Eight
Mexican Statistics, Maps, Patents, and Governance
Above all, nineteenth-century great exhibitions were about science. Science was both the midwife and the firstborn child of modern times, and it would be hopeless to attempt to present a modern appearance without a scientific outfit. The Enlightenment had brought about the possibility of uniting, as Condorcet proclaimed in 1793, all sciences and arts to achieve "an equilibrium of knowledge, industry, and reason necessary for the progress and the happiness of the human species."[1] Science was considered universal—a form of knowledge that knew no national context. Nonetheless, science was produced in different and competing national settings,[2] with a paranational consensus about the effectiveness of scientific knowledge. That modern consensus was tightly linked to nationalism. What in modern times was essentially new was not the existence of nationalist sciences but the insurmountable requirement of conceiving nations through science.
French universal exhibitions were an extravaganza of science that proved not only France's modernity but also its national existence. They proved that France was more than the abstract land of freedom and fraternity; it was also the concrete reality of a national entity captured in maps, statistics, and numerous socioeconomic reports. As historian Claude Nicolet has demonstrated, in order for the republican ideology to be reported to other republics (that is, Germany, England, and the United States), it had to "provide something more: the confirmed conviction of being a form of political organization that not only favor [ed] but, to a great extent, depend [ed] on science."[3]
Mexico's displays in world's fairs echoed to the last detail the dictates of the era of science and nationalism. Accordingly, in 1889 the Aztec Palace housed countless statistics and studies on medicine, administration, chemistry, physics, criminology, electricity, mineralogy, and so forth. Several scientific societies (including the Sociedad Antonio Alzate, the Sociedad de
Geografía y Estadística, the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural, the Sociedad de Ingenieros y Arquitectos, the Observatorio Astronómico Central, the Museo Nacional, the Escuela de Bellas Artes, the Escuela Nacional de Ingenieros, the Escuela Nacional de Medicina, and the Escuela Nacional de Jurisprudencia) exhibited their works in 1889, as they did in Chicago 1893 or Paris 1900.
By 1889 Mexico's political and cultural life had experienced a scientific turn,[4] which echoed the international Western trend of framing all knowledge in a scientific format. That Mexicans shared that format is evident. What is important to determine is how the demanding and intricate construction of scientific explanations (in all realms of the national life) occurred. Here lies a clue for understanding both Mexico's particular version of modern times and modernity's own coming into being.
During the Porfiriato, Mexico's urban elites created a scientific milieu that included the concept of scientific politics, the terminology of which was endlessly repeated in specialized writings, in political speeches, and in literary pieces. With the consolidation of power in the hands of the Científico group, the country's development could only be dealt with through scientific explanations. Accordingly, in 1901 José Yves Limantour, the Científico par excellence, observed: "Science has just put at our disposal the driving force which we were so lacking." The nation could now be completed.[5]
For Mexico's technocrats, therefore, to have a presence in world's fairs constituted a great opportunity both to display the progress the country had achieved and to learn about advancements in the unstoppable course of Western progress. For the wizards of progress science was indeed a two-way street: Mexico had to look scientific, and it had to look for science. Consequently, "to make Mexico known in Europe" and "to make Europe known in Mexico"[6] were the explicit goals of the Mexican team in the 1889 Paris fair: more specifically, to "make our political and social organization known in all its principal forms and with all the unique circumstances that could interest especially immigrants, be they capitalist or worker, permitting them to judge the rights that they can enjoy in this country, the franchise and guarantees granted to them, the public health and security, the criminality, etc."[7] To accomplish such a goal, the exhibition team arranged its Parisian performance simultaneously as a demonstration of Mexico's modernity and natural abundance and as a call for immigration and investment. What was created, thus, was both a show of symbols and a socioeconomic report.[8]
For the latter, the goal was crystal clear: to convince Europeans of Mexico's possibilities for investment and advantages for migration. Nonetheless, the goals of the scientists who undertook this task went beyond the pragmatic objectives of the Mexican government. They had their own scientific agenda—to develop their areas of expertise.
