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The most obvious threat to his throne came from Iran's feudal countryside, where almost all the land, including thousands of rural villages, was owned by a class of rich landlords who called themselves "the Thousand Families." Their power, enforced by their own private police and condoned by traditionalist mullahs (Moslem religious leaders), was all but unlimited. They exacted as much as 80% of their tenant-farmers' crops, "supervised" every election, then used their control of Parliament to steal the government blind. One landlord, who owned 59 villages in Azerbaijan, regularly declared an annual income of only $1,200.
At first, the Shah tried to loosen the landlords' hold by persuasion and personal example. He turned over the deeds to his own extensive royal estates to the tenants who had been farming them, in hopes that the Thousand Families would follow suit. They did not. Then he sent two land-reform bills to Parliament, which promptly amended both bills into uselessness. "Finally," the Shah recalls today, "I became so exasperated that I decided we would have to dispense with democracy and operate by decree."
In May of 1961, he did just that. To help him rule by decree, he filled his Cabinet with a group of earnest technocrats who called themselves "the Progressive Center," set them to work fleshing out his own blueprints for "the White Revolution," a bloodless, coordinated program of reform and development. The White Revolution originally consisted of six basic commandments that have since been increased to ten; they range from compensation of the landlords with shares in government-owned industries to electoral reform and nationalization of forests and water resources. Together, they form the guiding principles of the Shah's government, almost a substitute for the nation's outdated 1906 constitution.
The first basic step was land reform, and the Shah was tough about it. Operating by timetable, he broke up the great estates, paying off the dispossessed landlords with shares in new government industries and distributing the land to their former tenants at nominal prices, with payment terms of up to 30 years. He tolerated no delay. When a land-reform surveyor was murdered on a rural road in Pars, he stepped up the timetable in the district, showed up to hand out the deeds in person. Now all but complete, the land-reform program has freed 98% of Iran's 50,000 villages from landlord control.
Incredible Ignorance. His other basic measures have been generally just as successful. The Shah decreed compulsory profit-sharing (of 20% of net profits) for Iranian factory workers, a step that inspired an immediate increase in productivity and virtually eliminated strikes. He created a "Literacy Corps," whose khaki-clad volunteers have built thousands of schools, taught a million Iranians to read and write. The ignorance of rural Iran was incredible. One village elder, watching his first movie, ordered a feast prepared for all the actors, convinced that they could somehow step out of the screen and join him for a chelo kebab. In another village the audience wrecked the screen by giving chase to the villain of a Hollywood western.