Riding With the Revolution: The American Left in the Mexican Revolution, 1900–1925 9004271341, 9789004271340

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Riding with the Revolution

Historical Materialism Book Series Editorial Board Loren Balhorn (Berlin) David Broder (Rome) Sebastian Budgen (Paris) Steve Edwards (London) Juan Grigera (London) Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam) Peter Thomas (London) Gavin Walker (New York)

volume 313

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm

Riding with the Revolution The American Left in the Mexican Revolution, 1900–1925

By

Dan La Botz

leiden | boston

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: La Botz, Dan, author. Title: Riding with the revolution : the American left in the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1925 / by Dan La Botz. Other titles: American left in the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1925 Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2024] | Series: Historical materialism book series, 1570-1522 ; 313 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2024019800 (print) | lccn 2024019801 (ebook) | isbn 9789004271340 (cloth) | isbn 9789004271333 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Mexico–History–Revolution, 1910-1920. | Mexico–History– Revolution, 1923-1924 | Labor movement–Mexico–History–20th century. | Americans–Mexico–History–20th century. | Internationalists–Mexico– Biography. | Comunists–Mexico–History–20th century. | Anarchists–Mexico–History–20th century. Classification: lcc F1234 .L133 2024 (print) | lcc F1234 (ebook) | ddc 972.08/21–dc23/eng/20240529 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024019800 lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024019801

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface. issn 1570-1522 isbn 978-90-04-27134-0 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-27133-3 (e-book) doi 10.1163/9789004271333

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Contents Preface vii Acknowledgements Abbreviations xi Pseudonyms xii

ix

Introduction: The American Left and the Mexican Revolution – A Testing of Political Theories and Strategies 1

part 1 The American Left Supports the Mexican Revolution 1

American Protestantism, Progressivism, and the Mexican Revolution 17

2

The Mexican Anarchists of the plm and the American Left 41

3

Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party, and the Mexican Revolution 99

4

American Anarchists and the Mexican Revolution 127

5

Riding with Pancho Villa: The Radical Socialism of John Reed 162

6

Lincoln Steffens: An American Progressive in Mexico 182

7

American Labour Imperialism: Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor 195

part 2 Americans Organise on the Ground in Mexico Introduction to Part 2 249 8

Conscription, Repression and Flight: America’s First Revolutionaries in Exile 260

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9

Socialists and Internationalists: Four American War Resisters Who Chose Mexico 277

10

Political Refugees in Revolutionary Mexico: Socialists and Spies 299

11

American Slackers and the Organisation of the Mexican Communist Party 319

12

American Slackers and the Industrial Workers of the World 344

13

The Slackers, the Feminist Council, and the Revolutionary Peasant Leagues 369

14

The Expulsion of the ‘Pernicious Foreigners’ 395

15

The Communist International Agents in Mexico: Louis Fraina and Sen Katayama 415

16

Bertram Wolfe, the Communists, and a Right Turn in Mexico 441

17

Joseph ‘José’ W. Kelley: The Farmer Labor Party in Mexico 466

18

Failed Movements and Varied Fates: The Slackers and Communists after Their Mexican Adventure 496 Epilogue

519

Bibliography and Works Consulted 529 Index 559

Preface I initially began to study the groups and movements discussed in this book because of a certain personal, autobiographical interest in the subject. Like many of the people discussed here, I was an anti-war activist, though 50 years after they were. I grew up on the US-Mexico border, became a Spanish speaker, and like the subjects of my book I worked with Mexican socialist and labour organisations in international solidarity. Like them, I edited or wrote for several socialist and labour newspapers. Finally, like them, I hoped that working-class internationalism might overcome capitalism and war. My projects, like theirs, failed to achieve that hoped-for revolutionary transformation. No doubt my own experiences stimulated my interest in the US left and its relationship with the Mexican Revolution. When I began to write this book some 25 years ago, my thought was that it would be simply a book about international labour solidarity, in particular the role of American leftists in the Mexican Revolution. I was intrigued to find that a group of American war resisters, beginning in 1917, should have gone to Mexico and ended up with some other foreigners and a handful of Mexicans organising the Industrial Workers of the World and founding the Mexican Communist Party. I found it both a fascinating example of transnational and international solidarity and labour organising, as well as a romantic story of idealism and adventure. The book today is, I believe, still all of that. The more I worked with this material, however – letters in archives, newspapers of all sorts, memoirs, institutional documents, police reports, and of course the developing secondary literature – the clearer it became that it was also a record of experiments in the social laboratory of the era of industrial capitalism in North America in the early twentieth century. And in particular it was a study of the theory and practice of internationalism by American labour and left organisations. We have in the quarter century from about 1900 to 1925 in Mexico an opportunity to examine several labour and leftist strategies at work as groups from the United States, each using its own political theories and methods, analysed, planned, and then acted to carry out their strategic goals. We see in this history how American Protestant social gospel missionaries, the Socialist Party of America – with its reformist majority and its revolutionary left wing – the revolutionary syndicalists of the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Farmer Labor Party members, as well as the revolutionary socialists of the early Communist Party each attempted to intervene in the Mexican Revolution and with what results. While originally focused on the US war resisters