In world's fairs, therefore, it is possible to see how Mexicans commanded
the language of science in what were the most important scientific events of the century. The significance of world's fairs in the development of science in Mexico, if evident, is still to be historically pondered. Indeed, Mexico's presence at world's fairs accelerated the processes that had been taking place quietly in Mexican laboratories, scientific associations, and universities. Mexican attendance fostered publications, created new institutions, and sponsored scholarship and scholarly congresses. For instance, in 1889, thanks to the suggestion of a Mexican chemist who was sent to Paris to study laboratories and to participate in international congresses, the laboratory of the Instituto Médico Nacional was conceived. The first general medical geography of the country was published for display in 1889. The first sketch of a national map was synthesized to be sent to Paris. Textile statistics were gathered and exhibited at the 1893 Chicago Columbian exhibition, and general agricultural statistics were prepared for the 1900 Paris fair.
Mexico's scientific image in world's fairs tells us a great deal. In the first place, through these displays the specific status of Mexican science is disclosed at a particular moment in time. Science was difficult to improvise, so scientific formality required a background of laborious and long hours of thinking, researching, and writing throughout Mexico's history. Second, in world's fairs we are able to observe how the profile of Mexican science was reshaped by the inherently trendy nature of professional modern science. That is, in universal exhibitions the particular stage of science in Mexico was remodeled in order to suit particular scientific criteria and developments, thus allowing the historian to see both the new profile of Mexican science and the way in which it was reshaped. Finally, in Mexico's scientific image in world fairs we are able to ponder the width of the scientific gap between Mexico and the mainstream Western nations.
With this in mind, in this chapter and the next one I examine Mexico's scientific exhibition at world's fairs, once again taking as the pivot of analysis the 1889 Paris fair. The larger objective is to analyze Mexico's proficiency in the lingua franca of late-nineteenth-century Europe: science in its diverse forms.
Numbering and Mapping
In Mexico, as in any other modern state, concrete notions of society and state came into being through numbers. Statistics became the technology of ruling and the foundation of late-nineteenth-century scientific politics.[9] The Paris exposition of 1889 was, of course, a fiesta of numbers, because since the London Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851 statistics had been a fundamental part of the picture of the modern world.[10] In the 1889 fair, every area of display included statistics: hygiene, criminology, agricultural production, industrial production, anthropology, social economy, geography, sanitation,
and so forth. Even the exposition itself had a statistical account in the ninth volume of Alfred Picard's report.[11]
From the 1770s to the 1840s the science of statistics experienced its golden age, from the statistics produced by the early postrevolutionary regimes to the massive production of numbers by the Napoleonic empire.[12] Deriving first from astronomy and geodesy and later from biology and physics, statistics had been a common ground of scientific expression that gradually was applied to the social realm, despite, for instance, the influential opposition of Comte's positivism.[13] By 1889 the idea of mere descriptive social physics based in numbers was already transformed into the deterministic notion of scientific statistics. That is, by the 1880s statistics were defined in French as "the profound knowledge of the specific and comparative situation of states," or better yet, "statistics is history resting, history is statistics in motion."[14]
In Mexico, as in France, statistics were first associated with the geodesical and geographical sciences but gradually became the expression of the state's actuality and actions. As was the case in France, Mexican statistics were not an inherent component of positivistic science. On the contrary, statistics in Mexico also suffered a transformation from mere descriptive reports to deterministic law; and, as in France, Mexican orthodox positivists rejected statistics as an accurate form of scientific knowledge. For instance, in 1857 Jesús Hermosa observed in one of the first statistical guidebooks of Mexico that statistics was not an exact science but was one "of the fundamentals of politics."[15] However, by 1880 Emiliano Busto, a statistician and a member of the wizards of progress, defined statistics as "the profound understanding of society"; a science that had "figures as its language," which "gives [society] a precise and assured character, as with the exact sciences."[16]
Busto's conviction epitomized the Científico consensus that had equipped statistics with a deterministic twist. This determinism was not a natural and harmonious result but an intellectual outcome determined by international and domestic needs. In fact, the orthodox Comtian positivists were inclined to repudiate statistical determinism as a form of positivist explanation of social phenomena. Therefore, as late as 1902 the prominent positivist Agustín Aragón considered that those who used statistics without philosophy were merely ignorant.[17]
