MEXICO: U.S. OCCUPATION OF VERA CRUZ.

MEXICO: U.S. OCCUPATION OF VERA CRUZ.
Scrapbook containing photographs, clippings and memorabilia of George Frederick O'Loughlin, aboard U.S.S. Wyoming, 1912-1919. Tall folio, 350 x 212 mm. Half red morocco and textured cloth. Spine perished, corners of pages chipped, browning throughout.

Covering a period primarily during the U.S. occupation of Vera Cruz in 1914, and through the First World War, this scrapbook includes photos, newspaper clippings and other printed ephemera, and a carbon copy of a memorandum, all tipped into a standard lined paper notebook. George O'Loughlin, a native of Naugatuck, CT, served as a stenographer and personal secretary to Admiral Frank Friday Fletcher, Commander-in-Chief of Naval forces in the Battle of Veracruz. There are numerous items related to Fletcher, including a letter of recommendation for O'Loughlin, Fletcher's obituary from 1928 (loosely inserted). The memorandum, describes a meeting between a Mr. Schuyler, First Secretary to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and Admiral Fletcher, in which Schuyler describes the coup in which Victoriano Huerta seized power, the corruption of the Mexican government at the time of the revolution. Schuyler describes how the Mexican government could be shored up by a loan from the U.S., issued "on the lender's terms...." He goes on to say that that "it would be a comparitively [sic] easy matter to manipulate the loan to this end ... no foreign bankers would make a loan to the Mexican Government ... by keeping these bankers uncertain as to our policy of intervention, Mexico would be forced to come to the United States for this loan...."