B 1,370,335 1 : ARTES 1817 SCIENTIA VERITAS LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 2 FLUNTOUR UMUNT TUEBOR SI QUÆRIS PENINSULAM AMŒNAM CIRCUMSPICE T • My $3 143 1234 .B37 Mexico An Interpretation BY CARLETON BEALS AUTHOR OF "Rome or DEATH" NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH, INC. MCMXXIII COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY B. W. HUEBSCH, INC. PRINTED IN U. S. A. PREFACE My first visit to Mexico was made in August, 1918, and lasted more than two years. During the first year, I traveled by foot, horseback, or train through fifteen of the Mexican states, in many places living for a time with the Indians. In Chihuahua and Durango, I passed through Villa districts; in Morelos, through part of Zapata's kingdom-at a time when both these rebels were in open arms against the Carranza Gov- ernment. In Mexico City proper, I was employed in various educational and literary capacities and have taught in the Mexican schools. For three months prior to the fall of Carranza I was employed as in- structor to members of his staff. I witnessed the Obregón revolution and followed closely the devel- opments during the first six months of the De la Huerta Administration. The material on Spain was collected as a result of nearly a year's residence in that country. It has been my good fortune to know personally many prominent officials connected with both the Carranza and Obregón régimes. For the more recent material, gathered since my return to the country, I wish to thank the various governmental departments, particularly of Education, of Commerce, Industry, and Labor, and of Agriculture, for generously proportion- ing data. Mr. Roberto Haberman, Chief of the Preface Department of Languages, has given me many valu- able suggestions and criticisms and has assisted me to meet prominent officials. Señor Luis N. Morones, head of the Regional Labor Confederation of Mexico and of the national munitions factories, has looked over the chapters on Labor and Reconstruction and has assisted me in securing information. Señor Vitel, author of an official text-book on cooking for the Mexican technical schools, has assisted me with budget-material for the chapter on the Condition of the Lower Classes. Señor Carlos Bedal kindly made suggestions for the chapter on the Agrarian Problem. For material on the woman's movement I am indebted to Señorita Elena Torres, head of the Centro Fem- inista and in charge of supplying the children of the Federal District with breakfasts. Miss Harriet Mann kindly read and criticized a number of chap- ters. Above all I am indebted to the patient assist- ance, criticism, and sympathy of my wife, Lillian. CARLETON BEALS. Mexico City. CONTENTS PART I. BACKGROUND I. THE INDIAN HERITAGE, 3 II. THE SPANISH HERITAGE, 18 III. THE POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF INDEPENDENCE, 28 PART II. RISE OF THE MEXICAN PEOPLE IV. THE REVOLUTIONS OF JUÁREZ AND MADERO, 39 V. THE RISe and Fall of Carranza, 53 VI. THE REVINDICATING REVOLUTION, 69 VII. RECONSTRUCTION, 75 PART III. THE SOCIAL FABRIC VIII. SOLVING THE AGRARIAN PROBLEM, 89 IX. THE CONDITION OF THE LOWER CLASSES, 115 X. RISE OF THE MEXICAN PROLETARIAT, 131 XI. THE MIDDLE CLASS, 145 XII. THE ARISTOCRACY, 151 XIII. THE CHURCH, 162 Contents XIV. THE MILITARY CLASS, 179 XV. THE WOMEN, 188 XVI. THE MEXICAN AS HE IS, 200 PART IV. THE FOREIGN INVASION XVII. THE FOREIGNER, 217 XVIII. AMERICAN CAPITAL, 232 XIX. THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT, 248 PART I BACKGROUND MEXICO CHAPTER I THE INDIAN HERITAGE THE difference between the conquest of Anglo-Saxon and Latin America is marked, illuminating, significant. The English colonists, largely drawn from the middle and working classes, fled from religious and political persecutions to found new homes. The Spanish con- querors, recruited from the nobility, the cavaliers, the feudal riff-raff of the empire, came to discover treasure, with little intention of remaining in the subjugated. lands. The Puritans, the Quakers, brought with them fervent, unshakable religious convictions branded so deep upon their souls by persecution that in many cases those same convictions mold the living creeds of their descendants to this day. The debonair cavalier—any man according to the old Castilian statutes who could rake up enough money to buy horse, armor and weap- ons-used his religion and the name of his devout Catholic rulers as a loose cloak to conceal the bandit- knife beneath. The New Englanders found a harsh cruel climate, a barren inhospitable shore more pitiless than the persecutions they had escaped and demanding the most arduous toil and perseverence to wrest from it a bare subsistence. The Conquistadores encoun- 3 4 Mexico-An Interpretation tered a genial climate resembling that of the home- land; while in Mexico and Peru they preyed upon the richest, most civilized portions of the New World; and if the Conquest was at first bitter and dangerous, it held forth the glamor of bold adventure and speedy fabulous enrichment rather than the prospect of un- remitting struggle. The Northerners brought their wives, their children, and their meagre world posses- sions. The Southerners were adventurers, bringing but their armor and machines of conquest, their fear- lessness and their devilry. The former exterminated the Indian; the latter mingled promiscuously with na- tive women, leaving a trail of unfortunate mestizos. In the one case English culture remained English cul- ture, slightly modified. In the other, Spanish culture was superficially imposed by a colonial government upon a subject race, or—with the exception of the more serious and enduring civilizing efforts of the early priests was scattered accidentally by the wastrels of the empire. Thus the seeming unity of Mexican nationalism is due to the veneer of Spanish language and Spanish in- stitutional life; but actually the resultant survival of the Indian has complicated the Mexican social order, accentuating racial and class cleavages-creating an unwelded, heterogeneous population imbued with a deep hatred of foreign oppressors and repeatedly up- torn by internal rapacity and violence. Mexico is the product of many peoples, many cultures, many epochs -and the synthesis is not yet. Nevertheless, in spite of ethnic and social confu- sion, a distinct cultural and racial type is slowly emerg- The Indian Heritage er ing. This type results from the mixture of the two great race-stocks, Iberian and Indian, and is called Mestizan. Writes Luis G. Urbina in his La Vida Literaria de México: Physiologically we (Mexicans) are neither the one nor the other; rather are we a well-differentiated ethnic type, partak- ing of the characteristics of both progenitory races. Both strive to co-exist, even strive against each other in our organ- isms for survival. To the Sancho Panzan jollity and the Quixotic delirium are united in our hearts the sadness of the Indian, the ancestral submissiveness of a subject race, and the gentleness of the aborigine. And if we are Mexicans in life, we are Mexicans in speech, in dreams, and in song. But, though this type is evolving, the unity is not yet as marked as Señor.Urbina would have us believe. The mestizos number but forty-three per cent. of the population, and fifteen or twenty per cent. of these live. in the Indian fashion. Thirty-eight per cent. are still Indian in blood and custom, two million of whom do not know Spanish or refuse to speak it. In all, eighty- five per cent. of the people are Indian or mixed, with Indian habits predominating. Ethnic evolution has been retarded, perhaps fortu- nately, by a lack of unity in both conquerors and con- quered. In Spain, the Catalonian, Castilian, Basque and Moorish elements have by no means blended into one outstanding type. Among the Mexican Indians. the ethnic and culture fissions were even more pro- nounced. In 1864 Dr. Manuel Orozco y Berra classi- fied the natives according to fifty-two distinct lan- guages. Later investigations have reduced these fig- 6 Mexico-An Interpretation ures to twelve, possibly ten, widely separated lin- guistic families. Authorities declare that fragments. of every Amerind tribe are to be found in Mexico- fifteen such in the state of Oaxaca alone. The large number of unrelated tongues indicates how migration after migration wedged into the Mexican cornucopia; how the irregular topography, abrupt mountain chains, hidden valleys, caused the stream of peoples to be broken up, widely disseminated, and racially confused. These same physiographic irregularities operate to - this day towards separatism; and, in part, explain the political semi-independence of Baja California and Yucatán; the wherefore of military revolts in Sonora. In spite of this ethnic confusion two-thirds of the modern Indian population sprang from four races: the Nahuas, including the bloodthirsty Aztecs, who still occupy the western slope of the Sierra Madres, the Federal District, and the central plateau states; the Otomis, north of the Nahuas on the plateau; the Mix- tecas and Zapotecas on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; and the Maya Quichés of Yucatán and Central Amer- ica. Three of these races: the Nahuas, Mixtecas and Zapotecas, and the Mayas, possessed settled civiliza- tions of relatively high order and a developed sense of social relationship and nationality, with the result that, together with the Yaquis in the northwest, they now contribute significantly to the political disorder. Prior to Cortez, local patriotism had just been in- flamed by Aztec aggression. This internecine antag- onism, while it enabled Cortez to conquer, endured as a greedy cancer in the social organism, to become one of the most potent dissolving forces of to-day. The Indian Heritage 7 Greater than the Indian's love for the patria grande often burns his love for the patria chica. The pacific Maya, for example, hates the Aztecs, the Zapotecas and the Mixtecas. He loathes the for- eigner-especially the white man. He considers him- self a citizen of an invisible Mayan State. A Yuca- tecan grows furiously indignant if you call him a Mexi- can. An outsider cannot safely penetrate into Quin- tana Roo without the permission of the local caciques. These people cling to their historical traditions and racial consciousness. Thus Yucatán, with the best or- ganized social life of all the Mayan districts, has be- come Mexico's Ireland. Every administrative act of the centre is suspiciously scrutinized and if possible con- strued as an aggression. The fact that Yucatán served as a penal colony during the Díaz régime did not disrupt the Mayan race-fabric; Carranza's stiff- necked attempt to dominate peninsular affairs proved one of the most unhappy stories in Mexico's tragic history. The Mayan population of Mexico is like the Slav population once confined in Austria; it wishes to unite with Central America as the latter wished to unite with Serbia. For a century the Mayas have been plotting to break away. The Obregón revolution barely anticipated the secession of Yucatán, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, Chiapas, and Campeche. Those states demand self-determination, and only force or fear holds them a part of the country. The day a strong united Central American republic is created, the Ser- bian analogy will be completed, and the problem will become acute. The Zapotecas and Nahuas possess a similar group 8 Mexico-An Interpretation loyalty. Part of the animus behind the Zapata re- volt was the "race question." The Zapatista leaders immediately demanded of the Obregón régime, polit- ical autonomy for the Morelian Indians. And the modern Aztecs cherish the memory of the glorious Montezuma days, and dream of their nation's revival. Many a common name as well as the chatter of the house-servants attest the virility of the old idiom. Díaz statutes laid penalties upon Aztec customs, Aztec money, and Aztec festivals; while not so many years ago, the Church abolished certain holidays and prac- tices because they helped to keep alive the militant love for the old empire. And this same passion for the patria chica is the heritage of the Yaquis-the ter- rible Apaches of Sonora a race, savage, horribly cruel, uncompromising, which, ever since Díaz wrenched away its valley lands and shipped thousands of its people to Yucatán slave-camps, has never been subdued. Thus the love for the aboriginal nation is still a motivating factor in politics. It has wrecked more than one régime. And it is significant that the most festering sores of discord during obstinate Carranza rule were the Indian centers: Morelos, Oaxaca, Mi- choacán, Yucatán, and the Sonora Yaqui districts. The old love of the race and the soil! If under the vigorous centralization of Díaz and during the last ten years of marching and countermarching, these early racial barriers have been somewhat lowered, Indianism itself has taken deeper root. The hundred years of Mexican independence are the history of the rise of Indianism. Mexico's Lincoln, Benito Juárez of the The Indian Heritage 9 'fifties, who founded modern Mexico, was a pure- blooded Zapotec Indian and appealed to the Indians as Indians. Many a brigand has gained his following by an appeal to race-prejudice. But recall the ter- rible bandit-chief of the Sierra de Alicia, also a full- blooded Indian and the idol of Nayarit, who declared upon taking command of his army of 18,000 men in December 1873: "The indigenous race will never re- cover all its dignity, all its honor, all its lands, all its wealth; will never fulfil the Indian dream until . . . in all the confines of this broad Mexican land there re- mains not a single living white man!" Since then In- dianism and social liberation have become synonymous, and during the past ten years of political experiment, the voice of the aborigines has become fully articulate, so that native leaders formulate the demands of native culture and liberty in creative rather than destructive terms. The ferocious Yaquis had become so world- conscious, so the story goes, as to declare war on Ger- many, and to-day this same untutored race provides the dependable elements for the military control of the leaders of the Revindicating Revolution. In the literature this Indianism finds expression as hatred of the Conquistadores. Bustamente, editor of the historian Itlizochitl, concludes a vigorous invective against the invaders by recommending that a monu- ment be erected where the tortured Cuatemoc was cap- tured, to be devoted to the "eternal execration" of the “detestable memory of those bandits." Mexico has no monument to Cortez, but it has a lofty memento mori of the man he tortured, an inspired bit of native art, where annual ceremonies revive the anger in the ΙΟ Mexico-An Interpretation common heart against the Spaniards and the eternal love of the Indian hero. Mexico's noblest traditions are in her Indian ancestors and Indian culture. Indian modes of living, institutions, and psychology have been assertive, yet to determine what has survived as an integral part of the national life is difficult. Per- haps, according to our standards, most of the Indians. in the past would be accounted rancorous, revengeful, suspicious of strangers, and uncommunicative. The Yaquis and Aztecs were cruel, and, though latent, this cruelty could be inflamed by military and religious fanaticism. That fanaticism often displayed itself in idolatry and human sacrifice-even cannibalism. And though these practices involved a great genesiac conception, the effect upon the popular psychology was tremendous and injurious. Picture the terrible sacri- fice in the reign of Ahuizotl at the completion of the lofty teocalli in Tenochtitlan. The first streaks of dawn disclosed, winding up the sides of the temple, a great procession, conducting war-captives to the piedra de sacrificios. At that huge block of convex jasper towered six priests with long matted locks, decked with green feathers and flowing in Medusa-like disorder over their black hieroglyphic-covered robes-awaiting their victims who, one by one, were sacrificed before the eyes of the dense, breathless mass below. priests would secure the head and limbs, while the sixth, clad in a blood-red cape, slit open the breast with a flinty razor, and, thrusting his hand into the wound, tore out the palpitating heart. With a mighty ges- ture it was held up toward the sun and then flung smok- Five The Indian Heritage II ing at the feet of the terrible snake-sheathed god, Huitzlipochtli, who reared his grotesque brutal form above the prostrated multitude. Every day until dark for four long days, every day until priests and stones were reeking with blood, the sacrifice continued. But while the Aztecs had much influence upon Mex- ico during subsequent centuries, they have not molded the life of the country as a whole; rather, having undergone the Conquest and been more exposed to Spanish and foreign influences, their social structure has been extensively disrupted, their physical and men- tal characteristics modified, and their stamina de- stroyed. The Nahuas of the capital are the dirtiest, most immoral, untrustworthy, and shameless Indians of the country. They retain neither their pride nor their courage; rather an inherent cruelty that is mani- fested in their amusements, their ritual, and their treatment of women. Other races and doubly so to-day-could be gen- erous, hospitable, and considerate, as well as proud, ambitious, and courageous. If we speak of the Mayas, Zapotecas, even of the non-Aztecan Nahuas, and dozens of other tribes, we must add that they were industrious, self-abnegating, honest, religious. To-day these two strands: volubility and taciturnity, meekness and arrogance, gentleness and brutality, sym- pathy and blood-thirstiness are inextricably inter- twined, and sometimes passionately battle in the same breast. And with them one invariably finds the worst bandit endowed with another trait which is truly In- dian-a profound mysticism born of a certain taciturn 12 Mexico-An Interpretation sadness, of a patient, fearing worship of the unknow- able universe-a mysticism too often shot through with oriental fatalism. Thus the Indians of New Spain, while having many characteristics in common, were as distinct in their psychology and social habits as the modern European nations. How can we say that the savageness, the cruelty, the war-like characteristics of the Yaqui rather than the peaceful, gentle, chaste, and honest character- istics of the Tarahumara have survived when both may be encountered on the modern highway? If we read of the terrible human sacrifices of the Aztecs, we should remember that the bloodthirstiness of this race so shocked the sensibilities of the other tribes in the Anahuac Valley that the Aztecs at the outset of their career were well-nigh exterminated, only a few fugi- tives escaping to the marshes of the Texcucan lake to found the famous Tenochtitlán, the modern Mexico. The Texcucans across the lake were a sturdy, indus- trious, cleanly, people of high morals, the fragments of whose literature reveal a loftiness of spirit com- parable to that of the inspired literature of any lan- guage. Even to-day the difference in the character of the towns and the people on the two sides of the lake is singularly striking. All these traits, good and bad, were the reflection of the leading native social systems. Religion and war were the two chief interrelated interests of those systems. Even to-day the Indian huts cluster about the base of the lofty pyramids of Teotihuacán, and the smoke from their roofs rises up in thin quaint in- cense as though the modern peon still worshiped at The Indian Heritage 13 those ancient mysteries which sprang from the tre- mendous religious afflatus of the old Toltec. Once, in Cholula, the religious capital of the Aztec empire, Cortez was able to count four hundred towers, while above them all he could see the undying fires on the great central pyramid of Quetzalcoatl. Everywhere in far Yucatán, the jungle may be seen wrapping its arms about the stone records of a vanished religion as though to drag them down into everlasting oblivion. Yet the spirit that burned in those ancient hearts and caused them to expend so much of their energy upon massive religious edifices and majestic ceremonies still burns in the breast of the modern sons, and indeed in few countries may be encountered such intrenched re- ligious zeal. In few places have native barbaric pomp and impressiveness dove-tailed so well into the elabo- rate Roman ritual. But push through a crowded church festival such as that of Santa Anita or the Fiestas de las Naturales above Guadelupe and catch the sunny laughter of paganism behind it all. You will see in the uplifted figures of saints, the images of ancient gods; and in the flowers garlanded about the heads of the men and women, that unabashed pantheistic love for nature and beauty which throbbed in the pre-Spanish art. The modern tribes still fall down in worship before the majesty of snow-capped Mount Orizaba, clipping a triangle from the dawn-that mountain of the star (Citlaltepetl)—for on that lofty summit was not Quetzalcoatl, the greatest of the earth-gods, consumed in divine fire? This old pagan civilization may be clearly traced be- 14 Mexico-An Interpretation neath the surface. Even to-day in the shadows of far- off barrancas and beside the tropic seas, the natives secretly prostrate themselves before their stone gods; and in remote districts the crude carved idol may often be encountered behind the Christian saint or bleeding Christ. The name has changed; both are still the grotesque fear-filling shapes of unseen powers of earth and air and water. Thus the Indians of Tixtla cut from bamboo, or the pith of the calchual, a body re- sembling that of Christ, which they coat with terra- cotta, then paint in a brilliant scarlet-fairly bathing it in blood. After a priestly blessing it is installed on the altar of the domestic teocalli among the household gods (penates) of similar fabrication. Yet did not the early Christians, as is told in "Marius the Epi- curean," set out food for the old gods? Only here the process is reversed. War was a common form of industry. As the partner of religion, it provided slaves and human bodies for sacrifice; it enriched the temples and palaces with gold and silver. It filled the granaries with produce and satisfied the semi-barbaric lust for power and glory. To this day the people have not learned to live in peace. The Indian's social systems explain these practices. Industrially the people had nowhere passed beyond a primitive agrarian civilization. Their political order revolved about the system of ejidos or agricultural communes, and though the individual enjoyed some slight independence and the inalienable right to labor and to eat, for his life and goods he was ultimately an- swerable to the local patriarchal cacique (as in the The Indian Heritage 15 days of Díaz to the jefe político) who was the repre- sentative of a national, despotic, military-church hier- archy, founded upon cruelty and absolutism. The masses were servile and abject beneath the wealth, pomp, and power of their masters. War was inevi- table; religion an adjunct of superstition and theocratic rule; slavery their product. The Spaniards utilized these native growths, root, stock, and branch, graft- ing upon them their own colonial system of exploita- tion, the Spanish-Roman ritual, the Spanish-Roman superstate tradition; they secured obedience by the understandable use of force and fear through torture, inquisition, and massacre. The Spaniards provided the directing genius for institutions already existing. But not only are the Indian's local patriotism, his traditions, his character, his psychology, his religious. fanaticism, his fondness for strife, his political institu- tions to be discovered in the modern complex; but one sees how very superficially the Spanish occupation touched the regular routine of everyday life—“the immediacies." The modern Mexican binds to his feet the same kind of huarache as the forest-treading Toltec; he flings over his shoulder the end of his scarlet zarape, woven on native handlooms; and if he may not deck himself out as the ancient nobility in the feather-work so lauded by Cortez, he may purchase specimens in which the artistic skill matches that of the robes preserved in the Museo Nacional. His wife still amuses herself with bead-work (mullo); still fastens about her dusky throat necklaces of brilliant seed-beads; and adorns herself with jewelry as simple as it is artistic and his- 16 Mexico-An Interpretation toric. Her toilet table is embellished with hand- painted pin-trays made from gourds, and with beauti- ful wax and carved figures. The children jump rope with twisted fibres from the agave and play with terra- cotta dolls and toys such as I myself have dug up from the kitchen-middens of seven centuries ago. Pass the holiday stands (puestos), flaming with these and other bizarre products. Behind yon yellow awning you may drink a glass of thick, whitish atole made by dissolving sugar and ground roasted corn in water or milk; here are cinnamon-flavored cakes of chocolatl; there, candied sweet-potatoes (camotes de Puebla) rolled up in tissue-papers like expensive cigars. Halt before the straw mats (petates) laden with fruits, yellow mangoes, golden papayas, green calabazas and chirimoyas, red tomatles and scarlet chillis; squdgy zapotes borrachos-drunk sapotes, apple-colored tejo- cotes, hairy cocoanuts (cocos), earthy Jalapa roots. This wrinkled, barefoot woman will sell you zarza- parilla and té de limón and herbs unknown to science- herbs whose mystic qualities effected cures centuries ago. On down the avenue you will see leaning against the modern palace the same dirt-floored, adobe-walled, thatched-roofed jacal in which the Indians shivered centuries before in the Texcucan marshes. Early in the morning you will hear the crisp pat-a-pat-pat of tor- tillas in the making, those unleavened, unsalted, flat corn-cakes of prehistoric America; inside you will find, on the same straw mat or table, the inevitable jug of pulque, that white licor divino given by the miraculous Aztec god, Tezcatlipoca-the same drink which sent 1 The Indian Heritage 17 his rival, the wondrous foreign white god, Quetzal- coatl, roaming to the oblivion of an ancient ocean. In the feather mosaics of Michoacán; in the Uruá- pam lacquer, rivaling that of China; in the carving on the walking-sticks of Apizaco, that atavic wood-tracery which has found such beautiful expression in the choir- stalls and benches; in the floral decorations from Coyoacán, Tlalpam, and Xochomilco; in the Venetian- like Tarascan glass-ware; in the sculpturing on the façades of the houses; in the gold and silver filigree- work; and even in the mural paintings of the pul- querías-pulque-shops-are to be found evidences of the indigenous culture. It will always remain one of the marvels of history that a mere handful of Spanish cavaliers and priests were able to impress their language and institutions upon a continent and a half, thereby opening up chan- nel that has carried a stream of cultural influence from Spain to the New World for nearly five centuries. Yet more remarkable is the fact that the despised In- dian race has been able to persist and progress in a world of Sturm und Drang, of relentless imperialism and world conflict. If history and geographic circum- stance have favored that survival, it is nevertheless an unparalleled 'record among backw peoples. If the Indian of Mexico must face a new invasion, that of industrialized America, and a greater test of his stam- ina than the centuries have yet recorded, it is because he has already shown his power of survival in the his- tory of his country-because the backbone of Mexico - is still Indian. CHAPTER II THE SPANISH HERITAGE "FRIENDS, let us follow the cross, and if we have faith we shall conquer"--such was the motto of the black and crimson banner emblazoned with the cross and arms of Charles V, King of Spain, that Cortez and his little band of five hundred soldiers planted upon the ramparts of Montezuma's palace in the shadow of the lofty teocalli of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the mightiest barbarian empire of the Western Hemi- sphere. In that hour began the intolerant dominion of Roman-Spanish Church and State, and the deca- dence of much that was great and good in native life. In that hour sprang into being the "red man's burden." Spain, though ethnologically a strange mixture, has long proved itself a docile child of the Roman Empire. It was conquered the proverbial three times: by Roman arms, by the Church, by law; and ever since has adhered tenaciously to the Justinian precept of "One State, one Law, one Church," which had meant in Rome a unity of administrative power never paral- leled in history; and in modern Spain the rise of insti- tutions at the expense of human liberty. Beneath this inherited system of the super-state and the effacement of all individual rights—this system of centralized Church, State, and Law, Spain has been riveted to intellectual and social backwardness, crushed 18 The Spanish Heritage 19 to a condition of slothful inertia-singularly isolated from all the forward-looking movements of Western Europe. There the Inquisition, under Torquemada, perpetrated its most ferocious crimes; there the Renas- cence of Cervantes and Lope de Vega was struck down by the relentless Counter-Reformation that has re- mained in the saddle down to the twentieth century, un- shaken by the clamor of "Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality," or the "Rights of Man." Even the Na- poleonic conquest which plowed up the dead earth of feudalism and exposed it to the sunlight of new times could not cut into the deep Catholic subsoil of Spain or destroy the traditional growth of poder that clung to Church, State, and Law. In what other country, save old Russia, could Ferrer have been officially mur- dered? The Church, inspired to a belated crusading fanati- cism by its efforts to annihilate Jews and Moslems, be- came a powerful ruling-class weapon. Isabella and Ferdinand consciously wielded it to centralize their power. As an institution it was bitterly anti-Renas- cence, and perforce anti-Reformation; it bolted all gates against the afflatus of the French Revolution and imprisoned the mind in an intellectual slavishness in- comprehensible to those nursed on the traditions of English constitutionalism. Spanish feudalism, though cumulatively corrupted, was intrenched more powerfully, more arrogantly, by its colonial system. That system was the brain-child of Colbert; the system of the English navigation acts, of tributary colonies pouring out their life-blood to the point of material and moral degradation for the - 20 Mexico-An Interpretation exaggeration of the mother country's world power. It was buttressed with religious bigotry. The buccaneer and the conqueror found in the cross a ready hand- maiden; and the Church was not slow in profiting by the power gained by sanctioning these nefarious prac- tices and diverting them into crusades charged with the ancillary duty of converting pagans. Thus the Spanish State and Hierarchy formed a so- cial complex based upon: 1) a monarchial system; 2) the super-domination of the State; 3) the sub- mergence of the individual to the status of the cives romanus, enjoying privileges but neither rights nor re- sponsibilities; 4) a feudal aristocracy; 5) a pre-Renas- cence church, denying the individual religious self- expression; 6) a colonial system, feeding upon the blood of subjugated peoples. In all a régime steeped in traditions of official cruelty and disguised by ro- manticism, sentimentalism, and vicious feudal chivalry. This system was rudely imposed upon Hispania cen- turies before the flowering of the creed of individual freedom. It dove-tailed nicely into the native hier- archic polity. With its absolute viceroy, its inquisi- tion, its official murders, its massacres, it was a fitting sequel to the Indian empire of bloodthirsty power based upon idolatry and warfare. One native writer has bitterly declared that the Spaniards brought but three "blessings" to Mexico-priests, bull-fights, and gam- bling. But this Kultur conquest was facilitated by ex- isting conditions. Foreign despots more worldly-wise and cunning were substituted for more naïve native despots. Spain substituted a religion more crafty in its teachings. A great racial problem was created. The Spanish Heritage 21 Industrial conquest followed on the heels of the first, Cortez and his followers were presented with immense concessions, and it Was Cortez who initiated in His- pania that system of repartimientos of lands, mines, and slaves, which was followed by all the later ayun- tamientos, audiencias, and viceroys. The encomen- dores, or recipients of the concessions, were given the right to exploit the properties and levy tribute upon the Indians through their caciques. In return they were obliged to build churches and provide religious instruction-a stipulation with which they readily com- plied as it buttressed their own economic control. But these grants—and this is supremely significant-largely guaranteed the preservation of the village ejido sys- tem with its despotic cacique, the pivot of the old hier- archy. The strength of this imposed exploitation lay in just this scrupulous regard for those intimate cus- toms of the Indian's daily life. The wealth exacted was at first the surface wealth, the easily obtainable treasures of the richer mines, and the accumulated riches of the aboriginal monarchs and nobility. The labor expended was relatively small, so that the earlier period of colonial rule was probably, aside from racial considerations and irritating disruptions of the local order, not much more irksome than the earlier régimes. Yet the massacres by Cortez, the harsh military slavery of the repartimientos, the horrible torture of the emperor Cuatemoc, constitute a terrible com- mentary on the depravity and Christianity of the Con- quistadores. A law of 1619 in Guanajuato forbade the branding of slaves upon the face! Even earlier, the Viceroy Gaspar de Zuñiga y Acevedo conveyed to 22 Mexico-An Interpretation Spain the astounding information that since the arrival of the Spaniards the native population had fallen off three-fourths! As time went on the avaricious and brutal exploitation remorselessly reached out its ten- tacles to strangle the furthest peaceful villages. The new rulers came-as do the modern Americans -to get rich quick; and so wherever they established their estates, their mines, or their industries, imposed the cruellest toil. The head black-snaker-and the expression is not melodramatic-was the viceroy who knew the length of his term and made the most of his short opportunity: like the Roman pro-consuls, he had to amass two fortunes, one to pay his political debts, the other on which to live the remainder of his life. It was therefore necessary to drink deep of the coun- try's wine-cellar of richness while the drinking was good. Occasionally a viceroy of nobler fibre was ap- pointed, such as the great "Emancipator" Luis de Velasco, who struck the chains from 150,000 slaves and distributed crown-lands to the Indians. But such administrators were rare, and their liberalism but threw the more inhuman practices into blacker relief. No es lo mismo virrey que viene, que virrey que se va -the viceroy who comes is not like the one who de- parts was the native adage of fear regarding the idiosyncrasies of their capricious rulers. The leech-like character of the Conquest is revealed by the enormous land-grants, and the fabulous for- tunes realized from mines and lands. The Conde de Valle de Orizaba owned 2,500,000 acres in Durango and Coahuila alone. The first Conde de Valencia, it is said, took from his mine in Guanajuato an annual The Spanish Heritage 23 profit of from $400,000 to $1,200,000. Agustín de Zavala paid $800,000 in fifths to the king. The story is told of one mine-owner who for a wedding paved fifty yards of the street with silver and lined the bridal chamber with the same metal. In Tepenasco the mines of the Conde de Regla were so productive that their owner invited the king to visit Mexico, boasting that his Majesty's horse would touch nothing but solid silver from Vera Cruz to the capital. The Marqués de Fagoaga extracted a net $4,000,000 in six months from one vein in Sombrette. During the three cen- turies of Spanish domination, it has been estimated that over $3,000,000,000 (pesos) in gold and silver were extracted. In 1810 at the outbreak of the struggle for independence, the yearly gold production amounted to $27,000,000 (pesos). Such facile exploitation created new social, racial, and economic cleavages. First, between Spaniards and Creoles. The colonial system that reserved every- thing for the mother country considered all Mexican offices, religious, civil, and military, plums for crown favorites, and made the division between things Span- ish and colonial so uncrossable that it was almost a crime to be a Mexican. A person who even set foot in a Spanish ship to go to or from the colonies without. permission was at one time subject to five years in the galleys. Only one of the sixty-two viceroys, five of the thirty-three bishops of Guadalajara; two of the thirty-four bishops of Michoacán; and one of the thirty-two archbishops were creoles born in Mexico. The highest offices were always reserved for Spaniards of Spain; neither creole nor mestizo could ascend far : 24 Mexico-An Interpretation on the political or religious ladder, no farther than cap- tain in the army, while apparently but one mestizo was ever appointed judge during the entire colonial period. Many of the creoles, however, had gained huge properties; but the colonial system, besides denying official preferment, was a heavy financial burden. The difficulties of intercommunication, the excessive reve- nues exacted by the crown, the rigorous trading acts, the strict curtailment of industry that might prove com- petitive for the mother country, combined to impose an irksome yoke. Even a project for establishing an art school was strangled because of the profitable sale of the works of Spanish painters to the colonial nou- veaux riches. If one of the contributing causes of the American Revolution was the obstruction of the smug- gling business of the patriots, so in the case of the Mexican revolutionary priest Hidalgo, the ruthless de- struction of his mulberry trees because of the commer- cial jealousy of the Iberian silk-growers was as potent a motivating force as the "rights of man." But if creole hated gachupín (term of reproach for the Spaniard), Indian and mestizo hated both. The mestizo was in many ways the most unfortunate: he was a pariah-in the eyes of the Spanish-blooded he was superior to the Indian but treated with contempt; in the eyes of the Indian he had been forever alienated from the tribal life. But beneath the whole pyramid of feudal aristocracy and ecclesiastical privilege groaned the Indian, the lowest, the most suffering, the most patient of the four classes, yet hating in his dumb way, treacherous mestizo, cruel creole, and arro- gant gachupín. All these hatreds were released from The Spanish Heritage 25 the colonial Pandora-box of historical, social, and racial differences and inequalities-a system that per- sisted with one short interruption down to the close of the Díaz régime. Economically and socially that system was an agrarian, feudal, sacerdotal, and aristo- cratic system based upon serfdom and slavery. Polit- ically it was a monarchy, represented by the absolute viceroy who was surrounded by a small ruling clique, which manipulated the native cacique system and the revenues from the repartimientos, the mass of the peo- ple enjoying no political rights. Ethnically it consisted of a ruling race divided into antagonistic Europeans and creoles, made up of nobility, priests, and incipient capitalists; and beneath-the hybrid mestizos and na- tive Indians still conscious of national antipathies and difference in blood but united in their common hatred of the white race. This institutional heritage was charged with the arrogant fretfulness of the Spanish character. The Spaniards contributed to Indian treachery their own spirit of petty greed and assumed virtue, smothering both in grandiloquent phraseology, tinseled vanity, and shallow ostentatiousness. Yet their uniformed splen- dor, hauteur, and conscious superiority, from all ac- counts, was in many respects callow beside the oriental massiveness and dignity of the Aztec royal and re- ligious practices; and their talkative self-assurance was but slowly acquired by the tenacious, taciturn, moody Indian. The religious and military braggadocio of the Conquerors was not easily imitated by a race mys- tically and profoundly emotional, inured to hardship and apathetic self-sufficiency. To this day the poorer 26 Mexico-An Interpretation Mexican is not as hablador (talkative) as the creole politician; nor is he so caballero, so full of dignidad and chest-inflated importance. He is a more ele- mental, more human, less glazed product of the great Potter's wheel. And Spanish civilization to this day corresponds to this grandiose temperament: street-car conductors with uniforms that would have gladdened the heart of a Tarragonian king, but the most haphazard traction system; a magnificent post-office building, but the most careless mail-distribution in the world; tremendous Churrigeresque cathedrals but a physically, mentally and morally rotten priesthood. Though the love of outward show is a barbaric trait, its most pronounced present-day manifestations in Mexico are a part of the Spanish heritage. The Spaniard brought with him the polish of an extremely artificial civilization, the glittering stage-trappings of carefree court salon, promenade, and tournée,-a reflected glow that has spread the dying day of a rich decadent past across the harsh upland prairies of Mexico. The modern sons of the west still cherish this twilight of quixotic gods and still provide audiences for this ancient tragi-comedy with its pathetic faded scenery. Yet the Spanish heritage may also be discovered be- hind the scenes, where real tragedy may always be found. The more fundamental Spanish contribution consisted in the semi-paralysis and subsequent re- orientation of the Indian system; in the institutions of Church, State, and Law, altered, developed, and raised to a more diplomatic level; in the one grandiloquent but picturesque language-things that for better or The Spanish Heritage 27 worse have served as unifying forces in the national life. But the racial and social class hatreds, the meth- ods of exploitation-things that also largely originated in the Conquest-have served as centrifugal forces- forces that to-day have invaded all institutional life, and which, coupled with the native love for the patria chica, are in large part responsible for the highly charged, complex, unstable, social melange that has burst asunder into the revolution of 1910-1920-the logical result of a five-hundred-year-old system face to face with modern capitalism. Therein lies much of Mexico's terrible story of blood and tears. CHAPTER III THE POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF INDEPENDENCE THE torch of liberty lit by Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopædists set fire to the dead fields of European feudalism. The resultant conflagration spread a glow in the sky of human events that was marveled at in the furthest Indian village of the Andes, and the sparks, traveling far on the shifting winds of political freedom, kindled in the Western Hemisphere a hun- dred fires of revolt that ate into the rotten supports of the dilapidated Roman-Spanish empire. Spain was rapidly committing political suicide. Chained to the tent posts of its corrupted mediæval system, it continued to dance beneath the whip-lash of Floridablanca, the most renowned ringmaster of Eu- ropean reaction; and by its participation in the coali- tion laid itself open to Napoleonic Conquest. In the crises of the time, the Government had no stamina. From the period of the exhausting dynastic wars of Charles and Philip, which finally lost for the country the hegemony of Europe and the control of the sea, the Government rapidly aged to the childhood of senil- ity. This enervation was accelerated by the stream of unearned wealth pouring in from the Americans- thirty milliards of piastres, according to Humboldt, by 1803-which corrupted officialdom from minister to gendarme and made it indifferent to domestic problems. 28 The Problems of Independence 29 Intoxicated with power and luxury, absolute in its rule, opposed to the spirit of the times, Spain's demands upon its colonies became constantly more galling, while at the same time colonial control became more inefficient. In the confusion of the Napoleonic period, the colonies, responding to the undercurrent of the new world movements, inspired by hatred for the incestuous blood-sucking of the mother-country, and encouraged by the example of the United States, one by one de- clared their independence. Mexico was among the first to revolt. At the be- ginning of the nineteenth century it was the richest gold-mine of the Spanish Government-more wealthy than any other colony. The population consisted of 3,600,000 Indians, 1,000,000 mestizos, and 1,000,000 whites. The Government revenues amounted to $20,- 000,000 (pesos); foreign commerce to $31,000,000 (pesos); while the mineral production exceeded $20,- 000,000 (pesos). Yet the administration was becom- ing more corrupt and onerous. Revolt had been ma- turing from 1808 to 1810 under creole leadership, a natural result of creole hatred for the colonial restric- tions. Yet no strong complementary love existed for the kindling ideas behind the European revolutionary movement. The conflict in Mexico was primarily a struggle between two ruling classes; and, as indepen- dence in the United States, in spite of the efforts of the Paines and the Jeffersons, did not result in immediate civil or religious liberty, so in Mexico, where there existed such a pronounced class-cleavage, there was almost no popular gain. Most of the leaders desired 30 Mexico-An Interpretation merely to substitute creole for Napoleonic rule. The creole priests in whose hands the torch of independence was born used the opportunity to aggrandize them- selves and the organization they controlled-showing no fear of the papal edicts of excommunication or of the condemnations of the High Court of the Inquisi- tion. The landed aristocracy hated the frequent crown interference with their heartless slave-driving. The military aristocracy determined to arrogate to itself the actual rule of the State. All were against the revolutionary progress of the times. Hidalgo was careful to declare that the struggle for independence was a thrust against the French and not the Span- ish. The movement for independence was a counter- revolution. After twelve years of bloody betrayal, executions, and defeats for the more visionary leaders, indepen- dence was finally achieved through the most vicious elements of reaction. The resident Spaniards and the more aristocratic creole leaders of the Church, be- came alarmed at the course of events in the mother country-the revival of the suppressed Spanish liberal constitution of 1812, which confiscated part of the Church's property, destroyed the convents, abolished the Inquisition, established a free press, and seized the tithes of the clergy. In Mexico part of the Church wealth was arbitrarily seized by Spanish officials to combat revolt. The creole class suddenly discovered that "absolute separation from Spain and its radical- ism" was necessary. A similar spirit animated the royalist military officers. Independence was actually consummated by the defection of the royalist general, " The Problems of Independence 31 Agustín de Iturbide, who forced the newly arrived accede to the Plan de That programme, known Viceroy, O'Dontroujou, to Iguala on August 24, 1821. as the Tres Guarantías, provided for independence under a monarchy with Ferdinand or one of his sons pon the throne, union and equality of Spaniards and Mexicans, and the supremacy, political and religious, of the Catholic Church. Iturbide believed in absolutism. He championed the unlimited sway of Church and aristocracy. As re- gent he dictated the acts of the new Congress, which had assembled on February 24, 1822, flinging into prison those of its members who showed any opposi- tion to his monarchial schemes. When Ferdinand re- fused to recognize the Plan de Iguala, Iturbide had himself crowned, with great pomp and ceremony, on July 21, 1822, in the great Cathedral, as emperor of Mexico, then the third largest country in the world. He immediately created an order of nobility, whose members were designated as the Caballeros de Guade- lupe. Thus Mexican independence began with a Catholic monarchy modeled after that of the reac- tionary Spanish hierarchy. It continued the ruthless exploitation of the lower classes and perpetuated mediæval institutional traditions. Yet no group of men could shut out the ideas ham- mering at the gates of all nations. It is doubtful if the independence struggle would have been sustained with such perseverance, against such hopeless odds, had the lower classes not felt the revolutionary afflatus. The soldiers sent by Spain to smash revolt had breathed in liberty from the very smoke of battle on the fields 32 Mexico-An Interpretation of Europe; they bore in their breasts the hurt of the suppressed Spanish liberal constitution of 1812. I deed that constitution was reproduced in form, if not in spirit, in the early rebel constitution of Apatingán. Iturbide himself was promptly overthrown by repub- licanism championed by Santa Anna. But though a constitution (pastepotted from the American, the Spanish of 1812, and the Mexican of Apatingán) was finally established, the feudal Church system was not and never has been completely vanquished. For this reason the Mexican struggle for liberty has centered until this day in the "rights of man"—the dignity and importance of the individual. Thus two contradictory traditions persist side by side in Mexican history: one the tradition of absolutism, one-man rule, force, the tradition that has always been followed in practice; the other the tradition of Hidalgo and Morelos, of the Constitution of Apatingán, the tradition of liberalism, of individual freedom as against the cives romanus, the tradition of political democracy. The first repre- sents the rule of cloister, intriguing to reëstablish mon- archy; of the landed aristocracy; of the military ele- ments. The second is the thwarted dream of the downtrodden people. The practice of absolutism, bonneted with repub- lican formulæ, has meant continuous feudal class-rule. Sometimes Bishop, Marqués, and General have worked in harmony, sometimes in discord, but always the key has been the army, until it has become the superstate, the maker and breaker of rulers, as in ancient Rome. In other words, not only do economic and social con- The Problems of Independence 33 ditions involve problems long solved in other parts of the world, but the racial disparity and deep caste lines have made the civic problem that of political equality vs. the rule of a class. The abysmal social inequality with its concomitants of economic subjection, poverty, illiteracy, and ignorance reserves the posts of power for the few. Thus all struggles, with the exception of two great upheavals, have been instigated by the mem- bers of the ruling class, between the "ins and the outs," between Centralists and Federalists, all of whom ral- lied the people to their support beneath the banner of "liberty." Because of this class rule based upon armed power, we have the persistent phenomenon that all prominent men are either with the Government, in exile, or in armed revolt. When you have no means of express- ing political opinion by pacific parties, by free discus- sion and publicity, when governmental changes are af- fected by cuartelazos and armed revolt, then the con- tumacious are feared and persecuted. Thus it is that Mexican history, like that of the religious Italian city- states, is a long record of feverish plotting, revolt, cuartelazo, coup d'état, official and unofficial assas- sination, all woven into an outré pattern of uncer- tainty, treachery, and public grafting. Writes Trejo Lerdo de Tejado in his La Revolución y el Nacionalismo: Of the seventy-two governments that have brutally assaulted the public power since independence, fifty-five have been headed by military men. Of these seventy-two only twelve have had legal origin. The rest have been shameless usurpations, sav- 34 Mexico-An Interpretation age cuartelazos, ignominies, treason during foreign war,--in short, a frightful national anarchy, a succession of crude des- potisms ridiculously cloaked in the toga of republicanism. Excluding the thirty-year