According to Antonio Peñafiel, who in addition to being an archaeologist and historian was one of the main producers of statistics in the second part of the nineteenth century, Mexico's statistics went back to pre-Hispanic times. Following his indigenist bias, Peñafiel believed that statistics in Mexico began with the Chichimeca ruler Nepaltzin, who ordered that the members of his tribe be counted when the valley of Mexico had been reached. He was, Peñafiel claimed, "the first statistician, if by this word one means a ruler who makes good use, like him, of numbers, for the benefit of his subjects and well-being of those he ruled."[18] Nonetheless, Peñafiel affirmed that
modern statistics in fact began in Mexico with the works of Alexander von Humboldt. These efforts were later developed by the Instituto Geográfico (1833-1838), and by the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística.[19] However, as late as 1893 the Mexican economist Carlos Diaz Dufoo affirmed (in a book published for the 1893 Chicago world's fair) that the science of statistics was still only beginning in Mexico.[20]
Following the construction of a social physics based on statistical laws, as affirmed by the most famous statistician of the first part of the nineteenth century, Adolphe Quetelet,[21] various statisticians emerged in Mexico, such as Antonio Peñafiel, and flourished during the Porfirian peace.[22] By 1882, thanks to the influence of Antonio Garcia Cubas and Emiliano Busto, Minister Carlos Pacheco created the Dirección General de Estadística, which was administered by Peñafiel.[23] By the 1890s the demographic, criminal, sanitary, geodesical, geographical, and administrative aspects of Mexico were all addressed statistically. For the 1889 Paris fair, statistics on education, crime, and health, as well as graphic explanations of the Mexican political and administrative legal framework, were prepared.[24] Therefore, as part of the exhibit of the agriculture group, its director, Pedro J. Senties, undertook an intricate and massive research project. He requested data from the state governments regarding climates, altitudes, directions and speeds of winds, rainfall totals, and other technical information. He also inquired about the characteristics of soils as well as the various types of agricultural products.
Clearly this investigation aspired to present a comprehensive view of the state of Mexican agriculture. Toward that end, statistics were also compiled on salaries for machinery workers and day laborers and on prices of the haciendas and ranchos, together with pictures or photographs of the rural buildings, livestock, tools and feeding equipment. Much of this information was concentrated in tables that contained data on name, price, size, and location of ranchos and haciendas; salaries paid to men, women, and children; machinery used; amount of land under irrigation; and types of fertilizers utilized. However, the task of compiling these statistics was not finished until the 1900 Paris world's fair. The result was a rich source of information that deserves to be included in studies of Mexican agriculture, although it is important to keep in mind its main purpose: to attract foreign investment and immigration by creating an image of a promising modern nation. Thus salaries seem exaggeratedly low in the complete compilation of 1900, and the good conditions on haciendas are perhaps exaggerated.[25] The demand for this type of statistics grew constantly, making it necessary for the Mexican government to undertake more statistical works for future displays.[26]
International investors and observers assessed Mexican potential through agricultural statistics and maps, which constituted universal forms of presentation for modern nations. Argentina presented two comprehensive statistical studies whose only difference from those of Mexico was that instead
of referring to races, the Argentine study talked about nationalities (that is, Spaniards, Italians, Chinese, and so forth).[27] The Franco-Brazilian commission hired a well-known French economist, E. Levasseur (who, as we saw in chapter 3, was hired by Mexico in 1900), to produce Brazil's statistical image.[28] EL Salvador also efficiently, if modestly, assembled a statistical image.[29]
For Mexico, and for other Latin American countries, the numerous statistics reported at the 1889 exhibition had a mutually reinforcing international and national use. For France, these statistics were not only arguments expressed in a familiar language, but also a sine qua non for its own statistical existence. For Mexico, statistics were an important part of a larger social, cultural, and physical topography of the nation which included, in addition to statistics, maps, photographs, and natural history studies.
By definition, statistics were comparative, and only through comparison could what was then called the law of large numbers be uncovered.[30] As historian of statistics Ian Hacking has explained, "that statistics should be comparative is part of their original mandate to measure the power and wealth of the state, as compared with other states."[31] Thus in an increasingly numerical world, statistics were always welcome, as was shown by the numerous European comparative statistical studies on crime, industrial production, races, and hygiene. In essence, more than one set of statistics was needed in such comparisons, and thus all components being compared acquired equal importance in creating statistical images. In fact, Mexicans compared their statistics with French statistics. In turn, some specific Mexican statistics were used and shown to prove France's progress or backwardness. Indeed, whether Mexican statistics were actually used by French or European statisticians to make a comprehensive comparison (such as that of France and England) was only secondarily important. What was essential for both France and Mexico was that statistics be universally available. Only in a sea of numbers provided by all nations could the statistical picture of the ideal modern nation have emerged.
