“1. The “Errand” to Iran” in “Mission Manifest”
Chapter 1 The “Errand” to Iran Mission and Place in Transnational History
“Mission” was the driver of the American errand to Iran. This is a new argument about US-Iran relations that has deep roots in US history. Historians have highlighted the connections between Protestant “providentialism,” American “exceptionalism,” and convictions about the United States as a “redeemer nation.”1 As Anders Stephanson described it, “Manifest Destiny” defied the separation of church and state, involved Americans of different faiths and belief systems, and transcended the continent to travel across oceans. The American global mission was, to missionaries and statesmen, universal and exceptional, and it was based on the assumption that the United States had a “providentially assigned role … to lead the world to new and better things” through what Stephanson called “regenerative intervention.”2 If the framework of “promised land, crusader state” carries more explanatory weight than the standard international relations categories, then the question for historians is, to borrow from Andrew Preston, “not of whether religion influenced US foreign relations, but how.”3
This book argues that the answer to that question hinges on the historical conditions, contingencies, and contexts of “place.” Place is a “social process” involving the natural, built, and human environments and “defined by deep conflicts of persons, institutions, and processes, both local and global.”4 A conception of place that is local and transnational, and attuned to culture and power, the sacred and secular, and the subjective and interpersonal, offers a unique vantage point on US-Iran relations. It reveals that missionary ideals, and the related concepts of exceptionalism, providentialism, and redemption, were not merely theoretical. Christian evangelicals, along with champions of the American global mission, considered it a duty to actualize their ideas through an “errand to the world.”5 In other words, an evangelical impulse compelled Presbyterians and other Americans to leave the United States and take their missions global. Through the evangelical errand, ideologies of mission, which were embedded in imperial networks and transnational processes, became manifest in places such as Tehran.
The natural environment, or setting of this history, was Tehran. Then as now, the city sits on a high plateau, between the Great Salt Desert and the Zagros Mountains, on the southern banks of the Alborz Mountains. One missionary described the city as being “beautifully situated on the northern edge of a great plain with a noble mountain range rising like a wall behind it.” Travelers regularly comment on the Alborz Mountains and Mount Damavand, the highest point in the Middle East. If Damavand’s snowcapped volcanic peak seems to climb to the heavens, the city in its shadow historically served as a conduit between “East” and “West.” As an analyst wrote of Tehran’s longue durée, “Its crossroad location explains why this area has been inhabited for more than six millennia.” This was true for the ancient city of Ray and, beginning in 1785, the national capital of Iran.6 In 1907, one year after Iranians opened their parliament, or Majles, the country’s first class of elected officials made Tehran the constitutionally mandated capital of the country.7 During the twentieth century, Iranian nation-building and globalization transformed Tehran and elevated its international profile. The mid-twentieth century, in particular, coincided with and was propelled by the rapid scientific and technological advances of the “age of speed.”8 Travel time between the United States and Iran shrank from one year in the 1830s to six weeks in the 1920s to thirty hours in the 1950s, if one flew a jet into Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport. During the early Cold War, Americans realized that “New York is far closer to Teheran today than it was to Boston when the Republic was founded.”9 This is why Tehran was, since the 1930s, the administrative and institutional hub of the Presbyterian Mission, and why, after the Second World War, the city was the site of the US colony. Tehran, more than any other place in Iran, hosted the American errand.
This chapter, as a foundation for the rest of the book, ascertains the centrality of “mission” and “place” in the history of US-Iran relations. It begins with a section that explains what Presbyterian evangelicals and other Americans meant when they spoke of mission, before turning to the socio-affective worlds and emotional neighborhoods of Tehran, where their mission became manifest.10 The second section profiles the human environment of place: the Del Be Del, or heart-to-heart, network. This transnational network included Presbyterian evangelicals, along with their American and Iranian friends, and they were the primary actors in this history. The third section excavates Tehran’s built environment through the deposition of the first Pahlavi shah in 1941, with a focus on the Presbyterian Mission’s institutions that physically hosted the American-Iranian encounter at the local level.11 The chapter concludes with a section of commentary on the Iranian supporters of the Presbyterian Mission after 1941, primarily but not exclusively Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Throughout, the emphasis is on the meaning of mission, and the feeling of the American errand to Iran.
American Evangelicals
Ideology has historically mattered to US foreign relations. Whether the inspiration was the French Protestant John Calvin’s reformed theology, the American activist Jane Addams’s social outreach, or US President Woodrow Wilson’s use of national power, evangelically minded Americans considered their beliefs universal maxims that they could and should propagate on a global scale. Whatever their gospel, these Americans believed that “right” and “truth” were on their side. Some maxims sprang from the Bible. The word “evangelical” originates from the Greek word for “gospel.” As the historian Lauren Turek wrote, “All evangelicals share a commitment to evangelize, or to spread the ‘good news’ throughout the world.”12 Good news came in other forms, including “the gospel of Americanism,” which was “carried … to every corner of the globe.”13 Matthew Mark Davis was among the first historians to identify the convergence of missionary and nonmissionary gospels in Iran. Because the “ideology of mission” was infused with notions of God and country, which were assumed to be both exceptional and universal, the Presbyterians were like other Americans who “possessed an idealistic vision of how things ought to be in Iran and acted upon that vision.”14 In Tehran, the evangelical errand was the product of two visions that were separate yet singular: the Presbyterian and American global missions.
