Barbarous Mexico/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII
THE DIAZ-AMERICAN PRESS CONSPIRACY
If there is any combination of Interests in the United States that exercises so powerful an influence over the press of this country as does President Diaz of Mexico I should like to know its name.
In a previous chapter I asserted that no publication in Mexico dares, no matter what the circumstances, to criticize President Diaz directly. While the same thing cannot, of course, be said of the United States, at least this can be said, that there exists a strange, even an uncanny, unwillingness on the part of powerful American publishers to print anything derogatory to the ruler of Mexico; that, also, there is manifested a remarkable willingness to print matter flattering to the Mexican dictator.
At this writing I do not know of a single book, regularly published and circulated in the United States, which seriously criticizes President Diaz, the man or his system; while I could name at least ten which flatter him most extravagantly. Indeed, I do not know of any book that has ever been circulated in the United States—that is, one put out by one of the regular publishing houses—which attempted an extended criticism of President Diaz.
And the situation with the magazines is exactly the same. While the number of articles containing praise of Diaz which have been published in magazines—not to mention newspapers—during the past several years have undoubtedly run into the hundreds, I do not know of one prominent magazine that has prosecuted a criticism of the Mexican dictator.
Is it not an astonishing situation? And what is the reason for it? Is it because the system of Diaz is beyond reproach? Or is it because by some mysterious power that personage is able to control the press in his favor?
Look about you. Is there any other statesman or politician of the present day, American or foreign, who has been accorded a larger proportion of praise and a smaller proportion of blame by prominent American publishers than President Diaz?
I say that I do not know of one prominent magazine that has prosecuted a criticism of Diaz. Then how about The American Magazine? The American Magazine began a criticism, truly. And it planned to carry it out. Repeatedly it promised its readers that it would deal with the political conditions behind the slavery of Mexico. It hinted that Diaz would be shown in a new light. It had the material in its hands—most of the material of this book—and it was very bold and unequivocal in its announcements. And then—
The American Magazine proved the point that I am making more convincingly than any other instance than I can cite. Suddenly my articles were stopped. The political investigation was stopped. Other articles were substituted, milder articles, good as corroborations of the exposures of slavery, but in each and every one of these articles there was contained a suggestion that President Diaz was not personally to blame for the barbarous conditions that had been held up to the light.
With these words the editors of The American Magazine heralded to the world the first of my articles under the title of "Barbarous Mexico."
"Skilfully applied influence upon journalism!" Little did the writer of that pregnant phrase realize how pregnant it was. Little did he imagine that before six short months were gone that phrase would be as applicable to his own publication as to any other.
What was the skilfully applied influence exerted upon The American Magazine? I am not pretending to say. But to anyone who will go back and read again the bold announcements of the September, October and November numbers of the magazine—1909—read the enthusiastic comments of the editors on the interest aroused by the series, the delighted statements of jumping circulation, the letters of subscribers begging the editors not to fear, but to go on with the good work, and then note how the magazine sheered away from its program after the first of the year, the conclusion that there was some kind of "skilfully applied influence" seemed pretty well justified.[1] But let us note some of the journalistic antics of some other leading publishers. There is William Randolph Hearst, for example, proprietor of The Cosmopolitan Magazine and numerous daily newspapers in different parts of the country. There is no use of dwelling here upon the democratic and humanitarian professions of Mr. Hearst. Everybody knows that for the United States, and doubtless most other countries, he advocates democracy, freedom of speech, a free press, universal suffrage, regulation of predatory corporations, protection of labor. But Mr. Hearst's readers have just learned that for Mexico he is in favor of despotism, a police ruled press, no suffrage, unbridled corporations, and—slavery. I have never seen a more frantic apology for these institutions anywhere than is to be found in the March, April and May, 1910, numbers of the Cosmopolitan Magazine.
That Mr. Hearst was personally responsible for the publication of these articles is evidenced by an interview which he gave The Mexican Herald while in Mexico last March. Says that newspaper, under date of March 23:
So headlong was Mr. Hearst's hurry to the defense of Diaz that he did not take time to secure writers familiar with the most primary facts about their subject, nor give them time to compare notes and avoid contradictions, nor give his editors time to verify ordinary statements. Mr. Lewis' article was prepared so literally at the last moment that, when it came, the magazine had already been paged and the article had to be put in as an insertion, with special paging. A laughable feature of the campaign was that, in introducing his knights of the defense, the editor of the Cosmopolitan moralized at length on the matter of permitting raw and untried writers—meaning myself—to handle important subjects, and named a list of proven and guaranteed to be reliable writers among whom was Mr. Alfred Henry Lewis. But when Mr. Lewis came to write! I pray that in all this book there is not one mistake one-half as ridiculous as any of a dozen in Mr. Lewis' short article.