rule of Díaz, in sixty-eight years some seventy changes occurred in the dictator- ship! Seventy national upheavals, all in the name of liberty-the reign of Díaz was in many respects prof- erable. Indeed the monarchy of Iturbide, the dicta- torship of Santa Anna, and the despotism of Díaz were the ipso facto outcome of such political practice and theory, and many a serious thesis has advocated the re- turn of actual monarchy. "Crude despotism ridiculously cloaked in the toga of republicanism!" This has meant a constant and irri- tating contradiction in the national life, a contradic- tion that has ulcerated into one hundred years of in- ternal discord. Because of this vicious circle of class- rule, coupled with economic subjection, racial confu- sion, and wasted national energy, the country has not progressed, and through the decades one fact blazes forth: the people have not benefited, they have borne the brunt of every abortive upheaval and suffered an endless exploitation. Yet behind the seemingly egoistic struggles between the ins and the outs, the Centralists and the Federal- ists, has stalked the eternal shadow of real liberty and real representative government. But that these things have been but a shadow has made the situation seem so hopeless-such a blind struggle in the midst of tur- moil and the hurried rule of unenlightened despots, there has been little opportunity for constructive prog- The Problems of Independence 35 ress, little opportunity for the people to acquire those elements of understanding and social training that would make possible the turning of those endless con- flicts to some permanent advantage. Any solution of the problem is therefore social. The house must be built from the foundations up. The creation of an intelligent people, decently fed, de- cently sheltered, having practical education and a train- ing in civic responsibility is the only sure road out of this political morass. This is the path the struggle must take. This is the direction it has rarely taken. Yet if the situation presents itself as a blind, vicious circle, apparently hopeless, if the ideals of liberty have been but shadows, those shadows have been the stuff of dreams, and dreams cannot be stifled in the human breast. Thus in the history of all peoples, however dumb and driven, come periods when the forces work- ing for social liberty, for the release of the subjected human spirit, grow stronger, finally coalesce, and ex- press themselves in the powerful tongue of rigorous readjustment. Thus it has happened that two revolu- tions in the life of the Republic have had profound significance in the struggle for human freedom: the revolution of Juárez and the revolution of 1910-20. PART II RISE OF THE MEXICAN PEOPLE CHAPTER IV THE REVOLUTIONS OF JUÁREZ AND MADERO AT almost the same hour that the United States was being guided through the night of sanguinary civil war by the noblest figure our national life has pro- duced, the destinies of Mexico were being determined by the tenacious faith of a man equally noble and equally conscious of the invincibility of the cause he was championing. That man was "Benmerito" Benito Juárez. He was born March 21, 1806 in the picturesque Indian pueblo of San Pablo Guelataa of the state of Oaxaca, which stands upon the shores of Enchanted Lake-La Laguna Encantada. Perhaps during the long lazy days when he watched as a shepherd on the southern reaches of the Oaxacan sierras overlooking the tropical Pacific, he caught a glimpse of that flame of a better Mexico that was to lead him on to fight for the emancipation of his people; perhaps there too he breathed in that patience and courage and unalterable devotion to principle that strengthened him to sur- mount superhuman obstacles, that have made his name the sublimest tradition of Mexican national life. For, like Lincoln "the color of the ground was in him, the red earth, the smell and smack of elemental things. . . ." Like Lincoln he had to struggle against poverty and adversity. A pure Zapotec Indian, he 39 40 Mexico-An Interpretation also had to battle with race and color prejudice, with creole scorn and ruling-class hatred. But shepherd, book-maker, student of divinity, lawyer, governor of Oaxaca, head of the Supreme Court, head of the revo- lutionary army, president emancipator, and man, his footsteps led directly to the destiny he was to fulfill. In the darkest hours he never faltered. At the very moment when he was striking away the chains of his people, the country was sold to the French by the cre- oles; yet, betrayed by his closest friends, he flung him- self into a seemingly hopeless struggle for national lib- eration and with true Indian doggedness, by the force of his genius and, strangely enough with the moral aid of the great Lincoln, expelled the invader and once more cleared the road for the fulfillment of his aspira- tions for his people. And though, in the smaller sense, the revolution he precipitated was a failure, he cut deep into the roots of the evil tree of class privilege with sure understanding of the needs of his country. His constitution of 1857, together with the Reform Laws of 1859, brought the Reformation to Mexico and boldly shifted the bases of state sovereignty by effectively shattering the great economic and political power of the Church and allied ruling classes; and though later they crept back into favor, they did so in the rôle of the modern capitalist, and the Juárez tradition has been so strong and so assertive that the people will never again, for any great length of time, bow down to the old Creole- Church-State Trinity or permit the recreation of a powerful landed aristocracy. The Church, in his day, was said by some authori- Revolutions of Juárez and Madero 41 ties to own over one-third of the land in Mexico; in any event it was unbelievably rich, controlling all agri- cultural activity by means of heavy mortgages and en- joying an enormous revenue. Juárez boldly confis- cated all Church property, Church and State were sepa- rated; the Clergy was severely arraigned for its crass participation in the bloody, devastating civil wars; the Inquisition and the Church courts were abolished; Church land-holding was forbidden. Religious free- dom was guaranteed, civil marriage inaugurated, the cemeteries secularized. The great estates were cut up, serfdom abolished, and provision made for free, non-sectarian, and compulsory education-all of which were to be safe-guarded by the institution of free- speech, free-press, and free-assemblage. But Juárez was confronted by the whole reactionary, unprincipled might of the educated, privileged classes; he was confronted by the destructive, intolerant forces that were the heritage of Mexican society from the centuries of Indian and Spanish misrule. He encoun- tered above all the bitter opposition of the Church. The Archbishop circularized the country, when the government demanded all officials to take an oath of allegiance to the constitution, declaring that the new constitutional provisions were "inimical to the insti- tution, doctrine, and rights of the Catholic Church" and forbade "both clergy and laity to take the oath under any pretext whatsoever." Even the Pope launched a long bull at Juárez, energetically condemn- ing "every decree that the Mexican Government has enacted against the Church and her sacred ministers and pastors, against her laws, rights of property, and 42 Mexico-An Interpretation E also against this Holy See," and threatening those who had "contributed to the fulfillment of the said decrees by action, advice, or order" with the "penalties and censures imposed by the apostolic constitutions." But the Church was not content with pronouncements, and the day after the new constitution took effect was in readiness with an attempted cuartelazo under the lead- ership of Felix Zuloaga, the commander-in-chief of the army. The priests patrolled the trenches exorting the revolters to fight; the Church guaranteed the wages of the soldiers, and busily bribed any officers who were not definitely pro-clergy; and when the reaction conquered, were the first to rejoice, to ring the bells, to sing the Te Deum. The ecclesiastical elements later, it was charged, provided $300,000 to General Miramón to drive Juárez from Vera Cruz; they, with the rest of the native propertied classes, schemed for French inter- vention; they helped to maintain the aristocrats, Ala- monte, Salas, and the Archbishop La Bastada as re- gents until Maximilian, who had already promised the return of $200,000,000 worth of mortmain prop- erty, could be seated on the throne; they were the first to fawn at the feet of the new monarchy. Thus Juárez had no opportunity to put into prac- tice the enlightened principles he had formulated. The Church evaded his decrees, the lands to be distributed slipped into the hands of his own self-seeking follow- ers; the army robbed and plundered. Yet the great leader gave to Mexico, in spite of all, a modern con- stitution, a tradition, and an unforgetable dream of human liberty. The ensuing events, which swallowed up the imme- Revolutions of Juárez and Madero 43 diate tangible results of his revolution, were the log- ical outcome of social precedents too strong to be im- mediately broken-revolution, force, the dictator, this time the most successful in Latin-American history, Porfirio Díaz. Mouthing the customary meaningless slogans of "democracy," he forced himself to power in the traditional Mexican fashion. He had before him two alternatives: one corresponding to class-rule and super-state tradition, the other answering the liber- tarian tradition and continuing the work begun by Juárez. Had he followed the latter, had he built the state upon the Indian as a man, he would either have been overthrown early in his career or would have made modern Mexico. But he chose the super-state tradition. Cautiously feeling his way, paying his revo- lutionary.debts, trying out this man and that man, he gradually but surely established his power until he could act independently with an iron hand. His early campaigning slogan of "Less administration and more liberty" was reversed to "Little politics and much ad- ministration," and with his slogan "pan o palo”. "Bread or the Cudgel"-he bought off his enemies and relentlessly scourged those who refused to be bought. From an administrative point of view his policy was successful. It was successful because it was four- square with the political practice of past centuries, and because the forces of liberty were too inexperienced to profit directly from the work of Juárez. But under Díaz's thirty-year rule, the new usurping landholders became more aggressive, the Church crept back to a measure of power, foreign investors found ready welcome. Absolute rule has to be class rule, 44 Mexico-An Interpretation and a foreign-sacerdotal-aristocratic class was re- created with all the former rights of exploitation. With its support Díaz succeeded in building his super-state, respected and feared by the mass. Men stopping to converse on the street were quietly tapped on the shoulder by the ubiquitous gendarme. News- papers refrained from discussing internal affairs. Even foreigners never criticised the Government in public for fear some secret-service man might be at hand. In the country districts stern order was main- tained by the mounted cossacks, the rurales, compris- ing the highest paid military corps in the world, who massacred first and inquired afterwards-if they in- quired at all. The capital was the safest city in the world, safer than London, New York, or Chicago. One could wander in the worst districts at any hour of the night unmolested. Mexico was well-ordered. But it was the order of class-rule and easy profiteer- ing. The lines were strictly drawn-two classes, the rich, the elegantly dressed, those who rolled down the fashionable avenues in their French motor-cars, and those who slipped in sandals and "pajamas" along the back streets. Spawns of beggars those unpolished heels of a uniformed nation-insistently and discon- certingly pushed into the white lights. Serfdom reached its cruelest extremes since the Conquest. Yuca- tán was one vast slave camp where men promptly died from the terrible climate, abuse, and hard toil. Ya- quis, sold into slavery at $65 a head, walked the length of Mexico to regain their patria chica. The peons worked with chains on their legs and were not infre- quently branded. It was the customary practice to Revolutions of Juárez and Madero 45 beat servants and peons when occasion arose; and the overseer without the protruding pistol and the heavy blacksnake whip was the exception. In this nefarious savagery, the Americans were often the leaders; and one may still encounter in Mexico City among the best society folk a certain American hacendado who owned one of the worst slave plantations on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, who buys expensive rose water at the American Drug Store, and whose daughters are re- ceiving the best culture money can buy. Writes John Kenneth Turner in his "Barbarous Mexico": "Americans work the slaves-buy them, drive them, lock them up at night, beat them, kill them, exactly as do other employers of labor in Mexico. . . . All over the tropical sec- tion of Mexico, on the plantations of rubber, sugar-cane, tropical fruits-everywhere you will find Americans, buying, imprisoning, killing slaves." f To maintain such a system, all personal liberty for the lower classes was abolished; freedom of speech was a myth; the jury-system non-existent. The poor man had no recourse to law, he was without rights, independence, or dignity. The hacendado, in the case of the marriage of any of his peons, always had the jus primis noctis, and the same privilege at any other time. If the husband objected, some trivial complaint whispered to the authorities would see him torn away and thrust into prison to rot indefinitely or into the army in some barracks far from his home. Now in that significant centennial year of 1910, the ruler of these Mexican preserves of loaves and fishes was not a king with a large jaw, but an old man of LA 46 Mexico-An Interpretation eighty years, surrounded by other old men. Because of the number of mummies the government offices con- tained, one newspaper facetiously called them "the pyramids of Egypt joined to those of Teotihuacán." The administrators of this pantheon were the Cientí- ficos, a group of clever business manipulators so- called because of their assumed belief in "scientific" government. This group consisted of an inner clique of a dozen or so individuals who used the government for personal enrichment. It is said to have included Reyes Spin- dola, owner and editor of the leading daily paper, El- Imparcial; Francisco Bulnes, leader of a fake opposi- tion party in Congress; the governor of the Federal District; and the representatives of the real beneficia- ries of the system-the leading banks; the San Rafael Paper Company, run by an American and a Spaniard, which held absolute monopoly by means of a protective tariff on news-print paper; the Tobacco Trust, El Buen Tono, managed by a shrewd Frenchman; the great un- taxed Pulque Trust, etc., etc. This clique spun its web about every business trans- action of importance. Not a public improvement could be made in the smallest village, not a street paved, not a sewerage system installed without the consent of the Díaz-imposed governor of the state, who, as chef of the public soup-kitchen of graft, la- dled out the contracts to the Científicos. The beautification of Mexico City by a stupendous programme of public works-the construction of mag- nificent public buildings, drives, monuments and statues was conceived by the fertile brains of the Científicos. Revolutions of Juárez and Madero 47 The mammoth unfinished structure intended to rival the Paris Grand Opera building; the Post Office, one of the finest edifices in the world, the capitol building with its soaring unfinished dome of rusting steel, the railway offices, the imposing Paseo de la Reforma, lined with statues and widening out at every crossing into beautiful glorietas and matchless public monu- ments, were built as splendid sarcophagi above the slavery, the misery, the degradation of the driven masses. A few of the concessions manipulated directly or in- directly through the Científicos and foreign capitalists and indicating the extent of the spoliation of the coun- try were: the sale of the lower half of Lower Cali- fornia for a song to Mr. Luis Huller, who passed it on to an American colonizing company; the sale of 7,500,000 acres in northern Mexico to two favorites who proved to be agents of the interventionist, Mr. Hearst; the granting to Colonel Greene of enormous copper concessions in Sonora; the granting of per- sonal concessions to the United States Ambassador Thompson with which he organized the United States Banking Company and the Pan-American Railroad Company; the arranging, through the Científico law office of Señor Joaquin Casasus, for immense rubber concessions to Rockefeller and Aldrich. 145,000,000 acres were practically given away to twenty-eight per- sonal friends of Díaz. It is claimed that nearly 300,- 000,000 acres were sold for approximately five cents a hectare. In addition, immense oil and mineral con- cessions were made to various American and English companies, among them the Guggenheim interests, 48 Mexico-An Interpretation which attempted to drive the Madero family out of the smelting business. Such was the economic basis of the Díaz dictatorship. Juárez failed because the people had had no experi- ence in self-government and no past enjoyment of lib- erty. Díaz succeeded because he spared with the strongest political precedent, and the secret behind his fall is not found in Madero's "Effective suffrage and no reëlection," a foreign and cold concept, but be- cause he reinstated the old governing aristocracy and the domination of the foreigner, and because for the first time he destroyed the ejido root and branch. Thus the rubber concessions to Rockefeller and Al- drich in Durango ruined a great number of poor towns; the privileges granted temporarily to the Tla- hualilo Company on the Nazas River-a company which Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson supported with his official influence-ruined the river-dwellers; the grants in Sonora, immediately resold to American land companies, despoiled the Yaquis of their river lands, precipitating a bloody struggle that has lasted down to the Obregón régime, and which cost the Dic- tator alone no less than $50,000,000 (pesos); the con- cessions which divided Quintana Roo among a few companies led to revolts and massacres; the timber concessions in the State of Mexico to the paper fac- tories of San Rafael and Anexas wrenched away the village holdings of the district. In other localities the ejidos were enclosed by the nearest great landholder. Thus in Morelos the hacienda of Atlihuayán in the County of Yautepec was created by the seizure of the ejidos by the governor, Pablo Escandón. The robbed Revolutions of Juárez and Madero 49 people appealed to Díaz who wept over their misfor- tunes and restored-a small worthless portion! Thus through the recreation of a landed aristocracy, and the reëstablishment of the Church power, through his violation of the ejido, his stifling of all personal liberty, his direct interference in local affairs through the jefe político, and the contract system of the Cien- tíficos, Díaz ignited a smoldering fury in the common heart. The type of governing aristocracy created had become an anachronism with the Juárez revolution, the enclosures gave rise to an acute agrarian and un- employed problem, and revived the old Indian nation- alism; the interference in local affairs by the jefe polít- ico started the cry for the municipio libre (Municipal home-rule). Yet Díaz was in the grip of a belated industrial revolution that no man could have forestalled. Díaz merely accelerated an inevitable process. The virtues of his administration were incident to its evils. He at- tempted to impose western industrialism upon an Indian-Oriental people steeped in traditions of com- munalism; he delivered his country over to the for- eign exploiter-yet in doing so, must to-day receive the credit for the industrial expansion of Mexico, for the founding of its railroads, the rapid exploitation of its mineral resources, the establishment of factories, the promotion of world commerce. He failed to couple this transformation with a progressive readjust- ment of the national institutions, with a corresponding education of the national psychology, with any broad- ening of political privilege, the result being that most of the benefits of his régime have been swallowed up 50 Mexico-An Interpretation in the hurricane of ten years of revolution. But if he ground the people into the mire, he also ground into them a passion for liberty they will not soon lose; if he imposed a dictatorship he also imposed a thirty- year peace and thereby established a tradition that can never be ignored and which must be emulated by any régime of liberty if it is to endure. Yet his methods could not continue. The country was rotten, ripe for change. Opposition came from many quarters. The plotting of General Reyes, for twenty-three years a loyal dictator of Nuevo León and Coahuila, was but a species of personalism, but the propaganda of Madero, the Magóns, Villareal, and Soto y Gama was a genuine thrust at the pillars of Porfirismo-was indicative of the speedy approach of the time when the Sampson of revolt would shake down the temple. The leader of that revolt was the fanat- ical but sincere Madero, who had been previously nominated for president by the Centro Anti-Reëlec- cionista and the Partido Nacionalista and was backed by his wealthy family. Madero was a dreamer and a spiritualist, told by the planchette that he would some day be president of Mexico, a man with the crusading zeal of a Jeanne d'Arc that carried him across all ob- stacles by his faith in his assured destiny and the right- eousness of his cause. Appearing at the psycholog- ical moment, favored by the tacit friendliness of the United States, he soon gained the leadership of the rapidly unfolding nation-wide movement which em- bodied to the people the two ideas “Tierra y Libertad” -a spontaneous, enthusiastic uprising. The Madero programme was intended to "reëstab- Revolutions of Juárez and Madero 51 lish the dignity of the constitution" and embraced the ideas of effective suffrage and no reëlection, state and local autonomy, abolition of the jefes políticos or local bosses, abolition of alcoholism and gambling, equal rights of the Indians, "Mexicanization" of the rail- roads, land for the poor. It is doubtful whether the visionary Madero or his selfish family, however, had any idea how this programme was to be put into opera- tion. Madero, furthermore, knew nothing about govern- ment, nothing about political machinations; and in the events that followed close on the heels of his accession to power, showed that the century-long system of governments established by the strong man could not be altered except by a super-strong man-which he was not. Mexico, during its ten years of revolution has repeatedly reverted to its Iturbide-Santa Anna-Díaz tradition. Madero went down before that overrid- ing tradition. The forces against him were, of course, overwhelm- ing. Besides his own political inexperience, he was faced with 1) the rapacity of his own family, whose pillaging of concessions and public funds seriously damaged his reputation; 2) the military plotting of such generals as Reyes and Felix Díaz; 3) the counter- revolution of the Terrazas family and other big land- holders under the leadership of Orozco; 4) the plot- ting of American Big Business; 5) the open antago- nism and secret plotting of the American Ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson, who strove to precipitate inter- vention; 6) the veiled antagonism of the United States government, expressed in refusal of coöperation, 52 Mexico-An Interpretation threatening notes at critical moments, and armed demonstrations. In the national disintegration that resulted from these forces and Madero's inability to institute ade- quate reform; in his failure to satisfy the ravening maw of foreign and domestic reaction, and at the same time his failure to give assurances of honest intentions to his own revolutionary followers-in this interplay of national and international forces, the supports of his government were rapidly eaten away. His plan of land distribution, for instance, was inadequate and hastily conceived, and as a consequence was promptly abandoned. He failed to satisfy the Zapatistas and drained his financial resources by attempting to subdue them with an army under Huerta! On the other hand Big Business found it more difficult to wring conces- sions from the new government. The old approach to a corrupt officialdom was closed, and in the un- principled scheming that ensued, coupled with a grow- ing popular distrust, Madero was isolated, and the stage finally set for the entrance of the strong man, the coup d'état of the bloody Huerta-the paladin of the tradition of the super-state, the atavistic recrudes- cence of Mexico's barbaric centuries. CHAPTER V THE RISE AND FALL OF CARRANZA As a consequence of Madero's overthrow and assas- sination, Mexico (and the United States in its rôle of self-appointed guardian) had on its hands in Huerta a bloody dictator who disregarded all human decencies and ushered in a white-guard reign of court-martial terror, a clever, ruthless superman whom Ambas- sador Henry Lane Wilson and American business inter- ests desired, at the moment, to have recognized by the White House. But no amount of recognition or non-recognition could have saved Huerta. He marked an interlude during which the forces of the agrarian-libertarian- democratic revolution of Madero were gathering strength for a further advance upon the State. The banner of revolt was promptly raised by Don Venus- tiano Carranza. The prestige of the latter's official position as governor of Coahuila and the promptness with which he refused to recognize the Huerta coup, instantly singled him out as the real leader of the re- volt against the Huerta-Porfirian-Catholic-Aristocratic reaction. He was aided by the picturesque Villa, a strange mixture of bandit, dictator, and social- reformer. Behind Carranza and Villa gathered not only the real revolutionary elements, but the small farming class of the north, the small business man, 53 54 Mexico-An Interpretation and those elements of American capital which had come to fear for their own investments and the future in the consistent favoritism with which Huerta re- warded the British Pearson interests. The subsequent Carranza-Villa split, while due to the personal rivalry of the two leaders, resulted in a ginning of the seeds. American capital, as is evi- denced by the tremendous flood of favorable propa- ganda in the American press, rallied behind Villa and attempted to side-track Carranza. The more deter- mined revolutionary elements, with few exceptions, supported Carranza, along with the small farming and business elements. But as the revolutionary elements. were alone aggressive, Carranza was forced into an uncongenial revolutionary position. He himself repre- sented the country-gentleman type of Mexico, a small but vanishing group of dignified, conservative demo- cratic landholders. Carranza had all the earmarks of his kind plus a certain dogged personal ambition. He was never by training or temperament a proper leader of the revolution which had overthrown Díaz and put Madero into the Palacio Nacional. He had been both a senator and governor under the Díaz régime- an official of genial, liberal tendencies, though with an inflexible austerity toward his personal enemies--but during that lengthy period showed no interest in the cause of the people. Indeed evidence strongly points to the fact that he was preparing to revolt against Ma- dero at the very time Huerta administered his golpe de estado. The subsequent revolutionary alignment of Carranza was, therefore, somewhat anomalous; he accepted the open support and became the avowed The Rise and Fall of Carranza 55 champion of the more radical elements during those precarious days when he was bottled up in Vera Cruz and his future seemed most uncertain. By doing so he gained three influential supports: the financial backing of General Alvarado in Yucatán who, it is said, sent him $20,000,000 (pesos) from the treasury of the flourishing state-owned Comisión Reguladora del Mer- cado de Henequén; the sympathy of Labor—effec- tively crystallized into the batallones rojos; and the military genius of Obregón who defeated Villa in the battle of Celaya and drove him north into the Dur- ango cactus. But in the subsequent 1917 Querétaro constitutional convention, the true character of Carranza was thrown into high relief. His proposed constitution proved more conservative than that of 1857. It contained no labor code, no curtailment of Church power, no na- tionalization of land or subsoil. These provisions were inserted by the radical and Labor delegates whose position was strengthened by Carranza's many indis- criminate Vera Cruz promises and by the pressure of Zapata in the south. The constitution finally adopted, though it proved a hodge-podge of theory and prac- tice, clipped from the legal systems of all nations and lacking, in many ways, a truely organic relation to Mexican traditions, is ideally more enlightened than any similar document in existence. Its weakness re- sides in the very fact that it attempts to correct four hundred years of misrule in one blow without creat- ing an organized people to make that achievement possible. It goes far beyond the 1857 constitution in its cur- 56 Mexico-An Interpretation tailment of Church power. While it guarantees re- ligious freedom, ministers and priests are not only for- bidden to vote or participate in politics, but may not control any charitable institution, asylum, hospital, or foundation devoted to scientific research or the dis- semination of knowledge. All such, all schools and churches, are made government property, and cannot be utilized without permission. Property ownership provisions are equally far-reach- ing. All communal lands enclosed since 1857 are or- dered returned to their original owners. Each state is given the right to determine the maximum amount of land any one person or corporation may own. The ex- cess may be disposed of in small parcels on long-term payments. The state may also determine the size of the inalienable family patrimony. The Constitution contains strenuous clauses forbidding the existence of monopoly and specifically revokes all government con- tracts since 1876 which have created such. Foreigners may only acquire ownership in lands, waters, or in con- cessions to develop mines, waters, or oil-fields by spe- cial government contracts and the signed pledge never to invoke the protection of their respective govern- ments under penalty of forfeiture. The labor clauses are perspicuous, extensive, and radical. They embrace the eight-hour law (seven hours at night), six day week, minimum wage, equal pay for equal work, payment of wages in legal cur- rency, limitation of overtime to three hours, double pay for overtime; good-housing, public markets, and schools at all mines and on all haciendas, etc.; work- men's compensation, sanitary shops, safety appliances, The Rise and Fall of Carranza 57 right to organize and to strike, limitation of right of lock-out to cases of excess production, arbitration and conciliation, precedence of wage-claims in bankruptcy proceedings, forbidding of employment bureaus to charge fees, social insurance, three months' pay award to employees discharged without proper notice. These provisions and other pledges of the Carranza régime were never put into operation. That govern- ment was pledged to land and labor reform. It was pledged to extend the school system. It was pledged to the programme of "Mexico for the Mexicans." It accomplished none of these things. The revolutionary elements were one by one eliminated and supplanted by politicians and unprincipled militarists. The en- lightened constitutional provisions were ignored or malconstrued, few ejidos were returned, even in the face of court decrees; land was not distributed except in certain states where it was forcibly torn away at the first opportunity; labor not only did not receive pro- tection accorded it by the constitutional code, but its organizations were openly persecuted, the educa- tional budget was steadily curtailed and thousands of schools closed, while the slogan of "Mexico for the Mexicans" which had been one of Carranza's strongest rallying calls, came to mean "Mexico for certain Mexi- cans" for a small and vicious military clique, who, cloaked behind that phrase, plundered and devastated the country. Carranza began the military pacification of the coun- try before social reconstruction. In a measure this may have been necessary in a country which since the fall of Madero had retrogressed rapidly towards an- 58 Mexico-An Interpretation archy. But in not paralleling armed pacification with substantial reforms, control slipped from the hands of the intellectuals, the radicals, the labor elements into the hands of the militarists, whose one ideal was public looting. An era was inaugurated comparable to our own post-Civil War, carpet-bag period. The honest revolutionary elements deserted the army for the plow and the loom, leaving the professional militarists in control. The more decent of the military leaders, such as Generals Obregón, Calles, and Alvarado-re- formists rather than militarists-were one by one forced into disgusted retirement. Irresponsible favor- ites were regaled with important positions. General Barragán, chief of Carranza's staff and military ruler of Mexico, was an upstart of less than thirty years, who filled perfectly the shoes of the aristocratic tradi- tion-a dude and a braggart, who swaggered around the capital with a gold-headed cane and women of ill-repute, who came to own a string of mansions on the fashionable Paseo de la Reforma, who brazenly defied the traffic regulations by dashing through the streets with his feet cocked on the windshield of his auto. Urquizo, the Acting Secretary of War, was a bestial, unscrupulous, and universally hated autocrat. Diéguez, formerly governor of Jalisco, received sev- eral million pesos from the federal government with which to promote education. He was charged with using it to build a private railroad from Guadalajara to Chapala. Another general was connected up with a gang of house-robbers, but was sent on a special mis- sion to the United States, until all the human evidence could be assassinated. The Diario Oficial is befouled The Rise and Fall of Carranza 59 with immense grants of oil, timber, mining, and agri- cultural properties made to these men or their agents. Such was the character of the Carranza military party, which lived from the fat of the land, padding-pay-rolls, marauding, looting the countryside, destroying com- merce, countermanding railway rolling-stock, promot- ing disorders to insure a continuance of their public thievery, until the people came to fear the federal sol- dier more than the bandit. The loot-spirit infected every department. The Finance Department created a chronic small-currency shortage. Members of the Department sold change at high rates of discount. Hundreds of thousands of pesos worth of revenue stamps were distributed with- out public records. Concessions were granted for money that went into private pockets. The financial extremities of the Government, on the other hand, forced it to pay the salaries of teachers, stenographers, office-assistants, etc., partly in I. O. U. slips. These were purchased at ruinous rates by Barragán, Urquizo, and other high officials who immediately cashed them at face-value. No money was left for constructive undertakings. One by one the pitifully few schools of the Díaz régime were closed until, at the time of Carranza's fall, some of the large residential suburbs of the capital, such as Mixcoac and Tacubaya, could not boast a single ele- mentary school, while five-sixths of those in the city it- self were closed. And educational conditions in the Federal District were better than elsewhere in the re- public. The teachers in the institutions remaining open, and the professors of the national university, 60 Mexico-An Interpretation worked for part pay and on occasions for no pay. Military abuse led to a direct attempt to crush the incipient labor movement. One of the first adminis- trative acts was the suppression of the Casa del Obrera Mundial, the first real attempt of the workers at or- ganization. Scarcely an important strike occurred that Carranza did not, through his Secretary of State, Berlanga, send federal soldiers to shoot down the workers, or invoke, or threaten to invoke, the treason act. During the teachers' walk-out in 1919, which de- veloped into a general strike, the protestors were for- bidden to meet, union-headquarters were closed, the machine-guns were in the streets, women were knocked down by fire-hoses, mounted gendarmes rode down the pickets, federal soldiers operated the street-cars. In Tampico, General Orozco of anti-Madero fame, used military coercion, shooting or jailing the workers and leaders in several important strikes. Ultimately all labor organization was forbidden, union-headquar- ters were closed, and the workers forced to sneak into the fields, as in the days of old Russia, to hold their meetings. A few of the labor leaders were con- scripted to fight in distant states, as in the times of Díaz. Three leaders, Diego Aguillón, Pablo Castro, and Samuel Fernández, were spirited from the capital and thrust into the Army of the North under General Diéguez. Many workers were deported from Tam- pico and Orizaba by the military during strikes. Another direct source of irritation toward the close of the administration was the annihilation of constitu- tional rights, such as the attempted destruction of the municipio libre, the suppression of newspapers, the The Rise and Fall of Carranza 61 arrest of newspaper editors and managers, without warrent or subsequent trial; and the illegal domina- tion of elections. By one means or another, Administration governors were imposed upon the states of Guanajuato, Queré- taro San Luis Potosí, Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León. In Tabasco General Greene was re- moved by force by the federal general Domínguez. Only on the promise of ceasing his efforts toward the economic reorganization of his state, was he permitted to resume office. In the last Mexico City election under the Carranza régime, the ballots were seized by armed agents and the governmental candidates de- clared elected. This was all part of a studied program to defeat General Alvaro Obregón in the approaching presiden- tial elections and foist into power Ignacio Bonillas, a man vaguely known as the Mexican Ambassador in Washington, and contemptuously designated by the public as Meester Bonillas because of the belief that he knew more English than Spanish. Upon the arrival of Bonillas in Mexico City to begin his campaign, the government junked all semblance of neutrality, wrapped the flag about the public buildings, decorated the streets, placarded the city with posters printed on government paper, paid for the luxurious Bonillas headquarters on Avenida Juárez, and even hired the mammoth procession of welcome in which many a gov- ernment employee found it necessary to participate. The Bonillas slogan was "Down with Militarism." Obregón especially was singled out as representing militarism and accordingly his meetings were scattered 62 Mexico-An Interpretation by the drawn saber, his local elections stolen, his ad- herents jailed. Yet furtive whispers kept alive the fact that the party crying so loudly against militarism was headed by the Carranza officials, Murgía, Bar- ragán, and Mariel, the three most notorious army grafters in the country. These high-handed proceedings led directly to the final debacle of Carranza. But the real key to the Obregón cuartelazo is to be found in the events tran- spiring in the widely-separated and semi-isolated states of Yucatán and Sonora,-both strongly pro-Obregón. Yucatán had been, with Sonora and Tamaulipas, even during the darkest days of national turmoil, the most prosperous of the Mexican states. Through the Reguladora de Henequén created by General Al- varado military governor of the state, the Yucatán government had been able to exercise a world mo- nopoly upon henequin, and war-demand had created inflated war prices. At the same time General Alva- rado had promoted social progress. First of all, he made labor independent and able to command decent wages-labor which a few years previous had been branded and worked in chains. Furthermore, he confiscated the estates of owners of haciendas who re- fused to abide by his regulations; he tore away the opulence of the Church, put the Indian on the land, opened schools on every hacienda, gave the Indians free medical attention, instituted Prohibition, founded coöperative stores, and built up, with the assistance of the labor-leader Felipe Carrillo, the Liga de Resis- tencia del Partido Socialista with 70,000 male and 25,- ooo female members. The Rise and Fall of Carranza 63 The United States Government which wanted its war-henequen cheaper, the McCormick Company which had to use henequen for its binders, and the dis- gruntled hacendados, were not interested in the welfare of the people of Yucatán and descended upon the state government and upon Carranza with cajolery, threat, and intrigue. The United States Food Commission fought the Reguladora at every turn, holding up its ships in United States ports and multiplying friction. The American consul in Mérida even threatened to blacklist the Yucatán Government. Carranza was annoyed at the attitude of Yucatán, which, although contributing a very large revenue to the national treasury, never lost an opportunity to emphasize its state rights and its Mayan antecedents. Furthermore, Carranza was angered by the endorse- ment of the candidacy of Obregón by the Liga de Re- sistencia. His first move was to attempt to get con- trol of the United Railways of Yucatán, owned and operated by the state government, on the pretext of preventing their reversion to English capitalists hold- ing the construction mortgages. But the attitude of the Yucatecan Congressmen and Senators against this attempt to federalize the commercial life of the state was so aggressive that the project had to be abandoned. More direct methods were utilized. In any event, Carranza was determined to forestall Obregón's vic- tory in Yucatán, as he had already done elsewhere, by imposing a governor who would control the elections. "Quien escrute elige"-"Whoever counts the ballots, elects"—is the popular Mexican phrase. Accordingly General Hernández, a relative of Señor Cabrera, Min- 64 Mexico-An Interpretation ister of Finance, was sent to break the Liga de Re- sistencia and obstruct the work of the legally elected governor, Carlos Castro. Troops were placed on every hacienda and the Indians disarmed and molested. Soldiers even entered the state capital building and all police-stations, confiscating every weapon. This ac- complished, Hernández instituted a reign of terror. The peons were driven from their acquired lands at the point of the bayonet. The coöperative stores. were destroyed by pillage. In July 1919, Hernández turned the machine-guns on the defenseless people of the town of Muna. The storm of protest at these acts became so ominous that Hernández, for the sake of appearances, was recalled. Colonel Zamarripa was left in charge. He continued and rigorized the terror. Whole villages were wiped out; and it was claimed that over 1,000 members of the Liga de Resistencia were killed in a vain effort to force them to join the Car- rancista Partido Liberal. Colonel Zamarripa after- wards celebrated these murders by publicly flogging one hundred naked Indians in the plaza of Motul, the home-town of Felipe Carrillo, president of the League, who was forced to flee from the Peninsula for his life. State election-day arrived. Two soldiers guarded every booth. Every man was obliged to vote, but few men dared to ask for any colored ballot but that of the government ticket. Pedro Lugo, a jovial young school teacher, was sent by Governor Castro to the village of Tekit as an election inspector. During the night his head was cut off and perched on the ballot-box as a warning to all who dared to question the right of the Carranza soldiers to dictate the elections. The vote The Rise and Fall of Carranza 65 of the League was normally over ninety per cent, but it did not elect a single official in the entire state. So outrageous were these proceedings that the Senate held an investigation and sent a special deputation to the President demanding Colonel Zamarripa's punishment. This Carranza promised, but two months later he ele- vated Zamarripa by appointing him to the governor- ship of Quintana Roo. The matter of the elections was carried to the Supreme Court, which, while recog- nizing the truth of every allegation, dared only to render the verdict that the harm had been perpe- trated, the elections had been held, nothing could be done. Yet it might have been predicted with certainty that the new revolution would start in Sonora and not in Yucatán. Yucatán had been taken unawares, the presidential elections were still distant, and the people had permitted the federals to confiscate their weapons. But Sonora was the home of Obregón. It was to Sonora he had gone, after resigning as Secretary of War, to accept the office of mayor of Huatabampo, his native pueblo. To Sonora went Plutarco Elias Calles after resigning his post as Secretary of Commerce and Labor, in order to organize the workers. To Sonora went De la Huerta after relinquishing his post as Secre- tary of State. It Sonora was almost as prosperous as Yucatán. was economically independent, having more commer- cial relations with the United States than the interior, from which it is cut off by deserts, mountains, and lack of railway communication. Out of Sonora came the most impetus revolutionary army of 1914, the army of 66 Mexico-An Interpretation Obregón that had gained momentum and swept down the coast, across Jalisco, and to the capital long be- fore the armies of Villa and González. Out of Sonora during the last days of March 1920 came rumors of impending revolt and disloyalty. Gen- eral Diéguez was sent on a tour of military inspection. The federal forces were strengthened. This aroused the protest of the elected governor, De la Huerta. He telegraphed Carranza that the State was in perfect peace and had no need of more federal troops. Car- ranza telegraphed a reply on April 9 to the effect that he could not "discuss with a governor of a state the convenience or inconvenience of military measures,' dictated within constitutional faculties, but that he de- sired to call attention to the fact "that the attitude of a state, which, in whatever form or for whatever mo- tive, resists as a violation of its sovereignty the mili- tary movements made by the Federation, is tantamount to an immediate declaration of insurrection and the breaking by that state of the Federal pact." De la Huerta again protested, eliciting the reply from Car- ranza that the matter had now become for him "a ques- tion of principle," a test case, and that he "could not permit the establishment of the precedent that would be created if he acceded to the governor's wishes." Obregón had already been arrested upon a fake charge of rebellion. Everywhere the military arro- gance of the Government became more open. As troops closed in on Sonora, Calles and De la Huerta realized that not only was the sovereignty of Sonora in danger, as had been demonstrated in the case of Yuca- tán and other states, not to mention their plans for The Rise and Fall of Carranza 67 local economic and social regeneration, but the very life of the commonwealth and the institutions of free government. On April 10, the sovereign state of Sonora seceded from the United States of Mexico. A few days later Obregón escaped from the capital where he had been placed under arrest by Carranza, rallying the anti-governmental elements of the state of Michoacán to revolt. Within less than a month Car- ranza was fleeing from the capital to his grave. In final justice to Carranza's memory: he came to power after a period of frightful destruction, universal disorganization, and national anarchy,—without money, without a systematized government, and bur- dened with an untried constitution. In the face of these odds and the cumulative vindicativeness of the United States, he established a government, provided revenues, pacified the central portion of the republic, opened up the main arteries of communication, and, above all, made the new constitution irrevocable. If he did not enforce the enlightened provisions of that constitution, if he failed to promote sound reconstruc- tion, it was in large part because he was caught in the web of self-consuming militarism and international financial intrigue. Had he been a greater man, less inflexible, less vindicative, and truly interested in the up-building of his country, he might have conquered against all these odds. But by scourging organized labor and by forcing out of his cabinet and away from his side every honest element of the revolution, he pursued a Wilsonian tactic that, however, high-minded may have been his intentions, dogged his every act with the prophecy of failure and foretold that personal am- 68 Mexico-An Interpretation bition and egoistical self-assurance could not replace the organized coöperative efforts of a people; that his rule was to vanish in the wreck of foundations ever narrowed by animosity, suppression of political rights, persecutions, and the scourging of the sincere revolu- tionary elements,-plus favoritism toward sycophantic, treacherous self-seekers. CHAPTER VI THE REVINDICATING REVOLUTION THE revolution which swept Obregón into power in accordance with the Plan de Agua Prieta is significant not for its methods but for the character of its sup- porters and the subsequent achievements of the De la Huerta-Obregón administrations. The revolution it- self sprang from traditional political practices, which have always made the army the basis of state control- mass action, expressed through military cuartelazo. The army of Mexico, at that time, was not a na- tional army, but essentially a feudal army, a personal army, integrated of individual commands; but being the only instrument of social control, it also reflected the tendencies of the entire body politic, so that in reality it consisted of a liberal-democratic party and a conservative-aristocratic party. General Obregón, though in retirement, headed the liberal-democratic wing of the army; General Pablo González, also a presidential candidate, headed the aristocratic-reac- tionary party. Originally Carranza supported González for presi- dent, but seeing the impossibility of electing him, at- tempted to create a fake "anti-militarist" party, sud- denly appealing to the people for the support that he had lost through the excesses of his own military fol- 69 70 Mexico-An Interpretation lowers. This volta face of Carranza split the con- servative-aristocratic army group and threw Pablo González temporarily for expediency-upon the side of Obregón. The army, thus practically unified, save for the more corrupt elements still surrounding Car- ranza, made the turnover a matter of weeks-a cuar- telazo. The revolution itself, however, was greatly blurred by thus suddenly absorbing all of the elements that were disgruntled with Carranza's rule. Obregón even gained for the moment the tacit support of American capital, which hoped, either that the reactionary ele- ments would succeed in gaining the upper hand or that Obregón, having so much popular support, would pacify the country and perhaps prove amenable to the wishes of foreign investors. But though Obergón came into power via the cus- tomary route of military cuartelazo, he was supported by elements which had never before made their ap- pearance in the terrain of Mexican politics. He had first of all the support of organized Labor as expressed by the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (C. R. O. M.), the one thoroughly national organi- zation. In addition the leaders of this body or- ganized the Partido Laborista in Zacatecas during the presidential campaign. Nineteen of the twenty-seven Mexican states were represented, and the platform contained the following significant statement: As it appears that preparations are being made to defraud the people of their right to express their free will during the coming national elections, the Labor Party, if it be necessary, The Revindicating Revolution 71 will employ all its moral and material strength to prevent the hopes of the working people being defrauded in the approach- ing struggle. A convention of labor unions held in Tampico in March also declared for Obregón, a fact which gave him the united support of the railroad workers, per- haps the most powerful labor union in Mexico. This support later proved of direct assistance. The Car- ranza troop-trains were constantly sabotaged during the revolution and the way blocked. When Carranza attempted to escape from Mexico City, one train was wrecked because of loose trucks on the engine, said to have been the result of round-house sabotage. Obregón also drew to his side all rebel factions ex- cept Felix Díaz. These included the various agrarian groups, the Zapatistas, Villistas, Cedillistas, etc., which had been unequivocally opposed to Carranza and had kept all the frontier areas in turmoil throughout his administration. The following summarizes the elements embraced in the Obregón movement: Nomenclature and Characterization OBREGONISTAS: The liberal-democratic army group. GONZALISTAS: The reactionary army elements not directly favored by the Carranza government. The Church-Aristoc- racy group. PELAEZ and his followers: A bandit group in the pay of the petroleum interests. Catholic, reactionary. ZAPATISTAS: The Morelos Indians, formerly led by Zapata. Land reformers demanding political and racial autonomy. 