The Presbyterian Mission grew out of the denomination’s “family tree” in the United States.15 The first American presbytery—the basis of the church’s governance structure—was established in Philadelphia in 1706, and the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, or PCUSA, was founded in 1789, the year that the US Constitution went into effect. However, American Presbyterians have rarely been unified. Pro-slavery southerners split from their co-denominationalists in 1858. That same year, a faction of northerners met in Pittsburgh to establish the United Presbyterian Church of North America. In 1869, in the aftermath of the US Civil War, some other northern Presbyterians rehabilitated the PCUSA. In 1871, as denominational mission boards broke up the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the PCUSA acquired its mission fields in Iran. In 1872, James Bassett opened the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran. Despite their differences, the major branches of American Presbyterianism were, through the mid-twentieth century, evangelical. All sponsored “foreign missions,” with the two northern churches active in the Middle East. The Pittsburgh-based church managed a mission field that followed the Nile River from Cairo to Khartoum and Addis Ababa. From 156 Fifth Avenue in New York City, the PCUSA’s Board of Foreign Missions administered a global organization that, in the Middle East, stretched from the beaches of Beirut to the mountains of Mashhad. In 1958, the two northern churches merged into the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (UPCUSA). The churches consolidated their mission fields under a new board called COEMAR: the Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations. As the subsequent chapters demonstrate, the year 1958 was, for various reasons, a watershed moment for the evangelical errand to Iran and the Middle East.16
The Presbyterian Mission, like the institutional family tree, had many roots, branches, and leaves of all seasons that blew with the shifting winds of American Protestant culture.17 Presbyterianism is rooted in the French theologian John Calvin’s interpretation of the Protestant Reformation, with various branches adhering to the “Westminster Standards,” and all believing in God’s divine plan and the original sin of humanity.18 The Presbyterians in Iran, however, were products of the United States. While most nineteenth-century missionaries were animated by “nothing but Christ” and the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening, those in the twentieth century modernized the formula to include “Christ and Culture,” with some taking after progressive-era reformers such as Jane Addams to preach the “social gospel.”19 Many scholars have contended that, in the Middle East, these modern missionaries abandoned the evangelism of their predecessors to focus on education and medicine and support local nationalisms.20
In Iran, there was no hard and fast division of the “sacred” and “secular” elements of the Presbyterian Mission. Like US power more broadly, evangelicalism melded seemingly contradictory impulses that reinforced each other, and that cut through generations rather than between them. During the interwar years, the Presbyterian Mission reflected the larger rifts within American Protestantism between “modernists” and “fundamentalists” that was seen in the interdenominational “Laymen’s Inquiry” of 1932. The report tilted toward the modernists in calling for “Christianity’s active participation in an emerging world religion,” a recommendation that dissenters considered the equivalent of “renouncing missions.”21 In New York, a mainline consensus emerged under Robert Speer’s leadership of the PCUSA’s Board of Foreign Missions. However, the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran included social gospelers and those who spoke of a Christian “Kingdom in Iran.”22 There was a discernible shift toward “evangelical secularism,” or “missionary modernity,” but, as the religious studies scholar Adam Becker noted, intonations of secularization did not result in the “desacralization” of mission.23 To use the lexicon of this book, the new mission of the Jane Addams archetype—which involved everything from social work to education and international organizing, had a “Presbyterian connection,” and touched the United States and the world—did not displace the old religious mission of the John Calvin archetype.24
Because of the coexistence of the old and new missions, Presbyterian evangelicals linked “individual salvation” to “social salvation” and sustained a consistent missiology through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Early in the century, a PCUSA board member in New York stated that “foreign missions … is not a side issue … it is the supreme duty of the Church.” He believed that, despite their obvious differences in the United States, American Christians “will be more and more agreed as to the imperative duty and inspiring privilege of preaching Jesus Christ to the whole world.”25 Later in the century, American Presbyterians made the metaphorical errand into the wilderness central to their understanding of the Cold War world. A 1958 document titled “In Unity—For Mission” celebrated the merger of northern Presbyterians, and it explained that “the church’s mission is on the frontier.”26 The authors of that document, which was written two years before President John F. Kennedy introduced his “new frontier,” were mainline Presbyterian church leaders.27 But they put forth a literal interpretation of the Gospel of Matthew’s “great commission,” in which Jesus instructed his followers to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them … and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” Other evangelicals would have understood their missiological impulses in relation to one of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, which read: “an obligation is laid on me, and woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel!”28 The Presbyterian Mission in Iran, as the historian Heather Sharkey wrote about the American missionary community in Egypt, “reflected the grassroots Presbyterian evangelical culture of its day.”29 They just happened to live and work in the Middle East.
The coexisting impulses of Presbyterian evangelicals in Iran were related to, yet distinct from, the American global mission. Scholars have made this point about other parts of the world. As examples, Darlene Rivas wrote about “missionary capitalists” and Emily Rosenberg about “financial missionaries.”30 In addition to the scholarship on global capitalism is the corpus on “development” and “modernization.” Michael Latham established that “modernization theory resonated with previous combinations of missionary vision and imperial control.” Development workers, modernization theorists, and other “emissaries of … ‘Americanism’ ” were, according to Nils Gilman, driven by “proselytizing zeal” and “armed with sacramental science and technology” to “exorcise the secular demons of the postwar world.” Such sentiments stretched beyond technical experts and aid workers, with the Peace Corps acting as “a new lay missionary army,” and the US military, particularly noncombat advisers and engineers, embracing the idea of “nation-building.”31 To borrow from the scholar Larry Grubbs, these were “secular missionaries.”32 These Americans had different aims in Iran than the Presbyterians, but both groups shared enthusiasm for affecting “regenerative intervention” in the religious, socioeconomic, and political affairs of a foreign land.33 While the evangelical impulse has millennia of history, the projection of US power on a global scale is a more recent phenomenon.
The archetype of the American global mission was President Woodrow Wilson. He was deeply religious, yet, as a wartime president and international statesman, Wilson wielded the instruments of American power, including the military, to promote his vision of world order. His Southern Presbyterian “covenant theology,” which strove to extend God’s relationship with Abraham to the nations of the world, informed his foreign policy and the League of Nations “covenant.”34 Wilson’s religious messianism was matched only by his conviction that the United States was “the hope of the world.”35 He failed to realize that vision during his lifetime, but “Wilsonianism” survived as Americans who believed theirs to be an exceptional nation with universal appeal, divine destiny, and regenerative capabilities worked with international partners to “keep the covenant” alive.36 The scholar John Fousek made a convincing case that, during the mid-twentieth century, Americans were certain they were chosen, not just to lead their constituents or congregants at home, but “to lead the free world.” US President Franklin Roosevelt urged every American during the Second World War to act “as a trustee for all those who fell in the last war—a part of their mission unfilled.” That mission was, according to Roosevelt, to resurrect Wilsonianism and build “a world fellowship.” In the Cold War, ideas about “destinarianism,” and the material ability to project various forms of national power, made the globe an “American icon,” which meant that “the entire world was now the proper sphere of concern for US foreign policy.”37 In Iran, prior to the Second World War, representatives of the Calvin and Addams archetypes far outnumbered the Wilsonians in the country.