This could be exemplified even in the revolutionary transformation that statistics underwent with the works of the British biologist Francis Galton. At the 1889 Paris fair Galton measured heads of Parisians, and in the same year he published in London his celebrated Natural Inheritance .[32] At the same time, the Mexican exhibit at Paris displayed collections of skulls and statistics on the facial angles of Mexicans. In fact, it would be difficult to imagine the type of transformation introduced by Galton in statistics, if not for the availability of statistics collected in many countries. One can argue that in the realm of statistics, the global creation of the picture of the modern world becomes historically noticeable.
Cartography was another tool in the self-creation of a national image. As late as 1880, Manuel Orozco y Berra affirmed that "as of yet, exact knowledge of the vast extent of our country is not possible."[33] But by 1889 Mexi-
can scientists had already advanced in this regard, mainly because of the efforts of the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística and the Comisión Geográfico-Exploradora (created in 1878).
Thus in 1889 the Mexican exhibition team decided to exhibit a Carta geo-gráfica of Mexico that was to be prepared by the cartography section of the Ministry of Economic Development (which in fact consisted of the Comisión Geográfico-Exploradora) (see Fig. 20).[34] The plan for this map summarized all the factors that the Porfirian elite wished to emphasize: the Mexican climate, which offered advantages for agriculture; Mexico City, which proved Mexico's modernity; the political and social organization of Mexico, which demonstrated that order existed and explained the bureaucratic and financial facilities offered by the state to investors and immigrants; the extent and quality of Mexico's communication system, especially telegraphs and railroads; the quantity and quality of civic buildings and monuments, which exemplified Mexico's republican and aesthetic advancements; the condition of public health and hygiene, which were sine qua non ingredients of modern development; the state of Mexican culture, which could be understood as modern nineteenth-century high culture (a review of the most French of the Mexican artists and intellectuals); and the ingredient of exoticism, which made Mexico simultaneously European and modern, yet unique.[35] This plan was not fully carried out, but it constituted an ideal description of what the map ought to include.
The history of late-nineteenth-century Mexican cartography is closely connected with displays at world's fairs. In 1884 a Carta general geográfica had been prepared for exhibit at the New Orleans fair. A larger and more comprehensive one was displayed in Paris 1889, and it became the basis for the general map of Mexico, which was not finished until 1906.[36] For the Chicago fair of 1893 another map was made, this time a hydrologic one.
In addition, in 1889 there was an important scientific-cartographic display: the exhibit of the Comisión Geográfico-Exploradora, which was highly praised by the French scientific community.[37] The director of this commission was the Mexican military cartographer Agustín Díaz.[38] He had worked in the Comisión de Límites, which had been established after the Mexican-American war, and was appointed by Porfirio Díaz to undertake a map of Puebla in 1877. As Agustín Díaz himself explained in the catalogue of the commission's display in Paris, the commission was made possible by "the urgent need for drawing and designing better maps than those that had been conceived to that date."[39]
The French scientific community singled out for praise Mexico's geodesical, topographical, and geographical maps and calculations, as well as twenty issues of La Carte générale de la République contruite à la cent-millionèsime partie, par le système horizontal . In addition, topography and technology were combined in a map of Mexico's telegraph system that was especially prepared
Image not available.
20.
Sketch for a geological map of Mexico, made for the 1889 Paris exhibition.
(Photograph by the author)
for the Paris exposition. Antonio Garcia Cubas, the most prominent geographer of nineteenth-century Mexico, was also represented in Mexico's cartographic display.[40] He exhibited his "Statistics and History of the Mexican Republic Comprised by Thirty-one Maps of the States, Territories, and a Map of Railroads with Texts in Spanish, French, and English," a revision of his work for the 1884 New Orleans world's fair.[41]
The general topography of the nation included more than maps and statistics; geology was also important in descriptions of the national territory. Therefore, another topographic effort was the Carta general geológica , undertaken by the Ministry of Economic Development for exhibition in Paris. Antonio del Castillo, with the technical expertise of the geologist José G. Aguilera, was in charge of this task.[42] This map encompassed various strategic concerns of the Porfirian government. The study of earth science was tightly related to productive activities such as mining and agriculture.[43] It was also associated with international anthropological and archaeological concerns about the origins of humankind in America, which in turn formed part of the national discussion of Darwinist theories and racist speculation about the backwardness of Mexican Indians. Thus, among the maps were the Plano geológico del Peñón de los Baños donde se encontró el hombre fósil prehistórico and the Carta general minera de la República Mexicana .[44]
One hundred copies of the geological and mining maps were distributed
in France and Europe to, among others, the director of the French geological map, the director and professors of Paris's Mining École Supérieur, and the professors of geology of the Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle. In Austria they were given to the Geologische Reichsanstalt of Vienna and to professors of mineralogy and geology at the Naturhistorisches Museum, also in Vienna.[45] In truth, promotion was as important in the sciences as it was in commerce.