72 Mexico-An Interpretation VILLISTAS: Land reformers. CEDILLISTAS: Land reformers. YAQUIS: Indians of the northwest, particularly Sonora, de- manding the return of their valley lands and racial autonomy. LABOR: a. The Partido Laborista, the political wing of the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana, corresponding to the American Federation of Labor in national influence, but far more radical. b. The Liga de Resistencia del Partido Socialista de Yuca- tán. Very thoroughly organized. c. El Partido Socialista de Michoacán which gave Obregón strong support during the first weeks of his revolt. d. Most of the labor elements not affiliated with the C. R. O. M., including the railway workers, and practically all but the Anarchist elements in Tampico. The following personalities finally emerged as the guiding spirits of the revolution and the new govern- ment, and serve to indicate in a general way the char- acter of the Revindicating Revolution: Name and Characterization OBREGÓN, ALVARO: Ex-rancher, ex-Carranza general; anti- Church, anti-capitalist, pro-labor. CALLES, PLUTARCO ELIAS: Ex-school teacher, ex-labor leader, ex-governor of Sonora, ex-Minister of Commerce and Labor under Carranza. A sincere, courageous personal- ity of liberal-radical tendencies. De La HuertaA, ADOLFO: Ex-Secretary of State during the first days of Carranza rule, ex-governor of Sonora. Frankly sympathetic with labor. VILLAREAL, ANTONIO: An agrarian agitator who led a pre- The Revindicating Revolution 73 mature revolt against Díaz in 1906. Fought for Madero. Opposed to both Villa and Carranza. TREVIÑO, JACINTO: Deserter from the González faction. A highly-trained military man. ALVARADO, SALVADOR: Founder of state socialism in Yu- catán. Founder of the Liga de Resistencia in Yucatán. CARILLO, FELIPE: President of the Yucatán Liga de Resist- encia. Jailed by Díaz for reading the constitution to the Indians. MORONES, LUIS: Founder and leader of the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana and the Partido Laborista. SOTO Y GAMA, ANTONIO DIAZ: Lawyer. Agrarian agitator, seven years fighting with the Zapatistas. Founder of the powerful Partido Agrarista. Member of the Chamber of Deputies. VASCONCELOS, JosÉ: An educator. Sent by Carranza to study the American school system. Participated in the propaganda against Díaz and Huerta. Thus the Revindicating Revolution, though utiliz- ing the customary military paths to achieve political power, gained the tacit support of many popular or- ganized groups. The Madero revolution had been an inchoate, half spontaneous uprising against the thirty-year misrule of Díaz. Like the revolution of Juárez, it lacked a real, solid, organized basis; it lacked strong, consistent civil and social support. Car- ranza, for the first time in Mexican history, gained organized popular backing; but he cast that backing aside at the first opportunity. The Obregón régime, on the other hand, not only utilized such backing to buttress the military operations which put it into power, but has consistently widened the civil basis upon which its control rests. In other words, the blind up- 74 Mexico-An Interpretation } rising of the Maderistas has at last developed through ten years of revolution into organized purposefulness. For the first time in Mexican history, a fundamentally new method of social control has been evolved-more direct and economic than the American political party system, but for that reason more truly in line with the reconstructive tendencies that seem to be emerging from our era. CHAPTER VII RECONSTRUCTION OBREGÓN's immediate problem was the establishment of peace, the solidifying of his régime, and demobiliza- tion. The attainment of peace, since all the anti- Carranza elements had rallied to his standard, and had by his victory become a part of the regular army, and since the greater part of the Carranza forces had flopped, was chiefly a question of demobilization. When Obregón, after the flight of Carranza, swept down the broad Paseo de la Reforma into the capital at the head of twenty thousand troops, he was leading the advance-guard of over a hundred thousand who were costing the Government in direct upkeep at that time about a million pesos a day. The reduction of this force was a ticklish task, some- what equivalent to holding a series of lighted fire- crackers in the hand, each having to be ejected at just the proper moment. To revise the grades of arrogant officers, eliminate thousands from the service and dis- charge nearly two-thirds of the rank and file in order to cut the army down to a pre-determined 50,000 was a monumental task. The army was full of González supporters, Pelaez supporters-officers accustomed to personal privilege and easy graft. The regular Car- ranza army elements were the worst, for they had been accustomed to plunder the countryside. For instance, 75 76 Mexico-An Interpretation Some- the rolling-stock of the railroads was largely controlled by the officers. Scarcely a general or a high officer was without at least one private car. Other cars were used at the expense of traffic and commerce. times they were used, as in Vera Cruz by General Aguilar, son-in-law of Carranza, to establish food- monopolies, or for other personal graft. General Cal- les, then Secretary of War, was obliged in some in- stances to proceed against recalcitrant officers with warrants of arrest or armed force. No personal privi- lege was tolerated. Officers committing depredations. as in the old days, even officers too zealous in the perse- cution of the dying régime, were removed from their commands and called to the capital for court-martial. On the whole, rather than resort to arbitrary meas- ures, the new Government undertook to accomplish de- mobilization through conciliating the rebel and military elements while at the same time preventing serious dis- ruption of civil life. Every important agrarian rebel leader was promptly given land, implements, and guns for distribution among his followers. The Cedillistas were permitted to found eight colonies near the Ciudad de Maiz on the Rio Verde in San Luis Potosí on lands seized at the very outbreak of the revolution. His followers were provided with tractors, American plows, telephone equipment, seed, rifles, and ammuni- tion. The Zapatistas were sent tractors, hundreds of plows, seed, school-supplies, etc. Villa was given two very large haciendas for subdivision among his follow- ers, together with plows, seed, school-supplies, etc. The same policy was followed with all the agrarian rebels; and to continue it the Government bought, Reconstruction 77 within three months of its establishment, two hundred carloads of agricultural machinery at a cost of a mil- lion dollars. The Government continued these activities through the two following years. Experimental military land colonies were established in Michoacán, San Luis Po- tosí, and other states, and when they had proved suc- cessful, demobilization was accelerated. In Decem- ber, 1920, 2,000 officers and 19,000 men were dis- charged in accordance with the colony plan; January, 1921, 5,000 officers and men; in February, 4,000. These were divided among the eight soldier colonies of General Saturnino Cedilla in San Luis Potosí and the town colonies under General Carrera Torres. On March 15, 1921, an official decree was issued reducing the army to 50,000 men, this to be achieved by March 31, 1922. By July 10, 1921, the army had been cut to 81,000 officers and men, and by the given date to the required 50,000. The military budget for 1922 was thirty million pesos less than the amount spent in 1921. The general demobilization policy proved success- ful from the start. The overnight recognition of rebel claims and the measures for caring for the de- mobilized soldiers on the land, brought about peace and rapid reconstruction, indeed is in happy contrast to the haphazard demobilization of many European coun- tries-Italy for instance. When I left Mexico, for the first time, in August 1920, but thirty soldiers were said to be garrisoned in Cuernavaca, the capital of the state of Morelos, home of the Zapatistas and the bloody Reyes, who had been under arms for ten years 78 Mexico-An Interpretation -where some six months previously Carranza had been conducting a campaign that was costing his Gov- ernment for a time over $300,000 (pesos) a day. Trains were being sent into the most remote areas without military escort. My route to Puerto México to embark for Spain lay over a road that during most of Madero's, Huerta's and Carranza's régimes was heavily guarded-when it was operated at all—but which in this instance carried not a single soldier. And since then the Obregón Government has main- tained a record of internal peace, which could well be emulated by such settled countries as Italy and cer- tain sections of the United States. (As may be seen, the question of demobilization was, on the whole, a land-settlement problem; and the agrarian problem is the fundamental problem of the revolution. The agrarian achievements of the new régime have therefore been preserved for separate treatment in the next chapter. They are the most significant achievements of Obregón's administration.) Education became one of the first concerns. The De la Huerta Government found that the school- system of the country, in so far as one had ever existed, was completely wrecked. In addition it had to cope with the illiteracy that had accumulated as a result of ten years of revolution. Under the able direction of Señor José Vasconcelos, primary schools were every- where promptly opened and an intensive campaign was inaugurated against illiterary. The Department of Education was reorganized to include administrative control of all scholastic activities, libraries, and muse- ums. The budget in 1922 amounted to fifty million Reconstruction 79 pesos, the largest in total and percentage to total gov- ernmental outgo ever expended in Mexico, in striking contrast to the 2,000,000 peso expenditure of Car- ranza, and comparing most favorably with that of the majority of European countries. The general purpose of Señor Vasconcelos has been to make "free men and women capable of judging life from their individual points of view, of earning a liveli- hood, and of shaping society, in such manner that the person who works may be in a position to obtain decent. standards." He squarely opposes the old Díaz idea that the Indian (composing working class) forms a race apart, incapable, for racial and selective reasons, of higher cultural development. As the Indian forms the bulk of the population, Vasconcelos has made spe- cial efforts in his Department of Indigenous Culture to foster Indian culture and make it the real basis for a larger participation in the national activities without creating a "reservation system." The fundamental necessity however, was the crea- tion of schools. Primary, non-sectarian, obligatory education was decreed in Mexico over seventy years ago. But few schools existed. The Díaz Govern- ment established public schools in the principal cities -among them various normal schools for training- teachers. The Obregón Government has extended the school-system, in accordance with the constitution, to the furthest districts, and the hacendados are being required to support schools on the large plantations. In 1922 there were in operation 12,206 schools with 25,342 teachers and 1,044,229 pupils. The cost per inhabitant ranged from 48 centavos in Guerrera, 80 Mexico-An Interpretation the most backward and undeveloped state, to $8.02 (pesos) in the Federal District and $21.55 (pesos) in lower California. The total expenditure for primary schools was $26,764,684.17 (pesos). In addition, university extension work was for the first time in- augurated, largely to provide lectures for workers; 460 new public libraries were established with 48,851 volumes and 309 schools were opened to promote in- digenous culture with 314 teachers and 17,925 pupils. To combat illiteracy, a staff of 8,947 teachers (largely volunteer) was created; and $436,545.16 (pesos) was spent for this purpose in the Federal District alone. The study of English, under the direction of Roberto Haberman, has been extended to all schools and thor- oughly systematized. The Revindication Government has guaranteed all the rights of Labor established by the constitution. Señor Zubáran, until recently Minister of Labor, was for some years with the Carranza government, and, largely through his efforts, the batallones rojos were recruited in support of Carranza. General Calles, at the very outset, refused to permit federal soldiers to be used as strike-breakers. The Government works in coöperation with the Confederación Regional Ob- rera Mexicana in all matters. Perhaps the most important law signed by Obregón was that which pro- vides for the protection of Mexican emigrant workers, through the supervision of all contracts by the De- partment of Industry, Commerce, and Labor. All contracts must guarantee to the emigrants the same wages as those of other countries, together with round- trip fares. Other important Other important labor legislation is Reconstruction 81 pending. As the Mexican labor-code is perhaps the most liberal in the world, the Government has, through the enforcement of its provisions, in three years greatly accelerated the improvement of the condition of the Mexican worker and the prosperity of the country. No reconstructive measures would have been pos- sible without strenuous efforts to balance the budget, keep down expenses, and arrange for the refunding of the national debt. A new revenue bill was put in oper- ation which provided for entirely new methods of taxation. Antiquated taxes were abolished and in their place the following principal revenue taxes were established: an inheritance tax, an income tax on all salaries over $1,800 (pesos), a land tax levied accord- ing to productive zones and the size of the holdings, export and import taxes, taxes on mortgages and capi- tal loans and on all industrial and commercial concerns. The funding of the national debt grew out of the petroleum question. When the Águila Petroleum Company (British) withdrew from the American As- sociation of Oil Producers in Mexico, and agreed to abide by all Mexican laws, the American concerns be- came alarmed and in August 1921 the American oil magnates made a special trip to Mexico in which an agreement was arrived at with the Government to pay the new oil taxes in defaulted bonds, then selling at $40 but having, with the unpaid coupons, a par value of $135. This was equivalent to cutting the petroleum taxes to a third of their actual amount. The international bankers thereupon became alarmed that this reduction and method of payment would pre- vent a liquidation of the indebtedness. Accordingly 82 Mexico-An Interpretation in the early part of 1922 De la Huerta went to New York to meet Mr. Thomas W. Lamont, representative of the bankers holding Mexican bonds. The bankers attempted to drive a hard bargain which would give them control of the customs and practically reduce Mexico to the status of Haiti-that of an American protectorate with direct administrative rights. De la Huerta brought out the points, among other things, that Mexico was one of the most solvent countries of the world and that it was attempting, as no European country was doing, except England, to comply with all its international obligations. The debt was smaller than was believed, totaling, with the inclusion of the unguaranteed railway debt, unpaid interest and sinking fund, 700 million dollars, a per capita of $50. No other nation has so small a per capita debt with such large resources. In addition, De la Huerta reminded the bankers that they had bought the bonds for a song and could not justly expect to retire them at par. The result was an agreement providing for the commence- ment of partial payments on principal and interest on January 2, 1923, full payment to be resumed by Jan- uary 1, 1928. In general, production, business, and commerce are in better condition than at any time since Díaz was overthrown; indeed, in spite of ten years of revolution, the country has progressed and developed, the total export and import figures surpassing those of 1910. Transportation is in much better condition than it has been for years, although new rails, road-beds, and roll- ing-stock are still urgently needed. But improve- ments, purchases of rolling-stock, and more efficient } Reconstruction 83 management has brought the railway system up to a condition superior to that in many European countries. The chief Vera Cruz-Mexico City line has been re- turned to the owners. The other lines, though the government holds fifty-six per cent of the stock, will be put under private management as before the revolu- tion. In all, Mexico, compared to any time during the Huerta or Carranza Administrations, presents in May, 1923, a settled, industrious, and prosperous condition. Thus, from the standpoint of law and order, of mili- tary organization and demobilization, of financial re- form and foreign debt payment; from the standpoint of the promotion of agriculture and the break-up of the vast estates, of education, of industrial and com- mercial development, the Revindicating Revolution as the culmination of a ten-year struggle for liberty marks an epoch in recent Mexican history. While in many respects, Obregón and his followers are but completing the work of Juárez and Madero, the efforts of the former have been characterized by a much greater independence and a much more practical spirit of sound reconstruction. Their program has been consistently actuated by a broad impersonal statesmanship and has throughout shown a deep understanding of the needs of the people. Thus is written the latest page in the 1910-20 revo- lution. That revolution has at no time been a Bolshe- vik experiment. It is above all else a conservative revolution. It represents a profound reaction to the industrial and commercial invasion of the United States and Western Civilization. Díaz so accelerated the industrial revolution in his country as to disastrously 84 Mexico-An Interpretation 7 shatter the social order. Socially, educationally, ra- cially, temperamentally, the Mexican people were not prepared for such a tremendous break with the tradi- tions of centuries. The climate, the character of the national resources, and geographical relativity have further militated against such a change, inevitable though it may ultimately be. The Madero-Obregón revolution, while motivated by ideas of democracy, of industrial freedom, of so- cialism, has nevertheless, in its more fundamental race- motivated aspects, clamped the brakes on a runaway industrialism; it has attempted to hold the country back from a too violent departure from the agrarian- communistic, semi-oriental traditions of the race and the nation. A conservative revolution of that kind could take but two courses. It could return to the Army-Church- Hierarchy tradition at the expense of the modern driv- ing capitalist-industrial American system; and this was, in part, the tendency of the Huerta régime and even to a slight degree of the Carranza régime; or it could attempt to conserve those intimate agrarian, commun- istic customs of the Indian so wisely respected by the Spaniards and existing undisturbed until towards the end of the Díaz rule. But owing to the admixture of the "Rights-of-Man," democratic, liberal ideas, the second course was inevitable. These "modern" ideas served as the spark to ignite the deep race-conservatism instincts, which last have done the real driving of the Madero-Obregón cylinders. For this reason the ag- rarian achievements of the Revindicating Revolution have been of supreme importance. They will either Reconstruction 85 make a great Mexico through an ultimate moderniza- tion of the ejido system; or they will prove as disas- trously conservative as the industrial innovations of Díaz were disastrously disruptive. PART III THE SOCIAL FABRIC CHAPTER VIII SOLVING THE AGRARIAN PROBLEM Up to the Obregón Administration, with the exception of the Juárez interlude, only futile attempts had been made by the revolutionary elements and governments to solve the complex problem involved in the disap- pearance of land-communism, the passing of serfdom, and the rise of private ownership-a change in social relationships so abrupt that the vestiges of five cen- turies still flourish side by side. The 1910-1920 Revolution has been the battle of three ages: serfdom, capitalism, and industrial freedom-but its strongest motive force has been the peon's land-hunger .. his century-old conservative love for the soil. Yet after ten years of turmoil, the big estates, many of them built up from enclosed ejidos, still existed. An article appearing in the Excelsior of Mexico City (De- cember 28, 1919) toward the end of Carranza's régime, listed the land concessions still in the hands of foreigners at approximately 54,875,000 acres. In that list 7,725,000 acres were not considered, making in all 62,600,000 acres in large foreign estates. In addition many large estates were held by native Mexi- cans and a vast domain was still in the hands of the Government-in 1912, 54,000,000 acres. And though much of the empire represented by these figures was mountain, desert, timber, and mining land, yet the 89 90 Mexico-An Interpretation broad haciendas were invariably unwieldy and but partly cultivated. Señor Oscar Branef, prior to the Obergón Administration, owned the Hacienda de Jalapa in Guanajuato, so large that he had never seen its furthest boundaries. Señor Dante Cusi, one-time owner of the Hacienda de Lombardia and Nueva Italia in Michoacán-where now exists a military colony founded by ten generals and thirty captains- stated that his hacienda was so extensive that he did not know its actual area. The Hacienda de Armar- gura of Señor Luis Espinosa formerly stretched as far as seventy-five kilometers and contained three railroad stations. The peon's demand in the face of this dispossession was not articulate. He had been conscious only that his peace and happiness had been disturbed. But a few years ago he lived in a village surrounded by com- mon lands, pasturage, woods, and waters. In such a group environment he was able to exist happily by rais- ing a little corn, pigs, cows, chickens, and was stimu- lated to those handicrafts of pottery, weaving, basket- making, wood-carving, ornament-making, and bead- work for which he still shows such artistry. He knew nothing of private ownership; he did not grow to sell; he merely had gentile relations and rights which were guaranteed by the whole weight of customary law. The lands were distributed according to philosophical and practical system of need, and every man was as- sured enough to eat, a place to sleep, and clothes for his body without excessive toil. In some respects the ancient agriculture was more advanced. The Aztecs and neighboring tribes were Solving the Agrarian Problem 91 more closely linked to the soil than their modern dis- possessed sons. In ancient times agriculture was a woven pattern in the civil and religious institutions. It had its own presiding deities and played its part in determining the nomenclature of the Aztec calendar. The religious life was enriched by those great com- munal celebrations that had their counterpart in West- ern Europe in such festivals as the Great Dionysia in Greece. The land was rejuvenated by that village system of letting part lie fallow each year for pastur- age; which the extreme drought that continually men- aces the cultivable portions of Mexico was forestalled by extensive canal-systems and by the imposition of heavy penalties upon those who destroyed the dense forests of the time. Even these measures were not sufficient, owing to the crude methods of cultivation, to prevent the recurrence of widespread famine and re- sulting epidemics. But at the time of the Conquest, the native Mexicans had learned the lesson taught to the Pharaohs by Joseph of building granaries that the seven fat years might not be swallowed up by the seven lean years. But the modern Mexican has had no granaries; he has enjoyed few agricultural improvements. His corn, when mature, has been bought up at ruinous rates by comisionistas. He does not know those modern sys- tems depending upon fertilization and dry-farming. In many places he has no irrigation system. He often- times breaks the soil with a stick, or a rude wooden plow pulled by oxen. He does not even understand the old system of letting part of the land lie fallow each year-perhaps because he has no land to spare. 92 Mexico-An Interpretation Thus the agrarian problem is not alone the abolition of serfdom or peonage, not alone the distribution of lands; it is a question of education, a question of meth- ods. It is more. It is a question of social relation- ship. The peon has never learned to own his land privately. Attempts by Madero and Carranza to give him lands on this basis were only partly successful. They were not successful because the peon, in many localities, has not learned to labor outside of a com- munal group, except under a state of semi-serfdom. The attempts of Madero and Carranza were further unsuccessful because most lands need irrigation, and produce crops such as tobacco which needs careful cur- ing and packing, or sugar-cane which requires adequate refining facilities. These requisites must be provided through coöperative effort, through governmental as- sistance, or private initiative. It is doubtful, there- fore, if the Mexican land problem can be solved en- tirely in the "American" and Fascist manner, by the creation of small proprietors. It is daily more ap- parent that the peon will resist, in part, the private- ownership and freedom-to-starve implications of the industrial revolution that has invaded his country. At the same time the modern world will not tolerate a universally inefficient cultivation of corn. Yet that cultivation could not be much less inefficient than it is under a system of large land-holding which effectively chokes agricultural expansion. Towards the end of 1919 it was estimated by various authorities that be- tween 15,000,000 and 20,000,000 acres were under cultivation-no more than 3,000,000 acres of which Solving the Agrarian Problem 93 were in relatively small holdings. The seriousness of this could be vividly realized by passing along the mountain slopes of the Sierra Madres and beholding the little patches of corn-fields, yellow against the rain- less sky, where the Indians cultivate the very crags to wrest an independent living from the soil. Yet, under existing conditions, 25,000,000 acres is about the maxi- mum that can be cultivated. Though Mexico has been termed the garden spot of the world, as one rides. through the sterile reaches of Coahuila, Chihuahua, Durango, Zacatecas, Aguas Calientes, Nuevo León, through the whole of northern Mexico; if one crosses the Sierra Madres and the desert wastes of Sonora, where as the natives say-even the coyotes cry out for rain and the unwary traveler may perish from thirst, he realizes how many millions of acres are be- yond cultivation unless some genius appears to provide them with the water cut off by the perpendicular cliffs. Some of these areas have had complete droughts for seven years at a stretch. To find the rich portions of Mexico one must pass to the lowlands, where in places three crops a year of fifteen-foot corn leap above the house-tops from the humid soil; to the southern states of Morelos, Michoacán, Guerrero, Tabasco, Colima, Oaxaca, and Jalisco, where, according to President Obregón—when he took office-but two per cent of the land was cultivated. Yet even in those areas stretch long reaches of cactus and sage-brush-covered hills and, near the coast, miles of impassable morass and jungle. And in these most productive regions one finds few railroads. Even on the 20,000,000 acres 94 Mexico-An Interpretation under cultivation, the crops must depend upon ignorant planting, the uncombated scourge of pests, and a ca- pricious rainfall. This is less a tragedy for the world than it is for the Mexican peon. In the southern part where tropic fruits grow in profusion, and hogs are as prolific as guinea-pigs, the failure of crops is not such a calamity -elsewhere it means famine. At the time Obregón entered the capital with his revolutionary army, I asked an uneducated Zapatista, fresh from the hills, what his people wanted. His an- swer clipped like the snap of a whip-drilled into him doubtless by ten years of guerrilla warfare in the saddle: "Lands, Water, and Schools!" "Water!" for even the wondrously productive state of Morelos is, in parts, terribly arid. But he will find that the Indian of Morelos will need more, a need only par- tially felt by even the leaders. I The land problem must be considered from various points of view: 1) Land-distribution; 2) Education; 3) Rural credits; 4) Creation of new cultivable lands by irrigation, fertilization, scientific farming and re- forestration; 5) transportation. The repartition of the great estates among the beons, according to one scheme or another has natur- ally been the objective point of the agrarian movement. Even before Madero's revolution, the cry of "Tierra y Libertad!" had been raised. Various agitators had printed pamphlets, made speeches, and issued procla- mations years before the final explosion. Among the agrarian agitators were the two brothers Ricardo and Jesús Flores Magón, one of whom died later in an Solving the Agrarian Problem 95 American prison, Antonio I. Villareal, who raised a re- volt against Díaz as early as 1906 and occupied the portfolio of Agriculture under De la Huerta, Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama, a lawyer who went out to fight for the Zapatistas for seven years, and others. When Madero began his struggle, the revolution had already stirred in the south under the agrarian leaders Aquiles Serdán and the Zapata brothers. Madero heard this clamor for land and inserted the following third paragraph in his San Luis Potosí mani- festo, which brought the various agrarian revolters be- neath his banner: Through a vicious interpretation of the unimproved land law, many small land-owners, most of them Indians, have been dispossessed, either by decrees of the Secretary of Public Works, or by the judgment of the federal courts. It is ele- mentary justice to return to their owners or the latters' heirs the land of which they were despoiled through such immoral practices, besides indemnifying them for the losses incurred. Madero attempted to fulfil this pledge of land- reform, but his attempts were ill-advised, unscientific, and disastrous. Land-reform was abolished! (This discouragement however, did not prevent him from making many huge grants among which his own fam- ily figured.) But he was not permitted at any time to forget his pledges. The principal agrarian leaders reappeared in public life in the Partido Liberal which launched a lengthy manifesto reciting the agrarian abuses committed by Porfirismo and presenting a pro- gramme of methods of reform. As the pamphlet was issued by the "Extreme Left" a schism arose with the 96 Mexico-An Interpretation "Extremo Legalista," splitting the party. The Ex- treme Left of the Liberal Party continued its active propaganda down through the Huerta period. Huerta assassinated Mariano Duque, one of its leaders, and threw Soto y Gama into prison. In 1911 the Zapatistas launched their Plan de Ayala. It is crude, but short and effective. It pro- vides for the creation of small rural properties, and the restitution of lands and waters to the "despoiled people" by the "complete expropriation of exploiting hacendados who have for any reason opposed the revolution," and expropriation of the remainder with partial indemnification. In the Zapatista districts some efforts were made to realize this programme. Soto y Gama told me how he escaped from the clutches of Huerta and fled to Morelos to join Zapata. He instigated the holding of a Zapatista Congress, known as the Convención de México. A provisional government was established- El Gobierno Convencionista-and a Secretary of Agri- culture, Señor Manuel Palfox, appointed. "Agrarian commissions" were promptly created in each county (distrito) controlled. These commissions consisted of a representative of the Secretary of Agri- culture and six technical experts, whose duty was to make surveys, retrace the limits of the old ejidos and determine the most practical method of land restitu- tion. This work proved very difficult as old titles were often obscure or non-existent. Furthermore all enclosures had been legalized by Díaz, and often the land had passed through a number of hands. The in- vestigations proving very tedious, provisional subdivi- Solving the Agrarian Problem 97 sions, based upon the best of the knowledge at hand, were made during the years 1915 and 1916. Hand in hand went the work of creating a rural bank, modeled upon the Raiffeisen coöperative system; and through this and provisional land-repartition, the state of Morelos beneath the "Convention Govern- ment❞ achieved comparative prosperity. But this prosperity was soon shattered by the inva- sion of Carranza troops. Carranza made little at- tempt, after the first few months of his régime, to solve the agrarian problem. Generals Calles of Sonora and Estrado of Zacatecas both encountered more or less op- position in putting into operation the agrarian provi- sions of the constitution. General Calles in Sonora in- stituted the practice, followed by the Obregón Govern- ment, of settling his soldiers on the land and providing them with ammunition to protect themselves against future dispossession. General Alvarado in Yucatán gave the Indians their own land-plots, with the result that labor, which in the days of Díaz had worked in chains, was enabled during the henequin boom to com- mand as high wages as seven or eight pesos a day. But in Yucatán, in Morelos, in Nayarit, as in Sonora and in Zacatecas, the state officials encountered Car- ranza opposition. In Yucatán, Morelos, Oaxaca, and Michoacán, the Indians were driven from their lands at the point of the bayonet and herded back on to the great haciendas. In Morelos, General González oper- ated the large haciendas with governmental troops and is said to have pocketed the harvest-returns. The De la Huerta Government began its career by taking an active interest in the problem of land-distri- 98 Mexico-An Interpretation bution. It encouraged the formation of the Partido Nacional Agrarista, headed by Soto y Gama, which launched a Zapatista programme and suggested the recreation of the old agricultural bank of Díaz, but on a basis that would make it of benefit to the small farmer. At the same time it established an agrarian commission, consisting of technical and social experts to supervise the work of land distribution and promo- tion of agricultural enterprises. Active measures were taken to restore the ejidos enclosed since 1857, and, before relinquishing office, De la Huerta signed orders for the return of nearly 100,000 acres in the States of Pueblo, Tabasco, Vera Cruz, Tlaxcala, Jalisco, Zacatecas, Lower California, Sinaloa, Mo- relos, Hidalgo, and Sonora. In addition all idle lands were made accessible by the first law signed by President De la Huerta-the Idle Lands Law-which provided that any lands not plowed and planted by certain dates (these to be fixed by local legislation) may be petitioned for by any citi- zen, preferably some one in the community, up to a given acreage, which varies according to the district (70 acres for the Federal District and 250 for Lower California). Petitions must be granted within three days. The land may be occupied from one to three years, according to the time that it has remained un- cultivated. In return for this use, a maximum tax of five per cent on the crop, or ten per cent if tools and seed have been provided, must be paid to the ayun- tamiento or town council. Other lands for distribution were readily acquired with little friction. Under Díaz the Land Survey Solving the Agrarian Problem 99 Law gave any man one-third of the land he might survey and map, and an option to purchase the re- mainder at a very low rate. Under this law, few lands were surveyed, but many mapped, and old land- titles, Indian holdings, and village commons were ruth- lessly torn away. To-day the Government itself may at any time exercise the right of eminent domain by condemning property at the value set by the owner in declaring his taxes (plus ten per cent). As most landed estates have been very lightly taxed-many a poor pajero being taxed more on his burro-load of vegetables than some rich hacendado—and as the De la Huerta-Obregón Government promptly made use of this right, there resulted substantial increases in the amount of taxes paid or the acquisition of property by the Government at a very low rate. Some ten mil- lion pesos worth of secretly held lands were taken away from the Church. Ejidos enclosed since 1857 were and still are being returned to all village com- munities making application. Also, the Obregón Gov- ernment, in full accordance with the constitution, has expropriated all lands within the Federal Zones, i. e., bordering upon frontiers or the sea-coasts, which are illegally held by foreigners, as for instance the Ha- cienda de las Palomas, previously owned by former Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo. Other lands. have been expropriated with proper payment in in- terest-bearing bonds which have increased in value, a procedure also followed in Rumania and other Balkan countries. By May 21, 1922, over 1,900,000 acres had been expropriated. $13,000,000 (pesos) was paid for the vast Terrazas estate comprising most of 100 Mexico-An Interpretation Chihuahua and a large part of Durango. Other large haciendas which have been partly expropriated have been "Encinillas" with an extension of 1,750,000 acres; "Illescas," 620,000 acres; "El Carro," 500,000 acres; "La Hormiga," 440,000 acres; and an estate of the Kargil Lumber Company, 430,000 acres. Prob- ably the total area expropriated by May, 1923 to- talled 2,500,000 acres. Under Obregón the experimental work of the Na- tional Agrarian Commission was continued, but most of its activities were standardized according to a num- ber of laws which definitely regulated the manner of applying the constitutional provisions. Thus the Idle Lands Law of De la Huerta was supplemented by an even more rigorous and comprehensive act. At the time of its enactment, President Obregón took the op- portunity to point out that ninety per cent of Mexico's cultivable land was still monopolized by latifundae who had never taken any interest in its proper develop- ment or in inaugurating scientific methods. Later, in a memorial addressed to the Chamber, he called for the establishment of the principle that every Mexican citizen is entitled to a plot of ground sufficient in size to sustain himself and family. The resulting law followed his suggestions, calling for the right to expro- priate a) rural estates, b) land held uncultivated for a period of five years, c) land cultivated by methods adjudged crude and antiquated. Actually it is no more radical than the laws adopted by Jugo-Slavia or Ru- mania, or the decrees in operation in Italy prior to the rise of the Fascisti. The owners of seized lands in Mexico have been recompensed for the assessed value Solving the Agrarian Problem 101 of their lands, plus ten per cent, by interest-paying bonds redeemable in twenty annual installments. The size of the plots distributed have ranged from five to twenty hectares, and the recipients pay cost, plus five per cent for organization and distribution, in twenty annual payments. owners On April 10, 1921, a land law was put in force, regulating the expropriation and distribution of agri- cultural lands for the benefit of "villages, hamlets, fraternal societies, coöperative colonies, community groups, groups on estates, . . . abandoned by the the cities and towns whose populations have fallen off . . . and are no longer industrial, com- mercial, or mining centers." Holdings of less than fifty hectares are respected by this law as are various classes of lands on which property has been accumu- lated, lands acquired during the distribution of 1856, lands claimed by communites, etc., and held by title for more than ten years when not in excess of fifty hec- tares. In answer to a questionnaire which I submitted, the Agrarian Commission stated that by March 1923 it had distributed about 1,500,000 acres, 25 per cent of which recreated old ejidos. No mention, however, was made of Morelos, a state where the land has been very extensively distributed; and the figures for Yuca- tán seemed inadequate. Nor do these figures take into account the land distributed by state governments or those granted by the executive to the military colonies. In carrying out the land-programme the adminis- tration has had constant regard for local conditions and sentiments. In the main it has not attempted to 102 Mexico-An Interpretation push land-distribution but has rather responded to the popular demand, feeling that until the organized force of the agrarian movement is sufficiently powerful, it is useless to anticipate with a too radical programme. Thus it has happened that, while land-distribution has taken place in all parts of the republic, this distribution has been conservative save in three or four states, which may be considered as in the nature of experi- mental laboratories, viz., Morelos, Vera Cruz, and Yucatán, to a lesser extent in Chihuahua, Michocán, Sonora, San Luis Potosí, Puebla, Hidalgo México, and elsewhere. And in many states the work of the Agra- rian Commission has been supplemented by local laws which have established maximum acreages and actively stimulated land-distribution. In Morelos where, prior to the time of Madero, the state was owned by thirty-three individuals and where the Zapatistas had been in revolt for ten years, any other policy than thoroughgoing land-distribution would immediately precipitate armed revolt in one of the most strategi- cally defensible districts of the Republic which is on the highway to all the southwestern areas. In Vera Cruz agrarianism has taken on an exceedingly radical character, in many cases ignoring the laws es- tablished and resorting to direct occupation as oc- curred in southern Italy in 1919 and 1920. In Yuca- tán, the people are organized into strong Ligas de Resistencia and this fact, coupled with the separatist character of the Mayan Indian race stock, the long period of oppression under Díaz, the revolutionary tradition implanted by General Alvarado, makes any- thing but a policy of land-subdivision impractical. Solving the Agrarian Problem 103 The activities of the Government is recreating the ejidos and in breaking up the large estates have not been carried on without considerable opposition. In cases of dispute regarding the subdivision of lands, the maxim of President Obregón, as publically announced, has been: "Life before property." In answer to a memorial of protest addressed to him by the Chamber of Commerce of Nuevo León, he declared, in part: .. The restitution . . . of ejidos is already a constitutional right which the villages are exercising within the conditions. the law establishes; and it is furthermore a social necessity and equity which will be accomplished with as little in- jury as possible and without executing abuses in the name of a principle so noble. • • • With regard to the reduction in agricultural production for the present year, I differ from your opinion for I do not believe that this diminution . . . is due . . to the restitu- tion of ejidos . . . but to the greater or less lack of confidence among the hacendados resulting in part from the fact that our revolution has placed them in the necessity of having to pay more reasonable wages; and, as the great majority of them have not accepted the revolution and still use very primitive systems of cultivation, many prefer to cease sowing crops rather than pay wages-for, as a result of their routinary methods of labor, they would only be able to make money if they could obtain their hands in accordance with conditions which obtained prior to 1910. I am certain that the agriculturists to whom I refer are not determined to progress, to import the modern machinery necessary in order to compete with other centers of civilization, and their properties must pass into hands more apt in order that these may cause the land to produce what the hacendados are incapable of accomplishing. 104 Mexico-An Interpretation In Morelos, the old landed aristocrats charge that land-distribution has destroyed the sugar-industry, which depends upon large areas of sugar-cane and ex- pensive machinery. This same charge was made by León Salinas, president of the executive council of the National Railways of Mexico. He declared that the agrarian policy in Morelos had merely "destroyed the rich and made the number of poor people greater," though quite inconsistently he added that this same policy had decreased the population from 180,000 people to less than 80,000. "Sugar-cane is a product that supported a great number of workers while corn and beans only give by the hardest toil what is in- despensable for the remuneration of the labor directly expended." Boyden Sparks, in a series of syndicated articles, attacked the Morelos land experiment because of conditions which have largely grown out of ten years of revolution and are not a part of the experi- ment itself. . . . But the conditions of labor in the sugar-cane industry under the Díaz régime are too notorious to need comment. The worker produced sugar but did not eat thereof. The new régime in the state of Morelos at least provides the essentials for the Mexican's diet. If Mexico and the world is the loser in sugar, it is the gainer in the peace of what was once the most troubled spot in the Republic. Presi- dent Obregón stated in a visit to Cuernevaca (in in- direct reply to the charge of Salinas): The state of Morelos presents, in our revolution, very original aspects. The leaders of the state of Morelos are the highest representatives of one of the ideals that served as the very pith of the revolution . . . and when the revolution Solving the Agrarian Problem 105 triumphed they dedicated themselves with all their force and honor to the development of their programme. On re- peated occasions I have cited the state of Morelos as an exam- ple of the resolution of the agrarian problem, because the sons of this state have desired to solve it with the greatest delicacy, well-knowing the danger which would ensue for their own ideals if they executed acts which would signify a profanation of themselves. The state of Morelos, which was considered a state of anarchy and a state of banditism, has, when its ideal was satisfied within the limitations of the law, demonstrated . . a condition of absolute Peace and Labor, an absolute respect for Institutions, and a desire-very intense and very noble- to find its true happiness by means of its own energy. And thus we see how that tumultuous and rebel state, which dur- ing a period of ten years refused to submit to tyranny . is to-day a model which we hold up to rulers whenever it may become necessary, and to other states which are beginning to mistake their path. • • In other localities the activities of the Church and landed proprietors have not been limited to protest but have extended to physical coërcion, as in Michoa- cán, Nayarit, and elsewhere. In Vera Cruz the ha- cendados attempted to disarm the peons who had re- ceived lands, in some cases to drive them off their newly acquired properties. The agrarian elements thereupon retaliated by occupying various large ha- ciendas. In Chiapas the Governor used all of his powers to obstruct the work of the local Agrarian Commissions and to destroy the agrarian movement. As a result he was forced to flee the capital of the state. Yet, as has already been pointed out, making the 106 Mexico-An Interpretation land readily accessible to the people is but one step in solving the agrarian problem of Mexico, though per- haps it is the one step necessary for establishing a firm internal state of peace. Small land-holding must be supplemented by other constructive educational, finan- cial, and development projects. In many places, the communal traditions-and these the Obregón Govern- ment has attempted to promote wherever feasible- make a semi-socialized system very workable, and, with proper education, could be made highly efficient. In Morelos, for example, the Government has encouraged the peons to refrain from building fences, and while giving them their individual plots of land, is providing tractors and other machinery to be used collectively. In any event the people must be educated in scientific methods. Much has been done by the Obregón régime in establishing agriculture in the schools and in 1922 over 100,000 children were given some training in farming subjects, and thousands of teachers attended the national agricultural school for short courses. In most of the normal schools practical farm courses are given to the student-teachers. Many traveling ex- perts have been sent through the country, and the De- partment of Agriculture has imported high-grade cows, pigs, and horses which are sold cheaply for the purpose of building up the native breeds. But these are only beginnings and but indicate what may be accomplished if Mexico is permitted to remain in peace without out- side interference. It is frequently declared that the peon is too igno- rant to learn. But no attempt has ever been made to Solving the Agrarian Problem 107 make him foresake the ways of his fathers except to put him in chains. Yet, although I have usually found the peons on large haciendas very apathetic, the owner of a little plot of ground is usually ingenious and in- ventive. With a strip of rawhide, he can repair any tool and put together any necessary device. With rawhide he holds together his house and binds to- gether the barred crates (cacaxtles) in which he carries his pottery, his fruit or his poultry to market; with rawhide he makes his looms, patches his harness, and mends a broken arm. In the most remote districts I have seen intricate home-made shadufs and norias. I have seen a rude Archimedian screw, the casing made of maguey leaves and the spiral carved from wood. But where the Indian has a primitive plow, he cannot plow deep-not much over six inches. Nor has the peon ever heard of dry farming, which would open to settlement an immense area comparable to the Great American desert. Practically all northern Mexico. above Guanajuato, including the states of Aguas Cali- entes, Zacatecas, Durango, Chihuahua, San Luis Po- tosí, Nuevo León, and Coahuila, could be made avail- able wherever the soil is good. Proper soil, dry- farmed, can grow crops with a rainfall of 350 mili- meters, and in the states named at least seventy-two million acres, but an infinitesimal part of which is under cultivation, receive an annual rainfall of from 350 to 750 milimeters. While the remaining area only re- ceives from 250 to 750 milimeters, it could be largely used wherever the terrain is suitable, by the same sys- tem coupled with the use of reservoirs, wells, and rela- 108 Mexico-An Interpretation tively simple irrigation systems. In other parts of the country, with sufficient rainfall, the crops are usually cultivated only during the wet season, which limits sowing to once a year, whereas with proper methods the land could be made to yield two, even three crops. Nor does the Mexican understand the necessity of rotating crops or of fertilizing the soil. Usually the same crop-corn or beans-is grown year in and year out. Only near the large centres is the land devoted to more diversified products. The cost of fertilizer, for the immediate future, need not be great. With a little national enterprise, the great beds of guano, which have been accumulating for centuries on the islands off the coast, could be conserved and utilized. Coupled with training in methods must come educa- tion in coöperative enterprise-the creation of ability to unite in communities for the development of large tracts. Much of the land in Mexico may only be ex- ploited in large units. In Yucatán (as it was obviously infeasible, owing to the nature of the land and the crop, to break up the henequen plantations, although other lands were distributed to the Indians) General Alvarado resorted to regulation rather than coöpera- tion. The Comisión Reguladora del Mercado de Henequén which he established was very successful. It was created to protect the small growers against the large owners and commission merchants and at the same time guarantee such a price for the henequén that decent wages could be paid. All henequén had to be delivered to the Commission which paid a nominal cash price. The henequén was then sold at the most advantageous rates. After administration costs and Solving the Ažrarian Problem 109 taxes were deducted, a pro-rata dividend was declared to the growers. Henequén, through the commission, was actually raised from three to nineteen centavos. But Carranza, though he owed his financial backing during the revolutionary days to this Commission, later used his influence to destroy it. . . . In Morelos, the early agrarian banks (Casas Rurales) aimed to com- bine coöperative effort with governmental production. The peasants of that state have now organized a large coöperative with the financial assistance of the govern- ment, which aims to restore the sugar industry de- stroyed during the revolution and which is already working several large plantations. The preliminary land-distribution efforts of the Obregón Government for the time being destroyed much of the demand for machinery and improvements, because its immediate purpose was to make a contented Indian through putting him on the land regardless of his capacity for conducting his farming operations ac- cording to scientific methods. But as education pro- ceeds, as the ejido system again takes firmer root, and as coöperative enterprises grow, the demand will soon come for farm machinery, good roads, proper trans- portation and irrigation. But these things all require capital, which can only be secured through coöperative enterprise or state aid. During the time of Díaz, owing to the continued de- mand for a land-bank to serve these ends, Limantour created the Caja de Préstamos para Obras de Irri- gación y Fomento de Agricultura. The Government, as the majority stock-holder, advanced money and secured for it a loan of $25,000,000 in New York. 110 Mexico-An Interpretation But the bank was used to bolster up wild-cat Científico financing. $31,393,000 (pesos) were loaned out to twelve individuals or concerns, while the whole sum loaned out, $52,855,180 (pesos), went to 98 indi- viduals or corporations. Nearly two millions pesos. were loaned to the Monterey Iron and Steel Works. The bank was never used to further agriculture. In Morelos, during the years 1915 and 1916, were developed the outlines of a coöperative state agricul- tural bank according to plans drawn by Señor Felipe Santibañez based upon the Raiffeisen system. Aso- ciaciones de Crédito were formed of the farmers in each village, who were to become associates in the enterprise and jointly determine the method of apply- ing loans. These Associations then united to form. Sociedades de Asociaciones de Crédito, which had charge of larger districts and the prevention of general crop-failures through its ability to concentrate its re- sources and attention upon any menaced locality. The directive head of these associations was the Caja Rural de Préstamos del Estado de Morelos (Rural Loan Bank of the State of Morelos). Loans were made in the following three ways: 1. Loans guaranteed by the Asociaciones de Crédito destined for the purchase of tools and work animals, payable in three annual installments. 