While Wilsonians were small in number during the early twentieth century, Morgan Shuster and Arthur Millspaugh were the most well-known of this group in Iran. Both were political insiders in the United States and, as American financial advisers in Iran, unofficial diplomats whose legacies became tied to larger historical events. Shuster gained notoriety because, as an ally of Iranian parliamentarians in 1911, he was conspicuously dismissed from his duties and expelled from the country, by Russian demand with British backing. His attempts to reform Iran’s financial system became wrapped up with the halted Constitutional Revolution, which began five years earlier. After the First World War, Wilson’s fourteen-point vision for the peace provided a retroactive framework for understanding Shuster’s cavalier attitude toward European imperialism, and in Iran he became a stand-in for Wilsonian self-determination.38 Arthur Millspaugh’s financial missions—the first in the 1920s at the start of the Pahlavi Dynasty and the second in the early 1940s during the Second World War—had more ambiguous legacies.39
Wilsonianism, and the American global mission it represented, acquired meaning in Iran during the Second World War and Cold War.40 Franklin Roosevelt pledged self-determination to the world in the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and to Iran directly at the wartime summit of 1943 via the Tehran Declaration. In 1944, Roosevelt was “thrilled with the idea of using Iran as an example of what we could do by an unselfish American policy.” More recently, the historian David Collier argued that “Iran was … the blueprint for the American program of building associated free nations through highly intrusive micro-management on all levels.”41 During the Cold War, those programs were based on partnerships between the US government, missionary societies, nongovernmental actors and organizations, and in-country hosts, as William Warne, the director of the US aid program in Iran in the 1950s, explained in his memoir. After the three books published by Shuster and Millspaugh, Warne’s memoir, Mission for Peace, was “the fourth in a series written by Americans who have struggled with the problem of aiding Iran.”42 After the Second World War, Warne was “ready to enlist” in the national mission because, “For the first time in the life of our nation … we were actively waging peace.” Unlike the piecemeal efforts of the early twentieth century, the Cold War seemed to necessitate a coordinated effort of the public and private sectors in “a campaign on fields where peace must be won or lost in the hearts of people.” Whether for religious, socioeconomic, or political reasons, Warne thought that Americans could declare victory when Iranians began “opening the windows of heaven.”43 These were the Wilsonians who facilitated “a peaceful conquest” of Pahlavi Iran.44
In these ways, the American errand to Iran involved the John Calvin, Jane Addams, and Woodrow Wilson archetypes. Whether one’s inspiration stemmed from a religious or national creed, or some combination of the two, most Americans abroad understood their missions as anti-imperial, or part of an “empire by invitation.” Ignoring the coercive capacities that provided shelter to US activity in Iran, they insisted on American benevolence, rejected moral equivalence between the United States and other countries and cultures, and acted on exceptionalist assumptions about their God and nation.45 Such was the meaning of “mission” to evangelically minded Americans in the twentieth century.
Del Be Del / Heart to Heart
While the previous section unpacked the meaning of mission, this section outlines the “structures of feeling” that enveloped the Del Be Del network.46 This transnational socio-affective community was united by their Christian faith, shared friendships, family ties, other intimate relationships, and, most significantly, a collective emotional experience in Iran.47 As the scholar Barbara Rosenwein wrote, histories of “emotional communities” are the same as those of “social communities,” but they differ in attempting to “uncover systems of feeling” that involved “modes of emotional expression” and “affective bonds between people.”48 The members of the Del Be Del network processed their feelings about Iran through the Persian proverb: Del be del rah dare, which they translated as “There is a road which leads from heart to heart.”49
At the most basic level, Del Be Del was “a newsletter for missionaries and other workers who have lived in and loved Iran.”50 In February 1944, Sarah McDowell mailed out the first issue of the quarterly newsletter from her home in Wooster, Ohio. McDowell was born Sarah Evans Wright in 1893 in northwest Persia to a multigenerational missionary family. Her husband, Philip McDowell, was a doctor in Tehran during the interwar years, during which time she worked with women and children. The couple retired to Ohio during the Second World War after the Presbyterian Mission Hospital in Tehran closed.51 Except for the late 1950s and early 1960s, when she returned to Iran, Sarah McDowell lived in Wooster, where she compiled issues of Del Be Del well into the 1970s. In life and death, recipients on the mailing list knew that she was “the moving spirit of these letters.”52 Families mailed her everything, from professional updates to vacation stories and Christmas letters, and McDowell dutifully organized the information under the categories “over here,” “over there,” and, occasionally, “between.” Most entries were from Presbyterian stalwarts, many of whom, like McDowell, had multigenerational ties to Iran. However, the mailing list also included “other workers” from the United States who, in pursuit of their own missions, forged similar socio-affective bonds with Iran. As McDowell stated in regard to the newsletter’s audience and purpose: “Whether or not we have had the opportunity of knowing each other in person, we all know … and understand each other through our common interest in and love for Iran.”53
The men and women of the Del Be Del network were not representative of the American population. While some, like McDowell, were born in Iran, others grew up in the United States. Many were from the traditional wellspring of missionary activity in the northeastern United States, with undergraduate degrees from Presbyterian liberal arts colleges like Wooster and Lafayette. This was a highly educated cadre, with divinity degrees from places such as Princeton and graduate degrees from equally prestigious institutions. Others grew up in the Rust Belt, Rocky Mountain region, and West Coast, and a few spoke Persian with an accent that betrayed their upbringing in the American South. Despite the regional variations and international setting, the Del Be Del network was a homogenous and predominantly white bunch of Americans that was privileged both in the United States and in Iran prior to the postcolonial era.54
The core of the Del Be Del network came from the three generations of American Presbyterians who served in Iran during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.55 The first generation, which included Arthur and Annie Boyce and Samuel and Mary Jordan, were, at the dawn of the twentieth century, successors to James Bassett and the founders of the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran. The Boyces were an exception, but most careerists from this period retired before the start of the Second World War. Still, the legacy of figures such as the Jordans and the Boyces loomed large over the Del Be Del network. The second generation—Sarah McDowell’s generation—drove the postwar evangelical errand. As such, readers of this book will become familiar with Leree Chase, Jane Doolittle, John and Ruth Elder, Commodore and Franke Fisher, Walter Groves, Frederic Taylor Gurney, Ralph Cooper Hutchison, William McElwee Miller, Edwin Wright, Herrick Young, and Cuyler Young. These and other individuals became missionaries in the 1920s and 1930s, and their professional lives ran through the 1960s. A third generation of evangelicals went to Iran during the Cold War era, and they included Robert and Carolyn Bucher, Charles Hulac, Richard and Mary Ann Irvine, and others such as Frank Woodward. They were the last cohort the PCUSA sent to Iran before the church’s reorganization in the United States in 1958 and the closure of the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran in 1965.
