latin America, copper came chiefly from Chile, Mexico, and Peru, where U.S. copper firms had first established operations in the late 19th century. These companies were attracted to the region not only because it was home to massive deposits, but also because it was assumed these deposits could be mined cheaply, by a docile workforce.

As the case of Mexico’s Cananea copper mine makes clear, the development of

Latin American resources was, at times, a process driven by violence. This mine’s copper was not made available to the world through “market forces,” in other words, but rather because Mexican officials, funded in part by U.S. investors, launched a campaign of extermination against what was, in their eyes, a meddlesome entity: the Yaqui indigenous population. Only once the Yaqui were driven from the region could development proceed.

And a number of problems continued to hinder copper mining in Latin America during the war. In Chile, for example, Anaconda Copper Company officials complained regularly about financial issues, like government tax policies and proposed revenue redistribution plans they found irritating. Both Washington officials and copper firm

60 executives were disturbed by labor unrest in that country during after the war, and in particular panicked whenever they suspected miner-organizers counted Communists among their ranks.

The Metals Reserve Company sent Alan Bateman to Mexico, meanwhile, where he worked to erect a legal architecture in line with the desires of mineral corporations.

And in Peru, U.S. officials grappled with what they considered the stereotypical indigenous mindset—one content with the fruits of subsistence farming, and indifferent to the wages one could obtain in exchange for wage labor.

A successful case of development

As Mexican officials deported the Yaqui from Sonora to Yucatán, where forced labor on henequen plantations awaited, the new slaves might have reflected on the decades preceding their early 1900s displacement. In the 1850s, Sonoran governor

Ignacio Pesqueira sought “to pacify the state and improve its infrastructure,” repelling

U.S. annexation attempts while beating back a Yaqui rebellion. José María Leyva,

Cajeme, an indigenous leader, proclaimed a separate Yaqui state the goal, fighting for it until government forces caught and murdered him in 1887. By then a “war of extermination” against the Yaqui was underway.101

U.S. investors facilitated the killing, “assisting the Mexican government in supplying weapons to Sonoran troops,” writes Sterling Evans, who adds that Arizona governor Joseph Kibbey “issued orders against the sale of arms to the Yaqui Indians.”

The victims were to have no means of self-defense as the onslaught, soon accompanied

101 Don M. Coerver, Suzanne B. Pasztor, Robert Buffington, Mexico: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Culture and History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004), 474-475.

61 by discriminatory laws, intensified. Sonoran governor Rafael Izábal “ordered that all

Yaqui Indians age sixteen and over be required to wear identification passports” in 1902, arresting “any Yaqui whom officials even slightly suspected of rebel involvement,” and demanding “that the persons be arrested ‘with all their families, so that not a single Yaqui remains, big or small.” It was “an unabashedly racist campaign of extermination,” Evans emphasizes.102

One of the chief Yaqui sins was living on land ripe for conversion to a profit source. The Mexican government, once it seized this territory, sold it to people who knew its potential. “Approximately 100 million acres of land in Sonora became the property of such landholders as William Randolph Hears, copper mining baron William

C. Greene, the Phelps-Dodge Company,” and others. Salt Lake City’s Mines and

Methods noted in 1910 that Sonora’s climate for extractive industries improved as the

Yaqui were decimated. A combination of “the progress of civilization, raids of the

Rurales”—Porfirio Díaz’s repressive police—“and frequent deportations to Yucatán have converted the…Yaquis to ‘good Indians,’ and now they no longer retard the development of the country,” it reported, satisfied. The “racist campaign of extermination” was necessary for development to proceed, in other words. Sonora’s copper mines could, at least, reach their potential.103

102 Sterling Evans, Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the Henequen-Wheat Complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, 1880-1950 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2007), 71. 103 Evans, Bound in Twine, 84-85. “Notes on Northern Sonora,” Mines and Methods (Salt Lake City, UT), May, 1910, 303.

A hideous copper mining boomtown

The myth about Greene, the copper baron who invested in stolen Sonoran land, is that he “realized the value of Cananea”—Mexico’s largest copper deposit—“and outsmarted the boys on Wall Street.” The reality is that “the boys” learned of Cananea in the 1860s, when assayer Robert D’Amuaile “detailed the nature and exact locations of the rich desposits.” The problem then was a “persistent threat of [Yaqui] depredations” rendering the site “uneconomical,” and so the investors held off.104

By 1899, when Greene formed his Cananea Consolidated Copper Company, this threat was subsiding. Steel titan John W. Gates “recognized a potential bonanza and provided the financial backing Greene needed” for the project. What these men saw in

Sonora, John Mason Hart explains, was “a rich deposit of copper, cheap but capable labor, nearby railroad transportation, access to technology, strong financial support, market demand, and competent management”—much of which the Sonoran oligarchy lacked. Local elites “had never owned the resources necessary to successfully operate the mines.”105

Greene’s success brought into being “a hideous copper mining boomtown,” replete with “deep mineshafts gaping blankly at the vanities of the age like empty eye sockets,” in Claudio Lomnitz’s poetic assessment. The site “was an abomination” for miners, he continues. “Mexicans were second-class citizens in their own country,” earning “around half of what American workers made,” while “Mexicans working in copper in mines across the border in Arizona had better conditions than workers in

104 John Mason Hart, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico Since the Civil War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 145-147. 105 Hart, Empire and Revolution, 145-147.

Mexico”—Greene’s project was “a kind of monument to relative deprivation,” Lomnitz concludes.106

It was a monument the miners refused to venerate. They went on strike on June 1,

1906, and “sabotaged mine shafts, broke machinery, and paralyzed the mines.” Greene was furious. He asked Arizona’s governor to invade Mexico. Soon “Arizona Rangers crossed the border carrying rifles and shotguns,” and upon arrival “menaced the workers, and infuriated the Mexican press, who inflamed public opinion. The blunder provoked nationwide patriotic criticism of the Díaz government, for failing to protect Mexico’s sovereignty.” The event prefigured the Revolution, and signaled the end of Greene’s tenure. William Rockefeller and his associates took control of the mine.107

A cheaper and more compliant workforce

The Rockefellers were just one prominent clan with copper interests then. The

Guggenheims were another, and they faced a problem in their U.S. mines as “labor actions became longer, more militant, and ever more costly to [their] interests” in the early 1900s. They searched for “a cheaper and hopefully more compliant workforce overseas” as a result. And like Greene, they looked in Mexico. “In 1892 they opened a smelter in Monterrey,” for example, then “another in Aguascalientes in 1894,” pouring money into these projects until “investments…exceeded $50 million in value,” making

106 Claudio Lomnitz, The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2014), 132- 133. 107 Hart, Empire and Revolution, 76-77, 148.

64 theirs “the largest privately held enterprise in the country” by 1910. Porfirio Díaz’s

“generous concessions” were crucial in allowing their interests to expand.108

These concessions also helped Phelps Dodge. That firm “concentrated its efforts at Moctezuma, at a mining site known as the Pilares de Nacozari,” some seventy-five miles east of Cananea. The Guggenheims first worked this site in the 1890s, “but problems with Native American resistance and geographic remoteness” frustrated them to the point where they “sold Nacozari to Phelps Dodge” in 1897, Hart writes. The new owners founded a Mexican subsidiary, the Moctezuma Copper Company, and proceeded to buy “tracts of timberland, dry rolling hills, and mining claims that eventually totaled

350,000 acres in northeastern Sonora.” Its “American-style town” resembled Greene’s at

Cananea, with Mexican workers consigned to the outskirts.109

U.S. companies also exploited Chile’s copper in this era. The country’s businessmen, like their Mexican counterparts, “lacked the capital, technology, financial expertise, and support of the state” needed to mine copper, “opening the door to large- scale foreign companies such as Anaconda and Kennecott,” Angela Vergara explains.

Mining engineer William Braden pushed open this door even more. He was prospecting for the Rockefeller-controlled American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) when he found the El Teniente deposit. ASARCO’s president, E. W. Nash, helped finance the Braden Copper Company formed in 1904 to exploit it, but Guggenheim funds

108 Thomas O’Brien, “Copper Kinds of the Americas – The Guggenheim Brothers,” Mining Tycoons in the Age of Empire, 1870-1945: Entrepreneurship, High Finance, Politics and Territorial Expansion, ed. Raymond E. Dumett (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009), 199-201. 109 Hart, Empire and Revolution, 141-142. Thomas Miller Klubock, Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904-1951 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 26- 27.

65 provided for the site’s smelter and railroad allowed that family to take over the site in

1909.

The Guggenheims bought the Chuquicamata copper mine in 1910, then “merged their U.S. and Chilean copper mines and formed the Kennecott Copper Company, which became the largest copper producer in the United States,” five years later. To raise money for their foray into Chilean nitrates, the Guggenheims then sold Chuquicamata to the Anaconda Copper Mining Company in 1923. “How did this colossal corporation decide to invest in Chile?” Vergara asks, referring to Anaconda. That copper was

“virtually tax free,” and that “the wage for a Chilean miner was a third of that earned by unskilled North American workers,” were two decisive factors.110

Peru was alluring for similar reasons. “From 1887 on,” writes Helmut Waszkis,

“a US syndicate had started evaluating the Cerro de Pasco copper reserves,” forming the

“New York-based holding called Cerro de Pasco Investment Company” in 1902, and using its Peruvian subsidiary to buy the Andean country’s mines and railroads. “In a short time,” adds Peter Klarén, “the new U.S. corporation bought up most of the locally owned mines at Cerro and Morococha and then acquired the main smelter at Casapalca at the end of World War I,” around the same time Anaconda won control of “the rich Cerro

Verde copper mines,” and that ASARCO bought its own Peruvian copper deposits. But

Cerro de Pasco remained dominant. It “produced more than 80 percent of the total output

110 Angela Vergara, Copper Workers, International Business, and Domestic Politics in Cold War Chile (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 14-18. Charles K. Hyde, Copper for America: The United States Copper Industry from Colonial Times to the 1990s (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 171. Klubock, Contested Communities, 26-27. John H. Davis, The Guggenheims: An American Epic (New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1994), 116-117.

66 of the nation’s metal mining industry” in the ensuing decades, according to Charles

Hyde.111

The degree of advancement of civilization

The metal the Guggenheims, Rockefellers, and other elite families sought to control is one humans have worked with for more than ten millennia. “Ancient civilizations used copper to form tools,” Nivaldo J. Tro recounts, tracing the earliest copper implements to “a site in Tepe Yahya, Iran, dating from about 3800 B.C.” Copper also fuses with tin to make bronze, which can “resist wear and corrosion better than pure copper” and has been used, again for thousands of years, worldwide.112

Bill Carter notes that, for thousands of years, “getting copper from the ground involved people picking up the red metal and beating it with a rock or hammer to separate the metal from the rock,” though larger-scale mining developed with “a steady supply of slave labor” forced to work the metal continually. Quests for copper also drove the foreign policies of dead empires. “Romans roaming Europe and northern Africa” sought tin and copper deposits, for example, and Carthage “was home of a large copper mine” that attracted Roman interest.113

Today much copper is used for electrification. After Thomas Edison switched on the first incandescent lightbulb in 1879, there was an explosion in copper mining, as

111 Rodrigue Lévesque, Railways of Peru, Volume 2: East of Lima (Gatineau, Québec: Lévesque Publications, 2008), 88. Helmut Waszkis, Mining in the Americas: Stories and History (Cambridge, UK: Woodhead Publishing, 1993), 87. Peter Klarén, Peru: Society and Nationhood in the Andes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 206-207. Hyde, Copper for America, 174-175. 112 Nivaldo J. Tro, Chemistry: A Molecular Approach (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2011), 1039-1040. 113 Bill Carter, Boom, Bust, Boom: A Story About Copper, the Metal that Runs the World (New York: Scribner, 2012), 33-34.

“thousands of miles of copper wire were needed to plug America, and the rest of the world, into this new invention.” Increasing use of the telephone in the 19th century’s last decades further raised copper demand—partly why the Guggenheims, Rockefellers,

Greene, and the rest became eager to control the mineral.114

In the 20th century, copper’s uses were legion, for cookware and plumbing purposes as well as electric wiring. “Every coin has copper in it,” Carter adds. “Every house has, on average, four hundred pounds of copper pipe and wiring.” From 1935-

1939, the Metals Reserve Company noted, “about 23% of total copper consumption in the U.S. was used in electrical manufactures; 13% in utilities; 13% in wire and rods; 11% in buildings; 10% in automobiles,” and the remaining 30% for miscellaneous purposes.

“The uses of copper in modern civilization today,” Bureau of Mines official Charles Will

Wright commented in March 1942, “are so extensive that the degree of advancement of civilization of any one country might well be gauged by its per capita use of this metal.”115

The ruination of vast areas

The Guggenheim legacy is instructive, given that industrial copper mining had a rich history before World War II. “They had made a lot of money” in the early 20th

114 Ibid., 38-39. 115 Jane M. Yang and Kent B. Lewandrowski, “Trace Elements, Vitamins, and Nutrition,” in Clinical Laboratory Medicine, ed. Kenneth D. McClatchey (Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2002), 454. Carter, Boom, Bust, Boom, 115-116. “COPPER;” Box 4, Copper, Metals Reserve Company; Administrative Histories of the R.F.C.’s Wartime Programs, 1943-54; Office of the Secretary, Reconstruction Finance Corporation; Records of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Record Group 234; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Charles Will Wright, Director, Minerals Division, and Bennett R. Bates, Mining Engineer, Minerals Division, “Copper,” to Inter-Agency Coordinating Committee, March 23, 1942; Box 11, Copper (General) June 1941 – 1942; Records Relating to Individual Commodities, 1941-45; Records of the Division of Defense Materials; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

68 century, as everyone knows, “but they had made much of it at the expense of the planet, often to the ruination of vast areas,” John Davis explains. “In Bingham Canyon, Utah,” site of the “first open-cut copper mine, there is now a vast devastation, the earth so gouged and lacerated as to seem the scene of some cosmic disaster. Kennecott: an entire mountain destroyed in Alaska. Chuquicamata: an entire mountain destroyed in Chile,” he adds. “Rivers everywhere contaminated with the detritus of Guggenheim mines and smelters. Yes, the Guggenheims had made a lot of money,” he repeats, “but what respect had they in their relentless pursuit of wealth for the rights of mountains and rivers and the rights of men and women to enjoy them?”116

The Guggenheims made possible the electrified lifestyles U.S. residents increasingly took for granted. And Washington worked to expand their ruinous activity as World War II approached.

A nation at war, without copper, might as well have no guns

“They said that military aviation would kill the demand for wartime copper, because air-bombs don’t have copper castings,” a South Carolina newspaper reported in

August 1939. “But old King Copper, like old King Cotton, is always coming back. The

French government bought 50,000 tons of copper the other day”—“almost a year’s output of the great Cerro de Pasco,” it explained. “Canny old Britain knew,” the paper added, that empires “are more or less copper-riveted,” and for this reason it “took over

South Africa and developed its vast copper deposits.” The more recent Nazi “agitation

116 Davis, The Guggenheims, 138-139.

69 about elbow room to live,” the article suggested, “could be accurately translated in terms of copper and oil.”117

Elbert O. Sowerwine, in a report for the Metals Reserve Company, further stressed copper’s military importance. “Modern warfare relies heavily upon copper,” he wrote. “A nation at war, without ample supplies either in the form of metallic reserves or assured production or imports, might as well have no guns or no board of strategy,” he argued, explaining the metal was “essential in every arm of offense and defense, and in every round of munitions from the cartridge in the officer’s pistol to the largest shell hurled far over the horizon by the biggest behemoth of Mars.” He proceeded to list copper’s myriad uses to drive his point home. The Navy needed it for its “resistance to corrosion when in contact with sea water or where high electrical conductivity is required; e.g. condenser tubes, tube sheets, pipes for salt water cooling,” and so on. “The uses of copper and copper alloys in Army equipment,” meanwhile, were “so diverse as to defy enumeration,” though Sowerwine tried anyway. “Important items are heavy duty bearings on gun mounts and all mobile equipment, rifle bands and instrument parts for rifles, machine guns and cannon, recoil cylinders, electric motors and generator parts; tank, truck and auto construction, engine parts, bearings, radiators and wiring”—the list goes on for several more lines.118

But copper’s scores of uses did not, at first, motivate U.S. officials to make emergency procurement plans for the war. “When the Army-Navy Munitions Board issued its list of strategic and critical materials early in 1940,” William P. Tidwell wrote

117 Edwin C. Hill, “Human Side of the News,” Herald-Journal (Spartansburg, SC), August 10, 1939. 118 Elbert O. Sowerwine, “Copper as a War Industry;” Box 4, Copper, Metals Reserve Company; Administrative Histories of the R.F.C.’s Wartime Programs, 1943-54; Office of the Secretary, Reconstruction Finance Corporation; Records of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Record Group 234; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

70 in Metals Reserve’s official history of copper procurement and stockpiling, “copper was not included because that organization then believed there was sufficient domestic production to meet all requirements of the National Defense Program.” This belief was false; these requirements had not been determined. Once they were, it became obvious that wartime production required huge amounts of copper.119

The U.S. Geological Survey, for its part, described the 1940 “domestic copper situation” as “peculiar,” given that “American producers dejectedly watched their

European markets dwindle and wondered where they were going to dispose of their metal” early in the year, only to find themselves “straining to meet the demand of

American fabricators” at its end, by which point they “were even reconciled to an influx of foreign copper to ease their load.” This inflow was one of the largest ever. And it reversed the trend, dating to the 1932 imposition of a tariff on foreign copper, of U.S. copper exports surpassing imports. The foreign metals arrived from Chile, Mexico, and

Peru, as well as from the Belgian Congo and British South Africa. Reliance on these sources “was accentuated in 1941,” the Survey explained in a later report. “Copper was consumed at an astounding rate in the United States for its own military requirements, for the needs of its Allies, and for civilian uses, exceeding previous records by 40 to 50 percent,” as an “unbelievable growth in plans for airplanes, tanks, and other munitions made all previous ideas regarding consumption requirements obsolete.”120

119 William P. Tidwell, “Copper: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1941 – 1945,” 1948; Box 4, Copper, Metals Reserve Company; Administrative Histories of the R.F.C.’s Wartime Programs, 1943-54; Office of the Secretary, Reconstruction Finance Corporation; Records of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Record Group 234; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 120 T. H. Miller, H. M. Meyer, and Allan F. Matthews, “Copper,” in Minerals Yearbook – Review of 1940, ed. H. D. Keiser (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1941), 85-86, 89, 101. T. H. Miller and H. M. Meyer, “Copper,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1941 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1943), 93.

U.S. officials had only a vague sense, as these plans proliferated, of how great wartime pressures on copper would be. “The impact of defense orders had increased consumption in September [1940] by 6,000 tons to 93,000 tons, and three months later to

120,000 tons,” alerting them to the problem “with startling suddenness” the following month, “after the defense program had been only four months in progress.” Since

“domestic mines were then reportedly operating at capacity,” U.S. planners “turned to the

Reconstruction Finance Corporation to make up the deficiency through purchases in

Latin America”—where U.S. capital, controlling “60% of the world’s reserves of copper” at the time, owned substantial deposits. In November, therefore, it was recommended that Metals Reserve “import up to 100,000 tons of Latin American copper” to meet the rising demand.121

It was found advisable to stimulate additional production

Washington signed its first wartime contracts for Latin American copper on

December 19, 1940. The agreements were, in line with Washington’s instructions to

Metals Reserve, for 100,000 tons of the metal, and “distributed as follows: 57,000 tons from Anaconda Copper Mining Co., 28,000 from Kennecott Copper Corporation, 10,000 from American Metal Co., Ltd. (sales agent for the Cerro de Pasco Co.), and 5,000 from

Phelps Dodge Corporation.” A second round of contracts, publicizes in February 1941, was for another 135,000 tons “and included 73,000 tons from Anaconda Copper Mining

Co., 49,000 tons from Kennecott Copper Corporation, 10,000 from American Metal Co.

Ltd., and 3,000 from Phelps Dodge Corporation.” Phelps Dodge supplied its metal from

121 Tidwell, “Copper, Procurement and Stockpiling: 1941-1945.”

72 sites in Mexico, the American Metal Company from mines in Peru, and Anaconda and

Kennecott largely from Chile.122

This initial phase of the “procurement program was conducted on a limited scale,” with U.S. officials “recommending piecemeal purchase in Latin America and Jesse H.

Jones, Federal Loan Administrator, obtaining individual approvals therefor from the

President,” Tidwell explained. But when the Office of Production Management (OPM) took charge of the initiative in mid-1941, purchasing objectives were “broadened to some extent,” as OPM “counselled the purchase of ‘all available’ supplies of foreign copper.”

Metals Reserve thus initiated talks with Chile, Peru, and Mexico to work out overall agreements, which would first “prevent strategic and critical materials from getting into the hands of the Axis powers,” and later expand mining as well, so that the U.S. could build a reserve supply of copper for emergencies. But it took years to meet this objective.

Copper purchased in the first years of the war “was consumed as fast as it reached

American ports,” and no “stockpile could be accumulated until the autumn of 1943 when the war had gone on almost two years.”123

Copper sources: Chile, Peru, Mexico

Washington expanded copper production in Chile partly because of “low production costs” there, Tidwell wrote. Its rich geological endowment was another factor. “Among the South American countries Chile probably has the greatest share of the mineral resources and ranks first as a producer of copper,” Charles Will Wright wrote in April 1940. He added that “these mineral products are exported almost entirely and for

122 Miller, Meyer, and Matthews, Minerals Yearbook – Review of 1940, 87. 123 Tidwell, “Copper: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1941-1945.”

73 the most part to the United States,” a reflection both of its immense copper appetites, and of the extent to which its mining companies controlled Chilean deposits. “The bulk of

Chile’s copper production is by American companies—Chile Copper Co. and Andes

Copper Co., subsidiaries of Anaconda Copper Mining Co., and Braden Copper Co., a subsidiary of Kennecott Copper Corporation,” the Geological Survey explained.124

Because of the war, Chilean copper extraction “reached unprecedented levels in

1941,” the “main reason” for “a new high record for imports” the U.S. set that year. “In an effort to supply a substantial part of the needs of the United States Government for copper to feed its war machine,” the Survey observed, “Chile again pushed its copper- production rate into new high territory” in 1942. The next year, Chile “was the only important foreign country to continue to establish new high records,” its “enormous expansion in production of copper…due to the heavy orders placed by the United States for all possible supplies of this metal to fill its astounding war requirements.” These orders also put more Chileans to work in the mines. There were 14,200 of them in 1936,

18,300 in 1941, and 20,500 in 1943.125

Janet Finn notes that this expanded production followed a period of political upheaval. After the Popular Front came to power in 1938, it built “a coalition government of radicals, socialists, and communists that won strong working-class support.” But Chile’s “copper enclave,” she points out, “kept tight control of its industry.

124 Tidwell, “Copper: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1941-1945.” Charles Will Wright, Foreign Mineral Specialist, U.S. Bureau of Mines, “The Mining Industries in Chile – Their Production and Future Possibilities,” Santiago, April 13, 1940; Box 22, Vol. XXII, General Records, 1940; Santiago Embassy, Chile; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 125 Miller and Meyer, Minerals Yearbook – 1941, 111, 120. Miller and Meyer, Minerals Yearbook – 1942, 157. T. H. Miller and Helena M. Meyer, “Copper,” Minerals Yearbook – 1943, ed. C. E. Needham (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1945), 164-165.

Caught between its dependence on copper taxes and U.S. government assistance on the one hand and the growing radicalization of the miners on the other, the Popular Front was unable to make good on its commitment to the Chilean working class.” In her assessment, the “wartime copper price controls imposed unilaterally by the U.S. government, scaled back Chile’s earnings from copper taxes and sales, further jeopardizing the Popular Front’s precarious position.”126

Peru was the second-largest Latin American copper producer, supplying

“somewhat more than 10 percent” of U.S. imports from the region. Cerro de Pasco

Coper Company, the U.S. firm, was “dominating the industry” there at the time, though

Peru “broke no records in the production of copper in 1941,” unlike Chile. Copper mining in Mexico was “also dominated by American capital,” namely the Anaconda

Copper Mining Company, American Metal Company, and Phelps Dodge Corporation.

Washington wanted these companies to increased production during the war, but they were reluctant initially, “largely because of their earlier experiences with restrictive measures imposed on foreign capital by the Mexican Government.”127

But the problem, as Washington quickly became aware, was that in all of these countries there were several barriers to expanded procurement. U.S. copper firms in

Chile, Peru, and Mexico would have to deal with these before they could get more copper out of the ground. Among the chief challenges were “sentiment among Governments and nationals of Latin American countries against American-owned capital,” “threats of

126 Janet L. Finn, Tracing the Veins: of Copper, Culture, and Community from Butte to Chuquicamata (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 42-43. 127 Miller and Meyer, Minerals Yearbook – 1941, 122. Tidwell, “Copper: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1941-1945.”

75 higher taxes against the copper companies,” and “fear of postwar labor troubles following curtailment operations.”128

Barriers to Chilean procurement

But to secure an agreement with Chile, Washington had first to confront the

Japanese, who offered the Chileans an attractive market for their copper. For example,

Tokyo not only paid more than Washington, which “demanded higher-grade ores at lower prices for copper content,” but also agreed to buy “low-grade ores which could not be sold in the United States,” made available “Japanese ships for transporting ore to

Japan,” and furthermore “aid[ed] the Chilean economy by selling them much needed materials, such as cheap textiles.” In Metals Reserve’s view, it was only when

Washington “had acceded to virtually all demands of the Chilean Government”— including the payment of higher prices for lower-grade ores—that the Chileans conceded to an agreement, signed on February 17, 1942.129

Throughout this period U.S. officials met regularly with the executives of major copper firms active in Chile, listening with sympathy as they complained about various problems. Many of these related to taxes and revenues the businessmen considered unjust. “Officials of Braden Copper Company visited the Department today and expressed most serious concern regarding information they have received that the

Chilean Government is considering the issuance of a decree subjecting them to new tax assessment,” Secretary of State Cordell Hull wrote in April 1940. Hull believed “it important that this situation not be permitted to develop into any more serious phase,”

128 Tidwell, “Copper: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1941-1945.” 129 Ibid.

76 adding that the State Department, in its talks with Chilean officials, would “make it clear that [the proposed tax assessment] might prejudice current discussions of financial assistance.”130

In December 1941, two top Anaconda officials, J. R. Hobbins and W. H. Hoover, visited Herbert Feis, economic adviser to the State Department, “concerning the Chilean proposal for the distribution of increased copper revenues. The Anaconda gentlemen said that this settlement was distasteful to them since it did not give them as much income as they thought was due their company.” Their hope was that Under Secretary of State

Sumner Welles would postpone his scheduled meeting with Chile’s Ambassador “for a day or two in order that they might see whether they could not do something to increase their share of the higher revenues.” Though Welles “was categoric in his statement that he felt sure a worse settlement than the one now possible would result” were his meeting postponed, Feis “pointed out at considerable length that the Department might be subjected to criticisms for not having given the copper companies adequate opportunity to be heard,” and Welles soon relented. He told Feis to inform “the Anaconda representatives that he would stave the Chilean Ambassador off” for several hours—as long as he felt he could.

Hobbins and Hoover were waiting for Feis as he spoke to Welles, and when Feis returned he explained that the Department “had approached this problem energetically in an effort to defend the copper companies, but that there was another broad interest, namely that of the United States Government”—not that the two were at odds, as Feis felt it necessary “to protect the broad national interest by assuring that the copper tax not

130 Cordell Hull, “Telegram No. 69,” April 18, 1940; Box 63, 863.5, Vol. XXII, 1940; General Records, Santiago Embassy, Chile; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

77 become law.” He told E. Tappan Stannard, head of Kennecott Copper, the same thing when he “called over long distance from New York” right when the Anaconda men were leaving.131

The following day, as it appeared the new copper tax would, in fact, be levied,

Hobbins and Hoover returned to the State Department, staying for an hour. They

“expressed considerable regret that they had not been consulted more fully as these negotiations progressed,” prompting State officials to stress that they “had done everything within [their] power to protect the interests of the copper companies.” The only issue was that Washington had a range of allegiances, and its “relations with Chile did not concern only copper but also a wide variety of other items, ranging from the purely political to debt matters, electric power matters, shipping, other metals, priorities, and numerous other things.” But State officials were not at all opposed to Anaconda’s demands. “The copper companies should receive an equitable share,” they believed— though one official did wonder whether Anaconda was “not trying to be just as greedy as the Chileans.”132

Copper company men also met with U.S. officials to discuss labor relations in the mines. In early March 1943, the Federal Loan Agency’s William Clayton “called in Mr.

Hobbins,” and in their ensuing discussion presented “a number of different reports…indicating that possibly labor relations were not as good as they might be at

131 “Chilean Copper,” December 1, 1941; Memoranda on Chile, Oct. 1941 – Feb. 1942; Box 30, Chile, Vols. 2-3, Jan. 1938 – Feb. 1942; Memorandums Relating to Individual Countries, March 2, 1918 – Dec. 31, 1947; Office of American Republic Affairs, Its Predecessors, and Its Successors; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 132 “Department of State – Memorandum of Conversation,” December 2, 1941; Memoranda on Chile, Oct. 1941 – Feb. 1942; Box 30, Chile, Vols. 2-3, Jan. 1938 – Feb. 1942; Memorandums Relating to Individual Countries, March 2, 1918 – Dec. 31, 1947; Office of American Republic Affairs, Its Predecessors, and Its Successors; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

Chuquicamata.” Hobbins was taken aback. He responded with “extremely categorical statements to the effect that labor conditions at Chuquicamata were entirely normal, that production is at a record level both of volume and efficiency,” and that the site’s general manager was “handling the situation most ably.” But in August 1944, Hobbins, accompanied by Anaconda’s Washington representative, visited the State Department to brief U.S. officials on “the difficulties his company had experienced during the last year or so as a result of labor legislation and other action taken by the Chilean Government which was causing his Company increasing concern.” U.S. officials were typically sympathetic, explaining they “would be glad to have arrangements made to receive them and discuss their problems with them.”133

And as discussions of miners’ unrest revealed, Washington’s preoccupation with

Communism predated the Cold War. “Communism is strong among the workers in the mines on Northern pampas,” Donald R. Heath, First Secretary of the U.S. Embassy in

Santiago, wrote with alarm in February 1942. Heath assessed the Communist presence as he tried to determine the “corelation [sic] between increases in wages and the output of workers,” which among “the industries located in the Central and Southern Regions of

Chile” was “negative,” he determined, suspecting “cheap wine” was to blame. “If a worker wins a wage increase he has more money for drink. In many cases it is

Wednesday or Thursday before a factory has as much as 95% of its labor force back at

133 “Labor Conditions at Chuquicamata,” March 3, 1943; Memoranda on Chile, December 1942 – May 1943; Box 31, Chile, Vol. 5, Nov. 1942 – Dec. 1943; Memorandums Relating to Individual Countries, March 2, 1918 – Dec. 31, 1947; Office of American Republic Affairs, Its Predecessors, and Its Successors; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. “Discussion of Anaconda Copper Company Matters,” August 11, 1944; Memoranda on Chile, Aug. 1944 – Dec. 1945; Box 32, Chile, Vol. 6, Jan. 1944 – Aug. 1946; Memorandums Relating to Individual Countries, March 2, 1918 – Dec. 31, 1947; Office of American Republic Affairs, Its Predecessors, and Its Successors; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

79 work after the week-end ‘binge,’” and thus Heath saw no point in raising wages to boost worker productivity.134

Heath discussed “the strike at the mine of the Braden Copper Company” a week later, citing Percy Seibert, Braden’s Santiago representative, as a source claiming “the

Communists [were] to blame” for the unrest. Heath agreed that the strike seemed linked to a “Communist plan,” though weighed other factors that might have inspired the miners. “Aside from political aspects,” he suggested, “the strike might logically be attributed to the desire of the workmen to obtain a share in the larger profits which the copper companies are supposed to be receiving.” Reporting again in early March, Heath wrote that there was “no visible prospect of early settlement” of the Braden strike. He felt that “the root of the matter” was that the laborers had “two things in the backs of their minds: a) that workmen in the mines in the United States receive for substantially the same work wages which are several times greater, and b) that the Company is making enormous profits because of the recent increase in the price of copper,” part of which should go to the workers. His sense was that there was “little to be done” regarding wages, since “standards of living in the United States are so different from those in Chile that discussion is virtually useless. The average American mine foreman probably has his own automobile, while a Chilean mine foreman would no more expect to have an automobile than a steam yacht.”

The miners’ irrationality compounded the problem. No “reasonable argument” could move them, Heath felt, since “they believe, or pretend to believe, that they are being exploited by foreign capitalists”—it is difficult to understand how they could have

134 Donald R. Heath, First Secretary of Embassy, “Despatch No. 2699,” Santiago, Chile, February 12, 1942; Box 122, Vol. XLVII, General Records, 1942; Santiago Embassy, Chile; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

80 arrived at such a notion—“and they intend to get more money if they can.” Their greed, rather like Anaconda’s, seemed to have few limits, and the miners’ stubbornness coupled with self-interest made it appear “possible that the Company eventually will have to make concessions of one kind or another.”135

Back in Washington, U.S. officials did what they could to resolve the problem.

Feis and Philip Bonsal summoned the Chilean Ambassador on March 7, informing “him that this Government would view with a great deal of concern any interruption in the vital flow of Chilean copper to the United States,” and emphasizing their great concern about the strike. Ultimately the workers were back in the mines by March 23. Their “demands are met in part,” U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers wrote, “but they do not receive everything originally claimed; thus, wages are increased by 6.00 and 6.50 pesos per day, as compared with the 10.00 pesos originally demanded and the 5.00 pesos offered by the

Company,” he explained.136

Even if relieved by the end of this strike, Bowers would have felt copper-related anxieties resurface before the end of the year. “A number of breakdowns, accidents and shutdowns have occurred on the properties of the Chile Exploration Company

(Anaconda), on and after October 14, 1942,” the Office of American Republics

135 Donald R. Heath, First Secretary of Embassy, “Despatch No. 2658: Strike at the mine of the Braden Copper Company; possible causes; editorial in LA OPINION,” February 20, 1942; 863.5, Box 122, Vol. XLVII, 1942; General Records, Santiago Embassy, Chile; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Donald R. Heath, First Secretary of Embassy, “Despatch No. 2719,” Santiago, Chile, March 2, 1942; Box 122, Vol. XLVII, General Records, 1942; Santiago Embassy, Chile; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 136 The Chilean Ambassador, Dr. Feis, Mr. Bonsal, “Memorandum of Conversation: Braden Copper Company Strike,” March 7, 1942; Box 122, Vol. XLVII, General Records, 1942; Santiago Embassy, Chile; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Claude G. Bowers, “Despatch No. 2880: Strike at the mine of the Braden Copper Company,” March 26, 1942; Box 122, 850.4, Vol. XLVII, General Records, 1942; Santiago Embassy, Chile; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

81 explained. “Mr. [Thomas] Campbell, the manager, denies this is due to sabotage, and attributes it to a lack of discipline resulting from the activities of the Chilean Communists in the camp,” while the Embassy’s opinion was that Campbell’s anti-Communist fears had “reached the point where collaboration between management and labor becomes increasingly difficult to achieve”—though U.S. officials hastened to praise him as “just as loyal and just as anxious to further the war effort as any one of us.”

Still, this memorandum noted that blaming Communist influence for labor problems was problematic. “The attitude of American companies in Chile has normally been to resist sharing higher profits through payment of higher wages,” it admitted, adding that “wages in American enterprises in Chile, are roughly speaking at the 1930 level,” and that at least some labor actions could be “attributed to the high-hat attitude of

American employees towards Chilean employees,” as well as to the fact that workers were “really feeling the pinch of the increased cost of living and should share in any increase in profits.” But the Embassy opposed a “proposed labor clause,” since it was felt the measure “would give the impression that the United States Government was forcing unwilling American companies to improve labor and living standards of their

Chilean workers”—an impression to be avoided at all costs.137

Bowers would have been further disturbed by developments early the following year. In a February 2, 1943 letter to Sumner Welles, for example, he wrote that he had been “hearing from all sides of uneasiness because of indifferences between the management and workers at Chuquicamata which constantly threaten labor troubles,” and

137 “Chilean Labor Difficulties,” February 15, 1943; Memoranda on Chile, Dec. 1942 – May 1943; Box 31, Chile, Vol. 5, Nov. 1942 – Dec. 1943; Memorandums Relating to Individual Countries, March 2, 1918 – Dec. 31, 1947; Office of American Republic Affairs, Its Predecessors, and Its Successors; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

82 that “all [his] information ascribes the trouble to”—once again—“Campbell, the manager, who is reported by all our people who have seen him…[as] very stiff and unfriendly about the workers, and prone to ascribe liberal feelings to ‘Communism.’”

Bowers felt Campbell’s attitude smacked “of the old school of Dollar Diplomacy days,” when U.S. officials thought of “the ‘natives’ as hewers of wood and drawers of water to take what they get and like it—the sort of attitude that gave us the reputation we are trying to live down,” though with what success one could justifiably wonder.138

And in the following year, 1944, Washington’s attention turned from Anaconda’s

Chuquicamata mine to its Potrerillos holding, operated by its subsidiary Andes Copper

Company. This firm “had a traditional hierarchical structure,” writes Angela Vergara.

The managers at the top “wielded a lot of power over a vast operation,” which at

Potrerillos saw the workers “strictly segregated,” with U.S. employees in “California- bungalow type” houses, and Chileans in tiny dwellings without private bathrooms.139

A March 6 telegram noted that over “5,000 workers employed by the Andes

Copper Mining Company and the Potrerillos Railway Company (both Anaconda Copper

Company) continue the illegal strike begun on March 1” as a “protest against the new rationing system, despite their legal obligation to accept the decision, claiming that the rations do not permit sufficient food allowances to workers.” Two days later, an airgram provided an update. “Strike situation at Potrerillos involving some 4500 mine and plant laborers and transportation workmen of the Andes Copper Company has become more

138 “More on Chilean Labor Difficulties,” February 22, 1943; Memoranda on Chile, Dec. 1942 – May 1943; Box 31, Chile, Vol. 5, Nov. 1942 – Dec. 1943; Memorandums Relating to Individual Countries, March 2, 1918 – Dec. 31, 1947; Office of American Republic Affairs, Its Predecessors, and Its Successors; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 139 Vergara, Copper Workers, 26-27, 39-40.

83 serious and labor now in northern Chile may cause vital injuries to economy of country,” the note explained, somewhat panicked. “Laborers at Chuquicamata may strike soon in sympathy with men at Potrerillos as indicated by call tonight for mass meeting at plant at

Chuquicamata and in that case the federal Government may find itself engaged in a

‘show down,’” the airgram elaborated, fearing the confrontation would “prove to be a battle royal for control of government.” In the end this crisis was averted.140

One of the worst disasters in South American mining history

But a disaster did occur later that year, at Kennecott’s El Teniente mine, run by its

Braden subsidiary. This site’s “workers came from a variety of backgrounds. Many migrated from agricultural regions in Chile’s fertile central and southern valleys,” others came from Santiago or the port cities of Valparaíso and Antofagasta. “Accidents from cave-ins, falls down chutes, asphyxiation, and dynamite explosions were frequent in the mine” early in the 20th century: “between 25 June and 8 July 1912, for example, a snowstorm destroyed a small house inhabited by eight workers, and twenty miners were killed in a dynamite explosion,” while one week later “a sixteen-year-old miner was killed when a railcar carrying copper spilled on him, and another miner was killed when a piece of rock fell on him from the roof of a mine tunnel.” Throughout 1920, “the company reported an average of twenty-seven severe mining accidents each month,” and a Chilean congressional report that year concluded “that ‘the El Teniente mine has cost

140 “Telegram No. 438,” March 6, 1944; Box 202, Vol. XXXVIII, General Records, 1944; Santiago Embassy, Chile; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. “Airgram from American Consulate, Antofagasta, Chile, March 8, 1944;” Box 202, Vol. XXXVIII, General Records, 1944; Santiago Embassy, Chile; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

84 the country thousands of men. There have been explosions, cave-ins, every kind of catastrophe, which indicates that there is no safety for the workers.’”141

Problems like these persisted in the ensuing decades. “In central Chile the copper mines, both Chilean and American, are in a worse position with respect to their laborers than at any time for a good many years past,” Bowers wrote on August 10, 1940. He was especially concerned by “outstanding labor difficulties” hindering extraction “at the plants of the Braden Copper Company at Sewell [the camp for El Teniente’s workers],

Coya and Rancagua,” where it was “understood that the labor unions have been increasingly dominated by Communist agitators” since the preceding May.

The Braden Company was Bowers’ source for this information. The corporation’s men had little doubt that the site’s labor leaders were “definitely

Communistic,” and that they had “encouraged a deliberate policy of antagonism among the mine workers toward the foremen and managers of the mines and plants.” These workers were “consistently disobeying the Company’s rules,” for example, and were

“slack and inefficient in the discharge of their duties,” presumably on orders from

Moscow. The result of this round of unrest was “a fatal attack on the part of a workman at Sewell upon the Level Engineer who was his immediate foreman.” The victim—“Mr.

Patrick M. Kinney, an American citizen who had thirteen years’ service in the mines”—

“was attacked with an iron bar from behind and his skull crushed.” Several days “later the carabineros [Chilean national police], in an attempt to maintain order among the unruly laborers at Sewell, arrested a workman named Muñoz, who drew a revolver and wounded one of the carabineros,” who then drew his own weapon and shot Muñoz to

141 Klubock, Contested Communities, 33-34.

85 death. “This affair accentuated the tension throughout the area of the Company’s operations,” Bowers concluded.142

“One of the worst disasters in South American metal mining history” subsequently occurred there, in 1944. The event, “costing at least 116 lives, occurred about nightfall on August 8,” U.S. Embassy official John B. Dorsh reported.

“Considerable time will be lost for the many burial services and attendant duties in connection with settlements of estates and consultations with lawyers regarding death claims and benefits,” he added. “The deaths resulted from carbon monoxide gas, which spread throughout the mine after a fire,” an Embassy report from the following July explained. U.S. officials were reviewing the disaster then as yet another strike occurred at the site. They discussed the event with Salvador Ocampo, a union official, who “stated privately that the purpose of the general stoppage…was not that of attacking an American

Company or to arouse anti-American feeling, but to the contrary, it was called because it was felt that considerable resentment had been created as a result of the accident and that the stoppages” would serve a cathartic purpose.143

142 Claude G. Bowers, “Despatch No. 731,” Santiago, August 10, 1940; Box 60, Vol. XIX, General Records, 1940; Santiago Embassy, Chile, Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park; College Park, MD. 143 John B. Dorsh, American Embassy, “Report on Causes and Effects of the Catastrophe at Sewell, Chile,” Santiago, Chile, August 18, 1944; Box 174, Vol. LI, General Records, 1943; Santiago Embassy, Chile; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. American Embassy, “Despatch no. 12,418: Labor and Social Developments in Chile – June 1, to July 1, 1945,” Santiago, Chile, July 11, 1945; Box 238, Vol. XXXV, General Records, 1945; Santiago Embassy, Chile; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

The future president of Chile backed down

Labor unrest disrupted Chilean copper mining sporadically throughout the war.

“As in previous years, additional labor costs and the shortage of labor adversely affected production and income,” Anaconda wrote in its 1945 annual review. “Strikes of employees at the properties of Chile Exploration Company and Andes Copper Mining

Company in Chile…likewise diminished profit of operations,” it lamented.144

But ultimately these problems did not impede copper production’s steady expansion. By April 1945 “Chile supplie[d] the United States with more copper…than the United States imported from all sources in 1939,” the North American Newspaper

Alliance (NANA) reported. And by this point, the men in Washington and in charge of the copper firms were looking ahead to the post-war period. “Post-war reconstruction, especially in the European countries, requires extraordinary quantities of copper,”

Anaconda noted in its 1946 review. “Thus the demand for copper is not limited to the

United States alone, but worldwide demand exceeds the world supply,” it explained, noting that “such reconstruction as has taken place and is now continuing absorbs all copper available. To this requirement for reconstruction must be added the cumulative need throughout the world for copper in the many current uses for which it is so essential.” After a slump in 1949, the copper market revived dramatically, to the point where “it was impossible to satisfy the demands of consumers,” Anaconda wrote in

1950.145

144 Anaconda Copper Mining Company, “Annual Report – 1945;” Boston & Montana Cons. C. & S. M. Co. / Reduction Dept., Great Falls; Collection No. 169, Anaconda Copper Mining Company Records; Montana Historical Society Archives, Helena, MT. 145 Anaconda Copper Mining Company, “Annual Report – 1946;” Boston & Montana Cons. C. & S. M. Co. / Reduction Dept., Great Falls; Collection No. 169, Anaconda Copper Mining Company Records; Montana Historical Society Archives, Helena, MT. Anaconda Copper Mining Company, “Annual Report – 1949;”

The Geological Survey’s annual reports confirmed that copper demand remained high as the war ended. “Production of copper in Chile dropped in 1945 but continued to be close to the peak rate for the war period,” the Survey wrote. But these reports also confirmed that the smooth functioning of Chile’s mines could hardly be taken for granted, as labor actions continued throughout the late 1940s. “Mine production of copper dropped 19 percent in 1946,” for example, and one “5-week labor strike at the

Chuquicamata mine of the Chile Exploration Co., ending in late June, and one at the

Braden mine of the Kennecott Copper Corp, beginning late in September and settled in

December, were the principal deterrents to capacity operations,” according to the Survey.

“Labor difficulties continued to impede production in 1947,” it explained, and mining

“was interrupted several times by labor strikes” in 1950 as well.146

Particularly alarming for U.S. officials was a series of copper strikes in 1946-1947 involving the Braden Company. While the firm was able to reach agreements with the unions at its Caletones, Coya, and Rancagua sites, Sewell—“controlled by the

Communist Party”—proved more problematic. “The Sewell and Mine Labor Union voted not to sign an Act of Agreement similar to the Acts signed by the other three

Braden Copper Company Unions and, after further negotiations had broken down, the

Boston & Montana Cons. C. & S. M. Co. / Reduction Dept., Great Falls; Collection No. 169, Anaconda Copper Mining Company Records; Montana Historical Society Archives, Helena, MT. Anaconda Copper Mining Company, “Annual Report – 1950;” Boston & Montana Cons. C. & S. M. Co. / Reduction Dept., Great Falls; Collection No. 169, Anaconda Copper Mining Company Records; Montana Historical Society Archives, Helena, MT. 146 “Chinese War Migration Was History’s Greatest; Some Facts About Chile,” Milwaukee Journal (Milwaukee, WI), April 26, 1945. T. H. Meyer and Helena M. Meyer, “Copper,” Minerals Yearbook – 1945 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1947), 148. Charles White Merrill and Helena M. Meyer, “Copper,” Minerals Yearbook – 1946, ed. Allan F. Matthews (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1948), 484. Charles White Merrill and Helena M. Meyer, “Copper,” Minerals Yearbook – 1947, ed. Allan F. Matthews (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1949), 477. Helena M. Meyer and Gertrude N. Greenspoon, “Copper,” Minerals Yearbook – 1950, ed. Leonard L. Fischman (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1953), 466, 496-497.

Sewell workers called a strike and stopped work at 11 p.m., September 25,” 1946, the

U.S. Embassy reported. Braden official E. T. Stannard explained that the initial three agreements offered “considerably more than we felt we should grant,” rendering any further concessions—as Sewell’s union demanded—unthinkable. Chilean officials

“imposed government arbitration on the copper company and the unions” in an effort to end the standoff.147

Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in early November 1946, sent a telegram explaining that the “Department has already informally pointed out to Chilean Chargé the embarrassing even untenable position in which this Government would be placed considering Chile’s request for further Exim Bank loans and credits on naval vessels,” given that this request would be fulfilled while the “proposed arbitrary settlement strike…was jeopardizing highly important United States investment [in the] copper industry.” His fear was that Washington “might be bitterly criticized by press and

Congress if it were alleged that at time when interests of thousands of Kennecott stockholders were endangered American Government had made additional loans to

Chile.”148

147 W. E. Dunn, Counselor of Embassy for Economic Affairs, Earl T. Crain, Second Secretary, “Report No. 368: Braden Copper Company Strike,” October 8, 1946; Box 263, 850.4, Vol. XXIX, 1946; General Records, Santiago Embassy, Chile; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. E. T. Stannard, Braden Copper Company, to Marcial Mora, Ambassador of the Republic of Chile, October 25, 1946; Box 263, 850.4, Vol. XXIX, 1946; General Records, Santiago Embassy, Chile; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. “Miners’ Strikes and the Demise of the Popular Front: U.S. State Department Cables,” in The Chile Reader: History, Culture, Politics, eds. Elizabeth Quay Hutchison, Thomas Miller Klubock, Nara B. Milanich, and Peter Winn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 327- 329. 148 Dean Acheson, “Telegram No. 544 – November 9, 1946;” Box 263, 850.4, Vol. XXIX, 1946; General Records, Santiago Embassy, Chile; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

But the Chilean president, Gabriel González Videla, remained somewhat stubborn, and “told Braden officials” at a meeting on November 11 that their “offer did not go far enough; that he could not break with Communists so soon;” and that he “would be personally grateful if [the] company agreed to [the] principle of full arbitration [.]” He added that he would “appoint any type [of] arbitral body [the] company might choose with arbiters completely acceptable to [the] company”—an inadequate offer to Braden, since the stubbornness of the company’s executives dwarfed the president’s.149

Ambassador Bowers was next to try reasoning with the Chilean president, who

“was visibly excited and at times stood up and gestured vigorously to reinforce his remarks” during the meeting. And he was particularly outraged by “the ‘threats’ that had been transmitted by their Chargé d’Affaires in Washington concerning the cutting off of further credits and assistance to Chile because of the Braden strike situation”—the topic, in other words, of Acheson’s telegram reviewed above. The president felt “that if such was the attitude of the U.S. Government,” Chile “would be forced to accept the overtures made by the Perón Government of Argentina, or to look to the British and others for cooperation,” since “Chile could not be treated like a Central American country.”

Bowers, for his part, “said that we are much preoccupied by the fact that the Communist policy in South America is to attack the United States and all men in South American favorable to us; that we fear that the success of the Communist-inspired strike at Sewell would encourage a general attack in Chile on American interests generally,” in the same

149 Claude Bowers, “Telegram No. 991 – November 12, 1946;” Box 263, 850.4, Vol. XXIX, 1946; General Records, Santiago Embassy, Chile; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

90 way U.S. officials, in March 1944, feared the Potrerillos strike would inspire workers across the country.150

But by 1947, Chile’s president had adopted a new outlook. When he took office in November 1946, it was as “a left-wing Radical,” who “fought the election on a program that promised firm state action to encourage industrial development, the nationalization of some public utilities, a modest but not insignificant land reform,” as well as “unionization rights for the peasantry and the extension of suffrage to women.”

Broadly his aim was to “improve conditions for working people,” in Andrew Barnard’s assessment.151

When Ray Josephs, a reporter with Pittsburgh’s Post-Gazette, met with him a year later, he spoke to a card-carrying Cold Warrior. “Russia and her satellites have already declared invisible war against the United States and the American republics are now using Latin America as a field from which effectively to attack the United States’ economic and war potential,” President González declared, echoing closely the remarks

Bowers had made in their meeting. The Communist Party, the president continued, was

“an invisible army,” and “Chilean workers controlled by them” were his chief enemy in the war underway. His statements, and harsh anti-worker measures, were “regarded not only as a complete break with the extreme left but as evidence of further desire for closer

150 W. E. Dunn, “Conversation between Ambassador Bowers and President Gonzalez Videla,” November 29, 1946; Box 263, 850.4, Vol. XXIX, 1946; General Records, Santiago Embassy, Chile; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 151 Andrew Barnard, “Chile,” in Latin America Between the Second World War and the Cold War, 1944- 1948, edited by Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 79.

91 co-operation with the United States,” Josephs concluded. And González’s shift dramatically improved Chilean relations with the State Department, Barnard adds.152

President González did far more than talk big, and “as work stoppages continued” throughout the 1940s, he “declared states of siege and sent in the military to take control of the mines and put an end to the strikes.” After troops “took control of the El Teniente mine,” for example, “a number of miners identified as Communists were fired and detained; some were sent to the Pisagua concentration camp in the northern desert.”

Captain Augusto Pinochet ran this facility. One day in 1947, a member of Congress visited the site “to investigate the conditions under which the prisoners were being held.”

The military barred the man from entering, at which point he declared he would examine the site even without official permission. Pinochet promised to shoot him if he trespassed, and the Congressman “backed down.” His name was Salvador Allende.153

Procurement in Mexico

To help increase copper mining in Mexico, Metal Reserve turned to Professor

Alan Bateman, whose specialty at Yale was economic geology, and who “was charged not only with investigating the expansion possibilities among a number of essential metals and minerals, including copper,” but “was also empowered to work in conjunction with the Department of State in negotiating with the Mexican Government with respect to easing the existing restrictions on American capital,” Tidwell explained. Bateman spent over three months in Mexico in 1942, negotiating with the government and the copper

152 Ray Josephs, “Chile’s President Says Russia Has Declared Invisible War on U.S.,” Pittsburgh Post- Gazette (Pittsburgh, PA), October 20, 1947. Barnard, “Chile,” 87. 153 “Miners’ Strikes and the Demise of the Popular Front,” The Chile Reader, 327-329. Ariel Dorfman, Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of General Augusto Pinochet (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 22.

92 firms “with respect to their expansion possibilities, reporting in April that copper production could be increased by 48,360 tons yearly to 101,000 tons.” Metals Reserve reviewed Bateman’s report, approved it, and “agreed with the Mexican Government to purchase up to a total of 75,000 tons annually.”

“The gist of the new agreement,” according to Tidwell, “was that the Mexican

Government would alleviate and stabilize its tax policy for the mining industry, would not increase existing freight tariffs on metals and minerals hauled on the Mexican

Government railroads, and would agree to a relaxation of its restrictive labor laws and regulations.” A country’s legal architecture is nearly as crucial as its physical infrastructure, where rapid mining expansion is concerned. In return for these concessions, Metals Reserve promised “to purchase higher quantities of copper” and other minerals.

But even with the agreement in place, “copper production did not increase materially for some years or until the Anaconda and Phelps Dodge expansion had been completed during the last year of the war. For example, from 1940 to 1941 production rose from 43,490 tons to 54,508 tons, then to nearly 57,404 tons in 1942 before declining over the following two years. The total finally rose again in 1945, “to almost 65,000 tons,” Tidwell noted. What Anaconda wanted was “certain assurances from the Mexican

Government, which it suggested should be obtained only through our State Department, before it was ready to proceed.” These assurances, like those Bateman sought, entailed relaxed labor and taxation policies.154

154 Tidwell, “Copper: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1941-1945.”

Traditional ways of mining became obsolete

By World War II, Anaconda controlled Mexico’s Cananea site, first developed in the early 20th century by William Greene around the time of the Yaqui expulsion from

Sonora. “At the request of the United States Government,” the Geological Survey noted,

“Cananea Consolidated Copper Co., South America, a subsidiary of Greene Cananea

Copper Co., is developing an extensive body of low-grade copper ore adjacent to its present mine and plant at Cananea, Sonora,” funneling some $12 million of Metals

Reserve’s money into the project “to increase the production of copper substantially.”155

Mexican historian Juan Luis Sariego explains that Cananea’s modernization program ultimately met its goal of expanding output. Without increasing its number of workers substantially, the mine produced 30,000 tons of copper from 1945 to 1950, a dramatic increase over the 19,000 churned out from 1930 to 1944. Another result of modernization, he writes, was the commencement of a new era for Cananea’s workers, as the underground mines were gradually abandoned in favor of a surface, open-pit site. As this transformation occurred, traditional ways of mining became obsolete.

For example, the open-pit mining depended more on the use of heavy machinery than subterranean mining had. Workers were thus expected to adapt themselves to the use of these machines. This adaptation meant that long-held positions in the old mines, often passed from fathers to sons, were eliminated. But the major change, in Sariego’s view, was the miners’ loss of control over their pace of work, as machines, not people, determined both the speed and intensity of extraction. The size, weight, and complexity

155 Miller and Meyer, Minerals Yearbook – 1942, 159.

94 of the new machinery also made accidents more dangerous, insofar as a slight technical error, or minor mishandling of this technology, could result in a disaster.156

Meanwhile, as was the case in Chile, class tensions in Mexico were high wherever mining was concerned. Robert K. Peyton, U.S. Vice Consul, wrote on March

11, 1941, that the “local mining men” in Chihuahua hoped “that the incumbent federal administration”—that of Manuel Ávila Camacho—“which is indicating conservative tendencies, will take steps to reassure and encourage investors by legislative actions securing their investments,” and generally these men’s hopes were fulfilled. The “rumors concerning American purchases of vast quantities of metals” encouraged them, for example, as did the “expanding markets and rising prices for metals as a result of the

European and Asiatic wars,” Peyton noted.157

And as in Chile, labor unrest persisted throughout the war. “The strike of the workmen of the Cananea Consolidated Copper Company began on April 5 and it is still in progress as up to the present no agreement for a settlement has been reached between the representatives of the labor unions and those of the company,” L.S. Armstrong,

American Consul at Nogales, reported in 1940. In a follow-up briefing, he reported that the strike “was finally brought to an end by an agreement reached at Mexico City between representatives of the company and representatives of the Labor Union on

156 Juan Luis Sariego Rodríguez, Enclaves y minerales en el norte de México: historia social de los mineros de Cananea y Nueva Rosita, 1900-1970 (México, D.F.: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antrolopogía Social, 1968), 249-258. Juan Luis Sariego, “La reconversión industrial en la minería cananense,” in Cananea: tradición y modernidad en una mina histórica, eds. Óscar F. Contreras, Alejandro Covarrubias, Miguel Ángel Ramírez, José Luis Sariego Rodríguez (México, Colegio de Sonora: M. A. Porrúa, 1998), 47-50. 157 Robert K. Peyton, Vice Consul, “Review of the Mining Industry in the Chihuahua Consular District for the Calendar Year 1940,” March 11, 1941; Box 112, Vol. 117, General Records (1937-49), 1941; Mexico City Embassy, Mexico; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

September 10th and the men returned to work on September 12th,” receiving “various minor concessions” from the company. Most important, however, was that “the strike is settled,” meaning “business and economic conditions at Cananea, which were adversely affected as a result of the strike, should improve considerably.”158

In March 1942, American Vice Consul Raymond Phelan described tensions at

Nacozari, Sonora, where the Moctezuma Copper Company, a Phelps Dodge subsidiary, operated. The firm was “meeting with some trouble in the negotiation of a new labor contract,” he elaborated, as “workers demand[ed] wage increases and a betterment of working conditions which the management of the Company [felt] to be too great.” T. L.