2. Loans guaranteed by the Asociaciones de Crédito destined for the purchase of seeds and the sustaining of the farmer until his crop might be harvested and sold. 3. Negotiable certificates, guaranteed by the Sociedades is- sued by the Caja upon agricultural products in warehouses, pending sale. Solving the Agrarian Problem III The Caja Rural also took charge of sugar produc- tion, the growers delivering their cane to the proper stations, receiving an immediate arbitrary payment, and, subsequently, a dividend. The De la Huerta Government, in order to utilize this system on a nation- wide scale decided to recreate the agricultural bank of Díaz. To that end it began to collect the outstanding loans at compound interest-loans amounting to over $100,000,000 (pesos) or one-seventh of the national debt. This bank was to be purely agrarian and was to be used to promote coöperative credit associations, agriculture and irrigation projects, construct reservoirs and dams, aqueducts, hydraulic plants, etc. The Obregón Administration, however, determined to in- corporate this project with the establishment of a national bank which will be opened in the middle of 1923. Through some agency the Government should also undertake the work of reforestation-which would in- crease rainfall and conserve surface wastage. The Spanish conquerors stripped away the forests in many parts of the country, a process that had been pro- hibited by the Aztec statutes. The forests of Mexico, while still comprising at least 10,000,000 acres, are being rapidly diminished, and with the arrival of more settled conditions, lumbering will be carried on with the same ruthlessness that characterized the industry in its earlier stages in the United States. The use of wood-burning engines on many of the railway lines has stripped thousands of acres in northern Mexico and has aroused universal alarm. A more immediate necessity is adequate transporta- 112 Mexico-An Interpretation tion. And although the railroads have noticably im- proved their service during the Obregón régime, the road-beds, after ten years of revolution, are still in very bad shape, thousands of bridges have still to be reconstructed, and the rolling stock is sadly depleted. For the self-sufficient farmer with his little plot of ground inadequate transportation has little direct sig- nificance. Even for the small self-sufficient community it has little significance. But the demands of world commerce will not long leave the Indian in peaceful seclusion. Nor will the demands of his own country. The long barren reaches of northern Mexico need the rich agricultural products of southern Mexico. Yuca- tán, a few miles distant from Tabasco, which is one of the largest hog-raising states in Mexico, imports most of its meat and lards from the United States. The following table convincingly indicates the needs of Mexican transportation. AREA IN NO. OF KILO. AREA INHABI- PER TANTS COUNTRY SQ. OF KILO. PER KILO. R. R. OF KILO. R. R. OF R. R. Belgium 29,456 4,580 6.4 1615 Great Britain 314,667 36,100 8.7 1163 Germany 540,743 55,240 9.9 1247 France 536,484 45,430 11.8 858 United States 9,380,000 456,343 20.2 210 Mexico 1,987,200 20,000 99.3 800 And while the differences in surface areas of Mexico and the relatively sparse population make this Solving the Agrarian Problem 113 condition, in part, inevitable, nevertheless it is signifi- cant that the richest agricultural section has the fewest railways. While the average area for each kilometer of railway is nearly one hundred square kilometers, in the richest district, including the states of Vera Cruz, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tabasco, Yucatán, Campeche, Quintana Roo, Morelos, nearly 250 square kilometers are served by each kilometer of railroad. Land distribution, education, irrigation, rural cred- its, forestry conservation, and development projects— all in all the agrarian problem of Mexico is not a sim- ple problem, yet it is the most important problem. Upon its proper solution depends the prosperity and peace of Mexico. Once the peon is on the land a tonic will have been administered to the national life that will send a glow of stability and progress into every activity, governmental, industrial, and social. This has already, to the limited extent that the Obregón Government has carried it into effect, resulted in pacifi- cation, improved standards, independent labor, and commercial and social regeneration. Yet certainly from the standpoint of the content- ment of the peon,-the mass of the Mexican popula- tion-the problem is, at the outset, sufficiently simple. However long it may require to work out a compre- hensive and adequate scheme of land and agrarian de- velopment, the peon is at present so easily satisfied that any government that does not give him this elemental satisfaction of being closely linked to the soil in answer to the demand that he has reiterated through an entire century of so-called independence and through ten years of bloody strife—such a government must be ad- 114 Mexico-An Interpretation judged criminal, unpatriotic, and bandit-minded. The Obregón Government represents the first sincere and successful expression of the popular demand for land since the fall of Juárez. The peon is being restored to his ancient patrimony. Yet a country being rapidly modernized industrially cannot successfully revert to a primitive small land-holding system. Machine-made cities demand efficient agriculture. The problem is now to modernize the ejido system. CHAPTER IX THE CONDITION OF THE LOWER CLASSES MEXICO's future depends upon the material and spirit- ual condition of its people. Their long-standing illiterate, untrained, and penurious condition is the re- flection of labor-purchasing power. For from ten to eighteen hours of work, the Mexican peon would earn, under the Díaz régime, from five to twenty-five cen- tavos with a daily ration of a quart of corn and a quart of pulque. During Carranza's time wages on the ha- ciendas ranged from thirty-five to seventy-five centavos, with similar rations. To-day, the peon earns, in the better developed sections, from seventy-five centavos to a peso or a peso and a quarter, though in some out- lying districts, in Guerrero, for instance, his wages still conform to the Díaz schedules. He is employed only at harvest time, although in many localities he is per- mitted to grow a small field of corn about his jacal and raise a few pigs and chickens. Purchasing value of wages is frequently reduced by the necessity of his buy- ing at company-owned stores; and are often paid in company-script, valueless beyond the radius of a few miles. Under Carranza, the common laborer in govern- ment employ, such as park-cleaners, street-cleaners, garbage-men, etc., received seventy-five centavos; po- licemen a peso and a half, and other employees in pro- 115 116 Mexico-An Interpretation portion. With good luck a Mexican could steal that much in a day, and often make as much peddling fruit or papers. The De la Huerta Government imme- diately raised these wages fifteen per cent. The com- mon laborer now receives in the neighborhood of a peso to a peso and a half a day. Painters, carpenters, etc., receive but two and a half to three pesos. The bakers work eighteen hours, mostly at night, for two pesos. Store-clerks work the same number of hours. and receive from two to three pesos; women rarely more than a peso and a half. Only in special instances, as for mechanics, chauffeurs, etc., does the pay run up to four pesos. Girls in cafés in the capital tell me that they are on their feet alternately fourteen and seventeen hours a day for fifteen pesos a month. In the better cafés, the pay is even less and in some, owing to tips and the better opportunity to make "gentlemen friends," the girls must pay the manager for the right to work and are only employed if they are "good- lookers." In the poorer Chinese cafés practically all the girls add to their incomes by going to some hotel with a man at least once a week. In few cities is there. such widespread prostitution. These conditions hold for all the upper central part of Mexico. In some other localities wage-standards are higher. From Torreón to the American border, in Lower Cali- fornia, Yucatán, and Tampico, the wage-rate for farm- workers ranges from two to six pesos-and other labor in proportion. In contrast, in distant localities in Michoacán, Oaxaca, and Chiapas, the wages on iso- lated haciendas are the same as in Díaz days, with the Condition of the Lower Classes 117 old system of debt-slavery persisting from generation to generation. These wages are paralleled by repulsive working- conditions. In mine, shop, and field the most unsani- tary conditions prevail; factories are usually without safety devices, medical service, or toilet facilities. On one hacienda I once saw a peon who had sliced his foot very badly with a machete. Owing to neglect, the cut had become infected and his foot had swollen to three times its natural size. Obviously the man would die if not attended to immediately and in any case amputa- tion might prove necessary. Through the intercession of our party the superintendent sent him to town for treatment. Had he lost a foot he would have received no recompense. The cost of living in Mexico-according to the standards of American workmen—is as high as, if not higher than it is in the United States. Actually, how- ever, prices for the peon and industrial worker are much less. By living under terribly unsanitary condi- tion, by eliminating bread, butter, white sugar, good meat, coffee, eggs, etc., and substituting for them cheap domestic products, by doing without medical care, de- cent clothes, and amusements, the cost of living is kept down. The most thorough study ever made of the condi- tion of the Mexican working-class was made by En- gineer Alberto J. Pani, now Minister of Foreign Re- lations. His is a propaganda book, however, for the Carranza Government. While it is a study of the conditions in the capital and not of the country as a 118 Mexico-An Interpretation whole, Mexico City, as he himself points out, is the most advanced spot in the Republic, where standards are highest, conditions the best. This is in general a true statement, except for the high wage-districts in the north and for the Indians who are land-owners in favorable localities. In no place in the Republic, how- ever, are the sanitary conditions or the mode of living of the people advanced beyond those of the capital. In Appendix 3 of his book, Señor Pani gives the bud- gets of four families in which the weekly expenditures (balancing incomes) amounted respectively to $5.06 (pesos), $4.66, $5.30, and $9.64. Checking up on the articles given in the budget with prices that existed in April, 1923, I find that the same standard of living would cost nearly two and a half times as much—but in no instances have wages even doubled, which means that the workman now receiving two pesos a day haş been reduced to the standards of the man who for- merly received seventy-five centavos or $4.50 (pesos) a week. One budget of Señor Pani indicates how terrible is even the standard of the man who now receives two pesos daily. The budget given is that of a park worker named Agustín López, a man of mod- erate habits who was employed in the Department of Public Works for seventy-five centavos and supported himself, his wife, and mother: Food: 11.2 kilograms of corn 3.8 (( << 2.0 Chilli Salt (pesos) $1.04 Mexican beans 0.48 meat 0.70 0.16 O.II Condition of the Lower Classes 119 Sugar Wood and charcoal Pulque Clothes: 2 metres of percale or calico Washing: Soap House-rent: Weekly rent for a small, damp room on the fifth O.II 0.60 0.42 0.62 0.25 block of Calle de Chile, No. 19 in the colony of Santa Julia 0.50 Hair-cut: Every three weeks at a cost of $0.20, the weekly cost therefore being 0.07 An examination of the budget reveals that the in- vestigator was somewhat careless in getting at the facts. It is obvious, for example, that the weekly ex- penditure for salt could not be eleven centavos, and that two metres of calico would not be bought every week. However, the amount given probably corre- sponds rather closely to that spent upon clothes, and, in general, the budget is typical. As such it shows that the diet is practically limited to beans, corn, tortillas, and pulque. No entry exists for tea or coffee, fresh fruits and vegetables or a proper sugar- ration. Coffee of an inferior quality, however, some- times figures, but more frequently roasted corn or chick-peas will be used. Fruit, especially bananas, plantains, oranges, and alligator-pears; and such vege- tables as squash and sweet potatoes are occasionally purchased, although at the expense of some other sus- taining part of the diet. The sugar used is piloncillo 120 Mexico-An Interpretation or pinocha and comes in coarse, hard brown cakes. The corn is utilized by soaking it in lye-water (for which no provision is made in the budget) to remove the hulls, grinding it into masa, or dough, on a flat stone, patting it in the palm of the hands into very thin pancakes and toasting it without salt or grease on a flat, hot tin. The corn is the most filling and cheapest part of the diet and is often used at the expense of other essentials, thus augmenting the danger of pe- lagra and similar diseases, and also increasing the amount of undigested protein, where meat is excluded, from ten to over thirty per cent. The beans are ex- pensive and rendered more so in that they must be cooked for hours and are considered better if cooked for days, necessitating an excessive use of charcoal. Both corn and beans are cooked with tequesquito, a sort of baking powder. Chick-peas are often substi- tuted for beans. The meat, in proportion to the quantity and food-value, is relatively expensive, and increasingly so as the poorer cuts are chosen. Kid- neys, intestines, stomach-linings, and bladders are gen- erally used by the poorer classes. The more destitute are forced to piece out their food not only with cats and dogs, as in Hauptmann's "Weavers," but with rats, squirrels, ditch-eels, and maguey-worms. The menu often has to be filled in with melon seeds, roots, fried pumpkin flowers, etc. When one passes by the little fruit, vegetable, and dulce stands, the income from which often has to support an entire family, one marvels at the stoic self-restraint that prevents these people from falling upon their wares and devouring them. The meagreness of the food also leads to an Condition of the Lower Classes 121 excessive use of chilli in hot doses in order to dull the stomach temporarily to the pangs of hunger. Pulque is cheap and serves the same purpose, though when fresh has considerable nutritive value. In out-of-the-way districts, cheese, fish, and other foods are substituted for the beans. In general, for at least a short time of the year, the diet is better in the country districts than in the cities, and in certain regions, especially in the south, food is wastefully abun- dant. In the hot-country (tierra caliente) it may be pieced out with fruits and other natural products. In sugar-cane districts, the sugar deficit does not exist, while elsewhere are encountered liberal supplies of milk and eggs. The dislocated city-dwellers and the people in arid districts suffer the worst, but by and large the diet of tortillas with some base such as beans, meat, or cheese forms the staple diet everywhere. Above this dead-level of malnutrition rise a few more fortunate workers whose wives become janitresses or whose children gain a little by begging or selling papers. The aliment for a man should provide the following number of calories: Hervé-Mangon Atwater For moderate work For ordinary work For heavy work 4,200 3,000 4,800 3,520 6,000 4,060 In 1910 the medical experts of the British Army came to the conclusion that 4,500 to 5,000 calories would be necessary for ordinary field service. Results of war service showed that even more than 5,000 calories 122 Mexico-An Interpretation were needed. The amount varies according to local- ity, season, and climate, and is less if food is prop- erly varied. The diet of Agustín López would provide each of the three members of his family with 2,813.07 calories, and even if this were increased 500 calories for the bread-winner at the expense of the other two members of the family it would not provide sufficient energy for efficient work. While the climate is not, on the whole, rigorous in Mexico, nevertheless in many parts the win- ters are quite severe and are not combated with heat in the houses or with proper clothing. In the capital the excessive altitude causes a more rapid burning up of the tissues. Food values are actually reduced fifteen per cent. An adequate ration for the Mexican would have to give him about 4,000 calories, the actual amount varying according to local conditions, the character of his work, etc. The work of the wife is usually as strenuous as that of her husband. Grinding corn to a smooth consistency with a stone necessitates hours of back-breaking toil. The clothes are invariably washed in cold water at the cost of much added elbow grease with corresponding saving of fuel. The children need less, although the appetite of a growing child is ex- cessive. 10,000 calories for a family would certainly be a very low minimum. In compiling any food budget that would give the necessary calories and be properly weighted between proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, it is necessary to consider the foods actually used and obtainable in Condition of the Lower Classes 123 Mexico. The following table corresponds to the actual diet of a better-grade workman. It will be no- Minimum daily ration for a family of three. FOOD GRAMS PROTEIN FATS CARBOHYDRATES Corn 2,000 174.0 34.0 141.0 Beef 500 120.5 15.0 Beans 500 III.O 8.0 300.5 Rice 100 8.0 .3 79.1 Chilli 50 4.6 3.8 35.0 Brown sugar 100 85.0 Lard 100 95.0 418.1 156.1 640.6 Price (Centavos) FOOD CALORIES MEXICO AGUAS CALIENTES per kg. per kg. Corn 7,258.0 $0.23 .46 $0.21 .42 Beef 458.0 1.10 .55 .90 •45 Beans 1,912.5 .35 .17 .35 .17 Rice 384.7 .60 .06 .60 .06 Chilli 194.9 2.00 .10 1.80 .09 Brown sugar 348.5 .40 .04 .35 .035 Lard 881.5 2.00 .20 2.00 .20 11,438.1 $1.58 $1.425 C-H Pure 4,100 cal. per kilo. Prot. Pure 4,100 cal. per kilo. Fats on oils Pure 9,300 cal. per kilo. ticed that it contains a larger meat and bean ration, and a smaller chilli ration than is usually consumed. 124 Mexico-An Interpretation It also includes rice. It takes into account the waste in the consumption of corn, sugar, and lard, but not of the other elements-waste due to poor weights and meas- urements, dirt, poor quality, improper cooking, indiges- tion, and similar factors: the prices used were cal- culated from wholesale prices listed during the months. of February and March, 1923, and checked and cor- rected by records of purchases made by interested working-class friends. The list does not include pulque for which in the central regions an allowance of at least ten centavos. must be made. The pulque contains saccharose and gum and gives 448.3 calories per litre. It is ques- tionable whether this is not offset by the injury due, not to the eight per cent alcohol contained, but to the elements in decomposition. Nor does the list include salt, spices, or coffee or provide for fruit or vegetables, or for milk in the case of babies. Agua miel, or the unfermented juice of the maguey, is often substituted for milk. The budget makes no note of the fact that the housewife must have matches for her fires and wood and charcoal to burn. Nor does it allow for the fact that the Mexican housewife has never heard of calories or for those occasional erratic purchases that the most humble creature is bound occa- sionally to make in defiance of the most carefully cal- culated scientific diets. These figures must be in- creased also for house-rent, not less than twenty-five centavos a day; tobacco, which will add another ten or fifteen centavos; washing, four or five centavos. Some- thing must be spent for pots and pans, for clothing, for emergencies. At the smallest estimate these neces- Condition of the Lower Classes 125 sities would come to eighty centavos daily. In other words, given just enough to eat, rags to wear, and a damp cubbyhole in which to cook, eat, and sleep, still living in the most poverty-stricken condition, without amusements, without money for religious offerings, without medical attention, the Mexican must have from $2.40 to $2.75 (pesos) a day, varying accord- ing to locality and excluding those tropic districts where money is not a necessity. Juán Vitell, the inspector of domestic science teaching in the govern- ment schools of the Federal District, after most ex- haustive investigation, declares that the lowest wage which will prevent racial degeneracy is seven pesos per day. How body- and soul-destroying is the present Mexi- can wage of from a peso and a half to two pesos is to be seen by the most casual inspection of the present- day life and surroundings of the working-class. The budget makes no provision for medical care. It fails to consider the tragic circumstances of families having five, six, ten or more children. The Mexican stork arrives regularly every ten or twelve months. Med- ical attention is rarely received at the time of child- birth and rarely at the time of any other serious ill- ness-although in the large centres free clinics exist. The people are still familiar with the ancient herb- cures, some of which are resorted to by the most reput- able physicians and which still offer to science a promis- ing field for investigation. Yet if herb-cures can be affected in the lighter and, in some cases, more ob- stinate diseases; often the kill-or-get-well cure of fate 126 Mexico-An Interpretation must be used in diseases as serious as smallpox, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, etc., not to mention the host of new diseases introduced by the Conquistadores for which no herb-treatment exists. Only the most sturdy survive, for in the capital forty per cent of the deaths are those of children under five years of age. The death-rate during the years from 1895 to 1912 (since it has probably been higher owing to the revolution and the world epidemics of Spanish influenza) fluctuated between 42 and 50, which is three times greater than that of similar-sized cities in the United States, two and a half times as great as that of comparable cities of Europe, and even higher than the mortality coeffi- cients of the Asiatic and African cities of Madras and Cairo, in spite of the fact that in those cities cholera is endemic. This is in part due to the housing conditions. The Mexican family usually lives in one small, cold, dark, unfloored, windowless room, reeking with moisture and sewer gas. Outside of a faded print of the Virgin Mary, the Christ, and beneath them candles, there is no decoration upon the smudged walls. The furniture is very scanty-here again there is no provision in the budget a few broken chairs, a rickety table, some home-made benches, a few home-woven straw mats for beds and blocks of wood for pillows-nothing more. For dishes, a few earthen-ware bowls and pitchers; for cooking a tin charcoal stove and its inevitable concomi- tant, the hand-hewn stone metate for grinding maize. Into this room are jammed the whole family-mother, father, and children, and occasionally a roomer, who may even be a prostitute. There is no privacy, no de- Condition of the Lower Classes 127 cency, and all the acts of life, however intimate, are beheld by the child from the day it opens its eyes. In sleeping the one door is always hermetically sealed, so that in less than half an hour the air is befouled, and, with the humidity and cold, promptly induces tuber- culosis, pneumonia, and allied disorders. Cleanliness under such conditions is no longer even a virtue, it is an impossibility. Food and bones are thrown on the floor to the flea-bitten, mangy curs who sleep with the children; the place is infested with lice and rodents till the human body becomes the happy hunting-ground for busy fingers. In the country dis- tricts, this one room also becomes the common corral for stray pigs, chickens, and the newest born. Disease reaches out its shriveled hand of death from every corner. No opportunities exist for bathing, often no opportunities for washing clothes. In the smaller towns the rivers sometimes serve for both purposes. In many places one also finds public washstands which, though serving to spread disease, are preferable to un- washed clothes. Occasionally, where the rainfall is scant, it is necessary to buy water. It is common prac- tice to drink ditch-water, however stagnant it may be, and I have seen the more poverty-stricken lap water from the gutters of the city streets. The Mexican house has no toilets. The open highway, as in Italy, is substituted, until the air is befouled and disease travels upon every floating particle of dust. The only scav- engers that exist in the smaller places are those ubiqui- tous red-and-black-headed zopilotes (buzzards) met with from Encinada to Progreso. The dress of the poor Mexican is scanty: a calico 128 Mexico-An Interpretation shirt and thin white cotton trousers, usually no under- wear. The outfit resembles pajamas for which they also serve, for in them, protected by only a thin zarape, the Mexican curls up and shivers through the night, which, throughout Mexico, at least during part of the year, is extremely cold. This everlasting habit is patched and repatched with the first piece of stray cloth that comes to hand, and is worn until it falls into pieces. One gains a sudden insight into the pathos of Joseph's coats and grandmothers' patchwork quilts. The hat consists of a cheap straw sombrero with a broad brim, that would sell for about fifty cents in the States. Though occasionally the poor Mexican may become the proud possessor of a stray pair of shoes, more frequently he is barefoot or shod in huaraches- rude sandals consisting of leather soles held in place by thongs. The woman's dress is equally shabby. Her waist, skirt, and rebozo, which she throws over her shoulders or head, are of the cheapest calico or percale. Occasionally her skirt is not even made up, but consists of cloth wrapped around her loins and legs. Usually she is barefoot. Occasionally the poor Mexican is able to provide himself with better clothing at the expense of no one knows how much starvation, self-denial, and thievery. In such cases, the most important part of his attire is a Brobdingnagian sombrero, broad as a Baobab tree, on the rim of which he carries his immediate necessities and more treasured possessions. Next in importance will be his tight-fitting trousers, preferably of leather, if not, of gray coarse cloth. How he gets them on or off is a mystery. The chances are they remain fas- Condition of the Lower Classes 129 tened to his body until necessity requires their replace- ment. The budgets given contain nothing for recreation. For that the Mexican must cut into his already insuffi- cient diet. His pleasures center, first of all, in the Church. The Church is his parlor, his museum, and his theatre. Somehow or other the indigent Mexican finds a few pennies to drop into the pittance-boxes; somehow or other he manages to save enough to buy a candle to burn before his favorite saint; and on Guade- lupe day he succeeds in buying a larger, more ornate candle than usual. Somehow or other, he will manage to find the price of admission to a cock-fight or bull- fight; and now, as the result of the world-conquest of Charlie Chaplin, a few centavos to enter a movie. Often in the place of beans he will buy pulque. And often in the pulque-shop, where he can forget his hard lot, he leaves behind on pay-night his entire week's wages. When the indigenous race was close to the soil, en- meshed in their aboriginal ejido village life, such pov- erty, occurring in years of drought or crop-plagues, was supportable, an inevitable part of the native sys- tem, and could be alleviated by the killing of game, the eating of roots, etc.; but the continuance of such standards in a semi-industrialized society for a dis- located people herded into unfamiliar plantation or urban life (where the survival knowledge of their fathers, were it even a part of the social educational heritage, is useless) means degradation and ruin. All the finer sentiments of the Mexican nature will one by one be swallowed up in the awful loss of moral and 130 Mexico-An Interpretation so physical stamina with which these conditions, aggra- vated by race-conflict, threaten the lower and Indian classes. It was on the backs of this unfortunate mass that the Díaz Científicos and aristocrats rode to in- famy. But that, in spite of the social break-up, the lower and Indian classes of Mexico still have survival value, still have stamina and race-pride, is evidenced by their having imposed their leaders upon the nation, have gained the land they need for their traditional social and racial contentment, and are organizing themselves to stand against the rising tide of foreign industrial exploitation. CHAPTER X THE RISE OF THE MEXICAN PROLETARIAT THE powerful surge of our post-Civil War industrial development, with its over-production, scramble for world markets, spheres of influence, its use of a per- verted Monroe Doctrine and dollar diplomacy, washed over into Mexico threatening to inundate completely that country's social individuality. Porfirio Díaz, standing at the turning-point of his country's economic life, by his oligarchic rule unduly hastened an in- evitable process. The resultant economic revolution with its ruthless enclosures and growth of industry introduced such sudden contradictions into the national system as to precipitate the Madero-Obregón revolu- tion. That same process and that ensuing revolution have created the Mexican proletariat. The inauguration of the industrial revolution has everywhere been accompanied by the worst treatment of labor. Invariably a new industry in a non-indus- trialized country recruits its employees from the one available source, the ranks of the dispossessed, un- skilled, agrarian workers. Low-pay standards are further lowered-by the relentless processes of eco- nomic evolution, land-enclosures, and the competition of a glutted labor-market. Such a new proletariat needs time and experience to learn organization. History declares that low-paid 131 132 Mexico-An Interpretation labor is the slowest to organize and the least aggres- sive. Mexican labor conditions in the time of Díaz clamored for betterment through some form of work- ing-class organization, but labor's own immaturity, coupled with the absolutism of the Government, which was quick as in the case of the Orizaba textile workers, to stamp out strikes with blood and iron, prevented all working-class activities. Señor J. D. Ramírez Gar- rido, Chief of Police of the Federal District in 1920, told me how in 1907 he had witnessed the striking tex- tile workers shot down in the village of Rio Blanco in such numbers that their bodies had to be run out on flat-cars and dumped in the sea. And the road to or- ganized expression was made more stony by racial temperament, the Latin opposition to centralized or- ganization, and by suspicion among themselves due to the danger of arrest, arbitrary conscription, and even assassination—all of which led to a distrust of aggres- sive labor-spirits, frequent schisms, and a lack of sus- tained interest and enthusiasm. The few unions or- ganized prior to 1910 had no power, importance or inter-relationships. Had labor been capably organ- ized, the story of the years from 1910-1920 might not have touched the same depths of degradation. Proletarian and peon participated in the Madero revolution en masse-blindly, passionately, without any defined goal, understanding only that it was against the exploiter. "They fought neither for political ends, nor directly to better their economic situation; they struggled solely and exclusively . . . to recover the dignity of which they had been despoiled" (Carlos Gracidos, Querétaro Constitutional Convention). Rise of the Mexican Proletariat 133 The Madero Revolution let loose every social force which had been denied expression for thirty years. Among the proletariat this meant opportunity to or- ganize. In Tampico was founded the Casa del Obrera Mundial with a revolutionary programme that recog- nized direct action, syndicalism, the boycott, the union label, the general strike, and discountenanced political action; pamphlets written by the leaders also ad- vocated sabotage. Similar organizations grew up like mushrooms everywhere. In Yucatán (where the Cuban, Francisco Ros Planas, had been deported, just prior to the revolution, for attempting to organize the workers) Carlos Loveira, later prominent in the formation of the Pan-American Confederation, Felipe Carrillo and others, were successful in organizing the Alianza Mutualista de Empleos de los Ferrocarriles and later the Liga de Resistencia del Partido Social- ista. In Vera Cruz the Camara del Trabajo was founded by Pedro Junco Rojo, who had fled from persecution in Spain and had spent his life in organiz- ing the workers of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay. The workers soon discovered that their blood shed for Madero had gained them nothing more than this right to organize. Asks a member of the Casa Mun- dial early in 1913, speaking of the Government: "What has it done for the working classes? Has it lessened that number of hours of work? Have you any law protecting industrial workers? tainly not. . . Most cer- But much had been gained. After Madero's over- throw the incipient unions had acquired too much mo- 134 Mexico-An Interpretation mentum to be crushed by Huerta's dictatorial meas- ures, even though their leaders were intimidated and imprisoned. The later national disorder between the downfall of Huerta and the ultimate rise of Carranza, the lack of central governmental authority at that time, permitted them to become firmly established in the in- dustrial centers. After the Carranza-Villa split, Mexican labor, as an organized force, took a definite share in determin- ing events. At the moment when the fate of Car- ranza was trembling in the balance, in order to obtain the assistance of labor, Rafael Zubáran Capmany, his Secretario de Gobernación, signed a definite pact with the leaders of the Casa Mundial promising to put into effect at the earliest opportunity an enlightened labor- code. With the signing of this pact, the various labor leaders hastened to the industrial centers of Yucatán, Vera Cruz, Tampico, Orizaba, and Puebla to secure enlistments of workers for the red battalions,-batal- lones rojos. Thus, unlike the workers in the Madero revolution, those who supported Carranza were or- ganized with a definite programme,-syndicalistic rev- olutionary, determined. That programme found partial expression in the Querétaro Constitution through the famous Article 123. Unfortunately Carranza confounded the economic programme of the labor unions with political ambition. Any strike for the betterment of conditions, he con- sidered as a direct thrust at his own prestige. The years of internal war preceding Carranza's ascendancy had left the country in a pitiable state. Industry, ex- cept in a few centres, was paralyzed. The labor- Rise of the Mexican Proletariat 135 market was gutted. Wages were low. Strikes were frequent. The paper-money which became legal ten- der added to the misery, for it was so manipulated that the workers alone suffered. The Government gave the money an arbitrary legal-tender value of twenty centavos on the dollar. The financial agents and speculators, through official connections, were able to realize this amount. They bought it from the mer- chants, however, for ten centavos, while the workman who was forced to accept it from his employer at the twenty-cent rate, found that it had an actual purchas- ing value in the stores of five cents. The situation enabled the man with money and the speculator to reap fortunes, while the workmen suffered, not only from starvation wages, but from having to accept his pay at practically a seventy-five per cent. discount. In the Federal District this resulted in a general strike in the early part of 1916 which paralyzed all in- dustry and traffic. Carranza then made it a criminal. offense-punishable by death for any workman to participate in a strike. Leaders were arrested and court-martialled. The Casa del Obrera was sup- pressed throughout the Republic. From that time on Carranza's record against or- ganized labor was black. Not wise enough to see that the government of a country seething with ideas of so- cial change could not be built upon militarism alone, he consistently opposed the civil organization of his people. Though he permitted and for a time assisted in the formation of the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (C. R. O. M.), in practice he smashed every formidable strike, used machine-guns on • 136 Mexico-An Interpretation the workers, destroyed the Casa Mundial and, tempo- rarily, the Liga de Resistencia of Yucatán. The work- ers of Tampico were even forced to hold their meetings in the fields. In spite of these persecutions, the labor movement grew steadily stronger and better organized. The C. R. O. M., in spite of Carranza's attempts to con- trol it, was, nevertheless, the result of a universal de- sire for national unification on the part of organized labor. The first important convention toward this end had been held in Saltillo in May, 1918. That con- gress drew representatives from organizations in eigh- teen states. It provided for the organization of the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana with Luis N. Morones as General Secretary and two correspond- ing secretaries, Ricardo Treviño and J. M. Tristán. The programme adopted was summarized under the heads of Agriculture, Industry, Social Legislation, and Organization. Specifically, it stressed the need for agrarian reform and land-distribution. It urged the Government to take immediate action in breaking up the large estates according to the constitutional pro- visions. It advocated the ownership of industry by the workers, the enforcement of existing laws, and the reform of the Conciliation and Arbitration boards. The demands at that time were vaguely expressed (ex- cept with regard to agrarian reform), cautious, defer- ential to the Government, lacking in vigor-to be ex- pected of a labor movement not yet conscious of its strength. At the fourth Mexican labor convention, which be- came known as the first annual convention of the C. R. Rise of the Mexican Proletariat 137 4 • O. M., held in Zacatecas in June, 1919, and at the sec- ond convention held in Aguas Calientes in July, 1920, Luis N. Morones emerged as the dominating personal- ity of the organization. His leadership then and since has been realistic and has been motivated by the fol- lowing general tactical considerations: 1.The programme of a Mexican labor organization cannot be more radical than the organized strength, if that organiza- tion is to wield a practical influence. 2. The labor aims must be cautiously expressed in order not to contribute to American intervention propaganda. A pro- letarian revolution would precipitate intervention immediately. 3. Good relations must be maintained with the government in power, if possible, owing to the traditional character of Mexican political practices which would result in the prompt suppression of an organized movement as yet too weak to re- sist official persecution. Latin political practices guarantee tangible advantages for such good relationships. The first interest of Mexican labor in the interna- tional movement was aroused at the time of the Puni- tive Expedition. At that time a communication was sent in the name of the organized workers of Mexico, signed by Edmundo E. Martínez, Carlos Loveira, Baltasar Pages, Luis N. Morones, and Salvador Gon- zalo García to the A. F. of L. urging it to use its in- fluence upon the American Government to secure the withdrawal of the expedition. As a result of this communication plans matured for the Pan-American · Confederation of Labor, and the five above named were sent to various parts of Latin America to pro- mote such an organization. The first congress was 138 Mexico-An Interpretation held in the city of Laredo, Texas, during November, 1918, and marked the beginning of an organization which resulted in the first affiliation of Mexican labor with the labor movement of the world. At the con- vention of the P. A. C. L. held in Mexico City in January, 1921, the Committee on Credentials stated that the delegates of the A. F. of L. represented 4,300,000 members and those of the C. R. O. M. 300,000. The C. R. O. M. now claims over 500,000 members. This relation of the C. R. O. M. has had practical value. On one occasion American warships sent into Mexican waters "because of the revolutionary attitude of Mexican workers in endangering American prop- erty," were hurriedly withdrawn at the protest of Gompers and various American labor organizations. As a result of this relation, the C. R. O. M. has failed to gain the confidence of certain more revolu- tionary unions. Opposition was early aroused by its alliance with the A. F. of L., discredited with many Mexican workers by its real or fancied failure to pro- tect, or accept upon an equal basis, Mexican workers in the United States,—a charge denied by Samuel Gompers. This is partly explicable from the interest of many Mexican workers in the American I. W. W. The majority of the 1,500,000 Spanish-speaking resi- dents in the United States are Mexicans. In Texas alone there are 450,000 Spanish-speaking inhabitants. New Mexico is at least 60 per cent Spanish-American, and El Paso, 55 per cent Mexican. San Antonio har- bors some 50,000 Mexicans and Los Angeles, Cali- fornia, over 30,000. The majority of these are in the Rise of the Mexican Proletariat 139 unskilled labor group and hence have, in a large meas- ure, drifted into the ranks of the I. W. W. Thou- sands of these cross and recross the border; some of them return permanently to Mexico. They are apos- tles of opposition to the A. F. of L. and are blind to the bearing of an alliance of the C. R. O. M. upon international relations. In addition the theoretic heri- tage of Mexican labor psychology is the syndicalist and anarchist literature of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Sorel, Fer- rer, Grave, etc. And in the field of practical experi- ence, the Mexican worker had gained little from Ma- dero, nothing from Huerta, and paternalism and perse- cution from Carranza. For these reasons there is a large element that discredits political action. The So- cialist Party of Mexico had been in existence from the time of Díaz but never had numbered more than a few score members in the capital. In Yucatán, however, the semi-industrial Liga de Resistencia del Partido So- cialista was well-organized under the régime of Gen- eral Alvarado, and now completely controls the state. In Michoacán the Socialist movement had considerable strength, and there has, since the election of Obregón, grown into being a Socialist Party of the Southeast which takes in all the Mayan states and many farm- workers. The first national convention of the So- cialist Party was held in 1919 but was poorly attended and accomplished little. Nor can it be said that the two communist parties, since formed, were more im- portant or successful, and the Russian agent supplying funds for the united Communist Party that later re- sulted was subsequently deported to the United States. Although the C. R. O. M. is not political, its leaders 140 Mexico-An Interpretation have engaged more or less in politics ever since the Carranza-Casa Obrera Pact. Morones organized the Partido Laborista Mexicano in support of Obregón on February 11, 1920. This organization held its first convention in Zacatecas on March 9. Nominally it was entirely independent of the C. R. O. M., but it was created with the idea of throwing the support of organ- ized labor to Obregón. As labor was sympathetic with Obregón, Morones' efforts were largely success- ful. But this and his subsequent appointment as Chief of the National Munitions Factories drew upon him. the criticism of the purely syndicalist elements. Furthermore, the events in Russia, in Europe; the twenty-one conditions; the shifting winds of post-war doctrine-have all played havoc in Mexico. A con- siderable element of the proletariat was wavering to- ward Bolshevism. In the second annual convention of the C. R. O. M. at Aguas Calientas a definite re- calcitrant group developed. That convention, not to mention certain excluded elements, consisted of three factions; the official Morones group; the Soto y Gama agrarian group, determined to revolutionize the pro- gramme of the Confederation; and the Secessionists. Three children were born of these last. The textile workers of the Federal District constituted themselves an independent group. Others, uniting with elements not represented in the convention, attempted in a meet- ing held some months later in the capital to organize the Confederación Comunista Obrera. And lastly, there was formed the Mexican section of the I. W. W., which absorbed many disgruntled elements and counts Rise of the Mexican Proletariat 141 upon a certain following among the oil workers of Tampico. These groups, individually insignificant, were largely developed by foreign agitators-most of whom were expelled from the country in 1922-but they repre- sented a certain discontent with the C. R. O. M. spring- ing from the causes previously enumerated. Most of this ill-content finally focused into the formation of the Confederación General de Trabajadores (C. G. T.) which was organized in the convention of September 1921 in Mexico City. This organization is semi- anarchistic, semi-syndicalist and looks to the similar organization led by Seguí (since murdered) which cen- ters in Barcelona, Spain. Outside of the C. R. O. M. and the C. G. T. is the Confederación de Sociedades Ferrocarilleros, a powerful organization embracing all of the railway workers. The C. R. O. M., how- ever, remains the strongest and most representative national organization, the only organization capable· of an intelligent, evolutionary solution of working class problems. These developments have since been followed by the foundation of a Fascist movement. Fascist locals. were first organized in Jalapa in 1922, and other groups subsequently sprang into being in Mexico City, Tampico, Guadalajara, and elsewhere. No national organization has been affected, though the principal leader, "Rooster" Saenz de Sicilia of Mexico City, who publishes the organ El Fascista, informed me that in the entire country at the end of April 1923 there were 150,000 organized Fascisti. In Tampico 142 Mexico-An Interpretation the group has been charged with being in the pay of the petroleum countries, in other places in the pay of the dispossessed land-holders. The hacendados, or- ganized in the Sindicato de Agricultores for an offen- sive against the land-reforms of the Government, have now definitely united in most localities with the Fas- cisti. The Mexican Fascisti differ from their Italian pro- genitors in claiming to stand for liberalism rather than dictatorship, although they announce their willingness to "meet illegal and unjust violence with greater vio- lence." They are closely connected with the Catholic Church, whereas in Italy the movement was anti-Cath- olic. Many of the members of the Mexican move- ment are Catholic priests; and it has been charged that the Church has a fund of five million pesos which it expects to expend, during the 1924 elections, in Fascist channels. On June 26, forty generals of the revolution banded together to combat Fascism. C. R. O. M. has held frequent meetings to denounce the Fascisti and has published manifestos calling the movement "the pivot of the reactionary and Catholic forces of the country desirous of destroying organized labor and the benefits of the revolution." Adolfo De la Huerta, ex-president and Minister of Finance de- clares that "the significance of the Fascist movement in our country lies in the fact of its being a war-cry of the conservative element against the Mexican peo- ple who are supporting the progress of the proletariat towards social betterment." The Labor in Mexico will undoubtedly continue to make greater, more exciting, more revolutionary demands. Rise of the Mexican Proletariat 143 Labor rose in blind revolt against Díaz, but Madero, harassed