These three generations of Americans were “Persophiles” who genuinely loved Iran and felt a debt of gratitude to the country and its people.56 Del Be Del implies an emotional, almost telepathic connection between souls, and as much as missionaries aimed to change Iranians, the evangelical errand changed Americans, too. Richard Irvine, who for thirty years worked in Tehran as an international educator, found that “it has been our students who transformed what might have been ordinary schooling into a humane, affectionate and loving community.” That, so late in life, Irvine understood his Iranian community in relation to Christian Gospels and Persian poetry, indicates how international influence cut in multiple directions and reached beyond collectivities to affect individuals.57 For people like Irvine and McDowell, Iran became a love affair. On one occasion, McDowell applied Nathan Hale’s dictum to her birth-country: “I regret that I had only one life to give to Iran.”58 On another she cried: “Well, that’s Iran! Once you fall in love with her you never get over it.”59 This was American Persophilia in the mid-twentieth century.
It was also a form of “heart Christianity.”60 The “pious passion” of Roman Catholics and American Protestants, on the one hand, and Shia Muslims, on the other, has been documented and compared by scholars.61 Contrary to the Presbyterian reputation in the United States for having churches “so cold you could skate down the aisle,” there was another side to the Del Be Del network.62 While not true for all Presbyterians, so-called heart Christianity was powerful among evangelicals “because of their understanding of faith as born in an intimate and emotional connection to God.” And if evangelical Christianity was often emotional, the missionary endeavor was more intense. As a team of scholars explained: “The intimate nature of the contact required for the achievement of missionary goals,” which prioritized the “individual emotional experience” in relation to larger collectivities, had a profound impact on those involved.63 For American Christians in the Middle East, the experience was particularly powerful.
Americans blanketed the globe, but evangelicals believed their destiny in the “Bible lands” was “more manifest than was the American move toward the West Coast.”64 While some missionaries worked in Palestine, the Ottoman Empire, and, after the First World War, its successor states, others went to Iran.65 Into the 1960s, well after Americans began to use other terms to describe Iran’s neighborhood, evangelicals placed “Persia” on the edge of the “Biblical East.” This was because tales about Medes and Maji, the “wise men” allegedly present at Christ’s birth, and the Persian king, Cyrus, who liberated the Jews from captivity in Babylon, were embedded in Abrahamic textual traditions.66 To evangelicals, Iran’s “biblical and classical heritage” served multiple purposes. According to the scholar Hamid Dabashi, one was to “conquer and control,” and another was “to borrow and expand metaphors for their own political, moral, and intellectual reasons and purposes.” It is impossible to separate the two, as missionary imaginings served intrinsic and instrumental purposes and were mapped onto the geographies of US global power in the twentieth century. In the fantasies of previous centuries, the “Persian pedigree” of civilizational linkage figures was irrelevant, but the Iranian setting was foundational for evangelicals during the Cold War.67 They invoked biblical tropes about Iran as the “home of Queen Esther” and celebrated classical Persian thinkers such as Avicenna, thus opening the way for other Americans and Iranians to enter their circle.68
However, the Del Be Del network’s “love” for Iran was conditional love, reserved for Iranians who supported their evangelical vision for the Middle East. Expressions of the “heart” and invocations of “love” were embedded in the paternalistic worldview of mission work and the power structures of the modern world. In the language of hearts and minds, the Del Be Del network believed that “a change of heart is the only thing that will change the world.”69 This was a reference to religious conversion and the world’s acceptance of Christianity. Theirs was, therefore, an evangelical manifestation of what the scholar Vincente Rafael has called “white love.” It “conjoin[ed] love and discipline” and, in the context of US relations with the Philippines, “was meant to ennoble the colonizer,” as it at once liberated and subjugated the colonized. Whether manifest in its sacred or secular form, in colonial or commonwealth contexts, in the Philippines or in Iran, the American mission was “deemed a moral imperative,” fulfilled only when the “other” reciprocated that love by accepting “the compassionate embrace of the United States.”70 To members of the Del Be Del network, it appeared that Pahlavi Iran had, in fact, embraced them. At the dawn of the 1960s, they boasted that Iran was “the land of the ancient Wise Men and the modern land of rapid social change.”71
Understanding the Del Be Del network as a socio-affective community does not overlook its relationship to power.72 In fact, the socio-affective framework underscores the Del Be Del network’s embeddedness in global power structures. Indeed, the Presbyterian Mission was a manifestation of “Cold War Orientalism” and an extension of the American empire, despite the fact that its members would have understood their errand within “narratives of anticonquest … produced within a sentimental framework.” The heart-to-heart discourse was a kind of sentimentalism that, to borrow from the scholar Christina Klein, involved emotional bonds with “others.” Those bonds were based on presumptions of “reciprocity and exchange” and universalist claims that were meant to transcend “a divide of difference,” such as nationality, religion, language, gender, race, ethnicity, or class. The Del Be Del network’s sentimentalism, which stemmed from a combination of Persophilia and heart Christianity, was a “complex cultural mode” that was “double-edged.” As Klein wrote about the broader phenomenon: “In forging emotionally satisfying bonds across the divides of difference and in providing access to another’s subjectivity, the sentimental could serve as an instrument for exercising power.”73
The Del Be Del network shared a mission in and a love for Iran. The scholar Adam Becker described American missionaries in nineteenth-century Iran as “an intimate group” whose “core” consisted of “a circle of friends, family members, and peers” united in the mission of transforming Iran “one heart at a time.”74 The same was true for American missionaries in twentieth-century Iran, as the multigenerational heart-to-heart discourse resonated on various emotional registers. The phrase Del Be Del—a Persian proverb and newsletter title—was a community moniker that encapsulated the feeling of the American errand to Iran.