To advance geology in the nation, Antonio del Castillo was sent to Paris with the commission to travel in Europe and study all of the advancements and geological institutions.[46] Therefore, he simultaneously directed the exhibition of Mexican maps and studied French scientific concerns and Mexico's possibilities for being included in those concerns. Consequently, in January 1889 he reported that meteorites in the Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle were well appreciated and that for Mexico "it would be beneficial to exhibit them in Paris," because "it would make Mexico known worldwide as the country where the largest number of meteorites have fallen." In effect, natural randomness worked in favor of Mexico's national pride,[47] and models of Mexican meteorites were in fact displayed in Paris. At least two meteorites, weighing approximately 14 tons, were brought from Chihuahua to Mexico City, copied, and exhibited in replica.[48]
Together, statistics, maps, and geological studies created a clear picture of the nation's topography. The ideal image of the modern nation could observe its full likeness in such a mirror.
Patenting
Universal expositions were the capitals of invention because they epitomized the marriage of science and technology that accelerated the Industrial Revolution.[49] Not surprisingly, on these occasions European laws and customs placed great emphasis on property rights and patents. Hence English, French, and American legislation on property rights was tightly linked to world's fairs.[50]
In Mexico some laws in this regard were derived from the Spanish decree of October 1820, and in newly independent Mexico Lucas Alamán conferred the first patent license.[51] However, not until the Ministry of Economic Development was created in 1853 did patent rights obtain a clear legal status.[52] In 1890 a final law was passed that accelerated the process and established better guarantees for the registration of patents. This was not essentially a policy to develop domestic technology, but rather part of the general objective of attracting foreign investment and immigration by protecting the technology of foreigners in Mexico. Therefore, after 1890 the majority of the registered patents in Mexico were foreign. By the 1900s Mexico took care
at world's fairs, especially American ones, to emphasize that a legal framework for protecting patent rights existed in Mexico, again with the hope of inducing American companies to establish factories there.[53]
In 1889, when the industry group of the Mexican exhibition was collecting Mexican inventions, the tediously bureaucratic registration process meant that most of the items that came to be exhibited in Paris were not properly registered in the Ministry of Economic Development.[54] In fact, it seems that Mexican regulations were not especially concerned with the protection of patents on items displayed at Paris, though efforts were made to assure the authenticity of some products.
The French government, however, although authorizing certain exceptions to property rights on products exhibited at Paris, also required that the appropriate royalties be paid by those who made use of any invention or product.[55] Therefore, in the case of inventions or manufactures, Mexican exhibitors were required by the government to obtain a certificate signed by the respective Mexican local authorities of the authenticity of their work.[56] In this way the legislation on Mexican intellectual and scientific property rights was simplified but not strongly enforced by the central legal and bureaucratic structure.
In part, the government's casual attitude toward patent protection may have derived from the fact that the Mexican exhibit was not especially oriented toward technology. Most displays of native technological advancements focused on those areas in which Mexican industry had been especially successful, namely, textile, vegetable fibers, grain mills, and cigarette production (see Fig. 21).[57] For example, the Franco-Mexican entrepreneur Ernesto Pugibet displayed his machine to fabricate cigars, while the government of Yucatán and the private inventor Isaac Esparza exhibited various examples of Mexican technology, machines for scraping henequen.[58] In addition, Maximino Rio de la Loza exhibited a device to avoid railroad accidents (see Fig. 22), Angel Acedo exhibited a dynamo, and José María César exhibited a steam engine. F. Paez, the Acedo Brothers, and Rivera exhibited mills for grinding tortilla corn, and Leandro Ramirez displayed a sewing machine.[59]
In 1889 Paris also attracted flamboyant Mexican inventors, who followed in the footsteps of Juan N. Adorno at Paris 1855 (see chapter 3). One of these was Antonio Garcia Chávez, an auxiliary of the industry group, who requested 1,500 pesos at the beginning of 1889 to construct an engine for exhibition at Paris. García Chávez claimed he could produce an electric engine that would be "the definitive solution in the use of electricity as a driving force." The project was studied by the official commission, which rejected the request. But a few months later Garcia Chávez presented another project, this time for the construction of an airplane. Once again his project was rejected.[60] Antonio Carbajal, a physician who often wrote scientific articles for the Gaceta Médica de México , was more successful. He received 500 pesos to
Image not available.
