We know also that a committee of oil men and bankers held a series of conferences with the State Department in July regarding the Mexican situation and were reported as "gratified with the outcome of the conferences." We know that thereafter the formation of the Mexico International Corporation was announced, a financial merger of all the great Mexican interests—just as the National Association for the Protection of American Rights in Mexico is a publicity merger of the same interests; that there was immediately a great activity in all kinds of Mexican securities; that unauthorized reports continually appeared in print, to the effect that an understanding had been reached in Paris looking toward the "clean-up" of Mexico; that within that period the greatest of our interventionist drives was launched.
Were any further confirmation needed of Administration participation in the intervention conspiracy it would be found in its active cooperation in the propaganda itself. When the organization of the National Association for the Protection of American Rights in Mexico was under consideration, a committee of its promo'ters conferred with the State Department. Acting Secretary Polk "both welcomed and approved of" the plan, according to a written report of the committee.
Testifying to this effect, C. H. Boynton, continued:
"Later a larger committee came to Washington and presented the plans of the organization to Mr. Fletcher. . . . From that day on the bulletins of the Association and a knowledge of its activities have gone to officials of the State Department, and up to this minute I have never received from any government official or from any one who was in a position of authority. . . the slightest intimation that there has been a thing done that was. . . objectionable to the Administration."
The full meaning of this can be appreciated only by an examination of the propaganda of the National Association for the Protection of American Rights in Mexico.
Further, the State Department actively assisted by becoming, as in years past, a source of many of the inflammatory, exaggerated, and frequently untrue "news" stories which went the rounds of the press. It assisted by issuing passports freely to writers devoted to the intervention propaganda, while withholding passports to known anti-interventionists.
The lying Altendorf revelations reached the public only through the cooperation of the War Department. Altendorf was
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