Mr. Lewis modestly remarked, near the start, that: "Personally, I know as much of Mexico and Mexicans as any." But the burden of his story was that my writings were inspired by Standard Oil, which wanted revenge on Diaz for having been "kicked out of Mexico." Now how Mr. Lewis could have lived in the United States during the previous few months and read the newspapers without having learned of the oil war in Mexico, a war in which at the very time the lines were written, Standard Oil seemed on the point of forcing its only competitor to sell out to it on unfavorable terms, how Mr. Lewis could have failed to know that Standard Oil owns millions of dollars worth of oil lands and does a vast majority of the retail oil business in Diaz-land, how he could have been ignorant of the fact that H. Clay Pierce, head of the Standard Oil corporation in Mexico, is a director of the National Rail ways of Mexico, the government merged lines, so-called, and a close ally of President Diaz, is a little difficult to understand. Personally, Mr. Lewis knows as much of Mexico and Mexicans as any! Any—what? Just one more of Mr. Lewis' all-embracing blunders in that article. Said he:
Which proves that Mr. Lewis does not know the first principle upon which Mexican finance and Mexican commercial life is based. Not only does the same financial ring which monopolizes the great industries of the United States monopolize those same industries in Mexico—I shall presently enumerate some of them—but every state and locality has its minor trusts which control the necessities of life in their field a great deal more completely than such necessities are controlled in this country. Mr. Lewis does not seem to know that the Mexican government is openly in the trust business, that by sale and gift of special privileges known as "concessions" it creates and maintains trusts of high and low degree. Personally, Mr. Lewis knows as much of Mexico and Mexicans as any!
Just a slip or two from Mr. Stevens, taken almost at random.
And another:
To quote all of Mr. Stevens' blunders would be to quote most of his three articles. He went to Mexico to prepare a defense of Diaz and he did not take the trouble to put a liberal sprinkling of facts in his defense. He was taken in charge by agents of Diaz and he wrote down what they told him to write. He was even taken in on the little yarn about the Yucatan slave who got his master into jail, a yarn which had done duty before. The story runs that a henequen king beat one of his laborers, the laborer appealed to a justice of the peace, who arrested and fined the master. The truth of the incident was—and my authority is most reliable—that the slave had run away, was caught by a planter other than his owner, who attempted to hold him quietly as his own. In the course of the day's work the slave was badly beaten, and it was in this condition that his real owner found him. The real owner secured the arrest of the would-be thief, in the name of the slave, and so the story of the "equality before the law" of the slave and master went out to the world.
The important thing, however, is not the laughable mistakes of Mr. Hearst's writers, but the wherefore of Mr. Hearst's putting his printing presses so unreservedly into the service of a man and a system such as he would not defend for a moment were they to be found in any other country.
But let us mention a few more publications which have put themselves in the same class as Mr. Hearst's magazine. There is Sunset Magazine. In February, 1910, it began a series of articles by “Gasper Estrada Gonzalez," who is announced as "a stateman who is very close to Diaz." There were three articles of fawning flattery. Followed an article by Herman Whitaker, in which he praised Diaz to the skies and absolved him from all blame for the slave atrocities of Mexico. Then came an article by a man named Murray, who wrote to justify Diaz's extermination of the Yaquis.
Moody's Magazine ran a series of articles under the title, "Mexico as it Is," in which the writer attempted to neutralize the effect of "Barbarous Mexico" upon the public conscience. I have already mentioned defenses which were published in the Bankers' Magazine and in the Mining World. In addition, The Overland Monthly, The Exporter, many newspapers—like the Los Angeles Times—and various smaller publications, as well as many private individuals and a book publisher or two took up the work of defending their friend Diaz.
As to the book defense against "Barbarous Mexico," little has appeared so far, doubtless because of the shortness of time, but there are reports that several books are on their way. One of these, it is said, is to be by James Creelman, who left the employ of Pearson's Magazine at the call of Diaz, hurried to Mexico from Turkey, and spent several weeks going over the route I described in my articles, in order that he might be able to "refute" me with verisimilitude, no doubt.
The book "Porfirio Diaz," written by Jose F. Godoy, whom Diaz recently appointed as his minister to Cuba, though it does not refer to my exposures in any way, was quite likely hurried out because of them. Here is a very expensively printed book, containing nothing that has not been printed repeatedly before, except—seventy pages of endorsements of Diaz written by prominent Americans. Here we have the case of a man, Mr. Godoy, who actually went about—or sent about—among senators, congressmen, diplomats and cabinet officers, soliciting kind words for President Diaz. And he got them. In looking over this book it seems to me that almost any discriminating persons would be moved to inquire what moved G. P. Putnam's Sons to issue that book. Surely it was not entirely the hope of profitable sales to the general public.