21.
Miguel Saldaña's henequen-processing machine, an example of Mexican technology.
Source: Patentes y Marcas, Box 34, Exp. 1435,
reproduced courtesy of the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City.
(Photograph by the Archivo General de la Nación)
design a mask to protect against infection, which was actually exhibited as part of Mexico's display in the hygiene and sanitation class.[61]
Despite some legislation on technology and the machine, the emphasis of Mexico's display of products at Paris was clearly on agriculture. By 1889 the Porfirian plan for national economic development was oriented toward strengthening Mexico's participation in the Industrial Revolution as a supplier of raw materials and as a consumer of international technology. To foster industrialization through native technological inventions was a rhetorical commonplace, but in fact the Mexican elite had already abandoned the idea of catching up with the rapid pace of industrial technology and aimed only to be a cosmopolitan and wealthy supplier of raw materials. In sharp contrast, Thomas Edison's inventions were of the greatest interest in Paris, and his concerns with patent rights were epitomized by the registration of his patents not only in Paris but in Mexico even before 1889.[62] Of the new nations, the United States was definitely the technological master. By 1862 Jules Verne had already imagined that technology would develop until "[men are] swallowed up by their own inventions. . .. I bet the Yankees will have a hand in it."[63] Realists that they were, Mexican authorities were well aware of the impossibility of finding a Mexican Edison.
Image not available.
22.
Maximino Río de la Loza's machine to avoid railroad accidents.
Source: Patentes y Marcas, Box 33, Exp. 1384,
reproduced courtesy of the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City.
(Photograph by the Archivo General de la Nación)
Governing
Statistics, together with economics, eventually became the fundamental support for administrative knowledge, a major component of modern nations.[64] Public administration was created to meet the needs brought about by modern society: increasing complexity, division of labor, demographic growth, urban expansion, professionalization, and rationalization of time and resources. By the late nineteenth century it was a mixture of organizational skills, written laws, accounting methods, and division of labor supported on two pillars: the liberal political philosophy and the scientific consensus of the late nineteenth century. Through the first, public administration was part of a long-standing philosophical and political definition of the role of the state.[65] As such, public administration was linked to the particular ways in which each nation constituted a centralized power made into a state and to specific legal traditions that controlled power relationships. By being part of a scientific consensus, public administration became an arrangement of methods, techniques, and laws; that is, the science of modern administration.[66]
The politico-philosophical and scientific bases of public administration were threatened by three related ghosts: state intervention (fear of socialism), social control (fear of revolution), and corruption. In the French Third
Republic, as we saw in chapter l, these ghosts were alive and present in the French government.[67]
Economic liberalism and radical political liberalism opposed state intervention. But the fear of social unrest, the need for social control, and the urge to promote public welfare made state intervention necessary. More importantly, the need for state sponsorship in economic development was recognized and exercised, especially by countries like France, which were trying to catch up with industrialization. Therefore, in the late nineteenth century the political formula employed by various European countries was conservative liberalism, which added to the traditional areas of state intervention, such as national security and tax collection, new areas such as sanitation, housing, and industrial promotion. The role of the state as a universal referee expanded, and consequently the need for reliable professional civil servants grew. A well-organized and scientifically trained bureaucracy became an important facet of a modern state and perhaps its very essence, as Max Weber noted at the beginning of the twentieth century.[68]
Although the idea of public administration was part of the general conception of the role of the state, it possessed its own logic and functioning based on the technicalities of decision making and the geographical and physical organization of government.[69] In this realm, administrative knowledge was gradually developing relatively fixed forms for routine functions. In time these new developments crystallized and became proofs of modernity and efficiency in the handling of state affairs. Accordingly, regardless of the actual efficiency and honesty of bureaucrats, in modern states it became necessary for each agency to display crisp administrative formalities: trained personnel, an organizational scheme defined according to the fashionable style, and a well-defined division of labor and use of time and space. These formalities became fundamental in the general picture of the modern world.