Tehran to 1941
Tehran was the hub of the American errand to Iran. Prior to the Second World War, there were more Presbyterian Mission properties than US government installations in the Iranian capital. Three properties were most meaningful: Central Compound, the Hospital Compound, and the Alborz College campus. They triangulated the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran and were recognizable to generations of Americans and Iranians. However, their existence was threatened by Reza Shah, a military strongman and nationalist who came to power in a coup, founded the Pahlavi Dynasty in the mid-1920s, and directed a fifteen-year program of “authoritarian modernization.”75 Prior to the Anglo-Soviet invasion of 1941 and Reza Shah’s forced abdication, the Del Be Del network’s built environment was reoriented as the relationship between mission and place in Tehran was refitted for an era of Iranian nationalist ascendancy.
When the Qajar Dynasty declared its capital in the late eighteenth century, Tehran was a gated city of less than one square mile. A century later, the city into which James Bassett rode was surrounded by an octagonal wall with twelve gates and was approaching a population of 150,000 people. Reza Shah deposed the Qajars but kept their capital, and part of his program of authoritarian development in the 1920s and 1930s involved widening roads, demolishing city walls, and erasing evidence of the previous dynasty to make Tehran the symbol of “a new, secular, and thoroughly modern Iran.” By the end of his reign in 1941, Americans mused that Tehran had “reached the apartment house stage of civilization.” At that time, the city’s population was still measured in hundreds of thousands, but it mushroomed into the millions in the 1950s and 1960s. Population growth accelerated urban sprawl and elite migration into the foothills of the Alborz Mountains, and divisions based on nationality, politics, class, religion, and language accelerated dramatically during the 1970s. As the scholar Talinn Grigor found, in the mid-twentieth century, “the spatial segregation brought about by the north-south socioeconomic polarity had been firmly established.”76
Tehran was an unequal and cosmopolitan city whose built environment reflected the priorities of the Pahlavis and the city’s residents.77 As the modernism of the shahs merged with Iran’s integration into the world system, Americans watched as the cityscape took on “the weirdest combination of East and West.”78 Often conflated with tradition and modernity, “these two extremes could interact and reconcile in a creative way” to produce what one scholar termed “space-in-between.”79 Americans from the time would have agreed. “We can hardly imagine ourselves in the Orient,” a missionary couple wrote, “as we walk over the concrete and asphalt streets, dodge automobiles, and look at the many colored neon signs along the four-story business fronts.”80 Scholars often frame this hybrid built environment in terms of government and architectural planning, with some writing about a “world city.”81 More important, however, were the ways in which the city’s streets, sidewalks, and structures were part of an “enacted environment.” To borrow from scholars of urban history, Americans in Tehran contributed to the “production of space,” or the processes by which “the city milieu shapes identities, fosters certain kinds of politics, and exhibits the myriad cultural influences carried by its inhabitants.”82
Members of the Del Be Del network understood themselves in relation to Tehran’s built environment. They observed that, prior to the vast expansion and growing inequities of the 1970s, there were “three bands … running from west to east … and dividing the whole city into three sections.” The central section was “a broad belt out of the center of the metropolis,” where one could find the traditional middle classes, the more pious residents of the city, and the bazaar. This area was not open to foreign missionaries. Then there was South Tehran, an impoverished area that housed the poor and absorbed migrants who, for various reasons, sought a new life in the capital. The old north, which by the 1970s had become the city’s downtown, was, at mid-century, home to “the upper class of society with a generous sprinkling of … foreigners.” The missionaries acknowledged that, “It is here that all our mission institutions and homes are found,” and “where practically all our missionary work has been done.”83
To evangelicals, churches were the most important feature of Tehran’s built environment.84 There were churches in Iran before the Americans arrived. The Assyrian “Church of the East” traces its genealogy to the years immediately after Christ, but only remnants survived for Americans to encounter in northwest Iran in the 1830s.85 American proselytizing triggered a schism in Iranian Christendom, and some Assyrians began to break bread, hold meetings, and receive ordinations from American missionaries instead of from Assyrian priests. Assyrian evangelicals developed their own church structures; the first congregation dates to 1855 and the first presbytery to 1862. The final split between the Church of the East and the Assyrian Evangelical Church came in 1870. While early mission work was isolated to northwest Iran, the Presbyterian Mission that James Bassett opened in Tehran consecrated a church in 1876 to reach the city’s Armenians.86 Armenian Christianity is also nearly as old as Christianity itself, and while Iran’s Armenian population dates to seventeenth-century Isfahan, some moved to Tehran in 1788. In 1808, Armenians in Tehran opened the Church of Saint Thaddeus and Bartholomew, which was the first church of any kind in the capital. It was part of the Armenian Apostolic Church, which, like the Assyrian Church of the East, had its own language, institutions, religious endowments, and social structures.87 Still, as was the case with the Assyrians, a minority of Armenians broke with their church to become evangelicals. While the majority of Armenian and Assyrian Christians remained with their established churches, “Whatever results that Western missionaries had in Iran were in large part due to the Assyrians and Armenians.”88
The Presbyterian Mission chapel on Central Compound was the only Protestant house of worship in downtown Tehran until after the Second World War. In 1885, American evangelicals acquired “a piece of undeveloped desert land” in the Hassanabad neighborhood that was eventually enveloped by an expanding metropolis and known to generations as “Central Compound,” or simply “Central.”89 The five-and-a-half-acre property was purchased on behalf of the PCUSA’s Board of Foreign Missions in July 1885. Years later, the Presbyterian Mission acquired two adjoining acres, making the walled-in grounds just under eight acres in total. The first order of business was to construct a chapel, which opened in 1886, more than ten years after the start of the evangelical enterprise in the city. Eventually, Central Compound contained the chapel, along with residences and multipurpose structures that, over the years, housed local congregations, church and mission offices, dispensaries, schools, bookstores, libraries, and a Bible society. There was outdoor space with trees, and the main gate on the west side opened to a street called Qavam al-Saltaneh.90 The historic “one-way street” also hosted an Armenian church, a Jewish synagogue, and a Zoroastrian school, along with local shops, aristocratic homes, and government buildings.91 From Qavam al-Saltaneh, which means “support of the monarchy,” Central Compound was the headquarters of the Presbyterian Mission.92
