Under the photo there is the following inscription:
"General Emiliano Zapata, Mexico's apostle of terrorism, and recently officially reported to have been killed by Carranza's troops, was a former plantation stirrup-boy, who, at the zenith of his rebel power, gained temporary control of Mexico City. Twice since 1910, when he began his revolt in Morelos, he and his Indian followers took brief possession of the capital. For nine years he ravaged southern Mexico, co-operating for a time in 1914 with Villa. He was the most implacable enemy of peaceful reconstruction through several regimes. Poor, uneducated, primitive but magnetic, Zapata was the leader of Mexico's half-savage Indians, in whose power he planned to place control of the country. Toward the last he was little more than a hunted renegade, and is reported to have been killed by strategy of troops operating under General Pablo Gonzales in Morelos."
The wood-cut of Zapata appears in connection with an article by Jack Neville, part of which is hereby quoted:
"Cuautla, Mexico, April 23.--The death of Emiliano Zapata removes Mexico's most ruthless destructionist and implacable enemy of peaceful regeneration.
"Now, on the wreckage of his empire, where the rebel chief laughed at civilization and played his huge joke on 100,000 confiding workers, General Pablo Gonzalez is placing firm underpinning for freedom and progress.
"Here in the world's richest garden spot, where exploited humanity has been kept poorest, and where Zapata 'gave' his half-savage followers the land only to commandeer all crops--here the peon is for the first time in centuries enjoying the fruits of his toil and supporting instead of hating government."
The next day, April 25th, 1919. "The Call" published another article of Neville's under the title, "Mexican Peons Rejoice in First Taste of Freedom." Only a small part of the article will be quoted:
"I stepped into a pulque-reeking cantina. A group of former Zapatistas invited me to join them--to have a glass. It was the open sesame. They chattered like children. Presented me with cornhusk cigarettes; told me tales of Zapata; his perfidy, his ruthlessness.
"'Not more than 800 rebels were yet in arms when Zapata was killed,' they said. These, they explained, had ousted Zapata from leadership because he had refused to divide the loot with them. They told me of Zapata's former army of 30,000, blood-letting surianos and ayetes (unarmed men carrying ropes) who formed the rear guard to carry away the loot....
"Alongside the old church, where the patriot Morelos had more than a century ago made a successful stand against the Spaniards, a train was disgorging families returning to their homes, now that Zapata was gone.
"A little man stepped out--the bishop of Cuernavaca, coming back to his diocese under the conciliatory program of Don Pablo after eight years' exile.
"I rode into the country with Colonel Sanchez Neira and talked with the workmen in the field. They crowded round to pose for pictures.
"They laughed and sang while they worked.
"We rode to the headquarters of one of the 2,000,000 acre haciendas. The gigantic sugar mill, formerly worth more than $1,000,000, was a shell filled with debris. We rode to another mill. The same! Thirty-seven of them. All ruined, wrecked wantonly under Zapata's rule.
"In the village of Youtopec I drank lemonade with Gen. Pilar Sanchez, while Zapata's captured band serenaded us. We rode down the Inter-Oceanic railway and viewed the right of way, strewn with wrecked rolling stock. We saw utterly demolished villages, the work of Zapata and communism.
"I saw a bridge where train after train was dynamited, where Zapatistas had ruthlessly executed more than three thousand peaceful men, women and children passengers."
From these articles published in "The Call," the great Socialist paper of New York City, it seems that the poverty-stricken, perpetually begging staff of Hillquit's paper does not relish the Chicago brand of Socialism described so beautifully in the "International Socialist Review." The more "talented" and "progressive" "evolutionists" near the shore of Lake Michigan have many a year's hard work to perform before they can sufficiently develop the brains of their backward chums and brethren on the lower east side of New York City. It takes editors like Kerr, Haywood, the Marcys and all the Bohns on the staff of the "Review" to reveal the true glories of Socialism.
As recently as February, 1920, it could safely be said that the principles of Socialism had never been put into full operation in any country. The nearest approach to a truly Socialist state is Bolshevist Russia, that strife-ridden land of crime and bloodshed. The penalty paid for the foolish attempt has already been a dreadful one. How much greater it will be, as time goes on, nobody knows. The Socialists of America have hailed Russian Bolshevism as true Socialism; but, no doubt, as the evil consequences of Lenine's Red rule become more widely known and more universally feared, or if, even on the low ground of materialistic economics, the attempt fails, the slippery Marxians will try to prove that Bolshevism was not Socialism after all, since the Russian government was a dictatorship, with the principles of Socialism never fully applied.
We should add that even if the Russian dictatorship succeeds in realizing the mere economic success which seems to be the height of its ambition, this will not prove to be an argument in favor of Socialism, but a terrible indictment of it. For the road the dictatorship is now taking, which indeed offers it the only possible hope of even a passable economic success, is the barren, heartless, unspiritual, materialistic tyranny of machine-like "industrialism" which the I. W. W. represents. In the two chapters immediately following, VIII and IX, the reader will learn something of the loss of all moral standards and the cruel, lawless violence to which the atheistic, anarchistic materialism of I. W. W.'ism leads; and will also find that Bolshevism is already committed to this system as the only economic solution of its bloody experiment.
Is it worth while? In Chapters X and XI the reader will face some of the appalling details of the blood, violence and despair which have been tyrannically imposed upon Russia's groaning millions for the sake of an experiment which leads to nothing but the pagan barbarism of I. W. W.'ism. Is it worth while? Even if at last they are able to produce and distribute enough to clothe and feed themselves, can human beings be happy in such a state? Is this the dream of the dreamer come true?