Lilliestrom, another U.S. official in Sonora, wrote the following month that “it is reported that passive sabotage is carried on to a certain extent in the mining centers of the district lowering the output of the mines” as the contract talks proceeded.159

“The labor situation in the Nacozari mining district is not satisfactory, according to Mr. James F. Berry, manager of the Moctezuma Copper Co.,” Clark Vyse, American

Consul in Agua Prieta, wrote in January 1944, explaining that the miners “are discontented because their pay is lower than in Cananea.” Mexican officials “requested

158 L. S. Armstrong, American Consul, Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, “Political Report for the Month of April 1940,” April 30, 1940; Box 4105, 812.00 Sinaloa A/147 – 812.00 Sonora/12-3044; Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. L. S. Armstrong, American Consul, Nogales, Sonora, “Political Report for the Month of September 1940,” September 30, 1940; 812.00 Sonora/1555; Box 4105, 812.00 Sinaloa A/147 – 812.00 Sonora/12-3044; Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 159 Raymond Phelan, American Vice Consul, Sonora, Mexico, “Resume of Political and Other Conditions in the Agua Prieta Consular District for the Month of March 1942,” March 31, 1942; 812.00 Sonora/1609; Box 4105, 812.00 Sinaloa A/147 – 812.00 Sonora/12-3044; Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. T. L. Lilliestrom, American Vice Consul, Sonora, Mexico, “Review of the Political and Other Conditions in the Agua Prieta Consular District for the Month of April, 1942; 812.00 Sonora/1612; Box 4105, 812.00 Sinaloa A/147 – 812.00 Sonora/12-3044; Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

96 the Moctezuma Copper Co. to consider the possibility of increased wage rates,” but the

“company holds this to be impossible in as much as copper is already being produced at a loss.” Berry’s view was “that unless the Mexican Government should consent to reduce its tax on the production and exportation of copper, his company will have to cease operating.”160

Problems in Peru

In Peru, where the Cerro de Pasco Company still dominated copper production, the U.S worked in early 1941 to eliminate Japanese interests, which “had a firm foothold in Peru’s copper market” as late as the spring of that year. Tidwell, in his history of wartime copper procurement, explained that Peruvian officials responded positively to

Washington’s overtures. The U.S. promised to provide a market for their minerals, and to this end “the State Department suggested that Metals Reserve Company arrange to purchase the country’s exportable surplus.” Julian Smith, a Cerro de Pasco employee, worked out the procurement plan, which “prohibited further exportation of certain essential materials, including copper, to countries outside the Western Hemisphere.” On

September 30, 1941, Washington and Lima signed their agreement, in which “Metals

Reserve Company agreed to provide a market for 125% of Peru’s production during the ensuing year.”161

160 Clarke Vyse, American Consul, Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico, “Review of Political and other Conditions in the Agua Prieta Consular District for the Month of January, 1944,” January 31, 1944; 812.00 Sonora/1684; Box 4105, 812.00 Sinaloa A/147 – 812.00 Sonora/12-3044; Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 161 Tidwell, “Copper: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1941-1945.”

Tidwell added that, by the end of the year, Peruvian officials “began to urge a program of further mining development, a suggestion which [Metals Reserve] opposed because of its inability to provide shipping facilities for the ores then being produced.”

But the Board of Economic Warfare had “an entirely different attitude,” and “agreed to send a contingent of engineers to Peru to assist the country in a development program,” subsequently initiating one “at the expense of the U.S. Government.” According to

Tidwell, Peru’s “largest and most ambitious program was demanded personally by Vice-

President Henry A. Wallace;” entailed the formation of a new agency, the Peruvian

Development Corporation, set up by U.S. multinational W.R. Grace & Co.; and would

“stimulate production under contracts negotiated by Board of Economic Warfare” representatives. The project was short-lived in the end. When the Foreign Economic

Administration took over the Board’s duties in 1943, it was terminated.162

But as U.S. officials’ wartime missives make clear, the question preoccupying

U.S. officials was not whether to pursue development projects in Peru, but to what extent the country had to be transformed. A key aim there, as elsewhere, was getting as many tons of minerals out of the ground as possible. Board of Economic Warfare official C.B.

Larson, in a June 1942 letter to Dr. Alan Bateman, discussed one project related to this objective. “Up to now no construction work on the new railway itself has been done,” he explained. “Plans have been laid, some construction equipment has been ordered and the building of quarters for supervisors and some workmen” was underway, but finding “as many hands for this job as would be desired” was a challenge. Larson noted that the project would be completed “by hand labor largely,” and felt that “by intensifying the work as much as possible” it would be done soon. Labor’s cost was no issue: Peruvian

162 Ibid.

98 labor was a steal, since in the “highlands common surface labor currently costs about

2.00 soles (thirty-one cents United States currency) per eight-hour man shift.”163

Larson addressed labor problems again in October 1943, when he wrote that

“easing the labor shortage at mines” was crucial—perhaps to be accomplished via “the delicate task of arranging with the Peruvian Government that certain of the public works be discontinued for the duration of the war and that army conscription be modified to prevent draining labor from the mining areas,” he suggested. He further stressed that

“this decision can be made only in Washington”—which, of course, was the appropriate place to determine Peru’s domestic policies.164

Controlled by Indian and mestizo thought processes

Frederick Hinke, an official at the Lima Embassy, outlined in considerable detail the obstacles confronting U.S. development projects. He described Peru in November

1943 as “racially a predominantly Indian country,” its people “conditioned by essentially

Indian and mestizo thought processes, social customs, standards of living and work, as well as work habits and methods.” Hinke explained that, while they themselves did not realize it, “one of the needs of the illiterate people of Peru is a sufficiently strong desire for improvements in their ways of life and living standards to seek to better themselves,

163 C. B. Larson, “Detailed Information on Cerro de Pasco Transportation Project, Pachacayo – Chaucha (Yauricocha),” to Dr. Alan M. Bateman, Metals and Minerals Division, Board of Economic Warfare, Washington, D.C., June 24, 1942; Box 137, Vol. LIII, General Records, 1942; Lima (Peru) Embassy; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park; College Park, MD. 164 Carrol B. Larson, Principal Mining Engineer, “Estimates of Copper Production and Possibilities of Increasing Copper Production in Peru for the War Effort,” to Mr. Sidney H. Scheuer, Assistant Director in Charge, Office of Imports, Office of Economic Warfare, Washington, D.C., October 25, 1943;Box 197, Vol. LXX, General Records, 1943; Lima (Peru) Embassy; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

99 the incentive for which—taking the population as a whole—has been quite lacking for a very long period of time.” Indigenous Peruvians, left alone, were content to wallow in their mediocrity.

One clear sign of their aversion to self-improvement, for Hinke, was “the fact that most of the man-power of the country is engaged in subsistence agriculture of a type very wasteful of man-power and which provides a bare subsistence,” in his assessment not part of an indigenous culture to be preserved, but a barrier to be toppled. As he wrote, “the folk ways and the thought patterns of the past still have strong holds on the people,” and they failed to embrace wage labor as a result. For example, one “characteristic of the

Inca civilization of Peru was ignorance of the money concept,” and “even now the wage incentive does not weigh here as heavily as elsewhere. Among the Indians of the sierra,” he elaborated, “there still lingers the recollection of decades of hardship in the mines of the Spaniards, while fears of conscription and forced labor on highway construction are still active.” Washington’s railway project, to be completed by hand because U.S. officials knew this was the cheapest way, was entirely different, it is hardly worth mentioning.

These fears had to be eliminated “to incorporate more closely within the country’s economic framework the large Indian population of the sierra (and the still more primitive population of the montaña), and…to increase individually the productivity of literally tens of thousands of people”—the only way to “provide a sound basis,” Hinke felt, “for the payment of higher wages and improved living standards.” Peruvians had to learn, in other words, that a good wage, or better living standards—at least as U.S. officials conceived of them—were not rights, but instead something to be granted in

100 exchange for services rendered. They had to be acquired in the labor market. “These are problems of the first magnitude and, because of their complexity, progress must necessarily be slow,” Hinke concluded. To provide a reference point, he noted that “the labor problems of Peru are comparable to those confronting the United States in lifting the working efficiency and living standards of the colored population of the more backward portions of the southeastern United States”—the success of which we can gauge from our vantage point 70 years in the future.165

Unprecedented labor activity in the mining region

But conditions were grim even for workers integrated into the labor market, and this problem persisted after the war. “Inflation still goes unchecked and the wage worker is finding it harder to buy the everyday necessities,” American Vice Consul Edgar S.

Ehlers noted on October 10, 1945. “Business houses at the same time report that conditions have not slackened with the termination of the war but have shown some improvement,” he continued. “In the two main industries Nitrate and Copper there has been an increase in production.” He added that Peru’s “two large producers of fine copper have experienced no diminution since either the cessation of hostilities in Europe or in Asia, but have experienced slight increases.”166

Peruvian workers, confronting daily deprivation after the war, refused to remain docile. “The first five months of 1946 have seen unprecedented labor activity in the

165 Frederick W. Hinke, American Embassy, “Labor Conditions and Problems in Peru,” Lima, Peru, November 19, 1943; Box 183, Vol. LVI, General Records, 1943; Lima (Peru) Embassy; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 166 Edgar S. Ehlers, American Vice Consul, “September (1945) Quarterly Report on Business Conditions,” Antofagasta, Chile, October 10, 1945; Box 48, Vol. V, General Records, 1945; Antofagasta Consulate, Chile; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

101 mining region,” Lima Embassy official Maurice Broderick wrote in May 1946. “During

January there was a great deal of organizational activity which culminated in the formation of a new regional labor federation for all mine workers and employees which was endowed with the impressive title of the Regional Federation of Mine and

Metallurgical Workers of Central Peru,” for example. “Early in February this Federation presented a list of forty-three demands to the Director General of Labor and (as of possible interest) furnished copies thereof to the Cerro de Pasco Corporation and other mine operators,” he added.167

By the late 1940s, meanwhile, Peruvian mining was “depressed as a result of plummeting prices after the end of the Second World War,” and its government “was actively looking for means to attract foreign investors to invest in the vast untapped mineral reserves of the country,” writes Claes Brundenius. The result was a new Mining

Code, approved in 1950. The measure “was very controversial, and soon became the object of a heated debate in political circles,” in part because some of its most divisive passages were “very much influenced by similar US legislation at the time.” For instance, its Article 54 “was a literal word for word translation of the US regulation, providing for the inclusion of a 15 per cent so-called ‘depletion allowance’ to be deducted from sales, thus reducing tax receipts for the state.” Brundenius explains that people like “Robert Koenig, chairman of the board of Cerro de Pasco at the time, hailed

167 Maurice J. Broderick, Third Secretary of Embassy, “Mining Labor Demands Settled,” Lima, Peru, May 29, 1946; Box 315, Vol. 37, General Records, 1946; Lima (Peru) Embassy; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

102 the new code as creating ‘one of the most favourable—if not the most favourable foreign investment climates for US investments in the world.’”168

Worth stressing is the context in which this investment climate improved. “In early January 1950, [Manuel] Odría announced that elections for president and Congress would be held in July,” but he then “invalidated the opposition candidate,” and “easily won reelection. Once ‘elected,’ Odría embarked upon a program of military populism that was modeled after his counterpart’s in Buenos Aires.”169 One crucial difference was

Perón’s economic nationalist aspirations, which—as Cerro de Pasco chairman Koenig acknowledged—did not drive Peruvian policy. And it is instructive to compare this 1950 boon for business in Peru, in the wake of a fraudulent election, with similar investment conditions in Mexico following that country’s marred 1940 presidential contest, discussed at the start of the chapter on zinc.

He came out of the mines with green teeth

Throughout this increase in wartime copper production, miners experienced health problems as they did extracting other metals. “Miner’s consumption was the biggest killer in the mines,” Finn writes of Chile, “yet the Anaconda Company refused to acknowledge it as an occupational disease until the 1940s.” “In Chuquicamata,” she adds, “many people I spoke with volunteered an unsolicited story about losing a father, grandfather, or uncle to silicosis. Their talk of the illness indicated that the weight of its tragedy is still felt in the community.”

168 Claes Brundenius, “From nationalization to re-privatization of the Peruvian copper industry: structural changes and impact on environmental sustainability,” in Technological Change and the Environmental Imperative: Challenges to the Copper Industry, ed. Claes Brundenius (Cheltenham, UK: 2003), 106-107. 169 Klarén, Peru, 301.

103

One woman Finn spoke to was “Geronima, [a] miner’s wife from Toconce in the

Atacama Desert,” who “spoke of her husband’s illness from the mines: ‘We went to

Chuquicamata and my husband worked in the mines for ten years or so. Then we came back here because he was sick. He came out of the mines with green teeth. Later he had to drink wine to wash his stomach out.’” Geronima’s husband “‘was always, always sick and he couldn’t work anymore. He died in Antofagasta.’ Her account speaks to the physical wasting of mining men that need not bear the name ‘consumption’ to capture its corrosive force,” Finn concludes. As she emphasizes, “the greater the production and profit” of the mines, “the more men were consumed,” and “the length of an Anaconda

Company man’s life stood in inverse relation to his physical and social distance from the mines.”

Finn then expounds on a range of other health issues affecting families of mine workers. Many of these related to the psychological well-being of women in mining communities, who watched their men waste away. “The women of Chuquicamata spoke of being consumed with worries, but in a context of the powerful consumptive force of the desert climate itself,” she writes. “It was the incessant wind, dust, and sun that created the backdrop for women’s stories of their labor and lives. It was the altitude that took its toll over time on the lungs, leaving people unfit to leave and live elsewhere.”

Finn quotes “Sylvia, a longtime resident of Chuquicamata,” who “offered her critical feminist perspective on this way of life: ‘This harsh and isolated terrain presents a challenge to people who arrive here from other parts of the country. Among women, there’s a high incidence of depression, alcoholism, and other forms of stress and

104 emotional problems,’” she explained. Sylvia continued, noting “high rates of domestic violence, too,” compounding all the other problems.170

Conclusion

In Chile, Mexico, and Peru, U.S. officials pursued a range of policies that placed a low premium on Latin American self-determination and well-being. Washington’s goals in these countries—which it shared in broad terms with the mining firms active in them— entailed a range of changes to Chilean mining policy, Mexican law, and Peruvian people.

In other words, U.S. foreign copper policy, central to sustaining both the lifestyles U.S. residents took for granted as well as the war effort, aimed to disrupt Latin American institutions and means of living, and to adapt these to the aims of powerful governmental and business officials.

170 Finn, Tracing the Veins, 178-184.

105

Chapter 3: Manganese

Introduction

Manganese is an essential ingredient in modern steel, helping it to maintain its rigid structure at high temperatures. It is difficult to exaggerate how central steel’s role was to early 20th century U.S. life and warfare. Regarding the former, it is estimated that eighty percent of all products made in the U.S. in the 1940s used steel in some form, and that some two-fifths of all U.S. workers relied on its industry for their wages then. In broad terms, steel was as essential in wartime, used in vehicles and to make ammunition, and generally was a crucial component of military production.

It must be recognized that statist policies helped the U.S. boost domestic steel production, to the point where the country’s steel sector was the world’s most dominant circa 1945. The 1861 Morrill Tariff—named for the Vermont Representative of the then- new Republican Party—for example, was an early piece of legislation geared towards this end. Ultimately U.S. steel boomed to the benefit of the Gould, Frick, Carnegie and

Morgan clans, many of whom proceeded to proclaim the virtues, if not necessity, of “free trade” with a straight face, once their fortunes were secure.

Regarding manganese, it quickly became apparent to many that U.S. deposits were too scattered and low-grade to be feasible to mine at a profit. And thus attention turned to better-endowed countries like Cuba and Brazil, both of which supplied the U.S. with the mineral during World War I, and would serve again as important sources during the next global conflict. As described below, Chile and Mexico were two additional

Latin American manganese providers during the war, though far less important than Cuba and Brazil.

106

As with any extractive project, U.S. efforts to procure sufficient manganese abroad during the war ran up against a number of obstacles. For example, some of the men in Washington considered Brazil’s mining laws as much of an impediment to extraction as its shoddy roads, and thus worked to overhaul the former while teams of itinerant workers toiled in abject squalor, at times at certain risk of contracting malaria, building the latter. Cuba presented similar problems, in terms of inadequate infrastructure and social legislation some U.S. officials considered excessive.

These were not strictly wartime challenges, furthermore. The U.S. steel industry continued to need foreign manganese after World War II, and accessing a prize Brazilian deposit in the Amazon required that the area be “opened up” for development—thus indicating that the problems U.S. officials faced during the war, in terms of transforming foreign countries to serve domestic mineral needs, would persist.

Essential to industry

It is in the car traveling the freeway, the lattice of beams towering over a construction site. It is in the rails skirting a city’s edge, extending past the suburbs to the countryside. It encases foods on supermarket shelves. It does industry’s brute work—it is in chains, wheels, gears. In the 1940s, eighty percent of all products made in the U.S. used it in some form. Forty percent of the country’s wage earners relied on its industry then. This is steel. It was U.S. industry’s mid-century hero, but flawed: its crystalline structure breaks down at high temperatures, and thus it needs another substance for

107 strength. This is manganese. When added to steel, the resultant compound is stable, even in extreme heat.171

We know steel as an industrial material, but it has a long history. There is evidence “that the Persians, Medes, and Parthians manufactured steel long before the

Christian era and that the Parthian arrow was tipped with steel,” for example. There is evidence Greeks had steel armor in the Homeric era, and ancient India manufactured

“steel of a very high quality.” “Sparta’s military invincibility may have been due more to steel weapons” than any other factor. And manganese ores were also known in antiquity, though historians credit C. W. Scheele, a Swedish chemist, with its discovery in the late

18th century. Scheele named it manganese from the Latin magnes, for magnetism. There are other theories regarding its name. Some believe it comes from the Greek word for “a delusion, deriving from the brittle and unstable nature of the metal obtained from it,” or perhaps “the name derives from Mangana, which is in the East Indies.”172

Whatever the truth is, modern use of the metal can be traced to Robert Mushet, the British metallurgist. He perfected Henry Bessemer’s steelmaking process. This technique, developed in 1856, promised an efficient, reliable means of making good steel.

But it was defective. Mushet improved it in part by adding manganese, though Bessemer refused to recognize this contribution. In his autobiography, he railed against the idea

171 “Steel’s Tough Partner,” Popular Science 141, no. 5 (1942) 118-123. Delbert R. French, Postwar Packages and Containers for Marketing Foods (Washington, D.C., 1945). Tyler Priest, Global Gambits (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 1-2. Ernest Arthur Boas, Latin America’s Steel Industry: Present and Future (Berlin: Duncker u. Humblot, 1968), 38. United States. Congress. Office of Technology Assessment, Strategic Materials: Technology to Reduce U.S. Import Vulnerability (Washington, D.C.: Office of Technology Assessment, 1985), 55. John Van N. Dorr II, Max D. Crittenden, Jr., and Ronald G. World, “Manganese,” in United States Mineral Resources—Geological Survey of Professional Paper 820, eds. Donald A. Brobst and Walden P. Pratt (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1973), 386. 172 Chin-Chang Huang and Nai-Shin Chu, “Manganese-Induced Parkinsonism, Parkinson’s Disease and Welding,” in New Research on Parkinson’s Disease, eds. Timothy F. Hahn and Julian Werner (New York: Nova Biomedical Books, 2008), 204. A. H. Sully, Manganese (New York: Academic Press Inc., Publishers, 1955), 1-2; Douglas Alan Fisher, The Epic of Steel (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 21, 23, 66.

108 that Mushet had made any sort of breakthrough. For example, one William Reynolds, “in

December, 1799, obtained a patent…‘for a new method of preparing iron for the conversion thereof into steel,’ by employing oxide of manganese,” and Bessemer cited other cases to show the mineral was “perfectly well known to Sheffield-steel makers” then, years “before Mr. Mushet claimed the use of it.” Though Mushet’s chief claim was simply to have improved an erratic process, and not to have hit upon a use for manganese, he received little reward for his find. Bessemer amassed a fortune.173

The tariff created our whole steel industry

The main legacy these two men left was, again, a way to produce high-quality steel. The U.S. wasted little time capitalizing on this breakthrough, erecting trade barriers to allow its domestic steel sector to mature free from foreign—particularly

British—competition. In the mid-19th century, for example, “most domestically used iron, including that used for rails, was imported from the United Kingdom. In 1850, production in the US was one-fifth that of the United Kingdom,” but the emergence of the new Republican Party changed this situation, bolstering U.S. steelmakers.174

The Morrill Tariff was an early, crucial law benefiting these manufacturers.

“Justin Smith Morrill, Republican of Vermont, proposed the tariff bill in the House of

Representatives” in the spring of 1860, intending “to protect and support many sectors of the economy and all the regions of the country by placing tariff duties on agricultural,

173 Robert P. Rogers, An Economic History of the American Steel Industry (London: Routledge, 2009), 17. Sir Henry Bessemer, F.R.S., An Autobiography (London: Offices of “Engineering,” 35 and 36, Bedford Street, Strand, W.C., 1905), 257-258, 260, 277. 174 Michael Goldfield, “The impact of globalization and neoliberalism on the decline of organized labour in the United States,” in Labour, Globalization and the State: Workers, women and migrants confront neoliberalism, eds. Debdas Banerjee and Michael Goldfield, 132.

109 mining, fishing, and manufactured goods”—part of an effort “to draw Northern industrial states to the Republican Party in that year’s election,” the contest that brought Lincoln to power.175

“When the Morrill tariff was adopted this country had not produced one pound of

Bessemer steel,” James M. Swank, secretary of the American Iron and Steel Association, observed, “and it was not until 1867 that its manufacture in the United States as a commercial product may be said to have been established.” In that year, for example, the

U.S. “produced 2,276 gross tons of Bessemer steel rails, and in 1881 we produced

1,187,770 tons. In the whole period of fifteen years from 1867 to 1881 we produced

4,566,358 gross tons of Bessemer steel rails, almost every ton of which was laid in the track of American railroads.” Swank believed protectionism’s importance could not be exaggerated. “Our whole steel industry of every form may truthfully be said to have been created by the Morrill tariff and its supplements,” he insisted.176

“By 1895,” meanwhile, “US iron and steel production had already surpassed that of the UK worldwide.” Eleven years later, “US steel production was four times as great as that of the UK. At its peak in 1945, 62 per cent of the world’s steel was produced in the US, and, of course, US steel makers were among the leading proponents of ‘free trade,’” Michael Goldfield writes sardonically. That the tariff’s beneficiaries were clamoring for free trade was not unusual, Joel Magnuson explains. Around the turn of the century, the richest men in the U.S.—many of whom made fortunes laying steel rails, thanks to the Morrill Tariff—denied “their reliance on these anti-competitive structures,”

175 Peter S. Genovese, “Morrill Tariff Act (1861),” in The American Economy: A Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Cynthia Clark (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 297. 176 James M. Swank, The tariff on iron and steel justified by its results: a paper laid before the Tariff Commission at Pittsburgh, October 10, 1882 (Philadelphia: The American Iron and Steel Association, 1882), 2-4.

110 and thus “concealed their monopoly power behind bold proclamations of the virtues of free-market capitalism.”177

The array of “anti-competitive structures” benefiting U.S. steel led to intensified manganese mining. There were no good substitutes for the mineral—titanium, zirconium, or perhaps tungsten could have also strengthened steel at high temperatures, but all these were too scarce and costly to be viable alternatives. By the mid-20th century, every ton of steel made in the U.S. contained ten to fifteen pounds of manganese, and the iron and steel industries absorbed 95% of the manganese used in the country.178

Of small extent, discontinuous, and scattered

This immense U.S. appetite for manganese ran up against the country’s geological endowment. High-grade domestic deposits fulfilled industry’s needs in the 19th century, but as these needs persisted—and expanded—in the 20th, attention turned increasingly to foreign sources. Domestic deposits supplied just under a quarter of U.S. manganese consumption during World War I, for example, even as the conflict promoted intense exploitation of whatever manganese the homeland could offer. As the Pittsburgh Press reported in October 1915, one “American industry to benefit from the world war is the

177 Goldfield, “The impact of globalization,” 132. Joel Magnuson, Mindful Economics: How the U.S. Economy Works, Why It Matters, and How It Could be Different (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008) 83- 84. 178 Bidwell, Raw Materials, 185. Priest, Global Gambits, 1-2. Technologic Committee on Manganese, National Academy of Sciences National Research Council, “Manganese, 4/1/40 – 3/31/42, Part I,” September 20, 1940; Box 33, Administrative Subject Files (1940-45), Metals Reserve Company; Records of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Record Group 234; National Archives at College Park; College Park, MD.

111 production of manganese ores. Mines which before the war could not be profitably worked in competition with the higher grade ores are now being taxed to capacity.”179

Before the war, “annual production of true manganese ore in the United

States…was almost negligible,” British imperial officials commented in 1921, while cataloguing the world’s manganese deposits for their own needs. “Most of the known deposits of manganese ore proper” in the U.S. “are of small extent, discontinuous, and scattered,” the British added, explaining that Washington was “dependent during the war on foreign sources of supply, and especially on Brazil, whose exports of manganese ore to the United States rose from 70,200 long tons in 1913 to 524,291 long tons in 1917.”

Another crucial source “was Cuba, whose exports to America rose from 5,141 tons in

1915 to 82,974 tons in 1918.” Decades later, during World War II, domestic sources would supply just 13 percent of U.S. manganese requirements, and Brazilian and Cuban manganese would again play key roles in the war effort.180

But while the British referred to the U.S. as “dependent” on foreign manganese, in a strict sense this description is inaccurate. The U.S. did not totally lack this mineral, but instead was left with medium- and low-grade deposits that were difficult to exploit at a profit. The turn towards, say, Brazilian and Cuban manganese was thus motivated less by utter necessity than it was by a range of factors: the fact that these countries had won the geological lottery, with rich manganese reserves below their soils, but also that these reserves could be exploited for relatively little money. “The cost of mining manganese ore in the United States is so much higher than that of the foreign ore, that the domestic

179 “Manganese Ore Output Boosted,” Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), Oct. 24, 1915. 180 Imperial Mineral Resources Bureau, The Mineral Industry of the British Empire and Foreign Countries— War Period—Manganese (1913-1919) (London: Printed and Published by His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1921), 103, 104; Office of Technology Assessment, 184-185.

112 producers cannot readily compete with the foreign producers,” British officials observed.181

The fact that the U.S. was not compelled by utter necessity to rely on foreign deposits—or at least not to exploit them to the extent it did—led to a debate in the interwar years. The argument centered on the question of whether domestic low- and mid-grade deposits should be exploited more fully, and it played out at, among other venues, the First Annual Convention of the American Manganese Producers Association, held in Washington in September 1928. Several speakers there stressed the feasibility of expanded domestic mining. “Turn back the pages of history of the copper industry 30 years and you will see there was a time when the pessimist bemoaned the fact that he had but small reserves of high-grade copper,” J. Carson Adkerson, the group’s president, remarked. But “our chemists and metallurgists are working wonders before our eyes,” he explained. “The mining companies are going back to their old tailing dumps and slag piles and are recovering values which less than a decade ago were not known to exist.”

He felt similar feats could revive U.S. manganese mining.182

But it was the War Department’s Major Alfred J. Hobley whose convention speech indicated the direction Washington’s manganese policy would take. “There are,” he argued, “certain raw materials which must be imported in whole or part and which are highly essential for industrial purposes.” These “strategic raw materials” were, according to the Army-Navy Munitions Board, crucial to both the military and industry—but also

181 Imperial Mineral Resources Bureau, The Mineral Industry of the British Empire and Foreign Countries, 103-104. William P. Tidwell, “Manganese: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1940-1945,” 1948; Box 5, Lead- Manganese, Metals Reserve Company; Administrative Histories of the R.F.C.’s Wartime Programs, 1945- 54; Office of the Secretary, Reconstruction Finance Corporation; Records of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Record Group 234; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 182 American Manganese Producers Association, Proceedings of the First Annual Convention (Washington, D.C., 1928), 13-15.

113 difficult to procure, since they had to be found abroad, extracted, and then transported to the U.S.

The Munitions Board and other governmental agencies issued lists of these materials beginning in World War I, altering the documents as domestic production fluctuated, extractive technologies changed, or wartime called for expanded procurement, to name some of the variables. But certain items were mainstays on these lists.

Manganese was one of them. It was on the War Industries Board’s list in 1916, when the

Council of National Defense also classified manganese as strategic. General James G.

Harbord, in 1921, drafted a similar list that included manganese. And the metal was in every subsequent paper like these, including the Munitions Board’s 1940 version, compiled as the war loomed. Manganese was that essential to industry, and considered that difficult to procure cheaply at home.183

Do they expect that, in isolation, they could get strong defense without manganese?

Still, manganese production during World War II suggested again that, to a degree, reliance on foreign ores was a choice, not a necessity. This conflict, like its predecessor, revived the domestic manganese sector. Some commentators saw this trend as indicating that the U.S. was largely self-sufficient in needed minerals. “The United

States is so large and so rich that 150 years of explorations have not revealed the full extent of our resources in materials which we have been importing. This is emphasized by the recent development of an immense deposit of manganese,” the Associated Press

183 American Manganese Producers Association, Proceedings, 72. C. Addison Hickman, The Future of Western Hemisphere Strategic Mineral Industry. Bureau of Mines, United States Department of the Interior, “Materials Survey—Manganese,” October 15, 1952; Box 41, Administrative Subject Files (1940- 45), Metals Reserve Company; Records of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Record Group 234; National Archives at College Park; College Park, MD.

114

(AP) reported, citing as evidence the fact “that a veritable mountain of this ore has been surveyed at Boston Hill, near Silver City, N.M. It will yield millions of tons of ore.”184

But the AP’s was one of the few sanguine assessments of manganese supplies for the coming war. As Peter Edson—in a Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA) dispatch filed two weeks before Pearl Harbor—told his readers, “You may not figure that manganese means much in your sweet young life,” but assured them it did. He wrote that

“when you consider that defense production calls for 99 million tons of steel a year by

1942 or 1943, you can see that the manganese requirements may run more than 700,000 tons a year, as against the current year’s requirements of around 140,000 tons.” Thus “a five-times expansion must be arranged.”185

“We are more self-sustaining than any other nation perhaps,” syndicated columnist Raymond Clapper conceded. “We have all of the iron ore we need. But steelmaking requires manganese. We must import about 1,300,000 tons a year, according to

Dr. William Y. Elliott, OPM [Office of Production Management] expert handling import stockpiles.” He added that U.S. planners had not “been able to find that much as yet,” and believed it “completely misleading to say that we are 90 per cent self-sufficient, that our foreign trade accounts for only 10 per cent of our economic life. It is like saying that nails are not necessary in building a house because only a few dollars’ worth are used. In spite of our high self-sufficiency, certain items must come in.”

Clapper proceeded to raise crucial points about U.S. foreign policy. “If we were

100 per cent isolationist we would still have to go and get this essential material—for I don’t hear of any isolationists saying they would scrap defense. Do they expect that even

184 “Now Our Own Manganese,” Toledo Blade (Toledo, OH), Nov. 29, 1940. 185 Peter Edson, “Fear Shortage of Manganese May Slow Up Defense,” The Evening Independent (St. Petersburg, FL), Nov. 21, 1941.

115 with isolation, they could get strong defense without manganese, for instance?” Given the activity of U.S. mining firms abroad throughout the first half of the 20th century, it is not clear what relevance terms like “isolationist,” or concepts like “non-interference,” have in describing U.S. foreign policy during this period.186

All of this manganese was to be purchased in foreign markets

The news articles reviewed above were in line with Washington’s views on the wartime manganese situation. “In 1939 the quantity of manganese ore in this country was approximately 900,000 tons. A geological survey made by the Bureau of Mines resulted in an estimate of 1,200,000 long tons of manganese ore to meet requirements during a year of stress,” a Metals Reserve report explained. Given these needs, on

October 4, 1940, U.S. planners “reported that unless additional procurements could be had during an emergency there would be no manganese ore…in the country at the end of twenty-six months.”187

The Geological Survey explained that the war in Europe, and the resulting “27- percent increase in American steel production” in 1940, were the main factors straining the U.S. manganese sector, which “supplied only 3 percent of the apparent domestic consumption” that year. Pressures on domestic manganese continued to rise the year the

U.S. entered the war. The Survey wrote that “all possible sources were stressed to the limit during 1941,” for example, and continuing “unprecedented demand for manganese

186 Raymond Clapper, “U. S. Lifeline,” Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), Oct. 31, 1941. 187 Metals Reserve Company, “Manganese Ore,” June 30, 1945; RFC Metals Reserve Company – Manganese Program, 1941-45; Subject File, 1931-1960, Papers of Frank E. Johnson; Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, MO.

116 by the steel industry resulted” again “in a record consumption of manganese ore during

1942.”188

In part to deal with these issues, President Roosevelt created the National Defense

Advisory Commission in May 1940. This new entity reported directly to the president, and a month after its launch released its first paper—a “Manganese Procurement Plan,” based on the expectation of a coming shortage of the mineral. Several U.S. agencies then proceeded to draft stockpile plans, disagreeing on a number of points as they strategized.

One dispute regarded the stockpile’s size. The Munitions Board suggested a figure that

“was not high enough to satisfy the” Advisory Commission, for example. “Its recommendation was first for a stockpile of 1,430,000 tons for a three-year emergency,” but the Advisory Commission later upped this total to 1,800,000 tons, “and this objective remained firm until June 1941 when the OPM established a new target of 3,200,000 tons, to be acquired over three years. All of this manganese was to be purchased in foreign markets,” and these fast-increasing targets reflect the poor grasp U.S. officials appear to have had of their country’s enormous mineral needs. The initial, comparatively modest estimates had to be revised upward as Washington confronted these requirements more directly.189

There were also disputes regarding the grade of manganese ore to be procured.

The Reconstruction Finance Corporation, for example, adhered rigidly to a 48%

188 Robert H. Ridgway, H. W. Davis, Allan F. Matthews, “Manganese and manganiferous ores,” Minerals Yearbook – Review of 1940, ed. H. D. Keiser (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1941), 567-568. Norwood B. Melcher, “Manganese and manganiferous ores,” Minerals Yearbook – 1941 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1943), 583. Norwood B. Melcher, “Manganese and manganiferous ores,” Minerals Yearbook – 1942, ed. C. E. Needham (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1943), 613. 189 Brian M. Blouet and Olwyn M. Blouet, “International Relations and Global Affairs,” Latin America and the Caribbean: A Systematic and Regional Survey, eds. Brian W. Blouet and Olwyn M. Blouet (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010), 108l. Priest, Global Gambits, 140, 167-173. Tidwell, “Manganese: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1940-1945.”

117 requirement for manganese, but the Advisory Commission encouraged “a more liberal attitude,” and the Munitions Board “registered no firm objective to recommended purchases of lower grades from South Africa,” for example, so long as “the stockpile would contain an average of 48 per cent manganese.” The steel industry merely “hoped the grades would run ‘nearer 45 per cent than 43 per cent,’” for its part. But these disagreements were merely tactical, it is clear, and did not reflect major differences among government agencies, or between the public and private sectors, on the urgency of getting as much manganese out of the ground as possible.190

This urgency grew as the war disrupted European markets, focusing U.S. attention more on Latin American manganese. Tidwell, in Metals Reserve’s history of manganese procurement, explained that “the emphasis in both [the Advisory Commission] and OPM swung to the Caribbean and Latin American countries early in 1941,” and the Advisory

Commission wrote to Nelson Rockefeller, chairman of the Interdepartmental Committee of American Affairs, that January stressing Latin America’s importance. “Cuba, Chile, and Brazil were particularly recommended” in the letter, and Washington arranged overall mineral agreements with the latter two countries, as well as Mexico, in 1941 and 1942, in which Metals Reserve “was to buy their exportable surpluses. A program of production stimulation and direct purchases was undertaken in these countries in 1942” to this end. By that point, U.S. geologists had already scoured the continent. Harold Ickes,

U.S. Secretary of the Interior, explained in December 1940 “that six scientists of the

United States Geological Survey are en route to Bolivia, Cuba and Brazil to explore areas

190 Priest, Global Gambits, 167-173; Tidwell, “Manganese: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1940-1945.”

118 which may furnish tin, tungsten, manganese, chromite and antimony, as well as other metals essential in the Western Hemisphere defense program.”191

Deposits of manganese are practically unlimited

Brazil, as it had during World War I, was expected to serve as a major manganese source for the U.S. in the Second World War. The Advisory Commission’s June 1940

“Manganese Procurement Plan” took stock of the country’s massive reserves, and expected its mines in Minas Gerais alone to produce 200,000 to 480,000 tons annually.

The geological endowments of Bahia and Mato Grosso were considered comparably rich, with the latter’s estimated at 30 million tons. Overall, the U.S. Tariff Commission suggested in 1941, Brazil was likely the country with more manganese than any other on the planet. “It is believed that deposits of manganese are practically unlimited,” A. W.

Childs, Assistant Commercial Attaché at the U.S. Embassy, emphasized.192

And Brazilian officials promised to share these immense riches with the U.S.

“American steel mills were assured ‘all the manganese they can use’ by a Brazilian government official today,” the AP reported on August 14, 1940. “Maj. Napoleão de

Alencastro Guimarães, chief of staff of Brazil’s ministry of communications and public

191 Jerome F. Machamer, “Manganese: Past, Present, Future and Applied Geology,” Industrial Minerals and Extractive Industry Geology, eds. P. W. Scott and Colin M. Bristow (London: The Geological Society, 2002), 95-96. David Rock, “War and Postwar Intersections: Latin America and the United States,” Latin America in the 1940s: War and Postwar Transitions, ed. David Rock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 24. Tidwell, “Manganese: Procurement and Stockpiling.” “U.S. Is on Track of War Metals,” Montreal Gazette (Montreal), Dec. 13, 1940. 192 John B. DeMille, Strategic Minerals: A Summary of Uses, World Output, Stockpiles, Procurement (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.), 308-309. Priest, Global Gambits, 178-179. Bureau of Mines, “Materials Survey—Manganese.” Tidwell, “Manganese: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1940-1945.” United States Tariff Commission, The Foreign Trade of Latin America (Washington, 1940-1941), 7, 17-18, 40. A. W. Childs, Assistant Commercial Attaché, American Embassy, Rio de Janeiro, “Availability of Certain Strategic Mineral Ores in Brazil,” July 1, 1940; Box 82, Vol. XXIX, Classes 861.6 to 863.4, 1940; General Records, Rio de Janeiro Embassy, Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

119 works, made this offer in announcing his purchase here of $1,800,000 worth of railroad equipment,” the paper explained, noting that this material supplemented his purchase the previous year “of 17 locomotives and 1,000 cars for the Central Railroad of Brazil.”

“That equipment provided the transportation needed for our manganese,” the Major explained, noting also that “he had signed a contract with United States Steel Corp. for

$1,000,000 worth of rails for tracks in northern Brazil”—thus indicating the extent to which his country supported the tariff-coddled U.S. steel sector, which in turn owned much of Brazil’s manganese.193

U.S. Steel, for example, controlled 60% of the country’s deposits as Washington was entering the war. It owned both “the Morro da Mina mine in the Lafayette district in

Minas Gerais and the Urucum mine in Mato Grosso,” which produced most of Brazil’s manganese. And this extensive U.S. control of the resource influenced where it was sent after extraction. “Nearly all of the 1940 exports went to the United States,” for example, and when production “increased greatly” in 1941, the situation was the same, with Brazil

“the largest supplier of manganese ore imported into the United States during the year.”194

This intensified exploitation of Brazilian manganese came towards the end of the

Getúlio Vargas era, during his Estado Novo dictatorship dating from 1937. As the War

Department explained in 1943, “there is no popular participation in government. All officials are appointed, directly or indirectly, by the president of Brazil.” Vargas had come to power in 1930 and remained at Brazil’s helm until 1945, a period “characterized

193 “Steel Plants Are Assured of Manganese by Brazil,” The Milwaukee Sentinel (Milwaukee, WI), August 14, 1940. 194 Ridgway, Davis, and Matthews, Minerals Yearbook – Review of 1940, 583. Melcher, Minerals Yearbook – 1941, 601. Melcher, Minerals Yearbook – 1942, 629. Norwood B. Melcher, “Manganese,” Minerals Yearbook – 1943, ed. C. E. Needham (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1945), 622-623.

120 by a strengthening of the armed forces, especially the army,” and by initiatives “to incorporate the working class into the government’s array of supporters.” Broadly, “the

Estado Novo reflected an alliance between the civilian and military bureaucracy and the industrial bourgeoisie,” whose “immediate common objective was to promote Brazil’s industrialization without causing large social upheavals.”195

The Estado Novo’s launch coincided with “Germany’s greater participation in

Brazilian foreign trade,” which increased to the point where “the Germans had managed to exceed the Americans slightly” by 1938, in terms of supplying Brazil’s imports, providing 25% versus Washington’s 24%. “Also during 1938, 34 percent of Brazil’s exports went to the United States, and 19 percent to Germany,” though in some respects this year marked the height of Germany’s fortunes in Brazil. “From 1938 onward,

Vargas tried to preempt any German plot to meddle in Brazilian politics by banning foreign political parties and agents from operating in Brazil,” and U.S. officials were aware of this policy shift. Thus “in a report to the State Department in 1938, Jefferson

Caffery had credited Vargas for this tough stance against Axis elements in Brazil,” writing that Brazil’s “vigorous anti-Nazi campaign” was “in direct contradiction to [its] previous historical attitude” towards Germany, and “due largely to the changed point of view of President Vargas.” This shift, needless to say, was “amenable to the United

States,” Caffery emphasized.196

195 Boris Fausto and Sergio Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil, trans. Arthur Brakel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 195, 206, 211-212. War Department, “Survey of the Southern Region of Brazil,” July 9, 1943; Box 2, Country Files, 1940-49; Division of Research for the American Republics, Office of Intelligence Research; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 196 Fausto and Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil, 220. Neill Lochery, Brazil: The Fortunes of War: World War II and the Making of Modern Brazil (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 46.

121

Still, one cannot assume that Vargas’ chief goal was pleasing U.S. officials. “If he could maintain his trading relationships with both the United States and Germany,” then “Brazil would be able to continue to grow and modernize even in the midst of a global war,” he believed. “Vargas saw no need to follow the advice of his ambassador in

Washington by choosing between Brazil’s two largest trading partners,” in other words, and in fact “had openly sought to play off Germany against the United States in order to maximize the economic advantages for Brazil.” But the war ultimately interfered with his plans, as it shut down “trade links between Brazil and Germany,” with Britain’s blockade undermining the latter’s Latin American business, leaving England “in no shape to take advantage of the vacuum it had created. The United States appeared with greater strength owing to this.”197

Thus as Pearl Harbor approached, Vargas was “drawing closer and closer to the

Colossus of the North,” and Washington’s “entry into the war in December 1941 forced

Brazil to decide. Vargas began to speak Pan-Americanist language more clearly,” and

Washington picked up on the signal, setting up bases in northeastern Brazil in late 1941

“without waiting for authorization from” Vargas. Brazil cut its ties to the Axis in January

1942, and in May “signed a secret political and military treaty with the United States.”

After “five Brazilian merchant marine ships were sunk by German U-boats” that August,

Brazil joined the war on the Allied side.198

197 Lochery, Brazil, 49. Joseph Smith, Brazil and the United States: Convergence and Divergence (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2010), 107. Fausto and Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil, 222. 198 Fausto and Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil, 222-223.

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Cheerful obedience to the powers that be will make capital secure

As important as Brazil was as a manganese source for the U.S., it was surpassed during the war, when “it dropped below Cuba as a producer” in 1943. The U.S. had given Cuban manganese—mined across the island, but mainly in the eastern Oriente

Province—preferential treatment throughout the early 20th century. By the 1940s, U.S. companies controlled 90% of Cuba’s mining.199

U.S. interest in Cuban manganese dated back to the 19th century. In 1897,

Maine’s Lewiston Evening Journal summarized a report U.S. Consul Pulaski F. Hyatt had sent the State Department. He explained that the island “stands in a geographical position, which, together with her productive soil, mineral wealth and climatic conditions, should entitle her to rank among the foremost communities of the world, a distinction to which I believe she will soon attain whenever a stable government and cheerful obedience to the powers that be” foster “conditions that will make…capital secure,” he wrote. And he lamented that “American capital recently opened a manganese mine about twenty miles from Santiago and built a railroad to carry the ore, but after shipping one cargo the business was closed up by the insurgents.” Still, he expected “that the product of these mines will be in great demand when the conditions are such that they can be operated with safety.”200

An article by Walter Davis in the Riverside, CA Press and Horticulturist, published a few weeks before the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War erupted,

199 Norwood B. Melcher, “Manganese,” Minerals Yearbook – 1948, ed. Allan F. Matthews (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1950), 769. Edward R. Drachman and Alan Shank with Edward Kannyo and Steven R. Ligon, Presidents and Foreign Policy: Countdown to Ten Controversial Decisions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 87. United States Tariff Commission, The Foreign Trade of Latin America, 9-10, 43, 64, 233-243. Bureau of Mines, “Materials Survey—Manganese.” 200 “Cuba’s Resources,” Lewiston Evening Journal (Lewiston, ME), Jan. 21, 1897.

123 emphasized that virtually “all metals and minerals that are useful in any sort of industry are found in Cuba—gold, silver, iron, copper, quicksilver, lead, asphaltum in all its forms, antimony, arsenic, manganese, copper, red lead, etc.” The problem was that

“singularly unfavorable conditions” on the island hindered mining efforts.201

Davis and U.S. Consul Hyatt were writing when Cuba was “commercially a dependency of the United States, while still remaining a political dependency of Spain,” as Henry Hall, U.S. Consul General, put it in 1881. Before Washington’s 1898 intervention, the island was still “a semi-barbarous land of insurrection, ignorance and poverty,” syndicated reporter Garret Smith asserted in 1922. But by the 1920s, the country was “a modern American state that, although politically independent, thanks to us, is to all intents and purposes practically a part of the United States,” he observed, adding that “Cuban mineral wealth is just at the beginning of its development,” with “rich deposits of copper, iron, manganese and chrome” ripe for extraction.202

To ease the import of Cuban ores into the U.S., Washington’s 1897 Tariff Act allowed them to enter the country duty-free. Follow-up legislation in 1909, 1913, and

1934 continued this policy. In February 1931, meanwhile, the “second largest producer of sulphur in the world,” Freeport Texas Company, “acquired controlling interest in

Cuban-American Manganese Corporation, owners of extensive manganese deposits in

Cuba,” the United Press (UP) reported. “Plans have been completed for immediate erection of a Cuban plant to treat 1,000 tons of manganese ore a day, according to Eugene

201 Walter J. Davis, “Pearl of the Antilles: The Story of Cuba, Her People, and Her Resources,” Press and Horticulturist (Riverside, CA), April 9, 1898. 202 Henry C. Hall, Consul General, “Present Condition of Cuba,” February 24, 1881, Reports from the Consuls of the United States on the Commerce, Manufactures, Etc., of their Consular Districts, No. 8 – June 1881 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1881), 835. Garret Smith, “Modern Cuba Wins Her ‘Place in the Sun,’” Berkeley Daily Gazette (Berkeley, CA), June 6, 1922.

124

L. Norton, president of Freeport Texas,” and the facility was expected to process some

“100,000 tons of ore a year containing 50 per cent or more of metallic manganese.” The fact that Cuban metals entered the U.S. duty-free was crucial here, “as it would place the

Freeport company in a position to supply the American steel industry with manganese in direct competition with the Soviet product, which it is said has been dumped here below actual cost of production.” By the end of the decade, as Washington readied for war,

Cuban manganese exports to the U.S. rose dramatically, and were 23% greater in 1940 than in 1939, for example.203

The pace of manganese shipments picked up in part due to planning, and in part because of technical innovation. The AP reported in August 1939 on a novel “extraction process...which gets this ore in Cuba from deposits that had been considered too low- grade to be useful on a large scale” in the past. Engineers from the Colorado School of

Mines, Columbia, and MIT had visited the island to develop this technique, which entailed “floating out…bits of manganese in a mixture of water and other chemicals.”204

Mining experts were involved in formulating a stockpile strategy as well. “The need for manganese in steel making in war is so acute that last winter mining engineers meeting in New York advised storing this metal instead of gold,” the AP explained, also in August 1939. Those at the meeting felt that, “in case of war, Cuba can supply all that is needed.” A year later, the Freeport-controlled Cuban-American Manganese

Corporation “announced plans for expanding the capacity of its plant at Cristo, near

Santiago, Cuba, to meet United States war industry needs for manganese.” Freeport’s

203 United States Tariff Commission, The Foreign Trade of Latin America, 9-10, 43, 64, 233-243. Priest, Global Gambits, 178. Tidwell, “Manganese: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1940-1945.” Ridgway, Davis, and Matthews, Minerals Yearbook – Review of 1940, 583. “Freeport Gets Cuban Concern,” Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), Feb. 20, 1931. 204 “Manganese Extracted from Low-Grade Ore,” The Tuscaloosa News (Tuscaloosa, AL), Aug. 8, 1939.

125 president, Langbourne M. Williams, Jr., “said the capacity by Jan. 1 would be stepped up to 130,000 tons of ore from 100,000 tons annually.”205

Charles Ducoté, the Assistant Commercial Attaché in Cuba, noted the island’s

“mineral industry registered a large increase in production during 1941,” due to the combination of improved mining technology and U.S. demand. Because of

Washington’s needs, “the long established companies producing minerals in Cuba were called upon to stimulate their output. This was done with a considerable measure of success and the larger production thus accomplished, together with the entry into the mining field of new entities,” all combined to effect “the rather large advance in production registered last year as compared with 1940,” Ducoté wrote in May 1942.206

This is an instance where the political element outweighs the economic

Chile also provided the U.S. with manganese. “The long sausage which comprises the land of Chile is full of excellent meat,” as syndicated travel writer Frank G.

Carpenter awkwardly described it in 1898. “There are few countries of its area which have such wonderful natural resources,” including “large deposits of iron, manganese, quicksilver and lead.” This was an overly rosy assessment; Chile was more a tofu sausage where its manganese was concerned. The country was a mere bit player compared to Brazil and Cuba. It contributed just 0.8% of Latin America’s total

205 “Cuban Manganese Gives U.S. Certain War Supply,” Milwaukee Journal (Milwaukee, WI), Aug. 5, 1939. “Expand Manganese Plant in Cuba,” Milwaukee Journal (Milwaukee, WI), Aug. 17, 1940. 206 Charles H. Ducoté, Assistant Commercial Attaché, “Cuban Production of Minerals During 1941 Registered Large Increase,” May 28, 1942; Box 219, Cuba-Cuban Ore Development Program, Reports and Blueprints Part 1 thru Cuba-Dispatches, 1/1/43-9/30/43 Part 2 of 2; Contract Files (1940-55), Metals Reserve Company; Records of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Record Group 234; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

126 manganese output from 1936-1938, for example, while Cuba accounted for 56.8%, and

Brazil 42.4%, during the same period.207

Despite Chile’s poor manganese prospects, the Japanese “showed an interest in

Chilean ores of all grade” during the early 1940s. “They were willing to take the entire

Chilean output over a long term and at prices in excess of American quotations”—in fact, they were willing “even to prefinance its production and announced that price was no object,” wrote William Tidwell, the historian of U.S. stockpiling efforts. The U.S.

Ambassador at Santiago, Claude Bowers, became aware of these proposals and informed the State Department, which then contacted Metals Reserve. On May 21, 1941, Secretary of State Cordell Hull sent Will L. Clayton, who during the war worked both for the

Export-Import Bank and as Assistant Secretary of Commerce, “a caustic reminder that

‘…the chief justification for entering into a contract for this manganese is to prevent its going to Japan. This is an instance,’ he said, ‘where the political element outweighs the economic,’” he emphasized.208

To secure Chilean cooperation on this issue, Dr. Charles Will Wright, of the U.S.

Bureau of Mines, traveled to Chile in 1941. Once there, it seems he simply informed the appropriate officials that the U.S. needed manganese—around 200,000 tons a year, ideally—and had the money to buy it. Chilean mining interests responded quickly, expanding extractive operations to provide the requested metals and putting thousands of men to work towards this end. Wright had been in Chile independently of Metals

Reserve and without its knowledge, since its officials told the Chilean government

Washington would purchase only 30,000 tons annually. But since Wright’s request “to

207 Frank G. Carpenter, “Among the Chilenos,” Deseret News (Salt Lake City, UT), Aug. 30, 1898. Bureau of Mines, “Materials Survey—Manganese.” Tidwell, “Manganese: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1940-1945.” 208 Tidwell, “Manganese: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1940-1945.”

127 the Chilean producers encouraged them to enlarge their mining capacity several times over,” the MRC’s goal was soon raised “to 80,000 tons per annum,” under the terms of the over-all agreement signed in February 1942.209

Chile’s shipments to Japan had ceased by then, and in fact may have been terminated as early as November 1941. Among the factors behind Chilean mining’s turn to the U.S. was that the Chilean Development Corporation “expressed an interest in the long range development of the country’s deposits and considered the Japanese intervention to be more of transitory character,” for example. Still, in order to effectively head off Japanese competition, the U.S. was forced to shell out “15.25 per ton for 42 per cent manganese,” versus “$10 a ton for 46 per cent ore” in Brazil.210

Later in the war, as the first purchase contract neared its termination, another agreement for an additional 80,000 tons—to be delivered over a 12-month period ending

July 31, 1944—was made. Chilean output increased considerably over the following years, and “shipped 149,564 tons of ore during 1946 compared with 91,334 tons in 1945 and 4,289 tons in 1944,” the Geological Survey noted.211

209 Tidwell, “Manganese: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1940-1945.” Department of State Memorandum of Conversation, “United States Purchases from Chile of Manganese, Copper and Nitrates,” December 20, 1943; Box 31, Memoranda on Chile (June-December 1943), Volume 5, November 1942-December 1943; Memorandums Relating to Individual Countries, March 2, 1918-December 31, 1947; Office of American Republic Affairs, Its Predecessors, and Its Successors; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park; College Park, MD. 210 Tidwell, “Manganese: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1940-1945.” 211 DeMille, Strategic Materials, 308-309. “United States Purchases from Chile of Manganese, Copper and Nitrates,” December 20, 1943. Norwood B. Melcher, “Manganese,” Minerals Yearbook – 1946, ed. Allan F. Matthews (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1948).

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Well, I finally saw a real manganese deposit

Mexico at first seemed to have little potential as a manganese supplier. Early assessments in the World War II era did not suggest efforts to expand its production of this metal would work. Mexican officials sought to change this pessimistic assessment.

Felipe N. Puente, of the National Railways of Mexico, delivered a speech in October

1940 observing that Washington was “clamoring to secure a supply of certain strategic materials, which include manganese, rubber, tin, chrome, mercury, molybdenum.