However important churches were to the Presbyterian Mission, the Del Be Del network reached far more Iranians through hospitals. The Presbyterian Mission Hospital in Tehran opened in 1893 and was located two miles east of Central Compound, just off Jaleh Avenue on Kuche Marizkhaneh, or Hospital Alley. The missionaries purchased the five-acre compound in the mid-1880s. The money came from an American woman in Chicago, and the seller of “The Park” property was a top minister in the Qajar government. Construction began in 1889, according to the hospital building’s keystone. The building’s main corridor stretched to different wings that, on one side, resembled a small fortress, and ramps connected the ground and upper floors.93 The Hospital Compound was, in effect, a private garden “surrounded by high mud walls on all sides” and with “a large metal gate for an entrance.” There were, in the early years, other structures in addition to the hospital, including “two lovely old fashioned original mission homes.”94 Those homes were named after missionary doctors and known as the “McDowell House” and the “Blair House.”95 The Hospital Compound was a quiet refuge from the city, and generations of Americans enjoyed smelling the honeysuckle blossom in the springtime and seeing the “gorgeous splashes of purple and gold” flowers that sprouted in the garden plots that dotted the compound.96 Outside the walls were the boulevards of East Tehran, a socially and politically significant neighborhood just north of the parliament building, Sepahsalar Mosque, and Baharestan Square.97
For a half-century, the Hospital Compound marked the Presbyterian place in Tehran’s medical community. The “ministry of healing” made vital contributions to public health in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when American doctors hastened the practice and acceptance of modern medicine. During the interwar years, Philip McDowell directed the hospital and worked with doctors such as Edward Blair to offer specialized medical services.98 But their hospital was just one of many medical institutions in Iran.99 Reza Shah’s government opened hospitals and a medical college, which made foreign expertise less pressing. The exception was nursing education, and the most reputable Presbyterian nursing schools were in Tabriz and Tehran. Still, Presbyterian Mission hospitals stayed open in Hamadan, Kermanshah, Mashhad, Rasht, and Tabriz, in some cases until the 1970s. But not in Tehran. In the 1920s, more than one-third of all doctors in Iran were practicing in the capital city. The low demand for American doctors in Tehran was matched by a diminishing supply of medical missionaries from the United States. Consequently, the Presbyterian Mission Hospital in Tehran closed in 1942.100 Yet the Hospital Compound remained in Presbyterian hands until the end of the Pahlavi period, and it hosted Community School in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
The Presbyterian foray into Iranian higher education followed a different trajectory. At the end of the 1930s, there were approximately one hundred teachers and two thousand students at six mission schools in Iran, along with thousands of Iranian alumni in the PCUSA’s educational network.101 In Tehran, the Presbyterians ran Sage College for women, and the flagship institution for Iranian men was Alborz College. Alborz College occupied a forty-four-acre campus that was, when purchased in 1913, on the northern outskirts of the city. However, “before many years the city had grown in that direction and completely surrounded the property.” Construction on McCormick Hall dormitory, Albert Residence, and Bird House began during the First World War. In 1925, Rollestone Hall opened its doors. The benefactor was an Oklahoman, but the main academic building was “distinctly Persian.” When complete, it stood nearly 42 feet high and 315 feet long, with classrooms and offices surrounded by the library and auditorium on either wing. In the early 1930s, the liberal arts college added Moore Science Hall and a new dormitory, Lincoln Hall. The hope was that Rollestone Hall and, by extension, the campus of Alborz College, would “stand amongst the buildings of Persia in a class by itself.”102 The founder-president was Samuel Martin Jordan, who worked in Iran from 1898 to 1940.103
Alborz College existed for fifteen years from 1925 to 1940, a period of “triumphs and troubles” for American evangelicals.104 The triumph was that many missionaries began “to see dreams come true,” with the acquisition of new properties and the opening of institutions such as Alborz College.105 The trouble was Reza Shah’s nationalism. Prior to his reign, Iran’s uncoordinated education system gave the Presbyterians relative autonomy over their affairs. That changed in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1927–28, the shah mandated a uniform curriculum and banned Christian instruction except in ethics courses. In 1932, the government nationalized elementary schools and forced foreign schools to Persianize their names, hence, “Alborz” instead of “American.” In 1933, the Iranian government opened high schools, which pulled 20 percent of the student body out of the mission system. In 1934, the original Presbyterian Mission in Urmia was ordered closed.106 Then, on August 13, 1939, the Iranian government announced it would nationalize all foreign schools before the start of the fall semester, in two weeks.107
A flurry of emotionally laden diplomatic exchanges followed the decree. The “shocked and amazed” missionaries hoped to get “more consideration” than they received because they had “for over one hundred years … been giving their services.”108 Cornelius Van Engert, the US chargé d’affaires in Tehran, told Iran’s foreign minister that he “considered a fortnight’s notice to institutions which had for a hundred years unselfishly served Iran little short of outrageous,” and that neither he nor other Americans “would understand such brusqueness.”109 The State Department’s Near East chief spoke “with entire frankness” to the Iranian chargé in Washington about how “these courageous American citizens” had “rendered an unforgettable service” to the Iranian people “before Reza Shah was ever heard of.” To his mind, “when the time came for a termination of the century-long activities of my fellow countrymen in Iran the Iranians would come forward and thank the Americans generously for their outstanding services to the country … and wish them Godspeed.”110 Iran’s foreign minister responded that his government “did not wish to give the impression that it did not appreciate the services rendered by Americans in the days when Iran was unable to help herself.” Iranians “were most grateful,” but the time had come for “the unification of their national education system.”111
Reza Shah was a convincing man, but the Presbyterians were “unwilling to accept the reported desire of the Iranian Government as final.”112 A commission negotiated on behalf of the PCUSA’s Board of Foreign Missions with the Iranian government over whether the schools would close and, if so, for what compensation.113 In March 1940, Samuel Martin Jordan personally appealed to Reza Shah.114 The king was not moved, and 1939–40 was the last academic year for Alborz College. An agreement was reached on August 15, 1940, whereby the Iranian government paid 1.2 million dollars to the PCUSA’s Board of Foreign Missions for the properties in Tehran.115 Alborz College, Sage College, and other Presbyterian Mission schools for Iranian students shuttered that summer. With the schools closed, the missionaries found that “just about everybody who hasn’t moved to America this summer has moved to Central [Compound].”116 It seemed as if the evangelical errand in Tehran was over.
