The Faithful Madero

...The family circle constituted a solid nucleus dominated by the age-old authority of the pater familias...

...The whole family took part in the subsequent discussions, and the man who was soon to be the leader of the Mexican people listened patiently and obediently to their arguments...

...Francisco de la Barra, the white President typifying the compromiser who washes his hands, Pilate-like, many times a day in order to be able to act out a role of apparent dignity, the prototype of the cultivated politicians and diplomats who so often dominate the Latin American scene...

...When Madero, already a grown man, wrote the book which was to launch his political career, he felt that before he could release it there was one obstacle to be overcome: He must obtain the consent of his father...

...His interest in spiritualism, homeopathy, vegetarianism are all revealing facets of his personality...

...Here are Porfirio Diaz, the progressive dictator who brought foreign capital into Mexico and carried out important public works while suppressing political liberties and annulling the most basic civil rights: Emiliano Zapata, the warrior inspired by the hopes of the humble, who armed his people in the struggle for the reconquest of their lands...

...For here was a man devoid of malice who firmly believed that good faith would triumph, who shunned demagoguery, and yet whose very simplicity imbued his oratory with a tremendous eloquence of its own...

...A revolution guided by a landowner who visited his sick workers with a bottle of Hahnemann pills in his hand was something no Latin American people, least of all the Mexicans, could have imagined...

...Here was a man genuinely loved by the people, who entered without fear or compromise the arena where gunpowder was the usual arbiter...

...Madero was an ingenuous and simple man...

...There was the book already printed, waiting for the author's father to give the green light for its publication...

...The new book by Stanley R. Ross, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nebraska, is an objective, well-documented and impartial biography which makes exciting reading not because the author tries to dramatize his subject, but because of the intrinsic interest of the documents themselves, and because the portraits of the leading personalities in the Mexican drama offer us a glimpse of the history of Latin America as a whole...

...Historians are disconcerted by this man who was so different from the caudillos of the Revolution...

...Madero's death following his imprisonment by the same Huerta who the very evening before had embraced him in a travesty of loyalty is like an etching by Goya, a miniature of Hell...

...A rising led by a crude and primitive soldier would have seemed a likely possibility...

...He came from a family of businessmen, bankers and landowners...

...He was the last person anyone would have expected to emerge in the role of a caudillo...

...But the most shocking thing of all is the spectacle of the celebrated Ambassador Wilson sending to Washington the kind of information that Huerta himself would have wished to see transmitted, taking a direct part in the goings-on behind the scene, threatening Madero with intervention, intriguing with the diplomatic corps, and implanting in the Mexican people a resentment that to this day is not entirely eradicated...

...He does not make Madero a god, nor does he dismiss him merely as an individual of mediocre abilities with an inclination toward mysticism...

...Everyone must have his say, mother, brothers, grandfather...

...This example of filial obedience, this acknowledgement of the right of family intervention which would be unthinkable in other social circumstances or in our modern era, this upbringing which held a youth back from making his own decisions, was to be reflected throughout the whole of Madero's career, and was one of the causes of his lack of assurance in decisive moments of the struggle...

...Victoriano Huerta, the soldier who betrays everyone, who murders Madero and Pino Suarez and at the moment of his sudden elevation to supremacy finds himself supported by the U.S...

...He fearlessly defied Porfirio Diaz, and displayed a power to sway the masses which few would have suspected he possessed...

...But Madero's story leaves no doubt as to the force of his passion for justice...

...The author has had the good fortune to be able to consult the archives pertaining to the principal actors in the drama, the family letters, public documents and newspapers of the era...

...General Bernardo Reyes, cultured, irresolute, ambitious, who returned from Europe with the illusion of becoming President and died riddled with bullets in the Plaza del Zocalo, in sight of the Viceregal Palace...

...There was more in Madero of faith than of passion, more of fervor than of combativeness...

...professor of sociology, Columbia University The transition from the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz to the Mexican Revolution was effected thanks to the appearance on the political scene of Francisco I. Madero, the son of a bourgeois family who has gone down in history as a prophet and an apostle...

...He heralded the new era, and assumed the leadership of his people in their struggle to regain their lost liberties...

...Ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson, the latter perhaps the best-realized character in the book...

...Rather, he lets the facts speak for themselves, giving us the personality of the man with all its limitations and all its power to evoke emotion...