Hence, for a nation to prove itself modern, it had to show that it was ruled by modern public administration, and at world's fairs Mexico aimed to show its recent advancements in government administration, to establish that Mexico had a theoretical awareness of how to govern a modern nation scientifically. Of course, the countless propaganda books distributed by the government invariably contained a section on administration (that is, territory, ministries, division of power, and so forth), and the organization of the wizards of progress was an attempt to prove the modernity of Mexican public administration. In addition, for the 1889 Paris fair Emiliano Busto suggested that he write a comparative analysis of the Mexican and French public administration systems, which would include "all the diverse services that compose [the Mexican government,] accompanied by statistical charts and tables."[70] Busto was the oficial mayor of the Mexican Ministry of Finance, a member of the Mexican commission in Paris, and a bureaucrat with long involvement in financial affairs both in the state of Guanajuato and in the fed-
eral government.[71] The study was published in French and Spanish, in a handsome edition,[72] and completed in no more than six months.[73] Busto himself kept Porfirio Diaz informed of the progress of his work.[74]
Busto's book was part propaganda, of course, and its goals were harmonious with the general objectives of Mexico's display in Paris. Hence, once Busto's initiative was approved, the Ministry of Economic Development asked that his study provide immigrants, capitalists, and workers with the needed information about "the rights they enjoy in this country, the franchise and guarantees."[75] But it was also assumed that Busto's book was to be a scientific study, and therefore the Mexican government arranged for it to be distributed to European newspaper editors and publicists, as well as to such distinguished scientists as Louis Pasteur and Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot.[76]
The book was a detailed description of the division of powers and of the organization of the six Mexican ministries vis-à-vis the ten French ministries. For each Mexican ministry, a complete organizational chart was prepared and compared with its French counterpart. Administration was, according to Busto—who literally translated the definition from a French study—"the conjunction of public services meant to assist, under government direction, the execution of laws, decrees, and rules that have as their objective the benefit of the state, the protection of its interests, or the maintenance, within just limits, of the exercise of public liberties."[77] Indeed, the role of the state was explicitly delineated in the concept of public administration: on one hand, the promotion of both private and state economic interests and, on the other, social control. Busto explained that the backwardness of Mexico's economy and society meant that the Mexican government had a larger role to play than did that of the French state. Along these lines, he maintained that taxes in Mexico served not only, "as with the French government," to provide national security, education, and communication services but to protect "railroad business in order to obtain speedy and reliable lines of communication." Accordingly, Busto affirmed, the Mexican government presented "the attributes that Josat finds in the universal tutor."[78]
In fact, Busto's book was based largely on a recently published study of the organization of the French Ministry of Finance, written by a rather obscure bureaucrat named Jules Josat, deputy bureau chief at the French Finance Ministry, who has left almost no historical record.[79] For Josat, scientific administration was the natural component of modern states: "If, within a state, the government is the soul that inspires, the administration is the body that acts."[80] Busto followed Josat's study in detail, even imitating the format and analytical schemes of his books.[81] Meticulously, Busto examined every agency of the various ministries, explaining its function and organizational structure and then comparing each with its French counterpart. Overall, Busto's work constituted a comparative proof of Mexico's administrative advancement, a confirmation of Mexico's disciplined society in which,
as he observed in explaining the goal of financial administration, "the entire lives of citizens . . . seem to have been enveloped in the ingenious net woven by the men of the treasury division."[82]
Busto's book was by no means an innovative or landmark study of Mexican administration, although it was indeed the first comparative study in this area.[83] However, it is quite revealing from the point of view of the construction of a modern national image. The very fact of its rapid, improvised, superficial, but elegant production says a great deal about the state of so-called scientific administration in Mexico. And it is precisely because of its comparative character that Busto's book acquired historical significance.
Doubtless Busto's work was rapidly executed following the latest studies—which proved to be ephemeral—of French administrative techniques. Busto must have believed that Josat's study of the reorganization of the French Ministry of Finance would have a significant influence on French thinking about public administration. In addition, Josat's study facilitated Busto's work because its organizational focus and charts invited comparison even in purely visual terms (for example, chart to chart). However, Josat had no major effect on the history of French public administration. Indeed, unlike the medical sciences, hygiene, and natural history (see chapter 9), in the domain of public administration, Mexican officials tended to be much more naive and generally unaware of the terms of the discussion. Mexican theoreticians of bureaucracy pale before Mexican physicians, hygienists, or naturalists.