Then, in August 1941, the Soviet Union and Great Britain invaded Iran, occupied the country, and forced Reza Shah off the throne. With Reza Shah exiled, the British and Soviets put his young son, Mohammad Reza, on the throne on September 16, 1941.117 The United States soon joined the Allied occupation, and the State Department speculated that “a more liberal attitude toward foreign institutions is to be anticipated,” in part because “the present Shah received education abroad.”118 Seasoned missionaries had a similar read. “There is a new hope and a new freedom which is about as different from two months ago as anything could be,” one wrote. “It was something like this in the days of constitutional reforms.”119 The Presbyterian Mission survived its bout with early Pahlavi nationalism and remained anxiously embedded in Tehran’s built environment. Whatever the trouble with Reza Shah, the Del Be Del network was optimistic in the fall of 1941 because there was “a completely new deal in power.”120
Mission for My Country
The new deal was not President Franklin Roosevelt, but Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. The historian Michael Zirinsky found that, despite their uneasy relationship with Reza Shah, Presbyterian evangelicals held the Pahlavis, whose two shahs ruled Iran from the 1920s until 1979, in high esteem for various reasons. First, they favored the dynasty’s secular nationalist vision, believing that the stock of Christians and other religious minorities would rise with the exclusion of Islam from the public arena. The second reason was the nature of Pahlavi reforms. With the establishment of the University of Tehran and the unveiling of women in the mid-1930s, Americans saw their priorities enter the government agenda. The third reason stemmed from tropes of “oriental despotism” and the willingness to support authoritarianism in Tehran but not in Washington. The fourth related to the Calvinist “doctrine of the elect,” which led Presbyterians to interpret earthly developments as the outgrowth of God’s will. They took literally the Bible’s pronouncement to “render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.” Finally, foreigners could work in Iran, not because of divine grace, but because of the shah’s. “So long as they sought to evangelize Iran,” Zirinsky wrote, “they had no choice but to render unto the shah.”121 During the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, as another historian, Philip Hopkins, wrote, “American missions in Iran reached a high point.”122
Mohammad Reza Shah was friendly toward Americans and other foreigners in Iran. In this sense, the last shah resembled the Qajar-era kings and princes who, in the first place, issued the royal decrees that allowed foreign missionaries to enter Iran in the nineteenth century.123 Later that century, as Presbyterian activity expanded throughout the country’s north, Naser al-Din Shah, who ruled Iran for the last half of the nineteenth century and considered himself the “pivot of the universe,” endorsed the Presbyterian Mission’s school for girls in Tehran. With royal sanction, Christian schools were allowed, not only to exist in Iran, but, as the twentieth century began, to enroll Muslim students.124 These trends stalled late in the reign of Reza Shah but escalated under Mohammad Reza Shah. Educated in Switzerland and inclined toward partnerships with the “West,” the last shah affirmed Americans’ self-understanding of their errand to Iran. The shah repackaged exceptionalist tropes to assure Americans that their country “never tried to dominate us as the old imperialists did.” He also spoke of “Westernization and modernization” as “our welcome ordeal,” and he wrote of the “natural attraction” that Iranians had toward the United States.125 This was one of the many reasons why the shah abandoned Iran’s diplomatic tradition of nonalignment to ally with the United States during the Cold War.126
The shah’s “mission,” or mamuriyat, was, as the title of his memoir suggested, “for my country.”127 An American who knew him wrote of the shah that, “to fulfill his ‘mission’ ” was “to restore the greatness of Iran.”128 This was a difficult task during the Second World War and Cold War because the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union vied for influence in Iran. Still, in the Pahlavi period, Iranians were “raised on a historical diet of heroes … with strong religious associations and a sense of mission,” as royals pointed to the Achaemenid Dynasty (550–330 BCE) and other ancient, pre-Islamic iconography to claim that “Iranian kings, as personified by Cyrus, were … a key part of God’s plan.”129 The Pahlavi mamuriyat was quite distinct from Christian mission and Islamic dawa, but it was religious.130 Mohammad Reza Shah understood himself as a “modern mystic.”131 As the shah explained in his memoir:
[F]rom the time I was six or seven, I have felt that perhaps there is a supreme being who is guiding me.… I often reflect, if I am driven—or perhaps I should say supported—by another force, there must be a reason. I know that some supposedly sophisticated people would be much irritated by such a notion, but.… Englishmen are not ashamed to say, “God save the Queen!” and Americans inscribe on their coins, “In God We Trust.” Long after I had emerged from childhood … my … faith has continued strong within me.132
Whether because he overcame childhood sicknesses or survived political violence, the shah “maintained a near lifelong belief in a watchful and protecting God who had decreed his success in carrying out a divine mission.” According to Marvin Zonis’s psychoanalytic biography, “The Shah’s claim to a mystical, divine force” was, along with his relationship to the United States, a “source of the psychic strength which he drew on for ‘doing’ Shah.”133 Perhaps, but it was also similar to the fantasies of other so-called great men about receiving divine protection or guidance, and to American exceptionalist claims that the United States had “greatness thrust upon it.”134
The shah’s mission was also part of the political theater that sustained his authoritarian rule for four decades.135 Written decades after the 1979 revolution, Abbas Milani’s biography of the shah revealed a complex figure. Yet, as Milani noted, the idea that the shah was “a man on a divine and historic mission to save his country” was always part of his “political persona.”136 It was part of the theater that, as the Kremlinologist Robert Tucker explained about Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, provided a useful mechanism for authoritarian control.137 Notwithstanding the manipulation and misappropriation of ideologies, most of the shah’s biographers determined that he was, to some extent, a true believer. As Zonis wrote: “He repeated it too often to too many diverse audiences—Iranian as well as foreign—for it to be merely a political device.”138 Others witnessed the shah’s mission, which defined “Pahlavism” in its Iranian and American environs.139 Sycophants at court in Tehran repeated the claim about “the Shah’s constant missionary struggle,” and the idea was propagated everywhere from the state media to public ceremonies to buttress the Pahlavi “myth of imperial authority.”140 Some Americans were skeptical of illiberal leadership and monarchical pomp, but the US government reported that the shah’s self-conception was that of “a leader with a divinely blessed mission” to achieve socioeconomic development at home and power on the world stage.141
