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ABSTRACT
The network considered here consisted of a journalist and a cartoonist based in New York and a young Mexican artist, respectively Benjamin De Casseres, Carlo de Fornaro, and Marius de Zayas. They worked together in 1906 on a newspaper in Mexico City, forging a friendship based on their opposition to the corrupt and dying regime of Porfirio Díaz. Back in New York the network survived, at least in the short term, while De Casseres and de Zayas defended and supported their friend Fornaro as he was prosecuted by Díaz’s cronies with the connivance of the US state.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. I’d like to acknowledge the work of Alan Knight, which has taught me more than I ever realised I wanted to know about the Mexican Revolution; of Claudio Lomnitz, on the transcultural dimensions of this period; and of Antonio Saborit, on Marius de Zayas in general, and on Carlo de Fornaro in Mexico. The relevant works appear in the References. Thanks too for helpful comments on an earlier draft to William Booth and Jak Peake; and to Antonio Saborit for patiently answering questions and providing material. On the general course of the Revolution, see Knight (Citation1990).
2. Carlo de Fornaro sometimes appears as di Fornaro, which seems more likely given his Italian background, but on most of his books he is de Fornaro. Fornaro employed a clipping service, the fruits of which are on microfilm in the New York Public Library. Where originals haven’t been located, references to this material take the form of Fornaro, Clippings.
3. To be precise: ‘self-accusations, alcohol, debts, love-frenzy and suicidal thoughts’ (De Casseres Citation1931, 70).
4. On de Zayas in Mexico, see Aurrecoechea (Citation2009), Moyssén (Citation1983), and Saborit (Citation2010b); in New York, Saborit (Citation1997, 2007, and Citation2010a), Kroiz (Citation2012); and more generally, Hyland (Citation1981), Reaves (Citation2009), and Saborit (Citation2009).
5. El Diario is available digitally at the Hemeroteca Nacional Digital de México: http://www.hndm.unam.mx/index.php/es/, although unfortunately this doesn’t include the Sunday supplement that Fornaro edited.
6. Politically, De Casseres was—if anything—an anarchist. His eight Mexican months leave little trace in his voluminous writings, published and unpublished, beyond a touristic account of Mexico City: ‘The City of Mexico’ (Citation1909a). The only recent attention to De Casseres is Stratton (Citation2013).
7. The first edition carried a date of 1908 but didn’t appear until January 1909.
8. On De Casseres helping with the writing, see Fornaro (Citation1924).
9. Paz’s account of his interview with Díaz is in Baerlein (Citation1913), 69–85. Here Díaz calls the interview ‘manufactured’ (confeccionado) (72). For other views on the Creelman interview, see Lomnitz (Citation2009) and Schell (Citation2001), 149–157. Limantour later wrote that the interview came as a surprise to members of the government (Citation1965, 154), lending credence to Fornaro’s speculation. Schell argues that US financial and political interests were combining to ease Díaz aside and ensure a smooth transition. A visit by Elihu Root would soften him up; followed by the Creelman interview. A translation was prepared and read to Díaz, who approved it for publication. That still leaves open the possibility that, to ensure that Díaz said what his US supporters wanted him to say, Creelman had simply fabricated the interview, or at least elaborated it. El Imparcial published it on 28 February 1908, before it appeared in the USA.
10. Juan Sánchez Azcona (1876–1938) later became one of the founding members of the Partido Democrático, offering tempered support to Díaz in the 1910 elections, but he then defected to work with Madero.
11. Two anonymous denunciations of working conditions in Mexico had been published in the ISR in May 1905 and February 1906: see La Botz (Citation2010). W. Adolf Roberts’s attack on Mexico’s genocidal policy towards the Yaqui appeared in San Francisco in August Citation1908.
12. The New York Call gave the most supportive coverage to Fornaro’s campaign, for which he thanked them, noting that they’d done so despite his declaration that he was not a socialist (Citation1909e).
13. See de Zayas’s ‘The Easiest Way’ (Citation1909). The ‘easiest way’ to promotion being through beating up workers.
14. If the drawing represents an actual meeting, then it probably refers to—and was possibly drawn during—the period from January to October 1909, when all four were in New York. Fornaro was in prison from November 1909. The only other possibility would be just after Fornaro was released in October 1910, just before Marius de Zayas left for Europe. Certainly in the months after he was released, Fornaro felt he was being followed and never slept in the same bed two nights running (‘Harried’ Citation1910).
15. Oddly enough Turner had been in New York in January 1909, just as Fornaro returned from Mexico, talking to the editors of The American Magazine, Ray Stannard Baker and Ida Tarbell. They sent him back to Mexico to investigate the upper classes of the capital city, which was why his exposé didn’t begin appearing until October. (After three of his twelve articles appeared, The American Magazine ceased publishing them: the remainder appeared in Appeal to Reason before the full book publication in Citation1910.) The ISR had stepped up its campaign through the three articles by Turner’s socialist comrade, John Murray, also based on his travels in Mexico, published in March to May 1909.
16. Further support came in Wilshire’s Magazine: ‘Mexico Menaces Liberty’ (Citation1909).
17. See the account in de Zayas Enríquez (Citation1911, 167).
18. In San Antonio Madero met Juan Sánchez Azcona, who had been forced to flee Mexico in June 1910 (‘Mexican Troops Seeking Madero’ Citation1910). In January 1911 Sánchez Azcona had to defeat an attempt by the Mexican government to extradite him on charges of obtaining money under false pretences. He argued that the charges were in fact politically motivated (‘Azcona Goes Free’). Sánchez Ancona became Madero’s private secretary.
19. Fornaro had the last word in the dispute (Citation1911c).
20. De Zayas Enríquez had written a blistering denunciation of Díaz in the days after his fall (Citation1911), but he had no time for Madero and quickly became a spokesman for his successor, Victoriano Huerta (Citation1914).
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Peter Hulme
Peter Hulme is Emeritus Professor in Literature at the University of Essex. His book, The Dinner at Gonfarone’s: Salomón de la Selva and His Pan-American Project in Nueva York, 1915-1919 will be published by Liverpool University Press in April 2019.