THE GOLDEN GEESE
In all these devious ways Mexico has tried to kill the goose which lays
her golden eggs. Not the least onerous of her efforts in this direction
has been the seeking she has always done to make the United States
government and American business men take the responsibility for this
precious goose of commerce. And sad to tell--to the Mexican mind at
least--we have not always awakened quite promptly enough to our sudden
new responsibilities, and the goose has more than once dropped near to
dying in our arms.
That golden goose was the product of the nature of Mexico and of the
régime of Porfirio Diaz. Long before Mexico became independent, long
before the social problems which assail her now had been allowed to
gain impetus, Nature had given up vast riches from the Mexican soil.
Spain garnered them in, and gave Mexico such care as she knew how to
give, and the golden era of the three centuries of Colonial life rolled
out. Then came the first revolution, and the destruction of such wealth
as Spain had left, until Diaz organized what remained and with it began
his thirty years of peace.
In those thirty years. Mexico was changed from a land whose wealth
poured out in bonanzas returning only caprice for industry and wealth
for caprice, into one where industry, solidly invested capital,
and wise foresight gained the golden fruit. In other words, the
goose became domesticated, and produced golden eggs when she was
appropriately fed with golden capital and golden brains.
It was literally the wealth imported and created by those years
of peace and domestication which made possible the outbreak of
revolutionary activity in 1910 and drove Diaz from Mexico in 1911.
Prosperity was too much for poor Mexico.
The revolution, indeed, came at a moment of Mexico’s saturation
with prosperity. And it has continued by the continuation of that
prosperity, which has furnished and still furnishes the fuel of
banditry and revolution. It was not until after Diaz fell that the
great wealth of Mexican oil became patent. And not until Carranza began
imposing his taxes on the oil industry do we find the upsurgence of the
ideas of socialism, bolshevism and nationalization which have been the
battlecries of all the governments which have followed him. Oil, as we
have seen, has furnished the sinews of war, and continues to furnish
them, despite all that can be done to turn the tide.
In the days of the revolutions previous to Diaz the rewards of
success were governorships, sometimes presidencies, and always some
brief spell of peace. But to-day the reward is too vast, the graft
quite too colossal, to slow down the round of struggle. Wealth pours
into the national capital in amounts which would be quite hopeless of
comprehension to the revolutionists of the older day. More tax money
reaches Mexico City to-day from oil alone than Diaz had from every
source at his command--while, save for the oil fields, Mexico is to-day
a desert waste.
It is no wonder, then, that the nation can and does buy herself honors
and praise in the world outside, that she considers it criminal that
she cannot buy recognition, cannot force aid and trade and gold to flow
to her. Is she not wealthy and can she not buy pages of advertising and
the services of hundreds of propagandists of every type known to the
trade? Gold is here and more gold she expects to bring to her through
other channels than her own genuine advancement. She is back again in
the days of the bonanza mines, when wealth went to caprice and labor
and industry meant nothing.
And so she is killing the golden goose, just as she killed it long ago
under the Spaniards, by forcing it to lay and lay and lay, till at the
height of its productivity it is trembling to its death. Destructive
legislation, the bitter threat of its confiscation, the continuing
theft of vast sums in exchange for the privilege of struggling against
these laws and threats--these are striking down the golden bird. To-day
that goose is dying, and all Mexico seeks is to bring in, somehow,
another goose to feed her hungry office-holders. She is willing that
it shall be a relatively tame domestic goose, if only it will lay the
golden eggs of foreign investment, trade, commerce--she would gladly go
back to the relatively mild, but sure, wealth of the time of Diaz.
And what does she offer to induce that timid, wabbling goose across
the national fence? I can see behind her promises of privilege nothing
more substantial than outraged rights, and beside them, the panting,
half-dead corpses of two golden geese of bonanza days--the almost dead
mining industry, the sadly ill oil industry. For Mexico has limited
mining by confiscatory taxation and by revolutionary outrages which
left the mines in such a state that to-day the cost of operation is too
great for them to continue under present prices. And she has set about
the starvation of the oil industry, as we have seen, by limiting it to
the narrow field of the Tampico-Tuxpam district, when the opportunities
for oil development throughout the whole of Mexico are probably
unequaled in any similar area in the world!
It is with such pictures as these that she would tempt trade and
commerce and investment to Mexico. No, the “centennial expositions,”
the trade excursions, the special trips for special friends of the
government, even the official telegrams of thanks to American officials
who breathe a misplaced idealism with regard to Mexico--none of these,
nor all of them, can quite make a screen before the unhappy corpses of
the once lively golden geese of Mexican prosperity.
Let us resume, briefly, the list of the events which have marked the
process of the years in the Mexican revolutions which began with the
uprising of Madero--and which have been the means of killing foreign
enterprise and native faith in Mexico’s succeeding governments. The
list is long, but it cannot be forgotten.
