MEXICO: REAL HOPE FOR DEMOCRACY
Rodell, Katherine
Mexico: Real Hope For Democracy THE WIND THAT SWEPT MEXICO: The History of the Mexican Revolution 1910-1942. Text by Anita Brenner, 184 Historical Photographs assembled by George R. Leighton....
...Padilla's profoundly democratic and at the same time international views should be the Foreign Minister of Mexico is a witness to the mental climate created by the Revolution...
...That he should believe in the sincerity and good faith of the United States, and say so although such views are not universally popular in his own country, is a tribute that I sometimes think we hardly deserve...
...It was Dr...
...The rest of the Latin American countries, as Miss Brenner emphasizes, tend to regard our relations with Mexico as a test of our intentions toward them...
...I am afraid, however, that his arguments have fallen on barren ground in certain policy-making sections of Washington...
...How well we understand the hopes and aspirations of the Mexican Revolution, how we use our power and wealth and influence in aiding it or attempting to crush it, will determine whether the wind that swept Mexico becomes again a gale which may sweep over all Latin America, threatening much more than investments...
...Mexico is not only the land mass which connects us with the rest of Latin America...
...But the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910, continues to this day and will go on...
...It is the past," says Miss Brenner, "and it is a set of beliefs...
...The people of Latin America, the Mexicans included, are by no means sure that they can trust us even yet...
...Miss Brenner's prose is simple, beautiful, and miraculously compact, yet full of warmth and humor...
...A hundred pages of text, and 184 magnificent photographs assembled by George Leighton, tell Mexico's terrible and inspiring story in unforgettable terms...
...Not to listen to his arguments, based on complete appreciation of Latin American realities and opinion, would be both ungracious and downright idiotic...
...lor a piece of land...
...2.50...
...That a man of Mr...
...All we know is what we read in the papers—about the oil expropriations, about the burning of churches, about a Pancho Villa who has become confused with Wallace Beery...
...This is what we say we are fighting for all over the world today...
...In spite of the compression, the focus is never blurred or sentimental...
...Mexico is not yet a democracy (and who are we to talk...
...Reviewed by Katherine Rodell THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE in this hemisphere (and not all of them Mexicans by any means) who will tell you that Mexico, and not the United States, is the real hope for democracy in the Western world...
...for the recognition by government and society that the humblest peon has the right to work as a man and not as a serf, to worship or not as he pleases, to send his children to school, to vote as he chooses for a government that he can trust to cherish his economic and political freedom...
...Hence when the Foreign Minister of Mexico speaks out for closer cooperation between the United States and Latin America, it has enormous moral effect throughout the southern continent...
...In Mexico the Revolution is fought on many fronts, day after day...
...but the Mexicans know what they want and are prepared to go on fighting for it...
...Ziff-Davis...
...The only way to answer unanswerable arguments is to ignore them...
...Here is the danger which the United States must understand and meet...
...I should like to do with it what Alexander Woollcott once wanted to do with another book—fill a wheelbarrow (or preferably a freight car) with copies of it and distribute them up and down the country...
...But Mexico, perhaps because of her 30 years of revolution, seems to understand the implications considerably better than we do...
...These two books, one by an American woman, the other by the Foreign Minister of Mexico, do much to give a solid basis to that contention...
...His main thesis is that a "guarantee of economic security must be the basis for inter-American solidarity," and he argues with unanswerable common sense for a program of raising the standards of living of the Latin American masses as a means of increasing their purchasing power...
...It is a fact that on the curve of Mexican-United States relations, the periods of greatest friendship between the nations are the periods of marked governmental conservatism in Mexico...
...For Mexico, right here in our own back yard, has been fighting for 30 years, and continues to fight, the war that has exploded into a global conflict...
...The Mexican policy of receiving the Spanish Loyalist refugees whom we will not admit is one example...
...And when the Revolution slows up, and the Administration moves more and more to the right, as the present one is doing, the people of Mexico become uneasy...
...and at least in the case of the Bolivian tin miners that has been our policy to date...
...The expropriation of the foreign oil properties, so consistently distorted by the press of this country, is another...
...His simply written and- deeply thoughtful book, Free Men of America, deserves to accomplish as much on the side of true inter-American cooperation...
...Most of us here in the United States have only a vague idea of the Mexican Revolution...
...FREE MEN OF AMERICA, by Ezequiel Padilla...
...3.75...
...Padilla's eloquence which enabled the United States, at the Rio conference of 1942, to obtain the practically unanimous support of the Latin American countries...
...Harper & Brothers...
...The Wind that Swept Mexico is the finest book I have ever read on any Latin American subject...
...it is also a political and, if you will, spiritual bridge...
...It is a war for a minimum of human rights and human decency...
...It is a very model of foreign interpretation, for its foundation is the solid rock of deep knowledge of Mexico—a rock veined with the pure gold of understanding and sympathy for the Mexican people...
...That is the lesson learned in their bloody past, and that is the hope of their future...
Vol. 7 • October 1943 • No. 43