Despite his many shortcomings, American evangelicals were fond of Mohammad Reza Shah because of the perceived position of Christians and other religious minorities during his reign. The Iranian Constitution of 1906 designated Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians as “protected people,” or “people of the book.”142 But like all aspects of the Iranian Constitution, the shah chose which provisions to enforce and ignore, with mixed results for religious minorities. An Israeli historian of Iran described the late Pahlavi period as “the ‘Golden Age’ of Iranian Jewry.”143 While legal protections and a homogenized nationalist imaginary eroded previous barriers to equality, social discrimination persisted, as did cases of persecution, most horrifically against the Bahais.144 The “two faces of the era of the shahs” were seen by religious minorities in Pahlavi Iran.145 But American evangelicals saw only one face of the shah. In addition to the security that came with royal decrees and international treaties, they found solace in the perception that late Pahlavi Iran was a golden age for Iranian Christians. American evangelicals, Presbyterian or otherwise, endorsed the authoritarian Pahlavi system. And because of Mohammad Reza Shah’s relationship with the United States, “he came to believe that he was the agent not only of the Lord, but also of the world’s most powerful state.”146
With American support, the shah’s mission became manifest in the 1960s in the form of the White Revolution. Passed through a referendum in January 1963, the original six-point agenda included land reform, women’s suffrage, nationalization of forests, privatization of state-owned factories, profit sharing for industrial workers, and a literacy campaign.147 The White Revolution eventually included seventeen planks that dealt with everything from education and health care to infrastructural development and social security, and it resembled global initiatives ranging from US President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society to statist developmentalism in Latin America and East Asia.148 Despite the socioeconomic transformations wrought by the White Revolution, its political failures contributed to the collapse of the Iranian monarchy in 1979.149
Notwithstanding its obvious failures, scholars have situated the White Revolution across the interpretive spectrum.150 At the time, Pahlavi loyalists in Iran and the media in the United States hailed it as the brainchild of a purportedly progressive and modernizing monarch.151 Ali Ansari, a scholar of Iranian studies, challenged this view and placed the White Revolution in the context of Iran’s domestic politics. In addition to the shah, various Iranian actors were involved, but it was, given the absence of political reform, a monarchical “strategy for legitimation.”152 Another argument is that the impetus involved Cold War imperatives. The historian James Goode argued that the Kennedy administration pressured the Iranian government to introduce socioeconomic reforms, only to be politically outmaneuvered by the shah.153 More recently, historians of the “global Cold War” have traced the transnational currents that flowed into the White Revolution and, in the 1970s, the so-called Great Civilization.154 This book sees the White Revolution, and the American place in it, as a transnational affair that was reflective of larger trends relating to the position of religious minorities in Pahlavi Iran, the midcentury push for national development, the internationalization of education during the Cold War, and the cultural politics of the US-Iran alliance.
During the era of the White Revolution, the Presbyterian Mission had important Iranian partners, some of whose names appeared in the Del Be Del newsletter. First and foremost were Iranian Protestants, mainly preachers and church administrators such as Jonathan Marzeki and Hassan Dehqani-Tafti, leaders of the Presbyterian and Anglican churches, respectively.155 The White Revolution’s developmentalist ethos and myriad programs created outlets for community organizers and literacy specialists such as Amir Birjandi, and for Sattareh Farmanfarmaian, the godmother of Iranian social work.156 Educational opportunities also expanded during the late Pahlavi period.157 In that context, female educators innovated in the classroom and broke professional boundaries in Tehran. Nayereh Ebtehaj-Samii, an Iran Bethel graduate and a Community School teacher, broke a political glass ceiling when she was elected to the Iranian parliament.158 America’s other friends in high places included Hossein Ala, Isa Sadiq, Sadeq Rezazadeh Shafaq, Hassan Taqizadeh, and others from academia and government.159 These Iranians were, as Richard Irvine described Hykon Sahakian, his longtime assistant, “as dedicated and as missionary minded as regular appointees of our Church.”160 The Presbyterian Mission had the prerequisite blessing of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, but more important to the Del Be Del experience was the personal friendship and professional support of these and other “eminent Persians.”161
Through the evangelical errand, ideologies of mission migrated across imperial and transnational circuits to became manifest in mid-twentieth-century Tehran. Once there, the natural, built, and human environments of “place” conditioned the meaning of mission and feeling of the errand. The American errand to Iran was driven by elements of religious and national mission, based on the archetypes of John Calvin, Jane Addams, and Woodrow Wilson. In this context, the Del Be Del network emotionally navigated a professed “love” for Iran, managed institutions in downtown Tehran, and built relationships with Americans and Iranians. With Iranian and American support, the Del Be Del network’s mission had myriad manifestations. There were differences between the religious, developmental, educational, and associational forms of evangelical witness, but each contained strains of what this book refers to as the old and new missions. The Presbyterian Mission was eclectic, and it was independent from, yet interdependent with, the American global mission and Pahlavi national mamuriyat. In this sense, the Presbyterian Mission was subject to the push of American globalism and pull of Iranian nationalism. The following chapters examine the parallel and at times intersecting histories of Presbyterians and Americans in Tehran, and how their missions related to Iranian history during the Pahlavi period.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.