The revolution in 1917-1918 virtually wiped out religion in Mexico,
profaned, sacked and burned churches, killed and outraged priests,
violated nuns and girls in the convents, and drove into exile thousands
of priests. The Constitution of 1917 virtually abolished religion,
and yet the Protestant churches have been allowed to continue their
work (with the result that many Protestant missionaries of Mexico were
active Carranza and Obregon propagandists in this country). While most
of the exiled Catholic clergy have now been allowed to return, they
still work under conditions which make religion a virtual monopoly of
the state, and practically eliminate religious freedom in Mexico.
Ten years of revolution have all but wiped out education in Mexico:
first, by destroying the Catholic schools, which were almost the only
educational system in the country outside the great cities, and,
second, by so curtailing the appropriations for public school expenses
as to make educational organization impossible.
The revolutionary hordes, when Mexico City was taken in 1915 by General
(now President) Obregon, sacked the city almost as thoroughly as
Attila sacked Rome, the public being invited by proclamation to join
in the looting. Beautiful houses were made barracks for the soldiers;
automobiles and horses, including those of foreign diplomats, were
taken; stores and homes were broken open and robbed, and trainloads of
rich furniture, including carloads of pianos, were shipped out, much of
the loot coming to the United States to be sold. While the population,
rich and poor, starved, no food was allowed to enter the city, and
trainloads of beans and corn, the staples of Mexican food, were shipped
out.
The revolution virtually suspended the political rights of the Mexican
people. Under Carranza’s decrees, which to this day form the chief
basis of government in Mexico, no one may hold office who ever served
under Diaz or Huerta, or who was not known to be a Carranzista
before the Huerta uprising--save by special permission, granted only
on personal appeal to the president himself. The revolutionists
continuously refused to allow any Mexicans but those of known
sympathies with themselves to participate in elections, so that only a
fraction of the eligible voters have ever taken part in any election.
The revolution exiled from Mexico, on one pretext or another, virtually
all the higher type of Mexicans, the men who throughout all Mexican
history have been the stable and stabilizing element in the government,
leaving Mexico in the hands of demagogues of the worst type, from
the highest offices to the lowest. There has been talk of political
amnesty, but none has yet been forthcoming, and the few Mexican exiles
who return do so under personal assurance of their personal safety.
Mexico is to-day taxing her people, both natives and foreign
corporations, to an extent and with a recklessness unknown even in
war-ridden Europe. Taxes on imports and exports have been doubled and
sextupled. The stamp tax has been quadrupled and broadened to cover
almost every possible human activity; direct taxation on every form of
industry and export taxes on the country’s products have become the
normal, where, before, these forms of taxation were distinctly avoided
in order to encourage enterprise. Mexico is still spending more on
her army, mostly in graft, than Diaz spent on his whole government,
including interest on foreign indebtedness (which the revolution has
never paid).
The present taxation system has been coupled with favoritism and graft
to an extent that punishes with ruin any enterprise (save those fed
from the natural resources of the soil, such as oil) which is engaged
in a business where profiteering is not possible.
Carranza, as we have seen, financed his revolution by issuing
2,000,000,000 pesos of paper money, forced into circulation at the
points of bayonets. None of this has ever been honestly redeemed.
The paper money orgy covered three years, and absolutely wiped out
all semblance of credit and all use of paper in business. In its
course, the revolution took from the banks in “loans” approximately
$28,000,000, completing the ruin of the banking system, as I have
described above.
Carranza took over the railways of the republic in 1914, and since that
date the revolutionary group has operated them for the profit of the
government and themselves. They have increased passenger, freight and
express rates to figures many times the normal, forcing the properties
to yield the national treasury $1,500,000 a month, meanwhile paying
nothing of rental to their owners, whose fixed charges are being
defaulted at the rate of $1,000,000 a month--a total theft of nearly
$400,000,000, growing at the rate of $1,000,000 a month.
The revolutionaries gained the support of the sincere Mexican
progressives and of American students on the ground of a defense of
the Mexican Constitution of 1857, but after they came to power they
promulgated the Constitution of 1917, a new instrument, although the
old Constitution was amply provided with means for its amendment.
The new document is the most radical written Constitution in effect
in the world to-day, but its provisions have been used so far only
for the aggrandizement and enrichment of those who can abuse its
privileges. The provisions for the confiscation and distribution of all
pieces of land of large area have been used only to take properties
of foreigners and Mexicans of the old régime to hand them over to
revolutionary leaders. The provisions against the operating of mines,
etc., by foreign companies have so far been used only to transfer
such properties to friendly Mexicans and Germans. The provisions
“nationalizing” oil deposits have been used only to exact towering
taxes and millions of dollars of loot from the foreign companies and
to drive the properties more and more into the hands of the British,
Dutch and Germans, and away from the Americans.