Mexico has most of them and to develop production in the required large scale, we need

American enterprise and equipment,” he emphasized.212

Mining engineer William J. Shedwick wrote in April 1945 that “the production of manganese in Mexico has been quite desultory and has amounted to a negligible portion of the world production.” Only in wartime did this situation change. “In 1940 and 1941 the increased demand for manganese and the gradual increase in price was the incentive for the reopening of a number of previously worked deposits and the beginning of operations on those recently discovered,” he explained. And while “approximately

35,000 tons of ore was produced” in 1942, in the following year the “the United States

Government, through the Metals Reserve Company, initiated its program for purpose of stockpiling,” with production doubling “to 70,503 tons of ore.” The total climbed again in 1944, “to 80,671 tons of ore,” Shedwick noted.213

According to a 1946 U.S. government report, manganese had been located in 355 deposits throughout 20 of Mexico’s 30 states. Before 1942, manganese ore production

212 “Mexico May Supply Vital War Materials,” Schenectady Gazette (Schenectady, NY), Oct. 18, 1940. 213 William J. Shedwick, “Manganese,” April 21, 1945; Box 641, Vol. 291, 863.5, 1945; General Records (1937-49), Mexico City Embassy; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

129 was around 54,000 tons, but this figure climbed to 70,503 tons in 1943, 80,671 in 1944, and then dropped to just under 52,000 tons in the war’s final year, continuing to fall the following one. Until late 1941, the metal was coming mainly from Chihuahua—the source of about half of Mexico’s output. San Luis Potosí contributed 17 percent, and

Zacatecas and Baja California about 10 percent each. The latter’s production increased sharply in 1942, making it the major producer that year.214

The most crucial mine in that state was known as Lucifer. It was 17 kilometers northwest of Santa Rosalía, a city on the Baja California Peninsula’s east coast. “Well, I finally saw a real manganese deposit,” the Geological Survey’s Parker D. Trask wrote after visiting the site in April 1943. Lucifer was Mexico’s largest manganese ore producer, and believed by some to hold the most high-grade manganese oxide ore in

North America. Most of its ore was first shipped to the Iron and Steel Division of the

Kaiser Co., based in Fontana, CA. Later, shipments were delivered to other firms as well, like the Tennessee Eastman Corporation, which used manganese for chemical purposes. A report on the mine in the records of the State Department’s Division of

Defense Materials explained that “the labor situation in the Santa Rosalía area is somewhat complicated by the recent increased demand and rise in price for shark liver,” which induced “many of the men who formerly worked in the mines” to fish. “It is not thought, however, that a serious shortage of labor will be felt although some difficulty may be experienced in any rapid expansion in operations,” the study concluded.215

214 Parker D. Trask and José Rodríguez Cabo, Jr., “Manganese Deposits of Mexico,” Geologic Investigations in American Republics, 1946 (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1948), 209-215. Bureau of Mines, “Materials Survey—Manganese.” 215 Trask and Cabo, “Manganese Deposits of Mexico,” 209-215, 228-231. Parker D. Trask, U.S. Geological Survey, to D. F. Hewett, U.S. Geological Survey, April 2, 1943; Box 322, Lucifer Mining Company; Contract Files (1940-55), Metals Reserve Company; Records of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Record

130

There is little “mining” in the usual sense of the word

Emerson Brown, Minerals Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Rio de Janeiro, felt obligated to correct a misconception when reporting on a November 1944 trip to Minas

Gerais. He explained that “there is little ‘mining’ in Brazil in the usual sense of the word,” since much “of Brazil’s mineral production, particularly the strategic minerals, is from surface or open pit operations, almost entirely by hand”—thus making investment in “modern mining installations such as are common elsewhere in South America” unnecessary. For example, Brown “was shown over the open cut mine of the Cia.

Meridional de Mineração”—a U.S. Steel subsidiary “entirely financed by American capital”—“which produces about 25,000 metric tons a month of manganese ore for export to the United States.” It was, in his experience, “unusual to see so large an open pit mine being worked” without machines.

In Cuba as well, American Consul General Harold Tewell saw that “mining methods” were “slow and inefficient as hand tools such as picks, shovels, et cetera, are still used to a very considerable degree.” There was a simple reason why hand mining was the norm in these countries. “Labor is cheap,” Brown admitted. “Much could be made of the expression ‘exploitation of labor,’ but the low wages and poor living conditions are standard in Brazil.” The State Department, in a 1945 memorandum, argued that Brazil’s “major issue…is economic and social because of the very uneven distribution of wealth and the poverty and illiteracy of a great part of the people,” whose

“unrest may be expected to increase steadily though slowly unless some improvement is

Group 234; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. “Report on the ‘Lucifer’ Manganese Deposit near Santa Rosalia, Baja California;” Metals and Minerals (Mexico), 1941-1943; Box 13, Metals and Minerals (Lead – Nickel), Records Relating to Individual Commodities, 1941-45; Records of the Division of Defense Materials; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

131 made. This is not likely as none of the political parties has met the problem,” it concluded.216

U.S. officials found conditions in Bahia, one of the country’s manganese- producing states, especially appalling. Larry Barnette, an Economic Analyst at the Rio de Janeiro Embassy, could not hide his revulsion in an August 1943 report. The state’s

“wage scale” was “atrociously low,” and “employers wangle means of beating it down” even further. Bahians “exist on a fare,” he added, “the sheer monotony of which would be revolting to civilized people.” It was “so lacking in calories and vitamins as to starve an ascetic monk in solitary meditation. The ration of the poor, if served in a boarding- kennel in the United States, would probably result in a visit from the S.P.C.A.”—and had

“produced,” in his eyes, “a race of people so sub-standard, physically and mentally, that it is difficult to believe them a product of the Western Hemisphere.”

A “shocking rate of infant mortality” wiped out large numbers of this “sub- standard” race’s young, Barnette continued, noting that only four of ten infants “will live to be a year old.” Those surviving to adulthood, meanwhile, “are flat-chested, stoop-

216 Emerson I. Brown, American Embassy Rio de Janeiro, “Minerals Quarterly Report, 4th Quarter 1944, with Cumulative Review of the Year 1944,” May 17, 1945; Box 339, Vol. XLVI, Classified & Unclassified General Records, 1945; Rio de Janeiro Embassy, Brazil; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Emerson I. Brown, Minerals Attaché, American Embassy Rio de Janeiro, “Notes of Trip to Minas Geraes—November 1944,” December 29, 1944; Box 339, Vol. XLVI, Classified & Unclassified General Records, 1945; Rio de Janeiro Embassy, Brazil; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Harold S. Tewell, American Consul General, “Suggestions and Recommendations Aiming at Increasing Cuban Production of Manganese and Chrome Ore,” March 26, 1942; Cuba—Cuban Ore Development Program Reports & Blueprints, Part I, 5 of 5, Thru Cuba-Dispatches-1/21/43-9/30/43; Box 219, Contract Files (1940-55), Metals Reserve Company; Records of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Record Group 234; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. “Summary of Press and Political Reports Received from September 14 to 25, 1945,” September 25, 1945; Memoranda on Brazil, April – Sept. 1945; Box 28, Brazil, Vol. 9, Dec. 1944 – Oct. 1945; Memorandums Relating to Individual Countries, March 2, 1918 – Dec. 31, 1947; Office of American Republic Affairs, Its Predecessors, and Its Successors; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

132 shouldered, wasp-waisted, spindle-shanked, puny specimens of degenerated humanity.

Group physiognomies look like the sketch-book of an embittered cartoonist,” and said group’s “docility amounts almost to fatalism,” he felt. Barnette thought Bahians’ eating habits produced this deep indifference, as “the counters of the butcher-shops look as though it was feeding time in the lion-house of a large zoo.” “Nothing better illustrates the low caliber of the people of the district than the methods followed in the handling of meat,” he argued. “To foreigners the spectacle is revolting, if not nauseating.”

This report impresses for several reasons. The vivid portrayal of poverty is one, but more striking is the contempt running through it, as Barnette attributes suffering to flaws supposedly rooted in “the race,” as opposed to, say, political and economic policies. In his view, “as the race becomes whiter, its health improves. This is probably because white blood increases the intelligence, hence the earning power, and thus the ability to buy more and better food.” A fantastic chain of reasoning. Barnette was but a functionary at the Embassy, it is true, but his writing reflects a disdain for Brazilians central to Washington’s wartime policy in Latin America. Contempt for the region’s people meant there were no barriers to getting as much of their “cheap labor” into the mines as possible. There was little ethical opposition to a key facet of U.S. foreign policy—namely, adapting “sub-standard” peoples to U.S. industrial and military needs.217

The Foreign Economic Administration’s Richard H. Rich outlined some of the problems related specifically to Brazilian mining in February 1944. “Despite increased wages, laborers, especially in the mines, are unable to make ends meet,” he observed.

217 Larry Barnette, Economic Analyst, American Embassy, Rio de Janeiro, “Health and Hygiene in the Bahia Consular District,” August 10, 1943; Box 180, Vol. XXXIV, Classified & Unclassified General Records, 1943; Rio de Janeiro Embassy, Brazil; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

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“The cost of living and the cost of labor and supplies at Governador Valadares [a municipality in Minas Gerais] have gone up inordinately,” he added, explaining that “the economic situation in [this] most important producing area is bad and deteriorating.”

One of the gravest problems related to “local food production,” which Rich explained was “being quickly wiped out for various reasons”—specifically because “labor is being drawn from the farms to the railroad, mines, lumber industry, and road construction,” thus revealing some of the disruption Washington’s wartime aims helped cause in this area.218

In Mexico, writer Fernando Jordán visited the Lucifer mine, to see how life was for those working its deposits. He got to the point: the manganese boom there produced no benefits for the miners, who risked succumbing to silicosis, if not injury. Jordán asked a mining engineer whether there were problems with silicosis in the region. “None at all,” came the reply. Then there was a brief pause. “There is no problem because all the miners have silicosis,” this man added. Jordán spoke to the mine’s bosses as well, who assured him accidents were rare. Later that afternoon, a collapse in the mine killed one man and wounded several others. Jordán found himself personally driving a nurse to the scene of the accident, and concluded en route that Lucifer’s medical resources were close to nonexistent. His brief account of this manganese motherlode reveals something of the human costs of Washington’s mineral requirements.219

218 Richard H. Rich, Maj., A.C., Special Representative, “Report of the Special Representative for Brazil, January 31, 1944,” to Leo T. Crowley, Administrator, Foreign Economic Administration, February 24, 1944; Box 2, Entry No. 173, Progress Reports of FEA Special Representatives and Missions; Records Analysis Division, Office of Administrator; Records of the Foreign Economic Administration, Record Group 169; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 219 Fernando Jordán, Baja California, tierra incognita (Tijuana, B.C.: Centro Cultural Tijuana, 1996), 123- 125.

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And there were other human costs of manganese mining. It is normal for small quantities of the mineral to be found in one’s diet, but excessive manganese exposure is toxic—a problem that became clear as manganese mining expanded to meet the steel industry’s growing demands. Signs of its poisonousness came early. In 1837, a brief article recorded observations of five workmen in a chemical factory who pulverized manganese dioxide to make chlorine for bleaching powder. Over time, their “whispered speech, hyper-salivation, limb tremor,” as well as “bent posture and muscle weakness,” became obvious. In October 1901, a report described three unusual cases of multiple sclerosis—all in men working as manganese dioxide grinders, and who attributed the disease to their work.

But this study never connected the suffering to manganese exposure. A 1913 article by Louis Casamajor did draw this connection. He wrote of one factory that, during World War I, had taken on more workers to meet increased production needs.

And he observed that several dozen workers exposed to manganese dust at this factory developed similar symptoms. Those who were most ill laughed and wept uncontrollably.

But “it was not until a series of reports in the 1930s and 1940s describing a high incidence of manganese toxicity in manganese mine workers, that manganese toxicity was recognized as a significant health hazard for certain populations. It has been estimated that up to 4% of manganese mine workers in Chile may suffer from manganism,” for example, and the condition “has also been reported in Japan, Morocco,

Cuba, Mexico, the Soviet Union, and the U.S.” The afflicted usually first experience the

“psychiatric symptoms, like irritability, emotional instability, compulsive behaviors and psychosis—the manganese madness,” and the ensuing stages involve “varying

135 proportions of parkinsonism and dystonia.” One common symptom at the latter stages

“is a peculiar gait called the ‘cock walk,” entailing an extension of the spine, flexed elbows, and toe walking that is characteristic of the condition.” Research indicates that even those exposed to low concentrations of airborne manganese are susceptible to the disease, which “can persist for years, even when the individual is removed from the high manganese environment.”220

These nuances aside, the crucial point to bear in mind is that the disease was not some fundamental mystery during the World War II period. It was known that manganese mining caused the condition just described, and it had to be expected that full- on exploitation of this metal would produce—apart from the mineral the steel industry relied on for its survival—an increase in the number of manganism cases as well. The disease was prevalent in the U.S., as Lawrence T. Fairhall and Paul A. Neal detailed in a

1943 study, where they state that “the probable number of workers exposed to manganese poisoning in the United States amounts to 23,340[.]” One of the consequences of

220 Paul D. Blanc, How Everyday Products Make People Sick: Toxins at Home and in the Workplace (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 249-251. Roberto Luccini and Chiara Benedetti, “Other Metals,” in Textbook of Children’s Environmental Health eds. Philip J. Landrigan and Ruth A. Etzel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 290-291. Louis Casamajor, “An Unusual Form of Mineral Poisoning Affecting the Nervous System: Manganese?” Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 60, No. 9, March 1, 1913. Cecil K. Drinker, “The Occurrence, Course, and Prevention of Chronic Manganese Poisoning,” Journal of Dental Research no. 3 (September 1921), lxxxiii-lxxxv. Chin-Chang Huang and Nai- Shin Chu, “Manganese-Induced Parkinsonism, Parkinson’s Disease and Welding,” in Timothy F. Hahn and Julian Werner (editors), New Research on Parkinson’s Disease (New York: Nova Biomedical Books, 2008), 208. Carl L. Keen, Jodi L. Ensunsa, and Michael S. Clegg, “Manganese Metabolism in Animals and Humans Including the Toxicity of Manganese,” in Astrid Sigel and Helmut Sigel, Metal Ions in Biological Systems, Volume 37: Manganese and Its Role in Biological Processes (New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc., 2000), 107- 108. Carl L. Keen and Sheri Zidenberg-Cherr, “Manganese Toxicity in Humans and Experimental Animals,” in Dorothy J. Klimis-Tavantis (editor), Manganese in Health and Disease (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1994), 194, 196. Eric S. Molho, MD, and Stewart A. Factor, DO, “Secondary Causes of Parkinsonism,” in Charles H. Adler and J. Eric Ahlskog (editors), Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders: Diagnosis and Treatment Guidelines for the Practicing Physician (Totowa, NJ: Humana Press, 2000).

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Washington’s World War II-era strategic minerals policy was thus to expose thousands of

Latin Americans to the same poison.221

A National Academy of Sciences monograph reviewed the effects of the increased manganese mining during the war. “The extension of pneumatic drilling in mining work led to an increase in the number of miners. Mining work was the main cause of the growing incidence of chronic manganese intoxication, which was sufficient to take the condition out of the category of medical rarities,” the study explained. There was a spate of studies pointing to the toxic effects of manganese mining in Latin America during and after the conflict. One report, from 1944, “described 64 cases of manganism in miners of Antofagasta, Chile,” while another from 1953 “showed that the introduction of pneumatic drilling, with an increase in dustiness, had led to such an outbreak of manganism at the Coquimbo, Chile, manganese mines in 1953 that, after 3 months of the new procedure, the mine returned to manual drilling.” Also, in Cuba, a pair of 1952 investigations “led to the detection of 120 cases of manganism in the Charco Redondo mine. In later investigations, they detected other cases of manganism.”222

It is a terrible life for the children

Bad infrastructure slowed mineral transportation in Brazil. In Minas Gerais, for example, “the uncertain capacity of the Central Railway for transporting ore to Rio” hindered exploitation of the state’s reserves. U.S. officials believed that, were this railway “built up to a high point of operating efficiency,” then “virtually all of the

221 Lawrence T. Fairhall and Paul A. Neal, Industrial Manganese Poisoning (Washington: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1943), 3-6. 222 National Research Council (U.S.). Committee on Biologic Effects of Atmospheric Pollutants, Manganese (Washington: National Academy of Sciences, 1973), 102.

137 problems of manganese supply would be promptly resolved.” Franklin G. Pardee,

Foreign Minerals Specialist based in Rio, wrote in May 1941 that the tonnage “of manganese that can be exported from Brazil depends upon…railway transportation,” which “must be placed in a position to carry more ore.” Emerson Brown, the Minerals

Attaché, confirmed this assessment. “Rail transport is inadequate, slow, unreliable and expensive,” he wrote. “Unless the railway’s capacity is materially expanded,” he added,

“it will not be able to continue transporting even the present limited amount of manganese along with the expected traffic of ore, fuel” and other materials it had to carry. Lastly, “the Cooke Mission, which consisted of a group of US technicians sponsored jointly by the Brazilian and US governments,” also stressed infrastructure’s importance. “The mission visited Brazil in 1942 and 1943” to determine how it could aid the Allies, and “pointed to a number of factors…that constituted obstacles to rapid growth”—chief among these was “the inadequate transportation system.”223

Brazilians thus had to be put to work laying these rails, so the ores miners and other “cheap labor” extracted could be sent efficiently to the industrial powers. There is some discussion of railroad construction camp conditions in the Office of Inter-American

Affairs’ papers. One report describes a project “divided into units of 10 kilometers,” with each section requiring “a crew of 200 to 500 persons,” for example. Some work camps were near villages, and could rely on area populations. But most “of the labor in the new construction camps is not local to the district” and was imported from other regions.

223 Franklin G. Pardee, Foreign Minerals Specialist, Rio de Janeiro, “Report on Manganese Ore in Brazil,” May 2, 1941; Box 171, Country Files—Brazil; Commercial and Financial, Central Files, General Records; Records of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Record Group 229; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Tidwell, “Manganese: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1940-1945.” Brown, “Minerals Quarterly Report,” May 17, 1945. Werner Baer, The Brazilian Economy: Growth & Development (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2014), 44-45.

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Those brought in had “the custom of moving from project to project with the contractor.

It is a terrible life for the children. Housing consists of crude huts with thatch roof and mud plastered walls.”

This report noted also that construction was proceeding “thru a very low swampy region, in several spots of which there is chronic malaria.” “There is no protection against mosquitoes,” it emphasized. There were “no privies” either. “Excreta are seen all around,” while the food supply was “very deficient,” with few fruits and vegetables.

“Milk for the children is unheard of,” and the camp’s young “show the ill effect of this life of malnutrition and sanitation”—ascariasis, a type of roundworm infection, “is almost universal in children here.”224

In another report, one Dr. Knott described the camps he visited traveling from Rio de Janeiro inland to Belo Horizonte and Itabira, then back to the coast through the Rio

Doce Valley, ending his journey at Vitoria. “Itabira is a very busy place,” he observed.

“They are building a spur line to connect with the railroad at Drummond,” among other projects, “all in addition to the mining operations.” Area “labor camps were the worst of any we saw in the valley,” Knott wrote. “A bacillary dysentery epidemic has been raging” in one of them, for example, and “infant mortality from dysenteries is very high all thru the valley.” A document discussing “Mosquitoes in the Vicinity of Vitoria,” from

December 1942, explained that a construction camp several kilometers from the city was

224 “Health and Sanitation of the Construction Camps of Brazil;” Country Files—Brazil—Basic Economy; Box 83, Central Files, General Records; Records of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Record Group 229; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

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“close to water, and consequently the houses are located on the banks of a wide creek which provides excellent breeding grounds for mosquitoes.”225

At another camp near Vitoria, called Taua, “160 persons, workers and their families” were living in “sanitary conditions” described as “the worst possible. There are no latrines,” and water was “permanently liable to contamination.” “The occurrence of intestinal verminosis among children is particularly striking, since very seldom is a child found who is not pale and who does not have an enlarged abdomen,” one report on the site pointed out. “Scabies is becoming epidemic, especially among the children,” it continued, adding that the young also suffered widely from dysenteriform syndromes.

“Grippe was widespread when we visited the camp, among adults as well as among children,” and one local doctor had “already diagnosed eight cases” of malaria in the camp’s first forty days. “The hygienic conditions of the camp,” it could not be overemphasized, were “very poor,” with its dwellings “built contrary to the most rudimentary principles of hygiene with regard to cleanliness, lighting, and ventilation,” and water drawn “from a stream which is proabaly [sic] polluted.”226

In Cuba, the U.S. Department of the Interior’s 1940-1941 Geological Survey, which the State Department sponsored, stressed that mining regions needed transportation improvements. Many mining areas were connected to Cuba’s Central

225 “Summary of Diary of Dr. Knott Describing Journey from Rio to Vitoria via Belo Horizonte, Itabira and Down the Rio Doce Valley,” Country Files—Brazil—Basic Economy; Box 83, Central Files, General Records; Records of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Record Group 229; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. “Report on Investigations of Mosquitoes in the Vicinity of Vitoria,” Country Files— Brazil—Basic Economy; Box 83, Central Files, General Records; Records of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Record Group 229; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 226 “Report on Investigations of Mosquitoes in the Vicinity of Vitoria;” “Dysentery and Other Diseases in the Vicinity of Alfredo Maia,” Country Files—Brazil—Basic Economy; Box 83, Central Files, General Records; Records of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Record Group 229; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

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Highway, or to railways, only by trails or rough roads that were barely traversable when dry and impassable when wet. Miners often used mules to carry the ore from the mines—needless to say, this made procurement annoyingly costly and time-consuming from Washington’s perspective.227

Tewell, the American Consul General, confirmed this bleak picture of Cuban infrastructure. “In all three branches of Cuban mineral production, especially chrome and manganese,” he wrote, “the construction of roads from the mine areas to the principal highways and railway lines, is urgently called for if large increases in production are desired[.]” Mining companies had informed Cuban officials of “the urgency of the need of fairly extensive work in this direction,” he added. The U.S. Geological Survey, visiting Cuba in January 1943, concurred. “The initiation, during the next month, of a road repairing and building program is of vital importance to some outlying properties, and will make possible shipments of ore from mines formerly unprofitable,” it reported.

The Survey was optimistic that “the activities of the various United States Government units, encouraged and coordinated through the efforts of the Embassy,” would soon “gain more momentum” and quicken road-building. Ultimately the pace of Cuban manganese mining did pick up, and the country “became the largest producer of manganese ore in the Western Hemisphere in 1943.”228

227 United States Tariff Commission, The Foreign Trade of Latin America, 9-10, 43, 64, 233-243. Charles F. Park, Jr., Manganese Deposits of Cuba (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1942), 75- 76, 80, 95-97; Priest 178. Tidwell, “Manganese: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1940-1945.” Tewell, “Suggestions and Recommendations,” March 26, 1942. 228 Harold S. Tewell, American Consul, “Department’s Telegraphic Instructions of December 27, 1941, 6:00 p.m., Requesting Data on Production, et cetera, of Chrome, Manganese, and Tungsten Ores,” January 8, 1942; Box 219, Cuba—Cuban Ore Development Program Reports & Blueprints, Part I, 5 of 5, Thru Cuba- Dispatches-1/21/43-9/30/43; Contract Files (1940-55), Metals Reserve Company; Records of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Record Group 234; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. C. A. Botsford, Minerals Attaché, “A Visit to Certain Manganese Mines in Oriente Province, to Chromite Mines in Oriente and Camaguey Provinces, and the Nickel Property of the Nicaro Nickel

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It seems the only recourse is to change the constitution

U.S. resource needs also required an adequate legal infrastructure, in addition to functioning roads and railways. Ernest Brown, describing the operations of the U.S.

Steel subsidiary in Minas Gerais, explained that its “charter was granted about 40 years ago,” giving the firm “legal right to acquire and operate mines as well as all other activities, such as transportation and power necessary to a large mining enterprise.” But by 1944, when Brown was writing, it was “no longer possible for an American owned company to obtain such rights,” and one of Washington’s wartime grievances with Brazil was the latter’s mining code, which U.S. officials sought to overhaul.229

Limits on foreign activity in Brazil defined the country’s mining legislation in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In 1937, for example, the new constitution “restricted the exploitation of minerals and waterfalls to Brazilians,” emphasizing “nationalization of mines, power resources, and ‘industries considered basic or essential to the economic or military defense of the nation,’” which U.S. capitalists also coveted. “All usage of subsoil wealth was reserved for Brazilians, or companies with Brazilian shareholders”— though Decree Law 66, passed December 14, 1937, expanded “the legal definition of

‘Brazilian’” to the point where the term became meaningless. For example, “foreigners could be considered juridically Brazilian” under this law, and “thus aliens could hold stock in and direct mining companies that were organized under Brazilian laws.”230

Company in Oriente,” February 5, 1943; Box 219, Cuba—Cuban Ore Development Program Reports & Blueprints, Part I, 5 of 5, Thru Cuba-Dispatches-1/21/43-9/30/43; Contract Files (1940-55), Metals Reserve Company; Records of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Record Group 234; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Melcher, Minerals Yearbook – 1943, 623. 229 Brown, “Notes of Trip to Minas Geraes,” December 29, 1944. 230 Fausto and Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil, 214.

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But nationalistic Brazilians “would not tolerate investment by outsiders in critical areas like steel and mineral production,” and thus promoted a new Mining Code, which was passed in 1940. This law “prohibited foreigners from owning or investing in subsoil resources or steel companies using domestic raw materials”—though, like its 1937 predecessor, it too “was softened sufficiently by decrees in 1941 to allow foreign capital back into these areas.” The legal pendulum’s swing between measures curbing outside investment, and those promoting it, “reflected a basic struggle” among Brazilians over whether development “in cooperation with private foreign capital” or autarchy was the most promising path forward.231

U.S. officials, for their part, considered the debate irrelevant. As Brown wrote in

1945, “Brazil has in abundance certain important minerals in which United States territory is deficient.” “The natural solution for such a problem” was obvious, in his view, and was “for American industry to acquire the mineral deposits needed by our country, develop them, and produce the ore required”—it was all very straightforward.

That “the Brazilian constitution and the mining code reserve the mining industry solely for Brazilian nationals” was a needless complication, he complained. “Therefore, it seems that the only recourse is by negotiation between the two governments, either to grant preferential rights to our industry in mining, or change the code and constitution,” he concluded, suggesting the depth of Washington’s commitment to popular decision- making as the “war for democracy” neared its end.232

231 John D. Wirth, The Politics of Brazilian Development, 1930-1954 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), 94-95. 232 Emerson I. Brown, Minerals Attaché, American Embassy Rio de Janeiro, “Memorandum on Some Aspects of Brazil’s Mineral Resources Pertinent to U.S. Policy,” February 27, 1945; Box 339, Vol. XLVI, Classified & Unclassified General Records, 1945; Rio de Janeiro Embassy, Brazil; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

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Paul Daniels, Chargé d’Affaires at the Embassy in Rio, reinforced Brown’s analysts in a June 1945 letter. He recounted, with optimism, how “the interested

Brazilian officials are continuing to give consideration to possible revisions of Brazilian mining legislation, with a view to the eventual drafting of a new Mining Code.” The purpose of these revisions, he elaborated, was to foster “conditions which would make it possible for American enterprise and capital to participate in the development of Brazil’s mineral resources”—and more broadly to open the country to “foreign interests in general,” an anti-autarkic move.233

Another U.S. Embassy official, M. Miles Flynn, contrasted Brazilian mining with extraction elsewhere. “For those who have had any mining experience in other countries the most obvious defects in the Brazilian Mining Code may be summed up as follows:

TIME LOST,” he essentially screamed. “The inexcusable waste of time and money involved in the effort to secure a ‘Concessão de lavra,’” or mining grant, meant “a lack of guarantee for the capitalist,” and ruined “all initiative for new mining ventures.” William

Beulac, also with the Embassy, wrote in September 1945 “that the present Brazilian

Mining Code can scarcely be considered as attractive even to Brazilian nationals interested in the development of mineral deposits.” For this reason, he felt “that any liberalization of the code with respect to possession and operation by foreign interests will be largely ineffective unless accompanied by revision of the many severe regulatory provisions included in the present code.”234

233 Paul C. Daniels, Chargé d’Affaires ad interim, American Embassy Rio de Janeiro, “Policy Regarding Mineral Development in Brazil,” to the Honorable Secretary of State, June 13, 1945; Box 339, Vol. XLVI, Classified & Unclassified General Records, 1945; Rio de Janeiro Embassy, Brazil; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 234 M. Miles Flynn, American Embassy Rio de Janeiro, “Mineracao e Metalurgia, May 1945—Defects in the Brazilian Mining Code,” July 11, 1945; Box 339, Vol. XLVI, Classified & Unclassified General Records, 1945;

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U.S. officials also worried about Cuba’s laws. Consul General Tewell whined in

February 1942 that mining was “hindered by so-called social legislation and agitation on the part of labor leaders,” and that one firm, the Compañía Cubana de Minas y

Minerales—a subsidiary of Philadelphia’s E.J. Lavino & Co.—was trying “to impress upon the Consulate General the unsatisfactory and uncertain status of labor in”

Camaguey. Frustrated in these efforts, the company decided “to request intervention of our diplomatic representatives in Cuba in order to urge the Government to repress the activities of Communistic elements stirring up trouble among the mine workers” there,

Tewell noted, giving some sense of the closeness of U.S. officials and businessmen in

Cuba during the war.235

By the time the U.S. entered the conflict, Fulgencio Batista had “consolidated his position as the most important figure in the army,” becoming president in 1940. He governed until 1944. While in office, “during the boom conditions of the Second World

War, he ruled as a social democrat,” much to mining executives’ annoyance. “Trade union rights were confirmed and extended, government money was spent on social programs and local Communists were welcomed into his government,” while Cuba’s

1940 Constitution “was very much a post-New Deal document,” proclaiming that the

“subsoil belongs to the state,” for example. This document also promised to guarantee

Rio de Janeiro Embassy, Brazil; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Willard L. Beaulac, American Embassy Rio de Janeiro, to the Honorable Adolf A. Berle, American Ambassador, Rio de Janeiro, September 10, 1945; Box 339, Vol. XLVI, Classified & Unclassified General Records, 1945; Rio de Janeiro Embassy, Brazil; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 235 Tewell, “Department’s Telegraphic Instructions,” January 8, 1942.

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“social insurance, accident compensation, pensions, a minimum wage, an eight-hour day, a forty-four hour week and paid holidays lasting a month.”236

The legislation, in brief, was “a curse of the first waters,” in one mining officials’ strange formulation. “If we were given the same right as the sugar companies for continuous work, which we need more than they do”—“and also the right to work a man

56 hours a week”—“it would help us materially,” he wrote. “Working efficiency is greatly reduced by these social laws as in addition to the 60 days which a man gets off with pay, and the 52 Sundays, he is also privileged to get 9 days off during the year for sickness,” the manager complained. “The result is that somebody is always off on illness or on vacation,” he added. “I would say offhand that our working efficiency now is 40% of what it used to be 4 years ago.”237

What will happen after the war?

William LaVarre, Chief of the Metals Reserve Company’s American Republics

Unit, did not avoid the big questions. As he asked in July 1942, “what will happen after the war? Will Brazil turn back to Europe for cheaper markets?” Or would “there arise an economic struggle between the United States and European countries for commercial supremacy in Latin America?” His was not a predictive exercise, and he wished only to outline the problem. Though he did believe “[o]ne fact appears certain”—namely, that

236 Sergio Guerra Vilaboy and Oscar Loyola Vega, Cuba: A History (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2010), 65-67. Richard Gott, Cuba: A New History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 144. Hugh Thomas, Cuba—or, the Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 720. 237 Tewell, “Department’s Telegraphic Instructions,” January 8, 1942.

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“Brazil will continue to find an export outlet for much of its raw materials and foodstuffs in the United States” after the war.238

The conflict’s end saw the conclusion of Vargas’ fifteen-year term in power, marked by a presidential contest. “The 1945 elections aroused great interest among

Brazilians,” as one would have expected. “After years of dictatorship, the Electoral

Justice was not accustomed to gathering and tallying votes,” and that December “13.4 percent of the population” participated in the elections—not quite at the level of participation in, say, ancient Greece—as opposed to the 5.7% at the polls in 1930, when the previous direct presidential elections were held. Eurico Gaspar Dutra took 55% of the votes that year, and assumed office the next. Leslie Bethell argues that this democratic turn “was real,” but ultimately “restricted in scope and fundamentally antipopular in nature. The price of democracy was state control of organized labor, restrictions on political participation, and the elimination of the Communist Left.”239

One of Dutra’s first initiatives was to rework the constitution. The changes were approved quickly, and ratified in September 1946. “Perhaps the measure that had the greatest impact in the economic area was the decision to liberalize external economic relations,” Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert Klein suggest, identifying a measure that also meshed with Washington’s desires. Emerson Brown, the Embassy official, wrote at the end of 1947 that “the Brazilian Constitution provides for foreign participation in mining through a Brazilian company in contrast to the Constitution of 1937 which

238 William LaVarre, Chief, American Republics Unit, “Brazil’s Foreign Trade in Relation to Western Hemisphere Economy,” July 7, 1942; Box 444, S.A. Brazil-Quartz 8/1/43 - 10/15/43 (Part 9) thru S.A. Brazil- Reports-General; Contract Files (1940-55), Metals Reserve Company; Records of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Record Group 234; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 239 Fausto and Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil, 231-232. Leslie Bethell, “Brazil,” in Latin America Between the Second World War and the Cold War, 1944-1948, 65.

147 reserved this right for Brazilian nationals alone.” Embassy official K. Kory explained, in

1948, how U.S. mining firms took advantage of Brazilian law, noting that there were some “dozen American mining companies” in the country then—“that is, mining companies in which American capital has been invested, but which are considered

Brazilian entities, in conformity with the present Brazilian mining laws,” he clarified.240

In other words, U.S. mining in Brazil did not seem at all hindered in the post-war period. In 1947, for example, Bethlehem Steel was granted a concession for the Serra do

Navio deposit in Amapá, near the Amazon River’s mouth. The U.S. firm thus acquired some 2,500 hectares of Brazilian territory, and was given exclusive mining rights at the site for 50 years. A manganese-mining boom was underway there five years later, as

Bethlehem transformed the region to ease the export of extracted metals—building, for example, a railway from the mine to the port at Santana.241

Considerable transformation of the land was inevitable following the discovery in

Amapá, given the location of the manganese. “The deposits are located in thick jungle country,” a report on the Serra do Navio site explained. And the fact that the mineral was in the Amazon allowed Washington to work towards objectives it was already outlining when it entered the war. In late 1941, for example, President Vargas “accept[ed] in

240 Fausto and Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil, 232-233. Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert S. Klein, The Economic and Social History of Brazil Since 1889 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 146. Emerson I. Brown, “Summary of Economic Information,” December 19, 1947; Box 399, Classified & Unclassified General Records; Rio de Janeiro Embassy, Brazil; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. K. Kory, “Accomplishment Report from the Office of the Minerals Attaché,” to Clarence G. Brooks, April 18, 1948; Box 427, Classified & Unclassified General Records; Rio de Janeiro Embassy, Brazil; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 241 Alan Tormaid Campbell, Getting to Know Waiwai: An Amazonian Ethnography (London: Routledge, 1995), 6. John J. Crocitti and Monique Vallance, Brazil Today: An Encyclopedia of Life in the Republic (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012). Peter B. Evans, Dependent Development: The Alliance of Multinational, State, and Local Capital in Brazil (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 157. Bureau of Mines, “Materials Survey—Manganese.” Priest, Global Gambits, 205-206. Michael Scully, “Amazing Amazonia,” The Rotarian Volume LXXXI, Number 2, August 1952.

148 principle an offer of assistance in the development of the Amazon Valley as outlined in a memorandum of the [Inter-American] Coordinator’s Office,” according to U.S. official

Ware Adams. This offer had “state[d] that if the Brazilian Government is really serious in its desire to develop that region,” then Washington would “be willing to be of assistance by having a survey of the region made by a group of experts in agriculture, tropical settlement, tropical diseases, transportation, nutrition, labor and agricultural economics.”242

“The desire of the United States to cooperate in the opening up of the Amazon is by no means a new one,” a January 1942 memorandum added. As it explained further, it was “obvious that the opening up of that vast area would be of the greatest value not only to Brazil but also to all of the Americas because of the almost unlimited possibilities which it holds for the production of commodities vital to a rounded hemisphere economy.” Another memorandum, written that same month, figured the sum that “could be expended on Amazon projects…[was] extremely flexible,” and envisioned, with some fear, “hundreds of millions of dollars going into the region and being gobbled up by the jungle just as easily as the Manaos opera house and mosaic praças.”243

242 “ICOMI: The Discovery and Development of Manganese Ore Resources in the Serra do Navio District, Federal Territory of Amapá, Brazil;” Correspondence File – Numeric File II, F-14; Papers of Merwin L. Bohan; Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, MO. Ware Adams, “Amazon Development Project,” November 13, 1941; Memoranda on Brazil, Sept. – Nov. 1941; Box 26, Brazil, Vol. 5, Sept. 1941 – Feb. 1942; Memorandums Relating to Individual Countries, March 2, 1918 – Dec. 31, 1947; Office of America Republic Affairs, Its Predecessors, and Its Successors; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 243 “Proposed Amazon Basin Survey,” January 1942; Amazon Basin Project; Food Supply—Agriculture, Basic Economy; Box 76, Central Files, General Records; Records of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Record Group 229; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. “Amazon Development Program,” January 3, 1942; Memoranda on Brazil, Dec. 1941 – Feb. 1942; Box 26, Brazil, Vol. 5, Sept. 1941 – Feb. 1942; Memorandums Relating to Individual Countries, March 2, 1918 – Dec. 31, 1947; Office of America Republic Affairs, Its Predecessors, and Its Successors; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

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The Urucum reserve, near the town of Corumba in Mato Grosso do Sul, was a second major discovery. The NANA’s Thomas R. Henry described both it and Serra do

Navio as “[t]he largest deposits of the strategic metal manganese in the Western

Hemisphere,” adding that “at least 40,000,000 tons in two areas” had been located, though the total “may run much higher.” Urucum, he thought, was “the most important.

The deposits are in rock laid down nearly 500,000,000 years ago on a number of mesas scattered over an area of about 500 square miles in western Brazil and eastern Bolivia.”

Its immense size surpassed even those of what, until then, were “the largest and richest deposits known in the world,” found “south of the Caucasus” in the Soviet Union.244

The CIA explained the strategic significance of Brazilian deposits in 1950. U.S.

“imports of manganese from the USSR, which in 1948 amounted to 372,000 tons (about

30 percent of US requirements at that time), have been drastically curtailed,” making a larger “non-Soviet supply of manganese…essential to US security.” In the CIA’s view, groups like “the Communists, socialists, laborites, and ultranationalists, who are opposed to foreign exploitation of Brazil’s mineral resources,” were potential problems, though

“unlikely…[to] grow large enough to be” a major threat in the end. “There is always the possibility, however, that the Communists, once the new mines”—at Amapá and

Urucum—“were in production, would attempt to engineer strikes as they did during 1948 in the mines of [U.S. Steel subsidiary] Cia. Meridional de Mineração,” the Agency feared. But it expected such unrest would “be promptly quashed by the government.”245

244 Thomas R. Henry, “Manganese Vein Found in Brazil – Deposit Largest in West Hemisphere,” Toledo Blade (Toledo, OH), March 23, 1951. 245 Central Intelligence Agency, “Intelligence Memorandum No. 321 – Importance to the US and Prospects for the Future Development of Brazilian Manganese,” September 25, 1950; SMOF: National Security Council File, Papers of Harry S. Truman; Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, MO.

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This allegedly “engineered strike” began in August 1948. Edward J. Rowell,

Second Secretary at the U.S. Embassy, interpreted it “as a warning that measures taken by the administration to date, to purge communist influence from the ranks of labor, by no means [had] been completely successful.” At the same time, while the government’s

“official interpretation of the strike is that it is an action willfully provoked by communists,” Rowell clarified that “it is generally admitted that the rank and file workers, in the majority, are not communists,” and moreover that “it can be assumed that their willingness to strike was based in some substantial dissatisfaction. The ‘relatively’ good wages and working conditions of Meridional could actually be quite different from the workers [sic] point of view,” he realized. “Life is difficult for the Brazilian worker.

Effective means of protest are stifled,” he elaborated, with “government policy toward social and economic improvement mov[ing] slowly at an almost imperceptible pace.”

This was the background on the sort of strike the CIA hoped would be met with a harsh governmental response.246

Apart from Brazil, Cuba and Mexico also continued to provide manganese after the war, though neither’s reserves were as impressive as those at Amapá and Urucum. R.

J. Fraser, a Metals Reserve Company official, explained that “our withdrawal from purchasing in Cuba does not indicate a decrease in the demand for Cuban ore but simply reflects the termination of the many factors which made it necessary for the Government to interpose itself as a third party between the producer in Cuba and the consumers in the

246 Edward J. Rowell, Second Secretary, American Embassy, Rio de Janeiro, “Mine Strikes and Threatened Labor Disturbances – Minas Gerais,” September 9, 1948; Box 422, 850.4, General Records, Rio de Janeiro Embassy; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

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United States.” Washington would “return to private trade channels the purchasing of ore and concentrates,” in other words.247

In Mexico, the Lucifer site continued to be a major manganese source.

“Production is averaging about 150 tons a day, all of which, with the exception of small amounts…shipped to the Tennessee Eastman Company, a subsidiary of the Eastman

Kodak Company,” was sent to Santa Rosalía for processing, Minerals Attaché Roswell

Prouty wrote in April 1946. The site’s “future…appears to be extremely bright,” he added. “Enough work has now been done to prove that they have reserves sufficient for many years and the plant is in position to produce on about any scale desired.”248

Conclusion

U.S. officials’ efforts to procure foreign manganese reinforce some of the points made in the preceding chapter on copper. More specifically, extracting minerals not only to fuel the U.S. war effort, but also to sustain the steel-based civilization U.S. residents took for granted, entailed a range of aims that virtually guaranteed the U.S. would play a disruptive role in Latin America.

247 R. J. Fraser, Assistant Chief, Metals Division, Foreign Economic Administration, to Mr. John B. Hand, Agent, U. S. Commercial Company Agency, May 15, 1945; Box 220, Contract Files (1940-55), Metals Reserve Company; Cuba—Dispatches, 1/1/43-9/31/43, Pt. 2 of 2 thru Cuba Office 1/1/42-8/31/43, Part 1; Records of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Record Group 234; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. United States Department of the Interior, Geological Survey, “Memorandum on Cuban manganese industry as of May 1, 1943;” Box 217, Cuba-Cuban Ore Development Program, 9/1/42- 10/31/42, Part 2, thru Cuba-Cuban Ore Development Program, 10/1/43-1/11/44, Part 7; Contract Files (1940-55), Metals Reserve Company; Records of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Record Group 234; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. “Press Release of the U.S. Commercial Supply Agency, Published by Cuban Newspapers,” May 15, 1945; Box 220, Contract Files (1940-55), Metals Reserve Company; Records of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Record Group 234; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 248 R. W. Prouty, Minerals Attaché, “Report on Current Mining Activities in the Santa Rosalía District, Lower California,” April 25, 1946; Box 744, Vol. 189, 863.5, 1946; General Records (1937-49), Mexico City Embassy; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

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This point becomes obvious as we consider, for example, Washington’s desires to overhaul to Brazilian constitution, or to construct roads there or in Cuba—not, primarily, to serve the needs of local populations, but to ensure the U.S. had sufficient supplies of the materials underpinning its way of life, and its war effort. In other words, U.S. intervention abroad does not occur only when, say, a president decides to send in the

Marines, or way the CIA orchestrates some sort of coup. As the range of Washington’s aims—various forms of meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations—reviewed in this country suggests, U.S. foreign policy is interventionist by default, even when U.S. officials intend to do nothing more than satisfy their country’s basic, massive mineral appetites.

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Chapter 4: Tin

Introduction

The U.S. was a “have-not” nation where tin was concerned, and thus forced to rely on imports of the metal. Once brought into the country, much tin was used for tinplate—thin sheets of steel coated with tin—essential both to the canned goods industry, and also in the shipping industry, for example with oil.

Given its lack of domestic tin supplies, the U.S. formulated a policy spanning several decades, from the late 19th century through the mid-20th century, aimed at securing greater control of the metal. For example, the 1890 McKinley Tariff helped take down the British tinplate sector, which until that time had dominated world production.

Thanks to this protectionist measure, the U.S. emerged as a major tinplate producer. But the men in Washington still faced another barrier in their quest to secure greater control over global tin production, namely the International Tin Committee.

This British-dominated entity allied with the preeminent Bolivian tin magnate,

Simón Patiño, just before the Great Depression to closely regulate global tin production, and—crucially—to help ensure tin smelting, crucial for transforming raw ore into usable metal, remained British-controlled. Reacting to this system, U.S. officials in the 1930s began to develop plans to create a new world order in tin production. As one would expect, this arrangement would grant Washington a far more decisive role, provoking the

British in the process.

And U.S. officials began to act on these plans as World War II loomed, securing large amounts of Bolivian tin production via procurement contracts, and constructing a domestic smelter in Texas. Though U.S. officials were motivated in part by Japanese

154 incursions into tin-rich Asia to ensure they could get sufficient quantities of Bolivian tin, their actions immediately before and during the war cannot be understood strictly in terms of security considerations. The war provided a context in which Washington could begin working assiduously to secure greater control over the foreign tin it needed.

It is essential to bear in mind that, in securing this tin, the U.S. participated in a mineral industry that consistently sickened Bolivian miners, who were malnourished and paid terribly for their work. The suffering of miners persisted in the background of the political upheavals occurring in Bolivia throughout the 1940s, for example with the 1943 coup brining Major Gualberto Villarroel to power, and with the organizing activity linking the urban-based MNR political party with miners and rural workers during that decade, culminating in the 1952 Revolution.

Neither friendly, nor considerate, nor morally justified

As soon as they learned of the plans, “the British lost little time in applying pressures designed to prevent summation of the projects,” William Tidwell, Metals

Reserve’s historian, wrote. The policies would prove a “serious disadvantage to Great

Britain during the war crisis and afterward,” one British official feared. Another complained they were “neither friendly, nor considerate, nor morally justified.”249

The U.S. was the British enemy here, and Washington’s tin policy was what disturbed its wartime ally. Metals Reserve had “contracted to buy ore from several

Bolivian producers” on November 4, 1940. “For 5 years,” the Geological Survey

249 William P. Tidwell, “The Government’s Tin Program, 1940-1950;” Box 6, Tin, Vols. I-II, Metals Reserve Company; Administrative Histories of the R.F.C.’s Wartime Programs, 1943-54; Office of the Secretary, Reconstruction Finance Corporation; Records of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Record Group 234; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

155 explained, Compagnie Aramayo de Mines en Bolivie, Compañía Minera de Oruro Group,

Compañía Minera Unificada del Cerro de Potosí, and Asociación Nacional de Mineros

Medianos would, together, annually provide Washington “ores containing approximately

18,000 tons of tin.” The U.S. would thus be picking up much of the country’s low-grade ores. Another firm, Patiño Mines & Enterprises, Inc., controlled the higher grades, but

“was not a party to the agreement because its output [was] obligated to British smelters under a 10-year contract” with Britain’s Williams, Harvey & Company Ltd. Still, the contract—which “was later amended to provide for a maximum of 30,000 tons”— secured 51 percent of Bolivia’s tin output for Washington, and made the U.S. Bolivian tin’s main market.250

While securing these tin supplies, Washington was also developing plans to build a tin smelter on its soil. U.S. officials floated the possibility of this project at a meeting the Americas’ foreign ministers attended in Havana in July 1940. “Soon thereafter,” the

Geological Survey recounted, Washington representatives, “acting through the Advisory

Commission to the Council of National Defense, solicited suggestions from industry on construction of the smelter.” A number of U.S. firms submitted proposals that fall, but ultimately the Dutch company Billiton won the rights. “The Tin Processing Corporation of New York—a subsidiary of N. W. Billiton Maatschappij of Batavia, Netherlands

Indies—will build the plant at Texas City, Tex., at an estimated cost of $3,500,000,” the

Survey announced in 1941. The U.S. government selected Billiton over domestic

250 E. W. Pehrson and John B. Umhau, “Tin,” in Minerals Yearbook – Review of 1940, ed. H. D. Keiser (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1941), 670. Tidwell, “The Government’s Tin Program, 1940- 1950. Gerald J. Foley and Eugene Maur Braderman, Pan-American Branch, Foreign Economic Administration, “Summary Report on F.E.A. Operations in the American Republics,” December 16, 1943; Box 5, Records Pertaining to Economic Conditions in Latin America, 1942-45; Records of the Pan American Branch, Bureau of Areas; Records of the Foreign Economic Administration, Record Group 169; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

156 contenders because the firm “had been in the tin business for nearly a century, and had extensive experience with Bolivian ores at its Arnhem smelter,” in the Netherlands.

“Galveston Bay was finally chosen” at the smelter’s site, the Metals Reserve Company explained, in part “because shipping in the Gulf and the plant itself would be less exposed to war-time attack” than at Atlantic ports, but also because hydrochloric acid—used for removing impurities during the smelting process—“was readily available at that location.”251

The United States is singularly tinless

The procurement agreement with Bolivia, as well as the smelter plan, might appear to have derived from strategic necessity, or panic the prospect of wartime shortages induced. “The United States is singularly tinless,” one newspaper explained in

January 1941. “It has never produced more than 169 tons of the versatile white metal within its own borders in a year. In 1940 only 44 tons were mined, and 41 tons came from the streams and gravels of Alaska.” These figures were significant because

“America uses half the world’s production of tin”—76,000 tons a year—“and it would be embarrassing if imports were cut entirely off,” the article concluded.252

Tidwell concurred. “So meager are this country’s tin resources and so substantial its consumption that it can be emphasized that we are, in this commodity at least, a ‘have- not’ nation,” given that “time and expensive search have demonstrated a virtual dearth of

251 Pehrson and Umhau, Minerals Yearbook – Review of 1940, 671. Glenn J. Dorn, The Truman Administration and Bolivia: Making the World Safe for Liberal Constitutional Oligarchy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 17-21. “Tin Processing Corporation,” December 31, 1945; Minerals – General, 1939-47, RFC Metals Reserve Company; Subject File, 1931 -1960; Papers of Frank E. Johnson; Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. 252 “Tin from Bolivia,” Indian Valley Record (Greenville, CA), January 29, 1941.

157 tin occurrences among our mineral resources.” He explained that, in the years before

World War II, the U.S. used some 70,000 tons of the metal annually, “of which considerably less than 200 tons came from mines in this country and Alaska. Since 1880, only about 2,000 tons have been domestically produced,” he added, citing this as a “fact which lends weight to the opinion of geological experts that this nation’s tin requirements can be supplied only by foreign mines and/or smelters.”

The Bureau of Mines counted such experts among its ranks, and reinforced this bleak picture of U.S. tin deposits in a pair of reports. The first, issued in March 1941, concluded after two years of exploration that “no appreciable part of the tin required by

American industry can be supplied from known domestic sources, regardless of how great the stringency or how high the price.” The second study was finished in 1945. By then, the Bureau “was even more emphatic after noting the minuscule wartime production from Alaskan and domestic mines,” Tidwell wrote. “The expectation that tin may be mined commercially—if at all—in the United States may well be dismissed,”

U.S. geologists concluded.253

A clear indication of U.S. long-term goals

But these U.S. tin policies were not merely responses to wartime conditions, and in fact emerged from deeper ambitions to control tin. Metals Reserve’s five-year contract with Bolivia, for example, was a failure in this regard. More specifically, “when State

Department analyst Herbert Feis negotiated the first contract with Bolivians in 1940, he

253 Tidwell, “The Government’s Tin Program, 1940-1950.”

158 sought a twenty-five-year commitment of all Bolivian tin—a clear indication of U.S. long-term goals.”254

The smelter’s construction, on the other hand, marked a success for U.S. planners.

“Intensification of hostilities in Europe provided the arguments necessary to ensure that government funds were made available to finance the construction of an American smelter,” notes Canadian scholar John Hillman. He stresses that “strategic considerations,” however, “were not paramount” for U.S. officials. Had these considerations been Washington’s chief concern, the U.S. likely would have never built the Texas City facility. “A large American smelter would tie up more stocks of concentrates and actually reduce the supply of metal,” Hillman explains, indicating how the smelter could have hindered the war effort.

And the Geological Survey, in 1941, wrote that “the permanent smelting of

Bolivian tin ores in the United States cannot be justified solely as a national defense measure because the higher smelting costs here compared to Europe would increase the cost of the resultant metal to domestic consumers.” But it could be justified as a means of drawing Patiño, the largest Bolivian producer, away from British smelting. His firm’s

1940 report stated that it had given “assurances to the agencies of the United States

Government in Washington of its readiness to cooperate” with the Texas City endeavor, for example. And in April 1942 he “predicted that future political ties between the

United States and Bolivia ‘will be stronger and of greater importance than heretofore,’” according to a Wide World (WW) news piece. Improved relations “can be achieved,” he emphasized, partly by “treatment of low-grade minerals by means of an adequate process,” which the new U.S. facility at the time was working to perfect.

254 Dorn, The Truman Administration and Bolivia, 17-21.

159

“The postwar status of the Government’s Longhorn smelter has been the subject of considerable discussion,” the Survey affirmed in 1946. It observed that some of the chief “arguments advanced for the continued existence of the smelter” related to

“strategic importance,” but that these were “not wholly valid.” “Military security may be secured most simply by stock-piling metal, a method already adopted in the United

States,” it pointed out. “Strategic arguments simply provided the cover necessary to realize a long-standing dream,” Hillman concluded. 255

The long-standing dream

This dream dated back to the 19th century, when the U.S. worked to unseat Britain as head of the global tinplate trade. Tin was an essential material then. But the metal was ubiquitous to the point where its importance was unrecognized. “This is probably due to the fact that the average person comes into contact with very small amounts of tin in everyday life, and of those, very few of them are recognized as being made of or containing tin,” one writer suggested in 1947. Still, the mineral was “essential to modern civilization,” Hillman argues, “in that the most important end use was tied to the most stable of all sources of final consumer demand, food.”256

By the 1940s, 40% of U.S. tin imports were used for tinplate—thin steel or iron coated with tin to prevent rust and corrosion. The oil industry found tinplate containers

255 Pehrson and Umhau, Minerals Yearbook – Review of 1940, 670, 685-686. C. E. Nighman and J.B. Umhau, “Tin,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1944, ed. C. E. Needham (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1946), 719. John Hillman, The International Tin Cartel (London: Routledge, 2010), 304. “Tin King Patino Boosts Bolivia,” Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA), April 25, 1942. 256 David Schoenfeld, An Analysis of the Tin Industry of Bolivia: Its Relationship to the Bolivian National Economy and the International Tin Situation (A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the College of Commerce, the University of Southern California, 1947), 73-74. Hillman, The International Tin Cartel, 27, 289.

160 ideal for shipping, and the metal’s use thus increased sharply as the petroleum industry boomed in the late 19th century. The U.S. tinplate sector further expanded as “the mass consumption of canned food” rocketed upward after World War I.257

“By the 1920s,” for example, “the average family in a US or Canadian city spent at least a third of its family budget on food,” with “canned goods…a central component” of consumption for urban residents. A 1945 study concluded that U.S. consumers ate

“about one-fifth of their fruit and one-fourth of their vegetables from cans,” for a yearly total of “about 100 cans of food per capita,” it estimated. There were obvious reasons for canned food’s growing popularity. Preserved fruits and vegetables “may be eaten out of season and out of place,” and “the kinds of food attainable in any given moment in canned form are far more diversified than is the choice of raw food.” Furthermore, cans

“are convenient to handle and to store in quantity when at a distance from a market; the contents are easily prepared for table use and are safe and clean.”258

But while these factors explain why canned food consumption grew in the 20th century’s first half, they do not tell us why U.S. tinplate production grew during the same period. To a large extent, this industry owed its success to statist policies that “facilitated

[its] growth with the establishment of a series of tariffs,” which “ultimately protected the infant industry and expanded can production in the US.”259

The original center of tinplate production was England, where historians credit a pair of industrialists, John Hall and Bryan Donkin, with launching the canned food

257 Schoenfeld, An Analysis of the Tin Industry of Bolivia, 3-9. John Crabtree, Gavan Duffy, and Jenny Pearce, The Great Tin Crash: Bolivia and the World Tin Market (London: Latin America Bureau, 1987), 42. 258 Joel Wolfe, “Summer’s Food for Winter’s Tables: Tin Consumption in the Americas,” in Tin and Global Capitalism, 1850-2000: A History of “the Devil’s Metal,” eds. Mats Ingulstad, Andrew Perchard, and Espen Storli (Routledge: New York, 2015), 82-83. Delbert R. French, Postwar Packages and Containers for Marketing Foods (Washington, D.C., 1945), 37-38. 259 Wolfe, “Summer’s Food for Winter’s Tables,” 76.

161 industry in the early 19th century. “British manufacturers went on to dominate the industry” in the ensuing decades, thanks largely to Cornwall’s huge tin deposit, which helped the U.K. secure “a world monopoly on tinplate,” according to Quentin Skrabec.

By the early 1860s, the tinplate trade was especially massive in places like South Wales and Monmouthshire, and until 1890 “the output doubled every ten years,” with average annual exports close to 400,000 tons from 1887-1890.260

The U.S. was the U.K.’s chief tinplate customer during this period. Of the late

1880s output, for example, the U.S. bought over 300,000 tons a year—roughly 75%.

“Three out of four of the British manufacturer’s eggs were in the American basket,” as

W. Llewelyn Williams put it, adding that Britain’s domestic market, during this same period, “had been comparatively neglected.” In Williams’ view, English producers ultimately paid for their dereliction. “It was not to be expected that the shrewd commercial men of the United States would stand idly by without making an effort to capture for themselves this profitable industry.”261

To this end, then-Representative William McKinley passed his 1890 Tariff Bill—

“the signature legislation of [his] career,” Skrabec notes, and one that “aimed to generate and develop new industries, which had been the dream of Alexander Hamilton and the

Federalists.” These aims were largely met over the course of the decade, at least where tinplate was concerned. While the U.S. had no tinplate mills in 1889, its “tinplate industry grew rapidly” from 1894 to 1898, explains business historian Mira Wilkins. The

American Tin Plate Company, soon churning out 90% of U.S. output, was formed in

260 John Krebs, Food: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 18. Crabtree et al., The Great Tin Crash, 41. Quentin R. Skrabec, William McKinley, Apostle of Protectionism (New York: Algora, 2008), 89. W. Llewelyn Williams, “The Tinplate Trade,” in British Industries Under Free Trade: Essays by Experts, ed. Harold Cox (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1904), 164. 261 Williams 164-165.