by counter-revolution and the machinations of American Big Business, could not fulfill the promises made to the people. The one gain by labor was the right to organize the Casa del Obrera Mundial and similar organizations. These incipient organizations were attacked by Huerta and destroyed by Carranza. The way, however, was opened for the rise of the more conservative and realistic Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana which through the channels of the Partido Laborista Mexicano contributed to the over- throw of Carranza and the inauguration of the Revin- dicating Revolution. Under Obregón the workers have been quite free to organize and have been guar- anteed every constitutional right for their activities. In three years the strength of organized labor, not in numbers, but in unity, knowledge, and tactical ability has increased more than in the entire previous ten-year period. All during the Madero-Obregón revolution, labor has been growing more self-conscious, better-organized, more determined, and more revolutionary in its de- mands, until to-day it has more than once demonstrated its power to paralyze the industries of the country, to think in terms of solidarity, and to force its demands upon the state. This fact means an entire revolution in the practice of Mexican politics and the century- long system of government by cuartelazo, military re- volt, and forced impositions. It means the shifting of the bases of the struggle from the sordid quarreling between the ins and the outs to a popular struggle for social and economic power, in which less and less, as 144 Mexico-An Interpretation time goes on, will the purely military elements be able to make the Mexican state the bitten bone of their contention. Yet inevitably this growth in power of organized labor means a complication of the political situation, a deepening of the questions involved, and imparts to the Government a real consciousness of its obligations. It is a challenge even to the existing Government which is frankly friendly to labor. The Government must watch its step. It is between the hammer and the anvil. It is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. It is between labor, which it cannot help fast enough, and American Capital whose power it cannot ignore. Organized labor, exercising a force disproportionate to its numbers, offers one more irri- tant to American Capital in Mexico. The more revo- lutionary the demands of labor, the more distressing will become the position of the Government. Directly or indirectly out of this conflict are likely to spring future interventionist movements. CHAPTER XI THE MIDDLE CLASS THE Mexican middle class, like that of France after 1792, has been largely a revolutionary creation. A small bureaucratic middle class existed in the times of Díaz. Its members were the necessary government hangers-on. Their hope was graft, lucrative sinecures, ultimate enrichment, and entrance into the true ruling caste. They were a class without honor, decency, or self-respect. They are vividly described by Francisco Bulnes ("The Whole Truth About Mexico," pp. 49– 50) with a rather Carlylian gusto as they appeared during the last days of the Porfirian régime: The members of the bureaucratic middle class were intel- ligent enough to be able to judge to what point the Científicos were culpable and to gauge the exact measure of Porfirian cor- ruption; but, as they were victims of that detestable vice of envy, which blinds reason and corrupts the heart, they ac- cepted as mathematically proved facts the assertions of the agitators to the effect that the Científicos formed a political party, and that every member of that party was receiving not less than 1,000,000 pesos per month or year, as the case might be, for his share in the work of the Association. The effect of this belief was deplorable. In all the homes of the bureau- crats, mothers, aunts, wives, sons and daughters, servants, and friends, advised the head of the house to "do business" with the government; if he were an employee, even more so. 145 146 Mexico-An Interpretation "Doing business" with the government meant, of course, stealing. It was advised to take everything on contract, from laying fifty thousand kilometers of railroad to removing trash from public offices, all to be manipulated so as to redound to the personal benefit of the contractor. If it were not pos- sible to obtain contracts, the judges ought to sell sentences; the court secretaries, the papers bearing on the case; the clerks, the public trust; the chiefs of departments, the office furnish- ings, the hospital supplies, the prison food, the arms and am- munition of arsenals; they should rob the troops of their pay; impose fines upon all; sell justice under every form; sell police vigilance, wholesale and retail; steal even the inkstands, pencils, paper, typewriters, and typewriter ribbons-in a word everything that could be taken ought to be taken, however low and unethical the means to accomplish it might be. It was even noised about the streets, in the cafés, in the theatres, in the Church sacristies, in public and private gatherings, at the funeral obsequies of friends. "Steal or you will be condemned; steal or you will be an unworthy. father, unworthy son, unworthy husband, unworthy citizen, unworthy friend, unworthy man, and even an unworthy beast," was the universal cry. The passion for stealing was so ingrained that it became . . . the master passion of the nation. The character of this bureaucratic middle class which also includes lawyers, business agents, and doc- tors has scarcely changed during ten years of revolu- tion. Its natural rapacity has found even greater op- portunities for public thieving in the disturbed era that is not yet closed. Immediately following the last turn- over, the government offices were swamped by tens of thousands of this type, desiring office, favors, railway passes, concessions of every sort. But a more staid type is growing into being, drawn The Middle Class 147 from the humbled aristocracy or elevated by the chang- ing times. Some of these have been forced into the professions, and many a son of the old Científicos is to-day a school-teacher, or a chemist, or commercial. representative. With these must be reckoned the better-paid business employees, stenographers, small business men, and small farmers, all of whom are well above the status of the peon and working class. This new middle class has turned from politics to the busi- ness and technical world, and to that extent is morally superior. Yet the group is not homogeneous, for as a group the middle class lacks social consciousness and common purposefulness. Its members are largely selfish, in- dividualistic, aspiring conformists, with little under- standing of the needs of their country. With this psychology they are building up a set of shabby respectabilities and insipid gentilities. The middle class home is cluttered with dingy upholstered furniture, great staring mirrors with gaudy gold drag- ons writhing over the top and sides; heavy dust-laden portiers, crude paintings of bloody Christs, expression- less Marys and old-fashioned fruits and flowers, end- less bric-a-brac and plaster casts. In the dim hallway one is likely to find the startling figure of a grinning porcelain negro, holding out a card-tray, and standing, perhaps, beside the Venus de Milo or an inevitable Dante. The middle-class home, the middle-class conduct, the middle-class psychology are a servile imitation of the wealthy aristocracy of the Díaz era. Middle-class people therefore have the snobbishness and self-suffi- 148 Mexico-An Interpretation ciency of the parvenu. They are more concerned with petty selfishness than group improvement or the better- ing of their less fortunate brethren from whom, by a turn of the revolutionary wheel, so many of them re- cently sprang. Indeed they seize every opportunity to be overbearing toward those over whom they happen to have direction, while to their superiors they are unctuous, servile, and insinuating. They are would-be members of the wealthier classes, aspiring to belong among the social idlers. Their penurious mimicry of the standards of the old Díaz ruling class is pathetic. Their women adhere strictly to the ancient sex-serfdom of Spanish feudal- ism. Their daughters are married-though the revo- lution has broken this down to a large extent-accord- ing to the old forms of balcony courtship, and by cere- monious church functions that are obviously beyond the purse of the unfortunate but willing groom. They are, with a few notable exceptions, thorough Catholics. They cling to the traditional past. They regret that they must work for a living, and burn with the shame of it. The women of the house creep out in the early dawn to do their own marketing that their more fortu- nate sisters may not know that they lack servants. In short, they have utterly failed to catch the mean- ing of the strenuous tongue of revolution. They have failed to see that a new era has spread over the land, nor do they see the resultant problems and crises that have been raised. Mexico has already run through the first harsh stages of the bourgeois state when the national resources are squandered and the old life dis- The Middle Class 149 rupted. Its people, more in blindness than with in- telligence, have shaken a continent in their resentment. at that process. Yet even to-day the bearer of one phase of the new era is still the foreign capitalist aided by a numerous corps of unscrupulous satellites. In this unfolding process of industrialization carried on by the most unprincipled yet intelligent elements of our modern civilization, there will be no conservation of those characteristics which are the noblest heritage of the Indian, no conservation of the virtues, artistry, and honest simplicity of the old communal life. Ordi- narily a middle class would take up the burden of con- serving those elements of the past that possess the most value for the future, which are always menaced during periods of abrupt transition. But the Mexi- can middle class lacks roots, it is too exotic, it has no traditions in terms of Mexican national life; and furthermore its members are already corrupted by the general Mexican vices; they lack stamina and virility; they lack patriotism and courage. What will be the future of the Mexican middle. class? Will it increase in numbers and importance as the process of industrialization continues? Will it be frankly pro-capitalist, pro-foreigner, or will it become. the balance-wheel of the impending industrial strug- gles of Mexico, and thus preserve the continuity of the national traditions and prevent the complete disruption of the social fabric? Or will it become quite respect- able in the Shavian sense-stupid, complacent, damned to the routine of a petty industrial treadmill as is the American middle class? Or will it by chance follow 150 Mexico An Interpretation the path laid out for it by Señor José Vasconcelos, head of the Department of Education (El Heraldo de México, 8 August 1920)?- The capitalist solidly bases his power upon his wealth and those institutions that to-day guarantee that wealth for his sole benefit. The worker bases his power in the tragically heroic fact that he can impose conditions, even at the cost of self-sacrifice, when he goes on strike. But the middle-class-what can it do? A strike of govern- ment clerks? What difference to the government? A strike of lawyers? Better, say the people, that they never return to work! Strike of the doctors? How beneficial for the health! Because of this, the middle class has no recourse left but to submit to, and procure entrance to, the caste that has always exercised over it an irresistible attraction, the caste of the rich, who live without working, and, whether from rent or privilege, always by abuse. It is now time, nevertheless, for the middle class to under- stand that even to enrich itself it should first make itself powerful, and in order to succeed in making itself powerful, it must convert itself into a productive class and ally itself, not with the oppressors, who are few and destined to fall be- cause they represent injustice, but with the oppressed, and with the humble, with its brothers the workers and the peons, with the proletariat of the earth. CHAPTER XII THE ARISTOCRACY THE so-called Mexican aristocracy, largely created during the Díaz régime, is the lineal descendent of the Roman-Spanish-Indian system of tradition-encrusted autocracy. It is the only class-conscious group in the national life. It is conscious of its unity, its common interests, its purpose, its historical antecedents. The Mexican pseudo-aristocrat has implicit faith in class- rule, for he considers himself alone capable of govern- ing the country. Yet he has no patriotism, no public spirit, and no loyalty—except for his kind. He be- lieves in absolutism, special privilege, the Spanish- Aztec Church, lawless power, and gold-headed canes. He knows nothing about the French Revolution. He places his entire faith in a moth-eaten feudal system -though the more intelligent members of his group are quite ready to make peace with Yaqui industrial- ism-and he humors himself with all the vices of that system, plus the polluting vices of centuries of decay. The son of the Mexican aristocrat is brought up a snob and a tyrant. No female member of the house- hold dares to reprove him, and a servant who does so courts a beating or instant dismissal. As a result, he is selfish, willful, intolerant, arrogant. These are the qualities of a gentleman and are sucked in from the cradle up. He is constantly in the hands of serv- 1 ISI 152 Mexico-An Interpretation ants. This not only adds to his feeling of self- importance and the right to rule, but incidentally intro- duces him at an early age to all forms of sexual de- pravity. As soon as he is old enough, he is sent off to a Cath- olic boarding-school to learn similar morality and other incidentals. He is thoroughly taught the importance of mass and confession so that his early-acquired sins sit lightly upon his conscience. If taught at home, his schedule will probably conform somewhat to that of a young man of my acquaintance. From eight to nine, he will receive the priest for religious instruction. Usually the priest finds him asleep and must wait until he takes his bath, slips into a dressing-gown, and drinks his morning coffee. This prevents religion from be- coming boring. From nine to ten he takes a guitar lesson. The music-teacher usually has to wait until he dresses. From ten to one he is given instruction in languages, mathematics, and similar subjects. The re- mainder of the day is given over to amusement. After he has finished his elementary and preparatory schooling he is packed off to France-in more re- cent years to the United States-to complete his stud- ies. There he idles away his time in the Latin- American colony of artists, poets, political exiles, high- livers-investigating Montmartre. He picks up a smattering of learning, French, and a foreign air that lends him distinction when he returns to his provincial patria. He soon learns to deprecate his own country, to mention it with a condescending shrug. He is a Mexican no longer. Indeed his return home is like a visit to a foreign The Aristocracy 153 land, where he lives, not from choice, but from neces- sity or because of parental pride. If he has sufficient family influence, he straightway obtains a government sinecure in some office that he rarely visits except to see the attractive female employees he has installed. In any case, he idles away his time in frivolity, brain- lessness, and vice. The daughters of the aristocrats are taught the same snobbishness and sense of superiority over others. They are given a more thorough Church training, and, being more restricted in their outlook, are invariably fanatical Catholics. Their status in the family, how- ever, is feudal submission to the trousers of the house- hold. After marriage, the wife of the aristocrat is hedged about by a hundred and one restrictions, con- jured up by the hot creole jealousy of her husband,- restrictions which he does not hesitate to break for her, if he wishes to indulge in family communal dissipation with his friends and their wives. She is pre- Her education is suited to her status. pared for connubial and concubinal slavery of a jewel- and-silk order by being taught to dance, play the piano, speak French, read sensuous poetry and French porno- graphic novels, embroider, talk sex, flirt, and win a husband. She knows nothing about politics, less about art, nothing of social conditions. She is ignorant, and a Mexican aristocratic husband desires her to remain so-a perfect mirror for his vanity, wisdom, and arro- gance. Aside from that she will serve for his sexual enjoyment when he tires of his concubines, lodged in two or three separate and luxurious establishments. The lives of the aristocrats are rounds of endless 154 Mexico An Interpretation dissipation. The following authentic schedule of liv- ing will serve for the majority: at ten o'clock, or later, Señor X. and his wife are each brought orange-juice, chocolate and cakes before rising. Señor X. spends from eleven until one o'clock tending to his business affairs. Señora X. spends the morning making her toilet. Her maid first prepares and gives her a hot bath, after which she dresses her. This process con- sumes time-much manicuring, coiffuring, and rouging. Señora X.'s dresses come from Paris and are always of the latest mode. About twelve, she will perhaps telephone a friend that she is sending around a lim- ousine and hopes that she can take "breakfast" with her. Breakfast lasts from one to three or four o'clock and is sometimes followed by a game of tennis; in the case of Senor X., who has usually breakfasted down town, by playing polo. Later Señora X. takes tea at some friend's house, where, if there is dancing, the company does not break up until late at night. More frequently tea will be over by seven or seven- thirty. This leaves time to return home and dress for the theatre, which begins at half-past nine or ten o'clock. The theatre presents, not regular dramas, but coarse musical comedy, burlesque and vaudeville. At one or two in the morning she and her husband will drive in an auto to Bach's or the Chapultepec Park Café to dine and dance. Dancing lasts until three, four, or five o'clock in the morning. At one of these hours, the Señores X. will return home, or, if they are part of a sufficiently congenial and intoxicated group, they will go to some friend's house, force the The Aristocracy 155 inmates to dress, and dance until seven or eight the next morning. The following description given by Mrs. Edith O'Shaughnessy ("Diplomatic Days," pp. 282-3) of a formal society event may prove interesting: Madame Casasus, large and impressive and a blaze of dia- monds, was flanked by her two pretty, slim daughters, very jeune fille as to dress, but rather sophisticated as to expression. The novia was in white, and the younger girl in a similar costume of blue. All strata of society (limited sense of word) were there, even the "pillars," holding up things for this single occasion; charming-looking and beautifully dressed women I had not seen before-some of that invisible chichería, I suppose; the official set, the military, etc., etc. There were some fine jewels-great plaques of emeralds much in evidence-and one lady wore a strange necklace of very large, very lustrous, al- most square pearls. The rooms are elaborately furnished in the French style. The brocade-covered walls hung with expensive modern French paintings. Portraits of Monsieur and Madame Cas- asus by one of the great French artists . . . were in the large pink and gold salon. The magnificent library, with thousands of volumes, the collection of a life-time, was furnished from London by Waring and had long tables bearing atlases and big inquarto volumes, deep leather chairs, and reading lamps, most inviting. The supper was lavish to a degree; it was whispered about that the cost of the entertainment was fifty thousand dollars [for which the peon would have to work 430 years]. Madame C. presided over a huge square table of diplomats, loaded with great candalabra, beautiful imported fruits in massive silver dishes and rare flowers in tall vases. • 156 Mexico-An Interpretation The champagne flowed, French patés, asparagus, all sorts of things which had come from long distances, were passed by the liveried servants. • The aristocrat's life, especially that of the more recent generation, is a continuous round of dissipation. It means the breaking of the moral fiber, immorality, degeneracy. Thus it is that the average young aristocrat is a wreck before thirty-a drunkard, a sexual pervert, and a cynic. I know one young man of but twenty-eight who is shattered physically, who is always steeped in alcohol, whose hands tremble violently when he lights his innumerable cigarettes, and whose palm is always clammy and damp. The fundamental excitement of life consists in carrying on love intrigues. On one hacienda I counted over a hundred children among the peons bearing the name of the owner. Sexual disease is rampant. The old aristocracy of Yucatán, owing to close interbreeding and promiscuity, is almost to a member afflicted with leprosy and syphilis. Corral, the vice-president under Díaz, was rotting away with the latter. sons. The record of vileness and degeneracy is scarlet in nearly every aristocratic family, and only varies in de- gree. One of the three richest families in Querétaro, for instance, consisted of three daughters and four Their history is instructive. The eldest girl married a high State Church official, but left him to elope with a young captain who later beat her to death. The second daughter married well and lived con- tentedly after the fashion of dutiful Mexican wives. The third daughter married a well-known official who The Aristocracy 157 proved to be syphilitic. She had two children, before she herself became a physical wreck, one of them still- born, the other idiotic. The first son was sent to the United States to be educated, where he became in- volved in financial difficulties, took to stealing and was accidentally shot by the police. The second son was shot in a drunken saloon brawl by his cousin. The third keeps a score of women whom he publicly boasts about, narrating with great gusto the intimate details. of his experiences with the Princesa, with the Linda, His excuse is that it is "in his blood," and he can't help it. The remainder of his free time is spent in gambling. He was left $80,000 which he will soon have spent. When that is gone, he intends to shoot himself. The fourth is a young fifi who will soon equal the exploits of his older brother. etc. Pick almost any prominent aristocratic family and the record is the same. The family, whose head was a great Científico lawyer, has run to seed in this gen- eration. One daughter is married to a leading news- paper editor. She is the most sedate. Her two sis- ters are utterly depraved, become quite drunk on every occasion, and when drink no longer thrills openly in- ject morphine into their legs. They married sons of one of the most noted educators of the country. The eldest son is a typical largartijo, spending his whole time in front of the Café El Globo in his cream-colored Hudson, attempting to flirt with the women who pass. The famous N. family that has figured so largely in the national chronicles, and was so favored by Díaz, consisted in this generation of a son and daughter. The daughter was sent to Germany to 158 Mexico-An Interpretation study. Upon the completion of her education, the son was sent to fetch her. The result of the trip was a child, and their subsequent hurried marriage. Later they shot themselves. Yet incest is sufficiently common among aristocratic circles. A brother and sister of the family whose life I have described fell in love with each other, but the Church refused to marry them. They made a special trip to Rome to see the Pope and offered him an immense donation to obtain his sanction, but he cursed them and their children unto the seventh gen- eration. Undaunted, they returned to Mexico and lived in the Hotel I. under the name of Señores Amor de B. I have met a wealthy aristocrat in Guadalajara who openly lives with his daughter and has had children by her. These and similar details are the woof of aristocratic salacious conversation. J For more seriously diverting occupation, the women indulge in charity. They arrange balls, the proceeds of which go to the hospitals and asylums; bull-fights for the benefit of the Red Cross; and dramatic per- formances. One of the latter affairs called for an expenditure of $120,000 on costumes and netted $12,000 for charity. The men, on their side, arrange polo matches, charging high admission rates. This class lived and still lives from public-graft, and rent, interest and profit. Most of them own, or did own, large haciendas, for most of them, if not for- merly of the military caste, belonged to the landed aristocracy. And even on the haciendas they have erected magnificent homes, among the hovels of the peons. Señor Luis Espinosa on the Hacienda de The Aristocracy 159 Amargura possesses a luxurious palace with the most up-to-date appointments, billiard tables, bowling al- leys, beautiful salons. The home of Señor Oscar Braneff on the Hacienda de Jalapa in Guanajuato has unnumbered guest-rooms each with its private bath, private chapel, and the most sumptuous reception rooms. Generally these palaces are but summer homes, and the owners, like those of the Hacienda de Contla in Jalisco, which formerly yielded a net income of over $2,000,000 (pesos) a year, live in the nearest large city. This, then, is the class that at all times has more or less control of Mexico's destinies, and even since the fall of Díaz, when it had reached its lowest depths of degeneracy, its members have held important govern- ment posts. Sometimes it has produced a statesman and an upright man such as Limantour, or Justo Si- erra, but these are exceptions. Living the life that most of them do, there is little possibility that they would have social vision, any sense of social responsi- bility, any stamina or vigor. They freight their sub- ordinates with their own duties and let the ship of state run on the rocks, time and again, like any drunken crew. While in power they rape the public treasury, and when overthrown by the "outs" run off to Europe to live in further idleness and luxury. When their power has in any way been threatened they have invariably shown their class-solidarity and accompanying lack of patriotism and civic loyalty. During the time of Juárez, they sent emissaries to Europe where they worked avidly to obtain the inter- vention of France, Spain, and England, and, after cap- 160 Mexico-An Interpretation turing the adventurous imagination of Napoleon III, were the first supporters of the imposed Hapsburg, Catholic, Maximilian, fawning at the feet of his great birth. It was they who betrayed the country during the invasion of the United States in 1847, and even when the American armies were nearing the capital and political generals, contending aspirants, and transient presidents were squabbling for position. It was they who surrounded Porfirio Díaz, clamor- ing each year for greater graft and larger concessions. It is they who have led the counter-revolution in Mex- ico and out, who cried from every foreign land at the iniquities of the enlightened Madero and of Carranza. It is they who, on occasions, advocate American inter- vention. Above all, they point with pride to the dic- tatorship of Díaz and his thirty-year peace as irrefut- able proof of their ability to rule. They forget that Díaz was never an "aristocrat," that he was a man of iron, that he understood them and their class thor- oughly-how to use them, how to beat them, how to bribe them. And had it not been for them, there is a bare chance that Díaz might have built his thirty-year peace on the rights of man, on the mestizos and the Indians, instead of upon a narrow class, and a rottenly decadent feudal class. But after one has read this indictment against the aristocracy as a class, one has merely said what is true of all feudal aristocracies at the moment of their pass- ing. Only there are reasons why the Mexican aristoc- racy and the wealthy orders are more depraved than is customary in history. The Mexican aristocracy has endured some centuries beyond its day. Its vices have The Aristocracy 161 swollen with those centuries. The Mexican aristocrat of to-day lacks stamina and ability to rule. But he and the United States Government are the only ones who do not know that fact. CHAPTER XIII THE CHURCH ON the weathered stone in front of the first Christian church ever founded in the Western Hemisphere, the church of Tlaxcala, is still inscribed: In this font the four senators of the ancient republic of Tlaxcala received the Catholic faith. That religious act took place in the year of 1520, the priests being Don Loán Díaz, chaplain of the conquering army, and the godfathers-Cap- tain Cortez and his distinguished officers. That conversion had not been voluntary. While the Mexicans had been expecting, at the turn of the sixteenth century, the return of their great soter, the fair-skinned earth-god, Quetzalcoatl, who had once lived among the Toltec people teaching them the arts of peace and kindliness, the giving of bread, fruits, and perfumes as offerings in place of human beings, incul- cating in them the doctrines of self-restraint, self- abnegation, and chastity, the Spaniards soon proved that they were neither he nor his descendants; and it took four bloody battles to persuade the Tlaxcalans to embrace the white man's God. To-day ten thousand churches dot the land. Sitting one clear afternoon upon the hill of Tetzcotinco, once the site of the summer home of the great Texcucan king Nezahaualcoyotl, I could distinguish more than twenty churches lying close about or poking their 162 The Church 163 spires above the distant trees. Similar shrines rise on the most distant shores, and tower beside the remotest peaks. But what, aside from sprinkling the land with sumptuous palaces of worship, has the Church of Mex- ico done for the people it has shepherded? The early missionaries were men of kindliness, sin- cerity, and resolution. Fathers Tecto, Gaona, Focher, Vera Cruz had been men in high positions; Gante, Witte, and Daciano felt royal blood coursing in their veins; yet, one and all, they deserted lucrative sinecure posts and brilliant careers to pioneer in a foreign and unsettled land in order to teach Indians how to read, write and be Christians. Nothing is more fascinat- ing and inspiring than the stories of the early friars, such as Padre Junípero Serra and Magán Catalá, who founded missions from Central America to California, suffering incredible hardships and discouragements. Torquemada was able to declare that, by 1540, 5,000- ooo Indians had been converted and baptized, and that nearly all the old teocallis had been leveled to the ground. Father Sahaguan tells of the work of con- version and demolition "Historia de Nueva España," tom iii, p. 77): We took the children of the caciques into our schools where we taught them to read, write, and chant. The children of the poorer natives were assembled in the patios and there in- structed in the Christian faith. After our teaching one or two brethren would take the pupils to some neighboring teo- calli and, by laboring on it for a few days, level it to the ground. In this way they demolished, in a short time, all the Aztec temples, great and small, so that not a vestige of them remained. 164 Mexico-An Interpretation The early fathers not only educated the Indian but they attempted to protect him from the brutalities of the cavalier exploitation. Some of the most enlight- ened colonial labor legislation is due to the ceaseless efforts of such ecclesiastics as Las Casas, who crossed the ocean fourteen times to implore better treatment for the Indians; such as Bishop Vasco de Quiroga of Michoacán, who protested year after year at the con- duct of the viceroys, of the Spanish aristocracy, and of the military officers. If the subsequent enlight- ened crown legislations had little effect upon a colony so distant as Mexico, the Indian under the lash of his new servitude at least found a place in the bosom of the Church to weep out his sorrows. But after the first fire of proselyting was extin- guished, regular priests were sent out to take up the work and institutionalism settled down upon the backs of the people. The Church gradually acquired lands, its wealth increased, its temples became more sumptu- ous, the robes of its priests more bejeweled, its altars more ostentatious and glittering. In the records of the Ayuntamiento, during even the first years of the Conquest, may be noted the alarm at the dangerous increase in clerical riches. Noble and Churchman began to contend for worldly wealth. Bishops excommunicated viceroys; viceroys exiled bishops-both of which procedures usually pre- cipitated riots and resulted in beheadings. In 1624, Viceroy Marqués de Galvéz and Archbishop de la Sema quarreled violently over the seed-monopoly. The Viceroy imprisoned the Archbishop and sent him to Spain in irons, charged with rebellion. The parti- The Church 165 sans of the Archbishop attacked the palace of the Viceroy, who took refuge in the bosom of the Church he had insulted, interning himself in the Cathedral of San Francisco many months-until the Crown had guaranteed to the Church freedom from official inter- vention and had appointed a successor. The Church as a great property-holder no longer upheld the Indian; it stood with the exploiting class, with the aristocracy. It became increasingly intoler- ant. As early as November 4, 1571, the Tribunal of the Inquisition was established in the City of Mexico. "From that day terror began among its good inhabitants! Woe to the heretics, blasphemers, and Jews! Woe to the sharpers, witches, and sorcerers! • "Fear swept over all, and that frightful secrecy with which the tribunal surrounded itself contributed greatly to increase the terror. No one lived at ease; unknown and secret denunciation threatened every one; unfortunate was he who gave grounds for the least suspicion, and unhappy was he who merely neglected to wear a rosary." (Luis González Obregón, Méjico Viejo.) From that day until the time of Juárez, Church wealth and power increased. During the eighteenth century, the Viceroy Marqués de Cruillas expelled the corrupted Jesuits. The Archbishop of Mexico was then receiving $123,000 (pesos) annually; the Bishop of Puebla $110,000; of Valladolid (Morelio) $100,- 000; of Guadalajara, $90,000. (Trejo Lerdo de Tejada, La Revolución y el Nacionalismo, p. 60.) The combined value of church property was estimated at $50,000,000 (pesos). The backbone of its organ- 166 Mexico-An Interpretation ization lay in the 1,073 parishes with some 22,300 ec- clesiastics; the 264 convents with more than 8,000 cel- ibates; the 157 missions with their many exploited In- dian worshipers. By the time of independence there existed, in addition, 19 male and 22 female orders, while the property of the Church had increased in value to one-fourth of the nation's wealth. Independence, under Creole leadership, only served to intrench the Church in power and prestige. Dur- ing the ensuing thirty years its strength and riches con- tinued to increase until it became the most powerful institutionalized force in the country. Madame de la Barca in her famous letters, written in 1837, betrays, by her very naïve worship of the magnificence and opulence of the Church, the priests, and the ritual, how far this process of engorgement had proceeded (Every- man edition): Before the altar, which was dazzling with jewels, was a representation of the Lord's supper, not in painting, but in sculptured figures as large as life, habited in the Jewish dresses. The bishops and priests were in a blaze of gold and jewels. (p. 131) The ceremony, though long, was very superb, the music fine, the quantity of jewels on the dresses of the bishops and priests, and on the holy vessels, etc., enormous. The bishops were arrayed in white velvet and gold and their mitres were literally covered with diamonds. The golden candlesticks and golden basins for holy water, and golden incensories ... of the Jewish tabernacle in the days of Moses. . . . (p. 180) Suddenly the curtain was withdrawn and the picturesque beauty of the scene within baffles all description. Beside the altar, which was in a blaze of light, was a perfect mass of The Church 167 crimson and gold drapery; the walls, the antique chairs, the table before which the priest sat, all hung with the same splendid material. The bishop wore his superb mitre and robes of crimson and gold; the attendant priests also glitter- ing in crimson and gold embroidery. (p. 193) The bishop himself in his purple robes and amethysts. (p. 196) Here was this country church crowded with leperos, the officiating priests, Indians with bare feet; yet the building large and rich, hung with black cloth, and lighted with great tapers which through their gloomy rays on as much of the rich gilding that encrusted the walls, as the dark pall left visible. (p. 280) Three altars were at first erected, and in the middle one destined for the image, was a sumptuous tabernacle of silver gilt, in which were more than three thousand two hundred marks of silver, and which cost nearly eighty thousand dollars. In the center of this was a piece of gold, weighing four thousand and fifty castellanos .. and here the image was placed, the linen on which it is painted guarded by a silver plate of great value. The rest of the temple had riches cor- responding. The candlesticks, vases, railing, etc., containing nearly fourteen thousand marks of silver, without counting the numerous holy vessels, cups, and chalices adorned with jewels. One golden lamp weighed upwards of two thousand two hun- dred castellanos-another seven hundred and fifty marks. (p. 457) The Catheral. . . is still wonderfully rich, notwithstand- ing that silver to the value of 32,000 marks has been taken from it during the civil wars. The high altar is dazzling with gold and silver, the railing which leads from it to the choir is pure silver, with pillars of the same metal; two pul- pits, with their stairs, are also covered with silver. . . . (p. 505) 168 Mexico-An Interpretation The cathedrals themselves, handed down through the centuries, represented an enormous labor and ex- penditure. The Cathedral of Mexico, the largest in the Western Hemisphere, cost two million dollars, the Cathedral of Oaxaca even more. The cathedral of Puebla necessitated an outlay for construction purposes of a million and a half; that of Aguas Calientes and Chihuahua over $800,000; Zacatecas, $600,000; Mér- ida and Jalapa, $300,000; San Juan Bautista, $250,- 000. It is a poor edifice that does not represent an expenditure of more than a quarter of a million dol- lars. Frequently villages too insignificant to find a place on the map have beautiful cathedrals that would do credit to any large European or American city. Nor did construction costs complete the expense. In the cathedral of Mexico City, the railings and bal- ustrades, alloyed from copper, silver, and gold, were imported from China at a cost of $1,500,000. In the reclusive cathedral of Tepotzotlán, each of the al- tars alone is said to have cost $1,000,000. In the cathedral of Morelia, the silleria of the choir, includ- ing its candlesticks, ornamentations, and sacred vessel, originally cost more than $3,500,000. The robe of the Virgin de los Remedios was rated at $300,000; and that of the Virgin de la Soledad in Oaxaca, into which was woven 397,920 pearls, with the crown, at $150,000. Along with this growth in power crept in corruption and degeneracy. The priests haunted the wine shops and the cheap theatres; flaunted their women on the streets. The active control of politics with its attend- ant graft and favoritism became more and more ob- The Church 169 noxious. Madame de la Barca gives a vivid picture of the priestly participation in the legislative assembly: "We were then at the door of the palace, where we went this morning to see the opening of Congress, the two houses being included in this building. The House of Representa- tives, though not large, is handsome, and in good taste. Op- posite to the presidential chair is a full-length representation of our Lady of Guadelupe. . . . The multitude of priests with their large shovel hats and the entrance of the president in full uniform, announced by music and a flourish of trum- pets and attended by his staff, announced it as anti-Republican looking an assembly as one could wish to see." The Church has had a hand in every counter- revolution, and to it are particularly ascribable the revolutions of Iturbide and of the years 1827, 1852, 1860 and the French invasion. It was largely respon- sible for undoing the work of Juárez. Under Díaz the priests again slipped back into the fold of special privilege to be once more cast out by the 1910–1920 revolution, with one short resplendent reëntry into grace during the months of Huerta's ascendency. And they had their faction participating in the Re- vindicating Revolution in the followers of González and Pelaez, and to-day they have reappeared in na- tional politics with a programme which seeks to re- store the old Constitution of 1857 without its anti- clerical provisions. But the Church is unlikely ever again to become a dominant power in Mexican politics, though it still ex- ercises a strong hold upon the imagination of the peo- ple. The clerical elements are awaiting the proper op- 170 Mexico-An Interpretation portunity when the old glory will reappear, the golden wealth creep back once more into place from hidden sacristy to altar; but the sceptre of power has passed into other hands-the hands of the foreign cap- italist. Yet the priests will find a privileged foothold on Mexican soil as long as the mass of Mexicans are illiterate and credulous; as long as Mexican women are bound to the wheel of feudal subjection. The present weapons of the Catholic Church in Mexico are still superstition, the confession, and female fana- ticism. The Indian possessed a religion based upon superstition and fear; and his ignorance has given him a profound faith in the marvelous and supernatural. Enter the little church of the Black Christ, back of the Volador or "Thieves' Market" in the street of Porta Coeli in Mexico City, and behold the effect pro- duced by such superstition. According to the legend an unsuccessful attempt was made to poison the Arch- bishop. The image of the Christ in the church im- mediately turned black, having apparently absorbed the poison. Great drops of sweat are said to appear on this image from time to time as evidence of pain, or an attempt to throw off the poison. The people of this district are ragged and diseased, but they flock to drop their pennies into the box beneath the "Lord of Poison" (Señor de Vénemo). "Near the heart of Mexico City, in a business locality and wedged in between tenement houses, is a small Church fifty meters square. Here is seen the image of the Virgin dressed in.cloth of gold, while the image of Jesus also wears a costly robe. The Church 171 "On the morning of the first of May, 1912, the curate of this church, returning from the Archbishop's residence, entered the little church for his customary devotions. To his great surprise, he found the image swaying. Calling the sacristan and some neighbors, it proved to be a fact. The image swayed as though rocking an infant to sleep. The movements began at ten in the morning and continued until three in the afternoon, from the second to the fifth day con- secutively. "The following Sunday morning, during mass, the swaying was renewed. The congregation became so excited over the strange spectacle that the curate was compelled to call for the assistance of the police. The following day the Arch- bishop sent a representative to investigate the phenomenon. The image was taken down to see if it was in normal con- dition. Nothing was discovered to cause the movements, but when the image was replaced, the swaying began again. The representative returned to the Archbishop and reported the above facts. The curate asked if he should close the church. The reply was that it would be better to keep it open that the people might have the satisfaction of witnessing it. One woman in particular was so overcome that she cried out: 'O Holy Mother, what wonderful miracle are you performing? Is it that there will be an end to the fighting in Chihua- hua?' policemen "Later in the day so many assembled that were required to keep order. The people had become frenzied with excitement; they hooted and threw stones. The police- men fired shots to intimidate the crowd which had now in- creased to over a thousand, one man being seriously injured. Mounted police then arrived on the scene and the crowd was dispersed. The next day a government official visited the church and ordered that the boards of the floor be taken up. He found that wires had been laid underground and connected with the machinery of a near-by mill, which, when put in mo- 172 Mexico-An Interpretation tion, caused the vibrations which swayed the image. (Mrs. John Wesley Butler "Historic Churches in Mexico," p. 104.) The other side of the coin of superstition is lack of education. It is true that at the outset the Church established many schools and colleges, but after the first years of the Conquest the elementary schools were closed and education restricted to ecclesiastical train- ing and the teaching of the sons of the wealthy. All ecclesiastical instruction was pre-Renascence. The most Dantesque beliefs prevailed and still prevail. Hell is very real to the average Mexican, who clings to a medieval theology, based upon fear. The very textbooks have kept up these credulities, and one scarcely picks up an elementary geography, reader, or copy-book of the pre-revolutionary period in the book- stalls without finding it clogged with ecclesiastical div- igations. One example of the working of this per- verted propaganda is the bitterness that exists in the average Mexican's heart towards the Jews. I had the following conversation with one of our criadas, an Indian girl, as a result of which she quit our house for- ever with sundry articles of value-for were we not infidels? : "What does a Jew look like?" I asked her. "Oh, there are several kinds. The real Jews have horns and a tail like the devil's. They are a very cunning people, and can change their shape to look like human beings." "Where do they live?" "In Jerusalem." "But there are very few Jews in Jerusalem. The The Church 173 Turks have killed them all. There are more Jews in New York City than in Jerusalem-several mil- lion." "Jesús! Real Jews? The padre told me that all the Jews lived in Jerusalem. I don't think those in New York are real Jews, at least not so bad as those in Jerusalem." "De veras, they are really Jews. But why don't you like the Jews?" Her eyes grew big with amazement. killed Nuestro Señor!" "But that was centuries ago. "Why, they You can't blame the children of the people who lived in those days, and besides only one man betrayed Jesus-Judas. You wouldn't want to be punished for something that some friend of your great-grandfather did, would you?" "N-0-0-0; but they are all wicked. They would kill Jesus themselves if they could. Besides they poison people and suck the blood of babies." "Why, I know some Jews who are very nice peo- ple." I named several friends accustomed to visit us. "No, no! They are not Jews and you are joking. No Jew would dare to come to Mexico." "Why not?" "They would kill him.' "" "Would you kill a Jew?" "If I could.” "But the ten commandments say: 'Thou shalt not kill.' Would you break the ten commandments?" "But we were talking about Jews. You can kill Jews. God wants you to kill Jews. This hatred of the Jews has its fitting climax on 174 Mexico-An Interpretation El Sabado de Gloria when the Judases are burned in the streets. The figures intended to represent Judas are grotesque images, painted up like devils or imps; others are half beast, half man. They are filled with fire-crackers and suspended from ropes above the streets. A great crowd assembles and at the ap- pointed moment at the cry of "Kill the Jews," the fire- crackers are ignited and the figure torn to pieces by their explosion. At the same time clothing, shoes, souvenirs (recuerdos) are flung from the windows on either side of the street to be snatched by the excited crowd. But what the Church pays out in rewards and os- tentatious display, it gets back with interest. From this created hatred, fanaticism, and blind worship they gain control of a great idolatrous following which can be turned to proper use when the occasion demands. The fanaticism stirred up by such festivals as the one just described, brings to the Church fabulous donations. and decorations; it formerly brought, and still does in a few nooks and corners, the tithes; and it always brings the pennies of the poor. It makes possible the charging of hundreds of parochial perquisites: fees for baptism, for confirmation, for marriage, for funer- als. These fees vary with the rank and wealth of the owner, but they have made for the poor Mexican a heavy burden that adds to his chronic indebtedness. Even the children, when you drop them a few pennies, run to buy candles and holy wafers instead of candy. The confession furthers Church control, for through it a finger is kept on the pulse of every community. Thus the Church keeps in touch with the psychology The Church 175 of the people, their troubles, their petty aspirations, and turns them to its own advantage. And in partic- ular the confession retains its hold upon the women. If the faith has everywhere been shaken in the male breast, the woman clings to it fanatically, passionately, secretly if necessary, but surely. She carries that in- fluence into the home, whence it is reflected in the con- duct of the state. Thus through the centuries the Roman-Aztec Church has been jealous of its right to rule, its wealth, and its luxuries. For this right to rule, it has re- turned majestic temples that tower above the plains throughout the length and breadth of the land, but it has returned very little toward the material, mental, of moral elevation of the people. The Church has had it in its power to create a new Mexican, an educated Mexican, a clean Mexican. It has had it in its power to raise economic standards. If it could teach the Indian to build monumental, airy, and clean temples, it could have taught him how to build a decent home in which to live. In short, it had it in its power to create a free people. But the Church in Mexico has done none of these things. During three hundred and fifty years of al- most absolute rule only the dominant aristocracy learned to read and write. The Church still permits the lepers and diseased to dip their rotting hands in the same holy water used by healthy children. And how many thousands of leperos still beg at the temple gates with all the misery of impending death upon their faces for alms, "in the name of the most Holy Virgin," "for the sake of the most pure blood of 176 Mexico-An Interpretation Christ," "in the name of the miraculous pure concep- tion !" And the Church could have raised the morals of the Mexican. One of the crying criticisms against Mexico-although a meaningless one-a cry that is raised by the Church itself—is that the peons are not married. To the peon civil marriage means nothing, but the fees and costs of a Church marriage are pro- hibitive, and if paid mean the beginning of a debt that lasts all his life and down to the days of his chil- dren. That the Mexican desires to marry is illus- trated by an amusing incident told by Flandrau in his Viva Mexico (p. 127): Last year a man I know, who has a cattle ranch a day and a half away from here, issued a general invitation to the countryside to come to his place and be married free of charge. He built a temporary chapel and hired a priest and for two days the hymeneal torch flamed as it never had in that part of the world before. So many persons took advantage of the opportunity that the priest, who began marrying a couple at a time, was obliged toward the last to line them up in little squads of six and eight and ten, and let them have it, so to speak, by wholesale. It was pathetic to see old men and women with their children and their children's children all waiting in the same group to be married. In some cases the Church has deliberately aggra- vated these evils. It has manifested its desire to see the Mexican remain ignorant, debased, and econom- ically subjected. It has opposed the secularization of education. It has opposed woman's suffrage. It has opposed prohibition. It has opposed labor organiza- The Church 177 tion. It