In no small measure, this was the result of the particular history of Mexico's administrative structure, which by the 1880s had found a new form of centralized authority with which to solve the nineteenth-century enigma of how to rule the country. This solution, of course, favored pragmatic authoritarian rule through violence, coercion, cooptation, and bargaining, devices that had little to do with innovative technical or theoretical administration. Further, in Mexico the philosophical, political, and scientific implications of administration were debated not in the rather confined and precisely limited realm of administration but in a wider ideological arena: within Mexico's liberal constitutionalist tradition.
Whatever its virtues or flaws, Busto's book achieved its immediate objective: to show Mexico, through comparison with France itself, as a well-structured, disciplined modern nation. Through comparison, Mexico's governing style was diffused into the structure, forms, and entire fashion of what was then understood as scientific administration. Mexico's administration could be read by the modern world as epitomized by the fair, in French and in a familiar conceptual structure. In addition, as with statistics, within a comparison the elements being compared acquired equal import and mutual relevance. In any comparison, similarities and differences acquire meaning only insofar as they make reference to a common ground of understanding, which the elements being compared mutually create. Busto's book at-
tempted to prove that Mexico's administration belonged to that common modern ground of public administration. Mexico's administrative structure, thus, was presented as a particular version of a universal form, and Mexico appeared to be not only echoing it but also contributing something to it through Mexican particularities. By doing so, and regardless of its actual impact on French officials, Busto's book gained for the Porfirian regime what nationally could be presented as a seal of approval. Mexico's administrative similarities with France could be internationally, but above all nationally, introduced as proof that Mexico was moving on the right track. And Mexico's administrative differences with France were presented by Busto as merely ad hoc additions required by the country's uniqueness. By attaining this seal of approval, Mexico could presumably claim to have the right to reap the fruits of a modern administration: investment, development, security, and political rights.
In addition, through comparisons the very idea of universal truths of general applicability in administration was reinforced. For France and for Mexico, the fact that an obscure Mexican official in a newly politically stabilized country could demonstrate that the formalities of modern scientific administration were being observed proved the universalism of modern administration. Through this mechanism, such works as Busto's aimed to take the historical particularities of Mexico's governing style and fashion them in the form of a common (with all modern nations) universal present of modernity.
It was in liberal constitutionalist discussions that the philosophical, political, and scientific aspects of administration had been debated in Mexico since the 1860s. The very idea of scientific administration as the solution to such problems as the role of the state and social control was deliberated in constitutional and political terms.[84] The new conservative scientific liberals of the late 1880s favored strong government and order. Conservative liberalism (epitomized in a statist administration charged, as Busto maintained, with more functions than the traditional notion of universal referee) was believed to be an organic result of both Mexico's violent history and economic backwardness. As Busto implied, in a recently pacified new country, only a strong state could create a real nation and lead it to the standards of international progress—hence the doggedly repeated battle cry of "less politics, more administration," in which administration was not at issue but rather seen as an assortment of scientific techniques, methods, and theories that needed to be applied in the daily exercise of governance.
In effect, Busto was not concerned with the actual creation of a professional group of employees or civil servants but with learning the technical and methodological formalities to clothe the new ideology that was presented as the end of ideologies, as the completion of politics itself: administration. Thus the ethical aspects (such as corruption) of public administration, which
were often talked about by professional bureaucrats in Mexico,[85] and which were a regular issue in the debate over public administration in England or France,[86] were not considered in Busto's work on administration. Busto was less interested in explaining the training, recruitment, honesty, and functioning of bureaucracy in Mexico than in showing the parallels between the formal structures of ministries in France and Mexico.
In sum, in world's fairs the Mexican elite utilized all the formalities of public administration as the attire of a nation that was aiming to catch up with modernity. During the 1880s and 1890s, for countries like Mexico, the apparatus of public administration was only a formal framework, a technically useful overlay for the habits, legal forms, and particular arrangements of the Mexican elite. Such a framework became both a learning process for new administrative methods and techniques and a normative criterion only applicable at specific moments and for particular sectors of the population. Within these limits, Porfirian bureaucracy doubtless worked rather well. Public administration was thus the black-tie attire indispensable for attendance at the reception of modern nations, the idea being that pragmatic rule clothed as modern public administration would gradually function in a modern manner . . . as if in the old tale, had the mendicant persisted in dressing like a prince, a king he would have become.