I know of only one book of criticism of the Diaz system that was put out by a regular American publisher, and the criticism in that book was so veiled and so interspersed with flattery that the American reviewers took it for one of the old adulatory sort. Only one of them, so the author himself told me, was discerning enough to see that it was a book of criticism. "I wrote the book that way," the author said to me, "in the hope that it would be allowed to circulate in Mexico."
But the officials of the Mexican government were more discerning than the American book reviewers and the book was not allowed to circulate. Not only that, but quite suddenly and mysteriously it disappeared from the stores in this country and very soon was not to be had. Had the book disappeared because it was bought by the public, the publishers would be expected to print a second edition, but this they declined to do and, though flatly asserting that the work was not again to appear, they also declined to give the author or other inquirers further satisfaction. The book I refer to was the one entitled "Porfirio Diaz," written by Rafael DeZayas Enriquez and issued by D. Appleton & Co., in 1908.
Carlo de Fornaro, a Mexican newspaperman, or rather, a native of Italy who had spent two years in newspaper work in Mexico City, also wrote a book, "Diaz, Czar of Mexico," printing it himself because he could not find a regular publisher. It was refused circulation in Mexico and action for criminal libel was at once begun against Fornaro in the New York courts. To bring this suit, the editor of Diaz's leading newspaper, El Imparcial, with Joaquin Casasus, the most prominent lawyer of Mexico and former ambassador to the United States, hurried from the Mexican capital. Among the American lawyers employed as special prosecutors was Henry W. Taft, brother of the president and counsel of the National Railways of Mexico. Fornaro, being without the means to bring witnesses from Mexico to support the charges made in his book, was convicted, sent to prison for one year and the book was thereafter not circulated in the regular way. In fact, immediately after the arrest of Fornaro for some reason the New York book stores, at least, refused longer to handle the work. The Fornaro incident occurred in 1909.
Perhaps even a more remarkable incident still was that of the suppression of "Yucatan, the American Egypt," written by Tabor and Frost, Englishmen. After being printed in England this book was put out in this country by Doubleday, Page & Co., one of our largest and most respectable publishers. It was put out in expensive form and, in the natural course of the book trade, should have been purchasable for years after it left the presses. But within six months the publishers, replying to a would-be purchaser, asserted that the book "has gone out of print and absolutely no copies are available!" I have the letter myself. The book was almost entirely about the ancient ruins of Yucatan, but it contained a score or so of pages exposing the slavery of the henequen plantations—and it had to go. What sort of argument was used upon our esteemed and respectable publishers to cause them to withdraw the book can be imagined.
These instances are added to the others to show what happens when a writer does succeed in getting an expose of the Diaz system into print. In this book which I am writing I am doing my best to bring out the most important facts and at the same time avoid giving valid grounds for action at libel. When it appears there will be no legal reason why it should not be circulated as the majority of books are circulated. Nevertheless, if it is extensively offered for sale in the usual way it will be the first extended criticism of Diaz and his system to be put squarely before the American people. And the reason for its being the first will be not because there have not been facts that begged to be printed and writers that desired to print those facts, but because of that "skillfully applied influence upon journalism" which General Diaz exerts in our land of free speech and free press.
Again I come back to the question: What is the source of that "influence upon journalism?" Why do citizens of the United States, who profess a reverence for the principles for which their forefathers of '76 fought, who claim to revere Abraham Lincoln most of all for his Emancipation Proclamation, who shudder at the labor-baiting of the Congo, at the horrors of Russia's Siberia, at the political system of Czar Nicholas, apologize for and defend a more cruel slavery, a worse political oppression, a more complete and terrible despotism—in Mexico?
To this question there is only one conceivable answer, that for the sake of sordid profits principles of decency and humanity, principles which are universally conceded as being best for the progress of the world, have been set aside.
By this I do not mean that all of the Americans who have expressed admiration for General Diaz have been directly bribed to do so by gifts of so many dollars and so many cents. By no means. Some publishers and some writers have undoubtedly been bought in this way. But the vast majority of the active flatterers of Diaz have been moved by nothing more than "business reasons," which, by some persons, will be considered as little different from bribery. As to the great mass of the Americans who think well of Diaz, and sometimes speak well of him—as distinct from what I have called the "active flatterers"—they have simply been fooled, deceived by the consistent press campaign which the others have kept up for, lo, these many years.
