BarbarousMexico JOHN KENNETH TURNER

THE DIAZ'AMERLCAN PRESS CONSPIRCY 241
statements. Mr. Lewis' article was prepared so literally
at the last moment that, when it came, the magazine
had already been paged and the article had to be PI.it in
as an insertion, with special paging. A laughable
feature of the campaign was that, in introducing his
knights of the defense, the editor of the Cosmopolitan
moralized at length on the matter of permitting raw and
untried writers—meaning myself—to handle important
subjects, and named a list of proven and guaranteed-tobe-reliable
writers among whom was Mr. Alfred Henry
Lewis. But when Mr. Lewis came to write! I pray
that in all this book there is not one mistake one-half as
ridiculous as any of a dozen in Mr. Lewis' short article.
Mr. Lewis modestly remarked, near the start, that:
"Personally, I know as much of Mexico and Mexicans
as any." But the burden of his story was that my
writings were inspired by Standard Oil, which wanted
revenge on Diaz for having been "kicked out of Mexico."
Now how Mr. Lewis could have lived in the
United States during the previous few months and read
the newspapers without having learned of the oil war
in Mexico, a war in which at the very time the lines
were written, Standard Oil seemed on the point of
forcing its only competitor to sell out to it on unfavorable
terms, how Mr. Lewis could have failed to know
that Standard Oil owns millions of dollars worth of oil
lands and does a vast majority of the retail oil business
in Diaz-land. how lie could have been ignorant of the
fact that H. Clay Pierce, head of the Standard Oil corporation
in Mexico, is a director of the National Railways
of Mexico, the government merged lines, so-called,
and a close ally of President Diaz, is a little difficult to
understand. Personally. Mr. Lewis knows as much of
Mexico and Mexicans as any! Any—what?