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1898, and in that same year the Welsh firm E. Morewood & Co., “once one of the largest and most technologically innovate of the Welsh tinmakers, was bankrupt, a casualty in an industry that saw seventy-seven out of ninety-one firms fail in the years 1890-1899 because of the evaporation of their U.S. export trade.” Wilkins observes that, as a new century dawned a decade after McKinley’s bill was enacted, “a new strong American tinplate industry had emerged,” with its British competitor eviscerated.262

“The tariffs put on tinplates by the United States completely killed our trade with that country,” one witness testified before the British Tariff Commission in 1904. “The full effect of the McKinley tariff was not felt for several years, as it took some time to build works in America, but in ten years the exports to the United States receded from

278,479 tons in 1892 to 65,148 in 1902,” he continued. “We are in the position of being driven by the McKinley tariff to give up the manufacture of tinplates very largely,” another witness affirmed.

The Tariff Commission also collected testimonies from U.S. industrialists, who concurred with their British counterparts. “Regarding the tariff on tinplate, there seemed to be no difference of opinion among the Witnesses. It was agreed that there would have been no tinplate industry had it not been for the tariff.” One witness argued not only that

“the tariff at present gives efficient protection,” but that “the removal of the duty would destroy the industry.” Another felt “that the entire industry was created by the tariff.”

The report noted that, in general, the McKinley bill’s beneficiaries considered it “unwise

262 Skrabec, William McKinley, 88. Mira Wilkins, The History of Foreign Investment in the United States to 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 258-259.

163 to take the risk of disturbing the present prosperous condition of the industry by a discussion of any changes in the tariff.”263

In the following decades, the U.S. tinplate industry’s rise was cited as evidence of the folly of free trade. As the American Economist explained in 1920, “There was a time when there was not a tinplate factory in this country and Free-Traders ridiculed the idea that there ever would be one. However, thanks to the McKinley Tariff act, we are the greatest producers of tinplate in the world at the present time,” exporting surplus production not only to the United Kingdom—the former tinplate titan—but also to Japan, which “has imported all that she has used.” The piece’s author reviewed this history to argue for “the benefit of a Protective Tariff,” seen at the time as “the permanent and durable remedy against flooding the country with cheap German goods.” More broadly, the ruin the McKinley Tariff visited on Britain’s tinplate sector reinforces economist Paul

Bairoch’s characterization of the U.S. as the “bastion of protectionism.”264

In the 1930s, meanwhile, U.S. officials debated ways to secure control over the global tin trade. It was during the Depression that the House Committee on Foreign

Affairs began “to investigate the extent to which the United States is dependent on foreign nations for its supply of tin,” Hillman writes. Representative Samuel

McReynolds (D-TN) chaired this subcommittee from 1934-1935, when it addressed topics like “the creation of a government stockpile” and “the viability of a domestic smelter,” identifying the dominance of the International Tin Committee, a producers’ cartel in which Britain played a major role, as a barrier to U.S. tin policy goals.

263 Tariff Commission, London, Report of the Tariff Commission: Vol. 1, The Iron and Steel Trades (London: P. S. King & Son, 1904-09). 264 “Needs of Protection,” American Economist (New York), January 9, 1920. Paul Bairoch, Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 51.

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Legislators recognized Bolivia as a crucial country in this respect. “As long as Bolivia was committed to that structure,” namely the Tin Committee’s, “it could remain intact but should she ever be tempted to strike a separate deal with the USA and provide the feed for her smelter, it would collapse,” the McReynolds committee believed.265

The mineral serves no purpose except to be thrown into a smelter

The reason why U.S. officials, in outlining what Hillman dubbed “a new world order in tin,” stressed the importance of domestic smelter construction, begins with the fact that tin, compared to other metals industry needs, is not especially abundant in the earth’s crust. The only tin-bearing ore worth exploiting—in the profit-oriented framework in which mining occurs—is cassiterite, a tin oxide. This mineral can be found in veins running through hard rock, or in deposits nearer the earth’s surface. The former are mined underground; this type of mining was prevalent, for example, in Bolivia. The latter are exploited in open-pit operations. However extracted, tin ore is treated at or near the mine to produce a concentrate. The concentrate is then sent to a smelter, and it is smelting that produces metals with high tin contents. In other words, “tin has no immediate value except in ingots,” as Bolivian intellectual Sergio Almaraz Paz noted.

“The mineral, a heavy earthy powder, serves no purpose except to be thrown into a smelter.”266

Processing concentrates at the scale required by modern industry is a complicated task, one in which “great expertise is required in order to avoid the loss of much of the tin

265 Hillman, The International Tin Cartel, 190-192. 266 John T. Thoburn, Tin in the World Economy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 1-15. Mats Ingulstad, Andrew Perchard, and Espen Storli, “Introduction: ‘The Path of Civilization is Paved with Tin Cans,’” in Tin and Global Capitalism, eds. Ingulstad et al., Tin and Global Capitalism, 1-7.

165 as fumes or waste slags during smelting.” In the 1940s, smelting called for

“technological savvy and yielded far larger economies of scale” than tin mining itself, in which hundreds of firms prospered. There were far fewer successful smelting companies, to the point where the smelting stage was “a substantial bottleneck,” bolstering “the leverage of the countries possessing smelters and a few large firms.”267

As World War II began, Great Britain dominated global tin smelting. It had secured this position in part by heading off threats to its power. For example, in 1916,

“Patiño Mines and Enterprises (formerly the Llallagua Company) abandoned the construction of a new smelter at Arica, Chile.” Tidwell cited a piece in The Annalist, a financial journal, by B. W. Corrado, who “ascribed this move to pressure applied by the

British smelters who ‘fearful of losing the Bolivian business, made the company an exceptional offer for the treatment of its ores in England.” Corrado added that a U.S.- owned smelter in La Paz was shut down that same year, presumably under pressures like those applied at Arica. Additionally, in the First World War “several American smelters had operated in the United States producing a nominal amount of tin from Bolivian ores.

They were forced out of business in the 1920s because operating costs were higher than in Europe and the Far East, and the British companies were not unwilling to use control of the ore supply to increase their other advantage,” in smelting.268

For example, “the American Smelting and Refining Company built a tin smelter at Perth Amboy, N.J.” in 1915, and a second on Long Island in 1918, according to Metals

Reserve’s records. “Seven other tin smelters were started during this period” in the U.S.,

“but all were short lived,” in part “because operating costs were higher than in Europe

267 Thoburn, Tin in the World Economy, 1-15; Ingulstad et al., “Introduction,” 1-7. 268 Schoenfeld, An Analysis of the Tin Industry of Bolivia, 73-74. Tidwell, “The Government’s Tin Program, 1940-1950.”

166 and the Far East,” but more fundamentally because, again, English companies would tolerate no rivals.269

Monopoly control of tin supplies—to be liquidated by violent revolution

The International Tin Committee was formed just before the Depression. In 1927,

John Howeson, head of the London Tin Corporation, had joined with Bolivian mining magnate Simón Patiño, who helmed Consolidated Tin Smelters. Their aim, according to

Glenn J. Dorn, was “to stabilize the world tin market, protect themselves from the devastating fluctuations that periodically wracked the industry, and guarantee their profits.” Their cartel was fully formed by 1931, when government officials and tin producers from the member countries “united to set quotas, restrict output, and at one point even launch a two-month ‘tin holiday’ by suspending all shipments to raise prices.

Consuming nations were eventually given access to the processing but, much to the consternation of Washington, were denied any vote.”270

Newspaper reports from the interwar period reveal the extent of the Tin

Committee’s control over global production. At a May 1931 meeting at The Hague, for example, it “decided to recommend that the four participating Governments”—Bolivia,

Malaya, Netherlands East Indies, and Nigeria—“should reduce their output of tin by

20,000 tons at the earliest date from which it was administratively possible,” a British

Official Wireless (BOW) dispatch noted. “The four Governments have now accepted that recommendation and agreed to a reduction to take effect from June 1,” it added. In

December 1939, the Committee “raised the tin quota for the March quarter from 100 per

269 “Tin Processing Corporation,” December 31, 1945. 270 Dorn, The Truman Administration and Bolivia, 17-21.

167 cent. of standard tonnages to 120 per cent.” The upsurge was a “surprise increase,” viewed by publications like Investor’s Chronicle as “an overnight revolution in the tin industry,” a 1939 news piece noted.271

And the Ottawa Citizen, in a November 1942 editorial, complained about the effects of the Committee’s policies. “A shortage of tin had been imposed upon Canada and other countries by an international cartel long before Japan captured the tin mines in

Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, Siam and French Indo-China,” it charged. “Monopoly control of tin supplies deliberately operated to diminish output,” it elaborated, explaining that “private interests known as the International Tin Committee were concerned primarily with profits. They conspired to keep the price of tin high by cutting down production,” with bad results for “Canadian industries, including canning.” One member of the New Brunswick legislature, J. J. Hayes Doone, railed against the Committee for

“being a combine in restraint of trade,” and decried the “tin plate racket.” The Citizen also recalled that W. H. Moore, head of Canada’s Tariff Board in 1928, had in that year

“summoned representatives of the tin plate cartel to Ottawa. They were informed that cartels would not be tolerated in this country. They made a show of taking heed, but soon forgot.”

In the Citizen’s view, the Tin Committee would persist until it was “liquidated by violent revolution. Certain declarations of economic independence were made in the

Atlantic Charter. They need to be put into more permanent form before the end of this war.”272

271 “Tin Surprise – Quota at 120 Per Cent,” Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, Australia), December 11, 1939. “Tin Production – Reduced Output – International Committee’s Decision,” Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, Australia), June 5, 1931. 272 “All Out for Tin,” Ottawa Citizen (Ottawa, CN), November 7, 1942.

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The called-for revolt never arrived, and the culmination of Tin Committee’s efforts, Tidwell explained, was that it “controlled 90 percent of world smelter production, including that of all important producing countries, except China,” in the period leading up to World War II. David Schoenfeld, a student of Bolivia’s tin sector, wrote that

“British smelters handled almost the entire world’s output of tin,” and that England had

“succeeded in obtaining control of a large percentage of the world’s supply,” placing it

“in the most advantageous position,” with few serious rivals. Washington’s tin aims—to build a domestic smelter; to amass a stockpile, of Bolivian tin especially—were a direct challenge to the Tin Committee. “Tin exports from Bolivia are subject to the restrictions imposed by the International Tin Cartel of which Bolivia is a participant,” C. W. Wright, a Foreign Minerals Specialist with the U.S. government, explained in 1939. “According to this agreement,” he elaborated, “none of the signatory countries may export a tonnage greater than the quota fixed quarterly by the International Committee on the basis of standard tonnages assigned to each country.” Washington wanted to break this agreement, and to exploit Bolivian minerals on its own terms.273

The central point regarding U.S. aims here is crucial. Many discussions of raw materials policy assume Washington wants access to resources—to say, Middle Eastern oil, or in this case Bolivian tin. But describing U.S. policy this way understates

Washington’s aims. The U.S. had access to tin under the Tin Committee system, but wanted control as well. This same point can be made regarding tinplate. When the U.K. had a stranglehold on tinplate in the late 19th century, the U.S. had ample access to this

273 Schoenfeld, An Analysis of the Tin Industry of Bolivia, 73-74. Tidwell, “The Government’s Tin Program, 1940-1950.”

169 material, consuming three-quarters of British output. But Washington wanted more than access, and to secure control over tinplate production McKinley passed his tariff in 1890.

A monoexport country

Bolivia was well-known for its minerals. The country’s “tin belt, on the high plateau extending from Peru on the north to Argentina on the South, is about 500 miles in length, and averages 60 miles in width,” the U.S. Tariff Commission explained. There were four chief mining districts: Potosí, Oruro, La Paz, and Cochabamba. Llallagua, in

Potosí, was “the largest known tin lode deposit in the world,” and its miners churned out

5,000 tons of tin a year in the World War II era. Extraction there was so intense that in

1942 one U.S. official, Merwin L. Bohan, found “sound ground for believing that

Llallagua had passed its peak by a wide margin,” making it just one of the sites

“definitely approaching exhaustion.” Finding sound ground for assessing Bolivia’s overall reserves was a harder task, and Washington’s understanding of the full scope of

Bolivia’s tin-producing capabilities was sketchy, at best. Bohan admitted that “the real answer to production capacity is that we do not know the exact situation at even the large mines, much less among the 28 composing the medium mines and the 1800 forming the small mining group.”274

Centuries earlier, when the Spanish dominated, extractive efforts focused on gold, silver, and copper. “Tin which was found in conjunction with these metals was discarded as rubbish,” Schoenfeld notes. “Its only usefulness at the time was to fill the cavities and

274 U.S. Tariff Commission, Mining and Manufacturing Industries—A Series of Reports on Mining and Manufacturing Industries in the American Republics (Washington, 1946-1949), 19-22. Merwin L. Bohan, “Suggested Tin Production Program,” to Spaeth and Collao, Rio de Janeiro, January 21, 1942; Box 61, Vol. 44, General Records, 1942; La Paz Embassy, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

170 depressions in the soil which had been caused by the mining.” Industrialism’s emergence promoted the exploitation of different deposits, and Bolivian tin extraction intensified around the turn of the century.275

That was when “the invention of tin cans for food preservation along with the prewar armament buildup in Europe and the United States led to a boom when huge tin deposits were discovered in Bolivia’s highlands.” The transition to tin was a “shake-up,” according to one historian, in the sense that it “moved the geographic locus of mining in

Bolivia northward,” to the “northern fringes” of Potosí from the south of the department.

“Mines in the neighboring department of Oruro also expanded”—but ultimately “Bolivia remained a monoexport country,” as a small group “of massive companies quickly came to dominate tin production.” Eight companies produced 75 percent of Bolivia’s yearly tin output in 1909, for example. As Constantino Morales, Oruro’s prefect, “complained,

‘The large mining companies appear to have monopolized industrial activity to such an extent that no one can begin a new operation.’”

Simón Patiño was soon the largest of these titans. The man “bought out his neighbor, the British-owned Uncía Mining Company” in 1910, and then “completed his domination of the two mining centers of Uncía and Llallagua by buying the Chilean

Llallagua Company” in 1924, by which point he had secured “his permanent position of controlling almost 50 percent of national production with a labor force of over ten thousand workers.” He then “moved to control his European refiners,” buying “the world’s largest smelter of Bolivian tin” in Liverpool. Ultimately he is “more accurately described as a European capitalist, given his vast non-Bolivian holdings.” And his ascent accompanied the consolidation of Bolivia’s tin trade in the hands of three families—the

275 Schoenfeld, An Analysis of the Tin Industry of Bolivia, 22.

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Hochschild and Aramayo clans in addition to his—who collectively controlled 80% of the industry, maximizing production to the point where “Bolivia supplied nearly half of the tin for the Allied effort in World War II.” 276

The only important source of tin in the Western Hemisphere

The Bolivian oligarchy’s consolidation of power—over both tin and the growing mine labor force—coincided with growing U.S. attraction to the country. Washington’s

“economic interest in Bolivia is chiefly due to the fact that Bolivia owns the world’s second largest deposits of tin,” Drew Pearson, special correspondent with the Milwaukee

Journal, reported in December 1928. And the war’s approach only reinforced Bolivia’s importance. “During the period 1936-40,” however, “87 to 95 percent of tin ores and concentrates from Bolivia were marketed in the United Kingdom and practically all of the remaining tonnage was sold to Belgium and The Netherlands,” the Board of

Economic Warfare explained. Washington’s initial “agreement for the purchase of

18,000 long tons of tin annually for a period of five years beginning July 1, 1940,” reached with “the principal Bolivian producers” and reviewed at the start of this chapter, helped redirect Bolivia’s tin outflows from Europe to the United States.277

276 Herbert S. Klein, A Concise History of Bolivia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 158-159. Roberto L. Smale, “I Sweat the Flavor of Tin”: Labor Activism in Early Twentieth-Century Bolivia (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 27. Gretchen Gordon and Aaron Luoma, “Oil and Gas: The Elusive Wealth Beneath Their Feet,” in Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia’s Challenge to Globalization, eds. Jim Shultz and Melissa Crane Draper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 79. 277 Drew Pearson, “Bolivia’s Tin Mines an Effective Bar to Warfare, Is Belief,” Milwaukee Journal (Milwaukee, WI), December 16, 1928. War Trade Staff, Board of Economic Warfare, “Bolivia,” April 5, 1943; Box 5, Records Pertaining to Economic Conditions in Latin America, 1942-45; Records of the Pan American Branch, Bureau of Areas; Records of the Foreign Economic Administration, Record Group 169; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

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The Metals Reserve agreement marked the culmination of earlier efforts to amass

Bolivian tin. For example, two Navy Appropriations Bills, one in 1939 and another the following year, “authorized the acquisition of tin as part of a program of stockpiling of strategic materials,” though “only small amounts were bought,” Hillman clarifies.

Congress’ June 1939 Strategic Materials Act “endorsed a more comprehensive stockpiling program,” though by the end of the year Washington still had a mere 1,955 tons on hand—the same total as the year before. And the Treasury Department’s

Procurement Division, meanwhile, was also working to accumulate tin, but in the spring of 1940 had just 4,000 tons on hand. This tonnage was “woefully inadequate for national defense,” Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles lamented.278

Welles thus wrote to President Roosevelt on May 1, 1940, stressing “the need for more aggressive action toward stockpile accumulation of tin,” and recommending the

U.S. build up a 50,000-ton reserve. The MRC’s files contained no record of Roosevelt’s response, according to Tidwell. But documents reveal “that within a fortnight the subject of a tin stockpile was discussed by Jesse H. Jones, Federal Loan Administrator, with representatives of the steel industry.” These businessmen, representing the U.S. Steel

Corporation, Bethlehem Steel, and the Weirton Steel Company, found Welles’ prescription extreme, and suggested Washington accumulate 30,000 tons of tin.279

On June 28, 1940, the U.S. arranged a contract with the International Tin

Committee, the producers’ cartel described above, and which counted Britain, British

Malaya, the Netherlands, the East Indies, Thailand, Indochina, Nigeria, the Belgian

Congo and Bolivia as members. Metals Reserve intended to amass 75,000 tons of tin

278 Hillman, The International Tin Cartel, 303. Tidwell, “The Government’s Tin Program, 1940-1950.” 279 Tidwell, “The Government’s Tin Program, 1940-1950.”

173 annually from these countries’ mines, and the Committee would be “raising allowable operations to 130 per cent of the quotas assigned to countries which were members of the cartel,” so that the metal would be extracted “on an ‘all-out’ basis.”

But this initiative failed. Even when Metals Reserve’s acquisitions were counted alongside stockpiles the Navy and the Treasury Department had amassed earlier, the total was only 21,419 tons—under one-third the tonnage desired. The contract was renewed for thirteen months in May 1941. There were 37,000 tons in the stockpile the following month. By December, as the U.S. entered the war, the total was 42,606 tons. “Actual purchases were far below the 150,000 tons [75,000 tons per year, for two years] possible under the contract, because of the abnormally large acquisitions by industry during the period and the fact that world production did not meet expectations,” according to the

Geological Survey.280

Exacerbating Washington’s difficulties was the fact that, “in 1941 and early 1942, the Axis gained control of the bulk of the world’s tin resources,” the Geological Survey reported. “At the outset of the war in 1939, Germany, Italy, and Japan controlled less than 3 percent of the mine output, but with the Japanese conquest of Indochina, Thailand,

British Malaya, Netherlands [East] Indies, Burma, and parts of China, as well as German domination of Europe,” it elaborated, “the Axis Powers occupied territory that produced

66 percent of the 1940 output.” The net effect was “the loss to the United Nations of supplies of an important strategic material,” it emphasized.281

The situation only worsened the following year. “Blockade of the principal sources of tin supply, long feared by students of the United States tin industry, was in

280 E. W. Pehrson and John B. Umhau, “Tin,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1941 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1943), 705. Tidwell, “The Government’s Tin Program, 1940-1950.” 281 Pehrson and Umhau, Minerals Yearbook – 1941, 704-705.

174 sight at the close of 1941 and became a reality early in 1942, precipitating a serious raw- material problem,” the Survey explained. “The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on

December 7, accompanied by a renewed drive on southeastern Asia, initiated the assault on the world’s richest tin-producing area, which was climaxed by the fall of Singapore on

February 15, 1942,” it added. And while the initial, optimistic assumption was “that

Singapore was virtually impregnable or at least could hold out long enough to permit completion of United States stock-piling objectives,” Japan’s “amazing speed and success” in winning new territories “forced the United Nations to drastically adjust their tin-consumption programs downward.” “The forlorn outlook for obtaining any substantial quantity of tin from domestic sources has emphasized the importance to the

United States of the Bolivian tin industry,” the Survey concluded.282

“With the fall of Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies into Japanese hands,

Bolivia’s importance to the United States has greatly increased,” the FBI concurred in mid-1942, explaining that Washington “must look to Bolivia alone to bear the burden of supplying all our needs for this metal.” “Production of tin was disrupted by the war to a greater extent than any other strategic metal,” the Reconstruction Finance Corporation added. “Before the end of 1942 the enemy had gained control of more than 70% of the world’s sources of primary production and a larger proportion of the world’s tin smelting capacity,” a situation making “Bolivia, the only important source of tin in the Western

Hemisphere,” a crucial ally.283

282 Pehrson and Umhau, Minerals Yearbook – 1941, 703-704. 283 Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States Department of Justice, “Totalitarian Activities: Bolivia Today, June 1942;” Box 1, Country Files, 1940-49; Division of Research for the American Republics, Office of Intelligence Research; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Reconstruction Finance Corporation, “Report on the Government- Owned Tin Smelter at Texas City, Texas,” December 29, 1947; Minerals – General, 1939-47, RFC Metals

175

The people who give their lives for the mineral do not own it

The Geological Survey felt that Washington, in buying Bolivian tin, was doing the Andean nation a favor. Given that “sales of tin ore constitute an important part of the national income of Bolivia,” wartime disruptions in the global tin trade “seriously threatened” its mining sector. But the U.S., in “contracting for the erection of a tin smelter, thereby providing a market for surplus Bolivia ores,” simply “acted in a manner wholly consonant with its ‘Good Neighbor’ policy,” the Survey reasoned—adding that

Washington, by pure coincidence presumably, simultaneously “took a realistic step toward ameliorating the potential threat to the democracies’ tin supply arising from

Japan’s tie with axis and its aggression in southeast Asia.”284

One might ask how Bolivian miners fared under this “Good Neighbor” initiative.

Increasing numbers of these workers had made the country’s expanded production throughout the early 20th century possible. One historian “estimates that 3,000 individuals labored in the country’s tin mines in 1900,” and that just a decade later the number was 13,147, as “the tin mines attracted former silver miners and migrants from the countryside.” Despite this large increase, “mine workers and their families formed only a minuscule part of the population. Yet the concentration of workers in just a few settlements critical to the country’s export-oriented economy magnified their importance.”285

If these thousands of miners had something in common, it was that, as historian

Robert Smale wrote, quoting Bolivian writer Sergio Almaraz Paz, “the people who give

Reserve Company; Subject File, 1931 -1960; Papers of Frank E. Johnson; Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. 284 Pehrson and Umhau, Minerals Yearbook – Review of 1940, 670, 685-686. 285 Smale, “I Sweat the Flavor of Tin,” 28, 31-32.

176 their lives for the mineral ‘do not own it. They never did.’” But still they extracted massive quantities of the metal. Peak production came in 1929, when Bolivian miners brought 46,388 long tons of tin from the earth; this was 24% of world output that year. In

1941, production came close to that level—42,199 long tons were mined, or roughly 17% of the global total—but could not quite match it. Estimates ranked Bolivia as “the third largest producer of tin ore in the world” then, with metals accounting for 94% of the country’s total exports. These figures give some indication of the role miners played both within Bolivia, and internationally. “The tin miners were as important as the soldiers in the front lines,” Bolivia’s foreign minister argued, “and they should have received the same treatment and consideration that was given to the defenders of the democratic cause.” But this was hardly the case.286

The miners’ diet is commonly inadequate

“We have all known for many years that the conditions of labor in Bolivia are deplorable and that the country is desperately poor. We also know that a small number of

Bolivians have made unconscionable profits,” the State Department’s Philip Bonsal admitted in January 1943. One official with the U.S. Labor Mission in Bolivia

“remarked that the whole economy was rotten and that the only way to remedy it would

286 Brent Z. Kaup, Market Justice: Political Economic Struggle in Bolivia (New York City: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 38. John Worcester, Principal Mining Engineer, U.S. Bureau of Mines, “Mining— United States Economic Mission to Bolivia,” June 15, 1942; Box 59, Vol. 42, General Records, 1942; La Paz Embassy, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Schoenfeld, An Analysis of the Tin Industry of Bolivia, 24-25. U.S. Tariff Commission, Mining and Manufacturing Industries, 19-22. Victor Andrade, My Missions for Revolutionary Bolivia, 1944-1952 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976), 55-56.

177 be by taking a mandate for 25 years and ruling it autocratically in the interests of revamping economic conditions completely.”287

And miners’ wages were exceedingly low. “The Bolivian mining industry can be said to be based on low wages rather than on machines and mechanization,” explained

John Worcester, Principal Mining Engineer with the U.S. Bureau of Mines. “The daily wages for unskilled laborers in 1939 were seven to ten bolivianos,” Schoenfeld noted, explaining that this was “the equivalent of twenty to thirty cents;” skilled workers were paid sixteen to twenty-four bolivianos, or fifty to seventy-five cents. “Since 1939, however, wages have more than doubled,” though the rise “by no means kept pace with the increase in the cost of living,” which shot up 237% during the war.288

A. M. Gaudin, Head Production Specialist at the U.S. Embassy in La Paz, commented on these same issues in 1942, remarking “that the wages for the workers in

Bolivian mills is entirely out of line with that in the United States, good pay being Bs 30. per day, or 60 cents in our currency.” And while “[i]t is perhaps thought that the cost of living in Bolivia is so much lower than that in the United States,” he continued, and “that

Bs 30. represents more than 60 cents in purchasing power,” this was “not true. As

287 Philip W. Bonsal, “Bolivian Labor Situation,” January 16, 1943; Memoranda on Bolivia, Jan. 1942 – March 1943; Box 22, Bolivia, Vol. 3, Jan. 1941 – Dec. 1943; Memorandums Relating to Individual Countries, March 2, 1918 – December 31, 1947; Office of American Republic Affairs, Its Predecessors, and Its Successors; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. “Bolivian Labor Mission,” March 19, 1943; Memoranda on Bolivia, Jan. 1942 – March 1943; Box 22, Bolivia, Vol. 3, Jan. 1941 – Dec. 1943; Memorandums Relating to Individual Countries, March 2, 1918 – December 31, 1947; Office of American Republic Affairs, Its Predecessors, and Its Successors; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 288 Worcester, “Mining—United States Economic Mission to Bolivia,” June 15, 1942. Schoenfeld, An Analysis of the Tin Industry of Bolivia, 39-41.

178 travelers, we have found that the cost of living is slightly higher, if anything, than in the

United States.”289

And the Board of Economic Warfare explained, in April 1943, that wage increases were not keeping pace with rising living costs. “In January, 1943, the three leading Bolivian mining companies granted the miners wage increases ranging from 10 to

15 percent,” it reported. “Yet, during the year 1942 alone the cost of living in La Paz had risen 26 percent. In the mining cities of Postosi [sic] and Cruro [sic] between January

1941 and September 1942 the cost of living increased 41 and 54.7 percent respectively,” it added.290

“Meanwhile there is available considerable information on the general character of working and living conditions in Bolivian mines,” Dewey Anderson, Chief of the

Board of Economic Warfare’s American Hemisphere Division, wrote in December 1942.

He noted that “because of the low wage level the miners’ diet is commonly inadequate both in quantity and quality,” and that “the inflationary situation now prevailing in

Bolivia has so increased food prices that even the low food standards which prevailed in

1939—the date for which our information is most complete—have been reduced.”

Anderson further observed that “miners’ dwellings lack running water and sanitary services of any kind, and many of them have dirt floors and no windows,” while the mines themselves generally lacked “exhaust devices or other safeguards against such lung diseases as silicosis,” while “only the largest have adequate medical facilities.”291

289 A. M. Gaudin, Head Production Specialist, “Progress Report No. 2,” to W. M. Tamplin, September 10, 1942; Box 60, Vol. 43, General Records, 1942; La Paz Embassy, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 290 War Trade Staff, “Bolivia,” April 5, 1943. 291 Dewey Anderson, Chief, American Hemisphere Division, “Your Request for Information About Labor Conditions at the Kami Mine in Bolivia,” December 8, 1942, to Theodore Kreps, Economic Adviser, Office

179

Bolivian miners continued to churn out massive quantities of the metal as they struggled to earn enough to survive. Bolivia exported 37,923 long tons of the ore they extracted in 1940, versus the 27,211 they had mined the preceding year. This was a 39 percent increase, and most of it “went to Great Britain,” the Geological Survey explained.

“The tin content of ore exported from Bolivia in 1941 was 42,199 long tons compared with 37,940 in 1940”—an 11 percent increase, according to the Geological Survey.

“About equal portions of the exports went to the United States (for treatment by the new smelter at Texas City) and to Great Britain,” it continued, citing “the labor shortage and lack of railroad transportation from mines to Pacific ports” as obstacles to be surmounted.

The Survey added that Bureau of Mines officials were “studying the problem of accelerating output and improving the grade of concentrates produced,” but labor problems the following year magnified these difficulties.292

“The tin content of concentrates exported from Bolivia declined 8 percent from the 42,199-ton level of 1941 to 38,293 long tons in 1942, or 22 percent the permissible quota of 49,106 tons (105 percent of standard) allowed under the Control Scheme,” the

Survey reported. That year Bolivia sent 53 percent of its tin to Washington, and the rest to London. “Inability to approach the quota was attributable to labor unrest that culminated in serious disorders at the end of the year,” and in an effort to prevent these

of Imports; Bolivia handbook BFDC #96; Box 5, Records Pertaining to Economic Conditions in Latin America, 1942-45; Records of the Pan American Branch, Bureau of Areas, Records of the Foreign Economic Administration, Record Group 169; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 292 Pehrson and Umhau, Minerals Yearbook – 1941, 724. Pehrson and Umhau, Minerals Yearbook – Review of 1940, 677, 685.

180 from recurring “financial aid and the assistance of numerous specialists were furnished by the United States.”293

Constitutional guarantees have, of course, been completely suspended

“Labor unrest in Bolivia has been increasing during the past six years,” the

Foreign Economic Administration reported in January 1943. “The workers, especially in the mines and the railroads, have been struggling for the right to organize, collective bargaining, better working conditions; but they have been particularly restive because of the increase in living costs arising out of the inflationary tendency of the last decade,” it added, explaining that “conditions were moving towards a crisis, especially in the tin mines,” as 1942 drew to a close. Miners “were increasingly unable to purchase food, not to mention clothing and medical services, with wages that ranged from ten to thirty-five cents a day for unskilled labor,” and “were aware of the increased prices for tin” and other minerals “that the mine operators were receiving. They knew that the largest of these operators—Patiño, Aramayo and Hochschild—had banded to resist increases in wages.”294

The combination of these factors made it clear by late 1942 that worker uprisings would not be contained, and one of the most crucial sites of unrest that year was Catavi, the Patiño-owned tin mine. Charles Collier, an official at the La Paz Embassy, explained that “the only ventilation in the mine is obtained by means of five or six vertical shafts

293 C. E. Nighman and J. B. Umhau, “Tin,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1942, ed. C. E. Needham (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1943), 749. 294 “The Bolivian Tin Miners’ Strikes of December, 1942,” January 1943; Bolivia handbook BFDC #96; Box 5, Records Pertaining to Economic Conditions in Latin America, 1942-45; Records of the Pan American Branch, Bureau of Areas, Records of the Foreign Economic Administration, Record Group 169; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

181 through which a certain amount of air flows by gravity,” and thus did “not meet the standards recommended by the Bureau of Mines as necessary to prevent excessive dust concentrations; nor would it, for example, comply with the New York Safety Code.” Dr.

George C. Bergman, Collier’s colleague, admitted that Bolivian miners generally were

“in a bad situation,” but argued that the point was “not to discourage mine management with ultra-scientific considerations. This is the proper approach to the health problems in the mines in Bolivia. In other words, United States standards must not be strictly applied at this stage of development in Bolivia.”295

Catavi thus conformed to Washington’s policy objectives, with working conditions for its miners worse than they would have been were the site in the U.S., and wages abysmal. Its grim conditions worsened as the Bolivian government worked to restrict demonstrators’ rights. Historian Robert J. Alexander adds that “a decree issued by the Peñaranda government in December 1941, using the excuse that Bolivia had joined the Allied cause in World War II,” exacerbated this situation. “While the present emergency situation exists,” the decree announced, “it is totally prohibited to commit any act, intention or incitement that tends directly or indirectly, and for any cause, to diminish, perturb, suspend or destroy production of minerals and products in general or their defense and transport within the national territory.” A similar decree came a year later, labor official Ernesto Galarza explained in December 1942. “Early this week the

President of Bolivia declared a state of martial law throughout the republic. Troops have

295 Charles W. Collier, “Extent of Dust Diseases Among Bolivian Miners,” April 29, 1943; Box 76, Vol. 30, General Records, 1943; La Paz Embassy, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park; College Park, MD. Geo. C. Bergman, M.D., Chief of Party, to His Excellency, Pierre de L. Boal, Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary, La Paz, Bolivia, November 6, 1943; Box 77, Vol. 31, General Records, 1943; La Paz Embassy, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

182 been posted on the railroads and at the mines. Constitutional guarantees have been, of course, completely suspended,” he wrote.296

This decree followed a labor action at the Catavi mine. “On December 14, 1942, some 16,000 workers [there] went on strike protesting the company store system and asking a 100 percent wage increase,” explained the Board of Economic Warfare.

“Existing wages were $5 to $10 per week and had changed little in the past decade despite a very high rise in the cost of living”—a tendency with which U.S. officials were familiar, to say nothing of the “lack of protective devices for miners engaged in hazardous underground work there,” another feature of life in the mine that its workers demanded be improved.297

One man who toiled there explained how, in 1942, “the mine workers of Siglo

XX asked for an increase in our allowance from general store’s supplies”—and

“especially more of the daily ration of bread that we were allowed,” namely the “three rolls of bread a day” that “wasn’t enough for an entire family.” Historian Robert

Alexander writes that “the unions in Catavi and the nearby Siglo XX mine had presented demands for 10 to 60 percent wage increases” that year, but “had been forced to accept

10 to 30 percent increases.” In September, “the unions presented further demands for wage increases ranging from 20 to 70 percent,” and “were in no mood to compromise.”

The government soon classified these mines as a “military zone” and dispatched troops to

296 Robert J. Alexander, A History of Organized Labor in Bolivia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2005), 45-47. Ernesto Galarza, December 19, 1942; Bolivia handbook BFDC #96; Box 5, Records Pertaining to Economic Conditions in Latin America, 1942-45; Records of the Pan American Branch, Bureau of Areas, Records of the Foreign Economic Administration, Record Group 169; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 297 War Trade Staff, “Bolivia,” April 5, 1943.

183 the region. The miners went on strike, then held an assembly, and “decided to march to the offices of the management of Catavi-Siglo XX” on December 21.

A confrontation followed. “The armed forces of the First Regiment were stationed on the hills surrounding the mouth of the mines. As soon as the miners began to appear they fired at them without wounding anyone, and the workers ran back.” Later another round of fire, at a group of women and children, killed one of the women, María

Barzola. During the confrontation, one exuberant woman yelled, “Hurrah for the nation!

Hurrah for the mines! The miners are those that give profits to the nation.” A soldier shot her. “The woman fell on the ground,” an eyewitness recalled. “She had a small child with her, and they say that the boy also fell to the ground, but out of fright. They say both died.” “Soldiers patrolled menacingly around the mining camps and allowed no one, not even the women, to leave camps,” Guillermo Lora, the Bolivian Trotskyist leader, recounted. “In Catavi soldiers fired on to a crowd of workers who were heading toward the management offices. It is said that thirty-five people fell, either dead or wounded.” Alexander cites 19 as the government’s fatality figure, with 40 wounded.

“But ‘cautious observers,’” he points out, “claimed that 40 had been killed, and others put the toll as high as 400 people.”298

One UP article gives some indication of how the event was portrayed in the U.S.

“The government announced tonight that a plot by the leftist revolutionary party to unseat the government and destroy Bolivia’s republican political system had been discovered,” the piece stated. The Catavi tin strike motivated “the government to declare a nationwide state of siege and to establish martial law in five mining districts,” it added. “A

298 June Nash, I Spent My Life in the Mines: The Story of Juan Rojas, Bolivian Tin Miner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 200-201. Alexander, A History of Organized Labor in Bolivia, 45-47.

184 government spokesman said that the tin strike was promoted by the revolutionary party, and the government tonight was seeking to establish documentary connection of Nazi agents with the strike.”299

Attributing worker unrest to foreign instigators was a common Bolivian governmental ploy, as U.S. officials understood. The Foreign Economic Administration, after describing the range of understandable motivations—atrocious work conditions, poor wages, and escalating living costs—leading to the Catavi strikes, noted that “a campaign was started” by the government “to make it appear that the whole movement was caused by nazi [sic] propagandists seeking to disrupt production for the United

Nations,” for example.300

Back in Washington, U.S. officials reviewed the incident and the response. W.

Tamplin, head of the Board of Economic Warfare’s Metals and Minerals Mission, wrote

“that if the Bolivian Government maintains the firm attitude which they have asserted from the first,” then Catavi would not become a site of successful labor struggle, and a symbol of inspiration to other mines. Confining the unrest to Catavi was crucial, since

“the ultimate loss of tin production will be much less than if any course is pursued that will permit the spread of strikes and their recurrences generally in the Bolivian mining industry,” this official wrote after soldiers had shot women and children in the manner just recounted.301

299 “Bolivia Foils Revolt Plot,” Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), December 20, 1942. 300 “The Bolivian Tin Miners’ Strikes of December, 1942,” January 1943. 301 W. Tamplin, Chief, Metals and Minerals Mission, to Allan M. Bateman, Metals and Minerals Division, Board of Economic Warfare, December 24, 1942; Box 60, Vol. 43, General Records, 1942; La Paz Embassy, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

185

But Board of Economic Warfare officials, to be fair, did envision limits to anti- strike actions, and felt their employees “should not concur in strikebreaking through abduction of leaders or starving workers”—since these “tactics endanger mineral production,” a nightmare scenario that had to be avoided.302

The 1943 Revolution

The harsh Bolivian response at Catavi accomplished the opposite of what

Washington hoped it would. According to Trotskyist leader Guillermo Lora, for example, “the Catavi Massacre and its aftermath had the result that ‘the MNR

[Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, which later won power in the 1952

Revolution] began its rapid rise as a popular ‘revolutionary’ party.” Víctor Paz

Estenssoro, the MNR leader who became president in 1952, “confirmed that the Catavi

Massacre issue ‘brought the MNR first into contact with the miners on a considerable scale,’” and also “brought them in touch with members of the armed forces who had a social point of view,” he added.303

The MNR’s ability to effect political change after Catavi was rapid. The

Geological Survey noted that outrage following the massacre “was not lessened by the general conclusions of the joint Bolivia-American investigatory commission [led by

Judge Calvert Magruder] that labor conditions and wages were substandard,” and that relentless MNR criticism of Enrique Peñaranda’s government, which oversaw the Catavi crackdown, “led to the resignation of his cabinet in September” 1943. “About December

302 “Statement of Mauricio Hochschild to Paul Nitze on December 30, 1942;” Bolivia handbook BFDC #96; Box 5, Records Pertaining to Economic Conditions in Latin America, 1942-45; Records of the Pan American Branch, Bureau of Areas, Records of the Foreign Economic Administration, Record Group 169; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 303 Alexander, A History of Organized Labor in Bolivia, 45-47.

186

20, 1943,” the Survey continued, “the government was seized by a military coup d’état and a new regime headed by Major [Gualberto] Villarroel and leaders of the MNR took its place.”304

Once in power, the new government “turned its attention to retributive measures for what was described as last December’s ‘Catavi massacre’ in which 19 were killed and

35 injured,” the AP reported immediately after the coup. “The government announced today a decree providing indemnities for the victims and said measures aimed at determining culpability for the shootings would follow,” for example. But the new regime also emphasized its wish to ensure “‘effective cooperation’ between the United

States and Bolivia” continued during the war, “with an early settlement of negotiations concerning tin”—thus making it likely that worker unrest would continue.305

“A general strike at the tin mines took place April 19, 1944,” for example. “The miners were requested to return to work by Major Villarroel,” who then announced nine days later “that a ‘vast revolutionary plot’ had been put down,” in the course of which

“ringleaders were arrested, and the country was declared in a state of siege until a national presidential election could be held in July.” That May, meanwhile, “a special

United States commission was dispatched to study and report on the situation. Shortly thereafter about 80 Axis supporters or agents were sent to the United States for internment,” the Geological Survey wrote.306

304 C. E. Nighman and J. B. Umhau, “Tin,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1943, ed. C. E. Needham (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1945), 748-749. Laurence Whitehead, “Bolivia,” in Latin America Between the Second World War and the Cold War, 1944-1948, 132. 305 “Bolivian Gov’t Turning Attention to Catavi Massacre,” Nashua Telegraph (Nashua, NH), December 22, 1943. 306 Nighman and Umhau, Minerals Yearbook – 1943, 748-749.

187

And the official U.S. stance was that the Villarroel government’s “Axis taint” ruled out recognition by Washington. For example, the State Department’s Laurence

Duggan explained to a Bolivian official in Washington that the Andean government

“contained elements which were wholly inacceptable”—a wholly spurious charge. As

Cole Blasier notes, U.S. officials conceded in private that their anti-Axis charges were baseless. “No definite proof was ever available, even at the time of the ‘Nazi-Putsch’ to establish direct connection between the MNR and the Nazi party,” an April 1944 U.S.

Embassy cable concluded. “At the present time it seems doubtful that the party was anything but a completely national one,” it added, calling to mind subsequent conflations, conscious or not, of communism and nationalism among U.S. officials during the Cold

War.307

Alfred Eckes elaborates on Washington’s fears regarding Nazi activity in Bolivia at the time. As he explains, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, “whose agency had taken control of Western Hemisphere security operations as the OSS concentrated on activities in Europe, Africa, and Asia,” drew motivation from “a 1939 comment attributed to

Hitler: ‘We have no intention of proceeding with the conquest of Brazil by landing troops for the taking of the country. Our armies are invisible.’” Compare this remark to Chilean

President González’s insistence that Communists were an invisible menace to his country in 1947—the year when, thanks in part to González’s emerging anti-Communism,

Chilean relations with the U.S. improved dramatically. Eckes adds that fears of “Axis interest in disrupting Western Hemisphere trading patterns” led U.S. officials to monitor

“events south of the Rio Grande closely, especially in Bolivia.” Their careful attention

307 Cole Blasier, The Hovering Giant: U.S. Responses to Revolutionary Change in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976), 48-49.

188 allowed them to conclude, after the December 1943 coup, that the Nazi-MNR link was a fiction, though they claimed otherwise. And there were other distortions of Nazi strength in the country. Max Paul Friedman describes an FBI “illustration that showed 12,000

German inhabitants of Bolivia lined up like storm troopers ready to march—although

8,500 of them were Jewish refugees. The remaining 3,500 were ‘men, women and children of German nationality or of German origin and Bolivian nationality,’” with just

184 of them, or 1.5% the original total, “Nazi Party members on the eve of the war.”308

Meanwhile there were more strikes in the spring of 1945. Villarroel responded with “wage increases of about 15 percent,” but delivered a grim message that autumn. In

November, he announced the country should “prepare to face an acute economic crisis,” when wages would not rise, in 1946. That year, labor actions “and increased operating costs adversely affected tin mining,” while Villarroel’s opponents tried several times to unseat him. They finally succeeded that summer. “On July 18 an open revolt took place during which Villarroel and many other persons were killed,” and the provisional government that replaced him “was recognized by the United States on August 12.”309

This quick succession of governments accompanied the rise of a national miners’ movement. “The most important labor development during the Villarroel period was the successful establishment of the miners’ federation, the Federación Sindical de

Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia (FSTMB),” writes Alexander. The group was founded in June 1944, largely on the initiative of the MNR’s Emilio Carvajal, who became its

308 Eckes, The United States and the Global Struggle for Minerals, 108-109. Max Paul Friedman, Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 124. 309 C. E. Nighman and J. B. Umhau, “Tin,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1945, ed. H. D. Keiser (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1947), 742-743. C. E. Nighman and J. B. Umhau, “Tin,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1946, ed. Allan F. Matthews (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1948), 1174-1175.

189 secretary-general—though Juan Lechín, appointed permanent secretary, soon became its best-known and most influential member. In Lora’s opinion, both Villarroel and the

MNR deserved recognition “for promoting the organization of the miners,” though they championed these laborers largely out of self-interest, “to gain the support of the majority of the workers” and thus head off rivals, in his view. Whatever their motivation was, the

FSTMB “was undoubtedly the strongest and most militant union group in Bolivia” through the late 1940s, when it helped push the MNR leftward—a crucial development on the road to the 1952 Revolution.310

Oppressive actions

Workers’ militancy and the ongoing upheaval in Bolivia threatened to disrupt

U.S. tin procurement. And there were other factors that interfered with mining there.

The AP, in October 1943, reported on “that heavily burdened industry’s mounting costs,” citing “the taxation nearly overwhelming” some of the firms. One of the article’s sources gave his own take on the situation. “The mining industry, overburdened with taxation and the unchecked rise in costs of labor, equipment and materials, is now the whipping- boy of every ambitious politician in this country,” he complained.311

U.S. officials fully sympathized with this view, lamenting the Bolivian government’s early 1945 resort to “oppressive actions.” One can be forgiven for assuming they meant a Catavi-style crackdown, or something along those lines. What they were actually talking about was new legislation “directing operators to grant a

310 Alexander, A History of Organized Labor in Bolivia, 51, 63. James F. Siekmeier, The Bolivian Revolution and the United States, 1952 to the Present (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University, 2011). James Malloy, Bolivia: The Uncompleted Revolution (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970). 311 “Tin Shortage in Bolivia Threat to Allied Effort,” St. Petersburg Times (St. Petersburg, FL), October 17, 1943.

190

Christmas cash bonus to mine workers in the form of a 25-day vacation with pay.” The

Foreign Economic Administration’s Arthur Z. Gardiner “promptly requested State

Department action to forestall final passage of the measure,” bemoaning “the burden on the tin operator through the payment of such a lump sum, which, he said, constituted a retroactive wage increase, ‘unilaterally imposed.’” Bolivian meddling in its own mining sector could not be tolerated.312

Despite the nuisance of aid for workers U.S. officials knew were suffering, miners did continue to extract tin at levels close to the target figures. “Bolivia exported concentrates and ore containing 40,312 long tons of tin in 1943 compared with 38,293 in

1942, 42,200 in 1941, and 46,434 in the peak production year 1929,” according to the

Geological Survey. “The United States was the destination of 20,580 tons,” it added, noting that Patiño continued shifting his operations from Britain to the U.S. in this period.

In 1943, he “supplied approximately 50 percent of the country total—an increase of 14 percent from 1942,” for example. “Under a 10-year contract, the Patiño concentrate is shipped to England, but 20,000 tons are to be diverted to the United States in 1944,” it added.313

And while, in the final years of the war, Bolivian officials “acted to increase the cost of mining by social and labor legislation, including additional pay for night work, increased employer contributions for compensation insurance, severance pay, wage payments for 12 holidays, and Christmas bonuses”—the list of outrages was long—in

1945 Bolivia’s tin exports, at 42,465 tons, “were 10 percent more than in 1944 and were

312 Tidwell, “The Government’s Tin Program, 1940-1950.” 313 Nighman and Umhau, Minerals Yearbook – 1943, 748.

191 exceeded only by the 1929 peak of 46,343 tons. The United States was the destination of about 77 percent, and the remainder went to the United Kingdom,” the Survey wrote.314

Demand for tin metal suffered no diminution

“The fact that tin has many industrial uses assures continuation of demand in peacetime,” the U.S. Tariff Commission explained after the war. “Substantial quantities of tin no doubt will be required in the immediate postwar period, particularly until civilian requirements that have been seriously curtailed because of the war have been satisfied.” Tidwell wrote that tin was rather unique in this regard. “Except for tin ores and concentrates and a few other commodities, cutbacks were effected in virtually the entire list of strategic and critical materials.” But “demand for tin metal suffered no diminution,” and “purchases of all available tin ores and concentrates were still required to provide a continuing and uninterrupted supply to the smelter at Texas City.” “The

United States desperately needed the minerals,” as Victor Andrade, Bolivia’s

Ambassador to the U.S. at the time, put it. “It neither wanted nor could afford to risk a breakdown in the mines.”315

But problems in the mines continued after the war. To discuss them, a group of industrialists and U.S. government officials met in October 1946. Representatives of the

Patiño, Aramayo, and Hochschild interests—the trio of Bolivian tin magnates—were present. “The general consensus of opinion was that the miners as a group could easily be controlled if their leaders were restricted in their activities.” Whether or not Catavi’s

314 Nighman and Umhau, Minerals Yearbook – 1944, 735. Nighman and Umhau, Minerals Yearbook – 1945, 742-743. 315 U.S. Tariff Commission, “Mining and Manufacturing Industries,” 38-39. Tidwell, “The Government’s Tin Program,” 1940-1950. Andrade, My Missions for Revolutionary Bolivia, 61.

192

1947 overhaul was the result of decisions reached at this meeting is unclear. But there seems little reason to suppose U.S. officials opposed it, given their approval both of the

1942 attack on miners there, and the 1946 concurrence that controlling Bolivian labor should be a chief post-war objective.316

As Spencer M. King, Third Secretary of the Embassy, explained, Catavi was temporarily shuttered in 1947 after “a series of labor conflicts and discussions between the company, labor and the government. The company had long wished to discharge all its workers in order to liquidate all obligations to them in accordance with existing laws requiring indemnity and longevity payments.” Once re-opened, the mine would hire workers “on a different basis,” with a more stratified wage scale, and an emphasis on incentivizing increased output—part of the firm’s determination to combat “certain troublesome labor leaders and agitators who, in the company’s opinion, had misled the mass of workers and had been responsible for the almost never-ending labor conflicts of the past two years.”317

Laurence Whitehead notes that similar changes affected all workers in Patiño- owned mines. In early September 1947, the Bolivian government “authorized Patiño

Mines to dismiss the entire work force and then rehire 95 percent, in this way ridding the company of all the principal ‘troublemakers.’” As a result, the company fired all its permanent workers, and “then rehired only those who were not known for their trade

316 John A. E. Orloski, Assistant Commercial Attaché, “Expropriation as a Possible Solution to Present Situation in Mining Areas,” to the Honorable Secretary of State, Washington, La Paz, Bolivia, October 24, 1946; Box 187, Vol. 27, General Records; La Paz Embassy, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 317 Spencer M. King, Third Secretary of Embassy, “Quarterly Minerals Report, Bolivia—Third Quarter, 1947,” November 20, 1947; Box 200, General Records; La Paz Embassy, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

193 union or political activities or sympathies,” thus ensuring “managerial control,” declining since World War II, would be “decisively reasserted.”318

Everyone there will be in grave danger

King, the Embassy official, described the labor-management tensions motivating this mass dismissal after speaking with Catavi’s manager, D.C. Deringer, in March 1947.

“Mr. Deringer is sincerely and seriously worried over the situation at Catavi,” King wrote, explaining that Deringer reviewed “in detail the events of the morning of March

5th leading up to the signing of an agreement to pay the workers for the time lost during the sit-down strike on March 3rd.” On March 5th, “approximately 6500 workers surrounded the management area” for several hours, as Deringer at first “refused to sign the agreement and finally did so only in fear of his own life and those of the other foreign personnel and their families.” He believed “that there was a very serious threat” at

Catavi, “especially since the workers, originally aroused by 15 or 20 of the agitators, had apparently gotten out of hand and could not be controlled even by their leaders.” They were insubordinate to the point where Deringer feared “that everyone there will be in grave danger unless the demands of the workers are met,” King concluded.319

But there were labor actions throughout Bolivia during this period, despite the changes in Patiño’s mines. “Labor difficulties continued to beset operators” in 1947, the

Geological Survey wrote. “In January there were civil disturbances at Potosi; miners from Hochschild’s Unificada mine attacked military and police quarters with

318 Laurence Whitehead, “Bolivia,” in Latin America Between the Second World War and the Cold Wari, 1944-1948, 143. 319 Spencer M. King, “Conversation with Mr. Deringer,” March 7, 1947; Box 200, 863: Mines – Catavi; General Records, La Paz Embassy; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

194 considerable loss of life, many injuries, and considerable property damage,” it explained.

Miners’ actions there “had a serious effect on production. The Patiño Co. stated that at its Oploca mine,” for example, “output had dropped 70 percent,” and in an attempt to cut losses “the mine was closed in the first week of February 1947. About 1,500 workers were released.”320

“The situation in the mines again became dangerous,” King, the Embassy official, reported in January 1948. “A serious case of sabotage occurred at the San José mine on

January 18,” for example, “resulting in the mine’s being flooded and operations suspending for almost a week.” Three days earlier, “the workers at Pulacayo assaulted and slightly injured the General Manager, an American citizen, when he refused to consider their demands for wage increases of approximately 50 percent.” There was additional unrest “at the Corocoro [sic] property of the American Smelting and Refining

Company on January 19. A demonstrating mob surrounded the management area, exploded sticks of dynamite and threatened to hang the gringos,” due to a dispute regarding wage hikes. And there were still other disturbances. “The workers at the

Callipampa mine have announced a hunger strike in protest against ‘miserable wages and intolerable conditions,’” for example, while “management’s efforts to discharge unnecessary workers” at the Barrascota mine motivated its workers to take it over,

“attacking one of the supervisors and threatening to hang the administrators.”

Confronted with this outrage, “[m]anagement decided not to discharge any one.”321

320 Nighman and Umhau, Minerals Yearbook – 1947, 1166. 321 Spencer M. King, Third Secretary of Embassy, “Monthly Labor Report, Bolivia, January, 1948,” January 30, 1948; 850.4: Labor; Box 217, General Records, La Paz Embassy; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

195

Problems continued in Catavi, especially in 1949. “Serious riots, resulting in the death of several Americans and Bolivians, began [there] on May 29,” the Geological

Survey wrote. The uprising “stopped operations at this mine and affected production at others. Order was virtually restored and production resumed at a curtailed rate July 15,” but then “[a] revolution began in August and was quelled by early September. Fighting was reported in Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, Catavi, Potosí, and Oruro Departments.”

Fortunately, Bolivia’s “mines continued operations, except for a few days,” during the upheaval.322

On June 1, 1949, the AP carried a story on a particularly dramatic episode. “A detachment of 200 Bolivian troops battled 2,000 dynamite-hurling strikers today for control of the Patiño Co.’s Huanuni tin mines,” it reported. “Superintendent Howard

Keller, a U.S. citizen, was held captive by the miners who struck to enforce a demand that the government return 26 men—union leaders and others—deported to Chile

Friday,” but the government refused to yield, and imposed a state of siege. “U.S. citizens and other foreigners were being evacuated from the mining area. Sympathy strikes crippled railway service. Unofficial reports said the death list might total 50.” There were “[t]wo American engineers, T. J. H. O’Connor of Pasadena, Calif., and Albert

Krefting of Seattle,” among the slain. “Meanwhile a pair of miners had been killed, and another six wounded ‘in an attack on the federal police station at Huanuni. Several policemen were wounded,” and when the government dispatched troops to Oruro, site of the Huanuni mine, workers were waiting for them, and “threw sticks of dynamite from surrounding hilltops” to try to fend them off. “Slowly, the mine strike spread,” however.

322 Gustavson and Umhau, Minerals Yearbook – 1949, 1214-1215.

196

This was the nightmare scenario U.S. officials had feared, years earlier, would follow the

Catavi massacre.323

Bolivia was, in reality, totally dependent on the U.S.

But Bolivia still supplied the U.S. with large quantities of tin as it worked to quash labor unrest, though production fluctuated in the late 1940s. Its exports “in 1946 declined 11 percent from 1945,” for example, when the U.S. “was the destination of about 60 percent of” Bolivian tin, “and the remainder went to the United Kingdom.” In

1947, Bolivia’s exports “were 12 percent less than in the preceding year and were at the lowest point of the past 8 years,” though a majority—some 60 percent—“was consigned to the United States, with approximately 40 percent to the United Kingdom,” according to the Geological Survey. Mining rebounded in 1948, when tin exports “were 12 percent more than in 1947,” as the U.S. received 54 percent and Britain the rest, and Washington signed a “2-year (1948-49) tin contract” with the Andean nation. Bolivia’s tin exports subsequently declined 9 percent from 1948 to 1949, and 9 percent again from 1949 to

1950. In the latter year, 44 percent of Bolivia’s tin exports went to the U.S. and 53 percent to Britain.324

As the U.S. reliance on Latin American tin increased during the 1940s, Bolivia’s relationship with the major tin-consuming powers changed. Bolivian producers’ lack of

323 “Bolivian Troops Battling Strikers in Tin Mines,” Schenectady Gazette (Schenectady, NY), June 1, 1949. 324 Nighman and Umhau, Minerals Yearbook – 1946, 1160, 1174-1175. C. E. Nighman and J. B. Umhau, “Tin,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1947, ed. Allan F. Matthews (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1949), 1166. Samuel A. Gustavson and John B. Umhau, “Tin,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1948, ed. Allan F. Matthews (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1950), 1224-1225. Samuel A. Gustavson and John B. Umhau, “Tin,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1949, ed. Allan F. Matthews (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1951), 1214-1215. Abbott Renick and John B. Umhau, “Tin,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1950, ed. Leonard L. Fischman (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1953), 1201, 1224.