has excommunicated peons participating in land-subdivision. It has torn the land in twain with sanguinary civil war during one hundred years and has fought every movement for human freedom and eman- cipation. The Church in Mexico, if it is to be of national service to a stricken people, must, like St. Francis, di- vest itself of its wealth, its material power, and its luxury, and regain its spirit of self-sacrifice, self- immolation, and the desire to serve. It must become less self-seeking and more patriotic. It must return to the traditions of the early missionaries. It must again become imbued with the passionate love of aiding man- kind. It must stand with the poorest Mexican in de- manding that his standard be raised until he has a de- cent place to live, food and clothing for his body, and schools for his children. The attitude of the Revindicating Government to- ward the Church is stated in President Obregón's re- ply to the Bishops at the time of the expulsion of the papal nuncio Ernesto Filippi from Mexico on January 10, 1923: The fundamental programme of the Catholic Church as it is interpreted to us by those entrusted with its destinies consists principally in guiding all souls along the path of virtue, moral- ity and brotherhood-using those terms in their broadest sense-aiming on the basis of these noble purposes to assure infinite happiness for all in life eternal. The fundamental aims of the present government which believes it is faithfully interpreting the desires of the people may be summed up thus: to guide all the people of Mexico along the path of morality, virtue, and brotherhood—using 178 Mexico An Interpretation those terms in their broadest sense-aiming on the bases of these purposes to achieve a greater well-being for the earthly life. The Catholic religion requires of its ministers that they should nourish and guide the souls of believers. The Rev- olution which has just ended requires that the Government born of it should nourish the stomach, the brain, and the soul of each and every Mexican. In this basic conception of the two programmes there is nothing mutually exclusive; there should be on the contrary indisputable harmony. CHAPTER XIV THE MILITARY CLASS The DURING the century of independence the military class has invariably been the deciding factor in the repeated sordid struggles between the ins and the outs. success of the ordinary revolution of this character has usually depended upon the disloyalty of the army to the de jure government, a disloyalty directly in pro- portion to the number of strong and ambitious lead- ers capable and willing to inaugurate rebellion. The fact that most revolutions, after gaining a certain head- way, have been successful and that every rebel leader includes in his programme a declaration that all who stand in opposition will be treated as traitors, hastens the defections, lending wings to the desire to stampede into the new band-wagon and share in the spoils of vic- tory. Thus the character of Mexican politics throughout the history of the country has lent the militarist party disproportionate importance. When governmental changes are effected by armed force, the way is paved for constant rebellion, and the control of the situation by the most ambitious and popular military hero. The military class, however frequently its personnel is changed, promptly becomes a feudal aristocracy without national loyalty or civic responsibility. The army is built up in a pyramidal fashion on the basis of 179 180 Mexico-An Interpretation shifting personal allegiance. While the Mexican sol- dier follows his officers, not for patriotism and rarely for social ideals, but in return for his few centavos a day, this enables the captain, in return for certain promises and concessions, to offer allegiance to some colonel. The colonel in this way comes to control a given number of troops. On the basis of these he pledges loyalty to some general, knowing that he will be generously rewarded with emoluments, loot, and graft. Should he later be disappointed, he will watch his chance to throw his support elsewhere. In other words, Mexico has rarely had a national army; it has had one or more personal armies. The Government becomes the first victim of this military system; its of- fices, its contracts, its concessions, its commands are the spoils to be torn apart in the greedy claws of all the military underlings from lieutenant to general. The members of the military class are purely person- alista-self-seeking and devoid of civic decency. They always have an ear to the ground for impending political turnovers. On such occasions, a few of the leaders are ousted, tried, shot, imprisoned, or exiled, but the majority of them are promptly found in the ranks of the new army of the new government, hands outstretched for spoil and promotion. Every turn- over creates new and more lucrative offices, more col- onelships, more generalships. Just prior to the overthrow of Carranza, I was teaching some fifteen members of his personal staff. At least eight of them were young officers, ranking as captain. A few weeks before the entrance of General Obregón into the city, without explanation, one by one The Military Class 181 they began disappearing from the class. Some of them remained with the de jure Government up to the very morning of Carranza's flight, but of the fifteen only two remained faithful to Carranza. The rest profited in position and salary by the flop. One be- came the prsonal aid of General Treviño; another, not more than about twenty-eight, became head of the national aviation department; a third took charge of General Pablo González's Mexican headquarters. The two who fled with Carranza made their way back to the capital, hoping to get back into military service at increased salaries and possible promotion through the influence of several friends who had suddenly risen in rank. There is a popular adage in Mexico that the army always wins. The problem becomes increasingly difficult in times of peace. During revolution, everybody is engaged. But a Mexican revolution, having for the military lit- tle significance with respect to principles, has an infinite number of debts to pay. Peace brings squabbles for preferment, rivalry to obtain sinecures. Any demobil- ization is charged with the dynamite of rebellion. Of- ficers refuse to be separated from their commands; they prefer to go into the brush as bandits. All the new crop of generals insist upon remaining generals at general's pay, and every general is a presidential possibility. The government is soon ridden by a stag- gering military burden. If a Mexican general is slighted in any way or de- prived of his ordinary graft, he rebels. A loyal gen- eral is sent into the field against him. This increases the opportunity for loot. The loyal general has the 182 Mexico-An Interpretation opportunity of robbing the people, satisfying his lust for power, and continuing in office. He purposely keeps the revolt going. If the rebel leader lays down his arms, the federal general stirs up the countryside by his atrocities until he has created a new and spon- taneous uprising. During Carranza's régime, the people feared the federals more than the bandits, and one of the current. sayings I heard in Durango was, "Villa steals by day, the soldiers by night." During the past ten years of revolution, the countryside has in this manner been ruined by sword, fire, and rapine. During the last months of Carranza's rule, I rode through some of the most troubled sections of the country. A poor starving people came to the train to sell food and trin- kets or to beg. Village after village lay in blackened The people had been stripped of everything- even their daughters. ruins. Besides this organized looting, the general engages in graft and commercial ventures on the side. He pads the payrolls. When the inspector comes around, the general rushes his troops over the nearest hill and has them begin firing. He then tells the inspector the troops are engaged in battle and just about to capture Villa. Inspectors are no braver than other men and do not like battle-fronts. The inspector accepts a few glasses of wine, examines the books, accepts an emolu- ment of a few thousand pesos, and leaves, carrying back a clean report. If he happens to be conscientious, or the general thinks he is, he is “accidentally killed” when he ventures on the battlefront. Sometimes an honest man gets back to make his report, but if the The Military Class 183 general is "in good," it is lost in the archives, and in any event the general "gets" that inspector sooner or later. But even more profit is made from trading in gov- ernment supplies. If one follows the Mexican papers for two or three years, one is astounded at the number of scandalous accounts coming to light of officers who make a business of selling government guns, powder, shells, food, and uniforms to rebel leaders. Frequently both parties are hand in glove, a frater- nalism that extends even to the soldiers. I once blun- dered after dark into a little Durango town which was in control of the federals and under martial law in ex- pectation of an attack by Villistas. Suddenly a gruff voice commanded: "Alto; hands up!" My hands hit the stars as I saw a gleaming carbine pointed at my breast. "What party?" was the next demand. "I belong to no party.' "Quien vive?-Who do you cheer for?" "Viva México." Thereupon I was taken to the "general" in charge to explain why I had ventured on the streets after dark when orders had been issued to shoot on sight. But the general profusely apologized when he discovered that I was an extranjero just come to town, and sent me to the home of a friend to be entertained. Firing with the Villistas began the following day at eleven o'clock. It continued all day until sundown. Only one person was wounded and he by the bursting of his own gun. At last the Villistas were calmly per- 184 Mexico-An Interpretation mitted to occupy half the town. That night Villistas and federals "painted the town red," galloping back and forth half-drunk down the crooked streets, dis- charging their rifles, and shouting: "Muera los gringos"-"Kill the Gringos." The loyal general will also engage in more "legiti- mate" commercial enterprises. He will set his sol- diers planting haciendas, as Pablo González is said to have done in Morelos when on the hunt for Zapata, and pocket the proceeds. Or he will engage in the ex- porting business, as did President Carranza's son-in- law, Cándido Aguilar. For "military purposes" he will commandeer all trains entering a certain district. He will then load them with foodstuffs, completely controlling the market and selling to one or two com- mercial houses, ruining the others and further raising prices. If these measures are not feasible, the general in the field resorts to open stealing of commercial goods in transit. On 25 October 1917, the following edi- torial appeared in El Universal, the leading daily of Mexico City: The overwhelming ruin resulting from poor railway com- munications and the resultant uncertainty of passenger and merchandise transportation remains one of the gravest prob- lems to be solved. Frequently assaults and dynamitings of freight-trains occur. The scarcity of rolling stock, and worse, the vicious exploitation of the railways by employees and mili- tary leaders continues. The most important route which connects our chief port with the capital of the Republic, the route by which the greater part of our exported goods go out, and by which most of the imported products from Europe The Military Class 185 enter, is at present least safe. By what perfect telepathy, or by what arts of marvelous intuition, do bombs explode ex- actly under the trains filled with the richest and most abun- dant of high-priced goods? These distressing reflections crop up repeatedly in our minds when we recall the peculiar circumstances surrounding the destruction of a freight train a short time ago near Ato- yac. The locomotive was pulling a car of paper belonging to this newspaper; another, the property of the National Paper Company; a car full of condensed milk, others with valuable cloth-goods, etc. It appears there was not a single death in the accident, and from data thus far received it is known the rebels profited little from their attack. We know but little regarding the fortune of the freight in this train consigned to various business houses of this capital, but as to our 115 rolls of paper, we have been informed that they were transported almost intact to the city of Vera Cruz by a second military authority who sold them to unprincipled dealers quite cognizant of the crime they were committing. We have proof, for our special representative was present at the inves- tigation ordered by the Governor of Vera Cruz, that the re- sponsibility rests entirely on the military authorities of the port. If the public peace requires it, individual guarantees should be suspended throughout the country; but if the military authorities are going to have absolute power, what will pro- prietors, merchants, and industrial people do when their goods and supplies are illegally sequestered? Can a Major Chief of the Line, or a General Chief of Garrison, dispose of private property without the owner having the right to protest? In the United States, these and similar military abuses were aired as reasons for discrediting the Car- ranza régime. It is true that these existed to a more terrible degree than at any time since the days of Santa 186 Mexico-An Interpretation Anna; it is true that they were the most immediate cause of the wrecking of Carranza's government, but at the same time they are the historic unchecked vices of the military class-vices that have existed through- out the period of independence. Indeed the general failure of every programme of social reconstruction during the past ten years must be laid in large part at the doors of the military party, which largely remained a tool of the Científicos, the Church, the landed aristocracy, and even of American Big Business, and which at the same time seized the opportunity to gorge itself at the trough of the na- tional degradation. Díaz gave the military class its measure of "pan" but he always held it in the hollow of his hand, playing off ambition against ambition. He permitted the same robbery and scourging of the people that existed under Carranza, but he did not permit the simultaneous rob- bery of the Church, the Hacienda, and Big Business. Carranza, put in by the militarists, instead of attempt- ing to curtail their power, made of them the greatest irresponsible force in the land, so that when he boosted Bonillas for president under the slogan of "Down with Militarism" he committed political suicide. The new master of the military class is President Obregón. In that respect he is another Díaz-an en- lightened Díaz. Obregón in Carranza's day had shown the character necessary to master the Army. In the early part of 1916, when the country was in the hands of the militarists, when the capital was full of unruly, sporting officers racing up and down the avenues in stolen motor cars with fast women, and haunting the The Military Class 187 cafés in drunken debauches which frequently ended in shooting affrays, Obregón had the courage to stand up single-handed for decency, and by stern but tactful measures put a stop to these excesses. As Minister of War, he introduced vigorous military reforms and attempted a measure of demobilization. In parting with Obregón, Carranza parted with the only man who could master the many-headed military machine. An encouraging thing about the Revindicating Revo- lution was that it was a military "strike," a strike of the more decent revolutionary elements, led by a group of men (the chief of whom was Obregón) who have never been fundamentally militarists, who are really social patriots. Thus twice, the second time as a revo- lutionist, Obregón has shown himself capable of dominating the military machine and bending it to the social reconstruction of the country. Thus out of the ranks of the militarists themselves has for the time be- ing come a man who reveals the desire, the courage, and the ability to govern them, use them, and shape a new state. And of equal calibre is General Plutarco Elias Calles. CHAPTER XV THE WOMEN A MEXICAN writer has said with the frankness of his race that "Mexican women were made by God to bear children, for they have fat breasts and thick loins." And in fact bearing children is their principal duty. At a time when the world is considering birth-control, and the birth-rate is everywhere declining, the Mexican woman continues procreating prolifically. The poorer the family, the more children. One of our servants is the fourth surviving from a brood of nineteen. Lum- holtz in his México Desconocido tells of an Otomi In- dian with a wife twenty-five years of age who had given birth to eleven children. Ask a Mexican the difference between the ages of his children and he is likely to re- ply, "el tiempo regular"—ten or eleven months. The Big Family is a strong Mexican religious and social in- stitution. Sanctioned by the Church, the State, and custom, the Mexican woman gives birth to her tiny, sickly babies year after year-with pleasure, with a deep sense of fulfilling her religious and wifely obliga- tions. Yet it is the surest evidence of her sexual and intellectual slavery and indicates how little she has been affected by the modern spirit. Yet when the world is rising with the yeast of feminism, when even the women of India and Turkey are beginning to demand rights, the Mexican woman, 188 The Women 189 caught in the whirlwind of revolution that has broken. so many chains-however apathetic she may be regard- ing the larger social relationships, could scarcely fail to be affected. The subjection of women in Mexico is the heritage of the most decadent, chivalric, and Don Juanish em- pire in history; a result of three centuries of domina- tion by a corrupted Church; and is a sidelight on the mixing of so-called inferior and superior races. The Spaniards, coming as conquerors, married native women and not only imposed their decadent feudal con- ceptions upon them but considered them actually as racial, concubinal slaves, a marital relationship fos- tered by the Spanish-Aztec Church. The privileges, although both men and women are very "loose" according to our lights, are all on the side of the men who are commonly philanderers. The looseness of the marriage tie, the traditional infidelity of the husband, the lack of economic security for the women, make the latter exceedingly subordinate. And worst of all, tradition has it that the Mexican woman shall not work. While the lower-class women are bred to hard toil, their work is not of a nature that will provide a living in case of separation from the husband. If a woman belongs to the middle or upper classes, she has no means whatsoever of self-support. Her education in French, embroidery, and the piano stands her in poor stead. Higher education for women is almost unknown and so far as I know has only been forcibly and exhaustively advocated in one Mexican book, "La Quijotita" (The Little Female Don Quixote) written by José Joaquin Fernández de 190 Mexico-An Interpretation Lizardi who died in 1827. Madame de la Barca thus describes the education of the Mexican women in her time (p. 221): "You ask me how the Mexican women are educated. In answering you I must put aside a few brilliant exceptions and speak en masse. The Mexican Señoras and Señoritas write, read and play a little, sew, and take care of their houses and children. When I say they read, I mean they know how to read; when I say they write, I do not mean they can always spell; and when I say they play, I do not assert that they have a general knowledge of music." The account needs little modification to fit the Mexi- can woman of to-day, so that if she is deserted or re- duced to the need of self-support, she must suffer, beg, and starve. If she is deserted she has no recourse to law. Her property belongs to her husband. But the sad part is that she has no feeling of resentment against such a state of affairs. The Mexican woman is marvelously dutiful; and her sense of duty demands —she is taught this by tradition and the priest to whom she confesses that she shall be unswervingly sub- servient to her husband, quick to observe his slightest wish, uncomplaining under the burden of his cruelty, infidelity, and egoism. He may leave her in the lurch with half-a-dozen children and be gone for years, yet if he returns to her bosom, she will accept him with thankfulness and resignation. She has been a good wife. She is respected by the world she knows as a model of devotion. All the relations of the sexes maintain this fiction of chivalric womanly superiority. This is first evidenced The Women 191 by the courtship. In many parts of Mexico a man woos his wife according to the old rules of Spanish custom. The suitor first sees his beloved in company with some member of her family at the theatre, or a dance, at Church, or on the street. He immediately shows his interest in her and if possible follows her to her door. Every day thereafter at the same hour, he passes by her window, and bows to her where she stands behind the iron rejas, or leans from an upstairs balcony. Gradually the pair arrive at the point of long-distance conversations or whispered tête-à-têtes, if the girl's window is on the first floor, even to the point of sly hand-holdings and stolen kisses. Usually the man is supposed to give her a serenade. In the days of Good Queen Bess a man had to know how to write a sonnet to be successful in love, and one of the curses that Sir Philip Sidney breathed upon those who did not love poetry was that they live in love, and "never get favor for lacking skill of a sonnet." And so in many parts of Mexico it is still necessary to be able to play and sing to your lady-love, or at least have enough money to hire some one else to do so. The suitor usually engages the largest orchestra his purse can afford. It is customary to invite all his male friends, furnish refreshments, and in general show that he is "a good fellow." The party usually ends up in the saloons and a visit to the niñas lindas. After some months of this farce, the parents sud- denly "discover" it and make investigations into the antecedents of the Beau Brummel. If he proves to have sufficient money and comes from a respectable family of thieves, he is admitted to the house and per- 192 Mexico-An Interpretation mitted to see his sweetheart under the watchful eye of a dueña or a trusted servant, who, however, is rarely above bribes. He is then an accepted suitor, irrevoc- ably pledged to marry, and supposed to be in a condi- tion to do so. Beyond the courtship is the marriage-an expensive and sumptuous function, costing even in middle-class families in the neighborhood of three thousand pesos. The groom must pay all the expenses, even to supply- ing the bride with her future clothes and wedding gown, from undergarments up. These and other expenses often delay marriage for years. Ordinarily the Mexican girl marries at seventeen or eighteen, but as engagements are not supposed to be broken, she may be gray before her fiancé scrapes together the capital necessary to provide for the wedding ceremony. For this reason a woman across the street from us has been courted nearly twenty years by her lover, who will probably continue this absurd practice of standing before the rejas through the years to come. Neither would think of cutting through the knot of custom and achieving their happiness in a more direct fashion. It is little wonder that fidelity before marriage, as well as after marriage, if for no other than physiological reasons, is a minus quantity. After marriage a woman's life is even more limited. She can scarcely speak to another man unless she is in the company of her husband. Oftentimes she is not permitted to go on the streets alone. A man seen walking on the streets with a woman is considered to be engaged to her. Such habits and such psychology spring from the very strictness with which women are The Women 193 guarded. Many men even lock their wives in the house when they leave for work, in probable remem- brance of their own philandering expeditions. One wonders whether it would not be more practicable to follow the medieval practice of encasing the proper portions of their wives' bodies in steel and applying padlocks. No restrictions are laid upon the men, who almost invariably have outside relations. Most of the newly- rich Carranza generals maintained three or four es- tablishments, a fact known by their wives and the com- munity. In Mexico, however, this would never be a valid ground for divorce-in the mind of the woman or in the eyes of society. A man may flaunt his har- lots in his wife's face and she says nothing except a few words to herself about her duty to her husband. The Church has driven it into her mind that divorce under all circumstances is immoral. Most of these practices are unknown to the lower classes, who do not follow balcony courtship, or mediæval customs, and who are on the whole more honest and loyal in their relations, but the example of the other classes poisons the fountain-head of social relations. Naturally few Mexican women have broken their chains of concubinage, and thrust themselves through the crust of prejudice and tradition to attain distinc- tion in any line of endeavor. Yet Mexican history re- cords a few illustrious female figures. Few more sagacious, energetic, and interesting characters have existed than Marina or Malinche who served as inter- preter and bed-companion for Cortez during the Con- 194 Mexico-An Interpretation quest. Another name stands out as the most remark- able woman of her century, that of Sister Juana Inez de la Cruz. She was born in 1651 in the shadow of the snow-capped soul-shaking Ixtaccihuatl, the Sleeping Woman, in a humble inn of the country town of San Miguel Nepantla. It is told how at three years of age she coaxed her nurse to teach her to read, and how at seven she had composed verses. Coming to the capital as a girl, she rapidly devoured the many pro- found books of her grandfather, learned Latin in twenty lessons, and finally, being insatiable for knowl- edge, disguised herself as a man that she might attend the university. Later, as the lady-in-waiting of the Doña Leonora María de Carreto, the wife of the Vice- roy, Juana enslaved the gallants with the witchery of her beauty and astounded the learned with her knowl- edge. The perplexed Viceroy, Marqués de Mancera, desired to convince himself that her learning could not be really profound, so he assembled at his palace some forty theologians, philosophers, mathematicians, poets, and humanitarians, before whom she held her own under the fire of severe cross-examination, astonishing all by her wisdom. Years later the Viceroy recounted the incident in the quaint language of the day, remind- ing one of an English writer's description of a bout be- tween Jonson and Shakespeare: As a royal galleon would defend itself against a few fishing smacks which might assail it, so did Juana Inez easily dis- entangle herself from questions, arguments, and objections, which they all, each in his own way, put to her. For some unknown reason, disappointment in love, The Women 195 the entreaties of her confessor, the mysticism of her poetic nature, she entered the Carmelite order, and later a nunnery, where she spent her life studying and in writing that poetry that is still loved wherever the Spanish language is spoken. She finally died from a fever contracted during a pestilence while caring for the poor for whom she had earlier sold her precious books that she might provide them with money. Juana Inez de la Cruz is a name that should be as well known as that of Mary Godwin. I have met a modern Mexican woman who is equally courageous and equally determined to live an indepen- dent life, the first woman lawyer on the American continent, Señora María Sandoval de Zarco, a woman who had to struggle not only against the prejudice of sex, but against the poverty of herself and her family. The sole support of a paralytic father, two minor brothers, and two sisters, she struggled through ten years of study. At one time she was on the point of giving up the unequal fight when she was encouraged to persevere by a letter from President McKinley, stat- ing that he had heard that a woman was studying law in Mexico and begging her to come to the United States and finish her preparation. Although he of- fered to pay all her expenses on condition that she would become a citizen and practice in the American courts, she decided that her place was in her own coun- try, whatever the struggle might entail. She deter- mined to appeal to her own government, at least to Doña Carmelita, wife of President Díaz. But Doña Carmelita, being a devout Catholic, informed Señora Sandoval that woman's place was in the home, that it 196 Mexico-An Interpretation was neither fitting nor moral for a woman to exhibit herself in a law-court. She offered Doña María a position in an orphan asylum as a teacher at the impos- sible salary of one hundred and fifty pesos a month if she would abandon law. This Doña María refused to accept, and at the end of two years had successfully defended her first case, and at the end of five years. was earning twenty thousand pesos a year. This purposeful woman founded the first feminist organization in 1905. At that time there were only 218 female school teachers in all Mexico, and only about 300 girls working in Mexico City. The organ- ization she founded was an important factor in paving the way for the Madero revolution. During the suc- ceeding upheaval the organization went out of exist ence, but the revolution itself swept women from the seclusion of their homes into the actualities of life and politics. Women fought as soldiers in the revolution; women even sold their virtue in order to gain informa- tion from Díaz officers, so keen was their loyalty to the cause, while many a woman served as messenger or spy. I have talked with the wife of a Zapatista, an Indian woman from the hills, who told me that for eight years the rifle lay beside her metate upon which she ground. the maize for tortillas and that she had campaigned many a weary mile with her husband. One remarkable revolutionary figure is Señorita María Arcías, "María Pistola" as she is designated in the musical comedies of the capital, a woman who later became head of the National Normal School for Girls. During the dark Huerta days, when men were being lined up and shot every day without trial or public protest, María Arcias The Women 197 went every day with flowers to the tomb of the mar- tyred president, until she was finally thrown into prison. When General Obregón entered the capital, he paid her the greatest compliment a Mexican ever pays-he gave her his pistol over the grave of Ma- dero, telling her that she had been braver than any man in Mexico. The revolution has thus given a direct impetus to feminism, though an organized movement has been slower in developing. General Alvarado, Señorita Elena Torres, and Felipe Carrillo organized the first National Convention of Feminists in Merida, Yucatán in 1916; and shortly after, in the capital, was organ- ized El Consejo de Mujeres (Women's Council) with a magazine subsidized by the Carranza Government, known as La Mujer-Woman. Its editor, and the controlling figure of the new organization, was Her- mila Galindo, a journalist, author, and propagandist. She made the first efforts to promote connections with the women's organizations of the United States and Spain. The organization, however, lacked a substantial so- cial and economic programme, and during the last months of 1919 a few enterprising women, the leader of whom was Elena Torres, broke away from the Con- sejo de Mujeres, and organized the Consejo Feminista now known as the Centro Feminista Mexicano, with a radical and fundamental programme embracing economic, social, and political emancipation. The or- ganization has formulated specific plans for elevating the standards of women, educating them to a modern attitude towards life, and particularly determined to 198 Mexico-An Interpretation begin some definite work toward establishing employ- ment agents, schools, and nurseries for working women's children. Through the volunteer efforts of this group, a move was made to provide the school children of the Federal District with breakfasts. On May 19, 1921, the first experiment was made by serv- ing fifty breakfasts. During the first month nearly 10,000 breakfasts were distributed. The work has since been absorbed into a governmental section ad- ministered by Elena Torres, which now supplies 10,000 breakfasts daily. In 1922 correspondence was conducted with various women's organizations in the United States, with the result that on May 20, was held in Mexico City the first North American Convention of the Pan-American League of Women. The discussion was conducted under the headings Economic, Social, Woman's Partici- pation in Social Service, Moral, and International Problems. Thus the women of Mexico, although still largely unaffected, except for a few enterprising spirits, are be- ginning to face the challenge of the times. Uncon- sciously old traditions are being rubbed away, and the demands of the new Mexico that has grown up during the past ten years are slowly being heeded. This general emancipation of the Mexican woman has been one of the belated results of the industrial revolution. The increasing demands of business, the increasing number of women working in offices and stores are all breaking down the old restrictive Span- ish habits. Formerly a woman could scarcely go on the streets alone even in the daytime, and she could not The Women 199 venture out at all after dark except in a closed carriage. To-day it is still improper in most places for a woman to be on the streets much after sundown. But as the business hours of Mexico are from nine to one and three-thirty to seven-thirty, the working girl must per- force go home after dark. The demands of the com- mercial world will inevitably be met by the necessity of human beings to earn a living. The standards of women will have to conform. The seraglio, where the upper-class Mexican to-day treasures his so-called wife, will have its doors burst inwards by commercial- ism; and the women in the factory, the store, and the office will soon become independent, with independent habits of thinking and acting. These latter will not long continue working for a few pesos a week. They will inevitably be forced to unite in labor organiza- tions, and in such groups they will learn their powers and capabilities. CHAPTER XVI THE MEXICAN AS HE IS THE Spanish Conquest, while fastening upon Mexico a formal, functioning system, failed to integrate society, nor have four centuries sufficed to accomplish this. For the masses that system has perpetuated and accen- tuated social inequality; it has brought out the vices of two races, and has resulted in much moral and physical degradation. The Mexicans are a dislocated, back- ward, oppressed and exploited people, lacking in stam- ina. Common misery threatens to level them, what- ever their antecedents, to one type-a type that suffers from disease, poverty, toil, malnutrition. The women are hard-worked, broken, and suffer from improper child-birth. The brutally strong survive. In this process, the mestizo, the biological result of the Con- quest is better adapted. The Indian, whenever he jostles the new unshaped civilization, degenerates and disappears, unless he is permitted to preserve his con- tact with the soil and handicrafts. The mestizo, though more Indian than Spanish, has less moral in- tegrity than the former. He is skilled in treachery, V cunning, and self-seeking: as a native wit has said: "God made the white man; God made the red man; but the devil made the mestizo.” Yet he is probably the Mexican of to-morrow, the only Mexican that can withstand the pressure of the 200 The Mexican As He Is 201 rising industrial system; and with all his weaknesses he is a type that promises ultimately to be more tena- cious, progressive, and peaceful than the purely Latin races, and more adaptable to modern civilization than the pure Indian. From Indian and Spaniard he has inherited, by tem- perament and tradition, a cruelty that has expressed itself in political assassination and is reflected in his habits, his conversation, and his amusements. His political life has ever been characterized by assassina- tion, stabbing, prisoners shot in the back, massacre of captives. His greatest amusement is the bull-fight, where he witnesses three or four horses, dragging their intestines across the sand, and a bull baited into im- potent madness. You will hear him shout in frenzied ecstasy, "Qué bonita!" "How beautiful!" or "Mire, mire!"- Look, look!" at each most bloody lunge of the horns or the matador's blade. If he can see no bull-fight, he will arrange his own little cock- fight and wax equally excited over bloody combs. The ruthless display of bloody carcasses in the butcher shops (as in Southern Europe), the news- display of the most gruesome pictures of any murder or accident, the permitting of beggars on the street with the most loathsome malformations and diseases; the repulsive sanguinary images of the crucified Christ —all express a secret passion for the horrible. For the Mexican, life has less significance than for northern races, Ku Klux Klan to the contrary. Living in the tropics, he sees it spawned in such prolific care- lessness. Killing must be enumerated among his amusements—or at least the telling of killings. Every 202 Mexico-An Interpretation Mexican evidently has a private graveyard. He has done the deed this way and he has done it that way, and withal bravely and artistically. It is his vanity speaking-vanity which expresses itself in love of outward show, perhaps an important reason why the flash of the sabre, the plumed hat, and gold-braid exercises such fascination over him. The secret dream of every Mexican boy is to be a gen- eral or a bull-fighter, in spite of the fact that the man on the street insists that there are more generals than soldiers. He also possesses a pompous love for au- thority: and he has yet to learn not to abuse his power. The other face of his vanity is a fondness for flattery, under the soothing unction of which he offers you him- self, his home, and his country—a fact that might well be remembered in our diplomatic relations. In the stress of emotion, he will even offer to vote for you for president, an honor which most modest men are only too glad to forego. But he is very sensitive to the at- titude of those with whom he comes in contact, and always has sufficient pride to scorn those who do not profer him the proper amount of courtesy. These traits are coupled with a Latin emotional instability that expresses itself in effervescing schemes-swollen, imaginative bubbles soon pricked by life's harshness. In general the centuries of imposed political sys- tems have molded his mind to a slavishness that makes him inefficient except under the close supervision of a stronger will. Yet this, too, is in part the result of a casual attitude toward life. He has discovered that he can make as much idling as working, a happy dis- covery (not entirely Mexican) in that it harmonizes The Mexican As He Is 203 with his racial temperament. "There are two classes in society," says Irving in his "Alhambra," "to whom life seems one long holiday, the very rich and the very poor; one because they need do nothing, the other be- cause they have nothing to do." How well this de- scribes a frequently-encountered type of Mexican. I remember well, one park idler, possessing nothing but his flaming zarape and his monumental hat, who re- plied with a twinkle in his eyes, when I asked him his occupation: "I am a caballero, señor, and consequently do noth- ing." "Nothing?" "Nothing." A similar specimen informed me importantly that he was an election judge; truly a quarternary occupation. Yet this casual acceptance of life is certainly preferable to the driven, hectic, squirrel-cage existence of the American office or factory worker. True, this love of idleness is one aspect of economic slavery; it represents a stubborn refusal of the Mexi- can to adapt himself to the factory-system. Low eco- nomic standards, coupled with the grafting spirit of his rulers, has tinctured the average man with what may be termed dishonesty; his very love of indepen- dence has forced him to steal, to lie, to be suspicious, even treacherous. Both oppression and Spanish chi- canery have engendered in his mind a constant sus- picion of friend and foe, a suspicion that encumbers with red tape every business relation and every institu- tion. Over this psychic complex has been cast the roseate 204 Mexico-An Interpretation glow of maudlin Spanish sentimentalism, which has contributed to the general softening of his mental and moral fiber and has prevented him from facing the realities of his position in a social fabric constantly threatened with political anarchy. If this is, in some ways, a harsh portrait, it is but fair to say that the Mexican is not wholly to blame. His mode of living is not conducive to elevated thoughts, sentiments, or deeds—and it is a reflection of centuries of foreign domination by governments, re- ligions, and cultures alien to his genius, during which time he has been betrayed, plundered, and his spirit profaned and exhausted. We, in our economic con- quest, our intriguing politics, our failure to promote social reconstruction, bear our share of responsibility for having disrupted his national life anew and hav- ing contributed greatly to the ten years of social dis- organization from which his country is only beginning to emerge. In spite of these many handicaps, the Mexican has done more to purge his country of its ills than the Spaniard has for Spain. And in the hotter, more pro- lific regions or in the outlying districts where the tribal, communal order still persists, where the life-struggle is not so terrible, where the economic problem in a measure solves itself, one still finds Indian and mes- tizo possessing the ancient race stamina. But whether in Tabasco, Oaxaca, Michoacán, or the barren rainless stretches of the northern plateau, the evolving Mexican bears in his breast some of the no- blest sentiments of man. Out of the very dregs of his humiliation and poverty have come four of the great- The Mexican As He Is 205 est, most representative characters of Mexico-pure- blooded Indians-Altamirano, the warrior and poet; Instolinque, the sculptor; Cabrera, the painter; and the Lincolnesque Benito Juárez. In the portraits of Mexico's 'nobler historic figures, one observes that the faces bear the stamp of high intellectuality and ideal- ism, and if that idealism has been untempered by re- straint or experience, it yet indicates an innate loyalty to principle that cannot but ultimately bear fruit. This idealism springs partially from the fact that the Mexican is still a child in thought and action- possessed of a naïveté that is refreshing. He is some- thing of a savage in civilization; and though he may never respond to the modern business slogan of effi- ciency, his southern emotionalism, romanticism, and sensuousness can be converted into divine creative forces as readily as they can be perverted into love for tinseled pomp and sanguinary horrors. That his tem- perament can produce great leaders has already been proved in his own history and that of the world; but it will not yield its finest fruit under exploitation that degrades the individual and harshens life until it is- sues forth in deeds of bitterness and moral perversion. Yet in spite of all, the humblest peon is an embryo artist, something that cannot be said for the American office drudge or factory hand. The peon is still close to the artistic handicrafts. Mexico is a land of widely diffused popular artistic culture. Colonial painters— Cabrera, Tresguerras, Echave, Ibarra-were at work before the United States existed. Every Mexican has a love for poetry and a love for music that should be the envy of the average American. What poet of the 206 Mexico-An Interpretation United States would, on his death, be awarded the en- tire front page of any of the New York dailies? What poet would be honored by 50,000 people waiting to pay homage to his dead body on its arrival at the Grand Central? Is there any writer whose body would repose in the grand salon of the Department of Foreign Relations and be viewed by 200,000 people in one day? What author would have a national holi- day set aside for his burial and be conducted to his grave by a great military and official procession, by the President, by the chief members of the Supreme Court and the Cabinet, by the leading Senators and Congressmen, by the marines of four countries? In- conceivable. Yet just such a celebration, just such appreciation occurred in the capital of Mexico in 1919 when the remains of Amado Nervo, the "Ambassador of Poetry," were brought from Uruguay. The living Obregón failed to receive an ovation as impressive as that of the dead poet. There must be something fundamentally worth while in a people that can honor its poets and thinkers in this fashion. Nor is the poetic faculty confined to the mere popu- lar admiration of the great; pictorial language flowers from the tongue of the most ragged, illiterate peon. The commonest objects are draped in beauty, which even the modern industrial inrush has not been able to kill for are not electric-socket-fuses, ojitos (little eyes); does not the metal towel-rack become a mane- cita (little hand)? Eggs are visualized as blanquillos (little white ones), and a refractory electric stove may become a little foreign sin (un pecadillo extranjero). It was an Indian girl who told me with Hebraic direct- The Mexican As He Is 207 ness of an attack of dizziness that overcame her stout mother when walking into the city from the suburbs, saying: "The sun wrapped his arms about her and loved her strength away." Pass down any street and read the names on the stores and pulque shops: The Dawn Dew on the Grass; The Little Black Hen that Laid the Golden Egg; the Golden Gates of Heaven- scarcely a business that does not bear a poetic name. The same enthusiasm exists for music. The small- est pueblo has its band that plays at least once a week in the public plaza. Against the greatest odds of changing times the capital has maintained its sym- phony orchestra, and the Mexico City Police Band takes its place among the best brass bands of the world. No musical offering of real merit comes to Mexico and fails of appreciation. Even the popular music has a softer, more melodious, more sensuous quality than ours-it possesses something of the melancholy of the darky songs, yet it is of richer, more mature composi- tion, the music of a people old in sorrow and civiliza- tion. How often have I heard the Mexicans breathe this same sadness and fullness into a piece of American rag-time, until the song that originally served but for a twist of shoulders in a Bowery dance became freighted with a deep and sorrowing passion. The Mexican has an abiding, almost religious sense of beauty! However humble his circumstances, he will make room for a few flowering plants, if he has to build his garden in the air. I have traveled the full length of the Tamazula River and along its rocky, in- hospitable banks have seen, before many a peasant's hut, a rude flower box, often elevated on stilts to pre- 208 Mexico-An Interpretation vent its destruction by pigs and chickens. These peas- ants had gone to this effort, though having to eke out a starvation existence by cultivating corn on the sides of mountains so steep that they have been known to fall off into the valley below! Go along the box-cars on the sidings where the railway section-hands live and notice how frequent are the flower-boxes. What Mexican hut is not surrounded by flowers? Where will you find such flower-markets as in Mexico, and where will you duplicate the chinampas, or floating gardens of Xochomilco, the gardens of Cuernavaca. Even the Zapatista cavalry clatters into the capital during revolutionary days with flowers about their necks or stuck in the ends of their muskets. The Mexican has a deep passion for color. His dress always thrills with a splash of red or yellow or blue. I once heard a little, ragged Indian girl speak of her favorite colors. It was a treat to watch her enraptured face as she tolled the words "azul, azul, azul," over her tongue in soft, purring memory of some shade of blue that had struck her fancy. They attempt to beautify their homes with the same artistic quality. The humblest home in town or city enfolds a patio fringed with tropical, flowering shrub- bery, open to the sun or the driving thunder showers, where at all hours of the day you may find sweet repose with the music of bird and fountain. Nowhere, not even in Spain, and but seldom in Italy, have I seen such sheer beauty, such picturesqueness, such artistic indi- viduality. Their cities are filled with quaintness and with bizarre colors. Flat-roofed, many-domed, orien- tal, glowing with a soft white and pink, they float The Mexican As He Is 209 mirage-like upon the horizons, melting into the quiet, unwashed brown of the hills. The zarape-mantled, flower-decked people themselves seem to dissolve into the softness of the landscape-become part of the odd vanishing quality of the light, the hazy horizon, the sudden pulsing colors. A generative renascence is constantly fermenting beneath the fevered unrest of their political life; for a race constantly reborn into beauty, into a world of light and color and passion, shall not perish from the earth. This vagrant yet omnipresent beauty that ever broods in the Mexican's heart and life, is a creative ex- pression of his innate melancholy and mysticism, of a certain long-suffering taciturnity that is more Indian than Spanish. Generally this freighted burden of mystic melancholy expresses itself in religious terms. How many times have I crept out of a Catholic Church in Mexico-that sodden Aztecan institution,-thrilled to the depths of my being by the awful seriousness, the enraptured ecstasy that I have seen in the face and eyes of some tatterdemalion peon, who has perhaps knelt for hours with arms outstretched toward his favorite image. This is what makes Guadelupe Day, celebrated in honor of the Virgin, so symbolic of the soul of Mexico. Every year on the twelfth of December, the people turn their faces toward this New World Ganges. For days previous, the camino real is dotted with pilgrims, some of them walking on their knees. All day on the twelfth, the road between Guadelupe and the capital is a flooded river of bobbing sombreros. At the portals of the great cathedral, the poor Mexi- 210 Mexico-An Interpretation can José wedges his way through a crushing, ragged, dirty throng all joyous and eager. Within he faces the imposing symbols of Aztec glory and Spanish power. The towering arches and huge vault swell to majestic height above the massive columns, impressing the cringing peon with his impotent insignificance and the awfulness of God. In the dim light, the solid gold and silver balustrades and chandeliers, half-obscured by the clouds of sweetish incense and the smoke of many yellow candle-flames, gleam with a heavy barbaric splendor and fling quick glints upon the broad copper- crusted prayer-engraved tablets which sink into the black brocaded walls between ascetic saints peering gauntly down from rich, faded paintings. A certain oriental profuseness and mysticism, a certain Egyptian massiveness broods within that sacred basilica. Before the majesty of the greatest Church of the world and the grandeur and grotesqueness of its Aztec antecedents, the poverty-stricken José trembles on his knees with his lighted taper in front of the splen- dor of the flaming altar. With real and honest wor- ship, he watches the tall, fat, big-jowled priest in his robes of ermine and purple velvet pass among the ragged, shining-eyed crew-past a woman who without the least show of embarrassment nurses her baby at her bare breast; past the boy who munches peanuts as re- ligiously as he recites his prayers; past the starving con- sumptive who ejects his bloody sputum upon the floor beside the kneeling worshipers; past the mangy dogs- past the great unwashed that knows more of catechism than soap. At the drone of the chants, the swelling sound of The Mexican As He Is 211 the full-voiced organ, the sonorous surge of the lit- urgy, the stricken peon's emotion masters him-he bursts into weeping. Finally he places his lighted taper in place before the shrine, drops two or three days' wages into the pittance-box and passes with his shaken soul into the sunlight of God. This Mexican, who can be so harshly cruel when his passions are aroused; this Mexican who is half-poet, half musician, and