CHAPTER IX

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.