The revolution has allowed and abetted the looting and ravaging of
Mexico by every method known to brigandage. Hundreds of thousands
of cattle have been killed for their hides; thousands of acres of
standing crops have been wantonly ruined; seed grains have been stolen
or destroyed; the vast sugar industry, left stagnant by Zapata’s
depredations has, since the government regained possession, been wiped
out by the shipping away for “junk” of the machinery of the sugar
mills; graft has been levied against relief trains sent by the American
Red Cross to feed starving Mexicans and the contents of such trains
even stolen and sold for personal profit of generals.
Carranza encouraged and abetted a military oligarchy which supported
brigandage as a means for its own profit. Campaigns against the
bandits and rebels were not pressed, arms and ammunition were sold by
the federals to the bandits and rebels, in order that the military
might continue to have work to do. The officers, acting as their own
paymasters, padded the army rolls to many times their actual size,
and the balance between the expenses and pay of the actual army and
the phantom army was pocketed by the officers. The Obregon process,
a variation of the Carranza plan, paid millions of pesos in cash
and land to ex-bandits and revolutionaries, setting up Villa on a
rich hacienda, and paying out the resources of the nation to buy the
appearance of a peace.
Revolutionary favorites, as we have seen, were given the rich state of
Yucatan for loot. They foisted upon that community (the only spot in
Mexico where any wealth has ever been created through manufacturing
and industry as opposed to the sacking of the riches of the soil), a
so-called “socialistic” régime. A “modern state” was set up, and the
experiment of taking from the rich for the benefit of the poor was
set in full swing. By means of a great national monopoly of the hemp
industry, prices were so inflated that in the course of five years the
American farmer paid, in artificially-increased prices for twine for
his wheat-binding machinery, $112,000,000 to the Mexican revolution.
The state-controlled hemp trust has been forced to relinquish its
control, and the costly experiment seems passed. Here is the first
collapse of the Mexican fetish of socialistic demagogy, but it seems
safe to believe that it will not be the last.
So stands the record, incomplete, shorn of detail, but each item taken
from the history of shame which has been written in Mexico in the years
just passed. Hidden behind a curtain of fair words and lofty idealism,
the shame has been committed, but behind that same curtain to-day
disintegration is hurrying on, coming as it came to Yucatan in the
grist of inevitable retribution. That we may understand the end, it
behooves us not to close our eyes to the beginnings.
The killing of the golden geese of recent years in Mexico carries a
responsibility from which the United States cannot be entirely free.
The eight years of the Wilson régime, when American foreign policy,
as enunciated by Secretary of State Bryan, held that Americans who
ventured abroad did so at their own risk and had no right to ask the
protection of their government, was a mighty factor in the despoliation
which followed in Mexico. Carranza, seeking the excuse for the policies
to which the great wealth of the oil fields tempted him, found in this,
our official attitude, his opportunity for baiting the Americans and
with them most other foreigners in Mexico. His virtual espousal of the
German cause in the Great War gave him still further opportunities, and
the result has been written in the outrages which he committed against
the Americans. This is a list only less appalling than the list of the
outrages which were perpetrated against Mexico and the Mexicans in the
name of the revolution. Here, briefly, is the record. Although many of
its outrages were committed only during the Carranza régime, it must be
remembered that that régime is the direct ancestor of those which have
followed it, for the personalities seem the same, the shift in their
places being the only change.
The revolution has killed over 3,000 foreigners, most of them in cold
blood, probably not one per cent in fair and open battle.
The revolution has murdered over 600 Americans since 1910, and the
revolutionaries have violated scores of American women.
The revolution has ruined over $1,000,000,000 worth of American
property in Mexico through wanton destruction, cynical recklessness and
savage bravado.
The revolution has driven from their homes in Mexico more than 30,000
Americans, men, women and children, who, in carrying to Mexico the high
standards of American living, American business and American ethics,
were pioneers of our trade and influence, and potential civilizers of
Mexico.
The revolution has, as we know full well, promulgated that Constitution
of 1917 which has been the bane of American, even more than it has of
Mexican, business.
The Mexican revolution, by its baiting of the American government
through nearly a decade, has nurtured in Mexico and sought to spread
throughout Latin-America a hatred and fear of Americans and hostility
to the Monroe Doctrine. This is threatening not only our own prestige
on this continent, but the peace of the established governments of our
Latin-American sisters, through the fomenting of hostility and unrest
within their frontiers.