197 smelters initially made them “dependent upon the British for the sale of their tin ores and concentrates.” But by 1940, smelting facilities in Southeast Asia allowed that region’s tin concentrates, previously sent to Britain for smelting, to be processed close to the source of extraction. “British smelter officials claimed they were dependent upon

Bolivian ores and concentrates for approximately 67 per cent of their output” as a result.

This new British reliance on Bolivian ores developed just as Metals Reserve worked out its contracts with Bolivia. As a result of Washington’s efforts, by the early 1950s “the

Bolivian state was in reality totally dependent on the income from US contracts.” Thus

Bolivia’s reliance on Britain before the war had shifted to the U.S. a decade later, suggesting that the McReynolds committee’s goal of “a new world order in tin” had been met, at least in part.325

Conclusion

The regular upheavals Bolivia experienced in its mining sector throughout the

1940s begin to reveal the everyday violence characterizing U.S. foreign policy. Even in the process of ensuring it has enough tin to fulfill relatively mundane needs like canned food stocks or oil barrel quotas, in other words, Washington participates in and promotes policies that pit impoverished workers against managers bent on maximizing their profits.

And as the history of late 1940s Bolivia makes clear, these confrontations are fraught with tension, which often increases to the point where physical altercations result. In other words, it is not only during coups, or in its support for military dictatorships, that

U.S. foreign policy promotes repression abroad.

325 Espen Storli, “The Birth of the World’s Largest Tin Merchant: Philipp Brothers, Bolivian Tin and American Stockpiles,” in Tin and Global Capitalism, eds. Ingulstad et al., 202-220.

198

Chapter 5: Tungsten

Introduction

Tungsten, unlike tin or copper, is a strictly industrial metal that has been used only in recent centuries. In the mid-20th century, it was an essential input into cutting tools, filament wirers, and the electric contact points of internal combustion engines.

And during the war, U.S. officials worked to procure it mainly from Bolivia, until large deposits were found in Brazil midway through the conflict.

This Latin American procurement plan developed as a result of the Japanese assault on China during the 1930s. China had been the world’s preeminent tungsten source, controlling its exports through a monopoly and offering grades superior to those found virtually anywhere else. But its tungsten shipments to the West were disrupted thanks to Japanese aggression, forcing U.S. officials to settle for much lower-grade tungsten ores from Bolivia. Washington also had to deal with the Japanese in procuring these Bolivia ores. Japan, as a resource-poor island, was eager to secure Bolivian as well as Chinese tungsten, and willing to pay more for it at first than the U.S. was. But ultimately political considerations overrode Washington’s economic calculations, and the

U.S. reluctantly agreed to a pay a high price for this metal.

As with, for instance, Washington’s manganese procurement programs in Brazil and Cuba, there were a number of barriers to successful extraction in the Andes. Among these were Bolivia’s shoddy system of roads, and the “Indian blood” U.S. officials believed influenced the conduct of the local population. Rather than eagerly renting themselves out on the labor market, in other words, indigenous Bolivians were content in many cases to produce just enough to fulfill their subsistence needs. This mentality was,

199 of course, anathema to the men in Washington, who firmly believed that a life well-spent entailed working in exchange for a wage—and, more specifically, working in order to maximize one’s wealth.

In Brazil, meanwhile, it seems as if U.S.-backed mining interests drew on concentration camp labor for their tungsten projects. The Brazilian government had built concentration camps in northeastern Brazil in the 1870s, to house those driven from the country’s interior by the droughts that periodically plagued the region—and to prevent these refugees from flooding the region’s cities. It appears that the Brazilian government shuttered these camps in 1942 to avoid drawing comparisons to the Nazis. But there were more than mere parallels between U.S.-endorsed policy and Nazi tactics, where the story of tungsten is concerned.

In fact, to secure its own share of the growing tungsten carbide market, a subsidiary of General Electric struck a deal with Friedrich Krupp AG, forming a cartel that helped enhance the Nazis’ power as they won control over Germany. Some considered this deal a direct detriment to Washington’s wartime military campaigns, in which tungsten carbide provided a substantial advantage to the Nazis. I turn now to this story.

By no means un-American

A government witness was testifying before the Senate Committee on Patents. It was April 1942. W. G. Robbins, president of Carboloy Company, Inc., listened with growing rage. He then “dramatically interrupted,” the AP reported, screaming “that he and his company ‘refused to be called un-American.’ Striding up to the committee table,

200 the stocky corporation president interrupted an explanation by John Henry Lewin, a

Justice Department anti-trust division attorney, of how Carboloy had controlled prices through a patent pool,” throttling potential competitors in the global tungsten carbide trade.326

Tungsten carbide is a chemical compound with tungsten and carbon atoms in equal parts. It “was a phenomenal marketing success by the late 1930s,” when it

“replaced more expensive industrial diamonds as a coating to increase the hardness and durability of cutting-tool tips.” And the arms industry wanted it to make “a newer and more deadly variety of armor-piercing shells.” German firm Osram Gesellschaft developed it as World War I erupted, and soon “carbide was rapidly diffused and commodified despite efforts of the global steel cartel to control its price and distribution.”

Friedrich Krupp AG, also German, then “absorbed the controlling patents” and made a better version of Osram Gesellschaft’s product. General Electric worked concurrently to break into this market, forming the subsidiary Carboloy in 1928 “to ‘exploit the product commercially.’ Later that same year Krupp and GE concluded a secret agreement to pool patent information, divid[ing] marketing territories” as they “fixed tungsten carbide prices at five times higher than the cost of production.” Assistant Attorney General

Norman Littell explained in 1941 that “prices were controlled and immediately skyrocketed from $48 a pound to $453 a pound and at no time during the 12-year period of this Krupp-General Electric domination of the tungsten carbide market did the price

326 “Patent Pool Linked to Germany,” Evening Independent (St. Petersburg, FL), April 15, 1942.

201 fall below $205 a pound, although manufacturing costs were approximately $25 a pound.”327

This arrangement came when “General Electric, while an enormous concern in some lines at that time, was just starting into the tool business.” There were “established tool makers much more likely to be able to use and develop tungsten carbide than

General Electric,” whose Carboloy offshoot was thus “an infant industry” that had “to get control at all costs” in order to flourish in a new sector. Ultimately its deal with Krupp gave it “a monopoly in the U.S. for tungsten carbide. So when World War II began,

General Electric had a monopoly at an established price of $450 a pound—almost ten times more than the 1928 price—and use in the U.S. had been correspondingly restricted.” The Nazis were among the deal’s beneficiaries. Krupp supported them, and

“almost all directors of German General Electric were Hitler backers” as well. The U.S. was the chief loser in the scheme, which “worked to the detriment” of its tungsten carbide development in the run-up to World War II.328

The Germans, for example, manufactured “tungsten carbide armor-piercing bullets that could not be stopped by the best armor” during the war. They used a Gerlich antitank gun that “fired a 28mm round of tungsten carbide at four thousand feet per second that was capable of penetrating any known tank armor.” And this Nazi advantage persisted throughout the war. The U.S. Army designed an assault tank, the T28, in March

1944. The following January, “Major General Gladeon M. Barnes, chief of research and

327 Ronald H. Limbaugh, Tungsten in Peace and War, 1918-1946 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2010), 112-113, 120. Norman M. Littell, “American Business and the New Order,” Ottawa Citizen (Ottawa, CN), July 26, 1941. 328 Patents. Hearing before the Committee on Patents, United States Senate, 77th Cong. 12 (1942) (Testimony of John Henry Lewin, Special Assistant to the Attorney General, Antitrust Division, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.). Anthony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (East Sussex, UK: Clairview Books), 59, 62, 164.

202 development of the Ordnance Department, advised the head of the department that the

‘startling performance of the new tungsten-carbide ammunition’ now in use by the

German Army left the T28 too vulnerable.”329

Washington exposed the G.E.-Krupp deal in August 1940, and a grand jury charged the two firms with “conspiracy to fix prices and restrain interstate and foreign commerce in hard metal composition tools and dies,” the AP reported. U.S. officials further alleged that Krupp, “famous for many years as Germany’s chief source of war materials, held a veto power over the issuance of patent licenses to American firms in the manufacture of hard metal compositions used in machine cutting tools,” including tungsten carbide—and that its scheme with G.E., geared towards “international control of these vital elements,” violated the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act.330

“No wonder that American industry is not operating on a tungsten carbide basis, but is confined to the old hard steel cutting implements,” Assistant Attorney General

Littell explained in July 1941, elaborating on the G.E.-Krupp deal’s effects. He cited estimates “that American industry would produce 25% more than at present if it were on a tungsten carbide basis,” adding that the Nazis had “over 20 times the amount of tungsten carbide” as Washington. “Now when the emergency has come,” a major tungsten carbide maker noted, “industry had not learned how to use tungsten carbide and has not the machines, the skilled men, or the technique which it would have had if the

329 Quentin R. Skrabec, Jr., The Metallurgic Age: The Victorian Flowering of Invention and Industrial Science (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006), 154. Richard A. Gabriel, Between Flesh and Steel: A History of the Military Medicine from the Middle Ages to the War in Afghanistan (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2013), 22. Kenneth W. Estes, Super-Heavy Tanks of World War II (Oxford, NY: Osprey Publishing, 2014), 38-40. 330 “General Electric Linked with German Company in Indictment,” Lawrence Daily Journal-World (Lawrence, KS), Aug. 30, 1940.

203 material had been available at the same low price at which it was available to German industry.”331

Congress held hearings the next spring. A G.E. advertising blitz peppered newspaper readers throughout the country at the same time, as the company worked to rebrand itself as a U.S. ally. “There is no scarcity now,” these ads—often full-page— insisted, referring to tungsten carbide. They emphasized that “the story of Carboloy does not end in ‘too little and too late.’ Like many previously untold stories of American industry, it continues, a sturdy and inspiring example of public service born of private enterprise, and characterized by hard work, ingenuity, research, risk, and courage—a familiar pattern on this side of the Atlantic.”332

But Senator Robert La Follette (R-WI) was after a different untold story when he grilled Zay Jeffries, the Carboloy Company’s Chairman of the Board. “Weren’t you at one time in the position where you could not share the South American market without getting permission from Krupp?” La Follette asked. “Yes,” Jeffries admitted. “Well, you come right out and say so,” La Follette sneered. Lewin, the Justice Department’s antitrust attorney, stated that “in order to ship to South America,” Carboloy “had to get the express approval of the Krupp Co.” following a 1936 amendment to the original 1928 deal. “In form it exists today,” he added, describing the shipping restriction in April

1942.

Robbins, head of Carboloy, felt his patience thin as this evidence was presented.

“These statements are absolutely false,” he yelled. “I refuse to be called un-American or that our company is un-American, as has been charged here.” Others thought the charges

331 Littell, “American Business and the New Order,” July 26, 1941. 332 General Electric Company, “This is the Story of Carboloy,” Schenectady Gazette (Schenectady, NY), April 23, 1942.

204 warranted. In 1948, a district court found “GE and its collaborators guilty on all counts.”333

The second most frequently used industrial metal

At its core, the G.E.-Krupp project was about an element that is never found in nature in its pure form. Tungsten must, instead, be extracted from one of several ores, like scheelite or wolframite. It “has the highest melting point of any metal,” maintaining

“exceptional strength at high temperatures,” and thus is a boon to industry. Currently it is

“the second most frequently used industrial metal (the first is iron).” Unlike, say, copper or tin, which humans have mined for thousands of years, tungsten entered our civilizational drama only recently. It may be the case, for example, that “the first humans to encounter tungsten were Neolithic placer miners and metalworkers looking for pliable pieces of native copper or gold,” for whom the metal “would have had little interest,” much in the way the Spanish, in the Andes, discarded tin in their hunt for silver. Since tungsten “required both an advanced technology and an industrial necessity before its properties could be understood and utilized,” centuries passed before its exploitation began.334

Carl Scheele, the Swedish chemist, kick-started this process when he discovered the metal in 1781. As with many such scientific breakthroughs, his triumph was “not an

333 “Patent Pool Linked to Germany,” Evening Independent (St. Petersburg, FL), April 15, 1942. Patents, 77th Cong. 12 (1942) (Testimony of Zay Jeffries, Chairman of the Board of the Carboloy Company, Nela Park, Cleveland, Ohio; Testimony of John Henry Lewin). Limbaugh, Tungsten in Peace and War, 112-113, 120. 334 Eugene A. Permyakov, Metalloproteomics (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 453. W. T. Elwell and D. F. Wood, Analytical Chemistry of Molybdenum and Tungsten (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1971), 3. Robert E. Krebs, The History and Use of Our Earth’s Chemical Elements: A Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), 154. Bidwell, Raw Materials, 194. Limbaugh, Tungsten in Peace and War, 1-2.

205 isolated event,” but rather the culmination of “small consecutive observations” his predecessors—particularly the chemist Axel Constedt—had made. In 1751, for example,

Constedt had written of “two minerals with an exceptionally high density,” one of which he named tungsten, or “heavy stone.” Two years after Scheele’s find, the Spanish brothers José and Fausto D’Elhuyar “heated a mixture of tungstic acid with charcoal for an hour and a half,” producing tungsten, and confirming the new metal’s existence.335

As “advancing science and technology in both Europe and America made mass production of steel compounds and alloys possible,” tungsten’s use quickly intensified, with the majority mined before World War I used to strengthen steel—though much went into filament wire, for incandescent lighting, then as well. Filament wires later went into television tubes, and tungsten was also a key input “in electrical contact points in the timing devices of internal combustion engines.” In 1958, one commentator, peering into the future, expected it would “have increasingly wide application where stability at high temperatures is required, in guided missiles, in jet engines and in atomic reactors.” And as the tungsten carbide episode made clear, the metal was invaluable as a cutting tool, and for killing people in combat.336

Global production increased rapidly in the early 20th century to fulfill these proliferating demands—from 4,025 tons in 1905 to 11,840 tons in 1915. Domestic mines fulfilled about half of U.S. needs at this time. One deposit was found in Colorado near

335 Jan Trofast, “The Discovery of Cerium – A Fascinating History,” in Episodes from the History of the Rare Earth Elements, ed. C. H. Evans (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), 13-14. 336 Bidwell, Raw Materials, 194. Carl L. Rollinson, The Chemistry of Chromium, Molybdenum and Tungsten (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1973), 744. William P. Tidwell, “Tungsten: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1940- 45 – A Synthesis of Activities of Metals Reserve Company (A Subsidiary of Reconstruction Finance Corporation),” 1948; Box 9, Tungsten-Zinc, Metals Reserve Company; Administrative Histories of the R.F.C.’s Wartime Programs, 1943-54; Office of the Secretary, Reconstruction Finance Corporation; Records of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Record Group 234; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

206

Boulder, for example, and later exploration located its ores in California as World War I loomed.337

Cutthroat marketing tactics, polling arrangements and secret acquisitions

G.E.’s formation and growth coincided with this expanded tungsten demand. And the company’s domestic strategies indicate that its 1928 Krupp deal was largely a continuation of entrenched practice. For example, “General Electric merged with a northeastern rival to form the General Electric Company in 1894,” and over the following decades a potent combination of “cutthroat marketing tactics, polling arrangements and secret acquisitions to eliminate serious competition at home,” to say nothing of “patent buyouts along with substantial investments in foreign rival companies to reduce threats from abroad,” spurred its rise to dominance. G.E. picked up the rights to the tungsten filament a pair of Austrians, Alexander Just and Fritz Hanaman, invented in 1909. In

1910, William David Coolidge, a G.E. physicist, ensured his company had “a ‘virtual lock’ on filament technology and production by patenting a ductile tungsten filament that soon became the industry standard. By World War I the General Electric Company controlled more than 90 percent of the electric-lamp filaments produced and sold in the

United States.”338

The company’s consolidation of power came in an era when the U.S. “turned decidedly protectionist,” working to bar foreign businesses from competing with budding domestic industries. “Steel industry protection began with the Morrill Tariff of 1861,” for example, and “President Taft signed the Payne-Aldrich Tariff” in 1909, which “was

337 Limbaugh, Tungsten in Peace and War, 3, 12-15. 338 Ibid., 13.

207 the first American legislation to impose ad valorem duties on steel alloys, including a 10 percent tax on imported tungsten ore and 20 percent on ferrotungsten,” an iron-tungsten alloy. This protectionism continued as the century progressed. The 1922 Fordney-

McCumber Tariff “made imports of tungsten dutiable at 45 cents a pound,” and the

Smoot-Hawley Tariff raised this duty in 1930 to 50 cents—“where it remained until

1948,” when it dropped to 38 cents. But efforts to boost domestic business could not alter the country’s geologic endowment, and “imported tungsten accounted for virtually half this country’s consumption” on the eve of World War II.339

Essential in the nation’s industrial life

The U.S. was “one of the world’s largest users of tungsten” by the 1940s. The metal’s “essential character in the nation’s industrial life,” coupled with “the contemplated tonnages of tungsten to be consumed in the defense program,” led U.S. planners to decide a stockpile had to be amassed. Procurement for the hoard “was to be conducted entirely from purchases abroad,” since needs far surpassed what domestic mines could provide. But there was a problem with foreign procurement as World War II approached. The most important source in 1940 was China, which under Japanese assault continued exporting the metal, “although at a greatly reduced rate.” First its exports “shifted to flow out of Indochina,” for example, as the Japanese held China’s ports. And when the Burma Road, linking southwest China to what is now Myanmar, reopened in October 1940, slowed tungsten outflows were “offset somewhat”—though

339 Limbaugh, Tungsten in Peace and War, 16-17. Bidwell, Raw Materials, 199. Tidwell, “Tungsten: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1940-45.”

208 not enough. To make up for the losses, the U.S. turned to other countries, including

Portugal and several in Latin America. It was not alone in its scramble for the metal.340

The eight hundred-pound gorilla on the international tungsten market

At that time, one country—“the eight hundred-pound gorilla on the international tungsten market,” in one author’s assessment—had “virtually no domestic tungsten supplies and no sizable stockpiles,” namely Germany. In 1938, Hitler had acquired

15,400 tons of tungsten, or “about one-fourth of the world production”—“far more than

Germany’s share,” Uncle Ray, the syndicated children’s columnist, informed his young readers the spring before Pearl Harbor. He did not tell them about Washington’s annual intake of half the world’s production.341

Like the U.S., the Nazis relied heavily on Chinese tungsten in the 1930s, making their appreciation for these reserves clear. “When the Chinese government was particularly obliging in the dispatch of tungsten” in 1935-1936, for example, “the

Germans were first moved to send thank-you telegrams and then special gifts—a ceremonial sword for Chiang from Hitler and a special car for him from [Werner] von

Blomberg,” the Commander-in-Chief of the German Armed Forces until January 1938.

“The Nanking authorities may have been reminded of gifts exchanged with barbarians in bygone days,” one historian speculates.342

340 Tidwell, “Tungsten: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1940-45.” Robert H. Ridgway and H. W. Davis, “Molybdenum, Tungsten, and Vanadium,” in Minerals Yearbook – Review of 1940, ed. H. D. Keiser (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1941), 615. 341 Limbaugh, Tungsten in Peace and War, 139-140. “Uncle Ray’s Corner: Tungsten Helped Hitler Prepare for World War,” Evening Independent (St. Petersburg, FL), May 20, 1941. 342 Gerhard L. Weinberg, Hitler’s Foreign Policy, 1933-1939: The Road to World War II (New York: Enigma Books, 2010), 263.

209

This reliance on Chinese ores forced the Nazis, again like the U.S., to cope with the 1937 Japanese invasion. “Hitler had welcomed Japan as an anticommunist ally after it signed an Anti-Comintern pact in 1936, and as an Axis partner following the 1940

Berlin pact,” it is true. But he faced Japanese pressure regardless. Tokyo wanted

Germany to stop sending weapons—provided in exchange for tungsten and other resources—to China, for example. Ultimately Britain’s blockade terminated Hitler’s sea trade with China. And while “Chinese ore continued to reach German plants via the

Trans-Siberian Railroad” in the war’s initial years, Hitler’s June 1941 invasion of the

USSR cut off this lifeline as well.343

The geological layout of global tungsten deposits, along with the extractive methods technology made available at the time, meant there were only so many places to which the Nazis could turn. One of these was the Iberian Peninsula. The Allies were also keen on the region’s tungsten as Japan disrupted the China supply. Thus “keeping the Iberian Peninsula neutral was important to belligerents on both sides,” so that Franco in Spain, and Salazar in Portugal especially, would not deprive either camp of the metal—which is not to say that England, for instance, took a hands-off approach to mineral procurement. “To keep wolfram out of German hands the British government resorted to ‘preclusive purchasing’ of all available supplies, forcing German dealers into a bidding war,” and driving tungsten’s price “upward from eleven hundred dollars per metric ton in 1940 to twenty thousand dollars in 1941.” Salazar ultimately announced his

“strict neutrality” policy at the start of the following year. Through it, he “gave both

343 Limbaugh, Tungsten in Peace and War, 139-140.

210 sides a share of the independent wolfram output, but fixed the price at twice the prewar market quotation.”344

Franco proved more frustrating. Hitler argued that “everything must be done to ensure our getting the greatest possible quantity of raw materials from Spain, tungsten in particular,” and for this reason “hastily ordered—against protests from the OKW

[Supreme Command of the Armed Forces]—that from February 1944 Spain should be sent at least twenty aircraft a month. On 2 February 1944, however, Franco blocked all exports of tungsten, and came to an understanding with the Allies,” thereby presenting

Hitler with a problem. He considered retaliation. But given, as he wrote, “that our conduct towards Spain must be dictated by the fact that at the present time we cannot do without the deliveries of tungsten from there,” and since Germany could not “go all the way” in punishing Franco, he concluded “it would be best to hold back entirely.” The

Nazis focused instead on “large-scale smuggling of the crucial ore,” and set up “a minimal traffic in goods by air. After that, the German war industry finally lost this link to a major supplier as well.”345

A strategic and critical mineral

As Washington developed its plans to acquire foreign ores, the Army-Navy

Munitions Board classified tungsten as a “strategic and critical” mineral in January 1940.

This designation meant the resource was “either in short supply or entirely lacking among the nation’s natural resources.” The Strategic Materials Act, passed the preceding June,

344 Ibid., 140-141. 345 Rolf-Dieter Müller, “Albert Speer and Armaments Policy in Total War,” in Bernhard R. Kroener, Rolf- Dieter Müller, and Hans Umbreit, Germany and the Second World War, Volume V/II: Organization and Mobilization in the German Sphere of Power: Wartime Administration, Economy, and Manpower Resources 1942-1944/5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 555.

211 launched the stockpiling program, in which the Treasury Department’s Procurement

Division was initially responsible for accumulating the metal. In 1940, it worked towards

“a 15,000 short ton objective established by the Army-Navy Munitions Board,” and subsequently the Council of National Defense’s Advisory Board Commission, which

Roosevelt had reactivated, “reduced the objective from 15,000 short tons to 13,000” that

October.346

But this reduction reflected irrational optimism about U.S. tungsten security, instead of a more sober appraisal than the Munitions Board’s. The shortfall became apparent early in 1941. Late that January, the AP reported that the Navy had “arranged to turn over its reserve stock of tungsten to the steel industry,” in order “to overcome a temporary shortage of the mineral, which caused some plants to face the possibility of stopping work on defense contracts almost immediately.” The Navy acquired its reserve

“before the present program of the government to accumulate national stock piles of several such materials,” the AP elaborated, explaining Congressional funds were used to pick up this tungsten. “One official in touch with the situation attributed the present shortage to the closing of the Burma Road from China last fall,” the paper added. “He said shipments were interrupted at that time, but since have been resumed.”347

These shipments soon aimed to bring in far more tungsten than either the

Munitions Board or the Council of National Defense had assumed the U.S. would need.

The Office of Production Management, in September 1941, increased the objective dramatically—to 30,500 tons, “a target which reflected the growing realization of a desperate tungsten shortage.” The previous year’s tungsten consumption had been larger

346 Limbaugh, Tungsten in Peace and War, 123. Tidwell, “Tungsten: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1940- 45.” 347 “Navy Meets Alloy Needs,” Reading Eagle (Reading, PA), Jan. 31, 1941.

212 than planners had expected, and they foresaw that use of the metal would only rise in the ensuing years. This growing U.S. appetite for the metal meant that “many defense contractors were unable to obtain sufficient supplies to maintain operations throughout the spring of 1941.”348

Data from the U.S. Geological Survey revealed the extent to which wartime needs enlarged tungsten consumption. “Imports of ore and concentrates for consumption

(tungsten content) rose sharply from 1,485,157 pounds in 1939 to 5,610,882 in 1940,” it explained. “Consumption of tungsten concentrated in the United States reached an all- time high in 1941; as a consequence,” the Survey reported, “both imports and domestic production established new records.” Imports were especially crucial, given the dearth of domestic reserves. “Receipts of imported ore and concentrated (tungsten content) during

1941 total 13,152,716 pounds—a new record,” it emphasized.349

That year, the Metals Reserve Company gradually replaced Treasury’s

Procurement Division as a tungsten purchaser. Metals Reserve made its buying decisions

“largely upon the recommendation of the Department of State,” working out agreements

“with the Governments of Bolivia, Argentina, and Peru for the purchase of their entire production of tungsten over the ensuing three years.” After Pearl Harbor, State

Department officials “continued to lend assistance and cooperation in Washington and through its Ambassadors and Ministers stationed in Latin American countries, as well as through the several American Economic Missions, seeking to determine how and to what extent tungsten production could be further developed.”350

348 Tidwell, “Tungsten: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1940-45.” 349 Ridgway and Davis, Minerals Yearbook – Review of 1940, 620-621. H. W. Davis, “Tungsten,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1941 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1943), 643, 649-650. 350 Tidwell, “Tungsten: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1940-45.”

213

This task remained urgent through much of the war. In April 1943, for example, the Foreign Economic Administration reported that the War Production Board had

“believed that there would be plenty of domestic tungsten available and felt that with a minimum of help from Latin America, stockpiles of this commodity could be kept very high.” The Production Board’s officials were seriously mistaken, since “domestic production which they believed would be from 17½ to 25 million pounds will drop to about 14 million. Consequently, it seems highly desirable that we purchase as much as possible from other sources outside of the United States.”351

The largest tungsten producer in South America

China was the top foreign supplier for the U.S. when the war began, controlling its tungsten “through a monopoly” that “determine[d] world prices” for the metal. But

Bolivia soon took its place. “Of the total general imports of tungsten, China supplied 46 percent, [and] Bolivia 20 percent,” the Geological Survey noted in 1940. “Bolivia and

China supplied 18 and 68 percent, respectively, of the 1941 total,” it observed a year later. By 1942, Bolivia supplied 43 percent of foreign ores and concentrates reaching the

U.S., and China 30 percent. In 1944, Bolivian ores and concentrates supplied 51 percent of total imports, and China’s just 19 percent.352

351 Brandon to Heller, April 12, 1943; Committees, Conferences, and Meetings; Box 1, Accounting – Commodities D, Pan American Records Station; Pan American Branch, Bureau of Areas; Records of the Foreign Economic Administration, Record Group 169; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 352 Ridgway and Davis, Minerals Yearbook – Review of 1940, 620-621. Davis, Minerals Yearbook – 1941 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1943), 643, 649-650. H. W. Davis, “Tungsten,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1942, ed. C. E. Needham (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1943), 681. Hubert W. Davis, “Tungsten,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1944, ed. C. E. Needham (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1946), 661. “An Economic Survey of Bolivia,” August 25, 1943 (Prepared at La Paz by a representative of an American commercial institution, April-August, 1943); Box 1, Country Files, 1940-49; Division of Research for the American Republics, Office of Intelligence Research; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

214

U.S. officials were well-aware of the country’s potential before they entered the war. They knew that Bolivia was “the largest tungsten producer in South America,” that its “output in 1940 (as indicated by exports) was exceeded only by that from the United

States and Portugal, and possibly Burma,” the Survey wrote. It first produced tungsten in

1905, and until World War I extracted scant quantities annually. That conflict’s demands boosted Bolivian tungsten mining, though many sites “were unable to survive the subsequent drop in the price of tungsten,” and folded. Exploitation of rich scheelite deposits near Oruro helped the sector revive in 1929, and by the mid-1930s “a number of scattered properties were producing, and the industry was well-established.”353

In the 1940s, “four large companies accounting for approximately 65 per cent of the total” output dominated Bolivian tungsten production, while “a considerable number of small operators,” working “available ore by hand,” produced the rest. John Worcester,

Principal Mining Engineer with the U.S. Bureau of Mines, explained in June 1942 that, since “Chinese wolfram is the accepted standard,” the Bolivian counterpart “ordinarily occupied a secondary place in world markets,” and “has customarily been sold at a discount in competition”—though not to the U.S., given its “customs duties” barrier described above.354

“Even the best of Bolivian ores from the larger companies falls somewhat short of the Chinese product,” the Metals Reserve Company’s historian admitted. The worst ores, meanwhile, “were of such inferior quality that they had never before been shipped to the

353 Ridgway and Davis, Minerals Yearbook – Review of 1940, 622. Davis, Minerals Yearbook – 1941, 651. 354 DeMille, Strategic Minerals, 520. Tidwell, “Tungsten: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1940-45.” John Worcester, Principal Mining Engineer, U.S. Bureau of Mines, “United States Economic Mission to Bolivia— Mining,” La Paz, Bolivia, June 15, 1942; Box 59, Vol. 42, General Records, 1942; La Paz Embassy, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

215

American market,” and U.S. officials at first hoped to lighten the burden of accepting such mediocre material, perhaps “in the form of penalties imposed on the seller.” But soon a number of factors, including Bolivian indifference to U.S. procurement proposals, as well as Japanese designs on Bolivian tungsten, forced Washington to relent, and to meet Bolivia’s terms. “In the end,” according to Metals Reserve’s account, “virtually all demands of the Bolivian Government were acquiesced to upon the urgent recommendation of the Department of State.” As a result, “the terms of a contract signed on May 31, 1941, and valid until July 1, 1944,” dictated that the U.S. would “be the sole market for Bolivian tungsten ores.”355

An effort to break what seemed to be an impasse

In August 1941, Metals Reserve’s G. Temple Bridgeman wrote to State

Department official Philip Bonsal, stating “most emphatically that the Metals Reserve

Company would continue to refuse to recognize a contract for the export of ninety tons of tungsten to a Japanese destination, which according to the Bolivian Minister was entered into in April 1941,” before the contract with Washington was signed. Bonsal explained that “Bridgeman’s attitude was very much influenced by a despatch dated July 25 from the Embassy, the implication of which is that the Bolivian authorities have, to say the least, not been over-zealous in avoiding evasions of the contract with the Metals Reserve

Company.”356

355 Tidwell, “Tungsten: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1940-45.” “An Economic Survey of Bolivia,” August 25, 1943. 356 Philip W. Bonsal, to American Legation, La Paz, Bolivia, August 15, 1941; Memoranda on Bolivia, Jan. – Dec. 1941; Box 22, Bolivia, Vol. 3, Jan. 1941 – Dec. 1943; Memorandums Relating to Individual Countries, March 2, 1918 – Dec. 31, 1947; Office of American Republic Affairs, Its Predecessors, and Its Successors;

216

One of the chief disagreements between U.S. and Bolivian officials was over tungsten’s price. In March 1941, Herbert Feis, Economic Adviser to the Secretary of

State, “intervened with the Bolivian Minister in an effort to break what seemed to be an impasse,” and “made a plea to the Minister for an early agreement, promising to request

Metals Reserve Company to increase the price to $17 per unit” from $9 a unit, among other assurances—all of which did little to sway the Bolivian official, and the talks stalled. The next “month passed with the Bolivians adopting an attitude of apparent indifference to the eager importunities of both the State Department and Metals Reserve,” after which Washington’s William L. Clayton repeated the $17-per-unit offer “and the

Bolivian Minister accepted, contingent upon confirmation by his Government at La Paz.”

But this confirmation never arrived, drawing Feis back into negotiations.357

Feis informed the Bolivian official “that his Government could fairly be asked to make a special effort to conclude an agreement with Metals Reserve on tungsten in the light of the many sided effort then being made by the American Government to contribute to Bolivia’s welfare,” for example “with respect to aid through Lend Lease.”

Feis also reminded the man of his patriotic duty—of the fact that, “since the Bolivian

Government was committed to the policy of mutual defense of the western hemisphere, they were bound not to sell tungsten, a strategic material, to Axis countries.” Only once he was through sermonizing did Feis get to the point, announcing “he would attempt to get Metals Reserve Company to consider a price of $19 or $20 per unit,” if the Bolivians promised to supply tungsten to the U.S. exclusively.358

General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 357 Tidwell, “Tungsten: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1940-45.” 358 Ibid.

217

The problem was that even the most generous price Feis named—which was a consideration, not an offer—was well under what the Japanese promised to pay. “While all these discussions were taking place in Washington,” Metals Reserve’s historian noted,

“the American Legation at La Paz reported that the Bolivian Government was considering an offer from the Japanese for the country’s entire production for a period of three years at $23 per unit.” And there were reasons apart from price that the Japanese offer appealed. For instance, Bolivian officials “were reported to be politically afraid of sponsoring an agreement with Metals Reserve because of the lower tax revenue thus obtainable in contrast to that which they could collect on sales to the Japanese at $23 per unit.” But while “the Japanese Government in Tokyo sent pressuring cables to a number of Bolivian Government leaders seeking to jettison the pending negotiations with Metals

Reserve,” ultimately U.S. pressure was greater, and Washington agreed to pay $21 per unit when signing its formal contract in May.359

This agreement was hardly a total victory for the U.S. Among its outcomes was

“the effect it had on the price which Metals Reserve Company was now forced to pay for all of its tungsten purchases throughout the world.” For example, in its 1940 tungsten contract with China, Washington had promised to pay $15.82 per unit. After the Bolivia deal, this price had to be raised to $21 per unit—“a vivid contrast to the prewar price of

$9 per unit which the Bolivians had received for their tungsten production,” and one soon to be reflected in tungsten contracts Washington signed with Argentina, Peru, and

Mexico. Where key resources are concerned, U.S. officials must compromise.360

359 Ibid. 360 Ibid.

218

Where the words of Cecil Rhodes applied

But concessions on specific issues did not narrow Washington’s overarching aims. “Probably to no country in the western hemisphere can the words of Cecil Rhodes:

‘So little done, so much to do’ be applied with more justification than to the Republic of

Bolivia,” wrote William O. Vanderburg, Foreign Minerals Specialist with the U.S.

Bureau of Mines, in December 1941. He felt Bolivia “may still be considered to be in the pioneering stage of development as far as the development of its natural resources is concerned, and it may be compared to the western United States of 70 or more years ago.” For example, “the value of the mineral production in Bolivia” was like that “of the

States of Arizona or Montana”—small, ultimately, but “nevertheless of special importance,” since its tungsten output was “largely non-competitive with the mining industry of the United States,” and its extractive industries “more complementary to our own than any other in the western hemisphere.”

Spurring Bolivian development, in Vanderburg’s view, required “an orderly efficient Government” to implement “an economic policy that will deviate from past ultra-nationalistic tendencies, stimulate the companies now operating in Bolivia, attract capital and encourage the formation of new enterprises.” Legislative objectives included

“reducing metal export taxes” and overhauling “the mining laws to make them steady, lasting and less burdensome [to] give security to foreign capital.” The country’s roads also had to be improved.

Clearly this was no pro-democracy project. The goal was to get Bolivian resources out of the ground fast, with minimal hassle, and the country’s legislative and physical architecture had to be geared towards this end. Vanderburg stressed that the

219 undertaking required U.S. officials to work with those “patriotic men deeply concerned with development and progress” in Bolivia. He estimated that there were roughly 400 of them in the country, “found in the same proportion as good mines or 1 in 1,000” among the population. “Bolivia’s future welfare is in the hands of the whites whose number is small in proportion to the total population,” he emphasized, adding that “the destiny of the country,” which Washington wished to guide in the manner he outlined, depended on this ruling class.361

The available and limited labor supply

No Cecil Rhodes-scale enterprise could proceed without a large enough number of workers, and this problem plagued U.S. planners throughout the war. “The labor supply in Bolivia which is available to the mining industry is very definitely limited,”

Bureau of Mines engineer John Worcester observed in 1942. Embassy official Allan

Dawson, in a letter written that same year, concurred, stressing that “there is insufficient labor on the altiplano for an all-out program of mining expansion in every field”—for which reason, he explained, “we think it can be made to serve needs in tin and tungsten if you concentrate on them instead of dispersing the program to try to increase other mineral production.” He suggested that the needed workers could “be spared from the small towns and agricultural sections of [the altiplano] without injuring the agricultural economy of the country unduly.” It would be difficult to find a statement more direct

361 William O. Vanderburg, Foreign Minerals Specialist, United States Bureau of Mines, “Financial and Technical Aid to the Bolivian Mining Industry,” La Paz, Bolivia, December 2, 1941; Box 38, Vol. XIX, General Records, 1941; La Paz Legation, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

220 than Dawson’s regarding U.S. policy aims—namely, adapting Bolivians to Washington’s objectives.362

Worcester, who by May 1943 had transferred from the Bureau of Mines to the La

Paz Embassy, assessed the challenge again that month. “Ever since the start of the emergency, all persons interested in the continuance of the supply of strategic minerals have repeatedly warned of the necessity of curtailing as much as possible public and private construction in order to conserve the available and limited labor supply in Bolivia for the essential job of getting strategic minerals out of the Bolivian mines,” he wrote.

But the metals sector was still 5,000 men short. “It can be roughly estimated that if these

5,000 men were available, the general production of strategic metals of these mines would be increased at least 50%,” Worcester emphasized.

But he added that “very little has been accomplished” in terms of getting men into the mines. By “very little,” he meant that “no labor has been released”—and, were the situation not already bad enough, the Bolivian government’s promotion of “two new road projects” made it likely “that the situation will rapidly become worse,” by further thinning the mines’ labor supply. Were Bolivians to follow their own development agenda, instead of fulfilling Washington’s mineral needs, it would be “impossible for the area to provide the necessary workers for both the mines and road construction,” unless

Bolivian officials managed “to double, triple, or quadruple the present wage scales.” But while higher payment could “provide the necessary inducements to the inhabitants of the

362 John Worcester, Principal Mining Engineer, United States Economic Mission to Bolivia, “Labor Supply in Relation to Production of Strategic Minerals in Bolivia;” Box 59, Vol. 42, General Records, 1942; La Paz Embassy, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Allan Dawson to Thomas K. Finkletter, Esquire, Special Assistant to the Secretary in Charge of the Division of Defense Minerals, State Department, Washington, D.C., February 4, 1942; Box 59, Vol. 42, General Records, 1942; La Paz Embassy, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

221 area who are now occupied in agricultural pursuits,” it would entail a “tremendous diversion of farm labor to other unfamiliar occupations,” thus presenting other problems.

Bolivia’s farms were already “inadequately supplied with labor” at the time, and

“production of foodstuffs for the city and mining populations nearby” had fallen as a result. Funneling more workers into the mines and onto the new roads would cause food production to plummet further, Worcester feared.

He thus weighed a number of solutions. “It seems barely possible that some representations to the Bolivian Government, which would point out the inconsistencies of their present policy of pushing road construction, might be of some help in avoiding the expected crisis in labor supply,” he admitted. But it was also “only good sense for the

Bolivian Government to take full advantage of present metals markets and to postpone extensive public works, including road construction, until after the war emergency has passed”—especially since, in his view, the country’s “present plans for public works are inconsistent with the commitment they have already made regarding the prosecution of the war.”363

An inert undemanding lump, with no desire for personal advancement

To deal with what U.S. Embassy official Allan Dawson termed “an emergency problem” where mine labor was concerned, U.S. planners had to recruit miners from

Bolivia’s large indigenous population. “Due to the extreme altitudes in which the mines are located,” David Schoenfeld explained in 1947, “only the local Indian population is

363 John Worcester, Minerals Attaché, “Labor Supply for Proposed Road Construction in the Department of La Paz,” La Paz, Bolivia, May 22, 1943; Box 90, Vol. 49, General Records, 1943; La Paz Embassy, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

222 capable of performing the work. There is no other source of labor available, since persons coming from any other part of the country cannot adapt themselves to the climactic conditions.” Exacerbating this problem were the facts that “the Altiplano on the whole is sparsely inhabited,” and that “thousands of [Bolivia’s] Indians were killed in the Chaco War” with Paraguay in the early 1930s. Yet another challenge stemmed from the accelerating “exhaustion of the high-grade ores” in the mines, which meant more work was required to produce a single ton of ore than had been the case in previous decades. For example, the same number of workers that produced 46,000 tons of tin in

1929 extracted only 28,000 tons a decade later.364

But grave as these difficulties were, Schoenfeld neglected what might have been

Washington’s biggest challenge. The issue was not merely to find workers—since, in a broad sense, the category “worker” scarcely existed among indigenous Bolivians, who often saw little reason to rent out their labor in order to survive. As the August 1943

“Economic Survey of Bolivia” noted, “while mining is the economic foundation of the country, it directly supports only about one-seventh of the population,” with “fully two- thirds of the inhabitants of the country” reliant on agriculture. “This apparent anomaly arises from the character of present day Bolivian agriculture, which is essentially a subsistence industry supporting the individuals engaged in it but producing very little in the way of surplus to enter the channels of trade,” it explained. U.S. planners, who

364 Allan Dawson, Chargé d’Affaires ad interim, “Bolivian Mine Labor Supply” (to Secretary of State), January 29, 1942; Box 59, Vol. 42, General Records, 1942; La Paz Embassy, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Schoenfeld, An Analysis of the Tin Industry of Bolivia, 39-41.

223 considered wage labor natural, thus had to grapple with an alien culture in their efforts to mine as much tungsten as possible.365

There was ample evidence of the labor supply’s indifference to money. The

Economic Survey described a mine granting “premiums, on a sliding scale that [ran] from

5% to 20% of a month’s wages, to workers who put in a minimum of 25 shifts a month.

Only about half of the workers ever” qualified for this bonus, however. A second mine

“offered a bonus for nothing more than punctual appearance at work. Only about 30% of the workers at this mine ever get the bonus,” the Survey noted. And at a third site, miners preferred to work for a local contractor than for a larger firm that paid twice as much, since “they can show up for work at any hour that they like and little is expected of them.”366

Worcester elaborated on the problem in a memorandum. “The Bolivian mine worker is of Indian blood and has been originally drawn from agricultural pursuits from the Indian settlements on the ‘Altiplano,’” he noted. “In colonial times, the mine operators were able to bring the peones to the mines by force,” but in the 1940s “force is no longer applied, and mining recruits must be had by persuasion only.” Persuasive efforts had to deal with the fact that “mining work is not a normal occupation” for these peoples accustomed to farming. “For that reason, the conversion of the agricultural workers into mining workers is a long tedious process,” Worcester lamented.

He then listed some factors impeding this conversion. For example, “the Indian of Bolivia has an ingrained fondness for the place where he spent his childhood and returns there at every opportunity.” Even worse, the typical indigenous Bolivian “has

365 “An Economic Survey of Bolivia,” August 25, 1943. 366 Ibid.

224 little use for or confidence in money as such but feels secure only when surrounded by land, crops, and farm animals of his ownership. He has no strong desire for more than a full stomach, a place to sleep, a family, and the security of these things in the future.”

Regarding “the purchasable products of modern civilization,” Worcester found his subject gazing at them only “with a dull eye,” and with “little interest in securing them for himself.”

Vanderburg, the Bureau of Mines official, wrote with ill-disguised contempt of what he considered a typical indigenous Bolivian in a separate report. This man “follows the same torpid existence as that of his ancestors of 300 or more years ago, and beyond his daily ratio of coca and simple food requirements with occasional flirtations with alcohol on fiestas, has no concern for the future, little or no nationalistic spirit, and no ambition to improve his lot,” Vanderburg believed. Worcester, for his part, while discussing one of the central indigenous customs, complained that any “confirmed coca- chewer becomes a person with generally dulled perceptions, lessened physical strength and resistance, and a general sense of well-being which permits the neglect of his surroundings.” When seeking to motivate a man thus satisfied, “it is obviously impossible to stimulate him to an active desire for money and the things it will purchase.

He has no desire for personal advancement and remains an inert undemanding lump, unless the supply of coca should be cut off.”367

The Economic Survey’s view was “that coca-chewing is to a large degree responsible for the general weakness of the race,” whose members suffered because they had “not been educated to desire modern comforts for themselves and their families.” It

367 Worcester, “Mining—United States Economic Mission to Bolivia,” June 15, 1942. Vanderburg, “Financial and Technical Aid to the Bolivian Mining Industry,” December 2, 1941.

225 was Bolivia’s “extremely deficient educational system,” this Survey believed, that carried

“the responsibility for the low standard of living. The adolescents are neither given any positive values—they do not learn how to live—nor are they given instruction in avoiding the vices typical of the country,” and were thus left with “no desire for money, neither for the purpose of bettering their condition nor for its own sake.” Education is envisioned here as a form of indoctrination, in other words, that would produce individuals determined to increase their wealth—at least in part to acquire “the purchasable products of modern civilization,” which it was assumed indigenous

Bolivians would not covet without the proper schooling.368

But even while acknowledging that potential miners were largely immune to consumerist impulses, U.S. planners could think of little that would lure them to work apart from “promises of fantastic wages” and “advances of money,” as Worcester wrote.

In cases where these incentives failed, recruiters were “used to secure the additional workers needed,” sometimes by “stealing the workers at one mine for the next one.” As the World Bank noted, one of the “‘questionable methods’ employed to secure labor” occurred during “local feasts,” when “advantage was taken of the ‘prevailing state of intoxication to bind the Indian to a mine by signing him up and advancing him some pay, which being promptly drunk up, the Indian was forced into the company’s debt and had to work in the mine to pay it off.” Perhaps the use of force was not as blatant as it had been in the era of Spanish dominance, but it seems it persisted in insidious ways.369

368 “An Economic Survey of Bolivia,” August 25, 1943. 369 Worcester, “Mining—United States Economic Mission to Bolivia,” June 15, 1942. Mahmood Ali Ayub and Hideo Hashimoto, The Economics of Tin Mining in Bolivia (The World Bank: Washington, D.C., 1985), 13.

226

Vanderburg held similar views of indigenous Peruvians, who also provided the

U.S. with tungsten during the war—though with far less than their Bolivian counterparts.

“Production of tungsten is relatively small, but since 1937 it has increased progressively and amounted to 370 metric tons in 1942. Exports of ores and concentrates were 337 metric tons in 1942, compared with 322 tons in 1941,” according to the Geological

Survey, which noted the “considerable activity in developing and expanding production in 1942,” adding that the main “productive mines are in the Departments of La Libertad,

Ancash, Puno, and Huancavelica.”370

“Mining is done entirely by native Indians who are more inclined to agriculture than mining,” Vanderburg wrote, explaining that “only in minor respects has [the indigenous Peruvian] diviated [sic] from the life of his ancestors,” having zero need for

“radios, newspapers, or other modern conveniences,” thus preserving “a certain amount of independence, and work[ing] only when so disposed.” When put to work, he could expect little for his efforts. “Cheap labor is the principal factor in the exploitation of the tungsten deposits,” Vanderburg pointed out, citing “[t]he prevailing wage scale ranging from one to two soles per day.” Apart from the low cost of its workers, the fact that

“unions are unknown in the tungsten fields”—where extraction was “accomplished entirely by hand methods,” the ore “transported either on the backs of workmen or in wheelbarrows” out of the mines—was another factor rendering Peru’s deposits, however meager, attractive, as Vanderburg explained in another memorandum.371

370 Davis, Minerals Yearbook –1942, 684. H. W. Davis, “Tungsten,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1943, ed. C. E. Needham (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1945), 682. 371 Wm. O. Vanderburg, Foreign Minerals Specialist, U.S. Bureau of Mines, “Tungsten Deposits in the Santiago de Chuco District, Department of La Libertad, Peru,” June 16, 1941; Box 92, Correspondence 862- 863.5, Vol. XXXVIII, 1941; General Records, Lima (Peru) Embassy, Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Wm. O. Vanderburg,

227

Worth noting is that the attitudes of the Bureau of Mines officials reviewed here were perfectly in sync with the State Department’s post-war cultural relations program, which U.S. planners were outlining in December 1942. This program prioritized the

“reshaping of the mentality of common men,” namely “tillers of the soil, dwellers in villages, socially isolated, illiterate, powerless, exploited, and tradition-bound. The low productivity of their labor gave only enough wealth for their own subsistence,” and this situation called for a “recasting of traditional values” that would place greater emphasis on efforts “to produce wealth,” among other objectives.372

Conditions are “almost unspeakable”

The fact that Bolivian mines were hellish places to work did not simplify

Washington’s quest to increase the number of miners. A World Bank study concluded that Bolivian mining conditions “can be referred to as deplorable, even in comparison with conditions in underground mines of other countries.” “Health and safety standards in the mines are appallingly low,” the Bank wrote, adding that “pervasive dust from the drilling operations and the absence of adequate ventilation cause a high incidence of silicosis. The average life of a mine worker is thirty-five years.” Much of these lives were spent in “temperatures so unbearably high that the miners have to be hosed down with cold water as they work.” And they toiled long hours. One site, Aramayo-owned,

Foreign Minerals Specialist, American Embassy, “Report on the Tungsten Deposits in the Departments of Ancash and La Libertad, Peru – Voluntary Report for U.S. Bureau of Mines,” Lima, Peru, September 9, 1941; Box 92, Vol. XXXVIII, General Records, 1941; Lima (Peru) Embassy; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 372 “The Post-War Program of the Department of State in Cultural Relations,” December 26, 1942; Box 11, Miscellaneous Reports, 1941-48; Division of Research for the American Republics, Office of Intelligence Research; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

228 had workers on twelve-hour shifts. “The record for inhuman hours was in a mine near

Potosí,” however, “where the miners worked on a thirty-six hour shift, taking a little time off at intervals to eat dried corn and chew coca.” Generally conditions were “extremely perilous” in the mines, with “frequent accidents” the norm.373

This Bank report dates from the Reagan era, but its depiction of Bolivian mines matches earlier descriptions. “Much has been said and written about living conditions in

Bolivian mining camps and it must be stated that judging from American or European standards they are far from satisfactory,” an 1943 report on Bolivia stated. “A report of the International Labor Office describes housing conditions for the workers in the great majority of places as ‘almost unspeakable,’” the Foreign Economic Administration was aware. “Overcrowding is general. Running water and electricity are very rare. In one mining community of 12,000 persons there are no individual toilets, the houses lack windows or other means of ventilation, there is little safe drinking water, and there are no bathing facilities,” it continued. Moreover, “a report to the Bolivian Government by a special commission appointed to inspect conditions in the mines” determined “that the dwellings are ‘certainly not much more comfortable than the caves of primitive man.’”

One worker, recalling his 1946 arrival at a mining site, explained that the “houses sat directly on the ground. There was no flooring. The houses were black, blackened by kitchen smoke, with straw roofs. Some had corrugated tin roofs, but they put straw on top of the tin because it was very cold,” and if workers tried to heat their homes “the company got angry. It was forbidden to use heaters.”374

373 Ayub and Hashimoto, The Economics of Tin Mining in Bolivia, 13. 374 “An Economic Survey of Bolivia,” August 25, 1943. “Labor,” Bolivia Handbook BFDC #96; Box 5, Records Pertaining to Economic Conditions in Latin America, 1942-45; Records of the Pan American Branch, Bureau of Areas; Records of the Foreign Economic Administration, Record Group 169; National Archives at

229

U.S. Lieutenant Emil Chanlett’s “sanitary survey,” undertaken in late 1943, confirmed this bleak picture. Chanlett traveled for “two months in Bolivia visiting 12 mines which employ a total of 24,000 workmen,” and recorded his observations. “With scarcely enough fuel for cooking, there is little spared for heating water for washing the body,” he wrote of one site. “The severe climate does not encourage bathing in cold water. As a result washing is a sketchy and infrequent practice,” he added. The Bank’s study also noted that workers’ dwellings were “inadequate, with frequent shortages of water and poor sanitary facilities.” Chanlett pointed out the human costs of these unhygienic environments. “The infant mortality in these communities is exceedingly high. Although the women have children annually, families usually have no more than two children,” he concluded.375

But Chanlett had a sanguine assessment of conditions in the mines themselves.

“The only potential occupation hazard is free silica dust,” he believed, to the consternation of U.S. Embassy official Charles Collier. Collier argued that Chanlett

“falls into a serious error of considering that only free silica dust is dangerous to the workers. The Bureau of Mines in the United States which has probably done more work on the question of dust control than any other, strongly disagrees with this point of view,” he explained.376

College Park, College Park, MD. June Nash, I Spent My Life in the Mines: The Story of Juan Rojas, Bolivian Tin Miner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 79, 128. 375 Emil T. Chanlett, “A Sanitary Survey of Mines and Mine Communities in Bolivia,” October 6, 1943; Vol. 31, General Records, 1943; La Paz Embassy, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 376 Pierre de L. Boal, “Submitting Report of a Sanitary Survey of the Mines and Mining Communities of Bolivia Prepared by Emil T. CHANLETT, Sanitary Engineer, Employed by the Institute of Inter-American Affairs, Division of Health and Sanitation,” November 11, 1943; Box 77, Vol. 31, General Records, 1943; La Paz Embassy, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Chanlett, “A Sanitary Survey,” October 6, 1943. Charles Collier, “Report of Emil T. Chanlett, Sanitary Engineer of the Division of Health and Sanitation on Health and

230

It is true, Collier granted, that “free silica dust is somewhat more damaging than other forms of dust and it is the only type of dust which causes the specific form of dust disease typically called ‘silicosis,’” but focusing on free silica alone downplayed the full range of hazards in the mines. More specifically, “all other forms of dust are dangerous when breathed in excess;” all of them “result in pneumoconiosis and tuberculosis.”

Collier also charged Chanlett with overlooking “the lack of adequate mine ventilation such as exists, for example, in the Catavi mines. The Bureau of Mines hold that adequate ventilation is an essential part of the various measures which must be taken to control dust, no one of which measures is sufficient by itself.”377

Collier’s colleague George C. Bergman, as mentioned above, had observed that

Bolivian miners generally were in “a bad situation,” but he argued that the point was “not to discourage mine management with ultra-scientific considerations. This is the proper approach to the health problems in the mines in Bolivia. In other words, United States standards must not be strictly applied at this stage of development in Bolivia.” Those convinced that the U.S., through its foreign policy, seeks to remake the world in its image might wish to weigh Bergman’s words here.378

Regardless of whether U.S. officials felt, with Collier, that the full range of health risks for Bolivian miners had to be considered, or like Bergman believed that many of these problems could be ignored, there was no doubt regarding the prevalence of the

Safety Conditions in the Bolivian Mines,” to The Ambassador, October 28, 1943; Box 77, Vol. 31, General Records, 1943; La Paz Embassy, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 377 Collier, “Report of Emil T. Chanlett,” October 28, 1943. 378 Geo. C. Bergman, M.D., Chief of Party, to His Excellency, Pierre de L. Boal, Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary, La Paz, Bolivia, November 6, 1943; Box 77, Vol. 31, General Records, 1943; La Paz Embassy, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

231 hazards themselves. Evidence from the U.S. Embassy’s files makes this point clear in various ways. For example, among these papers is a report, by the U.S. Public Health

Service’s Dr. Roy R. Jones, on “Silicosis: An Occupation Disease Hazard,” suggesting at least some Embassy employees tried to familiarize themselves with the miners’ grim reality. A second study gives background information on the disease, pointing out that

“the rate from tuberculosis is notably excessive among persons employed in trades involving an exposure to silica,” for example.379

And other documents faced Bolivian work-related illnesses more directly. The

Foreign Economic Administration, in a review of the country’s mining conditions, cited a

May 1942 report by Bolivia’s Caja de Seguro y Ahorro Obrero (CSAO, or Social

Security Administration) detailing “the unsanitary conditions in and about the mines,” which produced “a high incidence of silicosis, tuberculosis, and work accidents. Out of an average of 30,000 miners covered by the Fund, 1,650 have been indemnified annually for occupational diseases contracted on the job, and 190 have suffered permanent death

[sic] or disability because of accidents,” the Fund explained. “Another 800 reported occupational diseases but were not entitled to indemnity since they had contracted the diseases before enrolling in the insurance plan,” and compounding the health problems was the “very high” rate of tuberculosis “among many sections of the population”—“83 percent among military draftees in Potosí (a mining city),” for example.380

379 Roy R. Jones, M. D., “Silicosis: An Occupation Disease Hazard;” Box 60, Vol. 43, General Records, 1942; La Paz Embassy, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. “Summary Report of the Committee on Prevention of Silicosis through Medical Control;” Box 60, Vol. 43, General Records, 1942; La Paz Embassy, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 380 “Labor,” Bolivia Handbook BFDC #96.

232

Another report cited CSAO figures to support its conclusion “that silicosis and related pneumoconiosis and tuberculosis following upon silicosis constitute the principal causes of industrial disability in the mines.” This study added that the CSAO “each year indemnifies 2.16% of all workmen in mines belonging to the Caja for industrial classes principally resulting from dust conditions,” while estimating that another 2.6% of all miners annually “suffer from dust induced professional diseases sufficiently advanced in stage to be entitled to indemnification except that the workers suffered with the malady before registering with the insurance bank,” thus rendering them ineligible for compensation.

But these figures underestimated the problem. A more complete tally found “that

7.36% of the average [number of miners] annually reach a sufficiently serious stage of dust diseases or silicosis to be entitled to indemnification, and that, therefore, 7.36% of the average number of miners employed are annually lost to the mines through death or incapacitation.” These figures were “startling high”—and yet still “probably do not indicate the silicosis and dust disease situation to be as serious as it actually is,” U.S. officials suspected. “This is because the labor turnover in the mines is extremely high and perhaps from two to three times as many workers work in the mines at some time during the year as are actually employed in the mines at any given moment,” and for this reason, the report suggested that the 7.36% “should perhaps be doubled” to indicate the actual percentage of miners incapacitated annuals from illness or death. The “true risk,” in other words, was twice as great as the “startling high” figure first given.

