Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,154

This is the grave of Richard Patterson.

I don’t know very much about Richard Patterson. I hadn’t even heard of him when I visited this cemetery. But I am also up for a chatty grave. And when I see a listing of ambassadorships that include Yugoslavia and Guatemala from a guy active in World War II and the immediate Cold War period, well, that’s going to get my antenna up. So let’s see what we can find out here.

Patterson was born in Omaha in 1886. He grew up pretty well off. His father was a lawyer. Patterson wanted a bit of adventure after high school so he set off for the gold mines of the Black Hills, which by that time were pretty much owned by George Hearst and other capitalists. Of course nothing much came of that, so he went back home and enrolled in the University of Nebraska. He became a mining engineer, eventually getting a degree in the subject from Columbia University in 1912. Interestingly, he was a proud member of the Western Federation of Miners while working in the mines and maintained it for years, which was a pretty radical union. He then volunteered as a private for Jack Pershing’s poorly run invasion of Mexico to go get Pancho Villa. Then came World War I and he was an officer in the engineers, eventually becoming a major. DuPont hired him and he worked in China for awhile as an engineer.

Patterson moved to New York in the 20s and was successful. He was a liberal Republican who had friends in both parties and through the New York elite. He was a prominent engineer, fine, but he was also Commissioner of Corrections from 1927-32. Then NBC made him an executive VP. I’m not entirely sure why, but it’s not really that important. He was offered a slot at the head of a fusion ticket for mayor of New York in 1933, though he turned that down.

In 1938, Patterson became Undersecretary of Commerce. He went back to the private sector in 1940, working in radio. But in 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt asked him to be ambassador to Yugoslavia. This was of course a touchy time. The Nazis were declining and Yugoslavia was going to be an independent nation. But the nationalist leader was Tito and he was a commie. Patterson hated the idea of communists. I wonder how he squared that with his WFM membership. Probably didn’t make the connection at all. Thinking that it was impossible to be a commie and not under Stalin’s thumb, despite the fact that Tito was in fact the proof that this possible, there was a lot of tension between the new ambassador and the Marshal.

Then in 1947, Patterson was named ambassador to Guatemala. In 1950, Guatemala had elections. This was a key moment in that nation’s history. Ruled ever since independence by a small group of corrupt, violent, and extremely racist elites that were happy to serve the desires of United Fruit and other western investors whenever they weren’t serving their own interests of ruling the indigenous majority like slavemasters, the people of Guatemala had enough. In the mid 40s, Guatemalans had overthrown the vile dictator Jorge Ubico, who was of course completely supported by the Roosevelt administration as part of his Good Neighbor Policy, which was not really about being a good neighbor but rather about propping up dictators like Ubico or Somoza in Nicaragua or Batista in Cuba rather than sending in the American military to enforce corporate power instead. In 1945, they elected Juan Jose Arevalo as president. Despite many coup attempts from an outraged military and elite class, Arevalo not only survived as president for five years, but he chose to not run for reelection to establish democratic principles in Guatemala. So in the 1950 election, he supported Jacobo Arbenz, who won an overwhelming victory.

Patterson was horrified by Arbenz. He was sure Arbenz was a commie. Now, it’s important to remember how outright stupid American foreign policy was in these years. This nation of dumb ignorant clucks who understood not a goddamn thing about communist or the rest of the world was about to start raising hell wherever it wanted based on its fear of communism. Obviously Vietnam–a place where there was almost no trade with the U.S. and where Americans had almost no experts and almost no one who spoke the language–is the most disastrous example of this….for Americans. So he actively supported American intervention to stop this horror. Let me be clear, Arbenz was just a nationalist campaigning on land reform. United Fruit wasn’t even using its Guatemalan plantations for banana production anymore because of plant diseases that had decimated the area’s plantations. But the principle of violating the sacred private property rights of American corporations, well my God!!!!

As a point of complete trivia, it seems that while in Guatemala, Patterson may have created the Duck Test. I find this dubious, as there is some evidence of people using this term before. But he stated, in his completely false argument that Arbenz was a communist:

Suppose you see a bird walking around in a farm yard. This bird has no label that says ‘duck’. But the bird certainly looks like a duck. Also, he goes to the pond and you notice that he swims like a duck. Then he opens his beak and quacks like a duck. Well, by this time you have probably reached the conclusion that the bird is a duck, whether he’s wearing a label or not.

In any case, it was shortly after this that the Duck Test became a thing in the American lexicon. And it was based on complete bullshit. Again, Arbenz was no communist. He was a nationalist, but a man like Patterson could not see that at all. But Patterson was so over the top that he fled Guatemala because he had death threats. I don’t really know how legitimate those threats were, but in the era of the Truman Doctrine–communism must be stopped everywhere despite American policymakers being too stupid and incurious to understand anything going on in these places–I imagine Patterson was doing all kinds of awful shit. And of course it would be Eisenhower and the Dulles boys who would get rid of Arbenz and then turn Guatemala into the unstable violent place it remains today. Thanks America!

In any case, Truman took care of Patterson. He gave him an even sweeter position–Ambassador to Switzerland. Rough gig. He stayed there until 1953, when he retired. His buddy Robert Wagner, then mayor of New York, gave him a job as chairman of the Mayor’s Reception Committee, which I guess had to do with visiting dignitaries. Probably a good man for that job since he knew everyone. Later, he was Commissioner of Public Events in New York.

Patterson died in 1966. He was 80 years old.

Richard Patterson is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia. And this is why I appreciate chatty graves. Never even heard of this guy and look, I got to talk about one of my favorite topics, America fucking over Guatemala.

If you would like this series to visit other ambassadors to Guatemala, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Rudolf Schoenfeld, who replaced Patterson, is in Washington, D.C. We’ve covered the vile scumbag John Peurifoy before. Then came Norman Armour, who is in Princeton, New Jersey. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.