Such American planters as those whom I have quoted as defending the Diaz system of slavery may have been moved by nothing more reprehensible than a desire to prevent my exposures from "hurting the country," or "hurting business," meaning their business. In fact, I was much surprised that so many actual residents of Mexico came forward in support of my statements as did, inasmuch as nearly every American in Mexico has some land which he has obtained for a very low price—or for nothing at all—and which he wishes to sell at a profit. Or he has a stock-selling scheme, in a rubber plantation, for example, with which he is trying to secure the good money of widows and orphans, poor school teachers, small business men and working people. Just as the average American real estate boomer "boosts his town," decries exposures of political corruption as "hurting business," even suppresses news of plague, earthquake fatalities and such things, so the American in Mexico, knowing that exposures of slavery and political instability will frighten away investments and perhaps lose him some profitable deals, seldom hesitates to argue that political and industrial conditions in the country are ideal. The more property a man owns in Mexico the less likely is he to tell the truth about the country.
As to the American publishers, the "business reasons" are usually found either in the interest of the publisher himself in some property or "concession" in Mexico, or in his business connection with some other persons of means who hold such properties or such concessions. And through one or the other of these avenues undoubtedly nearly all of our largest publishers, of books, magazines or newspapers, are touched. The situation in my home town may be a little exceptional, but from it may be guessed the extent of the "skilfully applied influence" of Diaz that probably extends over the whole country. I reside in Los Angeles, California, where there are five daily newspapers. At the time of the high-handed persecutions of Magon, Villarreal and Rivera, Sarabia, De Lara, Modesto Diaz, Arizmendez, Ulibarri and other Mexicans, political enemies of Diaz, in 1907, it became plain that the muzzle was on all of those newspapers. Suspicion was confirmed by a managing editor of one of them, who said in confidence to me and to others:
"The newspapers of this town could get those men out of jail in twenty-four hours if they went at it. But they won't go at it because the owners of all five are interested in concessions in Mexico. You see we're up against it. We don't dare to say a word, for if we did Dias would get back at us."
Two of these newspaper owners were Mr. Hearst himself and Harrison Gray Otis, the latter proprietor of the well known Los Angeles Times. Each of these men own more than a million acres of Mexican land, which they are generally credited with securing from the Mexican government for nothing or practically nothing. In addition to owning a magnificent stock ranch, Mr. Hearst owns vast oil lands and, in addition, is credited with being involved financially with the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, which is one of the hugest beneficiaries of the Diaz government. As to the magnificence of Mr. Hearst's stock ranch, permit me to reproduce an item which was published in the Mexican Herald, August 24, 1908.
IS WONDERFUL ESTATE.
HEARST HOLDINGS IN CHIHUAHUA SMALL EMPIRE.
IS OVER MILLION ACRES.
"With over a million acres of the finest agricultural and grazing land, with large herds of blooded cattle, horses and sheep, roaming over this vast domain, the big Hearst cattle ranch and farm in Chihuahua is the peer of any such estate in the world, whether it lies in the great corn belt of Illinois or Kansas, or stretches for miles across the wind-swept prairies of Texas or Oklahoma. Two hundred and fifty miles of barbed wire fence enclose a portion of this vast ranch and within the enclosure graze 60,000 thoroughbred Herefords, 125,000 fine sheep, and many thousand head of horses and hogs. A modern, up-to-date ranch and farm, whose crops are unexcelled in the world, and whose stock is famous from end to end of the Republic, this ranch is convincing evidence of the great future which is in store for the agricultural and stock raising industry of Mexico."
Thus spoke E. Kirby Smith, a well-known planter of Campeche, who is spending a few days in the city. Mr. Kirby Smith has just returned from an extended trip into Chihuahua, where he spent several days on the great Hearst ranch.
"This ranch," said Mr. Kirby Smith, "is typical of the great modern stock farms and presents a glorious picture as to what may be expected from enterprises of this character, if properly conducted, in this Republic. The stock is of the best. Imported jacks and stallions, thoroughbred brood mares and thoroughbred cattle dot the ranch from end to end.
"Vast amounts of corn and potatoes are raised, and in potatoes alone fortunes are going to be made by the farmers of northern Mexico."
- ↑ Since this matter was put in type The American Magazine has begun a second series of articles on Mexico, in which it promises to follow out the thread of exposure which it dropped several months previously. In the October issue, 1910. it prints under the name of Alexander Powell an article two-thirds of which had been written by me and furnished to The American fifteen months earlier. The alleged author did not even take the trouble to re-write the material, and it appears almost word for word as I originally wrote it. To my mind this is but a confirmation of my widely circulated charges: First, that The American failed to carry out its promises to the public because of "skillfully applied influence;" second, that it has gone back to the subject of Mexico only because its readers Who have read my charges have whipped it into doing so. Finally, its publication at this late day of my original material is proof that it has not been "gathering new facts." as announced, and that the facts furnished by me in the first place are the most effective as well as the most reliable that have yet come into its possession.