who feels in terms of beauty and an all-pervading mysticism, is usually kindly in his human relations. Above all he is sympathetic, cour- teous, generous, boundless in his hospitality. His great Latin dignidad promptly melts if he finds that a person is simpatico; and the foreigner is more kindly treated in Mexico than anywhere else in the world. In the plaza of a small mountain town I have had the leading citizen come out and offer his assistance and fund of local information because I was an extranjero. I have had passing townspeople ask me whence I came, where I was going, how long I intended to remain in town, and always their questions were accompanied with an offer of friendship and assistance, an invita- tion to a meal, a proffer of a cigarette, or flowers, or an orange because I was a stranger in their midst. The Mexican's kindness to foreigners springs from his innate generosity and sensitive social spirit. When an out-of-the-way village still retains its early Indian customs and cultivates its own ejidos, the people are industrious, careful, thoughtful, and of a true coöperative spirit. What one vecino has the other shares. No man goes hungry, no man lords it over the others. These traits of inborn generosity 212 Mexico-An Interpretation are widespread. I have seen the tattered soldier, earning sixty centavos a day (Carranza's time) out of which he had to feed himself and perhaps his wife and children, give a starving old woman ten centavos with which to buy coffee. Among themselves, the poorer Mexicans are quiet, gentle, and polite in con- trast to the billingsgate screaming of the Spanish and Italian lower classes. These are the nobler human virtues. Some of them we of the greater nations lack. Indeed, as you depart from some peon, his sombrero sweeping his knees, his gentle "Vaya Ud. con Diós, amigo mio" (May you walk with God, my friend) seems to breathe a quiet reproach to the har- binger of a foreign, harshly commercialized world and lends him, even in his rags, the tragic, suffering dignity of his race. It is true that the Mexican makes promises easily and as easily forgets them, which is to say he does not value his spoken word very highly-nor do his com- patriots. He designates this characteristic by the suave formula of informalidad. The people are given readily to words, glowing plans, and glittering dreams. Among themselves they understand this. The foreigner does not and is abruptly shocked and "disillusioned." If he is an American, he immediately applies his hypocritcal and Puritanical standard of telling the truth and damns the Mexicans as moral degenerates for ever and anon- which is merely to say that the Americans in Mexico are business men with- out that more noble human quality of imagination. For Mexican words have little practical meaning- even on the statute books. They are reserved for art The Mexican As He Is 213 and poetry. Even the humblest mozo (servant) thinks and speaks poetically, pictorially, colorfully. Their very untruths are so copiously, eloquently, and intricately imaginative; their excuses such palpably beautiful dream-figments-so drolly daring, so ob- viously intended to avoid hurting your feelings—that I have always been too charmed and too pleased to apply the cold and calculating calipers of veritude, only wishing that I could lie as picturesquely. On the other hand deeds do count, perhaps because deeds are themselves a sort of poetry; and once you have really made a Mexican friend, he is loyal to the death. I know of a family that has kept a servant thirty years because of an awakened sense of loyalty. I knew one American to go where no stranger was safe, because he was loved by the vecinos; while many another American who has "disappeared" in Mexico and been the cause of diplomatic apoplexy has been some bull-necked overseer whose name, though on the records of the American consulate, is not to be found on the Lord's heavenly roster. But people who are starving, people that are broken by war, cannot continue to love poetry, to love music, to love beauty; they cannot forever continue to be generous, or sympathetic, or loyal. The more vicious traits, the more debasing features of their lives become accentuated. The finer things in the Mexican character can be salvaged and could become the mar- vel of a weary and cynical world. The proof may be found in the years through which the Mexican has shown an abiding love for liberty. He has risen against tyranny not once but a dozen times, and has 214 Mexico-An Interpretation been as many times betrayed. He has music, romance, laughter, and these are great gifts. He has artistic possibilities. If historical circumstance but gives the opportunity, Mexico City, and perhaps Mexico City alone, can become the Florence of the west. Only there is the knowledge and appreciation of form, color, and rhythm sufficiently diffused among the com- mon people. . . . And the Mexican has And the Mexican has a sunny scorn for the Puritan self-repression that warps our northern races. He has an easy fraternalism, an instinctive democracy. He is made of good and evil-the evil provoked largely by his present harsh, dislocated life. He can be a fiend incarnate; but he is fundamentally "virgin, naïve, sweet, and ready as a child to learn that which is taught him. The peon now seems a dirty, driven slave of toil. But under the sodden exterior are those invisible seeds of beauty-waiting the proper air for growth." He has with this the courage to attempt to emancipate himself-the will to be free. PART IV THE FOREIGN INVASION CHAPTER XVII THE FOREIGNER THE foreigners, taking the crude products of the indigenous civilization and the wealth of an inexhaust- ible land, are responsible for much of the Mexico of to-day. The Indian has resisted the submergence of his individuality, but what would the country be with- out its Spanish language, its Spanish culture, its Catholic Church, its Roman-Spanish tradition of gov- ernment? Who can conceive of a Mexico divorced from the grace of French learning and literature? Who can think of a Mexico not torn by the French struggle for democracy? How picture the country stripped of its American and English oil fields, mines, rubber plantations, coffee and henequén fincas, with- out its virus of industrial development? These things are bred into the bone and sinew; they are the sub- stance of foreign invasion. These are the by-products of the gold-lust of the Spanish cavalier, the greedy creole, and the corrupted Church; of the French mon- archical and imperial schemes; of the crass American materialism and unprincipled exploitation. The foreigner will always be a necessary and im- portant factor in Mexico's evolution. Yet withal it is hard to see how he has directly benefited the people. Materially they are in the colonial period. The dirty jácal leans against the million-dollar palace of the 217 218 Mexico-An Interpretation foreign capitalist. The bare-foot, ragged peon woman swings along with her little Aztec jog-trot past the limousine, her black-eyed, tousel-headed baby slung across her back. Physically the lower classes show the horrible marks of disease, hunger, and de- generacy. Morally they are, in many respects, broken and debased. The foreigners have, through the centuries, con- trolled the economic life, and hence the people. But aside from the early Church fathers, none have seriously attempted to help the people to adjust them- selves to the trying facts of their disrupted social medium; and the people's own governing aristocracy during historic crises have always stood on the side of the invader. The foreigners have little interest in the Mexican or his fate, and though largely respon- sible for much of his present sordid condition, they consider him worthless, incapable of improvement, de- generate. The foreigner takes this judgment as an axiom, forgetting that the Mexican knows only eco- nomic slavery and has no education and no training in civil responsibility. These foreigners with their smug conclusions have all the earmarks of a unified group, almost a type. From the days of the Spanish cavalier to the modern American, they have been largely composed of the ad- venturous get-rich-quick-type, devoid of moral principle or social responsibility-they have always been con- scienceless exploiters. As such they are invariably extremely reactionary: the Germans are still Kaiser- ites and still celebrate the birthday of their anachron- istic Napoleon; the French are narrow-minded petit The Foreigner 219 bourgeoisie; the Spaniards are sentimental monarch- ists; and the Americans still in the mental jungles of Fourth-of-July, flag-waving patriotism. One and all they pride themselves upon their race superiority, their intellectual superiority, their cultural superiority. They herd together with true "consciousness of kind," living in colonies, ear-marked with their native customs. The Spaniards are the most hated. Un gringo malo, pero un gachupín peor (an American is bad, but a Spaniard is worse) is the phrase used. The modern Spaniards are no longer cavaliers, no longer aristocrats or priests; Spain to-day contributes labor- ers, low middle-class immigrants and writers of the moment, such as Ibañez and Benavente. Most of these except perhaps the writers—are "“tagged,” i. e., farmed out in large numbers by Spaniards who have already made their fortunes and wish their compatriots for subordinates. The Spanish immigrant always slaves for next to nothing, until, after spirit-breaking economy, he can set up in his own business. Usually it is the retail grocery business-"Grocery-store Span- iards" is the contemptuous epithet. A grocery-store clerk will receive from forty to seventy-five pesos a month and a place to sleep. place to sleep. By sponging his food and being very economical with clothes and laundry, such a clerk will in a year or two be able to open a tiny business of his own. The slaving then becomes more intense. The naturally miserly, petty-cheating characteristics of the Spanish character manifest them- selves in a penurious struggle to expand the business. Once he has accumulated a little money, he treats his ر ہم 220 Mexico-An Interpretation employees as harshly as he himself was formerly treated. The Spaniards have the name of being the most petty, profane, conscienceless, small-business em- ployers in Mexico. The Spaniard in Mexico, though sprung from such humble sources, bears in his breast the hauteur, arro- gance, and intolerance that are characteristic of his bigoted race, and manifests the same feeling of racial and intellectual superiority as did his creole forerun- ners, thus keeping alive the old flame of hatred against the Conquistadores. For these reasons the Spaniards suffered much dur- ing the revolution. Spanish claims head the list of demands for recompense, perhaps because grocery stores are the first places attacked by hungry soldiers. More than once during the past ten years, even as during the war for independence and the revolution of Juárez, has the cry of "Muera los gachupines" (kill the Spaniards) been raised. In the Covodonga murders sixty Spaniards were hacked to pieces and two hundred wounded. Villa herded over six hundred of them into box-cars and shipped them from Torreon to El Paso; while many a charred casa de campo, many a devastated finca, holds the lost tragedy of a great landed Spanish proprietor who has driven his peons under the lash for the last time. The French and Germans-at least those before the War-came with more capital and represent a more intelligent class of people. The French are both loved and hated. French culture has been the toy of aristocratic imagination, while the Parnassians, and Post-decadents of later French verse have molded The Foreigner 221 contemporary Mexican poetry. And though the Mexicans still bear the scars of the invasion that over- threw Juárez, they recall that their own rulers were as responsible for this disgracia as the French. But experience has taught the poorer Mexican that the French in Mexico are sadly devoid of French cul- ture. The worker knows them to be petit bourgeois. French capital is important in Mexico; it dominates the textile industry, and the French proprietor of El Buen Tono, the largest tobacco corporation, was one of the guiding spirits among the Científicos and is to- day a large employer of labor. M. Camilo Jean, the owner of the textile factory, La Magdalena, is a typical French "boss." He was wont, up to a few years ago, to walk through his factory with a huge cane, with which he mercilessly beat any worker who did not please him. But the revolution came, and one day he was pushed into a machine by a worker who re- fused to endure such treatment and lost an arm. Nemesis further overtook him when the Zapatistas entered the city. His factory was one of the few points toward which they headed. The belts were torn off and made into huaraches, the tanks shot full of holes, and the machinery wrecked. To-day Mon- sieur Jean is more polite and never walks through the factory without an armed bodyguard. Even so he makes conditions so intolerable that the workers con- tinually sabotage the machinery, and the story goes that an English efficiency expert put in charge of the machinery went crazy in the attempt to keep it in repair. Thus, in spite of cheap labor, long working hours, and slave-driving methods, cloth is manufac- 222 Mexico-An Interpretation tured more cheaply and better in the United States than at La Magdelena. The Mexicans are "fond" of the Germans. The German, as a rule, is some industrialist with capital who establishes in Mexico the industry or business with which he is familiar, and later persuades his former neighbors and employers to follow him, so that Ger- man immigration is not properly such, but Munich im- migration, Wiesbaden immigration, etc. During the past two years, however, a great many poor Germans have flooded into the country to escape intolerable conditions in Europe. The Germans come to work and make their homes; and, though they come to get rich, it is with the staid doggedness of the race-they are not adventurers. Furthermore they frequently intermarry and mix with the people more than any other foreigners except the orientals, and are re- garded not only with affection but with real respect. The English, though not especially loved, are at least highly admired. They are respected for them- selves and their culture, which the Mexicans feel, both as to language and literature, is far superior to that of the United States. In the main, the English are recruited from the more wealthy and professional classes. English capital controls a large percentage of the railroad, oil, mining, and street-car systems. These companies send over high-salaried expert offi- cials. These officials do not mix with other national- ities to any great extent. They have their own ex- clusive clubs and look down upon the Mexicans and particularly the Americans. Oriental immigration is, in many respects, next in The Foreigner 223 importance to Spanish and American immigration. The Chinese minister informed me recently that there are over 40,000 Chinese in the country. The Orien- tals find no race barriers in Mexico and are able to conform to the economic standards of the humblest peon. They usually marry Mexican women, and one is astonished at the large number of almond-eyed chil- dren encountered on the west coast. The cross ap- pears to give excellent results, the children inheriting the best physical and intellectual traits of both pro- genitors. On the west coast the Chinese monopolize the retail and wholesale grocery business. They are rapidly coming to control the laundry, restaurant, and café business. Most of the railway stations and junctions are served by Chinese restaurants-from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to Sonora and Chihuahua. The Japanese are not so numerous, although, like the Chinese, they mix with the people. and cotton plantations on the west and run by Japanese. Many large rice coast are owned But, above all others, Americans constitute the most pushing, enterprising, and important foreign element. Yet nowhere else in the world is one so ashamed of his countrymen. In Europe one encounters the cultured American; in Mexico only the adventurer, business man, and technician. One cannot help recalling and applying to them those cutting words used by Lord Chesterfield in his letter of advice to his son in Italy: You are not sent abroad to converse with your countrymen ; among them, in general, you will get little knowledge and no languages, and, I am sure, no manners. I desire that you 224 Mexico-An Interpretation will form no connections, nor (what they impudently call) friendships, with these people: which are, in truth, only con- spiracies against good morals and good manners. Aside from technical men and more important repre- sentatives they were originally recruited from the mid- dle stratum of the working-class-generally with slight education and often ignorant. They came because they could not stay in the States or because they de- sired to get rich quick. Occasionally they were mis- sionaries, school-teachers, or small investors. In any case they soon discovered that Mexico was a lucrative field. Most of them within a few years amassed con- siderable sums of money. The ease with which it was made astonished them-they who a short time be- fore were scarcely able to make a decent living at home. As a group they cannot shake off their antecedents. They assume all the virtues and faults of the parvenu. The conversation of the best American society of Mexico, when bridge is not being played, deals with clothes, servants and the baseness of the Mexicans. I remember very distinctly how one of the prominent Americans-an officer of the American Club-burst into the American Drug Store and shouted: "Yuh got any chewing gum?" and could not help contrasting it with the Mexican before him who had said. "Good afternoon, sir. Would you be so kind as to show me some hair-brushes." At the American Club in Tampico, consisting in large part of aristocratic mechanics, who, because of the climate, earn manag- er's salaries, wear dress-suits, and chew tobacco, The Foreigner 225 the dances frequently degenerate into drunken orgies. Many of the Americans killed in Tampico lost their lives in the wide-open red-light district in a state of inebriety. These remarks are no reflection upon the many, sober, moral, and well-meaning members of the various American colonies, but they explain, in part, the Mexican's attitude toward the American. By and large the Americans in Mexico are unable to understand the country in which they live. They dwell stubbornly apart. They do not mingle with the Mexicans. Most of them speak the language poorly, in glaring contrast to other foreigners, who soon learn to speak fluently and correctly. I have known Amer- icans with ten, fifteen, even twenty years of residence who scarcely understand what is said to them and know the barest number of conventional phrases. But why should they learn to speak the language of Calderón, of Galdós, of Nájera?-now it is the lengua de los perros. The Americans in Mexico are ignorant of the coun- try. And they are ignorant of Spanish history, of Latin-American history, of Mexican history. They know little of the real traditional, social, and political antecedents of the Mexican. Engaged in the same sort of exploitation as were their Spanish forbears, they have neither the culture, the time, nor the inclina- tion to become acquainted with the fundamental so- cial forces that impel the people among whom they reside. Consequently they repeat glib phrases about race- superiority, the moral degradation of the Mexican, his unfitness to govern himself, his dirtiness, his dishon- 226 Mexico-An Interpretation esty, his propensity to lie. They do not attempt to delve beneath the surface facts. The antecedents, the habits, the ignorance of the average American combine to make him a hopeless re- actionary. These Americans are out of touch with world currents; they are out of touch with their own country. They conceive of the United States run as it was in their little Podunk, Texas, or Hinky Dink, Arkansas-for most of them are Southerners with all this fact implies with regard to race-prejudices and class-rule. They even forget that Podunk and Hinky Dink have changed since their departure twenty years before. Naturally their vision is bleared with regard to Mexican politics. Most of them talk longingly of "the good old Díaz days." "How clean the city was under Díaz!... How safe it was to travel in the good old Díaz days! . . . We used to go to Cuern- avaca to spend our vacations, but since the revolution it isn't safe. The place is in ruins anyway! One could really enjoy Mexico in the good old Díaz days! . . . The peons knew their place when Díaz was president! They wouldn't dare to sit in the park or walk along Francisco Madero Street!" If you finally force the reluctant admission that Mexico could not have continued to live under feudal- ism in a capitalistic age, they will then turn to the super-strong men, General Reyes, Felix Díaz, and above all to Huerta, the bloody murderer and drunk- ard. "If only Wilson had recognized Huerta! Huerta knew how to govern these people with a hand of iron. That is what these depraved people need. The Foreigner 227 They will never learn to govern themselves." If a vote were taken to-morrow among the American colony in Mexico City as to whom they would have preferred to see at the head of a stable government, I am convinced that Huerta would receive more votes than Madero, Carranza, or Obregón! This attitude is the direct result of their venomous contempt for the Mexican. "Yellow bellies" is the dignified and decent epithet usually applied. An American who falls so low as to marry a Mexican woman, unless she is of the very highest circles of society, is known as a "squaw-man" and his children are "half-breeds." But let such a man flaunt a Mex- ican woman in the faces of self-respecting people, with- out marrying her, and he will be accepted everywhere, though he have a wife and two children "back in the States." L Many of the good women indulge in charity work; this gives them an opportunity to point to their own generosity and the ungratefulness of the natives. One woman told me at great length how she had fed dozens of Mexicans during the hard times when people were starving during the revolution: "And did they appreciate it? No! They left their old cans and rags around the front steps. I had to have the servant clean up after every meal because they were so filthy. You would think they would have some consideration and enough gratitude to keep things clean. . . . Common decency should teach them that." Another woman told me that during the same period she was feeding twenty-five Mexicans on beans and 228 Mexico-An Interpretation tortilas, and they had the impudence to come in a body and ask her to make some changes in their diet, where- upon she was so incensed at their lack of gratitude that she refused to feed them at all-probably think- ing that starvation-for it meant that in those days- was a suitable punishment for their temerity. I thought of the futility of trying to point out to her how these same Mexicans must have felt at beholding a wealthy foreigner living in the land, while they, its true sons, had to beg at her door; or what a spark of real divinity it showed that a few downtrodden peons had the initiative to suggest and demand, where before they had always begged. But as for any fundamental lasting constructive work in Mexico, aside from that of a religious nature, such as missions, churches, Protestant schools, and the Y. M. C. A., most of which are truly sincere efforts, however misdirected, the resident American has done little. Most of the institutions named emanate from the United States, and not from the Americans in Mexico. The last live in opulent homes in the Colonia Roma or in the suburbs; they have their auto cars, their clubs, their golf-links, their tennis-courts, their luxuries, while at their feet are a wrecked peo- ple, starving, hungry. The American business man in Mexico cannot pass to his office in the morning with- out seeing heaps of almost naked street-waifs sleep- ing among the dogs to keep warm. And what has he done to further education? The American women, banded in the "Women's War League" in 1919 when relations were strained as a result of American troops crossing the border, tried The Foreigner 229 to have the Mexican students expelled from the Amer- ican School, although a Mexican ranked highest in the High School, and Mexican children in general are brighter and more intelligent and courteous than American children of the same age. What has he done to provide the Mexican with medicine and hos- pital service? I shall not enter into the very valid reasons for Carranza's expulsion of the Red Cross from Mexico; but no Mexican who cannot pay will be treated at the American hospital. What has the American done to take the children off the streets or to alleviate poverty? What has he done to teach the people to be clean and keep their cities sanitary? What established institutions can he point to with pride and say, "I have done this for the Mexican- for the people from whom I gain my easy and lux- urious living?" Before Carranza was overthrown, I talked with an American who owns a large hacienda near Puebla, and asked him about the sentiment of the people toward the presidential elections. "A new revolution coming as sure as you're stand- ing in your socks. But I'll have my wheat harvested before it comes. I should worry." "I should worry,"-that is the general attitude of the American toward the conduct of Mexican affairs so long as his pocket-book is unaffected. And yet he does worry about intervention-for fear it may not arrive some day. Scratch an American in Mexico and you find a Tartar of an interventionist. Many openly oppose intervention because they fear expulsion from the country, but secretly favor it. Even the leading 230 Mexico-An Interpretation oily minister, who is earnestly working with the Com- mittee on Coöperation with Latin America on concil- iation measures, never misses an opportunity to dis- cretely advocate intervention-among Americans. Whenever a troop of cavalry crosses the border and the relations between the two countries tighten to the breaking-point, the thermometer of the spirits of the American residents in Mexico leaps up; a jovial smile hovers over the faces of the acquaintances you meet on the streets; the drinks slip fast across the bar at the American Club, and every one is hail fellow well met. Intervention is the one and only panacea for all Mexican ills. Such people, not knowing the language well, not mingling with the Mexicans, ignorant of the country, unfamiliar with Spanish-Mexican history, believing in race-superiority and class-rule, reactionary in politics, out of touch with world-movements-people who in this day and age can talk in favor of the régime of Díaz, or can soil their minds with support of a reckless assassin such as Huerta, who have done so little to help to elevate the standards of those among whom they live, who are interested in business, in commer- cialism, in getting-rich-quick, in living in ease—such people may be excellent authorities on how much henequen Yucatán produces in a year, or on the busi- ness of exporting oil or importing socks, but they can never know the heart, the spirit, and the soul of the Mexican people; they can never understand the Mex- ican's aspirations; they can never be safe guides for international conduct or for the solution of the prob- lems that confront Mexico; they can never coöperate The Foreigner 231 in helping the people to stand upon their feet before the world as free men and women, as prosperous, happy, and dignified individuals, as masters of their own destiny. # CHAPTER XVIII AMERICAN CAPITAL BERTRAND RUSSELL writes in his "Political Ideals": "The matters in which the interests of nations are supposed to clash are mainly three: tariffs, which are a delusion; the exploitation of inferior races, which is a crime; pride of power and dominion, which is a schoolboy folly." But these delusions, crimes, and schoolboy follies are the stuff of capitalism, imperial- ism, and the scramble for world markets. This sys- tem forges the chains of subjection for the exploitation of backward peoples, which, forced upon a career of economic expansion and industrial development, are wrenched, in a few decades, from feudal and even more primitive forms of social organization to modern capitalism. But this process of forced revolutionary dislocation presents no direct opportunity for the at- tainment of a coherent, unified social structure, for the maintenance of moral standards, or for cultural advancement. Civilization-in the broader sense- becomes the Sancho Panza of the army of occupation, of the factory, or foreign exploitation founded upon force. The benefits of foreign contact to backward peoples are, aside from a phenomenal material ad- vancement, accidental, not born of purpose. How true this is of Mexico, the "mother of foreigners and the stepmother of Mexicans !" 232 American Capital 233 Towards the close of Díaz' régime, Marion Letcher, the American consul at Chihuahua, compiled a state- ment showing the total wealth of Mexico to be $2,434,241,422 of which Americans owned about one- half, or $1,057,770,000; English, $321,302,800; French, $143,466,000; all other foreigners, $118,- 535,380; Mexicans, $729,187,242,-in short, that the Mexicans owned but one-third of their country. Senator Fall, in his report as chairman of the Senate sub-committee on Mexican relation, put the Amer- ican holdings at $1,500,000,000 and the English at $800,000,000. Figures given by Cabrera and Salinas of the Carranza Government indicated that the Amer- ican holdings would be somewhat greater and the British holdings less, and the Fourth of July edition of El Excelsior for 1923 estimated the value of Ameri- can investments at $2,000,000,000. In any event, American capital dominates in all large industrial activities and, above all, in the production of oil, an industry said to be capitalized at no less than half a billion dollars. American control was largely gained during the Díaz régime. The Díaz grants included land, rail- way, light, power and telephone, banking, mineral, and industrial concessions, subsidies, loans and guar- anties. The disturbing factor in Mexican politics has been the land and mineral concessions. These con- cessions were coupled with considerable confusions in titles and rights, owing to the enclosures of old ejidos, lack of governmental records, the character of the min- eral laws themselves, and the early land-survey law that overrode all prior titles. 234 Mexico-An Interpretation 鳊 ​During the colonial period all land-grants were made by the king of Spain, and separated surface uses and mining rights. Distinct grants were also made of water for irrigation and power. Lands were usually divided into those tillable and those suitable for pasture. The development of the mineral deposits in the subsoil was always covered by a separate con- cession. Part of the immense revenue that rolled into the lap of the Spanish Monarchy was derived from the mines, which always paid the royal fifth, and though the ancient miners probably made less than the modern petroleros, they are known to have paid their excess taxes in better spirit, and even excelled the gifts of the self-adulating Mr. Doheny to charity, religion, and education. If the recipient or encomendor of these concessions did not strictly abide by the conditions stipulated, they immediately reverted to the Crown. Concession conditions were finally made uniform in the code of 1783, and later perpetuated by the independent government. The old conception of state control was emphasized in the Constitution of 1857, which dis- tinctly stated that "in the nation is vested direct owner- ship of all minerals, solid, liquid, or gaseous. "" By the older system, pastoral titles strictly limited the use of the land to grazing. They were sold at the rate of $200 silver for one sitio, an old Spanish measurement, which made them worth about 24 cents per acre. Titles to tillable lands were somewhat higher, and limited exploitation to agriculture and horticulture. The mining unit, until twelve or thir- teen years ago, was the pertencia of two and one-tenth acres, the fee for each pertencia being $2.87 in gold, American Capital 235 a sum which was reduced in 1909 to $1.36 per acre. The applicant could apply and receive title to any num- ber of pertencias, and was not required to declare that minerals would be encountered beneath the soil. The laws further provide that the operator under a mining title should have the privilege of purchasing at orig- inal values the amount of surface land deemed neces- sary for mining or milling purposes. The Díaz mining law of 1884 provided that: Art. 10. The following substances are the exclusive prop- erty of the owner of the land, who may therefore develop and enjoy them, without formality of claim or special ad- judication: 1. Ore bodies of the several varieties of coal. 10. Salts found on the surface, fresh and salt water, whether surface or subterranean, petroleum, and gaseous springs, or the springs of warm medicinal waters. The phrase "petroleum and gaseous springs" is suf- ficiently ambiguous, but it was construed to imply the right of boring for oil; and thus, by an interpretation obviously unconstitutional, petroleum was transferred from government to the private ownership of who- ever happened to own the land. This interpretation was confirmed by the Congressional law of 1892. This latter statute also abandoned the principle, first established by the Crown, that a mining concession was valid only if minerals were worked continuously. Thus in 1892 all mining claims were made perpetual, making possible the rapid acquisition of all ore bodies by the large interests whether or not they cared to in- 236 Mexico-An Interpretation vest the necessary capital for exploiting them. The private ownership of petroleum was again confirmed in the last mining law of the dictator, signed in 1909. But the modern Mexican considers that the govern- ment of Díaz had no right to give away the sub-soil of the country. Article 27 of the 1917 constitution reverts to the old principle that minerals should remain in the hands of the government to be exploited through special con- cession which would endure so long as the minerals are extracted. Petroleum is included among the min- erals. This was no more than a reiteration of the Constitution of 1857 under which the various interests had acquired their properties. Although decrees were not immediately issued re- garding petroleum, the Government refused to sanc- tion the drilling of new wells without a permit. On February 19, 1918, Carranza issued his decree estab- lishing a five per cent tax on production, a five a five peso per square kilometer tax on all oil-bearing lands, and a graduated tax up to fifty per cent upon the produc- tion of wells on rented property. The tax upon oil land was intended to force it into use. In addition all owners and lessors were required to make a declara- tion within three months that they intended to drill on their property. The failure to make such a declara- tion would be considered as giving the Government the right to grant concessions to other parties regard- less as to who might hold the land titles. The Amer- ican Government, at the demand of the oil companies, vigorously protested, and as a result the declaration- date was extended to the 31st of July and later to the American Capital 237 15th of August. A decree of August 8 ordered all owners to ask for their concessions within three. months (leases two months) from August 15, thus giving the actual holders the first opportunity to ob- tain concessions. In no case, however, it was spe- cifically stated, would concessions be granted, unless the recipients, according to the constitution, renounced the protection of their respective governments. On August 14, the Executive especially excluded from the operation of these decrees all properties on which capital had been invested for the purpose of oil ex- ploitation. The companies owning such properties were privileged to work "under special agreement." Nevertheless, no concessions were granted to others than the holders of the lands, although the govern- ment would not permit oil companies to drill new wells on their property without obtaining a concession in conformity with the presidential decrees. In November, President Carranza formulated and pre- sented to Congress a law embodying the previous de- crees and exempting properties already under exploita- tion from all obligations except payment of taxes upon their leases and output. A period of three months was to be granted to such companies in which to prove their right to operate without obtaining the concessions which would otherwise be demanded. Furthermore the owners or lessors of properties ac- quired before the constitution was put into operation would be given one year in which to take out conces- sions, provided they established their rights to the property within a period of three months. Pending the passage of this law, Article 27 continued to be 238 Mexico-An Interpretation enforced by decrees. Attempted illegal drilling was stopped by force, and the question came to an open deadlock, although the government agreed to issue unconditional concessions if the petroleum companies. would abide by any laws subsequently passed by Con- gress. This elicited from the United States Govern- ment the astounding note that it could not accept the constitutional principle of government-ownership of the sub-soil, whether enforced by "decrees or by law." So far as is known, however, the American State Department sent no note to the State of Pennsylvania whose Supreme Court decided in the case of Brown vs. Vandergrift (80 Pennsylvania 142-147) "that the property of the owner of lands is not absolute until it is actually in his grasp and brought to the sur- face. ... Nor did the State Department attack the Supreme Court of the nation which decided in the case of the Ohio Oil Company vs. Indiana (177 U. S. 209) that the owner of the soil "has the exclusive right on his own land to seek and acquire" oil and gas "but they do not become his property until the effort has resulted in dominion and control by actual posses- sion." The court further declared petroleum to be a "public thing, subject to the absolute control of the State, which although it allows it to be reduced to pos- session, may, at its will, not only regulate, but wholly forbid its future taking." The subsequent Mexican administrations did not recede from Carranza's position. One of De la Huerta's first acts was the appointment of a petroleum commission to investigate and study all phases of the American Capital 239 question. But at no time did he indicate, nor has President Obregón indicated, that they will cease to enforce the Constitution of 1917, and both have plainly and repeatedly stated that they will continue to con- sider the ownership of the sub-soil products vested in the nation. President De la Huerta in a message. to Congress toward the end of his administration took the opportunity to point out that all opposition to the petroleum laws came from a small association of oil interests, but that the fostering of competitive con- cerns by the Government was rapidly "offsetting the opposition of the oil-operators dissatisfied with the nationalization of the sub-soil." President Obregón has made even more forceful statements to the effect that all petroleum companies must exploit their prop- erties under concessions granted by the Government and in accordance with the constitution and the law. He has promoted in the Chamber a law in conformity with Article 27 of the constitution, which embodies the previous decrees and which guarantees the non- retroactive provisions of the constitution, while at the same time guaranteeing to the nation its rights in the sub-soil. He has also, for revenue purposes, stiffly increased the taxes upon oil. The oil-companies, from the first, complained that the taxes were excessive. In this contention they were backed by no less a person than Mr. Creel of the United States Government. When Mr. Doheny en- tered the field in the eighties, he operated under a law which stipulated that any new industry would be ex- empt from all taxation, local, state, or national, for a period of ten years. Under Madero, a tax of fifty 240 Mexico-An Interpretation 1 cents a ton was imposed, a sum which was increased under Huerta to seventy-five cents. The initial tax under Carranza amounted to sixty cents, but this was changed by the presidential decree of February as already indicated. Later, by decree of January 1, 1920, this was changed to a tax on crude petroleum of ten per cent on the value of each ton. The value was then to be determined by the Minister of Finance every two months according to a theoretical density. According to the American Government, these decrees "savored of confiscation." Mr. Creel declared that "the total amount of taxes ($8,000,000) paid was far in excess of the total return of capital paid to foreign investors in the shape of dividends. Oil companies therefore refused, with the sanction of the United States Government (according to their offi- cials) to pay their taxes. That these taxes were not excessive is indicated by the fact that higher taxes are paid in the fields of Oklahoma and Texas. Mr. W. E. Black, vice-president of the Tampico Petro- leum Pipe Line and Refining Company, issued a pub- lic statement early in 1920: "" "Obeying the law in Mexico is no more onerous than obey- ing the law in the United States, and the Mexican tax on oil cannot even touch the tax on the business in this country (U. S.) when you consider the state taxes and the income tax assessed by the Federal Government. "The government of Mexico is getting far less from Mexican oil than Uncle Sam. In a recent report of the Mexican Petroleum Company, Ltd., it is shown that the Car- ranza government received from the company, $1,917,541, while the American taxes on the Company's Mexican output American Capital 241 were $5,000,000. The report shows a gross income of $26,320,545, and in spite of the Mexican tax, and the excess profit tax in this country, the profits of the company were $6,699,644, or more than 100 per cent greater than for any previous year. American and foreign companies in Mexico are making millions out of Mexican oil." It is worth adding that this profit was made after deducting nearly $4,000,000 for depreciation and $5,000,000 for losses during the previous revolution. This totals something more than $8,000,000 for one company. No large oil company has operated at a loss during the ten years of revolution and most of them have reported fabulous profits, some even de- claring as high as 48 per cent dividends. In April, 1923, the Minister of Industry and Commerce in Mexico declared that careful estimates of the amount of capital invested in petroleum amounted to $979,- 106,619 (pesos) without including the $71,435,815 (pesos) invested in refineries. This, of course, takes no account of watered stock or increase in the value of holdings. Since 1901 the amount of Mexican- produced petroleum sold in the ports and at supply- tanks returned a total of $1,370,649,650 (pesos) or, deducting twenty-five per cent for expenses, rentals, etc., a clear $1,027,987,237 (pesos) which is $48,- 880,618 (pesos) more than the sum actually invested. In other words, since 1901, the oil companies have entirely recovered their original investment besides still holding property greatly augmented in value and still capable of producing enormous profits. Two great fears induced the petroleum operators 242 Mexico An Interpretation • to accede to the demands of the Mexican Government. The first was the fear that their titles might be ques- tioned. Under Carranza a gentleman's agreement was reached between the companies to refuse to re- cord their titles because of the faulty nature of many of the titles, some of which were mere pasturage rights and others were fraudulently acquired. Since 1884 Mexico has had a law which requires that land-titles must be filed with the proper authorities. This was also one of the requirements laid down by Carranza, and is insisted upon, with even greater emphasis, by the new government. The oil companies offered to submit their titles to the State Department of the United States, doubtless expecting a continuance of previous paternalism. The Mexican Government, however, has continued to at- tempt to clear up the question of legal ownership. Señor Vásquez Schiaffino, a member of the Advisory Council of the Bureau of Petroleum, issued a state- ment in December, 1919, in which he said, . . . the titles of the lands in the oil regions are the most defective and entangled throughout the republic. All of the properties are inheritances that were not divided among their several heirs; and the titles have been acquired from par- ents, brothers, or distant relatives without the consent of the real and legal owners, for which reason the said titles present very grave irregularities. "There has been the case of an Indian owner of extensive oil lands which he had obstinately refused to sell or lease. He became insane and died in a sanatorium in the United States, and now his extensive lands are in the possession of powerful companies." American Capital 243 Other lands have been acquired through the en- closure of village commons, through the occupation of so-called "federal zones," which comprise the beds of navigable rivers and lakes, and by the actual falsifica- tion of records. The oil companies have, in some instances, caused the official records to be tampered with so that legal heirs have been made bastards and childless parents have been given heirs. Minors have been sequestered until they should become of age and could transfer their property. For these and other reasons the oil companies have preferred gentlemen's agreements to legal administration. As a result, the Carranza Government permitted the legal filing of many new titles to lands already in the possession of powerful companies. In addition it permitted the drilling of new wells on these and other properties by new, outside companies. The first was the result of the older companies refusing to air their titles; the second, a result of their refusal to accept. the principle of national ownership of the sub-soil. The Obregón Government refused to retreat from the position taken by Carranza. The interventionist activities of 1920 were persist- ently intensified down into the year 1921. It is still wise to recall the events that led up to the intervention drive. The rich oil companies, the great copper, silver, and gold-mining companies, the immense land- corporations, the powerful industrial interests that control over half the wealth of Mexico, have been pulling the strings in Washington and Mexico City for ten years and more. The financial threads of these companies run back to a small group of men in Wall 244 Mexico-An Interpretation Street. The prospectus sent out to the privileged few by the Association for the Protection of American Rights in Mexico, reveals how strongly all of these elements were and are in harmony. The office at 347 Fifth Avenue, New York, of this organization also served for the Association of Oil Producers in Mexico; and the latter became a Soviet capable of ex- ercising a more powerful pressure upon the Govern- ments of the United States and of Mexico than many a foreign power. The oil interests in Mexico pursued the course of an independent entity. They even created their own army led by Pelaez. They dictated memorandums, notes, ultimatums to the two govern- ments; and at Mexico and Washington they main- tained and still maintain a diplomatic corps whose members, while not officially recognized as such, are, by that very fact, even more powerful than the rep- resentatives of a foreign government, for they can commit deeds against the happiness and peace of both countries that would bring about their instant dismissal were they actual accredited diplomats. In the United States, they were permitted, at the peril of wrecking the peace of two sovereign peoples, to conduct an in- cessant newspaper campaign against Mexico and its government, a campaign of exaggeration, vilification, and treachery. Those same representatives through the press attacked and belittled every public figure and every official American or Mexican who dared to op- pose their machinations. They, it has been charged, maintained a publicity agent with Villa, and Mr. Do- heny confessed before the Fall Committee that he had willingly paid contributions to Carranza and Villa and ' American Capital 245 provided oil for the Constitutional railways when Huerta was still president, a confession which he later reiterated in a letter to El Universal of Mexico City. Who else but the oil heads could have filled the gal- leries of the National Chamber of Deputies in Mexico City by hoodlums to shout down every speaker who stood for legislation regulating their activities? The oil companies paid great sums to bandits and even re- fused the protection of the Mexican Government. They were above the law. They refused to pay their taxes. They refused to abide by governmental decrees. Companies that committed these crimes are among those who have cried in Mexico and out of Mexico for intervention, who have dragged American diplomacy lower than it was ever dragged before-down into the mire of petty squabbling over petroleum rights; they are among those who sent a special delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference to have Mexico excluded from the League of Nations; who have succeeded in having France, England, and the United States with- hold recognition to the most stable and serious govern- ment that has appeared in Mexico for a decade; who paid for endless publicity in the New York papers; who hypocritically backed claims for injured American citizens and attempted to assume a protectorate over the interests of American missionaries; who cry down the four avenues of the world about the crime, the violence, the bloodshed in Mexico. It is they who have desired to hurl American troops across the border to massacre the Mexican people and die in a bitter war of imperialism. 