New and Square Deal

"New and Square Deal"

(See front cover)

As Mexico prepared last week to inaugurate a new President her Government, with a momentous change of heart, was thanking its stars for President Roosevelt and Ambassador Josephus Daniels.

"Roosevelt owes his election largely to Catholics!" was the alarm sounded last year by Mexico City's independent daily El Universal Grafico. Its editor thought he smelt a Papist in charge of Roosevelt patronage. Belief that the President, impelled by the Church, would crack down on Mexico's counter-clerical government was so strong that the official daily National took time to mourn for "Calvin Coolidge, one of the highest representatives of the human race. . . . Under [his] administration Mexico became better understood. . . . He had the good judgment to send us Mr. Morrow."

When President Roosevelt had the good judgment to send them Mr. Daniels, Mexicans could see at first only that they were expected to receive the Yanqui* who was Secretary of the Navy when it bombarded Veracruz in 1914. Ambassador Daniels was called a "living insult" to Mexico--last year. Today the politicos of Mexico City can scarcely believe they ever were so dumb.

In Ambassador Daniels they have found the weightiest approver of Mexico's radical and anticlerical Six-Year Plan. He has called it roundly "a new deal and a square deal!" Moreover, to the joy of Mexican silver interests, President Roosevelt has raised the price of silver. He has also recognized the Soviet Union, considered by Mexicans the spearhead of all that is Godless.

Professor Raymond Moley returned this autumn from a two-hour conversation with General Plutarco Elias Calles, Chief of the National Revolution and "Mussolini of Mexico." In Today, considered President Roosevelt's mouthpiece by Mexicans, Professor Moley wrote: "It may be taken for granted that Calles will dominate affairs for years to come. . . . After generations of misrule, exploitation and revolution, the federation of 28 Mexican states is on the way toward recovery."

This to the Government of Mexico was as good as a small loan. Last week, sipping grapejuice and fizz-water, Mexican friends of Dry Ambassador Daniels toasted a new era beginning Dec. 1, 1934, with the inauguration of His Excellency General Lazaro Cardenas as the 45th President of the United States of Mexico. By an appropriate coincidence, grim General Cardenas stands with genial Ambassador Daniels for grape juice and Prohibition.

The new era is the Six-Year Plan: 1934-40. New President Cardenas, who must put punch into it, is the pure Indian and highly radical "Left Hand" of Chief Calles. General Abelardo Rodriguez, the outgoing President of Mexico, who this year launched the Six-Year Plan, was Chief Calles' rich, part Spanish and less radical "Right Hand."

Sphinx into Revolution, Back to Mexico from France last week "to settle down" went a little old lady whose presence rolled back the years. She was Senora Carmen Diaz, widow of detested Despot Porfirio Diaz. When she fled with him to Paris in 1911 the brilliant white Creole regime--distinctly patrician --which had reared Mexican culture to brittle heights crumpled in a blood bath of anarchy out of which spurted such gory names as Huerta, Carranza and Villa. Respectively they were an Indian general who, while quaffing flagons of cognac, butchered his way to power; a blue-spectacled and white-bearded bourgeois Dictator; and an inarticulate champion of the peasant masses whose obscure idealism found vent in tearing up the Government's railway tracks, shooting up trains and weltering in lust and blood. Out of the heroic mess which such men made of Mexico emerged two mighty figures, the bulky, one-armed rancher General Alvaro Obregon and the lantern-jawed ex-schoolteacher General Plutarco Elias Calles.

Obregon, the genial conservative of the National Revolution, was assassinated as he was about to be inaugurated President for a second term (TIME, July 30, 1928). General Calles, the dour, autocratic priest-baiter, pursues today the safe policy of eschewing a second Presidency, runs Mexico from his ranch at Cuernavaca, 40 miles from Mexico City. In 1929 with a revolution on his hands, Boss Calles stepped back into the Cabinet as Minister of War. In suppressing the Insurrectos no Mexican general was more useful than silent, ruthless Lazaro Cardenas, "The Sphinx" who is to become President this week. Calles, notorious for almost never letting fall a word of praise, has given the new President his highest encomium, calling him tersely a "brave chief."

