His book Barbarous Mexico helped discredit Mexican President Porfirio Díaz's regime in the eyes of the American public.

[3] At 16, Turner began to develop an interest in socialism and at 17, published the weekly paper "Stockton Saturday Night,"[1] which concerned itself with uncovering corruption among politicians and businessmen.

They introduced him to Mexican anarcho-syndicalist leaders Ricardo Flores Magón, Librado Rivera, Manuel Sarabia, and Antonio Villareal in April 1908.

[1] The interview with the Mexican anarcho-syndicalists caused a movement among American radicals to free the prisoners in Los Angeles County Jail.

Its editor John Sanborn Phillips sent him back to Mexico to investigate the Mexican government's role in the peonage system.

Among the owners of the press that criticized Turner's report were people who invested in Mexico and owned properties there, such as William Randolph Hearst of the liberal magazine Cosmopolitan.

[1] Together with WFM Mexican miners, Turner welcomed Flores Magón and his followers when they were released from prison in Florence, Arizona, in August 1910.

At the end of January, he shipped 60 rifles, a few revolvers, and 9,000 rounds of ammunition by rail to a California farmer who sent them to Mexico as “farm machinery”.

[1] Turner questioned the Magonists' tactics, and was disappointed in the Flores Magón brothers' decision to reject the Mexican liberal President Francisco I.

Novelist Harry Leon Wilson and poet George Sterling helped bring publicity to Turner's situation through their writing in the newspapers.

Turner wrote articles for the socialist newspapers the New York Call and Appeal to Reason and other periodicals, covering the labor wars in American coalfields.

Just now a realtor, connected with the Carmel Land Company.In 1915, Turner traveled to Mexico to report on the American occupation of Veracruz and got an exclusive interview with Venustiano Carranza, one of the constitutionalist revolutionaries' key leaders.

As the guest of a progressive Republican senator from Wisconsin, Robert M. La Follette, Turner was present for President Woodrow Wilson's speech to Congress requesting a declaration of war on Germany.