Anecdotal evidence reinforced these statistics. For example, one “statement made by the manager of a mining enterprise” was revealing: “If they take away from the mine

233 all the workmen suffering from professional diseases, I shall be left with less than half my gang,” he claimed. A Bolivian doctor, Guzmán Tellez, who worked at the San José

Mine’s hospital, explained to Philip A. Kazen, Special Representative of the Board of

Economic Warfare, that of “1,028 workers he had examined recently, 58% had pneumoconiosis, either in the form of silicosis or tuberculosis,” prompting Kazen to ask,

“What do you do for them?” “Nothing,” the doctor replied.381

And there was another dimension to Bolivia’s mine-related diseases. Given, as

U.S. officials recognized, that miner turnover was “extremely high,” many laborers were

“employed in the mines during a part of their life”—long enough to contract tuberculosis—and subsistence farmers the rest of the time. “The miners in the more advanced stages of the disease when they can no longer perform mine work return to their homes in various parts of Bolivia thus spreading the disease among the general population,” Charles Collier observed. “This may be one of the explanations for the high incidence of tuberculosis in Bolivia even among those who do not actually work in the mine,” he suggested.382

The situation at the government camp is really very bad

Brazil also mined tungsten during the war, though surveyors discovered its ores only several years into the conflict. Once these were found, Foreign Economic

Administration official James S. Baker wrote that Paraíba and Rio Grande do Norte’s deposits had “world potentialities greater than any others newly discovered,” and the U.S. received 1,167 metric tons of tungsten concentrates from these states in 1943. More sites

381 Collier, “Extent of Dust Diseases Among Bolivian Miners," April 29, 1943. 382 Ibid.

234 were developed the following year, when “the central and southern areas of the state of

Ceará” produced the metal, and the total 1944 output was 1,989 metric tons. Richard H.

Rich, Special Representative of the Foreign Economic Administration, wrote in late 1943 that “[t]he grade of the scheelite is very high” in the region, “so that with very primitive methods of mining producers were able to make extremely large profits with the sale of scheelite. Scheelite was, in fact, so profitable that labor was drawn from tantalite to scheelite in large numbers,” he explained.383

“All mining and milling is by hand methods,” the Geological Survey added, conceding that these techniques were, “of course, both wasteful and expensive and are possible with the low grade ores of the region only because of the low wage scale in relation to the present price of tungsten.” Workers excavated scheelite in this wasteful manner from the 60-plus deposits found in Paraíba and Rio Grande do Norte, for example, “and new discoveries continue to be made,” a pair of geologists noted in early

1945. “With the present production experience,” they added, “more and more men in the area have learned to recognize scheelite and how to prospect for it.”384

Reviewing Washington’s scheelite operations in Northeast Brazil in May 1945,

U.S. Embassy official Emerson Brown explained that mining activity was greatest

“around August 1943. Over 10,000 men were employed,” he pointed out, and these workers sometimes produced up to 50 tons of concentrate a week with “the crudest sort of hand digging, crushing with sledge hammers, picking and panning the concentrate by

383 DeMille, Strategic Minerals, 520. Davis, Minerals Yearbook – 1944, 664. Richard H. Rich, Maj. A. C., Special Representative, “Special Representative’s Report – Brazil,” to Leo T. Crowley, Administrator, Foreign Economic Administration, December 31, 1943; Box 48, Classes 844-861.33, Volume XII; General Records, Belem (Pará) Consulate, 1943; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 384 Davis, Minerals Yearbook – 1944, 664.

235 hand.” The miners were paid “less than 50 cents per day” for their efforts, though Brown viewed this as a sign of generosity, given that “the mining of strategic minerals was providential for thousands of people” in the region during the war. They benefited because “the mining gave employment during a long drought when ordinarily the government has to care for the population of several states or move them to another region.”385

Brown seems to have been referring to the fact that the Brazilian government, by the 1940s, had for decades been forcing drought refugees into concentration camps throughout the northeast, and in Ceará in particular. The mining labor was so cheap— and the profits so high—apparently because the workers were drawn from these concentration camps. Nicholas Gabriel Arons explains that the facilities dated to 1878, when “Ceará’s capital, Fortaleza, was invaded by sertanejos [those living in the interior regions] numbering four times the population of the city,” seeking refuge from the desperate conditions in the countryside, suffering one of its ruinous droughts at the time.

The massive influx “destroyed the prevailing social order,” leading the government to construct camps to control those the drought displaced. “The experience of the camps, as reported by those who survived them, was one of privation and death,” writes Mary

Lorena Kenny. “In 1932,” Arons notes, “the official number of deaths in Ceará camps was twenty-three thousand.” The state continued to use this strategy until 1942.

Brazilian officials reportedly ended it then to avoid drawing comparisons to the Nazis.386

385 Emerson I. Brown, American Embassy, “Minerals Quarterly Report, 4th Quarter – 1944, with Cumulative Review of the Year 1944,” Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, May 17, 1945; Box 339, Vol. XLVI, General Records, 1945; Rio de Janeiro Embassy, Brazil; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 386 Nicholas Gabriel Arons, Waiting for Rain: The Politics and Poetry of Drought in Northeast Brazil (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2004), 146-152. Mary Lorena Kenny, “Landscapes of

236

Charles Wagley, an official at the U.S. Consulate in Fortaleza, described one of these sites in November 1942. “The situation at the government camp is really very bad,” he judged. “Food is badly prepared and insufficient. Refugees live camped under trees or any kind of a shade they could throw together. There is one house which houses only a few sick children and the administrative part of the camp. Only two toilets are available,” he added. The health of those in the camp, based on the conditions just described, was what one would have expected. “Cases of measles, mumps, diarrhea, eye infection,” along with tuberculosis and malnutrition, were pointed out to Wagley “by a local doctor,” as the two walked among the “swarms of flies [that made] living almost impossible” there.387

The obvious injustice of suddenly stopping tungsten purchases

U.S. officials began to plan for the post-war era well before the conflict ended.

And where tungsten was concerned, they had to consider several different factors. One was the manner in which Bolivian officials would respond to curtailed purchases or price adjustments in the mid- to late 1940s. At an August 1943 meeting, for example, attended by representatives of the Office of Economic Warfare, War Production Board, Metals

Reserve Company, and State Department, the Production Board officials explained “that the tungsten stockpile is now in a satisfactory condition and that the amounts of tungsten which will be received under present commitments are probably in excess of the goal

Memory: Concentration Camps and Drought in Northeastern Brazil,” Latin American Perspectives 168, no. 36 (2009): 21-38. “Cearenses relembram campos de concentração de retirantes da seca,” O Globo (Rio de Janeiro), March 31, 2015. 387 Charles Wagley, “Cearà Drought Refugees,” to Dr. Bernard Krug, November 6, 1942; Box 5, Vol. V, 844 – 892.43, 1942; General Records, Fortaleza Consulate, Brazil; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

237 which it will set for 1944,” when Washington’s Bolivian procurement agreement, signed in 1941, was due to expire.

The problem was that Bolivian officials were “asking that the agreement be extended for three additional years”—far too long, those attending the meeting agreed, though they had not yet concluded what their post-war policy would be. “It was agreed that the Bolivian Embassy might be told that it is the desire of this Government to continue purchases of tungsten from Bolivia for a period,” therefore, though a “more concrete reply” was considered “impracticable under present circumstances.” The tentative resolution at the meeting was that Washington “might let [the Bolivian tungsten industry] down gradually by reducing our price and thus automatically curtailing production.”388

Another meeting was held in early July 1944—immediately after Washington’s tungsten contract with Bolivia expired—and this session included Bolivian government representatives. Miguel Etchenique, a banking and development official, “disclosed that

[the Foreign Economic Administration] had offered the tungsten producers a new contract which envisaged the purchase of tungsten by [Washington] at a price of $16 per unit,” whereas the U.S. government had paid above $20 per unit in previous years.

“Señor Etchenique pointed out that the contemplated new price was entirely unsatisfactory to the tungsten producers and that the new contract proposed by

[Washington] also included some penalties which were very distasteful to the producers,” according to the meeting’s minutes.

388 Allan Dawson, “Tungsten Procurement Situation,” August 20, 1943; General Memoranda, July – Aug. 1943; Box 8, Memorandums Relating to General Latin American Affairs, Jan. 4, 1937 – Dec. 31, 1947; Office of American Republic Affairs, Its Predecessors, and Its Successors; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

238

A U.S. official responded by explaining that his government simply had “no further need for more tungsten” at the time, “and that the continued purchase of foreign tungsten at the previous high price was no longer justified. He said that he realized the obvious injustice of suddenly stopping purchase of tungsten from Bolivian mines of which the facilities had been expanded solely to produce tungsten for the United Nations war effort,” but ultimately felt the Bolivians would have to adjust to the peacetime reality. He told them that Washington “had lowered its purchasing price of Brazilian tungsten some time ago and inquired whether the Bolivian producers had not heard of the possibility of lowering of prices as far as Bolivian tungsten was concerned and seen the handwriting on the wall.”

But they had not, and they took offense at the Washington official’s comments, arguing “that they should have been given warning instead of suddenly being notified of the reduction in price. They implied that the United States had encouraged them to increase their production facilities and was now leaving them stranded to take severe losses and to cause internal economic disruptions.”389

One site of these disruptions was the Chojlla tungsten mine, which Worcester described as one of the country’s most vital, given its “richness and high productiveness in comparison with the money needed for plant and equipment.” The International

Mining Co., a subsidiary of W. R. Grace & Co., controlled the site.390

389 “Memorandum of Conversation: Bolivian Tungsten,” July 6, 1944; Memoranda on Bolivia, June – Dec. 1944; Box 23, Bolivia, Vol. 5, Feb. 1944 – April 1945; Memorandums Relating to Individual Countries, March 2, 1918 – Dec. 31, 1947; Office of American Republic Affairs, Its Predecessors, and Its Successors; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 390 Worcester, “Mining – United States Economic Mission to Bolivia,” June 15, 1942. C. W. Wright, Foreign Mineral Specialist, “Mineral Resources, Production, and Trade of Bolivia,” Foreign Minerals Quarterly 2, no. 4 (October 1939), Bolivia Handbook BFDC #96; Box 5, Records Pertaining to Economic Conditions in

239

“Who were the miners of Chojlla?” asks labor historian Andrew Boeger. “The majority—perhaps as many as 80 percent—came to Chojlla as first-generation miners from Aymara peasant communities in the Department of La Paz,” and it seems the problems the mine’s operators faced in their efforts to convert farmers into miners were similar to those U.S. officials described above. “Some people say that for roughly every thirty workers” persuaded to work at Chojlla, “only one would remain at the mine for more than a month,” Boeger observes, suggesting that “the demands and dangers of work underground and the low pay” were factors driving the men back to agriculture. “The vast number of personnel files stamped in red ink ‘escaped’ remain [sic] a mute witness to the unpleasant realities of life at the mine,” he adds.

For those who remained, the appalling work environment motivated efforts to unify. “Dire necessity, not some mystic revolutionary destiny, compelled the Chojlla workers to stand with other miners in the movement to transform Bolivia. Alone, the power of the company overwhelmed them,” Boeger explains, but assistance from the

Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario—which took power first in 1943 and then again in the 1952 Revolution—enabled the laborers “to build a union that allowed them to have greater control over their workplace and their community,” and they “built ever stronger ties to workers in other mining centers” throughout the 1940s as well.

Boeger indicates that the post-war disruption in Bolivia’s tungsten sector, resulting in part from the sudden plummet in Washington’s demand, played a role in spurring labor organizing at Chojlla. “The vertical drop in U.S. demand for tungsten at the end of World War II cost many workers their jobs” there, and “marked the beginning

Latin America, 1942-45; Records of the Pan American Branch, Bureau of Areas; Records of the Foreign Economic Administration, Record Group 169; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

240 of a crisis,” though “International Mining Company managed to stay open” while cutting back operations. Reduced operations accompanied “leadership’s efforts to discipline the workers in order to keep the mine open,” which many miners “interpreted…as a betrayal”—a common grievance that facilitated union-building.391

The ongoing labor-management struggles at Chojlla paralleled those at other tungsten mines. For example, on February 21, 1945, at the Aramayo-owned Rosario

Tungsten Mine, “the workers assualted [sic] and entered the mine administrator’s house, a Peruvian national, hitting him with rocks and striking his head; also, they destroyed the furniture and most of the house. The administrator escaped with grave injuries,” reported

Sproesser Wynn, the Foreign Economic Administration’s Special Representative. Miners then “attacked and damaged the auto conveying” a company official “who was arriving for an inspection,” Wynn added.392

Still, Washington officials proceeded with plans to curtail their Latin American tungsten procurement after the war, as they explained they intended to do in their meetings with Bolivian government representatives, and regardless of what effects such decisions would have among workers in the mines affected. U.S. industry’s tungsten needs did persist after 1945, though its appetites subsided following the conflict.

“Despite the duty” on the metal, the Geological Survey wrote, “postwar domestic production, as in the past, will probably be inadequate to meet home demands, and imports will be necessary,” meaning Latin America would retain importance as a

391 Andrew Boeger, “Struggling for Emancipation: Tungsten Miners and the Bolivian Revolution,” in Workers’ Control in Latin America, 1930-1979, ed. Jonathan C. Brown (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 217-243. 392 Sproesser Wynn, Special Representative of the Foreign Economic Administration, “Progress Report No. 21,” February 1945; Box 160, Vol. 42, General Records, 1945; La Paz Embassy, Bolivia; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

241 supplier. The Survey predicted that “postwar output will follow the pattern after World

War I and decline substantially there,” though it also believed “more South American mines probably will be capable of producing tungsten at the world price after World War

II than after World War I.”393

The war’s end brought a sudden slowdown to Bolivian tungsten mining, as

Boeger indicated in his discussion of Chojlla. This decline continued in 1946. “Greatly decreased demand and lower prices following the ending of hostilities resulted in an abrupt decline in production of tungsten in Bolivia; and, as happened after World War I, many mines closed or reduced operations,” the U.S. Geological Survey reported. Still,

“Bolivia continued to be the largest tungsten producer in South America” in 1947, and its tungsten output increased slightly that year.394

In the late 1940s, Bolivia and Brazil continued supplying the U.S. with substantial quantities of the mineral, but accounted for diminishing portions of Washington’s total imports as Chinese production renewed. Bolivia supplied 46 percent of total imports in

1945, for example, and was still the main U.S. source that year. In 1946, it accounted for

37 percent, then 14 percent in 1947 and just 5 percent the next year. Brazil was the second-largest supplier in 1945, accounting for 26 percent of U.S. imports. In 1947, it supplied 17 percent, and 14 percent in 1948. China, on the other hand, was the source of

26 percent of U.S. imports in 1947, 50 percent the next year and 68 percent in 1949.395

393 David, Minerals Yearbook – 1944, 654. 394 Hubert W. Davis, “Tungsten,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1946, ed. Allan F. Matthews (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1948), 1202. Hubert W. Davis, “Tungsten,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1947, ed. Allan F. Matthews (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1949), 1194. 395 Hubert W. Davis, “Tungsten,” Minerals Yearbook – 1945, ed. H. D. Keiser (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1947), 661. Davis, Minerals Yearbook – 1946, 1192-1193. Davis, Minerals Yearbook – 1947, 1192. Hubert W. Davis, “Tungsten,” Minerals Yearbook – 1948, ed. Allan F. Matthews (Washington:

242

Conclusion

While World War II is typically portrayed as an ideological conflict pitting democracy against fascism, viewing the conflict from the perspective of Washington’s resource needs challenges this interpretation. To begin with, U.S. firms like Carboloy, the GE subsidiary, were perfectly content to support the Nazis in their rise to power. And in Brazil, a crucial ally for Washington during the war, it appears concentration camps provided cheap, essential labor for tungsten mining projects, much-needed for industrial production and military campaigns. Examining both the roles private firms played in

U.S. foreign policy at this time, as well as the extent to which U.S. officials tolerated undemocratic practices abroad to secure much-needed metals, can help delineate more sharply the real battle lines of the mid-20th century.

Government Printing Office, 1950), 1255. Hubert W. Davis, “Tungsten,” Minerals Yearbook – 1949, ed. Allan F. Matthews (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1951), 1239.

243

Chapter 6: Zinc

Introduction

Zinc, like manganese, was used intensively in steel production. But whereas manganese was added to steel to make the resulting product strong enough to maintain its structure even in intense heat, zinc served a protective function via galvanization, when steel is dipped into molten zinc.

The U.S. produced substantial quantities of zinc in the first half of the 20th century, when domestic deposits supplied roughly half the country’s needs. Whatever one might believe about the extent to which free-market ideology governs U.S. economic history, the reality, where zinc was concerned, indicates that ideas related to this school of thought held little sway. For example, the trend in terms of domestic zinc firms was towards monopolization, and New Jersey Zinc had essentially throttled all of its U.S.- based competitors by around 1900. Furthermore, Washington did not hesitate to protect this noncompetitive system via tariffs. One of these measures, passed in 1909, proved ruinous for Mexico’s then-burgeoning zinc industry—to say nothing of the disruptive effects it had in the lives of Mexican workers.

But in the following decades, Mexican zinc production revived, and the country became an important source of the mineral for the United States during the 1940s. It bears emphasizing that this decade launched with an election that U.S. officials knew was fraudulent, bringing Manuel Ávila Camacho to power and eliciting not a peep of protest from Washington. There was no intellectual barrier to accepting authoritarianism in the political sphere, in other words, and thus—as one might expect—U.S. officials had little trouble reorienting other Mexican sectors towards the needs of intensified zinc

244 production. These needs, as indicated in the discussion of mineral procurement in the preceding chapters, entailed restructuring Mexican laws and infrastructure to more effectively serve these production requirements.

A higher form of democracy

Commander W. M. Dillon, Naval and Air Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico

City, knew the July 1940 Mexican presidential contest was a farce. “There is no question but that the election as conducted, was highly irregular, with both sides committing many offenses, such as Camachistas [supporters of Manuel Ávila Camacho] by the use of force, preventing Almazanistas [backers of Juan Andreu Almazán] from voting,” his cable explained.396

The Almazanistas were legion. William P. Blocker, American Consul General in

Ciudad Juárez, wrote in January that “Almazán was gaining strength throughout Mexico.

Some observers expressed the opinion that by the end of May, provided the government did not force him into armed rebellion, Almazán would be so strong among the masses and the army that his election to the presidency could not be stopped.” “A large majority of the independent citizens residing in the Matamoros district continues to favor the candidacy of General Almazán,” Herndon W. Goforth, American Consul in Tamaulipas, noted at the same time. 397

396 W. M. Dillon, Commander, U.S.N., Naval and Air Attaché, “Attaché’s Report – Mexico, Political, Principal Leaders,” July 23, 1940; 812.00 O.N.I./9; Box 4104, 812.00 Oaxaca/6 – 812.00 San Luis Potosi/12- 3044; Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 397 William P. Blocker, American Consul General, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, “Resumé of the Political Situation in the Ciudad Juárez Consular District for January 1940,” January 31, 1940; Box 4101, 812.00 Chihuahua/399; Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Herndon W. Goforth, American Consul, Tamaulipas,

245

A week after these reports were filed, a group of men tried to murder the popular candidate. It happened in Zacapú, a city in Michoacán’s Nahuatzén Mountains, early the morning of February 8. Dr. Leonides Andre Almazán, the candidate’s brother, recounted that some “80 men…armed with rifles left Mexico City en route to Michoacán with the definite purpose of attempting to assassinate General Almazán. This group, accompanied by the local police of Zacapú, insulted and threatened General Almazán and his followers at a meeting held there on the night of February 7,” shooting up his house later that night.

They killed the guard, a Lieutenant Sumoano, at the door, but their target survived.

“This is not the first time that attempts have been made on the life of General

Almazán and it is believed that other attempts will follow,” Dillon, the Naval and Air

Attaché, wrote, explaining that government officials had charged the presidential aspirant

“with attempting to foment revolution, and on the basis of this charge, would like to see his powerful candidacy removed, either by assassination, or openly shot down by troops under guise of quelling rebellion.” Dillon felt that Mexican authorities had not ordered the Zacapú assault. But “it is believed that some of them at least were aware of its existence and did nothing to stop it,” he concluded.398

That summer’s election, held July 7, thus proceeded as one would have expected.

Washington’s Assistant Naval Attaché, Earl S. Piper, observed that the Partido de la

Revolucíon Mexicana—the party of Lázaro Cárdenas, the outgoing president, and

Andreu Almazán’s opponent Ávila Camacho—“controlled the polling booths in spite of

Mexico, “Political, et cetera, Report for January,” January 31, 1940; 812.00 Tamaulipas/430; Box 4106, 812.00 Spanish/4 – 812.00 Tamaulipas/12-3044; Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 398 W. M. Dillon, Commander, U.S.N., “Attaché’s Report – Mexico, Political, Pricipal [sic] leaders,” February 9, 1940; 812.00 O.N.I.; Box 4104, 812.00 Oaxaca/6 – 812.00 San Luis Potosi/12-3044; Decimal File 1940- 44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

246 repeated Government promises to permit free and unobstructed voting.” This aspect of the contest was unsurprising. But “the enthusiasm” of the Almazanista protests startled

Piper.

“The first indication of trouble started at about 1400 on the Paseo de la Reforma near the P.R.M. headquarters, when the army and the police fired into a crowd of demonstrators, killing and wounding several,” he explained. “At about 1600 a similar disturbance took place near the Hipódromo,” when “the Almazanistas announced that they would gather at 1700 on Calle 5 de Mayo (in the central part of the city) for a march to the Zócalo (area around the National Palace) to protest the Reforma incident.” As

“several thousand began the march,” the “police and army units succeeded in preventing

[it] by the use of small arms fire and tear gas grenades. An undetermined number of casualties resulted.” One source “estimated that fifty had been killed and two hundred wounded throughout the country, most of the casualties having taken place in the capital,” though Piper considered these figures too low.399

But the government’s assault did little to quell Almazanista zeal. Lewis V. Boyle,

American Consul in Agua Prieta, wrote in late August that “[t]he vast majority of the inhabitants of the district continue to express freely their discontent with the announced results of the presidential election of July 7, 1940 since about 70% to 80% of the people in the district supported the candidacy of General Almazán.” His support was equally broad nationwide. “The consensus of information indicates that at least 75% of Mexicans are for Almazán, including larger part of army,” a pair of U.S. Marines, D. J. Kendall and

399 Earl S. Piper, Captain, U.S.M.C, Assistant Naval Attaché, “Attaché’s Report – Mexico, Political Forces, Political Parties,” 812.00 O.N.I./5; Box 4104, 812.00 Oaxaca/6 – 812.00 San Luis Potosi/12-3044; Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

247

John W. Thomason, with Washington’s Office of Naval Intelligence observed, noting that “President Cárdenas evidently intends to force Camacho on the people” regardless.

They added, with alarm, that Mexican officials were “seriously concerned as to the effect of this procedure on popular opinion, both in Mexico and the United States”—but saw no sign President Roosevelt intended “to do anything to remove the obvious belief of the majority of Mexicans that our government is supporting Cárdenas and Camacho, his protégé.”400

Three prominent Mexicans tried to argue on the public’s behalf nearly two months after the election. Dillon explained that “Generals Jacinto B. Treviño, Roberto

Cruz and Gómez Morentin (civilian), all prominent Almazanistas, called on President

Cárdenas in the Presidential Palace, to make one last appeal to him to ask for justice and recognition of the wishes of the majority of the Mexican people for Almazán to become the next President.” Their appeal failed, and the meeting “degenerated into a bitter quarrel with both sides throwing down the gauntlet. Treviño is said to have asked the

President: ‘What about your promises of a fair and free election for the Mexican people?”

“That form of democracy is out-moded, and present methods are simply a higher development of so called democratic processes,” President Cárdenas replied, adding that he was “prepared to crush any uprising.”401

400 Lewis V. Boyle, American Consul, Agua Prieta, México, “Political Review of the Agua Prieta Consular District for August 1940,” August 31, 1940; 812.00 Sonora/1551; Box 4105, 812.00 Sinaloa/147 – 812.00 Sonora/12-3044; Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. D. J. Kendall, Lt. Col., USMC and John W. Thomason, Jr., Lt. Col., USMC, “Mexico, Disaffected Groups, Strikes, Possible Revolutionary Forces,” August 13, 1940; 812.00 O.N.I.; Box 4104, 812.00 Oaxaca/6 – 812.00 San Luis Potosi/12-3044; Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 401 W. M. Dillon, Commander, U.S.N., Naval Attaché, “Intelligence Report – Mexico, Political, Revolutionary Tendencies,” September 9, 1940; 812.00 O.N.I./10; Box 4104, 812.00 Oaxaca/6 – 812.00 San Luis Potosi/12-3044; Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record

248

This preparation was needless in the end. The Mexican government’s returns claimed Ávila Camacho had won 93.9% of the vote, and Washington’s validation came that fall. “The United States formally recognized General Manuel Ávila Camacho as

President-elect of Mexico tonight when President Roosevelt designated Henry A.

Wallace, Vice President-elect, to represent him at the inauguration in Mexico City on

December 1,” the New York Times reported on November 13. “The move was regarded in some quarters as an indication that Mr. Wallace might become a ‘traveling salesman’ promoting the ‘Good Neighbor’ policy in Latin America,” and all it entailed—support for coups masquerading as elections, and violence targeting those protesting the fraud.402

A grim combination of unemployment and food shortages

Washington valued Mexico not as some model of political liberty, but as an ideal site for a “broad economic development program,” as one wartime memo termed it. This program would prioritize an “improvement and increase in local production” and an

“increase and facilitation of consumption” above all. Zinc was one crucial type of “local production.” Mexico’s mines produced more of this metal than any other Latin American country’s, making it “the most important source of zinc for the defense and war effort,” as William P. Tidwell, the Metals Reserve Company’s historian, explained. Throughout

World War II, Mexico provided “485,811 short tons of the 1,976,960 total foreign concentrates” Washington bought, or nearly 25%. Its zinc exports to the U.S. grew as the

Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. In his report, Dillon explained that “reports of this conference have been received by both the Military and Naval Attachés and a Secretary of the Embassy from many private sources and they all are in substantial agreement with the above related story.” 402 “Wallace is Named to Go to Inaugural of Avila in Mexico,” New York Times (New York), November 13, 1940. Lorenzo Meyer Cosío, Del Caudillismo a la unidad política nacional, vol. 11 of México y su historia (México, D.F.: UTEHA, 1984), 1564.

249 war continued—from 148,201 tons in 1941; to 160,959 tons in 1942; to 166,135 tons the following year. “Total imports in 1943 again exceeded all previous records,” the U.S.

Geological Survey reported, crediting Mexico for meeting “the great demand for zinc in the United States.”403

U.S. officials eased the mineral’s flow into their country by repealing zinc tariffs, thus reviving a sector they had ruined decades before. “Virtually all of Mexico’s industrial metal production was exported to the United States” in the early 20th century, when Washington determined zinc was too crucial to be left in a free market, imposing a tariff on it in 1909. Passed “in order to protect U.S. domestic producers from the rapid growth of zinc mining in Mexico,” the measure “effectively killed the Mexican zinc mining industry until World War I.” Porfirio Díaz’s efforts to resurrect it—through attempts to promote zinc shipments to Europe—failed, and states like Chihuahua, “the site of the greatest mining activity,” were devastated as a result. Mining’s decline there coincided with “agricultural disaster,” and the region’s cities, “from Aguascalientes to

Chihuahua, teemed with unemployed miners and industrial workers” suffering through “a grim combination of unemployment and food shortages.”404

403 Mr. J. S. Robbins, “Broad Economic Development Program for Mexico,” to Charles A. McQueen, December 6, 1943; Central Files, Mexico; Commercial and Financial, Country Files; Box 193, General Records, Office of Inter-American Affairs; Records of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Record Group 229; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. A. L. Ransome, Minerals Yearbook—1941, ed. F. M. Shore (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1943), 163. A. L. Ransome and B. A. Estill, “Zinc,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1943, ed. C. E. Needham (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1945), 187. William P. Tidwell, “Zinc: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1941-1945,” 1948; Box 9, Tungsten-Zinc, Metals Reserve Company; Administrative Histories of the R.F.C.’s Wartime Programs, 1943-54; Office of the Secretary, Reconstruction Finance Corporation; Records of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Record Group 234; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 404 Stephen Haber, Noel Maurer, and Armando Razo, The Politics of Property Rights: Political Instability, Credible Commitments, and Economic Growth in Mexico, 1876-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 250. John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), 144, 168, 247.

250

A monopoly, to all intents and purposes

The U.S. derailed Mexican mining at a time when its own zinc production boomed. The U.S. was the world’s major zinc source in the early 20th century, and a single firm, the New Jersey Zinc Company, provided most of this supply. The corporation “had formed in northern New Jersey in 1848 and made a success of using zinc oxide to manufacture paints,” exploiting the zinc ore Dr. Samuel Fowler had discovered on his property in the town of Franklin. In the late 1800s, the business

“merged with the Passaic Zinc Company, Manning and Squier [which had sold its paints], and other related companies such as the Lehigh Zinc and Iron Company and the

Empire Zinc Company.” New Jersey Zinc, circa 1900, was therefore “in the words of its publicist, George Heckel, ‘to all intents and purposes, a monopoly.’”405

And its acquisition of Empire Zinc gave it a presence in the Midwest. The Senate

Committee on Finance reported that Empire owned “some 2,300 acres of zinc mineral lands” and a zinc smelter near Joplin, Missouri, in 1894—when, it warrants mentioning, the company was literally begging for measures that would “shield us from imports,” as its statement included in the Committee report revealed. After swallowing its rivals, New

Jersey Zinc acquired both Empire’s Joplin-area holdings and “two natural gas smelters at

Gas City, Kan.,” and “purchased a large acreage of mineral-bearing land in the Joplin district” as well, for good measure. Washington’s zinc protections, adopted the next

405 Randal L. Hall, Mountains on the Market: Industry, the Environment, and the South (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2012), 116-117. Christian Warren, Brush with Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 48. Russell Roberts, Rediscover the Hidden New Jersey (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 26. John Emsley, Nature’s Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 501. Nnamdi Anyadike, Lead and Zinc: Threats and Opportunities in the Years Ahead (Cambridge: Woodhead Publishing, 2002), 84.

251 decade, ensured Mexican producers would not compete with New Jersey Zinc’s burgeoning empire.406

Hemorrhages were rather frequent

One New Jersey Zinc official explained his views on miners’ well-being in 1916.

“The directors have no more moral and legal right to direct part of the revenues of the corporation to the application of Christianity to their own employees than they have to employ them in maintaining a mission to Africa,” he argued—though there were, he conceded, certain circumstances that justified “improving the physical condition of the worker.” For example, if such improvements helped the laborer “do more and better work in a working day,” or convinced him that working for a particular company was

“desirable, so that [the firm] can maintain its working force at full strength in a rising labor market without increasing wages,” they were warranted.407

This official was sincere, as Dr. A. J. Lanza discovered when visiting the Joplin zinc mines in 1917, to conduct research for the U.S. Public Health Service. “Mining operations, drilling, blasting, etc.” there were “done in flint, an exceedingly hard rock with a silica content of over 95 per cent,” he wrote in his report. “This flint forms a very fine, hard, sharp and insoluble dust, which permeates the underground atmosphere to a varying extent and which, naturally, is extremely irritating to the lungs when inhaled, causing the condition known as miners’ consumption,” he elaborated. This condition

406 Senate Committee on Finance, Replies to Tariff Inquiries, Schedule C: Metals, and Manufacturers of, United States Senate, 53rd Congress, S. REP. NO. 418, at 121 (1894). John R. Holibaugh, The Lead and Zinc Mining Industry of Southwest Missouri and Southeast Kansas (New York: The Scientific Publishing Co., 1895), 15-16. “New Jersey Zinc Company Absorbs Two Smelters in the Joplin District,” The Age of Steel (St. Louis, MO) May 10, 1902. 407 Hall, Mountains on the Market, 131.

252 swept like a scythe through the mines. “That there is an unusual amount of tuberculosis among the sheet-ground miners in southwestern Missouri has been a matter of common knowledge in that part of the country for some years,” Lanza acknowledged, and his study reviewed 433 cases of miners’ consumption.

The afflicted did not have to wait long for the first symptoms to emerge. “Pain in the chest usually appears early and persists throughout, though often appearing to remit in the terminal stages,” wrote Lanza, citing weight loss as a second “constant symptom.”

“Cough was apt to be severe at night and in the morning,” furthermore, and many miners

“complained of vomiting their breakfast,” at times so often that they skipped it, “taking their first meal at noon.” “Hemorrhages were rather frequent”—“more so as the silicosis advanced”—and by the disease’s “later stages, with breaking down of lung tissue, the sputum was very characteristic, in fact diagnostic, being of a marked slaty blue color and of a very tenacious consistency.” The sputum was blue because of “the presence of flint dust, previously inhaled and embedded in the lung tissue.” And Lanza believed that

“probably 30 to 35 per cent” of Joplin’s miners suffered the symptoms just described.

But theirs were not the only lives sacrificed for New Jersey Zinc’s well-being.

Lanza also discussed “the poor and often wretched conditions under which so many of them live,” referring the miners’ families. In their homes—“three and four room shacks”—“unhygienic living conditions” were “very common.” The cramped spaces and squalor not only left laborers vulnerable to disease, but also made family members’

“intimate contact” inevitable, and “sufficient to insure the spread of tuberculosis infection among both the miners and their children.” The illness accounted for half the deaths

253 among miners, who experienced “a tuberculosis mortality 8 times as great as among

‘standard’ lives,” Lanza emphasized.408

A most essential nonferrous metal

As Joplin’s miners inhaled enough flint dust to cough blue sputum, they provided the U.S. with a crucial material. Zinc, with copper and lead, is one of “the most essential nonferrous metals used in modern industry,” its importance deriving from “its natural capacity to protect.” It is employed heavily, for example, in “that process in which steel is given a protective coating by dipping it into molten zinc”—galvanization—“used for car bodies, fencing, motorway guard rails and lighting posts, suspension bridges, heat exchanges and roofing tacks,” among other things. “By protecting iron and steel against corrosion, zinc prolongs the life of buildings, vehicles, ships and steel goods and structures of every kind,” and furthermore “is used along with copper to make the alloy called bronze,” with its own array of applications in coins, tools, and weapons.409

Hundreds of years before modern industry exploited the metal, “zinc compounds had a function in healing wounds and sore eyes,” ancient writings attest. Pliny the Elder

(A.D. 23-79), for example, refers to an ointment—probably zinc oxide—with these curative powers in his Historia Naturalis. Hindus in 14th-Century India engaged in “a limited amount of commercial zinc production,” and there is further evidence of

“extensive zinc production from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries” in Rajasthan, the

408 A. J. Lanza, United States Public Health Service, “Miners’ Consumption: A Study of 433 Cases of the Disease Among Zinc Miners in Southwestern Missouri,” Public Health Bulletin No. 85, United States Public Health Service, Treasury Department (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1917), 5-30. 409 Charles M. Riley, Our Mineral Resources: An Elementary Textbook in Economic Geology (New York: Wiley, 1959), 105-106. Anyadike, Lead and Zinc, xiv. Emsley, Nature’s Building Blocks, 503. Stanley E. Manahan, Environmental Chemistry, Eighth Edition (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2005), 515.

254 northwestern Indian state bordering Pakistan. China used zinc in the 17th century “to supply the needs of brass manufacture,” though “knowledge of deliberate zinc smelting” did not reach Europe until the following century, perhaps after a British traveler’s visit to

China around 1740. Whatever really happened, the British had their own zinc smelter at

Bristol a few years later, in 1743. Thus while German chemist Andreas Marggraf is often credited with discovering zinc in 1746, it is more accurate “to say that he was the first to identify it as an element,” given the awareness Indian and Chinese civilizations had of the metal’s capabilities centuries earlier.410

The spirit of cooperation between government and the zinc industry

U.S. zinc mines were so productive in the decades after Lanza’s 1917 study that the metal “had not been classified by the Army-Navy Munitions Board as either strategic or critical” in the run-up to World War II. But false optimism, rather than a clear-eyed appraisal of the pressures global conflict would put on domestic zinc supplies, was behind this classification, and “in the winter of 1940, a growing scarcity of zinc metal caused a slow-down in ammunition production.” C. C. Felton, Vice President of Revere

Copper and Brass, wrote to Metals Reserve asking for help in obtaining the mineral, “in the mistaken belief that zinc was being acquired by the government for a stockpile.” He simply assumed plans to amass it were already in place, but U.S. officials had yet to develop a procurement strategy.411

Felton’s fears were well-grounded, given the sharp rise in zinc use in 1940. “In an endeavor to meet the unprecedented demand for metal for domestic defense and

410 Anyadike, Lead and Zinc, 83-84; Emsley, Nature’s Building Blocks, 501-502. 411 Tidwell, “Zinc: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1941-1945.”

255

British orders, the smelting industry increased its output 33 percent over that in 1939 to a new high record and reduced its stocks 77 percent to the lowest year-end level experienced since 1925,” the Geological Survey reported. “Domestic mines could not pace the advance in consumption,” however. “Mine output increased only 14 percent and was 14 percent below the record production of 1926,” and thus “smelters turned to foreign ores,” which poured into the U.S. in quantities that “exceeded all previous records,” rising “400 percent over 1939 owing to sharply increased shipments”— especially from Mexico, whose shipments “represented approximately 52 percent of the total and were 304 percent greater than in 1939.”412

The 1941 situation was much the same. “The spirit of cooperation between

Government and the zinc industry resulted in a year of smooth-running but intense activity that broke all records in an endeavor to meet increased demands for the metal,” the Survey explained. It was true that “domestic mine output increased 13 percent to a point only 3 percent below the 1926 record” that year, but even so “it could not meet the gain in consumption, and smelters continued to use foreign ore in even greater amounts than in 1940. Imports in the first 9 months of 1941 exceeded the previous record for

1940 (12 months) and sufficed to establish an all-time record for domestic output of zinc from foreign ores,” it concluded.413

This reality shattered Washington’s zinc complacency. On February 14, 1941,

“Leon Henderson, Chief of the Price Stabilization Division of NDAC [National Defense

Advisory Commission], recommended that the Federal Loan Agency provide financial

412 E. W. Pehrson and A. L. Ransome, “Zinc,” in Minerals Yearbook – Review of 1940, ed. D. H. Keiser (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1941), 139, 154, 159. 413 A. L. Ransome, “Zinc,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1941 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1943), 143.

256 assistance for expansion of domestic zinc smelter capacity by 50,000 tons.” He also

“estimated a 1941 shortage in zinc supplies of 100,000 tons and at least 200,000 tons in

1942.” The Office of Production Management (OPM), less alarmed, “believed there might be a shortage in 1942 of only 90,000 tons,” but these quibbles did not reflect disagreements on core strategy. As Metals Reserve historian Tidwell explained, “the next immediate step was to purchase foreign concentrates to make up for the domestic supply,” and on April 22 Leon Henderson, of the Office of Price Administration,

“requested that Jesse Jones, the Federal Loan Administrator, ‘purchase 597,000 tons of zinc concentrates,’ which Henderson explained ‘was available in Argentina, Australia,

Burma, Canada, Mexico, and Newfoundland.” Responsibility for purchasing the zinc went to Metals Reserve.414

Washington signed its first mineral procurement agreement with Mexico later that summer, on July 15. “In addition to zinc and lead, the agreement provided that for 18 months MRC would buy at American market prices, such other materials as antimony, copper, fluorspar, manganese, mercury, tin, tungsten, and vanadium[.]” The next year, the U.S. and Mexican governments reached a second agreement, in which “several concessions granted by the Mexican Government” would be repaid by the MRC, which promised to raise “prices all around” for Mexican minerals, zinc included.415

Roosevelt’s acceptance of Ávila Camacho, opposed by some three-quarters of

Mexican voters, as the country’s rightful leader was paying off. “The United States policy of friendship and cooperation bore fruit after Pearl Harbor,” a State Department report explained. “Mexico immediately broke off relations with the Axis and vigorously

414 Tidwell, “Zinc: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1941-1945.” 415 Ibid.

257 stood for hemisphere solidarity at the meeting of Foreign Ministers in Rio de Janeiro in

January, 1942,” for example, before acknowledging “the existence of a state of war with the Axis” that May. But “[t]he high spot of the relationship between the United States and Mexico was reached at the time of President Roosevelt’s visit to Mexico in 1943,” since the event “constituted a convincing symbol to Mexicans of the sincerity of this government in its policy of recognizing the equality and full sovereignty of lesser Latin

American states”—provided they used said sovereignty responsibly, it goes without saying.416

As U.S. reliance on foreign ores increased, and as the amicability of Washington-

Mexico City relations was assured, U.S. planners worked to ensure companies dependent on Mexican zinc received the supplies they needed. These firms included New Jersey

Zinc, which was discussed above, as well as the American Zinc Company of Illinois, the

American Metal Company, and the American Smelting and Refining Company

(ASARCO). The latter also owned several mines and a smelter in Nueva Rosita,

Coahuila, and a smelter in San Luis Potosí, and according to the Geological Survey had

“expanded its mining operations at Xichú [Guanajuato], Tecolote [Sonora], Taxco

[Guerrero], and San Carlos [Chihuahua]” in 1942. The Eagle Picher Lead Company was also active in Taxco during the war, buying property there in 1941, after “a Mexican geological engineering company, Vaupell and Garcia, called [its] attention to zinc ore deposits” in the region. U.S. planners noted in 1942 that “Eagle Picher is ready to go ahead with its comparatively new property,” though the project was “being held up

416 “United States Policy Toward Mexico Since March 1933,” September 1, 1944; Box 15, Memoranda Analysis and Liaison Division, Aug. – Sept. 1944; Memorandums of the Division of American Republic Analysis and Liaison, Nov. 25, 1942 – Sept. 26, 1946; Office of American Republic Affairs, Its Predecessors, and Its Successors; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

258 somewhat because of the situation with respect to labor and taxes in Mexico.” These were just two of the many problems confronting Washington officials desperate for

Mexican zinc.417

A competitive menace

A third was the fact that “Japanese buyers in Mexico, Argentina, Peru, and

Bolivia continued to be a competitive menace both by paying higher prices and accepting lower-grade materials.” Like the U.S., Japan needed these minerals for domestic industries. “The profile of Japan over the last 100 years provides an almost classical example of a country with a large and growing population and a rapidly advancing technology combined with a relatively constricted territorial base,” meaning “Japan must continue to rely upon the acquisition of critical resources beyond its own borders”—a reliance that “has provided the dominant motivation underlying all foreign policy strategies for Japan, from the Meiji Restoration to the present.”418

417 Roswell W. Prouty, Mexico, D. F., “Mineral Production, Stocks and Exports for Fourth Quarter and Year 1942,” February 19, 1943; Box 380, Vol. 370, General Records (1937-49), 1943; Mexico City Embassy, Mexico; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. A. L. Ransome and J. H Schaum, “Zinc,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1942, ed. C. E. Needham (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1943), 202-203. Douglas Knerr, Eagle-Picher Industries: Strategies for Survival in the Industrial Marketplace (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1992), 122. Mr. Moorman, “Mexican Zinc,” to Mr. Francis A. Linville (State Department), Mr. Walter C. Page (War Production Board), and Mr. B. R. Bates (Board of Economic Warfare), April 2, 1942; Zinc (General), 1941-43; Box 16, Metals and Minerals: Wolfram (Portugal) – Zirconium (Africa – Peru); Records Relating to Individual Commodities, 1941-45, Records of the Division of Defense Materials; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. D. D. Irwin to Floyd D. Ransom, May 14, 1942; Zinc (General), 1941-43; Box 16, Metals and Minerals: Wolfram (Portugal) – Zirconium (Africa – Peru); Records Relating to Individual Commodities, 1941-45, Records of the Division of Defense Materials; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 418 Tidwell, “Zinc: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1941-1945.” Nazli Choucri, Robert C. North, and Susumu Yamakage, The Challenge of Japan: Before World War II and After (New York: Routledge, 1992), 24.

259

Again like the U.S., Japan during World War II could not produce enough zinc domestically to meet its galvanized steel and other industrial needs. It was estimated that

“Japan imports more than half its total supply of zinc,” and that these “imports have increased steadily since the opening-up of Japan” in the mid-19th century. The country pushed into China and Southeast Asia a century later to mitigate its dependence on resources imported from the U.S. and Britain. Soured relations with the former, for example, would mean that “supplies of nickel, molybdenum, tungsten, copper, zinc, mercury, mica, asbestos, aluminum, cobalt, and rubber” would last “for no more than a year and a half. ‘Such a situation would finish us,’” Admiral Soemu Toyoda declared in

August 1940. “Navy Minister [Zengo] Yoshida added the warning that, in case of hostilities, Japan—because of oil and related shortages—could not fight a war against the

United States for more than a year,” whereas Washington’s resource stamina was greater.419

Still, Washington’s reliance on foreign zinc, as mentioned above, also increased as the war began. Metals Reserve’s history of its procurement program notes that “the increase in use of foreign concentrates” shot up 427% from 1939 to 1940. “Dependence on foreign ores and concentrates rose steadily throughout the war years, despite the costly program carried on for the stimulation of domestic production,” it emphasized. For example, “dependence on foreign ores and concentrates rose from 3 per cent in 1939 to

13 per cent in 1940, 21 per cent in 1941, 29 per cent in 1942, and 37 per cent in 1943.”420

419 E. F. Penrose, “Japan, 1920-1936,” in Japanese Economic History, 1930-1960, Volume VIII: The Industrialization of Japan and the Manchukuo, 1930-1940, ed. E. B. Schumpeter (London: Routledge, 2000), 230; Choucri et al., The Challenge of Japan, 166. 420 Tidwell, “Zinc: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1941-1945.”

260

Given that Washington relied largely on zinc from Mexico, it was there that the

Japanese threat emerged. The problem was that U.S. firms were selling the metal to

Tokyo. As the State Department explained in a March 1941 telegram to the U.S.

Embassy in Mexico City, for example, ASARCO had signed contracts in July 1940 “for the delivery of some three thousand tons of zinc to Japan.” Other corporations working with Mexican zinc, “all of which are American controlled, had also booked considerable business in zinc metal with the Japanese 1940,” motivating State Department officials to urge that action be taken “to freeze out the Japanese buyers.” This process began in April

1941.421

“Through the cooperation of the State Department, the Director of Priorities of the

OPM took steps to protect the American Smelting and Refining Company in breaking its

Japanese contract,” the Metals Reserve historian recounted. These steps included OPM ordering ASARCO “not to make deliveries of zinc from the Rosita smelter,” for example.

But reining in this firm “was only a drop in the bucket toward eliminating Japanese purchases,” since Tokyo promised “higher prices than American smelters could pay,” and was “willing to take concentrates having zinc content of 48 per cent, against a 53-55 per cent content normally demanded by the American smelters” as well. Though “active competition throughout the greater part of 1941” between the U.S. and Japan persisted, in its July 1941 contract with Metals Reserve the Mexican government promised “to prevent exportations of zinc and other metals to points outside the Western Hemisphere,” thereby eliminating the competitive menace.422

421 Telegram from Department of State to Embassy Mexico, D. F., March 13, 1941, 7 p.m.; Box 113, Vol. 118, General Records, 1941; Mexico City Embassy, Mexico; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 422 Tidwell, “Zinc: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1941-1945.”

261

A vast undertaking of United States inspiration

Sidelining the Japanese and signing the metals contract with Mexico were just preconditions for expanded mineral procurement, and Washington had to consider other factors in its effort to help private companies extract and export zinc as fast, and for as little money, as possible. For example, a few months after the July 1941 Metals Reserve agreement had been settled, the Export-Import Bank advanced a $30,000,000 credit “to aid Mexico in constructing and developing its national system of roads and highways, including sections of the Pan-American Highway from Mexico City to the border of

Guatemala and from Nogales to Guadalajara,” cutting from the Arizona border to the country’s center.423

A major beneficiary of U.S. zinc protectionism—the auto industry—supported this highway in its infancy. The National Automobile Chamber of Commerce’s general manager, Alfred Reeves, expanded in 1920 on the simple economic logic of foreign highway construction. “The importance of foreign markets,” he stressed, “may be readily inferred from the fact that there is in the United States one car for every 14 inhabitants, and one car only for every 2,840 inhabitants throughout the world. In much the same way that the motor vehicle has hastened development in this Country will it develop foreign countries,” he believed.424

E. W. James, head of the Public Roads Administration’s Inter-American Regional

Office during the war, reviewed the highway’s history in a 1946 memorandum. “About

1923 the automotive industry felt that car ownership in the United States had reached, or was rapidly approaching, a saturation point,” he began. “Soliciting the cooperation of

423 Ibid. 424 “Industry’s Future is Greatest Abroad,” Automobile Topics (New York), October 16, 1920.

262 allied industries the automobile manufacturers proposed a long range plan for developing a new outlet for cars and trucks,” namely Latin America—where “the development of public sentiment in favor of road construction” would have to occur were this scheme to succeed.

“This plan was so far approved by the State Department that instructions were issued to the delegation from the United States to the Fifth International Conference of

American States,” held in Santiago in 1923, “to support an appropriate resolution in favor of the construction of motor roads throughout Latin America. On the initiative of the

United States delegation such a resolution was adopted,” James wrote, adding that, the following year, “the automobile industry and the manufacturers of highway materials, supplies and construction equipment contributed through the Automobile Chamber of

Commerce approximately $100,000 to bring to the United States engineers and administrative officials from Latin America,” both “to acquaint them with the progress and methods of highway construction” in the U.S. and to build “official sentiment in favor of road construction in their representative republics.”

The rest of the interwar period witnessed a series of conferences, resolutions and appropriations of funds geared toward building Latin American roads. “At the present time construction has been advanced until practically all of the major bridges have been completed, 50 percent of the entire length from the Panama Canal to the United States is paved and approximately 21 percent additional is passable in all weathers,” James wrote in 1946, stressing that Washington had “initiated this project” and had “repeatedly urged the other countries” to cooperate.425

425 E. W. James to Major General Philip B. Fleming, June 24, 1946; General Memoranda, July – Aug. 1946; Box 12, Memorandums Relating to General Latin American Affairs, Jan. 4, 1937 – Dec. 31, 1947; Office of

263

And the roadway’s strategic importance was obvious to U.S. officials as World

War II began. “Completion of the construction of the Pan American Highway has become of importance to the Department of State, War, and Navy and any financial assistance is being urged,” a July 1941 letter explained, adding that “the cheap means of transportation of products, the development of vast areas of resources, [and] the unlocking of tremendous economic wealth now inaccessible” were three of the main benefits the project’s conclusion would bring. “The utilization of trucks specially equipped with Diesel motors to haul regular freight and to make available the world’s largest potential concentration of strategic raw materials, in South America, could inject a new equation, favorable to the” Allied cause, according to an August 1941 Office of

Inter-American Affairs memorandum.426

Mexico was one site of intense road-building in the 1940s. “The growth and predominance of highways in Mexican transportation were reflected in the increasing proportion of expenditures for roads and motor vehicles in the total transportation investments,” one postwar study observed. This proportion was 43% in 1939. But it rose

“to an average of 52% in 1945-1950. During the same years, the ratio of railroad investment was declining from 46% in 1939 to an average of 37% in 1945-1950.”427

American Republic Affairs, Its Predecessors, and Its Successors, General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 426 Mr. Chrysler, Jr., to Mr. Rovensky, July 21, 1941; Background Need for the Inter-Amer. Highway; Box 160, Transportation – Landways – Inter-American Highway, Commercial and Financial; Central Files, General Records; Records of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Record Group 229; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. “The Pan American Highway’s Place in America’s Defense Program,” August 1941; Background Need for the Inter-Amer. Highway; Box 160, Transportation – Landways – Inter- American Highway, Commercial and Financial; Central Files, General Records; Records of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Record Group 229; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 427 Combined Mexican Working Party, The Economic Development of Mexico (Baltimore: Published for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development by the Johns Hopkins Press, 1953), 84.

264

An inviting field for the saboteur

The relative efficiencies of railroads versus highways preoccupied U.S. officials as they worked to maximize Mexico’s mineral exports. “It would be hard to over- estimate the importance of” updating Mexican railways, Nelson Rockefeller, Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, wrote in November 1942. “It is estimated that in the neighborhood of 1,300,000 tons of strategic and critical materials will be available for shipment by the railroad in 1943; yet last year the road carried only 180,000 tons,” he pointed out. The situation called for “a fundamental reorganization and renovation of both the road and its equipment,” he emphasized.428

The FBI, in a report completed two months earlier, concurred with Rockefeller on the importance of Mexican rail transportation, warning that Mexico’s “railways…present an inviting field for the saboteur due to the isolated nature of some of the country through which road beds are run.” The Bureau was particularly concerned about “the railway line running from Mexico City via Aguascalientes, Durango, and Chihuahua to El Paso,

Texas,” since “a great proportion of the mineral and livestock freight traffic going to the

United States” traveled along it. “For the most part the areas through which this line runs are isolated and therefore sabotage preparations of sufficient detail and extent could probably carry on unnoticed,” it warned.429

Roswell Prouty, a mining expert with the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, reinforced this assessment of Mexican train transportation. He wrote in February 1943

428 Nelson A. Rockefeller to Winthrop Aldrich, November 19, 1942; Central Files, Mexico; Commercial and Financial, Country Files; General Records, Office of Inter-American Affairs; Records of the Office of Inter- American Affairs, Record Group 229; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 429 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Totalitarian Activities: Mexico Today,” September 1942; Box 5, Country Files, 1940-49; Office of Intelligence Research, Division of Research for the American Republics; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

265 that “the deterioration of the physical property of the railroads and the uncooperative attitude of the workers, seriously affects mining activity.” A major problem, in his view, was “the congestion in the railroad yards of San Luis Potosí and Monterrey, which obstructs the flow of ore and concentrates to the smelter and of metal products to the market. Shortage of cars has resulted in quite a backing up of concentrates, particularly of lead and zinc,” he explained.430

Another Embassy official, Commercial Attaché L. B. Clark, emphasized that poor infrastructure continued to plague mineral extraction after the war. “Disorganization in the railroad systems throughout the country continued to be one of the most difficult problems with which the mining industry had to contend,” he wrote in January 1946.

Their poor condition left “the transportation of products, ore, concentrates, and metals seriously handicapped,” for example when zinc concentrates accumulated in northern

Mexico and were moved only “due to particular efforts put forth by the United States

Railway Mission.”431

A much less threatening version of the law governing nationalizations

Frank J. Hobson was Assistant General Manager of the Compañía Metalúrgica

Peñoles, S. A., a Mexico-based subsidiary of New York’s American Metal Company,

Ltd. He knew that bad roads and rail lines were not the only problems hindering zinc mining in Mexico, and believed that “heavy taxes” and “labor policies” were other obstacles that had to be removed. “There is probably no man in Mexico more competent

430 Prouty, “Mineral Production, Stocks and Exports for Fourth Quarter and Year 1942,” February 19, 1943. 431 L. B. Clark, “Mexican Mining Industry in 1945,” to R. W. Prouty, Mexico, D. F., January 25, 1946; Box 744, Volume 188, General Records (1937-49), 1946; Mexico City Embassy, Mexico; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

266 to write authoritatively on this subject than Mr. Hobson,” the American Consul in

Monterrey, Henry S. Waterman, asserted.432

Whether arriving at their conclusions based on Hobson’s arguments, or through their own reasoning, U.S. officials agreed Mexican laws needed to be overhauled. “The

State Department took the lead in ascertaining from the Mexican Government the extent to which this country could expect any modification of existing laws,” Metals Reserve’s history noted, explaining that State’s goal was to effect legislative changes “that would result in greater imports of Mexican minerals and metals.” Since U.S. officials decided the subject required on-the-ground research, and because “it had become clear by

December 1941 that there was still a large untapped volume of Mexican minerals and metals which should be obtainable for the war effort,” G. Temple Bridgeman and H.

DeWitt Smith, Vice Presidents of Metals Reserve, sent Yale’s Dr. Alan Bateman across the border in 1942 “to investigate the possibilities for additional metal production.”433

Bateman was tasked with determining how to lessen the “reluctance of American producers there to increase investments and stimulate production.” Diminishing these firms’ enthusiasm were “the unfavorable Government tax policy against the mining industry, high freight tariffs on metals and minerals over the Government-owned railways, as well as restrictive labor laws and regulations.” Bateman spent three months in the country, then reached the 1942 agreement with Mexican officials that augmented the original, July 1941 Metals Reserve arrangement discussed above. “In return for the

432 Henry S. Waterman, American Consul, Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, “Comments on the Lead and Zinc Situation in Mexico,” March 5, 1942; Box 238, Vol. 280, 863.5A-863.5 Tin, 1942; General Records, 1937-49, Mexico City Embassy; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 433 Tidwell, “Zinc: Procurement and Stockpiling, 1941-1945.”

267 several concessions granted by the Mexican government, [Metals Reserve] was committed to pay higher prices all around,” on zinc and other metals.434

One of Mexico’s concessions was to churn out as much ore tonnage as possible.