Starting life as a printer's devil, Lazaro Cardenas became, at 14, a tax collector, found that too arduous and felt he had won his niche in life when he settled down as warden of a drowsy village jail. In 1913, when the hell-popping Revolution was three years old, sedentary jailing became intolerable. In patriotic disgust Jailor Cardenas one dark night released his only prisoner and together they "joined the Revolution."

Sixty to One. Seven years later, one day before he reached the age of 25, Lazaro Cardenas was gazetted a General of Division. As is the prerogative of Mexican generals, he asked some local merchants in the State of Veracruz for a "loan" of 20,000 pesos. They forked over the money and General Cardenas joined Obregon and Calles in their final Putsch. It succeeded so well that six months later General Cardenas was in a position to do handsome things. He sent an agent to the Veracruz money lenders. "But we cannot accept repayment from a great hero like General Cardenas!" they protested. "What he now condescends to regard as a loan we always regarded as a contribution to his pure and noble cause!" The agent telegraphed to Cardenas. Wired back the general: PAY THEM! Since then in Mexico his honesty has been a legend.

None disputes that while aiding Calles to suppress the abortive revolution of 1929,* Cardenas, having received 100,000 pesos from the Ministry of War for his first month's expenses, returned 93,000 pesos at the end of the month with the notation, "seven thousand were sufficient"--an unprecedented act of Mexican self-control.

As Governor of the State of Michoacan, General Cardenas slashed his own salary in half, trimmed bureaucratic expenses to the bone, squandered money on schools and peasant welfare and made life intolerable for priests. "I was a laborer and I am still a laborer," the new President is fond of saying. "At the age of 11 the death of my father left me the head of a family of nine. Yes, I know what it is to work." In 1930 forehanded Boss Calles started General Cardenas through the mill that grinds out Mexican Presidents. He became successively President (chairman) of the National Revolutionary Party, Secretary of the Interior, Secretary for War, after which he retired for six months to meet the Mexican Constitution's requirement that one must have been out of office to become a candidate for President. Last July the Party--which can no more lose an election than the German Nazis, the Italian Fascists or the Russian Communists--made General Cardenas the people's choice by a majority of 60 to 1 over his nearest opponent. Cut & dried, the election was of no significance, but the National Revolutionary Party Convention which nominated Cardenas had taken an epochal step. It adopted as the Party platform, under Boss Calles' direction, the Six-Year Plan. To this Candidate Cardenas added one plank of his own. A moderate drinker, he announced: "If elected President of the Republic I shall decree Prohibition!"

Six-Year Plan, In Mexico the rumor is more than a whisper that radical, priest-baiting Boss Calles is "really Fascist." For that matter Benito Mussolini is really radical. Each in his own way, Il Duce and El Jefe ("The Boss") are providing slow-tempo revolutions as alternatives to Bolshevism. Red-hot Mexican radicals grumble against General Calles because his farm has not been chopped up and given to the peons. Under Callismo or the Rule of Calles, the 12,000,000 peasants of Mexico have been split into 9,000,000 who still toil as peons for the great landowners and 3,000,000 who have now received land from the Government./-

This land distribution, for years the chief plank of National Revolutionary Party platforms, is the cornerstone of the Six-Year Plan. Flatly the Plan postulates that over the period 1934-40 Mexico's budget will be saddled with "an augmentation of 81%" to pay the cost of putting peasants on what the Government hopes will be more than subsistence farms, with irrigation. Candidly the Plan admits "a great part of Mexico's lands are rather poor. . . . The country's sparsity of population is the chief obstacle in its progress. . . . Mexico is constantly threatened by diseases characteristically tropical. . . . The National Revolutionary Party believes that athletic training and sports are . . . an ideal manner of combatting vices, especially that of alcohol. . . . Delinquency offers a singular problem in the Republic . . . particularly cases of crimes committed by abandoned children--already perverted or on the point of being so. . . ."

