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.