Thus “old properties were to be reopened along with new properties, with marginal properties to be re-investigated to determine the prices necessary to initiate production or the expenditures necessary, whether private or governmental, to bring them into production.” All mines—regardless of whether they were owned by the U.S., Mexico,

Britain, France, or any other non-Axis nation—“were to be stimulated into production for export to the United States.”435

But the obstacles to expanded Mexican mining went far beyond production figures. “Initial reluctance of mining companies to expand operations in Mexico was found to be due mostly to” a combination of “unpredictable taxes,” “difficulty or inability to close down a property if the war emergency ceased or operations became unprofitable,” and labor laws—really, much of the mining-related legislation needed an overhaul, Bateman explained in April 1942. “Cooperation was promised if these obstacles could be overcome,” he wrote. “These objectives were accomplished and cooperation obtained.” Bateman believed his agreement, once signed, would give

“assurances to mining companies to expand operations.” The Geological Survey concurred, calling his agreement “the most important event in 1942,” where zinc procurement was concerned. Under its terms, “Mexico agreed to stabilize taxes on zinc,

434 Ibid. 435 Ibid.

268 free freight rates, and hold in abeyance certain clauses in the labor laws,” providing the legal framework for the expanded mining Washington wanted.436

The Mexican laborer has no conception of an honest day’s work

Early in the war, the Chairman of the Sub-Committee on Economic Relations in

Mexico City, Floyd D. Ransom, complained that the average “Mexican laborer has no conception of an honest days [sic] work for an honest days [sic] pay. In fact,” he continued in disbelief, “instances are known where labor leaders deliberately encourage workmen to perform less and less work. Until such time as the laboring class in Mexico can be educated to take a conscientious interest in his employment,” he elaborated, “the attitude of the employee will continue to be that of getting as much as possible from the employer and rendering as little as possible in return.” Ransom’s deep insight was that

Mexican workers, and not, say, profit-driven firms, epitomized self-interest. The typical

Mexican “uses as small a portion of his salary as possible in the maintenance of his home,” prioritizing “his own personal pleasure” above all else.437

The problem of Mexican labor concerned Bateman as well, and he tried to foster the correct “attitude of the employee” during his visit. “Considerable time was spent in building up labor cooperation and morale in order to maintain production at the highest possible levels,” he wrote. But the Geological Survey observed that “labor difficulties

436 Alan M. Bateman, “Report on Mineral and Metal Mission to Mexico, 1942,” April 2, 1942; Box 9, Tungsten-Zinc, Metals Reserve Company; Administrative Histories of the R.F.C.’s Wartime Programs, 1943-54; Office of the Secretary, Reconstruction Finance Corporation; Records of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Record Group 234; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 437 Floyd D. Ransom, Chairman, Sub-Committee on Economic Relations, Mexico, D. F., “Memorandum to Mr. Joseph McGurk from the Sub-Committee on Economic Relations,” February 11, 1942; Box 194, Central Files, Mexico; Commercial and Financial, Country Files; General Records, Office of Inter-American Affairs; Records of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Record Group 229; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

269 appeared” after his agreement with the Mexican government was arranged—little surprise, given that its aim was to make Mexican law conform to the desires U.S. planners and businessmen shared.438

The Survey would have described Mexican labor activity more accurately had it written that labor difficulties persisted, rather than appeared, in 1942. In October 1940, for example, there was a zinc workers’ strike in Coahuila. “The strike in the subsidiaries of the American Smelting and Refining Company at Nueva Rosita continues without prospect of an early settlement,” American Consul G. R. Willson reported at the end of that month. Thomas H. Lockett, the Embassy’s Commercial Attaché, wrote the following January that the site “normally produces 52,000 metric tons of zinc metal a year,” but that “stocks of metallic zinc [had] long been exhausted” due to the labor halt.

Lockett stressed that the dispute needed to be settled promptly, since zinc production would resume “as soon as strike is settled,” and the metal was “needed quite accutely

[sic] for our Western Hemisphere defense.”

In Lockett’s view, the miners’ demand for pay to be raised from “an average of

7.75 pesos a day” was not their real reason for refusing to extract zinc. He discerned other forces at work, like “communistic and Nazi elements” he felt were “quite active in continuing to foment the strike at Rosita, which seems to also have for its purpose the embarrassment of the new Administration”—victor of that year’s election despite 75% opposition from the public, we can recall. Ultimately the strike “was settled on February

14,” Willson wrote, “and the men returned to their work the following day.”439

438 Ransome and Schaum, Minerals Yearbook – 1942, 202-203. Bateman, “Report on Metal and Mineral Mission,” April 2, 1942. 439 G. R. Willson, American Consul, Coahuila, Mexico, “Political Report for October, 1940,” October 31, 1940; 812.00 Coahuila/417; Box 4101, Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State,

270

Fears that Mexican miners would fight to get “as much as possible from the employer” persisted throughout the war. Guy W. Ray, Second Secretary of the Embassy, wrote in April 1944 that it had “been rumored that the Miners’ Union of Mexico will demand a 50 percent increase in wages, and if this increase is not granted it will immediately go on strike.” He referred to “considerable talk” swirling among government officials, and in the major periodicals, “of the likelihood of further strikes

[.]” Were these to occur, he assumed they would be “due principally to the rapidly increasing cost of living,” which was exacerbated by a 33% fall in workers’ income during the Ávila Camacho sexenio. As Ray pointed out, a work shutdown would “be most serious for the Government, especially because of the fact that taxes on mineral products constitute a principal source of revenue for the Mexican Government.”440

It soon became clear that the rumors Ray had heard were true. A “labor strike against some 140 mining and smelting companies” began June 8, “and was not completely settled until August 11,” according to the Geological Survey. “Newspaper reports stated that 2,000 workers at the local smelter of the ASARCO, and 4,000 workers of other companies in the State of San Luis Potosí, went on a strike,” American Vice

Consul Henry T. Dwyer reported. George S. Messersmith, the U.S. Ambassador, wrote

Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Thomas H. Lockett, Commercial Attaché, Mexico, D. F., “Memorandum for Mr. Boal,” January 17, 1941; Box 113, Volume 118, General Records (1937-49), 1941; Mexico City Embassy, Mexico; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. G. R. Willson, American Consul, Coahuila, Mexico, “Political Report for February, 1941,” February 28, 1941; 812.00 Coahuila/426; Box 4101, Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 440 Guy W. Ray, Second Secretary of Embassy, “Political Situation in Mexico; General Unrest Caused Principally by Inflation and High Cost of Living; and the Possibility of Strikes and Labor Trouble,” Mexico, D.F., April 5, 1944; Box 487, Vol. 350, General Records (1937-49), 1944; Mexico City Embassy, Mexico; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. James M. Cypher, State and Capital in Mexico: Development Policy Since 1940 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), 42.

271 to Laurence Duggan, head of the State Department’s Latin American division, with his concerns about the unrest. “The mining strike, of course, has caused us all a great deal of preoccupation,” he admitted, explaining that, in his view, “miners themselves are reasonable and understanding,” the problem being that “some of the syndicate leaders are exceedingly obstinate”—no doubt because they “are communists” who wished to see foreign companies “dispossessed and the mines going into the hands of cooperatives.”441

This strike interrupted the operations of the American Metal Company subsidiary mentioned above in connection with its manager’s wish to rewrite Mexican laws. The

American Consul in Torreón, S. G. Slavens, explained that the summer 1944 strike shuttered “the various mining enterprises in this district as well as the Smelter of the Cia.

Metalúrgica de Peñoles, S. A., at Torreón.” He added that, with the strike’s resolution,

“the local mines will re-open promptly but activity will be deterred by the fact that it will require around ten days to get the Peñoles Smelter at Torreón, which handles their products, back into operation since considerable work will have to be done to the furnaces which have been closed down”—a time-consuming process.442

Slavens’ forecast proved accurate, and he wrote that the “strike was called off on

July 3,” when it ended “in accordance with orders from Mexico City without prior local indication as to settlement. The local smelter of the Cia. Metalúrgica de Peñoles, S. A.

441 Henry T. Dwyer, American Vice Consul, San Luis Potosí, México, “Summary of the Political Situation in the San Luis Potosí Consular District During June, 1944,” June 30, 1944; 812.00 San Luis Potosi/6-3044; Box 4104, 812.00 Oaxaca/6 – 812.00 San Luis Potosi/12-3044; Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. George S. Messersmith to Laurence Duggan, Esquire, Director, Office of American Republic Affairs, Department of State, Washington, D. C., June 11, 1944; Box 491, Vol. 354, General Records (1937-49), 1944; Mexico City Embassy, Mexico; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Alfred L. Ransome and Esther B. Miller, “Zinc,” Minerals Yearbook – 1944, ed. C. E. Needham (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1946), 200. 442 S. G. Slavens, American Consul, Torreón, Mexico, “Political and Economic Report for June, 1944,” July 1, 1944; 812.00 Coahuila/7-144; Box 4101, Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

272 was not in a position to assume normal operations until the 8th, however,” and its laborers only “received a 50-centavo a day raise according to the terms of the settlement which was less than anticipated and therefore received with reluctance by some of the laborers,” revealing that the tensions underlying the unrest had by no means been dealt with in full.443

These reports of interrupted activity at Torreón reinforced the FBI’s view of

Mexican workers’ unrest. “In the field of labor,” it explained, “Mexico’s strikes present probably the most effective means of sabotage although most strikes are not based upon any intent to commit sabotage.” Laborers demanding payment increases while wages declined and living costs rose, in other words, were fundamentally no different than, say, saboteurs derailing a train carrying a crucial mineral load, in the Bureau’s view. And the fact that functioning transportation was as necessary as mining and smelting, in terms of meeting Washington’s mineral needs, meant that U.S. officials were as concerned by interferences along the railways as they were by disruptions in the mines.444

A very real disparity between the cost of living and prevailing wages

“There appears to be a certain amount of agitation and electioneering going on within labor organizations, to determine probably who will be in control next year,”

Henry Waterman, the American Consul in Monterrey, wrote in December 1943, adding that the “railroad unions” were also “indulging in considerable agitation to prevent, possibly, the adoption by the Government of a final and definite railroad policy. The

443 S. G. Slavens, American Consul, Torreon, Mexico, “Political and Economic Report for July, 1944,” August 1, 1944; Box 4101, 812.00 Coahuila/8-144; Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 444 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Totalitarian Activities: Mexico Today,” September 1942.

273 conditions of the railroads, which is due principally to the attitude of railroad labor, is causing tremendous loss to many industries dependent upon the railroads for transporting their products,” he concluded.445

“The railroad situation has not improved,” Waterman followed up a month later.

“About fifty percent of the engines are in the shop for repairs, many of which are the result of unnecessary and avoidable accidents, and this leaves the railroads so short of power that it is almost impossible to move either loads or empties with any degree of despatch,” he complained. One development suggesting an unrelentingly bleak future for

Mexican railways was “the agitating element of labor,” which was “in the ascendancy” and in part characterized by “struggles to extend control by communistic union elements.”446

Agitation intensified that spring. “The labor situation at this time appears to be full of dynamite,” the American Vice Consul at Monterrey, Merlin E. Smith, noted. He understood that labor actions, “while inspired to some extent by political maneuverings, have a basis in the very real disparity between the cost of living and prevailing wages,” though saw few realistic means of taming the workforce. “It is felt here that until such time as discipline is established on the National Railways and control of the property given back to the management there is no hope for real permanent improvement,” he wrote. “Only when a division superintendent can really control his division without

445 Henry S. Waterman, American Consul, Monterrey, Mexico, “The Political, Religious and Economic Situation in the Monterrey Consular District,” December 31, 1943; 812.00 Nuevo Leon/275; Box 4103, 812.00 Lower California/341 – Nuevo Leon/12-444; Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 446 Henry S. Waterman, American Consul, Monterrey, Mexico, “The Political, Religious and Economic Situation in the Monterrey Consular District,” February 1, 1944; 812.00 Nuevo Leon/274; Box 4103, 812.00 Lower California/341 – Nuevo Leon/12-444; Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

274 divided authority” would “a permanent solution” to the ongoing problems be found, he elaborated.447

“Railroad labor elements instituted a strike in Monterrey on May twelfth,”

Waterman reported, noting that the protest persisted after its official termination “in the non-co-operative attitude of railway workers. All trains operate far behind schedules and all other services are similarly affected,” he lamented. In August, he noted that the situation was “essentially the same. Trains are many hours late and wrecks are the order of the day.” But the situation finally improved at the end of 1944. “There has been a lessening of labor agitation since the recent order of the Federal Government instructing military authorities to put a stop to ‘paros locos’ [sudden, unannounced work stoppages] on railroads,” he wrote, adding that the government’s “order includes placing armed guards (escoltas) on train to prevent ‘sit down’ strikes while en route.” Waterman suggested that the armed guards might permit trains to “arrive on time instead of from four to six hours behind schedule,” by exploiting Mexican labor’s fear of the military, thus effectively dealing with “the human element [that] is principally to blame for the universally late trains.”448

447 Merlin E. Smith, American Vice Consul, Monterrey, Mexico, “The Political, Religious and Economic Situation in the Monterrey Consular District,” May 2, 1944; 812.00 Nuevo Leon/277; Box 4103, 812.00 Lower California/341 – Nuevo Leon/12-444; Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 448 Henry S. Waterman, American Consul, Monterrey, Mexico, “The Political, Religious and Economic Situation in the Monterrey Consular District,” June 2, 1944; 812.00 Nuevo Leon/278; Box 4103, 812.00 Lower California/341 – Nuevo Leon/12-444; Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Henry S. Waterman, American Consul, Monterrey, Mexico, “The Political, Religious and Economic Situation in the Monterrey Consular District,” August 2, 1944; 812.00 Nuevo Leon/8-244; Box 4103, 812.00 Lower California/341 – Nuevo Leon/12-444; Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Henry S. Waterman, American Consul, Monterrey, Mexico, “The Political, Religious and Economic Situation in the Monterrey Consular District,” December 4, 1944; Box 4103, 812.00 Lower California/341 – Nuevo Leon/12-444; Decimal File 1940-44; General

275

A pro-business president

This aggressive approach towards labor that Waterman described was part of

Ávila Camacho’s broader legacy. As president, he “immediately took steps to change the nature of the relationship between the state and the business elite that Cárdenas has established.” He altered this relationship in several ways to benefit business. For example, an “excess profit tax was repealed, and a new and much less threatening version of the law governing nationalizations was promulgated.”449

U.S. officials reacted enthusiastically to these policies. “Recent decisive actions of President Camacho tending toward an abridgement of labor power and administration is [sic] creating an increasingly favorable reaction among local entrepreneurs and industrialists,” American Consul Lee R. Blohm wrote early in 1941, explaining that

“local entrepreneurs and industrialists…had feared that a continuation of the Cárdenas labor policies would inevitably wreck business in Chihuahua.” The belief “that the present Mexican administration has had informal conversations with American officials” further boosted industrial confidence, and “the capital guarantees which may result from implied policies will serve to encourage the investment of both foreign and domestic money and the expansion of commerce and industry,” Blohm believed.450

Washington’s enthusiasm for Ávila Camacho’s pro-business policies was hardly surprising, given U.S. wartime goals. The overarching objective, where foreign labor was concerned, was to get workers to perform tasks U.S. planners had decided were

Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 449 Cypher, State and Capital in Mexico, 46. 450 Lee R. Blohm, American Consul, Chihuahua, Mexico, “Politico-Economic Developments in the Chihuahua Consular District – January 1941,” January 31, 1941; 812.00 Chihuahua/440; Box 4101, Decimal File 1940-44; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

276 necessary for their wartime and industrial needs. Thus Mexican miners had to extract massive quantities of zinc to ensure U.S. steel would be protected effectively, for example. And other Mexican workers had to ensure zinc and other resources reached their target destinations. If adequate transportation routes did not exist, Mexicans would have to build them.

Paul Nitze was involved in outlining one such construction project early in the war, surveying Baja California in April 1942. “Building a railroad would involve more labor, a greater percentage of skilled labor, more time, and greater expenditure for materials than building a road,” he concluded, though found the better option problematic regardless. “For the last ¾ of the total distance construction gang would be working under desert conditions which in the summer may result in temperatures of 125 to 130 at midday,” and the labor supply was “low, the territory being sparsely populated,” for example. But the project proceeded regardless, and “with the State Department acting on behalf of the U.S. military, an agreement was finally reached in November 1942: funds for the construction of the road would be turned over by the War Department to the

Public Road Administration,” writes María Emilia Paz Salinas. “The work would be carried out by Mexican contractors and Mexican labor”—a raw material, essentially, used by Washington to meet its aims.451

451 Paul H. Nitze, Acting Director, American Hemisphere Office, “Memorandum for the Joint Mexican-U.S. Commission,” April 3, 1942; Box 194, Central Files, Mexico; Commercial and Financial, Country Files; General Records, Office of Inter-American Affairs; Records of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Record Group 229; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. María Emilia Paz Salinas, Strategy, Security, and Spies: Mexico and the U.S. as Allies in World War II (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 218-219.

277

The zinc needs of this country

Daunting as each of the above procurement barriers was on its own, to say nothing of their effect collectively, Mexico did meet Washington’s zinc needs.

“Production of zinc in Mexico continued to advance in 1943,” the Geological Survey stated, citing “197,199 metric tons compared with 189,278 tons in 1942 and 154,996 tons in 1941” as that year’s total. This increase occurred despite the shoddy “transportation facilities, both automotive and railroad,” which “were one bad feature of the industry in

1943.” Output also “continued to advance” in 1944 “despite many unfavorable conditions,” with total production “amounting to 219,309 metric tons compared with

197,199 tons in 1943.” In 1945, there were “relatively few difficulties between labor and management”—at least until the fall, when “labor unions presented demands for a 40- percent wage increase; to enforce these demands, a general strike of mine and smelter labor was called on December 31. Heavy taxes and poor railroad facilities and service continued to restrict Mexican zinc production,” undoubtedly worrying mine managers and their Washington allies in the process. This general strike lasted until February 1946, when “new wage scales were established and the workers returned to their jobs,” though

“poor railroad facilities” continued to plague mineral transportation the rest of the year.452

Washington’s interest in zinc remained after the war’s end, in other words. The

Geological Survey wrote in 1945 that “it seems certain that the post-war level of domestic mining will be lower” than it had been in the war, an alarming prospect given

“pent-up consumer demand to be filled in the post-war years.” Its forecast, “based upon

452 Ransome and Estill, Minerals Yearbook – 1943, 208. Ransome and Miller, Minerals Yearbook – 1944, 200. Richard H. More and Esther B. Miller, “Zinc,” Minerals Yearbook – 1945 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1947), 198. Richard H. Mote and Esther B. Miller, “Zinc,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1946, ed. Allan F. Matthews (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1948), 1264-1265.

278 past statistical records and current estimates,” pointed to “a deficit in domestic supply— including available zinc from scrap—that perforce must be made up by continued imports.” The U.S. boom years of the early 20th century, aided by protectionism that killed a flourishing Mexican rival, were gone. And “it is doubtful if domestic mines will again completely and continually fulfill the zinc needs of this country, even though zinc will be mined for many years to come.”453

U.S. zinc policy developed independently of fears regarding the Soviets’ post-war role. “The Soviet objective of fostering unity for the more effective prosecution of the war and the immediate post-war reconstruction is in accord with American interests in

Mexico,” the State Department’s Interdivisional Area Committee on Latin America concluded in August 1944. The Committee further believed that Stalin’s “intention to develop a position in Mexico [was] commensurate with the ordinary interests of a great power,” and “would not seem to create any particular obstacle to the interests of the

United States,” since he “ha[d] more logical and convenient areas in Europe and Asia available for the extension of [his] political and economic influence,” after all. U.S. reliance on foreign zinc had little to do with foreign threats at this stage, and instead stemmed from its industry’s projected post-war needs.

Arguably the most important president in twentieth-century Mexican history

One can be forgiven for suspecting Miguel Alemán, who succeeded Ávila

Camacho as Mexico’s leader, was the business sector’s hand-picked candidate. In office from 1946 to 1952, he “is arguably the most important president in twentieth-century

Mexican history,” and “profoundly changed the nation’s course by allying the state with

453 Ransome and Estill, Minerals Yearbook – 1943, 190-191.

279 moneyed interests, wooing foreign capital, accelerating industrialization, and undoing or mitigating many of the reforms promoted by Cárdenas.” One of his core objectives was

“the exploitation of all Mexico’s abundant natural resources,” and to this end he

“inaugurated the series of vast development programs” the lasted decades after his sexenio. Stephen Niblo, in his study of the era, demonstrates that a small group of men from the U.S. and Mexico planned these projects, securing Mexico loans from the then- new World Bank and International Monetary Fund so that they could proceed. Perhaps this was an even “higher development of so called democratic processes” than Cárdenas had pegged as responsible for bringing Ávila Camacho to power in 1940.454

To show his country had the right conditions for development projects and resource exploitation to proceed, Alemán had to pacify labor. He crushed an oil strike in

December 1947, for example, and the following year worked to sap the strength of the

Confederación de Trabajadores de México, formed under Cárdenas, by playing factions against each other to the point where the group splintered, with renowned organizer

Vicente Lombardo Toledano driven away. “Don Fidel” Velázquez, conservative and docile, took over in his stead. Ian Roxborough explains that this “large and powerful union confederation” had counted “Communists and other independent leftists” among its ranks. These elements “were decisively defeated” by Alemán, whose anti-labor stance

454 John W. Sherman, “The Mexican ‘Miracle’ and Its Collapse,” in The Oxford History of Mexico, eds. Michael C. Meyer and William H. Beezley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 576. Sir Nicolas Cheetham, A History of Mexico (London: Hart-Davis, 1970), 268. Stephen R. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1999).

280 was especially evident in “the so-called charazzo of 1948, when the Mexican government intervened in the railway workers’ union to impose a conservative leadership.”455

The crushing burden of taxation

Mexico remained a key zinc producer for the U.S. in the late 1940s. It supplied

55% of the 1947 U.S. import total, for example, and 54% the following year. In 1949, its zinc accounted for 60% of what the U.S. imported, and 55% of 1950 imports. But the legal, infrastructural and labor problems confronting wartime zinc production remained after the conflict, and throughout the 1940s Mexico’s mining sector deteriorated. A 1953 report, authored by the Combined Mexican Working Party (a team of researchers from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—the World Bank—and the

Mexican government) described this trend. The basic story was that, in 1939, “minerals were relatively much more important than agricultural and livestock products, accounting for 65% of the value of exports compared to only 28% for agricultural exports.” But a decade later, “minerals were equivalent to only 33% of the value of total exports, and in the first half of 1951, to only 30%.”

There were a number of issues at play here. For example, by 1950 “the value of agricultural commodities had risen seven times over the 1939 level,” an increase “chiefly due to the greater rise in the demand for agricultural products abroad as compared with minerals.” But there were also features present in Mexico promoting mining’s decline.

“Whatever the aim of official policy, its chief effect has been to discourage new investment in the industry,” with the “tax system and inadequate transportation facilities,

455 Sherman, “The Mexican ‘Miracle’ and Its Collapse,” 576. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s. Ian Roxborough, “Mexico,” in Latin American Between the Second World War and the Cold War, 1944-1948, edited by Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 190.

281 as well as lack of power facilities in some areas” aggravating factors that “kept investment at low levels.” The Bank warned that “any appreciable further decline in the industry would have serious effects,” given that “Mexico remains predominantly an exporter of agricultural products and minerals and an importer of manufactured goods,” making a robust mining sector essential.456

U.S. officials had no illusions about Mexican mining. Horace Harper Braun,

Economic Analyst at the Embassy, wrote in September 1946 of the “drastic reduction in the production and export of all the important minerals in Mexico.” He attributed the downturn largely to the “chaotic transportation conditions of the National Railways,” which were “fundamentally unable to meet the transportation demands on them” because of “repeated strikes and slow-downs which often entirely disrupted or greatly retarded the movement of traffic,” he complained. The “crushing burden of taxation and the general tax policy of the Mexican Government” were other problems, and worked “to discourage prospecting and exploration,” in his view.457

The Embassy’s Counselor for Economic Affairs, Merwin Bohan, backed up

Braun’s analysis in October 1948. “The principal cause of the reduction in mining output,” he stated, is the almost confiscatory Production Tax ranging from 25 to 35 percent on the gross receipts (not profits). If an income tax based on profits, instead of

456 Richard H. Mote and Esther B. Miller, “Zinc,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1947, ed. Allan F. Matthews (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1949), 1245. Richard H. Mote and Esther B. Miller, “Zinc,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1948, ed. Allan F. Matthews (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1950), 1306. Richard H. Mote and Esther B. Miller, “Zinc,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1949, ed. Allan F. Matthews (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1951), 1289. Richard H. Mote and Esther B. Miller, “Zinc,” in Minerals Yearbook – 1950, ed. Leonard L. Fischman (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1953), 1304. Combined Mexican Working Party, The Economic Development of Mexico, 42-43, 115. 457 Horace Harper Braun, Economic Analyst, and Ellinor Pettersen, American Clerk, American Embassy, Mexico, “Mineral Trade Notes and Mining Conditions in Mexico, First Six Months of 1946,” September 27, 1946; Box 745, Vol. 189, General Records (1937-49), 1946; Mexico City Embassy, Mexico; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

282 gross value of all metals mined, could be submitted, it would be a tremendous stimulous to mining,” he insisted. Bohan also wrote that the mines and smelters “are continuously in extreme difficulty through inability to move the ores, concentrates and metals” due to the poor state of the railways. A pair of geologists surveying the country that same year reached similar conclusions, identifying large distances between many mines and the nearest railways, as well as rough roads, as infrastructural problems impairing extraction.458

Heavy metals, at concentrations likely to pose a health threat

An article on Mexico, reviewing the cities of Chihuahua, Monterrey, and Torreón,

“hypothesized that residential neighborhoods located near ore industries” there “would be heavily polluted with multiple contaminants (arsenic, cadmium, and lead),” and this guess proved accurate. The latter city houses Latin America’s “largest nonferrous metallurgical complex,” owned by Industrias Peñoles S.A. de C.V., and housing a zinc plant—Torreón also was mentioned earlier in this chapter, as the World War II-era site of an American Metal Company subsidiary. “Dust concentrations of all heavy metals were significantly higher around the active smelter in Torreón, where more than 90% of samples exceeded Superfund cleanup goals,” while “dust concentrations were inversely related to distance from the industrial source” at all sites, “implicating these industries as the likely source of the contamination.” The authors “concluded that residential

458 Merwin L. Bohan, Counselor for Economic Affairs, American Embassy, México, D. F., Economic Unit, “Economic Developments (No. 133) (for week ending 10/24/48),” October 25, 1948; Box 829, General (1937-49), 1948; Mexico City Embassy, Mexico; Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Parker D. Trask and José Rodríguez Cabo, Jr., “Manganese Deposits of Mexico,” in Geologic Investigations in American Republics, 1946 (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1948), 209-215.

283 neighborhoods around metal smelting and refining in these three cities are contaminated by heavy metals at concentrations likely to pose a health threat to people living nearby.”459

Another study on Torreón reinforces these conclusions. “High blood lead (BPb) levels in children and elevated soil and dust arsenic, cadmium and lead were previously found” it explains, before outlining its findings regarding adolescent health. “Cross- sectional study of 512 males and female subjects 12-15 years of age was conducted,” and the conclusion was “that past and/or present plant operations continue to present health risks to children” in Torreón.460

Conclusion

As the discussions of Dr. Lanza’s visit to the Joplin zinc mines, and of ore processing’s health effects in Torreón, both suggest, mining entails a range of health and environmental costs that we ought to keep in the back of our minds when thinking about

Washington’s mineral needs. As discussed throughout this dissertation, these needs are essential not only for the U.S. in wartime, but also to sustain its day-to-day industrial functions. The fact that, in fulfilling these needs, Washington may routinely sicken populations and destroy nature ought to be considered as, perhaps, one of the most fundamental effects of U.S. foreign policy—one which, it must be added, U.S. diplomatic historians have largely ignored.

459 Andrea L. Benin, James D. Sargent, Madeline Dalton, Sandy Roda, “High Concentrations of Heavy Metals in Neighborhoods Near Ore Smelters in Northern Mexico,” Environmental Health Perspectives 107, no. 4 (Apr., 1999), 279-284. 460 Gonzalo G. Garcia-Vargas, Stephen J. Rothenberg, Ellen K. Silbergeld, Virginia Weaver, Rachel Zamoiski, Carol Resnick, Marisela Rubio-Andrade, Patrick J. Parsons, Amy J. Steuerwald, Ana Navas-Acién, Eliseo Guallar, “Spatial clustering of toxic trace elements in adolescents around the Torreón, Mexico lead-zinc smelter,” Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology 24 (2014), 643-642.

284

In the following chapter, I will review more fully some of the environmental harms copper, manganese, tin, tungsten, and zinc mining have yielded worldwide—in

Asia, Europe, the U.S., Latin America, and elsewhere. This discussion cannot be interpreted as commentary on Washington’s environmental legacy in Latin America, and is intended simply to make the obvious point that mining causes a range of ruinous effects to plant and animal life, soils, waters, and nature generally. Because of mining’s miserable environmental record, and because the U.S. relied on mining abroad in order to sustain its industrial society, it seems safe to conclude that an environmental history of

U.S. foreign policy would be grim reading indeed. In the next chapter, I try to point the way towards such a history.

285

Chapter 7: The Environment

Introduction

In this chapter, I first discuss, in general terms, mining’s environmental consequences, as well as its long legacy of pollution. I then review recent scientific work on some of the environmental dangers stemming from efforts to exploit the five minerals discussed in this dissertation: copper, manganese, tin, tungsten, and zinc. While these papers generally do not shed light on the effects of U.S.-backed mining in Latin America during the 1940s or earlier, they do reinforce the obvious point that mining’s environmental impact can be wide-ranging, and often severe. Future research could determine whether the same effects resulted from Washington’s procurement programs reviewed in the preceding chapters. But most fundamentally, what I aim to do in this chapter is to point to a topic for future research—to suggest not only that scholars could work to determine the environmental effects of U.S. foreign policy, but also that diplomatic historians could mine information sources they currently ignore, like scientific journals.

And in this chapter’s final sections, I discuss two of the bigger-picture debates surrounding extraction. Are mineral resources likely to run out in the near future? To what extent can the U.S., or other countries that import great quantities of foreign minerals, be described as vulnerable, or dependent on foreign supplies? I then conclude on what I believe to be an appropriately ominous note, given the collective fate some miners envision for our species, if current resource use continues unabated.

286

The most destructive industry in the world

As miners extract “materials essential for modern life,” they support “the most destructive industry in the world. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection

Agency’s Toxics Release Inventory, metal mining is the nation’s #1 toxic polluter.” For example, “the most common type of industrial scale mine,” the open-pit mine, leaves

“huge, irremediable scars” in the earth’s surface. “Because most modern ore is extremely low grade,” moreover, “these mines generate huge amounts of waste. The average gold ring generates more than 20 tons of waste.” This material “often contains toxic substances, like arsenic, mercury, and cadmium, that are harmful to public health and fish and wildlife when released into the environment.” And “pollution from acid mine drainage”—formed by “sulfides in rock exposed by mining reacting with water and air to form sulfuric acid”—affects areas beyond the sites of extraction. According to EPA figures, “40% of the headwaters of western watersheds have been polluted by mining,” in large part because of acid mine drainage.461

A September 2004 report by the Bozeman, Montana-based Women’s Voices for the Earth reinforces this analysis, explaining that the contamination “of air, drinking water, rivers and soils and loss of vegetation are common ecological impacts of modern mines.” The legacy of industrial-scale extraction “is more than 10,000 miles of polluted streams, hundreds of contaminated lakes, mountains reduced to craters and landscapes devoid of life where thriving forests and fragile deserts once existed.”462 A pair of

461 “Mining 101,” Earthworks, https://www.earthworksaction.org/issues/detail/mining. 462 Aimee Boulanger and Alexandra Gorman, “Hardrock Mining: Risks to Community Health,” Women’s Voices for the Earth (Bozeman, MT), September 2004, https://www.earthworksaction.org/files/publications/MiningHealthReport_WVE.pdf?pubs/MiningHealth Report_WVE.pdf.

287 scholars adds that mining’s environmental effects also include “noise disturbance and waste heat.”463

And mining’s ruinous impact on the environment is not a new development— extraction for industrial purposes has simply intensified the harms it has caused throughout its history. “The air was contaminated by sulphur dioxide and lead vapours, which led to extensive physical health impairments, such as infertility and genetic damage, nerve diseases and anaemia” in ancient Greece and Rome, due to mining.

“Moreover,” adds Lukas Thommen, “large numbers of trees had to be felled in the immediate and even the more remote surrounding forests” near mining sites, “which led to soil erosion and a drop in the groundwater level.” Effects were broadly similar in the early history of U.S. metals extraction. “Mining left behind gutted mountains, dredged- out streams, despoiled vegetation, open pits, polluted creeks, barren hillsides and meadows, a littered landscape, abandoned camps, and burned-out miners,” Duane Smith notes in his review of U.S. mining since 1800.464

One might assume that little has been done to mitigate these effects for the simple reason that no notice was taken of them until recently in human history. But C. G. Down and J. Stocks, in their monograph on the subject, work to debunk this notion. “The belief that environmental awareness is a phenomenon of the 1950s and later is entirely erroneous, for problems have been experienced, complained about and—at least temporarily—solved for at least seven centuries,” they explain. They cite one example

“from the year 1257 when the English queen Eleanor was obliged to leave Nottingham

463 Earle A. Ripley, Robert E. Redman, Adèle A. Crowder, Environmental Effects of Mining (Delray Beach, FL: St. Lucie Press, 1996), 110. 464 Duane Smith, Mining America: The Industry and the Environment, 1800-1980 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1987), 3.

288 town because of the smoke nuisance” from burning coal. In the early 14th century,

England’s “nobility, strongly backed by the populace at large, successfully agitated” against “the use of coal in London for industrial and domestic purposes”—the source of

“so great a smoke nuisance” that it resulted in this “first example of environmental legislation.”

Down and Stocks note also that Georgius Agricola’s 1556 work, De Re

Metallica—“the world’s first mining textbook”—“contains an excellent description of the destruction caused by mining in Germany[.]” For example, Agricola wrote “that the fields are devastated by mining operations,” and that “the woods and groves are cut down, for there is need of an endless amount of wood for timbers, machines and the smelting of metals.” Deforestation also “exterminated the beasts and birds,” and “when the ores are washed,” Agricola added, “the water which has been used poisons all the brooks and streams, and either destroys the fish or drives them away,” making it “clear to all that there is greater detriment from mining than the value of the metals which the mining produces.”465

No large-scale copper mine has ever not contaminated the surrounding water

Copper mining’s environmental harms were clear early on. In July 1903, for example, a study was published on the effects of smelter smoke on agriculture in Utah.

“During the last two years the attention of the [Utah Agriculture College’s Experiment]

Station officers has been called to the damage which the smoke from certain copper smelters, recently erected near Salt Lake City, were said to be doing to the neighboring farms,” it stated, adding that in some cases “very serious damage had been done.” A July

465 C.G. Down and J. Stocks, Environmental Impact of Mining (New York: Wiley, 1977), 7.

289

1907 study concluded that determining “the constituents of smelter smoke is important” in part because “a large number are poisonous in varying degrees to plant and animal life.” “During the last few years there have been numerous complaints from smelter districts, that the trees and grass are not only injured in their growth by the sulphur dioxide and sulphuric acid of the smoke,” it added, “but in some way the grass is also rendered poisonous for horses and stock, probably as the result of the deposition of mineral poisons.”

And in March 1910, prosecutors charged Anaconda with “constantly generating, liberating and causing to be discharged…vast quantities of smoke, sulphurous fumes, arsenic, antimony, and other noxious and poisonous flue and furnace gases, vapors and waste substance” in Deer County, Montana. Anaconda was thus “causing and creating a public nuisance and rendering the atmosphere dense, dark, impure, unwholesome and unpleasant and depriving…tenants, employees, and the denizens of said region, of sunlight and pure and pleasant air [.]”466

In Peru, Cerro de Pasco “polluted pasturelands in the 1920s and 1930s,” especially after erecting, in 1922, “a big smelter and refinery at La Oroya,” which

“became capital of Yauli Province” three years later and then “was elevated to the status

466 Experiment Station of The Agricultural College of Utah, “Bulletin No. 88: The Relation of Smelter Smoke to Utah Agriculture” (Logan, Utah: The Skelton Publishing Company, July 1903); Boston & Montana Cons. C. & S. M. Co. / Reduction Dept., Great Falls; Collection No. 169, Anaconda Copper Mining Company Records; Montana Historical Society Archives, Helena, MT. W. D. Harkins and R. E. Swain, “The Determination of Arsenic and Other Solid Constituents of Smelter Smoke, with a Study of the Effects of High Stacks and Large Condensing Flues,” The Journal of the American Chemical Society XXIX, no. 7 (July 1907); Boston & Montana Cons. C. & S. M. Co. / Reduction Dept., Great Falls; Collection No. 169, Anaconda Copper Mining Company Records; Montana Historical Society Archives, Helena, MT. Geo. W. Wickersham, Attorney General, James W. Freeman, United States Attorney for the District of Montana, Ligon Johnson, Special Assistant to United States Attorney, for the District of Montana, “United States Circuit Court, Ninth Circuit, District of Montana. United States of America, Complainant, vs. Anaconda Copper Mining Company and the Washoe Copper Company, Defendants. Bill of Complaint,” March 16, 1910; Boston & Montana Cons. C. & S. M. Co. / Reduction Dept., Great Falls; Collection No. 169, Anaconda Copper Mining Company Records; Montana Historical Society Archives, Helena, MT.

290 of a city” in 1942. Ultimately this smelter’s effects—at one point it was “the highest smelting chimney in the world”—were devastating. “The pastures withered, people became ill,” and within a few decades of the smelter’s completion “there were no birds or other fauna in its vicinity.” Trees suffered as well, as the smelter’s timber needs depleted nearby forests. For its services to modern industry, Oroya landed a coveted spot on

Time’s 2007 list of “The World’s Most Polluted Places,” thanks to its abundant quantities of “lead, copper, zinc and sulfur dioxide which are all products of the mining industry in the area. Lead is the contaminant of most concern because of its devastating impact on the health of children,” and 99% of Oroya’s young “have blood levels of lead well above the recommended safe limits of the World Health Organization. A toxic level of lead will remain in the soil, due to generations of mining activity, for centuries.”467

And Bill Carter makes crucial observations regarding the extent to which U.S. lifestyles are bound up with copper extraction—while explaining the massive challenges environmental movements face. For activists, “the issue of highly pollutant hard-rock mining is becoming more complicated. No industry creates more toxins in the United

States than hard-rock mining. No large-scale copper mine has ever not had an adverse effect on the surrounding groundwater.” The result is that “today’s economic and political shift toward renewable energy creates a strange dilemma for the environmentalists. Wind and solar energy require massive amounts of copper, which means more open-pit mines,” he explains. “Renewable energy requires less coal and oil

467 Joan Martinez-Alier, “Mining Conflicts, Environmental Justice and Valuation,” in Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World, eds. Robert D. Bullard, Julian Agyeman, Bob Evans (London: Earthscan Publications, 2003), 204. Mark J. Englund-Krieger, The Presbyterian Mission Enterprise: From Heathen to Partner (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015), 175. Nevin Cohen, Green Cities: An A-to-Z Guide (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2011), 291-292. Bryan Walsh, “The World’s Most Polluted Places: La Oroya Peru,” Time, September 12, 2007, http://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1661031_1661028_1661020,00.html.

291 but more electrical conduits for turning wind and solar into electricity. On a wind farm in

Sweetwater, Texas, one hundred miles of copper wire are required to run sixty-one turbines. The energy is more efficient, far less pollutant than coal or oil, but it uses far more copper,” he explains. “The circle of energy and pollution continues.”468

An important factor limiting growth and crop yields

Recent studies suggest manganese extraction’s impact ranges well beyond mines.

It can also cause environmental harm, though it seems there has been little research on this topic. This fact alone reveals a great deal. It suggests that the assumption among industrialists and policy planners was that minerals would be acquired one way or another—and that it was not even worth wondering whether mining would, say, poison the land.

One of the few studies of the effects of manganese on agriculture is from 2005.

“Worldwide, manganese (Mn) excess represents an important factor limiting growth and crop yields on acid, insufficiently drained soils with low redox potential,” it noted.

“Several developmental, environmental, and nutritional factors influence Mn toxicity in plants, e.g., leaf age, temperature, light intensity, silicon (Si) supply, and source of nitrogen,” it added. “Furthermore, great differences in Mn tolerance exist between plant species and cultivars within species.”469

One 2006 study looked at the risk of motor skill alterations in people living in a

Mexican mining district. It found a statistically significant association between manganese concentrations in the air and motor tests assessing the coordination of two

468 Carter, Boom, Bust, Boom, 45. 469 Walter J. Horst, Angelika Staß, and Marion M. Fecht-Christoffers, “Mineral Element Toxicities: Aluminum and Manganese,” in Bertold Hock and Erich F. Elstner (editors), Plant Toxicology: Fourth Edition (New York: Marcel Dekker, 2005), 232-233.

292 movements, for example. And it concluded that those living near manganese mines and processing plants may suffer from an incipient motor deficit, due to the inhalation of manganese-rich dust. A 2013 investigation of Molango, a mining district in Hidalgo,

Mexico—current site of one of the world’s largest manganese deposits—reached a similar conclusion. The district’s population and environment are exposed to mining wastes, and seem to exhibit a motor deficit like the 2006 study’s subjects, for the same reason.470

A twofold excess of cancer of the lung

Tin extraction has a long history in Cornwall, and often the Cornish tin miner is

“romantically viewed as a figure of ox-like strength who battled against the odds to bring food to his family’s table and wealth to the country,” writes E. S. Proctor. In reality, these workers were “part of a sick community whose mortality was among the highest in the country, almost entirely because of their occupation. The main diseases were phthisis and miners’ asthma, both of which were used as catch-all terms to denote a wide variety of lung diseases.” One study looked at “a group of men recorded as Cornish tin miners in

1939,” and reached disturbing conclusions. “A twofold excess of cancer of the lung was found for underground miners,” and “excess cancer of the stomach was also observed among” these workers. This study was not unique in its findings, and “several studies of

470 Yaneth Rodríguez-Agudelo, Horacio Riojas Rodríguez, Camilo Rios, Irma Rosas, Eva Sabido Pedraza, Javier Miranda, Christina Siebe, José Luis Texcalac, Carlos Santos-Burgoa, “Motor alterations associated with exposure to manganese in the environment in Mexico,” Science of the Total Environment 368, 2006, 542-543, 552. Facundo Rivera-Becerril, Lucía V. Juárez-Vázquez, Saúl C. Hernández-Cervantes, Otilio A. Acevedo-Sandoval, Gilberto Vela-Correa, Enrique Cruz-Chávez, Iván P. Moreno-Espíndola, Alfonso Esquivel-Herrera, Fernando de León-González, “Impacts of Manganese Mining Activity on the Environment: Interactions Among Soil, Plants, and Arbuscular Mycorrhiza,” Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, Vol. 64, No. 2, February 2013, 219-220.

293 miners exposed to high levels of radioactivity in underground air” point to miners’ high death rates from lung cancer.471

“The relation of mining and smelting exposure to arsenic and lung cancer was studied among tin miners in [China’s] Yunnan Province” in 1989, and researchers determined that “risk of lung cancer among workers exposed to arsenic only in mining is only slightly less than for miners whose exposure to arsenic limited to smelting,” with those “exposed to both mining and smelting” facing the greatest health risks. This study reinforced a 1985 report on lung cancer at the same mine, which drew similar connections between workers involved in mining and smelting, and the risk of lung cancer. And a 1987 report suggested “that some carcinogens present in the Yunnan Tin

Mine [are] responsible for…genetic damages in the miners.” Another study from that year reviewed “1,724 lung cancer cases registered at the Yunnan Tin Corporation in the period 1954-1986, of which 90% had a history of working underground,” suggesting the prevalence of the illness might “come from inhalation of arsenic-containing ore dust or other environmental arsenic pollution.”472

And during World War II, Washington’s coveted Texas City smelter produced

“an output of over 30,000,000 gallons of waste acid per year,” according to the

Reconstruction Finance Corporation. This “waste liquor was allowed to run into

471 A. J. Fox, P. Goldlbatt, L. J. Kinlen, “A study of the mortality of Cornish tin miners,” British Journal of Industrial Medicine 38, no. 4 (1981): 378-380. E S Proctor, “The health of the Cornish tin miner 1840- 1914,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 92, no. 11 (November 1999): 596-599. 472 P R Taylor, Y L Qiao, A Schatzkin, S X Yao, J Lubin, B L Mao, J Y Rao, M McAdams, X Z Xuan, J Y Li, “Relation of arsenic exposure to lung cancer among tin miners in Yunnan Province, China, British Journal of Industrial Medicine 46, no. 12 (1989): 881-886. Zhang Fuming et al., “Epidemiological Study of Lung Cancer Among Workers in Yunnan Tin Corporation,” Industrial Health and Occupational Diseases 11 (1985): 343-346. GG Hu, XM Luo, J Liu, X Liu, M Gu, BL Mao, ZY Chen, LJ Wang, “Sister chromatid exchanges (SCE), chromosomal aberrations and micronuclei of cultured peripheral lymphocytes in patients with lung cancer, miners and non-mining workers of the tin mine in Yunnan,” Chinese Journal of Oncology 9, no. 1 (1987): 29-32. SQ Sun, “Etiology of lung cancer at the Gejiu tin mine, China,” Princess Takamatsu Symposia 18 (1987): 103-115.

294

Galveston Bay” for the first three years the smelter operated, “and this method of disposal would have been continued had it not been for objections by the Texas Fish and

Game Commission. Because of alleged damage to fish and other marine life, and discoloration of the beaches, the smelter was forced to build ponds for temporary storage of the waste acid pending a permanent solution of the problem.” One suggestion was that the waste could simply be dumped into the Gulf of Mexico—but this plan was deemed infeasible “because of the large capital and operation costs and marine risks” involved, and a waste acid treatment plant was built at the site instead.473

Other scientific studies suggest some of the environmental harms tin mining entails. One report, on an abandoned Malaysian tin mine, found that extraction had

“resulted in the production of hazardous wastes, which contain high residual concentrations of heavy metals.” With time, these wastes “migrate to the surroundings and cause severe and widespread contamination of soils, surface and ground waters and to rivers,” the article concluded. “Control measures of pollution routes and remediation measures at the site are urgently required,” it added. Another study in Malaysia measured soil radioactivity, and found levels five times greater than normal “in alluvial tin mining areas. This is believed to be due to tin tailings which contain radioactive minerals,” it explained.474

“Soil characteristics of tin mine tailings are generally low fertility and unfavourable physical conditions for supporting plant growth resulting from heavy

473 Reconstruction Finance Corporation, “Report on the Government-Owned Tin Smelter at Texas City, Texas,” December 29, 1947. 474 Fares Yahya Alshaebi, Wan Zuhairi Wan Yaacob, Abdul Rahim Samsudin, Esmail Alsahabi, “Risk Assessment at Abandoned Tin Mine in Sungai Lembing, Pahang, Malaysia,” Electronic Journal of Geotechnical Engineering 14: 1-9. M. Omar, M.Y. Ibrahim, A. Hassan, L.H. Mooi and Z. Ahmad, “Enhanced Radium Level in Tin Mining Areas in Malaysia” High Levels of Natural Radiation (Proc. Int. Conf. Ramsar, 1990): 191-195.

295 disturbance during tin mining,” an article on extraction’s effects in Thailand noted. And an investigation in Nigeria found uranium and thorium levels “approximately 100 times above background levels of control soils” near a tin mine. Its authors urged that the site

“be properly monitored, controlled and potential remediation strategies be considered in order to avoid any radiological impact to the population.”475

Local water and food have been severely contaminated

Tungsten extraction affects the environment as well as those mining the metal, though this subject has received little attention. One “extensive research study,” however, collected “field samples, including soil, water, rice, vegetable, fish, human hair and urine” near “an abandoned tungsten mine in Shantou City, southern China.”

Scientists determined that “the local water resource and food have been severely contaminated with As [arsenic],” and that arsenic “concentrations in hair and urine samples were” also high, “indicating a potential health risk among the local residents.”

Another study “assessed the arsenic and heavy metal contaminations of agricultural soils around the tin and tungsten mining areas in Dai Tu district in northern Vietnam,” finding high levels of arsenic and copper “in the agricultural fields at both tin and tungsten mining sites.”476

475 Virat Tanpibal, “Characteristics and management of tin mine tailings in Thailand,” Soil Technology 2, no. 1 (March 1989): 17-26. I.G.E. Ibeanu, “Tin mining and processing in Nigeria: cause for concern?” Journal of Environmental Radioactivity 64, no. 1 (2002): 59-66. 476 Chuan-ping Liu, Chun-ling Luo, Yun Gao, Fang-bai Li, Lan-wen Lin, Chang-an Wu, Xiang-dong Li, “Arsenic contamination and potential health risk implications at an abandoned tungsten mine, southern China,” Environmental Pollution 158, no. 3 (2010), 820-826. Kien Chu Ngoc, Noi Van Nguyen, Bang Nguyen Dinh, Son Le Thanh, Sota Tanaka, Yumei Kang, Katsutoshi Sakurai, Kōzō Iwasaki, “Arsenic and Heavy Metal Concentrations in Agricultural Soils Around Tin and Tungsten Mines in the Dai Tu District, N. Vietnam,” Water, Air, & Soil Pollution 197, nos. 1-4 (2009), 75-89.

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And a third investigation, in Tasmania, noted its “relatively short history of tin and tungsten mining” had not spared the population from mining’s harm. Lead, manganese, sulfuric acid and other byproducts were discovered “far beyond the borders of the mining areas. It was found that bordering farmers were unable to utilize the water resulting from the creeks that contain these mining effluents,” and “fish and normal biota were found to be absent in these areas.”477

The first recognized air pollution disaster in the United States

Some of the dangers zinc processing entailed became clear shortly after the war.

The catastrophe happened in Donora, Pennsylvania, a factory town near West Virginia in the Monongahela River Valley. This was the site of U.S. Steel’s Donora Zinc Works, which processed Australian ores and for decades caused the town’s residents “to complain about smoke and other noxious emissions.” In 1919, for example Frank and

Mamie Burkehardt, who lived next to the plant, “sought $10,000 in compensation for damages to their property and health.” The couple “claimed that corrosive fumes from the zinc smelter had destroyed the shrubs and fence surrounding their home, as well as the paint on the house itself,” while “Mamie had been suffering from mysterious ailments,” which “diminished only when she left home to visit her sister in New York.”

When the Burkehardts took their case to court, their witnesses “described foul odors emanating from the smelter—‘like emptying an old toilet’ according to one person—as well as striking environmental changes in the nearby landscape,” like

“withered vegetation and severe erosion of the surrounding hillsides and even more

477 Ulrich Fōrstner and Gottfried T. W. Wittmann, Metal Pollution in the Aquatic Environment (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1979), 35.

297 dramatic impacts in the community of Webster, which was across the river but directly downwind of the zinc works.” Complaints continued in the following decades. “In 1935,

189 residents filed a joint lawsuit charging the zinc works and nearby Clairton Works [a coke manufacturing facility in Clairton, PA] for regional air pollution and seeking $1.5 million toward a trust fund for reparations.” But no one was prepared for what happened in 1948, when “the first recognized air pollution disaster in the United States” hit the town.478

By that year, “prodigious amounts of fume and dust full of sulfur, zinc, lead, cadmium, and arsenic,” were a common site in Donora. The town’s location—“on a horseshoe bend of the river, with the ground sloping steeply up from the river valley” and

“sheltered from the wind”—left it susceptible to temperature inversions, when temperature increases with elevation. These “inversions trap smoke in the bowl formed by the valley walls,” and a “severe inversion formed above Donora toward the end of

October 1948.”

Berton Roueché, a medical writer, explained that the morning fog on Thursday,

October 28, instead of dissipating as usual, “had stiffened adhesively into a motionless clot of smoke.” It was so thick that “it was just possible to see across the street, and, except for the stacks, the mills had vanished. The air began to have a sickening smell,” though at first the town’s residents were not concerned. But indifference soon gave way to panic. On October 29, “the telephones of the town’s eight doctors began to ring. By evening, the phones were ringing incessantly. The doctors were up all night, as was the fire department, bringing oxygen to the sick.” By the time morning broke, “the town’s leading undertaker had collected nine corpses.” People “were fleeing Donora” then,

478 Marcus Luna, The Environment Since 1945 (New York: Infobase, 2012), 2-3, 10-11.

298 while “the zinc plant checked its stack and decided to keep running.” The death toll reached nineteen on Sunday, when roughly “half the town’s population was ill.”

The follow-up investigation was also killed, by industry representatives. When

James Townsend, head of the Industrial Hygiene Division of the U.S. Public Health

Service, arrived in the region in mid-November, he “declared that the Donora smog was

‘…a problem that transcends Donora and is nation-wide in scope…. We have to get over the idea that smog is just a nuisance. There is no condition confronting us that is more terrifying,” he stressed. These remarks signaled a “sudden expansion of the Industrial

Hygiene Division’s mandate from the factory to the outside air,” bringing him in direct confrontation with the U.S. Steel subsidiary “that operated the zinc smelter” and announced “that it was ‘certain’ that the zinc works were not responsible for smog deaths.”

Still, the company refused to risk finding out what unfettered research might conclude, and in late December two men from the Mutual Chemical Company of

America met with Townsend and his colleague John Bloomfield. A smog study could potentially harm their business, so they “asked for deletion of all consideration of off-site air pollution from the plan; the request was granted on the spot, and the scope of the study was limited to the industry’s workers.” Industrial Hygiene’s “Preliminary Report” on Donora—there was never a final version—came out nearly a year after the disaster,

“was notably limited in scope,” and “did not try to calculate the resulting concentrations of pollutants” the zinc plant emitted. The study blamed “rare weather conditions rather than any special danger from Donora’s industries” for the 1948 deaths. When James

Townsend presented the report in October 1949, his outlook was far different than it had

299 been the preceding fall. “The starting point of the whole problem,” he affirmed, “is more research.” Benjamin Ross and Steven Amter, who review this entire episode in-depth, write that his “call for more research rings hollow indeed,” given his willingness to narrow his investigation’s scope at Mutual Chemical’s request.

And Townsend’s report had its critics, to be sure. Louis McCabe, head of the

Bureau of Mines, spoke in November 1949 at the First National Air Pollution

Symposium in Pasadena. His talk “was quoted at length in newspapers across the country,” and raised key questions. “Why,” he asked, “have we generally failed in our efforts to control air pollution?” The issue did not require “more research,” in his view, but resulted instead from “an incorrect estimate of the kind and size of the job” required to mitigate it, and the business view “that air-pollution control cost too much,” among other factors. He also argued that air pollution analysts wasted time penning “diverting papers on the minutiae of the problem,” as “trade journals editorialized on the unreasonableness of ‘do-gooders.’” For there to be any hope of dealing with the problem, the full scope of air pollution’s harms had to be confronted.479

Plant operations continue to present health risks

Zinc mining and smelting entail harms beyond air pollution, environmental studies have revealed in recent decades. “Metal oxide fumes escaping from two zinc smelters in Palmerton, Pa., have highly contaminated soil and vegetation with zinc, cadmium, copper, and lead,” one researcher explained in 1973. “Approximately 90% of metals deposited on the soil surface have been retained in the top 15 cm of the soil

479 Benjamin Ross and Steven Amter, The Polluters: The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 86-97.

300 profile,” she added, noting that “trees within 2 km of the smelters” were affected as well.

A follow-up study of the Palmerton area, published two years later, noted that the “area of Blue Mountain near the smelters is sparsely vegetated or completely barren over an area of about 485 ha,” with swathes of “burned, severely denuded areas” and a paucity of tree seedlings close to the smelters. “The combined stresses of high soil-zinc levels plus fire appear to be the primary cause of the vegetation damage at Lehigh Gap,” it concluded. A third study of the site, also from 1975, found that “total numbers of bacteria, actinomycetes [a type of soil bacteria], and fungi” in Palmerton “were greatly reduced in the most severely Zn-contaminated soils compared with control soils.” And

William Sopper, a professor of forest hydrology, wrote in 1989 that more than “800 ha of forest vegetation are dead on Blue Mountain at Palmerton, Pennsylvania. The major cause of emissions was Zn, Cd, Cu, Pb, and SO2 from a zinc smelter operating since

1898.”480

Scientists assessed the Palmerton smelters’ impact on wildlife in the mid-1980s.

“Various kinds of invertebrates (earthworms, slugs and millipedes) that feed on soil litter or soil organic matter were rare at, or absent from, the Palmerton site,” they explained.

“Frogs, toads, and salamanders were very rare at, or absent from, the Palmerton site,” though they were present “at other sites on Blue Mountain farther from the smelters.”

Another paper examined “deer shot within 20 km of the zinc smelters” at Palmerton, finding they “contained extremely high renal concentrations of cadmium and zinc. The

480 Marilyn J. Buchauer, Environmental Science & Technology 7, no. 2 (1973): 131-135. Marilyn J. Jordan, “Effects of Zinc Smelter Emissions and Fire on a Chestnut-Oak Woodland,” Ecology 56, no. 1 (Winter, 1975): 78-91. Marilyn J. Jordan, Mary P. Lechevalier, “Effects of zinc-smelter emissions on forest soil microflora,” Canadian Journal of Microbiology 21, no. 11 (1975): 1855-1865. William E. Sopper, “Revegetation of a contaminated zinc smelter site,” Landscape and Urban Planning 17, no. 3 (May 1989): 241-250.

