Porfirio Diaz: Dictator of Mexico
by
[Lippincott, $5.00]
LONG residence in that country, mastery of its language, sympathetic contacts with all strata of its people, a wide and detailed examination of its incredible terrain, conspire to give to Mr. Carleton Beals the most authentic voice now speaking to us of Mexico and things Mexican. His recent book, Mexican Maze, in its very title betrays the baffled mind of even the expert student of our neighbor republic. One man had much to do with making Mexico the puzzle that it is.
That man was Porfirio Diaz, from 1876 to 1911 its ruler. Nominally he was its president (except from 1880 to 1884); really what Mr. Beals calls him, dictator. Many have written about Diaz. But there has been no valid life of the man. While he ruled he controlled or subsidized — or both — every printed utterance concerning him. Result, a series of worthless panegyrics. After he fell, the pendulum swung to the other extreme.
In his preface Mr. Beals disclaims for his biography the characterization of ‘academic.’ Properly, for it is meagrely documented, and it slights wide and important segments of Mexican history. Benito Juárez, the early neighbor and later leader of Diaz, gets virtually no consideration. During his life he was a far more towering figure than was his lieutenant. The author’s conception of Diaz is of a man of stone, ruling an age of iron. He even finds a suggestion in his name — porphyry.
The first half of the life of Diaz is so crowded with incident, with harebrained adventure, with daring, with battles, imprisonments, escapes, and sudden death, that were the authentic facts woven into a work of fiction they would be instantly scouted as incredible. A poor mestizo boy of the Mixtec Indian tribe (Oaxaca), the hero of these adventures received scanty schooling. But he climbed mountains, he swam, he hunted wild game, he became an expert mechanic, he rode horseback, and grew into a lithe and powerful man. To the end he carried himself erect, — as witness the photograph of him at eighty ready to sail into exile, — was an expert horseman, a swordsman, and a dead shot. In Europe, at eighty-one, he plunged one day clothed into the ocean and swam to the rescue of a drowning child.
First he opposed and was persecuted by Santa Anna. Later it was the clericals and the French. He was in those years honest, patriotic, incorruptible, brave, cruel, relentless. Victory won over the conservatives, and the French driven out, he suddenly began to burn with consuming ambition to rule. The story of his rise to power and his long hold upon it cannot he told here. Mr. Beals analyzes and pictures it, ruthlessly, as that rule itself was ruthless. He throws his events on the screen, with cut-backs, fade-outs, and the other devices of the cinema. His style is slashing, often careless, overly graphic, obscure, in the end wearisome. But the book, with its satisfying format, will be read, for it fills a hitherto unfilled gap.
G. B. WINTON