More than all, the revolution has made of Mexico a refuge for the
enemies of the United States, first by allowing to be set up in its
capital the central organization of the German spy and sabotage system
in the Western world, and since the war by welcoming and aiding the
bolshevists and radicals who are working openly for the overthrow of
American institutions in this country and the destruction of American
industry and trade in Mexico.
This is a bitter record, but without it, as I have had to say of many
things in this book, the picture cannot come clear to our eyes. We
cannot, in justice to our own understanding, forget that since the
death of Madero, and even before, the Mexican revolution has been
but one movement. The rulers who have succeeded each other have all
been of the same group, and those in power in 1921 are those who
were scrambling for place within the same ruling group in 1913. “The
revolution,” as one of them has said, “is the revolution.” And so it
is in more senses than one. We but deceive ourselves if in our very
genuine desire to give each new Mexican president a chance, we close
our eyes to the obvious facts of his political heritage and the human
tools he must use.
Only one word more, and the tale of the golden geese is done. The
protection which the American government has failed to give its traders
and investors who have gone abroad has had an effect which those
traders and investors must obviate before they step forth, at least
into Mexico, again. Through the years of the Great War, our government,
along with those of the Allies, put into effect in neutral countries,
a “Black List” which was designed to keep German, Austrian and Turkish
firms and their sympathizers from dealing and trading with the neutrals
or with the peoples of the allied countries.
Mexico was of course our chief field for activity, and there our Black
List had its severest test. In those months of struggle, we committed
many faults; we shut off friendly firms from trade with this country;
we encouraged, by many stupidities, the activities of smugglers and
“cloaks” who bought for the Germans in Texas jobbing towns; we created
for ourselves a phalanx of enemies of American trade who will not soon
forget. Worse than this, even, when the war was over the tremendous
machinery of the enforcement of the provisions of the Enemy Trading
Act, with its literally priceless information regarding the business
of Mexico, the capital and trade of the Germans, the Mexicans, and the
Americans in the whole country--all this was thrown away. Literally it
was cast into the waste-basket, and the information which if followed
up and kept even partially up to date would to-day be the richest mine
of information for American importers and exporters was scrapped like
worn-out machinery. I do not know how many millions of dollars were
spent in gathering this data for the War Trade Board, but I do know the
nature of that data. It is gone, and the advantage which might have
come from it is lost forever.
But the unfriendliness which was engendered by our mistakes, which was
only slowly being wiped out by the correction of those mistakes when
peace came--that unfriendliness remains. That is our only heritage of
our Mexican activity in the war; it couples up with our own mistakes of
ignorance or of carelessness during the same period.
From 1915 to 1919, literally all the foreign trade of Mexico passed
through the United States. Imports and exports, the goods from and for
England and Japan and China and Africa no less than our own domestic
trade with Mexico went through the border ports by rail. Of necessity,
the advantages of ship traffic were lost, and our manufacturers and
our buyers of Mexico’s raw materials had the greatest opportunity of
all time to capture the vast bulk of the Mexican trade. The tremendous
apparent increases in our Mexican trade during the war years were only
the record of the world’s commerce passing through our border towns.
But to-day we have retained only a little of the gains recorded then,
and we shall lose still more of what we have kept. And why? Because we
have never truly sought Mexican trade and do not seek it to-day.
Ah, yes. We want to trade with Mexico, but, I repeat, we have never
sought Mexican trade. We have wanted to sell Mexico our surplus,
to have her take our extra runs and use the goods we have made in
quantities for other countries. But we have never sought to meet the
exigencies of the Mexican market. We have never done (as a nation, I
mean, of course) what England and Germany have done; we do not follow
specifications literally and send cloth, for instance, with exactly
the number of threads per inch which the Mexican must have to get his
best customs classification. We do not rearrange our patterns to meet
a special demand of the Mexican market, carefully described to us by
our customers. It is the old story of American trade everywhere in
the world--our manufacturers have heard it in a dozen ways, and they
are justly tired of the sound of it. My only point is that during the
period of the war, when Mexican trade had of necessity to come to us
in great volume, we did not link the Mexican buyer to us, either by
meeting his demands or by helping him to understand our difficulties.
So it was that when the golden goose of Mexican business was
surreptitiously put into our arms when we were busy with a lively war
in Europe, we did not take the care of it that its parents might have
expected of us.
The result is that to-day we have little hold on the trade of Mexico,
despite the astonishing figures of our preponderance in it. For what we
ship to Mexico is largely food and what we take from Mexico is largely
oil--an exchange which is more significant than columns of figures in
showing the economic condition of the land we trade with. Again we
swing back to the one great, significant fact, the need of an activity
which transcends mere barter, which has little to do with whether we
are deceived by Mexican conditions or whether we are willing to risk
them now for the sake of the great possible gains of the future. This
is the issue of our duty to learn how we can serve in the solution of
the problem--and to devote something of our energy to that solution.