301 deer with the highest renal concentration was shot 4 km from the smelters and had joint lesions similar to those seen in zinc-poisoned horses from the same area.”481

One report of “chronic zinc/cadmium toxicosis in horses near a zinc smelter,” for example, examined a foal with high zinc concentrations in its serum. “Marked nephrocalcinosis [excessive calcium in the kidneys] and osteoporosis were observed in” the animal, with the former “also observed in his dam [the female parent], who died of a punctured lung following rib fractures, though there was no history of trauma.” The foal’s “joint cartilage lesions,” meanwhile, “were similar to those induced experimentally in animals fed high-zinc diets,” and its “osteoporosis and nephrocalcinosis were consistent with chronic cadmium toxicosis.”482

Effects akin to the Palmerton smelters’ were also observed elsewhere. “A zinc roaster and smelter were operated at Henryetta in Okmulgee County, Oklahoma from

1916 to 1953, and the smelter was operated alone from 1953 to 1968,” a team of scientists wrote in the April 1975 Journal of Applied Ecology. “The area adjacent to the roaster and smelter was originally covered with post oak-blackjack oak forest but an area approximately 400 ha in extent was completely denuded downwind from the plant,” they observed, adding that the majority “of the originally denuded area has remained bare,” despite limited revegetation. Another study looked at “children in Bartlesville,

Oklahoma, who lived within 3.2 km of a zinc smelter,” and discovered high levels of cadmium in their blood. “Biological levels of heavy metals in these populations were

481 W. Nelson Beyer, Oliver H. Pattee, Louis Sileo, David J. Hoffman, Bernard M. Mulhern, “Metal contamination in wildlife living near two zinc smelters,” Environmental Pollution Series A, Ecological and Biological 38, No. 1 (1985): 63-86. L. Sileo and W. N. Beyer, “Heavy Metals in White-Tailed Deer Living Near a Zinc Smelter in Pennsylvania,” Journal of Wildlife Diseases 21, no. 3 (July 1985): 289-296. 482 DE Gunson, DF Kowalczyk, CR Shoop, CF Ramberg Jr., “Environmental zinc and cadmium pollution associated with generalized osteochondrosis, osteoporosis, and nephrocalcinosis in horses,” Journal of the American Veterinrary Medical Association 180, no. 3 (1982): 295-299.

302 related inversely to distance of residence from the smelting plants and were in direct proportion to levels of environmental contamination,” the authors wrote, summarizing their findings.483

Environmental Research published a piece in 1984 suggesting the effects of zinc smelting on all those—not only children—living near it. This “study of residents who lived in the vicinity of a primary zinc smelter and a large steel manufacturing plant in eastern Pennsylvania was undertaken to investigate the role of environmental pollutants in the etiology of lung cancer,” its authors explained. “Two-fold risks for lung cancer were associated with residence near the zinc smelter,” it found, adding that “increases were not explained by the effects of cigarette smoking or by employment in the zinc or steel industry.” The scientists cautioned that the study’s “limited size…precludes causal interpretation, but the findings suggest the need for further investigation of metallic air pollution and lung cancer.”484

Other research further illustrated zinc smelting’s harms for forests, soils, and vegetation. Carl Strojan wrote a pair of papers on these issues. One, examining “organic matter on the forest floor” near a zinc plant, discovered “a long-term depression of decomposition and mineral cycling near the smelter.” The other looked at forest litter arthropods. “Densities of all major taxonomic groups were lower near the smelter,”

Strojan determined. “Heavy metal contamination can impact soil ecosystems sufficiently to result in significant losses in soil quality,” given heavy metals’ “toxicity to biological

483 Sunil K. Pancholy, Elroy L. Rice, Jack A. Turner, “Soil Factors Preventing Revegetation of a Denuded Area Near an Abandoned Zinc Smelter in Oklahoma,” Journal of Applied Ecology 12, no. 1 (April 1975): 337-342. Philip J. Landrigan and Edward L. Baker, “Exposure of children to heavy metals from smelters: Epidemiology and toxic consequences,” Environmental Research 25, no. 1 (June 1981), 204-224. 484 Linda Morris Brown, Linda M. Pottern, William J. Blot, “Lung cancer in relation to environmental pollutants emitted from industrial sources,” Environmental Research 34, no. 2 (August 1984): 250-261.

303 processes, including processes catalyzed by soil microorganisms,” a 1997 Journal of

Environmental Quality piece explained. The article examined “soils in the vicinity of a

Zn smelter,” concluding that “metal loadings in these soils increased with proximity to the smelter,” and that both “microbial activity” and “population size” suffered from “the elevated metal levels.” Yet another study concluded that “elevated levels of heavy metals” in the soil near a zinc smelter “have had significant impacts on the population size and overall activity of the soil microbial communities.”485

And one 1995 article emphasized that abandoned zinc facilities remained potential dangers. Its authors examined the site of a shuttered plant in Socorro, NM, and reached unsettling conclusions. “Health concerns have been associated with soil lead levels about 150-500 ppm,” they explained, noting that “lead levels as high as 1,520 micrograms per gram (parts per million, ppm) were identified in residential soil samples

300 feet from an inactive lead/zinc smelter site in Socorro” in 1989. “The smelter had been in operation from 1883 to 1894,” but in a little over a decade it left enough contamination to merit concern a century later.486

Studies of zinc sites abroad reinforce the conclusions of these U.S. studies.

Research on Asia includes a study of “cows and buffaloes near a primary lead-zinc smelter in India,” which notes “varying degrees of exposure of animals to Pb and Cd in

485 Carl L. Strojan, “Forest leaf litter decomposition in the vicinity of a zinc smelter,” Oecologia 32, no. 2 (1978): 203-212. Carl L. Strojan, “The impact of zinc smelter emissions on forest litter arthropods,” Oikos 31, no. 1 (1978): 41-46. R. H. Merry, K. G. Tiller, M. P. C. de Vries, B. Cartwright, “Contamination of wheat crops around a lead-zinc smelter,” Environmental Pollution Series B, Chemical and Physical 2, no. 1 (January 1981): 37-48. John J. Kelly and Robert L. Tate, “Effects of Heavy Metal Contamination and Remediation on Soil Microbial Communities in the Vicinity of a Zinc Smelter,” Journal of Environmental Quality 27, no. 3 (1997): 609-617. John J. Kelly, Max M. Häggblom, Robert L. Tate III, “Effects of heavy metal contamination and remediation on soil microbial communities in the vicinity of a zinc smelter as indicated by analysis of microbial community phospholipid fatty acid profiles,” Biology and Fertility of Soils 38, no. 2 (July 2003): 65-71. 486 Millicent Eidson, Kristine Tollestrup, “Blood lead levels and remediation of an abandoned smelter site,” Journal of Environmental Health 57, no. 9 (May 1995): 8.

304 the vicinity of the smelter,” and an array of resulting “clinical signs” in the animals

“characterized by head pressing, violent movement, blindness and salivation.” In China, a “large amount of lead, zinc, and related elements, such as cadmium, have been released into the environment due to mineral processing activities and have impacted water resources, soils, vegetables, and crops,” a team of scholars writes. Another Chinese study determined that, near a lead-zinc smelter in Guizhou, “the environment has been contaminated with Cd and Pb, which has been transferred to cattle through the food chain.”487

And regarding Europe, there is a 1995 paper on “lead, cadmium, copper and zinc in soil, plants and arthropod species in the vicinity of a closed-down lead/zinc smelter with a long history of pollution in Arnoldstein, Austria,” while a Polish study found that bank voles trapped near a zinc smelter had high lead levels in their bones, and high cadmium levels in their kidneys. Examining the area around Portoscuso, Italy—the site of a lead-zinc smelter—a team worked “to evaluate contamination of the coastal waters,” determining cadmium and lead levels were “high enough to be of environmental concern in the whole study area.” And Belgian researchers “showed that the risk of lung cancer significantly correlated with indicators of environmental CD exposure” in a review of the effects of cadmium from zinc smelter emissions.488

487 SK Dwivedi, D Swarup, S Dey, RC Patra, “Lead poisoning in cattle and buffalo near primary lead-zinc smelter in India,” Veterinary and Human Toxicology 43, no. 2 (2001): 93-94. Xiuqu Zhang, Linsheng Yang, Yonghua Li, Hairong Li, Wuyi Wang, Bixiong Ye, “Impacts of lead/zinc mining and smelting on the environment and human health in China,” Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 184, no. 4 (2012), 2261-2273. Qui Cai, Mei-Li Long, Ming Zhu, Qing-Zhen Zhou, Ling Zhang, Jie Liu, “Food chain transfer of cadmium and lead to cattle in a lead-zinc smelter in Guizhou, China,” Environmental Pollution 157, no. 11 (November 2009): 3078-3082. 488 Wolfgang B. Rabitsch, “Metal accumulation in arthropods near a lead/zinc smelter in Arnoldstein, Austria. I,” Environmental Pollution 90, no. 2 (1995): 221-237. Monika Damek-Poprawa, Katarzyna Sawicka-Kapusta, “Histopathological changes in the liver, kidneys, and testes of bank voles environmentally exposed to heavy metal emissions from the steelworks and zinc smelter in Poland,”

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Limits to growth?

Anyone reviewing enough of the literature on mining will soon become familiar with the debate on extraction’s long-term viability. Some argue, for example, that since resources are finite—and since more and more of them are being used—industrial societies, with their immense appetites for non-renewable metals, will ultimately confront the problem of resource exhaustion. “If the present growth trends in world production, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years,” the authors of The Limits to Growth, the influential Club of Rome study, argued in 1972. “The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity,” they warned.489

Others find such statements pointlessly alarmist. “It is easy to show how misleading in the past forecasts based on proven reserves have been,” notes geographer

Judith Rees. “In 1939, for example, the US Department of the Interior predicted that indigenous oil stocks would be exhausted within thirteen years. However, since then additions to reserves have matched the increasing rate of annual production,” she explains, citing this off-base forecast as a reason for meeting related gloomy predictions with skepticism. As a second example, she notes that “predictions made in 1950 that world iron ore reserves would be exhausted by 1970 have proved to be wildly inaccurate;

Environmental Research 96, no. 1 (September 2004): 72-78. Marco Schintu, Barbara Marras, Laura Durante, Patrizia Meloni, Antonio Contu, “Macroalgae and DGT as indicators of available trace metals in marine coastal waters near a lead-zinc smelter,” Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 167, nos. 1-4 (August 2010), 653-661. Tim S. Nawrot, Harry A. Roels, Jaco Vangronsveld, Jan A. Staessen, “Cadmium from zinc smelter emission and variation in cancer incidence: the hierarchy of evidence,” European Journal of Cancer Prevention 21, no. 5 (September 2012): 497-498. 489 Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, William W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972), 23. 306 in fact by that date enough reserves had been established to last a further 240 years at the then-current level of consumption.” More generally, Rees observes “that, for most minerals, the rate at which new discoveries and technological and economic changes have added to proven reserves has exceeded, or at least kept pace with, increases in consumption.”

Her view is that analyses of resource use worldwide—and projected estimates of how resources will be used in coming decades—do not conform to “physically deterministic models,” which “fail to take account of the fact that resources are culturally determined, a product of social choice, technology and the workings of the economic system. Man is not a blind automaton programmed to push stock resource consumption to catastrophic limits,” she emphasizes. “In theory, at least, we have the capability of controlling consumption, through conservation and recycling, and of developing the potential of renewable resources. The way the resource pessimists”—the authors of The

Limits to Growth and their sympathizers—“ignored both human response mechanisms and the cultural nature of resources has brought them under severe criticism.”490

One could argue that Rees is overly optimistic in discussing the theoretical ability humans have to control consumption. Consider, for example, the series of reports being issued by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). One of the most recent, from November 2014, states that “[h]uman influence on the climate system is clear and growing, with impacts observed on all continents. If left unchecked, climate change will increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.” Youba Sokona, Co-Chair of the IPCC’s Working Group, argued that while “[i]t is technically feasible to transition to a low-carbon economy,” the

490 Judith Rees, Natural Resources: Allocation, Economics and Policy (London: Methuen, 1985), 31-32, 35.

307

“appropriate policies and institutions” to effect this transition have yet to be developed.

“The longer we wait to take action, the more it will cost to adapt and mitigate climate change,” he added—and the more the “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts” are likely to occur, it follows.491

And economic geologist John Tilton undermines not only Rees’ argument, but the foundations of the debate between the resource optimists and pessimists summarized above. In his view, both of these camps “are asking the rest of us to accept their faith, or lack of faith, that technology will in the future offset the adverse effects of mineral depletion.” Since Tilton sees the debate as faith-based, instead of dependent on reason, he thinks it “clear that neither the optimists nor the pessimists currently have the needed evidence to prove the other side wrong.” The two camps make unfounded assertions, more than they do well-supported arguments for their perspectives. “Claims that mineral depletion unquestionably does, or does not, pose a serious threat to the welfare of modern civilization should be treated with some skepticism,” Tilton concludes.492

An increasing dependence on foreign sources of supply?

Another resource-related debate deals with the question of a country’s dependence on foreign minerals, and here as well opinions are sharply divided. For many, the issue is straightforward: U.S. industry uses large quantities of minerals extracted abroad, and thus is dependent on them for the maintenance of its domestic economy, as well as for gearing production towards wartime ends when necessary.

491 “IPCC Press Release: Climate change threatens irreversible and dangerous impacts, but options exist to limit its effects,” November 2, 2014, http://www.un.org/climatechange/blog/2014/11/climate-change- threatens-irreversible-dangerous-impacts-options-exist-limit-effects/. 492 John E. Tilton, “On Borrowed Time? Assessing the Threat of Mineral Depletion,” 19-20, http://facultysenate.mines.edu/UserFiles/File/FacultySenate/DLS/tilton_text.pdf. 308

This is the line Percy Bidwell took in Raw Materials, his 1958 study for the

Council on Foreign Relations. “The dominant fact which emerges from all discussions of the raw materials position of the United States is the nation’s increasing dependence on foreign sources of supply,” he wrote. “Less than 50 years ago this country produced within its borders practically all of the basic materials required by its industries and in addition had some surpluses for export,” but by World War II U.S. planners had to deal with looming mineral shortages. The 1946 Strategic and Critical Materials Stock Piling

Act—a revamped version of a 1939 measure—marked one attempt to compensate for this dependence, Bidwell wrote. He cited its preamble, which explained that, with “the natural resources of the United States in certain strategic and critical materials being deficient or insufficiently developed to supply the industrial, military, and naval needs of the country for common defense,” policies “to provide for the acquisition and retention of stocks of these materials” had to be developed. If correctly implemented, such measures would “decrease and prevent wherever possible a dangerous and costly dependence of the

United States upon foreign nations for supplies of these materials in times of national emergency.”493

But others dismiss the sort of view Bidwell advances as unfounded, in a manner recalling Rees’ dismissal of the resource pessimists. “Alarm over ‘dependence’ on external sources of raw materials is not new,” Bruce Russett observes. “British opponents of changes in the Corn Laws warned in the 1840s that increased food imports would make the United Kingdom vulnerable to starvation in wartime,” for example. And during “the 1970s, oil dependence became an exemplar of the dangers to economic and political stability posed to industrialized states from excessive reliance on a wide range of

493 Bidwell, Raw Materials, 1, 39-40.

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‘strategic’ raw materials, chiefly mineral.” But Russett finds many of the alarmist statements along these lines to be “long on exhortation and short on analysis.”

In his view, the question of dependence must be assessed in light of a range of criteria. A number of “elements constitute necessary but not sufficient conditions for an accurate judgment that a country is ‘dependent’ on external commodity supplies”: if imports of, say, zinc make up a large “percentage of consumption,” and if the

“concentration of import suppliers” is limited to a few major zinc-producing countries, then zinc meets some of the “necessary conditions for any judgment of high dependence” on certain minerals, for example.

“If imports do not constitute a ‘large’ share of consumption,” meanwhile, of if

“many alternative external suppliers” of a particular mineral exist, then “international supply disruptions from one or a few countries need not be much feared.” By the same token, “[i]f additional supplies can be obtained at little additional cost from unused or underused foreign sources, or from new domestic production, dependence is again not serious.” Russett’s main aim in this discussion is to “illustrate the folly of simply compiling a laundry list of elements of vulnerability,” and he believes it more appropriate, instead, to “think in terms of necessary, sufficient, and mitigating conditions.” From this perspective, the fact that the U.S. lacks, say, deposits of high- grade manganese does not automatically imply that it is dependent on foreign supplies of this mineral.494

494 Bruce Russett, “Dimensions of Resource Dependence: Some Elements of Rigor in Concept and Policy Analysis,” in Mark W. Zacher (editor), The International Political Economy of Natural Resources, Volume I (Aldershot, Hants, England: E. Elgar Pub., 1993), 3, 18-21. 310

The simple fact of the matter

These debates about resource depletion and dependency are ongoing, and the questions they raise warrant serious reflection, insofar as they pertain to the repercussions our massive mineral appetites have abroad, and could have on our successor generations.

But even if world mineral supplies are not dwindling to a point calling for alarm, and even if the U.S. was not truly dependent on Latin American ores in the 1940s, the simple fact of the matter is that U.S. firms exploited them heavily during that decade, sickening miners and poisoning lands, waters, the air and communities in the process.

As detailed in the preceding chapters, mining was a grim occupation. Silicosis plagued Bolivian miners, for example, and mining camps were hardly suitable places to recover from the daily wear of extracting ores. Conditions in these camps effectively helped spread the diseases to which miners succumbed, and U.S. officials believed squalid conditions in Bolivia, coupled with the itinerant lifestyles of many miners in the country, were one reason many were sickened by tuberculosis even far from the mines.

In Brazil, meanwhile, it seems that tungsten miners were drawn from fly-infested concentration camps. And workers had to face still other risks, like collapses in the mines, or the particular horrors associated with exposure to certain minerals, like manganese. Recall that this metal can produce a kind of “manganese madness,” akin to

Parkinson’s disease and debilitating for its victims. Janet Finn’s work, meanwhile, discusses the psychological problems miners’ wives dealt with as they relocated their families to mining camps.

The range of ecological harms caused by mining is equally wide-ranging. The scientific articles cited in each chapter above indicate that extraction’s impacts on area

311 waters, air, and life are overwhelmingly negative, long-lasting and often severe. Apart from producing minerals that underpin the relatively luxurious lifestyle people of, say, my class background enjoy in the U.S., mines also produce displaced bird populations, dead forests, acid drainage, and noxious fumes—to name just some of the effects. The work of some researchers implies that these issues, rather than theoretical debates about resource dependency or the future viability of extraction, should hold our attention. As their writings suggest, the pressing problem is not that minerals might someday soon be exhausted, but that our present appetites for minerals might eventually kill us.

Mines will erupt like boils

A few writers have described the future we can expect as we continue extracting the earth’s minerals. “As deposits in the more accessible, and socially acceptable, areas are worked out there will be increasing pressure to explore and mine in less accessible regions including wilderness areas, National Parks and other designated lands,” C. G.

Down and J. Stocks explain. They add that the tendency “from higher to lower grade deposits has important implications for environmental impact” as well. “A lower grade of ore means that, in order to produce a ton of product, there must be” both “more material removed from the earth’s crust and hence a greater land area used,” and also

“more material processed,” producing “greater quantities of effluents and solid waste for disposal.” As a result, “it is probable that most of the environmental problems associated with mining will grow at a faster rate than the world output of minerals because of the steadily decreasing average grade of orebodies.”495

495 Down and Stocks, Environmental Impact of Mining, 360-361.

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Robert Horn, the retired mining official, concurs that “great pollution” will result as mining continues in the future. “From my perspective as a miner, there is no satisfactory answer to this human dilemma,” he admits, adding that “sustainability”—

“leaving the planet for the next generation no worse than we found it”—“is not going to happen. The world, its surface, its water, and its atmosphere, will become increasingly damaged and polluted,” as the greater reliance on low-grade ores, highlighted by Down and Stocks, means “more and bigger mines will erupt like boils. It will not be a shortage of minerals that will act as a natural restraint on human proliferation but environmental destruction,” he warns.496

Reckless use of the land, acknowledged by ancient civilizations as life’s wellspring, could end in ruin.

496 Horn, It’s a Minefield.

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Conclusion: The Role of Mining in U.S. Foreign Policy

Introduction

This concluding chapter will briefly summarize the dissertation’s main themes.

First of all, a review of Washington’s mineral needs suggests an obvious point—namely, that U.S. foreign policy cannot be considered simply as a governmental activity, but instead as activity undertaken by the government in collaboration with private firms.

Second, as discussed throughout the dissertation, when formulating plans to acquire Latin

American minerals, U.S. officials were outlining a series of measures that, if successfully implemented, would prove highly disruptive in the region. More specifically, these plans entailed extensive infrastructural development, the reworking of laws mining firms deemed unfavorable to their businesses, and the abandonment of traditional peasant lifestyles in favor of wage labor—not only to bring labor into the mines, but also to construct the roads and to lay the rails needed for minerals to be efficiently exported.

Finally, at the end of the chapter I propose one way to interpret Washington’s collaboration with private firms in terms of its ostensible pro-democratic foreign policy.

Recall that U.S. diplomatic historians have reached a consensus that Washington, in the

1940s, promoted self-determination abroad until fears of the Soviets led the U.S. government to abandon this policy circa 1947. But given that Washington regularly dealt with, supported, and championed the supposed “rights” of mineral corporations in Latin

America, and given that these firms were highly authoritarian—insofar as they were bent on curbing popular decision-making amongst their employees, and on keeping their business operations veiled in secrecy—it seems reasonable to conclude that U.S. foreign policy, at its core, had a pro-authoritarian streak.

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Two facets of U.S. power

Particularly during World War II, Washington’s needs were closely related to those of the country’s major mining firms. The government-business collaboration was a matter of official policy then: the former needed large quantities of minerals quickly, and wanted to pay as little as possible for them in the agreements it signed with the Bolivian,

Mexican, and other Latin American governments. And the mining companies had to continue extracting metals at a profit to survive.

It is true, of course, that Washington’s policy was not identical to those of the mining companies on every point. As Herbert Feis, an economic adviser with the State

Department, informed two top Anaconda officials in December 1941, “there was another broad interest” in Chile, apart from the copper company’s—“namely that of the United

States Government,” which pursued numerous economic, political, and military objectives.497 State Department officials further explained, during another meeting with top-level copper men, that Washington’s “relations with Chile did not concern only copper but also a wide variety of other items, ranging from the purely political to debt matters, electric power matters, shipping, other metals, priorities, and numerous other things.”498

But disagreements, to the extent these arose between the government and extractive firms, were tactical. They were on the level of, say, the disputes between the

Council of National Defense’s Advisory Board Commission and the Army-Navy

Munitions Board regarding the proper scope of Washington’s 1940-41 tungsten procurement initiative. Neither of these governmental agencies questioned the

497 “Chilean Copper,” December 1, 1941, National Archives at College Park. 498 “Department of State – Memorandum of Conversation,” December 2, 1941, National Archives at College Park.

315 appropriateness of the procurement program, the right of U.S. corporations to exploit foreign minerals, or the fact that these extractive projects directed Latin American lives and lands toward ends Washington desired. In the same vein, U.S. governmental officials never questioned whether, for instance, the Anaconda Copper Company had any right to purchase Chilean land and then to exploit the minerals beneath its surface, and in fact regularly championed the firm’s right (as they saw it) to do so. Neither the public nor the private sectors seemed to have any doubts regarding the fundamental legitimacy of these types of projects, and disputed only how best to implement them. On a number of fronts—working to effect the type of legislation mining firms desired, battling unionization efforts and polluting the environment in pursuit of prize deposits—

Washington and extractive industries were effectively partners, and represented two facets of U.S. power.

U.S. foreign policy in Chile reveals how aligned Washington’s interests were to those of the major mining firms active there. Consider the regular visits copper company men paid to the State Department, for example. When Braden Company representatives came calling in April 1940, voicing their “most serious concern regarding information they [had] received that the Chilean Government [was] considering the issuance of a decree subjecting them to new tax assessment,” Secretary of State Hull grasped immediately, as if he were a Braden employee himself, how crucial it was “that this situation not be permitted to develop into any more serious phase,” and promised to

“make it clear that [the proposed tax assessment] might prejudice current discussions of financial assistance.”499

The State Department, as mentioned above, had an “open door” policy for

499 Cordell Hull, “Telegram No. 69,” April 18, 1940, National Archives at College Park.

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Anaconda Copper as well. The firm’s December 1941 meeting with Herbert Feis was motivated simply by its annoyance with a “Chilean proposal for the distribution of increased copper revenues,” which it thought “distasteful” since it did not offer executives “as much income as they thought was due their company.” Company representatives needed extra time to strategize, and thus wanted Under Secretary of State

Sumner Welles to postpone his imminent meeting with the Chilean Ambassador for a couple of days. The seeming triviality of the complaint did not dampen Feis’ fervor in championing the company’s cause. He raised the matter with Welles, who at first “was categoric in his statement that he felt sure a worse settlement than the one now possible would result,” were his meeting with the Chilean Ambassador postponed. But ultimately

Feis was too persuasive to be ignored, and Welles promised “that he would stave the

Chilean Ambassador off” for several hours, solely to help Anaconda get as much money as it felt it deserved.

Consider also the fact that, right when the Anaconda men were departing from their meeting with Feis, Kennecott Copper head E. Tappan Stannard “called over long distance from New York” to lodge his own complaint about Chilean proposals to redistribute copper revenues. Stannard received, like the Kennecott and Anaconda executives, a sympathetic response from the State Department.500

And U.S. officials’ sympathetic responses extended to the full range of problems mining firms confronted, including labor unrest, which was anathema to both

Washington’s representatives and the copper men. Thus a March 1944 dispatch from the

U.S. Consulate in Antofagasta, Chile noted that over “5,000 workers employed by the

Andes Copper Mining Company and the Potrerillos Railway Company (both Anaconda

500 “Chilean Copper,” December 1, 1941, National Archives at College Park.

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Copper Company) continue the illegal strike begun on March 1” as a “protest against the new rationing system, despite their legal obligation to accept the decision, claiming that the rations do not permit sufficient food allowances to workers.”501

Two days later there was a more panicked update: “Strike situation at Potrerillos involving some 4500 mine and plant laborers and transportation workmen of the Andes

Copper Company has become more serious and labor now in northern Chile may cause vital injuries to economy of country.” This airgram also worried that miners “at

Chuquicamata may strike soon in sympathy with men at Potrerillos[.]” A successful strike in one location could have a powerful and—in the eyes of Washington and the mining interests—toxic demonstrative effect, in other words. Unrest therefore had to be carefully monitored, and U.S. officials kept watch on striking miners, both in this episode from 1944—when the crisis was averted in the end—and after the war, for example in the

1946-47 copper strikes at the Braden Company’s sites.502

Developments in Brazil further revealed the compatibility of U.S. governmental policy and mining firm objectives. Recall that Bethlehem Steel, in 1947, gained control of the Serra do Navio manganese deposit—some 2,500 hectares of Brazilian territory—in

Amapá, near the Amazon River’s mouth. It was inevitable that this discovery would profoundly alter the region’s landscape, given where the manganese was found. “The deposits are located in thick jungle country,” a report on the site explained. But the environmental devastation sure to accompany mining there was no barrier to

Washington—in fact, the Serra do Navio deposit allowed U.S. planners to work towards goals they had first outlined early in the war.

501 “Telegram No. 438,” March 6, 1944, National Archives at College Park. 502 “Airgram from American Consulate, Antofagasta, Chile,” March 8, 1944, National Archives at College Park.

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In 1941, for example, Brazil’s President Vargas was amenable to Washington’s

“offer of assistance in the development of the Amazon Valley,” according to U.S. official

Ware Adams. “The desire of the United States to cooperate in the opening up of the

Amazon is by no means a new one,” a January 1942 memo explained, emphasizing “that the opening up of that vast area would be of the greatest value not only to Brazil but also to all of the Americas because of the almost unlimited possibilities which it holds for the production of commodities vital to a rounded hemisphere economy.”503

Reviewing these developments affecting Chile and Brazil makes it clear that

Washington’s foreign policy cannot be understood strictly in terms of what governmental officials were doing. Focusing on Washington alone abstracts away from a crucial part of the story, since the government is merely part of U.S. power, and the private sector also needs to be considered if the full range of U.S. foreign policy’s effects is to be understood.

But the point is not that, say, private companies occasionally hijack the government for their own interests, or that firms with especially slick private relations teams are able to manipulate Washington from time to time. These interpretations of

U.S. policy presuppose that the government’s interests are in some sense fundamentally opposed to those of, in this case, major mining firms—and that Washington only aids the private sector unwittingly, when duped.

The foreign policy of an industrial power

One way to argue against these analyses of U.S. diplomacy—those presupposing

503 “ICOMI,” Papers of Merwin L. Bohan, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library. Ware Adams, “Amazon Development Project,” November 13, 1941, National Archives at College Park. “Proposed Amazon Basin Survey,” January 1942, National Archives at College Park.

319 a divergence between governmental and business interests—is to cite the numerous occasions, some of which were described above, when Washington’s aims overlapped with those of the major extractive firms active in Latin America.

Another way to challenge these analyses is to emphasize the fact that the U.S. was a major industrial power in the 1940s, and to then consider the range of mineral needs such a society must have had. Obviously metals played a crucial role in U.S. military production during the war, as well as in the country’s shift to a “permanent war economy” in the late 1940s. But they were also necessary for a wide range of more mundane purposes, including, for example, the construction of the houses in which U.S. residents spent their lives and raised families, and the cars in which they returned to these homes every evening, after work.

“Housing made up the single largest object of investment in the postwar era,” for example, as business historian Wyatt Wells explains. “Before 1945 the United States had never built one million homes in a single year. After 1945 the United States never built fewer than one million homes a year,” he elaborates.504 For a rough sense of what this construction boom meant for, say, copper use, consider the Copper Development

Association’s fact sheet on present-day residences. “Building construction accounts for nearly half of all copper use,” it points out, adding that some “two-thirds of the building construction market” is devoted to erecting residential units. “An average single-family home uses 439 pounds of copper,” it further notes. Some 195 pounds of the average home’s copper go to building wire, 151 pounds are used in plumbing tubes, 47 pounds

504 Wyatt Wells, American Capitalism, 1945-2000: Continuity and Change from Mass Production to the Information Society (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003), 28.

320 are in “built-in appliances,” and so on.505

Wells proceeds to note that “a vast array of related industries” also flourished after the war. For example, “the automobile industry benefited. Suburbs required transportation—in contrast to cities, shops and schools were rarely within walking distance of homes. Two-car families became increasingly common, and three- and even four-car families were not unknown among those with teenage children.” Thus while

“the United States had produced 4.5 million automobiles” in 1929, “in 1955 its factories turned out 7.9 million.”506

For some sense of the mineral needs this increased auto production entailed, consider that today’s average car uses 50 pounds of copper, and nearly a mile of copper wire. A typical automobile also “contains 37.5 lbs. of zinc,” a quantity that generally grows “proportionately with the size of the vehicle.”507 And in 1957, during hearings before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, it was observed that the normal “quantity of steel in the average car” was “roughly 1.8 tons.”508 Since the average ton of steel in the mid-20th century contained ten to fifteen pounds of manganese, there were 18 to 27 pounds of manganese in the average car.

And much of the postwar boom occurred in the “permanent war economy”—that is, in the defense-related industries that the government nurtured. A pair of “rapidly growing sectors, computers and aerospace, depended heavily on Washington’s patronage,” Wells explains, noting that Washington was “the largest single consumer” in

505 “Copper Facts,” Copper Development Association, Inc., http://www.copper.org/education/c- facts/facts-print.html. 506 Wells, American Capitalism, 28. 507 “How much copper and zinc in the average vehicle?” Stockhouse Editorial, May 19, 2015, http://www.stockhouse.com/news/newswire/2015/05/19/how-much-copper-and-zinc-average-vehicle. 508 Administered Prices. Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, United States Senate, 85th Cong. (1957).

321 the computers market, for example, “purchasing machines not only for the military but also for bureaus like the Social Security Administration. The federal government also funded much of the research on electronics, though it relied on universities and private firms to carry out the work.” Wells further observes that “[t]he aerospace industry depended even more heavily on the federal government,” particularly as “rising military spending during the Korean War” helped it revive after a post-World War II decline.509

As a recent piece in Mining Weekly makes clear, the aerospace and defense industries, like their housing and automobile counterparts, required large quantities of minerals. Copper, for example, can be found in “munitions, including shaped charge liners,” which are “used in antitank missiles and rockets and in high-explosive antitank shells.” Manganese is used for “batteries, aero engines and parts, aircraft, shipbuilding and repair, [and] radio equipment,” while tin goes into the “electronic components” of aerospace and defense industry products. Tungsten, for its part, is used in “search, detection and navigation equipment,” and zinc is essential for shipbuilding and ship repairs.510

Given the wide range of industrial applications minerals had in the mid-1940s

U.S., it is clear that extraction benefited both the U.S. private sector—mining firms needed to extract metals in order to profit; automobile companies needed minerals to build their products—as well as Washington, which invested heavily in the defense and aerospace sectors, underwrote much of the housing boom in the post-war era, and more generally relied on industrial production to maintain its global preeminence. The

509 Wells, American Capitalism, 33-34. 510 Keith Campbell, “Strategic minerals and the aerospace and defense industries,” April 30, 2015, Mining Weekly, http://www.miningweekly.com/article/strategic-minerals-and-the-aerospace-and-defence- industries-2015-04-30.

322 respective interests of government and business were so deeply intertwined in this regard that it would be pointless to ask whether, say, mining benefited private businesses more than the government, or vice versa. This question is largely meaningless, since both business and government needed to acquire minerals for the reasons described above. It was in the interest of both that the exploitation of needed metals, many of which were found abroad, continued.

Perhaps it is appropriate to think of these overlapping government and business interests in the 1940s in the same way scholars assess the shared aims of church and state in earlier societies. Robert Trager and Donna L. Dickerson note that, in the “oligarchic and theocratic governments of the European Middle Ages,” typically “church and state shared power over all subjects,” for example.511 “In Catholic Germany,” writes Rudolf

Vierhaus, “the Counter-Reformation had strengthened the common ground between church and state, stressing the affinities between the hieratic church and baroque absolutist sovereignty.”512 Robert J. Mullen notes that “Church and State shared power and authority” in Mexico during the period of Spanish rule.513 Both church and state, in these different examples, were seats of power, and it seems we can substitute “business and government” for the “church and state” of earlier areas when analyzing U.S. foreign mineral policy during the 1940s—simply to indicate that both facets of U.S. power had stakes in extraction abroad at the time.

511 Robert Trager and Donna L. Dickerson, Freedom of Expression in the 21st Century (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 1999), 37. 512 Rudolf Vierhaus, Germany in the Age of Absolutism, trans. Jonathan B. Knudsen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 62. 513 Robert James Mullen, Architecture and Its Sculpture in Viceregal Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 85.

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Masters of economic cannibalism

Worth emphasizing is that the U.S. interest in foreign minerals continued throughout the 1940s, from World War II into the Cold War. While scholars often identify a major shift in U.S. foreign policy during this decade—from a pro-democracy stance during World War II to an anti-Communism, motivated by fears of Soviet ambitions, that supported dictators as necessary bulwarks against the Reds at the end of the decade—it is worth emphasizing that there was no major policy shift where minerals were concerned. Again, these resources preoccupied U.S. planners consistently in the

1940s, both during the “hot” global conflict, and in the Cold War that followed.

Several scholars have already addressed, at varying levels of detail, the ways in which efforts to control minerals shaped the Cold War. Alfred Eckes, for instance, wrote that “the expansion of Soviet power appeared to jeopardize access to critical materials in

Eurasia and its offshore islands” in the postwar period. Eckes cited Harvard professor

Charles Abbott, who, in a November 1948 talk, “warned that Communist and nationalist forces might shut off the highly industrialized, raw-materials importing regions from supplies produced in former colonial areas. While the U.S. was ‘moderately vulnerable to this type of pressure,’ our Western European allies are ‘distinctly vulnerable,’” Abbott argued. He blasted the Soviets as “masters of ‘economic cannibalism,’ the process of absorbing or destroying economic activity outside the Soviet Union.”

Bureau of Mines official Elmer Pehrson was equally alarmed, according to Eckes.

“Control of the Eurasian Continent would jeopardize United States access to the minerals of Africa, without which our industrial efficiency would be impaired dangerously,”

Pehrson warned, adding that Washington could not “risk the loss of access to these areas

324 as [it] did the loss of the world’s greatest resources of tungsten and antimony in China’” during World War II.

As Eckes explained, Abbott and Pehrson were not fringe characters unusually obsessed with minerals, but in step with the era’s official decision-making. “Soviet attempts to sabotage and deprive the West of vital industrial raw materials became a major concern to American policymakers by 1948, and this priority remained through the

1950s until a massive stockpile procurement program reduced the dangers of external economic pressure,” he elaborated. During this period, “the CIA and National Security

Resources Board both were anxious about a possible loss of tin and rubber from the

Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia),” and Pehrson took State Department officials to task as they called for Indonesian independence, fearing political change would stanch mineral outflows.514

Other scholars have elaborated on Africa’s role as a crucial resource provider during this period. “A key component of the Marshall Plan was the ECA [Economic

Cooperation Administration],” for example, “which was the agency tasked with overseeing the exchange of excess raw materials (e.g., natural resources ranging from minerals to agricultural products) from recipients of American financial aid (i.e.,

European countries) to the United States.” Given the immense scale of European reconstruction, this system “meant that many countries would have to rely on the natural resources produced by their colonies in Africa (and, to a lesser extent, Asia) in order to maintain the inflow of American funds under the Marshall Plan.” Washington thus considered the colonies’ raw materials “as an absolutely essential part of its effort to

514 Eckes, The United States and the Global Struggle for Minerals, 148-152.

325 overcome the economic malaise in Europe following the war.”515

The persistent importance of mining during this period meant that extraction’s environmental ruin also continued. “Strategic ores such as uranium, manganese, cobalt, and nickel meant a great deal to the Cold War powers, so they tried hard to maximize and monopolize production wherever they could,” J.R. McNeill and Corinna Unger explain.

“The United States tried to persuade its firms to mine strategic ores in places where the prospects for profits were usually insufficient to tempt businesspeople, such as in central and southern Africa,” and “the in-filling of streams and rivers,” along with “the creation of mountains of slag,” were among this policy’s achievements.516 Researcher Olivier

Bomsel suggests that the World Bank was one institution critical in “expanding mining capacity internationally” at the time, in the way McNeill and Unger describe.517

The problems extraction entailed

Since minerals made U.S. industrialization possible, and since the industrial might of the U.S. was, to a large extent, the basis of its mid-20th century global preeminence, it seems safe to assume that problems related to mineral procurement were among the most crucial U.S. officials faced. To make this point another way: the U.S. still would have been an industrial powerhouse were its foreign policy rhetoric different, had its presidents had different personalities than those they are known for, or were any number of other

515 J. Andrew Grant, W.R. Nàdege Compaoré, Matthew I. Mitchell and Mats Ingulstad, “‘New’ Approaches to the Governance of Africa’s Natural Resources,” in New Approaches to the Governance of Natural Resources – Insights from Africa, edited by J. Andrew Grant, W.R. Nadège Compaoré and Matthew I. Mitchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 11-12. 516 J.R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger, “Introduction: The Big Picture,” in Environmental Histories of the Cold War, edited by J.R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 10. 517 Stephen G. Bunker, “Flimsy Joint Ventures in Fragile Environments,” in States, Firms, and Raw Materials: The World Economy and Ecology of Aluminum, edited by Bradford Barnham, Stephen G. Bunker, and Denis O’Hearn (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 277. 326 variables adjusted. But when it came to minerals, there were few options available to

U.S. industrial society other than acquiring whatever could be extracted. And the ways in which U.S. governmental and business interests procured these minerals reveal how U.S. power behaves in order to sustain itself. This dissertation catalogued this behavior, focusing mainly on the 1940s.

And as indicated throughout the preceding chapters, it quickly becomes apparent, when considering the role minerals play in U.S. foreign policy, that the problem of mineral procurement cannot be considered in isolation from other challenges, like the formation—and discipline—of a suitable workforce, or the development of infrastructure and the passage of laws that will improve the extractive climate. One cannot restrict one’s focus to what happens at the mining sites alone, in other words. The extractive process is more disruptive than that, and its effects are felt far beyond the locations of key mineral deposits.

Converting the heathen

Mining firms abroad could not simply begin their operations by, say, investing however much capital the projects required. For who would work the earth? To an extent, the sort of laborer who could perform the work mining firms needed done had to be created.

When U.S. officials discussed this transformative process, they—like their

Spanish predecessors in Latin America—spoke of the need to “convert” the local population. Obviously Washington’s representatives were not driven by a desire to spread Christianity, but they were driven by a principle they seem to have held as deeply

327 as the Spanish did their belief in God. This was the idea that renting out one’s labor to earn a wage, and thus to survive, was a reasonable mode of existence. More broadly,

Washington’s representatives felt that a properly organized economy would be made up of these kinds of wage laborers—an assumption that pitted U.S. officials against indigenous Latin American farmers, who often held different beliefs about work. Why should they devote their lives to enriching industrial powers, or to enabling the industrial lifestyles of those in the U.S., where copper-filled homes and manganese-filled cars abounded? Why should they rent themselves out in order to survive, when they could grow their own food?

U.S. Bureau of Mines official John Worcester recognized the challenges mining firms faced in developing a suitable class of laborers. “The Bolivian mine worker is of

Indian blood and has been originally drawn from agricultural pursuits from the Indian settlements on the ‘Altiplano,’” he noted, acknowledging that “mining work is not a normal occupation” for this sort of person. “For that reason, the conversion of the agricultural workers into mining workers is a long tedious process,” he lamented.

There were several factors impeding this conversion. One was that “the Indian of

Bolivia has an ingrained fondness for the place where he spent his childhood and returns there at every opportunity,” making it difficult to maintain a large enough workforce at mines far from laborers’ home communities. Compounding the problem was the fact that, in Worcester’s view, an indigenous Bolivian “has little use for or confidence in money as such but feels secure only when surrounded by land, crops, and farm animals of his ownership.” These people were scarcely concerned with “the purchasable products of modern civilization,” and thus could not be motivated to work simply with the promise

328 that earned wages would allow them to enjoy these commodities.518

Another Bureau of Mines official, William Vanderburg, sneered when describing what he saw as the typical indigenous Bolivian. This man “follows the same torpid existence as that of his ancestors of 300 or more years ago, and beyond his daily ratio of coca and simple food requirements with occasional flirtations with alcohol on fiestas, has no concern for the future, little or no nationalistic spirit, and no ambition to improve his lot,” Vanderburg explained. Trying to motivate a man satisfied by so little was not easy:

“it is obviously impossible to stimulate him to an active desire for money and the things it will purchase. He has no desire for personal advancement and remains an inert undemanding lump, unless the supply of coca should be cut off.”519

Frederick Hinke, an official at the Lima Embassy, was similarly dismissive of indigenous Peruvians. He felt these people were “conditioned by essentially Indian and mestizo thought processes, social customs, standards of living and work, as well as work habits and methods.” Like the U.S. officials in Bolivia, Hinke lamented the fact that these “folk ways and the thought patterns of the past still have strong holds on the people,” who thus failed to embrace wage labor as a way of life.

As he elaborated, one “characteristic of the Inca civilization of Peru was ignorance of the money concept,” and he saw this ignorance persisting into the 1940s:

“the wage incentive does not weigh here as heavily as elsewhere. Among the Indians of the sierra,” he observed, “there still lingers the recollection of decades of hardship in the mines of the Spaniards,” inhibiting efforts “to incorporate more closely within the

518 John Worcester, “Mining—United States Economic Mission to Bolivia,” June 15, 1942, National Archives at College Park. 519 William O. Vanderburg, “Financial and Technical Aid to the Bolivian Mining Industry,” December 2, 1941, National Archives at College Park.

329 country’s economic framework the large Indian population of the sierra (and the still more primitive population of the montaña), and…to increase individually the productivity of literally tens of thousands of people [.]” It was only through this increased productivity, he wrote, that there would be “a sound basis for the payment of higher wages and improved living standards.” Peruvians had to learn, in other words, that a good wage, or decent living conditions—at least as U.S. officials conceived of these—were not rights, but instead prizes to be won on the labor market.520

Thus, again, the conversion of peasants to workers was one challenge mining presented. Another was the fact that nature did not have humans, or more specifically industrial societies, in mind when depositing manganese, copper, tin and other minerals throughout the world, and thus did not situate these deposits in locations convenient for those most eager to exploit them. The necessary infrastructure therefore had to be built in order to facilitate the transportation of extracted metals to nearby ports, either via railways or along paved roads.

Building the infrastructure

In either case, Latin American had to be put to work building this infrastructure— thereby presenting U.S. planners with the same “conversion” problem mining required, insofar as these construction projects also needed wage labor. And conditions for those building this infrastructure were often quite grim.

Recall that there is some discussion of railroad camp conditions in Brazil, a major manganese supplier, in the papers of the Office of Inter-American Affairs. One report describes a project “divided into units of 10 kilometers,” with each section requiring “a

520 Hinke, “Labor Conditions in Peru,” November 19, 1943, National Archives at College Park.

330 crew of 200 to 500 persons,” for example. Some work camps were near villages, and could rely on the surrounding populations. But most “of the labor in the new construction camps is not local to the district,” and was thus imported. Those brought in became used to “moving from project to project with the contractor. It is a terrible life for the children,” the report lamented, describing the “crude huts with thatch roof and mud plastered walls” housing the workers.

This report further noted that construction was underway “thru a very low swampy region, in several spots of which there is chronic malaria,” with “no protection against mosquitoes” for workers and their families. “Excreta are seen all around,” and the food supply was “very deficient,” lacking in fruits and vegetables. The camp’s young showed “the ill effect of this life of malnutrition and sanitation,” and ascariasis, a type of roundworm infection, was “almost universal in children” at the site.521

One Dr. Knott, in another report, described the railroad construction camps he visited traveling from Rio de Janeiro inland to Belo Horizonte and Itabira, then back to the coast through the Rio Doce Valley, ending his journey at Vitoria. Around Itabira, the

“labor camps were the worst of any we saw in the valley,” he wrote. “A bacillary dysentery epidemic has been raging” in one of them, he noted, and “infant mortality from dysentery is very high all thru the valley.”522

At Taua, another camp near Vitoria, “160 persons, workers and their families” were living in conditions described as “the worst possible. There are no latrines,” and so water was “permanently liable to contamination.” Only rarely did one see a child “who is not pale and who does not have an enlarged abdomen,” according to one report on the

521 “Health and Sanitation of the Construction Camps of Brazil,” National Archives at College Park. 522 “Summary of Dr. Knott Describing Journey from Rio to Vitoria via Belo Horizonte, Itabira and Down the Rio Doce Valley,” National Archives at College Park. 331 site, which also noted that the young suffered widely from dysenteriform syndromes.

“Grippe was widespread” throughout the camp: one doctor had “already diagnosed eight cases” of malaria in its initial forty days of operation. And worker’s dwellings were

“built contrary to the most rudimentary principles of hygiene with regard to cleanliness, lighting, and ventilation,” near water that was likely polluted.523

In other cases, these infrastructure projects promoted ecological devastation.

Recall that efforts to develop the rich Serra do Navio manganese deposits entailed

“opening up” the Amazon. And more generally, it is clear that these projects had nothing to do with promoting Latin American self-determination, any more than, say, erecting the

Great Pyramid of Giza had to do with its builders’ self-determination. The U.S. had massive projects it wished to see completed in Latin America, and took for granted that it could use the region’s people as a kind of tool to help it meet these ends.

Changing the law

Successful mining projects also required that a suitable legal infrastructure be in place to facilitate mineral exploitation. U.S. officials spoke openly of their wish to change Brazil’s constitution around the time that country was transitioning to a more democratic government in mid-1940s, for example. Their frustration stemmed from

Brazil’s 1940 Mining Code, which “prohibited foreigners from owning or investing in subsoil resources or steel companies using domestic raw materials,” and thus overhauled its 1937 predecessor.524

Brazil’s 1937 constitution had initially “restricted the exploitation of minerals and

523 “Report on Investigations of Mosquitoes in the Vicinity of Vitoria,” National Archives at College Park. “Dysentery and Other Diseases in the Vicinity of Alfredo Maia,” National Archives at College Park. 524 Wirth, The Politics of Brazilian Development, 94-95. 332 waterfalls to Brazilians,” and worked towards “nationalization of mines” in the country.

But Decree Law 66, passed on December 14, 1937, expanded “the legal definition of

Washington’s goal during the war was to have U.S. mining firms restored to their status as “juridically Brazilian” entities.

The U.S. Embassy in Rio’s Minerals Attaché, Emerson Brown, assessed this problem in February 1945, writing that “Brazil has in abundance certain important minerals in which United States territory is deficient,” and that the best “solution for such a problem” was “for American industry to acquire the mineral deposits needed by our own country,” wherever these happened to be located. In Brown’s view, the way to surmount this challenge was obvious: “it seems that the only recourse is by negotiation between the two governments, either to grant preferential rights to our industry in mining, or change the code and constitution” of Brazil.526

Cuba’s laws also worried U.S. officials. Consul General Harold Tewell complained in February 1942 that “so-called social legislation and agitation on the part of labor leaders” hampered mining in the country, and that the Compañía Cubana de Minas y Minerales—a subsidiary of Philadelphia’s E.J. Lavino & Co.—was trying “to impress upon the Consulate General the unsatisfactory and uncertain status of labor in”

525 Fausto and Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil, 214. 526 Brown, “Memorandum on Some Aspects of Brazil’s Mineral Resources Pertinent to U.S. Policy,” February 27, 1945, National Archives at College Park.

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Camaguey.527 Excessive benefits for workers were anathema to U.S. officials, as were measures restricting the “rights,” as U.S. officials saw them, of firms to purchase and mine minerals abroad.

Backing authoritarianism

In all of these ways—developing miners as laborers; facilitating the construction of highways and railways; working to change national laws—U.S. power worked to promote and secure the interests of authoritarian entities overseas. For this is obviously what mining companies are. They are not at all democratic, are heavily invested in keeping their operations veiled in secrecy and are firmly opposed to popular decision- making—unionization efforts—among their workers. This point about the character of mining firms cannot be stressed enough. It is sometimes argued, for example by those describing Washington’s support for authoritarian governments during the Cold War, that the U.S. backed these regimes only in times of emergency, when its interests were threatened, and that in doing so it abandoned its more deeply-rooted, pro-democracy impulses.

But as a review of Washington’s support for mining firms suggests, pro- authoritarianism was central to U.S. foreign policy, and not only in the paranoid Cold

War days. Washington consistently backed authoritarian entities—the mining firms— around the world, and worked to protect their interests and to ensure that they continued functioning smoothly, since it needed the minerals only these companies could provide in massive quantities. And because Communists often worked to disrupt the smooth

527 Flynn, “Mineracao e Metalurgia, May 1945 – Defects in the Brazilian Mining Code,” July 11, 1945, National Archives at College Park. 334 functioning of these mines throughout the early 20th century, Washington’s pro- authoritarianism often took the form of anti-Communism, well before World War II had even ended.

There are numerous examples of wartime anti-Communism. “In central Chile the copper mines, both Chilean and American, are in a worse position with respect to their laborers than at any time for a good many years past,” Ambassador Claude Bowers wrote on August 10, 1940. He was especially concerned by “outstanding labor difficulties” hindering extraction “at the plants of the Braden Copper Company at Sewell, Coya and

Rancagua,” where it was “understood that the labor unions [had] been increasingly dominated by Communist agitators” since the preceding May. Braden’s source for this information was the Braden Company itself, which had little doubt that the site’s labor leaders were “definitely Communistic,” and that these employees had “encouraged a deliberate policy of antagonism among the mine workers toward the foremen and managers of the mines and plants.” These workers were “consistently disobeying the

Company’s rules,” for example, and were “slack and inefficient in the discharge of their duties,” presumably on orders from Moscow.528

“Communism is strong among the workers in the mines on Northern pampas,”

Donald Heath, with the U.S. Embassy in Santiago, wrote with alarm in February 1942.529

Heath discussed “the strike at the mine of the Braden Copper Company” a week later, citing the company’s Santiago representative as a source claiming that “the Communists

[were] to blame” for the unrest. Heath agreed that the strike seemed linked to a

“Communist plan,” though weighed other factors that might have inspired the miners.

528 Bowers, “Despatch No. 731,” August 10, 1940, National Archives at College Park. 529 Heath, “Despatch No. 2699,” February 12, 1942, National Archives at College Park.

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“Aside from political aspects,” he suggested, “the strike might logically be attributed to the desire of the workmen to obtain a share in the larger profits which the copper companies are supposed to be receiving.”530

Looking back in February 1943, the Office of American Republics noted: “A number of breakdowns, accidents and shutdowns have occurred on the properties of the

Chilean Exploration Company (Anaconda), on and after October 14, 1942[.]” The manager of the site, Thomas Campbell, felt “a lack of discipline resulting from the activities of the Chilean Communists in the camp” was to blame. U.S. officials felt that blaming Communist influence for labor problems there was problematic, since “wages in

American enterprises in Chile, are roughly at the 1930 level,” and that at least some labor actions could be “attributed to the high-hat attitude of American employees towards

Chilean employees,” as well as to the fact that workers were “really feeling the pinch of the increased cost of living and should share in any increase in profits.” Still, the

Embassy opposed the “proposed labor clause,” believing it “would give the impression that the United States Government was forcing unwilling American companies to improve labor and living standards of their Chilean workers”—thus falling in line with

Campbell’s anti-Communism.531

Seeds of repression?

The way mining firms responded to threats from Latin American organized labor in the 1940s can be seen as small-scale versions of what would ultimately happen at the national level decades later, when national security states emerged on the continent in the

530 Heath, “Despatch No. 2658: Strike at the mine of the Braden Copper Company; possible causes; editorial in LA OPINION,” February 20, 1942, National Archives at College Park. 531 “Chilean Labor Difficulties,” February 15, 1943, National Archives at College Park.

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1960s-70s. During and after World War II, Communists and suspected Communists deeply alarmed mining firms, which rooted out workers suspected of leftist sympathies, and punished activist miners to discourage other workers from organizing. The military was essential in helping the mining firms maintain order on these occasions. Recall that, in Chile, disruptive miners were sent to concentration camps, while in Mexico the military was dispatched to intimidate workers inclined to strike. Though these policies date to the start of World War II—and no doubt precede it—it seems they are different from Cold War-era repression mainly in terms of whom they targeted. In 1942, Bolivian miners were massacred at Catavi. In 1968, Mexican students and other civilians were massacred at Tlatelolco.

But perhaps this interpretation of U.S. foreign policy does not go far enough in breaking down the periodization diplomatic historians tend to accept. For example, to what extent can we say that the U.S., during World War II, was pro-authoritarian only on the comparatively small scale of the mining sector—versus the larger scale of country- wide concerns? Recall that the U.S. had no problem with the blatantly fraudulent 1940 election in Mexico, for example, which the U.S. Embassy’s Naval and Air Attaché concluded was “highly irregular,”532 and which the Assistant Naval Attaché wrote was conducted in a climate where the ruling party, whose candidate won, “controlled the polling booths in spite of repeated Government promises to permit free and unobstructed voting.”533 When questioned about his “promises of a fair and free election for the

Mexican people,” the outgoing president, Lázaro Cárdenas, explained, “That form of

532 W. M. Dillon, “Attaché’s Report—Mexico, Political, Principal Leaders,” July 23, 1940, National Archives at College Park. 533 Earl S. Piper, “Attaché’s Report—Mexico, Political Forces, Political Parties,” National Archives at College Park.

337 democracy is out-moded, and present methods are simply a higher development of so called democratic processes [.]”534 U.S. officials did not protest.

Recall also that Washington allied closely during the war with Brazil, which U.S. officials acknowledged was by no means a democratic state. As the War Department explained in 1943, “there is no popular participation in government. All officials are appointed, directly or indirectly, by the president of Brazil.”535 And even though the conflict’s end saw the conclusion of Vargas’ fifteen-year term in power, and was marked by a presidential contest, worth emphasizing is that the December 1945 elections saw just

“13.4 percent of the population” taking part. This was not quite the level of participation in, say, ancient Greece. Leslie Bethell argues that this democratic turn “was real,” but ultimately “restricted in scope and fundamentally antipopular in nature. The price of democracy was state control of organized labor, restrictions on political participation, and the elimination of the Communist Left.”536

Such were some of the fruits of the “good war.”

534 W.M. Dillon, “Intelligence Report—Mexico, Political, Revolutionary Tendencies,” September 9, 1940, National Archives at College Park. 535 War Department, “Survey of the Southern Region of Brazil,” July 9, 1943, National Archives at College Park. 536 Fausto and Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil, 231-232. Bethell, “Brazil,” 65.

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Works Cited

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Newspapers and Periodicals

The Age of Steel American Economist Automobile Topics Berkeley Daily Gazette Deseret News (Salt Lake City, UT) Evening Independent (St. Petersburgh, FL) O Globo Herald-Journal (Spartansburg, SC) Indian Valley Record (Greenville, CA) Lawrence Daily Journal-World Lewiston Evening Journal Lodi News-Sentinel Milwaukee Journal Milwaukee Sentinel Mines and Methods

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Montreal Gazette Nashua Telegraph New York Times Ottawa Citizen Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Pittsburgh Press Press and Horticulturist (Riverside, CA) Reading Eagle St. Petersburgh Times Schenectady Gazette Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA) Sydney Morning Herald Toledo Blade Tuscaloosa News

Corporate Publications

Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Annual Reports.

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Dissertations

Schoenfeld, David. “An Analysis of the Tin Industry of Bolivia: Its Relationship to the Bolivian National Economy and the International Tin Situation.” Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1947.

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