246 Mexico-An Interpretation Expediency alone has modified their desire to over- throw the Obregón Government and institute a new reign of anarchy. The entrance of the independent oil companies into the field, and, as has been mentioned, the granting of concessions to concerns willing to obey the law, has aroused a second great fear in the minds of the large petroleum interests. For if at times it is profitable to disobey the law, the independent com- panies saw that obeying the law, enjoying the confi- dence of the Mexican government, securing rich con- cessions at the expense of the old established compa- nies, could be even more profitable. It is noticeable that the Mexican government has granted most of its concessions to such concerns. The Cowdray interests were the first to become alarmed at the new turn that affairs were taking, and in 1921 withdrew from the. American Association of Oil Producers in Mexico, an- nouncing that they intended to obey all laws and pay all taxes. Senator Lodge read on the floor of the Senate from a letter to himself in which Senator Fall charged that the British corporations of Mexico had betrayed the American Association of Oil Companies "by accepting the American Government's demands with reference to oil-drilling permits," and "abiding. by its laws." This so alarmed the American compa- nies that in August, 1921, Teagle, Doheny, Sinclair, Van Dyke, and Beatty, of the large American compa- nies, made a special trip to Mexico to arrange for the payment of taxes and discuss other disputed matters. Since then the oil companies have ostensibly conformed to the demands of the Government, though still con- ducting anti-Mexican campaigns in the press, spreading American Capital 247 false information concerning the amount of their prof- its and the condition of oil production, predicting the failure of the oil fields, and threatening complete with- drawal to Venezuela. When once they have assim- ilated the independent companies, the old pressure will again be revived, and they may yet accomplish their purposes unless in the meantime every friendly force is put in motion, and every constructive service is ren- dered to the people to the south of us that they may reorganize and regenerate their country, unhampered and unintimidated. CHAPTER XIX THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT IF MEXICO is the child of Spain, its aspirations for liberty were plucked from the soil of the United States and France. The American Revolution and the fur- ore française both created a tradition of human rights, of individualism, of republican government. The re- volt of the English colonies also furnished a shining example of the successful assertion of independence. And though the Mexican struggle for independence was, in many ways, a counter revolution, it had its libertarian aspects, and in the minds of its greater leaders and for the majority of the lower class, was an assertion of the ideals of the French and American revolutions. The Spanish Prime Minister, Aranda, had earlier realized that the example of the United States would probably be followed by the Spanish colonies and that the United States might in turn become the instru- ment of their liberation. In a memorial to King Charles III in 1783, he prophesied that the American Federal Republic, "born a pigmy," would become a "giant, even a colossus, much to be feared in those vast regions." He declared that "its first step will be to get possession of the Floridas to dominate the Gulf of Mexico. Once this is accomplished she will not only be in a position to interrupt our commerce with Mex- 248 The United States Government 249 ico whenever she wishes, but she will aspire to the con- quest of that vast empire-which we from Europe could not defend against a large formidable power es- tablished on the same continent. . . . How is it pos- sible that the American colonies, when they are in a position to conquer Mexico, will refrain and leave us in peaceful possession of that country? . . . "" He proposed to create three semi-independent king- doms, which would gain strength to defend themselves and at the same time preserve their loyalty to the Crown-a curious anticipation of the "imperial fed- eration system" of Great Britain. But Spain did not follow Aranda's enlightened counsel. Instead it resorted to the futile policy of shutting out the light of political democracy by royal edict. Before the turn of the century, books dealing with the American Revolution had been translated and widely disseminated. Our constitution, together with speeches of Paine, Jefferson, and Washington, were also available, though the circulation of such lit- erature was prohibited and all foreign periodicals were excluded. Futile attempts were also made to pre- vent commercial relations with non-Spanish countries and to exclude foreign consuls who were in many in- stances the source of secret intrigue. And though Charles III sent over some of the ablest administra- tors history records, such as Bucareli to Mexico and Vertiz to Buenos Aires, restrictive measures could not take the place of an enlightened colonial policy. Both England and the United States were in a posi- tion to profit by the independence of the Spanish colo- nies. England was to be benefited by any blow at the 250 Mexico-An Interpretation prestige of the reactionary continental powers and probably considered it possible that she might here and there step into Spain's shoes. In any event she would gain by free and unrestricted commerce. طر The United States stood to reap an even greater harvest, for the Spanish empire in 1800 was the great- est power in America, standing at our very gates and blocking expansion west and south. Commercially South America was all-important. In 1801, 58.3 per cent of our exports went to American countries to the south. At the same time, the imperial commercial re- strictions in that region-formally revived in 1799, were a grievous irritation to the aggressive Yankee trader whose vessels were frequently forbidden harbor entrance and were even seized with their cargoes. Records tell us that in December, 1817, the United States frigate, Congress, was compelled to sail to Buenos Aires to liberate the shipping held in that port. As early as 1816 Clay had opposed a reduction of taxes resulting from the War of 1812, stating among other things that the United States might openly have to "take part with the patriots of South America," and on March 24, 1818, made a speech "for the eighteen millions of people struggling to burst their chains and be free," advocating our participation in their struggle on the grounds that "we have so much at stake,” that it concerns our "politics, our commerce, our navigation"; that the South American people should be freed "what- ever the form of government adopted." After con- sidering their capacity for free government, he con- tinued (in language which, if slightly altered, might have served as a memorial of Mr. Doheny to the Fall The United States Government 251 Committee) pointing out the benefit that would result to our navigation, transportation and mercantile prof- its, and saying significantly: "We may safely trust the daring enterprise of our merchants.' 99 The Mexican patriots were well aware of the desire of the United States to see Latin America independent. Miranda had been educated in Mexico City and at Yale and was in touch with Mexican aspirations for freedom. In 1811 the Spanish authorities captured a commission sent by Hidalgo from Guadalajara to the United States, carrying documents and plans of the revolutionary movement; and when on January 16, 1811, the forces of Hidalgo were annihilated at the Punto de Calderón, he, Allende, Aldama, Jiménez, and a small band of followers held together on a long but ill-starred journey toward the United States where they hoped to recoup the fortunes of their cause. Later Mina, with the aid of Padre Mier, gained much of his following through publicity in the United States. Following Mexico's declaration of independence, the interest of the United States in the wealthiest of the Spanish-American colonies was sharpened by Eng- land's aggressiveness in attempting to enter into inti- mate relations with the new government. Several English commissions were sent to investigate condi- tions, offer financial support, arrange commercial treat- ies, and proffer recognition. In this activity, which was paralleled by diplomatic manoeuvering on the part of Wellington at the Congress of Verona, existed the double fear of the Holy Alliance and the United States. Canning's proposal to the United States for a joint statement of policy regarding any aggression 252 Mexico-An Interpretation against America, if acted upon, would have check- mated both fears, for as Adams later declared in his memoirs, it would have exacted "a pledge from the United States against any acquisition to the United States themselves of any part of the Spanish posses- sions." At the same time, though recognition had been proffered Mexico by the United States in March, 1822, it was necessary for our Government to assume an attitude that would convince Mexico and Latin America of our friendship. As the Mexican Chargé, Torrens, put it in a communication to his government: "The American Government is being aroused from its apathy by the reports that England is opening relations with Mexico which might be of advantage to the United States." The result was the Monroe Doctrine -born of the fear of the Holy Alliance and the com- mercial activities of England in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. The United States was, furthermore, aroused to send Mexico a diplomatic representative, and Poinsett arrived in that capacity early in 1825. Among his official papers was a letter which read in part: "Make a good commercial treaty and take care that John Bull gets no advantage of you, if anything get the weather gauge of him. If you can get Texas for some of the lands of the poor Indians of the wilderness, you will soon be a great man among us, or if you can contrive to make Cuba independent, protected by the United States. . . . Poinsett promptly inaugurated that policy of direct interference in Mexico's internal affairs that has been followed by his successors to this day. He proved The United States Government 253 himself so faithful to his instructions that he had to be recalled. Ultimately Texas was wrested from Mexico and in the breast of the Mexican still burns the eternal shame of foreign conquest, and the capture of his capital by foreign troops, the loss of 529,189 square miles of territory by the treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo. He re- members, and his memory is helped by numerous monu- ments, how the heroic cadets in Chapultepec refused to surrender and fought until all were dead except one, who wrapped the folds of the flag about his body and leapt over the cliff. He remembers how he lost an- other strip of territory through the Gadsden Purchase, making in all, with Texas, more than 948,025 square miles-more than one and a fourth times the present area of his country and equal to the combined territory of Spain, Italy, France, old Germany, and old Austria -which has passed to the Anglo-Saxon, the Yanqui, the Gringo. He remembers, too, the story of Florida, of Texas, of Cuba, the Philippines, Perto Rico, Santo Domingo, Haiti, Panama, Central America-posses- sions that have circled Mexico with an iron ring of forts, gunboats, and subject States. He is ever con- scious of the imminence of armed intervention and the impossibility of living his national life independently. H This is in direct contrast to popular American in- difference and ignorance regarding Latin-American countries. That indifference and ignorance has led, paradoxically, to a very consistent policy, labeled by that obnoxious but perspicuous phrase, "Dollar Diplo- macy." Mexico, because of its importance and near- ness and the immense amount of newspaper publicity it 254 Mexico-An Interpretation has received, has been kept within the focus of popular sentimentality, while Santo Domingo, Panama and Central America must bow to the unrestrained might of American battleships. Yet, even so, it is difficult to find anything enlightened in the American policy to- ward Mexico. In Chapter IV I have considered the forces leagued against Madero. For all practical purposes the United States Government might have been included, for at that time the Soviet of American Capital in Mexico had achieved an almost direct representation in the American Government and American Capital had turned its thumbs down on Mexico. Three of the largest interests at that time in Mexico were the Rockefeller-Aldrich rubber interests, the Guggenheim interests, and the English interests of S. Pearson and Son, Ltd. The relations of these interests with the Taft administration are matters of common history. Nelson W. Aldrich was an influential Republican, close to the Administration, who achieved fame in the Payne- Aldrich tariff bill which devoted some slight attention to rubber. The S. Pearson and Son, Ltd., whose head became Lord Cowdray in 1908, and which has under- taken the drainage of Mexico City, the harbor works at Vera Cruz, the Tehuantepec Railroad, and now feeds the lion oil, employed as their American counsel the New York firm of Strong and Cadwalader with which were connected both Henry W. Taft, brother of the President, and George Wickersham, who was their active representative and who later became Attorney- General in the Taft Cabinet. But the most interesting connection was that of the Guggenheim interests The United States Government 255 ว through the American Ambassador, Henry Lane Wil- son, the Guggenheims, of course, being competitors of the Madero family in the smelting business in northern Mexico. Ambassador Wilson's brother, Senator John L. Wilson, was the Republican boss of the State of Washington and with him was associated, in the inter- est of the Guggenheim family, Richard Ballinger, who was very close to Taft and through whose request Henry Lane Wilson was transferred from Europe to Mexico. Henry Lane Wilson promptly trotted with every damage-claim, large and small, to Madero, soon creat- ing a friction that degenerated into personal acrimony and broken relations. Furthermore he was an ardent interventionist and a personal friend of Manuel Cal- ero, the Mexican Minister at Washington, who was secretly attempting to undermine Madero's prestige with the American Government. As early as Feb- ruary, 1911, Ambassador Wilson made a special trip to Washington to lay before the President a letter calling for intervention, which purported to be signed by the "Committee of the American Colony" but which was later repudiated. As a result of that letter, however, twenty thousand regulars were sent to Texas. On February 4, 1912, conditions had grown worse, and through the direct representations of Ambassador Wil- son, 100,000 troops were ordered mobilized on the border. That mobilization was a knife-thrust at Ma- dero at a moment when he needed every possible sup- port, and it spilled an ocean of blood across eight years of Mexican history. In March, Ambassador Wilson received orders to have all Americans leave troubled 256 Mexico --An Interpretation districts, which he interpreted as meaning practically all of Mexico, thus causing a great rush for the border, and further demolishing Madero's prestige. In April this was followed by one of those unnecessary, perni- cious, and derogatory notes that have since become too frequent to warrant extended press-notice. The reply of Lascurain, Minister of Foreign Relations, was dig- nified, to the point, and conclusive, declaring that the Mexican Government had "a full consciousness of its duties," and had never given any reason for its sin- cerity being doubted and that accordingly it could "not recognize the right of the United States Govern- ment" to "admonish the Mexican government." Ambassador Wilson continued to press claims, some of which were no business of the United States, and in September presented an unpleasantly worded note which dealt with acts of violence against American citi- zens. Lascurain's reply expressed "surprise" at the "reproaches so much at variance with the spirit of am- ity invoked" and clearly demonstrated that of the seventeen cases presented the strongest was that of one Henry Crumbley who was killed because he was "court- ing" the wife of a peon. The note of Ambassador Wilson also considered the Torreon claims of the British Tlahualilo Company which had attempted to rob the river-dwellers of their water; protested against a tax on an oil company (sic); discussed the quarrel of a press association, and debated the transfer of a pack- ing company's concession. The packing company was also British and had been the centre of a vicious scan- dal that had dragged down to ruin the United States Banking Corporation of Ambassador Thompson fame, The United States Government 257 and had sent its president, George I. Ham, to Belem penitentiary for twelve years. During the ten days' firing between the Arsenal held by the rebel Felix Díaz, and the National Palace, in the hands of the federal general, Victoriano Huerta, Ambassador Wilson even went so far as to petition. President Madero, through the Spanish Minister Col- gán, to resign. Later Wilson arranged an armistice agreement between Huerta and Felix Díaz. On the night of February 18, 1913, a document was signed at the American Embassy between Díaz and Huerta which established the new government and determined its cabinet. Perhaps the most interesting appointment was that of Señor Jorge Vera Estaño as Minister of Public Instruction, for he was the counsel for some. forty American companies, including the Phelps-Dodge interests. So much at least was the United States Government responsible for putting Huerta into power. Ambassador Wilson clung to Huerta even after the murder of Madero, sending a long note to Washington urging the acceptance of Huerta's version of the affair and advising that "American public opinion should deal with the situation calmly." From that time on Ambassador Wilson was very close to the Huerta Government, even attempting to prevent, through con- sular channels, the secession of Sonora. He suc- ceeded in having Washington bombarded with letters, telegrams, petitions, and delegations from Americans and Europeans urging immediate recognition. Huerta had already been recognized by international Capital, for he was able to negotiate, soon after his accession, 258 Mexico-An Interpretation a loan for $27,000,000 for the national railways and 6,000,000 pounds sterling for the use of the Govern- ment. Then Taft passed into professional oblivion and Woodrow Wilson slipped into office-without a ges- ture that would reveal the Administration's attitude in our greatest international crisis since the blowing-up of the Maine. A general statement issued by Presi- dent Wilson for the benefit of all Latin America con- tained a slight accent of reprobation for acts which might be construed as those of Huerta. But aside from this the White House was silent. Only Henry Lane Wilson continued to pave the path of the assassin with the roses of friendship, although daily the Consti- tutional revolt in the North was growing more menac- ing. It was not until July 15, four and a half months after President Wilson's inauguration and five months after Huerta had sabred his way into the Presidency, that Henry Lane Wilson was recalled and a definite "moral" policy formulated. It synchronized quite accidentally with the discovery by Big Business that Huerta was unduly partial to British capital, in fact was working hand in glove with the Cowdray in- terests so much so that British capital, according to Carlo de Fornaro, was willing to spend 7,000,000 francs in France to corrupt the press in Huerta's favor. That "moral" policy consisted of direct dictation, an ultimatum to Huerta, a greater official interference by the United States Government in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation that had ever occurred before in its history. It was carried by ex-Governor Lind of The United States Government 259 Minnesota, who arrived in Vera Cruz on a battleship on August 9. It embraced the following points: 1. Complete cessation of hostilities. 2. Resignation of President Huerta in favor of a President ad interim. 3. Fixing of an early date for the Presidental elections. 4. All parties to agree to abide by the results of the election. It was later amended to include the following: If Mexico acts immediately and favorably upon the fore- going suggestions, President Wilson will express to American bankers assurances that the Government of the United States will look with favor upon an immediate loan to Mexico. The first part of the note showed an utter lack of understanding of Mexico and its historical and social background. It demanded an utter impossibility; no election would have been "honest" so long as Huerta remained in the country, for he controlled the army. Hostilities would not have stopped, because no group of rebels would have had faith in an election; nor would either Government, rebels, or the people ever have acquiesced in the dictation of Mexican internal affiairs from the White House. Lastly, whatever moral weight the note might have carried was lost by the crass and stupid last paragraph, implying that the United States would be willing to buy from Huerta his resignation. Huerta's position was strengthened; in the eyes of Mexico and Latin America, he had become the paladin of resistance to Yankee aggression, making the success of any other group more difficult 260 Mexico-An Interpretation and prolonged. Secretary Gamboa neatly took ad- vantage of the opening offered by the Wilsonian note: Permit me, Mr. Confidential Agent, not to reply for the time being to the significant offer in which the Government of the United States insinuates that it will recommend to American bankers the immediate extension of a loan which will permit us, among other things, to cover the innumerable ur- gent expenses required by the progressive pacification of the country; for in the terms in which it is couched, it appears rather to be an attractive antecedent proposal to the end that, moved by petty interests, we should renounce a right which in- controvertibly upholds us at a period when the dignity of the nation is at stake. I believe that there are not enough loans possible to induce. those charged by law to maintain that dignity to permit it to be lessened. On August 27, President Wilson in a special message stated to Congress that all Americans would be urged to leave Mexico immediately. In the meantime he declared, without however mentioning the "moral" intimation to be proposed to American bankers, that "the steady pressure of moral force will before many days break the barriers of pride and prejudice down, and we shall triumph as Mexico's friends sooner than we could triumph as her enemies-and how much more handsomely and with what finer satisfaction of conscience and honor." The "moral" silence was not broken until October 14, when President Wilson warned General Huerta that the elections then being conducted would not be considered legal and that if he were elected he would リ ​The United States Government 261 not be recognized as president. Moral silence again reigned, cloaked by "watchful waiting." Finally in January, 1914, almost a year after the accession of Huerta, Wilson was forced to desert "moral pressure" and recognize the Mexican tradition of the "strong man," announcing to the members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that he would raise the embargo on the shipment of arms to Mexico. Fortunately for his consistency, Carranza was fighting beneath the banner of "Constitutional- ism." While President Wilson indicated on February 3, that this offered carte blanche to the Mexican to fight it out, actually it was a recognition of the belligerency of Carranza. At the same time, using this semi- recognition as a leverage, he instructed Mr. Lind to re- new negotiations with Huerta. Huerta refused to treat; Lind returned to the United States; and because of American aid given to Carranza, the Mexican Gov- ernment made reprisals upon American citizens, thus increasing the friction and forcing the White House to notice and thus emphasize the importance of Huerta. The Tampico incident, when American marines who had encroached upon forbidden military preserves were arrested, together with the subsequent occupation of Vera Cruz because Huerta refused to fire a salute of apology, was laughable in its inconsistency, but pa- thetic in that it considered the national honor and the peace of two great peoples to depend upon a salute- not from the President of Mexico (according to Presi- dent Wilson)-but from a gambler and a tippler clever to the last. The resultant occupation of Vera Cruz and the "peaceful blockade" of Mexican ports, 262 Mexico-An Interpretation merely served to strengthen Huerta's power (even though it did temporarily prevent the landing of arms from the German ship Ypiranga), once more mak- ing him the guardian of Mexican dignity and constitut- ing a practical recognition of his Government. Car- ranza attempted to offset the resulting sentiment for Huerta by insisting that the demand for a salute should have been made to him and brusquely demanding the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Mexi- can territory. The acceptance of A. B. C. mediation at this junc- ture offered an exit for an ungraceful blunder but again emphasized the importance of Huerta, who was ele- vated to even greater international prominence. Hope was revived in the breasts of the old régime. The Huerta delegates were Señores Elguero, Rabassa, and Rodriguez, all Científico lawyers. Elguero was di- rector of the National Railways and of Lord Cow- dray's Oil Company. The Niagara Conference was the "last stand of the Científicos." It finally ad- journed without arriving at any satisfactory conclu- sions. Carranza had refused to halt his campaign, realiz- ing that time was his ally. At the very outset of the conference his forces had conquered Tampico, and each day he loomed a larger and more decisive factor in the arbitrament of Mexico's affairs. Indeed by July 15, Huerta had resigned and within five days had fled from the capital. But American troops were not withdrawn from Vera Cruz until November 23 and then only at the ultimatum of Carranza, the salute never having been given. No accounting was ever The United States Government 263 made to the Mexican people of the customs collected. But Wilson's policy had not brought peace to Mex- ico, for ill-feeling between Carranza and Villa soon plunged the country into anarchy. On June 2, 1915, almost a year after Wilson's great moral victory, which cost not a few American lives, and which had prolonged Huerta's rule, Wilson was obliged to point out that the country was in a state of anarchy, to ap- peal to the warring factions to unite. He threatened to lend his "active moral support to some men or group of men, if such may be found, who can rally the suffer- ing people of Mexico to their support." This he stated, with solemnity and in contradiction of the facts, was something the United States "has not hitherto done or felt at liberty to do." Carranza attempted to offset this declaration by a proclamation issued in the name of the Constitutional Government that it would "afford to foreigners all guarantees to which they are entitled-and shall amply protect their lives, their freedom, and the enjoyment of their rights of property." On August 11, Secretary Lansing and the representatives in Washington of Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Uruguay issued a similar joint. appeal and called upon the factions to send representa- tives to a conference. All agreed except Carranza, whose position had been gradually strengthening. Dur- ing the sessions of the conference, the United States actively attempted to determine the attitude of the Carranza faction, not toward the people of Mexico but toward American investments. Its inquiries were replied to by Señor Arredondo, Carranza's Foreign Secretary, under date of October 7, to the effect that 264 Mexico-An Interpretation “Mr. Venustiano Carranza, depositary of the execu- tive power of Mexico, . . . has authorized me to say .. that his public declarations of December 12, 1914 and June 11, 1915 bear the statement that the government he represents in its capacity of a political entity, conscious of its international obligations and of its capability to comply with them, has afforded guarantees to the nationals and has done likewise with regard to foreigners and shall continue to see that their lives and property are respected . . . that besides it will recognize and satisfy indemnities for damages caused by the revolution." Apparently satisfied, the American delegates at the conference insisted upon a recognition of Carranza which was finally agreed upon before the conference terminated. Recognition was formally accorded October 19. While President Wilson repeatedly used the Latin- American countries to pull his Mexican chestnuts out of the fire, or to extricate himself from his own blunders, it cannot be gainsaid that he broadened the bases of Pan-Americanism and liberalized the Monroe Doctrine; and his idealism, however misdirected, can- not, upon this point, be questioned. Yet Mr. Wilson cannot claim, as he did, that he was at any time per- mitting the Mexicans to work out their own destiny. He was never neutral and constantly aggravated a vicious situation by his ignorance of Mexican history and psychology. He attempted to dictate to the Presi- dent of Mexico while at the same time refusing to recognize his official status, and then, baffled by the latter's spirit of independence, precipitously and igno- miniously retreated to the position of watchful waiting, The United States Government 265 which was designated as moral pressure that would "before many days break the barriers of pride and prejudice down"-when the world knew that no moral pressure would touch the murderer of Madero. Huerta's position was repeatedly strengthened. The inconsistent friendliness of Henry Lane Wilson, coupled with the silence of the White House, was a tacit recognition. Then the sudden attempt to dictate Huerta's conduct made of him the hero of anti-Ameri- can and patriotic sentiment, while the undignified re- treat of President Wilson increased his prestige. And though Wilson, in later supporting "Constitutional- ism," probably championed the only available opposi- tion force, yet his support only postponed the success of a movement which was inevitably bound to win. Both the Vera Cruz incident and the Niagara confer- ences magnified Huerta in his own eyes, the eyes of Mexicans, and the eyes of the world. Nor could President Wilson justly claim that he "kept us out of intervention," for then and subsequently he pursued a tactic that would have led inevitably to war except for the sagacity and self-restraint of both Huerta and Carranza. In his subsequent abrupt recognition of Carranza there is to be found no little politics. Election talk was beginning to appear in the American papers. Wil- son's Mexican policy was being bitterly attacked. It was absolutely essential to point to a stable govern- ment in Mexico. That stable government was the Government of Carranza, a government that was never the real choice of the most active revolutionary elements, a government that was always confronted 266 Mexico-An Interpretation with the most serious and bloody opposition, a govern- ment which created its own constitution and later never enforced it. Indeed the Wilsonian Administration soon came in conflict with the government it had tried to create and soon encountered grave difficulties in con- vincing the American people that Carranza had estab- lished a stable government. Various border attacks, the murder of a group of miners at Santa Ysabel, and the Columbus raid, March 8, led to the punitive expedi- tion under Brigadier-General Pershing. Although an agreement was previously in existence that the Amer- ican troops might pursue bandits across the border, this was not meant to cover a punitive expedition that had long lost track of those whom it was pursuing, and after a month Pershing encountered serious opposition. By May 22, relations with Carranza had reached the breaking-point and conferences between Obregón, Min- ister of War, and Generals Scott and Funston proved very acrimonious. The trouble came to a climax in the Carrizal episode when a detachment of American cavalry was made prisoner by Carranza troops. Car- ranza was finally obliged to recede from his position and liberate the prisoners. The real purpose of the punitive expedition, which was obviously making no serious attempts to run down Villa, is revealed in the following statement from an article by John Kenneth Turner in the Liberator of June, 1919: Finally the army of the punitive expedition was held in Mexico nine months after the Villa chase was definitely aban- doned, nine months after General Scott, acting for the United States, had signed a memorandum to the effect that The United States Government 267 the dispersion of the Villa bands had been completed. Mean- while Franklin P. Lane and his associates on the American- Mexican Joint Commission were attempting to browbeat the Mexicans into yielding the guarantees demanded by the Rocke- fellers, the Guggenheims, the Dodges, and the Dohenys. Al- though in explaining the expedition, the President had declared that the troops would not be used in the interest of "American owners of Mexican properties so long as sane and honorable men are in control of the Government," the public statement of Lane, issued at the end of November (1916) after a long interview with the President, was nothing more nor less than an acknowledgement that the troops were being held in Mexico for that purpose and no other, and a threat that they would remain there until an agreement was reached regard- ing such little matters as oil and mining taxes. The American Government was perhaps also aware of the discussions and decisions being made at the Querétaro Constitutional Convention; and if the puni- tive expedition was held in Mexico to browbeat the Commissioners, evidently it was also hoped to influence the decisions being taken at the Convention-an un- paralleled bit of coercion. From the date of the adoption of the Querétaro Constitution on January 31, 1917 (for the delegates had persisted in their purpose to write an enlightened document), the Carranza Government had no rest from the American press, the American Government, or American capital. On March 3, Ambassador Fletcher presented his credentials and his first act was to gain an assurance from Foreign Secretary Aguilar that the Constitutional articles did not signify confisca- tion. This assurance was repeated from time to time 268 Mexico-An Interpretation and dutifully cabled to Washington; and although the rapid approach of a crisis with Germany withdrew at- tention for the moment from the struggling Carranza Government, by the turn of the year Washington be- gan to take note of the new Executive decrees concern- ing petroleum, which reserved oil as the property of the Government in conformity with Article 27 of the new constitution. This led to friction with oil opera- tors who refused to take out permits, thus forcing the Government to obstruct the drilling of new wells. The United States vigorously protested, stating that "the necessity may arise to impel" the American Govern- ment "to protect the property of its citizens." The Mexican Government replied that provisional permits. would be issued provided the companies agreed to abide by all future legislation. From February to December a shower of notes was exchanged, the United States protesting against retroactive and confiscatory decrees, the Mexican Government pointing out that they were in conformity with the Constitution. The United States was finally reduced to the absurd posi- tion of declaring that such control of petroleum would not be recognized as binding either by decree or law— nothing in fact that "savored of confiscation." The flimsy character of the American position has already been discussed, but it serves to indicate how far Presi- dent Wilson had departed from any semblance of per- mitting Mexico to settle its internal affairs. The same acrimonious exchange of notes continued throughout 1919, the United States protesting against decrees, the stopping of the drilling of new wells by companies refusing to apply for concessions, the ob- The United States Government 269 structions placed upon companies refusing to pay their taxes. And all these violations, according to the pe- troleum companies, were done with the cognizance and tacit sanction of the United States State Department. American diplomacy and moral Wilsonianism had de- generated into a petty squabbling over petroleum. Several incidents aggravated the situation, the hold- ing up of sailors in a launch in Tampico, who had ven- tured into a forbidden zone without any flag or escort, and the murder of an American rancher, Peter Cotron. The last elicited the peremptory note which threatened a “radical change in policy," and, which accompanied by troop-movements, widespread cries for intervention, and a feeling of general hostility, aroused considerable anxiety in Mexican circles. The United States from this time on abandoned all pretense of amity-all acts were intended to create friction and all notes breathed a spirit of open an- tagonism. On July 19, the opportunity was taken to make public a list of 217 Americans killed during the past eight years. The record was cried from the housetops, but a little analysis revealed that it included every name that could be mustered by the recording angels of judgment—those killed in the punitive ex- peditions, those killed in Vera Cruz, Americans killed in the wild-west red-light district of Tampico, Ameri- cans killed in illicit love affairs, Americans who had been members of forces in rebellion against the Gov- ernment, Americans killed by the petroleum-paid Pelaez, Americans killed by Villa, the ex-protégé of the American Government. This was followed on August 5 by the creation of 270 Mexico-An Interpretation the Fall Investigating Committee-one of the most shameful acts in the annals of the American Republic. It was composed of men antagonistic to the Mexican Government, men who had property interests in Mex- ico-among them Senator Fall himself-men who for petty party reasons desired to discredit the Wilsonian policy; and it went to work with an ear at the keyhole, in a spirit of smugness, fault-finding, malevolence, and cynicism, attempting to bring to light every petty oc- currence, every crime committed by Mexican officials, every manifestation of anti-American feeling-with the obvious purpose of creating international complica- tions. With such a character, with such purposes, with such acts, it became a vile, sinister menace to the peace of two countries and an insult to the Mexican people. The previous announcement of a change in policy was also followed by the armed occupation of Juárez and the sending of a new punitive expedition which it was feared would develop into a real attempt at con- quest in view of the general massing of American troops in the South. The Oil Interests made the most of the tension by attempting to bully Washington into renewed action upon the petroleum question. The American Woman's War League of Mexico City tried to have the Mexican children thrown out of the Ameri- can School. But a monkey-wrench was thrown into the interven- tionist machinery by the exposure of the fact that the oil companies were paying Pelaez $200,000 a month for protection. Carranza displayed his customary truculency in his message of September 1 on the open- The United States Government 271 ing of Congress, narrating the historic acts of aggres- sion that the United States had committed against Mexico, showing conclusively that they far outnum- bered the bandit raids upon American territory and pointing out that if the United States could not prevent race-riots upon the streets of its own capital, Mexico might be expected to have some difficulty in maintain- ing peace in frontier areas. The close of 1919 was marked by the customary bickering notes concerning petroleum. The petroleum question was deliberately aggravated by certain offi- cials of the United States. In December, Mr. Payne, President of the United States Shipping Board, in an interview with Representative of Congress Gould, de- clared that, owing to the decrees of Carranza and the shutting down of so many wells, the Government Board, having such a limited reserve, would in less than two weeks not have enough oil to run a single merchant-ship. The Association of Oil Producers backed this up with several telegrams, demanding pro- tection; and an attempt was made to browbeat the Mexican officials into an immediate change of policy. Fortunately Mr. Joseph W. Guffey, President of the Agwi Companies, which have determined upon the policy of obeying all governmental decrees, made pub- lic the following extracts from a letter written by Honorable Alvey A. Adee to Honorable John Barton Payne: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of January 5, 1920, with which you forwarded two letters signed by Mr. Harold Walker, representing the Mexican Pe- 272 Mexico-An Interpretation troleum Company, in which it is asserted that the allocation of two Shipping Board tanks steamers to the Atlantic Gulf and West Indies Company for the transportation of crude petrole- um from Mexican to Atlantic ports, would operate to embar- rass the State Department in its negotiations with the Mexican Government relative to the mineral claims of the Mexican Petroleum Company and other American concerns. These matters were being paralleled by growing friction resulting from the arrest of Mr. Jenkins, American consul in Puebla, a Christian gentleman with large textile mills in that city, who had been kidnaped by bandits and forced to pay a ransom of $175,000. He was later accused of perjury in an ensuing investiga- tion and arrested, pending a deposit of $500, which he refused to pay, preferring instead to set in motion the wneels of international diplomacy and make of him- self a possible casus belli. The notes sent by Secretary Lansing were neither diplomatic, nor Christian, nor in accordance with international practices, revealing a venom unequaled in the foreign dealings of the United States. The case finally evaporated when a certain Mr. Salter Hanson paid the bail. The report of the Fall investigating committee subsequently appeared, but missed fire because of the premature overthrow of Carranza and the sudden rise of the Revindicating Revolution, which by the very rapidity of its success. prevented any cry for intervention gaining ground. That no change of policy could be expected from the Harding Administration, though it began its career with a decided show of friendship toward Mexico, was apparent from the very fact that Harding had been a The United States Government 273 member of the Senate Committee which approved the Fall policy and the very fact that the Cabinet harbored a man of Mr. Fall's propensities for anti-Mexican propaganda. Indeed, Secretary of State Hughes immediately set to work to undermine the Obregón Government. He immediately acted upon the report of the Fall Com- mittee, falling in with the proposal that the recognition of Mexico should be contingent upon the signing of a list of guarantees regardless of the fact that some of them were directly unconstitutional and illegal. These conditions, according to the Associated Press, were: Elimination of the retroactive clauses of Article 27. Elimination of provisions which deprive Americans of the right of diplomatic appeal in cases where property is acquired. Modification of provisions which prevent Americans ac- quiring and owning property within the Federal Zones along the Mexican coasts and international boundaries. Article 33, which permits the president to expel undesirable aliens from the country, not to be applied to Americans with- out filing of charges and the opportunity of a fair trial. Modification of the provisions governing religious worship in such wise that American clergy should have the right to exercise the functions usual in their denominations. Creation of a mixed commission for the adjustment of claims. This programme, according to testimony before the Fall committee itself, was evolved by an agreement reached between members of the National Association for the Protection of American Rights in Mexico and the State Department. The American Association of 274 Mexico-An Interpretation Petroleum Producers came out with substantially the same proposals. These are tantamount to a rewriting of the Mexican constitution to satisfy American offi- cials, American business men, and apparently Ameri- can missionaries. The insistence upon such an agree- ment as a price of recognition is unparalleled; it would have required President Obregón to violate his oath of office, to violate the Mexican constitution and laws, and would have established the precedent of a foreign veto upon the legislation of Mexico. The Obregón Government has shown itself radical, but has never been so Bolshevik as to wish to destroy the constitu- tion by which it governs. The demand with regard to the Expulsion Article 33 becomes particularly arrogant in view of the high-handed methods by which aliens have been expelled from the United States during the post-war years. That the missionaries had not been taken into the official counsels is evidenced by the statement made by Enoch F. Fell, Associate Secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, in tak- ing exception to Senator Fall's sudden ecclesiastical in- terest: So far as I have been able to ascertain, our missionaries in Mexico do not suffer any disability or persecution either from the Government or from non-governmental sources. I can- not say that our work has been seriously handicapped by any provisions of the Mexican constitution or laws passed there- under. I don't think that our government would ever be justified in demanding that the constitution of Mexico be changed to suit our tastes. .. Under no circumstances would we, the representatives of American Churches, allow The United States Government 275 our missionary interests to be so closely tied up to those of political and financial interests that are involved in Secretary Fall's letter. • This continual baiting of a government that had promptly proved itself more stable and progressive than any régime since the fall of Díaz, has been in striking contrast to the indecently hasty recognition of the new Orellani Government in Guatemala-the most reactionary and malodorous that has seized power in Central America for years. Furthermore, had Obregón consented to overthrow the constitution his oath of office had obliged him to obey, and thereby all the democratic gains made in ten years of struggle, he would inevitably have been faced with revolution. As it is, many publicists and authori- ties have repeatedly observed that our policy has been a direct, though unsuccessful thrust at law and order in Mexico. Leopold Graham of the London Finan- cier has declared that our refusal to recognize Obregón is heading the country straight back into "internal an- archy and disorder." Besides consistently holding the cudgel of non- recognition over the head of the Mexican Government, the United States Government continued to deluge it with notes concerning petroleum. The raising of the tax on oil to twenty-five per cent in 1921, for instance, was for Mr. Hughes, as lower taxes had been for his predecessors, "a confiscatory policy." In July, when an American oil company ceased operations in protest, cutting off its employees without food or water, Ameri- can battleships were sent to the coast of Tamaulipas 276 Mexico-An Interpretation "to protect American property from the outrages of Mexican labor." The C. R. O. M. immediately sent a protest to Gompers and the A. F. L. and to Senator La Follette, with the result that the warships were hastily withdrawn and an admission made by the State Department that Mexico was capable of maintaining order. When the British companies broke away from the American Association of Oil Companies and were granted special concessions in the Federal Zones, a secretary of the United States Embassy, in November, 1921 stated in a note: "I am instructed by my gov- ernment to inquire by what right the Mexican Govern- ment is granting concessions for drilling for oil on Federal lands." De la Huerta returned the note. During 1922, as President Obregón continued to resist all coercion, a new policy of watchful waiting was adopted. Later the American Embassy secured pos- session of a provisional draft of a new petroleum law being prepared by the Department of Commerce, In- dustry and Labor for submission to the Chamber of Deputies. This was found not to be to the taste of the petroleum companies because it insisted upon the renewal of all concessions obtained prior to 1917 in accordance with the new regulations, and the Mexican Government was peremptorily informed that such a law would not be acceptable. The matter was aired in the papers, which announced that evidently the United States not only refused to permit Mexico to enforce its constitution and laws but that a department of the new government was not even free to recom- mend a law to its own legislative body, that evidently The United States Government 277 it would henceforth be necessary to submit all proposed or pending legislation to the United States Govern- ment for prior ratification. The matter resulted in a heated anti-American demonstration in the Chamber of Deputies. During the early part of 1923 came rumors of recog- nition. Two forces had been at work: those which would profit by non-recognition have been gradually overpowered by those who would profit by free and unhampered commercial relations. Many states, such as California, Illinois, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, etc., and numerous cities, such as El Paso, San Fran- cisco, Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis and others sent special commercial delegates to Mexico City and at- tempted to stimulate trade-relations, while at the same time exerting pressure on the Washington Administra- tion for recognition of Obregón. The Southern Pa- cific Railway Company determined to spend $17,000,- 000 (pesos) to reconstruct the break in the line be- tween Guadalajara and the coast; the committee of in- ternational bankers are desirous of having the terms of the debt-payment fulfilled. A growing storm of at- tack has been directed against the futility of the Hard- ing-Fall-Hughes policy. Recalcitrant members of the Republican Party, such as Senator Borah, have flayed that policy unmercifully. Accordingly in April 1923, President Harding entered into direct communication with President Obregón; and on April 25 commis- sioners were named for a convention to discuss the rela- tions between the United States and Mexico. Pres- ident Obregón appointed Señors Ramón Ross, General Director of Public Benevolence, and Fernando Gon- 278 Mexico-An Interpretation zález Roa, former Secretary of the Interior and con- nected in various capacities with the National Rail- ways. President Harding named Charles B. Warren, former ambassador to Japan, and John Barton Payne, President of the American Red Cross and former head of the United States Shipping Board. If the Coolidge Administration recognizes the Obregón Government, it will not be from any change of heart; rather, like Wilson's recognition of Car- ranza, it will be a measure taken for political expe- diency. If Obregón, in spite of failing to accede to the Harding-Fall-Hughes demands, secures recogni- tion, it will serve to accelerate commercial intercourse, American business penetration, and international travel, but it will not necessarily mean any funda- mental change in the American policy of attempting to dictate the internal affairs of a sovereign people. Until the American Government accepts the principle that Mexico is a sovereign, autonomous nation there can be no enduring understanding, coöperation, or peace between the two countries. Thus during the past ten years there has not been a government in Mexico which the United States. authorities or the large financial and industrial in- terests, or both, have not attempted to coerce and browbeat; not a government which has been left in peace and good-will to work out its problems. We threw our moral support to Madero's revolution and then, when he had achieved power, harassed him at critical moments with petty claims advanced by a petty and antagonistic ambassador, with ugly notes, with border mobilizations-until he had no opportunity to The United States Government 279 institute any creative reform; we permitted his gov- ernment to be wrecked and supplemented by a brutal dictator supported by English capital; we proceeded to give orders to Huerta with no means of enforcing our demands and thus strengthened his prestige in the eyes of his people; we were forced to throw our sup- port to the first revolutionist topping the storm of growing anarchy. Not satisfied with what had hap- pened to Madero, we made the same tragedy possible in the case of Carranza. We blocked every effort he made to establish a government, we blocked every re- form-land, labor, electoral, and social; we filled the country with banditry, murder, and fear; we flung our troops at the border time and again; we crossed the frontiers in a manner that in Europe would have pro- voked immediate war, and we so contributed to the weakening of his power, already weakened by his own short-sightedness and ambition, that he was caught and strangled in a net of crass, rapacious materialism and crushing militarism. Yet imme- diately the Wilson Administration began with the same policy toward the De la Huerta Government; immediately it began browbeating with regard to the petroleum taxes and Article 27. Even before De la Huerta had formed a stable cabinet, we were attempt- ing to coerce his conduct; even before we had learned the new Government's ability to maintain law and order, we flung our warships into Mexican waters; with ten years of bloodshed on our hands, we refused once more to coöperate in the upbuilding of the coun- try. The Harding Administration pursued the same unending antagonistic coercion, demanding of Pres- 280 Mexico-An Interpretation ident Obregón the violation of the constitution by which he was elected, making the price of recognition his promise to disregard his oath of office and over- throw the legal system of his country. We have de- manded that the president of Mexico should be a criminal bound not by the laws of Mexico, but by the wishes of American politicians in Washington, whose shifting demands will in turn be shaped by the winds of political exigency and financial intrigue. Such is the noble spectacle of the diplomacy of the American democracy in relation to a sovereign people which is attempting to emerge from feudalism and save its racial and social integrity. to Is Mulico Worth work Saving ོ, ་,, L. Segal! 3945 JER UNID SIT) UN : NIVA ON VER UND OCT @ 1982 1 DO NOT REMOVE OR MUTILATE CARDS UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 3 9015 05111 7896 : ་་་་ྡ!; F 1234 B37