Appendix & Heel

Henry Fountain Ashurst has represented Arizona in the U. S. Senate since that territory became a State in 1912. His tall sleek figure, his shiny black hair, his resounding rhetoric, his theatrical by-play with black-corded glasses have caused many an ignorant observer to mistake him for a onetime Shakespearean actor. His secret hope is to win future fame as a great diarist of the current era. Today he is the senior Senator from the Southwest.

Like many another frontier politician, Senator Ashurst has long fired his imagination with dreams of U. S. territorial expansion. Last week he flustered the State Department, set Mexican officials to guffawing, by reviving his twelve-year-old proposal that the U. S. purchase Lower California from Mexico.-- To the 58,338 desolate square miles thus acquired he would add another 10,000 sq. mi. clipped from the Mexican State of Sonora and tacked on to his own Arizona to straighten its southern boundary. By" his resolution the President would be ''respectfully requested to open negotiations" for this international deal.

Of his proposal Senator Ashurst had declared: "The peninsula is a vermiform appendix to Mexico. It is the heel, the Achilles heel, to the United States. The Mexican Republic is both unwilling and unable to police the domain and is unable to resist aggressions from or settlements by Oriental powers."

Last summer Boulder Dam advocates proposed that the U. S. settle its dispute with Mexico over the waters of the Colorado River (which empties 80 mi. below the border) by the purchase of Lower California. With the money she got from the sale, they contended, "Mexico could settle not only U. S. claims but also all her debts to Britain, France and every other country." Big Navy men, who have repeatedly charged that Japan covets Magdalena Bay on the Pacific coast of Lower California as a base from which to attack the U. S., warmed to any proposition which would bring this fine natural harbor under U. S. sovereignty.

First effect of annexation would be the extinction of Tia Juana and Agua Caliente just over the border as drinking-racing-gambling resorts for U. S. tourists.

"Absurd," "Silly," "Not for Sale," retorted Mexican officials to the Ashurst proposal. Mexico is forbidden by its present Constitution to cede any of its domain to a foreign power.

--Last month Lower California was officially divided into northern and southern territories. Total population: 62,831 (1921). No railroad traverses its length of 760 mi.

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