In the glaring spade-calling of such passages the Six-Year Plan may offend the squeamish for whom two-fisted Boss Calles cares nothing. In the words of General Cardenas, the Plan lays down "a comprehensive program of action for 1) return of land to the villagers; 2) stimulation of education;* 3) improvement of public health; 4) promotion of irrigation; 5) extension of roads and railways and building up of our merchant marine; 6) industrialization of Mexico under close government control."

To his last Plan-plank the radical new President attaches major importance. "'Our Six-Year Plan is to transform and replace Capitalism!" Candidate Cardenas shouted in speech after speech. From the Plan he quoted many a pledge such as this: "The supply of electric energy shall be reduced in price so as to enable industrial production to live through electrical energy and not for electrical energy!"

It remained for Professor Moley to pry out of taciturn Boss Calles the Chief's own definition of his new and square deal. "Trying to sum up," wrote Today's Moley, "I asked him whether it [Mexico] could not be described as a republic, in which authority is exercised by government through the will of the people and in which government, in its relation to the economic system, is a regulating force rather than a paternalistic owner, directing and partially controlling capitalistic enterprise. He agreed with this interpretation."

Mexicans agree that Calles is their Mussolini. They blame him for everything that has gone wrong in the last decade. But they know he has given them much peace and talked enough Revolution to kill the goose of entrenched Capital--outside the Calles circle. For better or worse Mexico has now slammed the door against "imperialist exploitation." Three big foreign banks have cleared out of Mexico this year. The upping of silver prices has eased matters by producing a local boom.

Perfectly delighted was Professor Moley with the quaint personification of gold employed by Boss Calles in explaining Mexico's "entire freedom from the gold standard." Said the general grimly: "We marched gold out, stood it up against the wall and executed it!" The silver peso, declares Professor Moley, "is practically pegged to the American dollar. Mexico is prepared to follow the dollar, wherever it goes."

Plan Results. Delayed at the start, like Russia's Five-Year Plan, Mexico's Six was launched by President Rodriguez, but queries to Mexican officials on results thus far brought the reply last week: "It will really get under way only under President Cardenas."

As published, the Plan promises 1,000 new schoolhouses to be completed this year. Just before leaving office, President Rodriguez announced that they had been built. Also promised by Dec. 31, are: 1) the loaning to peasants of 20,000,000 pesos, of which 6,500,000 had been loaned to 1,200 peasant organizations at 8% by last week; 2) the spending of 15% of the Federal Government's budgetary outgo for education and 3.4% for public health; 3) reform of the Labor Code to insert social insurance in addition to the minimum wage recently decreed throughout Mexico of 1 1/4 pesos (42-c-) per day. Of this sum the National Revolutionary Party is proud, considering that peons by the million have long grubbed for less. To enforce even a 42-c- minimum will be for President Cardenas a hero's task.

Intensely practical in the most important respect, Mexico's Six-Year Plan includes this pledge: "Place at the Army's disposal such training, such preparation, such necessary armaments for it to warrant, in case of necessity, those exalted concepts and that profound faith which our country has vested in our armed institution."

As the warrior President of a nation of warriors General Cardenas has named the son born to him last May after the last Aztec warrior Emperor of Mexico, famed Cuauhtemoc.

*Even deepest Southerners are Yankees to Mexicans who take little interest in the niceties of the U. S. Civil War.

*Not to be confused with the so-called National Revolution which is now no revolution at all but the Government of Mexico.

/- According to Professor Maurice Halperin of the University of Oklahoma who testily adds: "The new landed peasant is better off than the peon in only one respect: he can starve without working, but the peon has to work while he starves." In expropriating land from private estates the Government hands the irate landlord bonds proportionate to the taxes he actually paid. Since most landlords connived with the tax-gatherers and paid less than they should, they are now neatly hoist by their own tax-dodging.

* The education clause is the Plan's red rag to the pious, for it provides, "The primary school, in addition to excluding religious instructions, will provide truthful answers--scientific and rational--to every question not clear in the minds of students."

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