Great Day

The Americas

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"This is a great day," said the tall, dark, handsome man.

It was not a great day so far as the weather was concerned. The night before, Washington had had its worst blizzard since Jan. 28, 1922, when the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater fell in. It was not a great day for pomp and circumstance. No crowds, no band, only Acting Secretary of State Sumner Welles and heads of the Army, Navy and Marines, were at Union Station to greet the visitor from Mexico.

But it was a great day for the Americas. The man whom Mexico sent on a visit to the U.S.--her Foreign Minister--was in sober truth as great a statesman and as big a figure in hemisphere affairs as any to be found in Washington. Ezequiel Padilla was not only the man whose eloquence swayed the Rio Conference to support the United Nations; he was the symbol of the coming of age of the American republics.

A generation ago there could have been no real hemispheric cooperation, for the spirit of cooperation can exist only among equals. Today a hemisphere policy is a fact--although the U.S. is still the most potent American nation, economically and militarily--because such men as Mexico's Padilla have established their right to equality at the conference table. Today that policy is a fact because such men as Mexico's Padilla have made it so.

American Man. Though Ezequiel Padilla came to Washington--so far as he or the State Department would admit--on no greater mission than to perfect the details of Mexican-U.S. cooperation, it was high time that the U.S. paid heed to even the routine comings & goings of such a man. In Brazil--which like the U.S. is not a Spanish-speaking country--Padilla is already known. Before he left there last January, samba bands dedicated songs to him. Mobs cheered him in the streets. Women tossed orchids to him. Some admirers even talked of him as "The American Man of the Future."

He has much right to the title. As he arrived in Washington, a tall, strapping figure in a blue suit, white shirt, blue necktie and grey homburg hat, he could have passed for an exceptionally handsome and well-dressed citizen of the U.S., or any other American republic. But he is something of which the U.S. knows little: a cultured man of the world who is almost entirely of Indian blood, a man who, on the one hand, was educated at the Sorbonne; on the other, has ridden through Mexico's barren hills with Pancho Villa's guerrillas.

Out of Mexico. More such men will doubtless come out of Mexico to play a part in the hemispheric symphony whose importance the U.S. belatedly realized. More such men will come, because Mexico is the place--all outdated U.S. notions to the contrary--where such men are possible.

Ezequiel Padilla, as Secretary of Public Education from 1929 to 1930, helped to build Mexico's modern school system. He himself was born, the son of a local lawyer, in a mountain village in Guerrero, over the mountain ranges southwest of the capital. When his father died, his mother taught school so that he could have an education. He won a village scholarship to go to a state high school, a state scholarship to go to the University of Mexico, a Government scholarship for two years at the Sorbonne. He got his education in Mexico at the time when education was very hard to get. He is a living monument to the fact that the right to an education--which the U.S. has long taken for granted--is in Mexico a new and highly prized possession. When Ezequiel Padilla returned home from the Sorbonne in 1914, Mexico was still seething from the revolution which overthrew the 30-year dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz--a revolution which was temporarily balked of its gains by the assassination of Francisco Madero, who led it.

As a common soldier, Padilla joined bush-whiskered Emiliano Zapata, a tenant farmer whose legions of peon generals spread terror among the owners of great haciendas. One of the few incorruptible revolutionists, Zapata believed genuinely in the social revolution. All Mexicans remember his motto: "Man of the South, it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees."

At that period Zapata, the wild-riding Pancho Villa and Venustiano Carranza were all carrying the agrarian revolt toward Mexico City. Padilla was "drafted" as a secretary to one of Villa's generals. In his incongruous stiff collar and city clothes, he joined the Villistas. Forced to flee in 1916, he went first to Cuba, then to Manhattan, which he reached penniless.

In New York he studied when he could at Columbia University, lived in the slums. From his sojourn he learned that Americans are "strong in business and materialistically inclined," but when he became ill in a dismal New York boardinghouse he also found that "the masses of the U.S. are more sensitive to the feeling of justice than the masses of any other country, and American democracy is the best democracy in the world."

After five years as an expatriate, Padilla returned home, became a deputy from Guerrero, Secretary of Public Education, then Minister Plenipotentiary to Italy and Hungary. He was a successful lawyer as well as a successful politician. (When he was appointed Foreign Minister in 1940 he registered his personal wealth--as the law requires--as $105,000.) His wife by his second marriage comes from a wealthy family. His home is at 84 Avenida Jalisco near the suburban heights of Chapultepec Park. He is today, not only a statesman, but a man of the world, popular in Mexican society.

The transformation of Padilla from a revolutionist in the hills to a man of property is a parallel to the transformation of Mexico. As a young politician, Padilla well remembered that the U.S. in 1846 fought Mexico over the uncertain Texas boundary and ended by taking a third of Mexico's territory, that it got another piece (by purchase) in 1853, that in 1914 it landed Marines at Vera Cruz, that it sent Black Jack Pershing into Mexico to chase Villa in 1916--all humiliations imposed by a big neighbor on a smaller one.

Mexico still has not forgotten these things. It still does not like or wholly trust the U.S. But Mexican feeling toward the U.S. is very like that of the U.S. toward Britain. Although a large part of the U.S. neither likes nor wholly trusts Britain, the U.S. likes a great deal that Britain stands for at the present time, recognizes that mutual interests draw the two nations together, that closer and better relations between the two countries would be a good thing.

It was very lucky for the U.S. that a man who had a similar feeling about the U.S. was made Minister of Foreign Affairs when General Manuel Avila Camacho became President of Mexico 16 months ago. Today President Avila Camacho is knitting Mexico together. His strong and stable Government is attracted to the U.S.

Part of the reason for its bent is Ezequiel Padilla's devotion to the cause of democracy. Mexico as a whole yearns toward democracy, but in Padilla that yearning is articulate. That is why he believes that Mexico must bend all its efforts to see that the U.S. does not lose.

In Washington Padilla named six forms of aid which Mexico is prepared to offer:

>Ousting Axis diplomats and potential fifth columnists.

>Controlling the movements of Axis nationals.

>Controlling Axis economic and financial interests.

>Keeping strategic materials out of Axis hands.

>Exchange of information about anything that affects the security of the continent.

>Opening its ports to the warships of all the American republics (of which four-fifths belong to the U.S.).

Today Ezequiel Padilla is quite sure that, in backing the U.S., Latin America is not backing the wrong horse. His reason is simple. The totalitarian powers go forth to conquer--by force or by economic penetration and threats of force. By the nature of their method, every new triumph makes them new enemies. The strength of the democracies is that they make friends. And in the long run that cumulative strength will triumph over their enemies' cumulative weakness. Said Padilla this week in Washington:

"The United States of America has only to fear the oceans. In the lands to the north and south, this great country has only friends."

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