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in Mexico between 1917 and 1921, I have also included the organisers that the Communist International sent just a few years later. We must follow all of their activities too in order to understand the trajectory of the American left in Mexico in those years. The one missing modern left political tendency, Stalinism, or to be more exact, bureaucratic collectivism, did not play a role in Latin America until the 1930s, which falls outside the purview of this book. I should say a word too about my other activities involving Mexico. While in Mexico doing my research, Robin Alexander, International Affairs Director of the United Electrical Workers Union (ue), asked me to produce a newsletter for the Frente Auténtico de Trabjao (fat) of Mexico and the ue of the United States, so I became the editor and principal writer of Mexican Labor News and Analysis. During that period, I also occasionally accompanied ue delegations as an authority on Mexican labour history, as a journalist, or sometimes also as an interpreter. So, for 20 years, like the subjects of my dissertation, I too was an American leftist and labour activist engaged in international work, in solidarity with the working people of Mexico. I have continued to write about contemporary Mexican economy, labour, and politics, with some articles appearing in publications such as the Solidarity website, Dollars & Sense, Against the Current, New Politics, Labor Notes, Jacobin, Viento Sur, and others. There is no doubt that my own experiences in Mexico collaborating at times with the fat, with the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabjadores (prt), or with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (ezln) allowed me to better understand the experiences and the thinking of the men and women who are the subjects of this book. Today, as a member of the socialist group Solidarity and of the Democratic Socialists of America (dsa), I continue to be involved in international work, still involved with my comrades in striving to establish international alliances that can advance the working class and the struggle for socialism.

Acknowledgements Much of the material for this book began as my doctoral dissertation, ‘ “Slackers”: American War Resisters and Communists in Mexico, 1917–1927’, written for the History Department of the University of Cincinnati and completed in 1998 with the support of Fulbright and Taft Fellowships. Professor Ann Twinam, then one of my advisors at the University of Cincinnati and now at the University of Texas at Austin, worked to help me earn the Fulbright. I conducted the research for the dissertation while I was associated with the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (ciesas) and was assigned to work with Daniela Spenser, an authority on the history of the Communist International in Mexico and on the relations between the governments of the United States, Mexico, and the Soviet Union. Daniela and I shared documents with each other: I shared documents from US archives and she shared documents from Russian archives. We became both colleagues and friends. I owe a great debt to professors Twinam and Spenser who were both enormously helpful. Benedikt Behrens, a historian of the University of Hamburg kindly shared with me documents from the private archive of Francisco Olivares. My thanks also to the late Ben Watanabe, a leader of the General Workers’ Union of Tokyo, Japan, for his help with Katayama’s Japanese autobiography. Two Latin Americanists, the late James D. Cockcroft, a historian, and sociologist Samuel Farber, read and commented on parts of the manuscript. Over the years, I also learned from his book as well as conversations and correspondence with Professor Barry Carr of La Trobe University. While involved in my research in Mexico and for years afterwards, I also worked closely with Robin Alexander, the International Affairs Director then for the United Electrical Workers Union (ue), for 20 years – 1994–2014 – on the monthly newsletter, Mexican Labor News and Analysis. I have no doubt that my immersion in Mexican political and labour affairs for twenty years helped enrich my understanding of those who decades earlier had been engaged in Mexico in promoting international labour solidarity. For 25 years after finishing the dissertation, I continued to research and write on the American left’s involvement in the Mexican Revolution. The journal Against the Current published some of my articles on this topic. My thanks to the librarians and archivists of more than a dozen institutions in Mexico and the United States who helped me find the documents I sought. I also wish to express my gratitude to Sebastian Budgen and Danny Hayward from Historical Materialism for their support and to the anonymous reader

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they assigned to read my manuscript who made several useful suggestions for editing my draft. Finally, thanks to my wife Sherry Baron, herself a model of dedication to workers and their health and safety on the job and in their communities, as well as a paragon of patience and a great companion who has supported me many times over the last 25 years and encouraged me to finish this book. Thanks for everything, Sher.

Abbreviations afl Casa cgt

American Federation of Labor House of the World Worker – Casa del Obrero Mundial General Confederation of Workers – Confederación General de Trabjadores clp Communist Labor Party com House of the World Worker – Casa del Obrero Mundial cpa Communist Party of America cppa Conference for Progressive Political Action cpusa Communist Party of the United States of America crom Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers – Confederación Regional de Obreros Mexicanos ctrm Confederaton of Workers of the Mexican Region – Confederación de Trabajadores de la Región Mexicana flp Farmer Labor Party fsodf Federation of Union of Workers of the Federal District fsorm Federation of Unions of Workers of the Mexican Republic – Federación de Sindicatos Obreros de la República Mexicana iam International Association of Machinists (US) isr International Socialist Review iww Industrial Workers of the World, Wobblies kresintern Communist Peasant International lcaev League of Agrarian Communities of the State of Veracruz – La Liga de Comunidades Agrarias del Estado de Veracruz spa Socialist Party of America Wobblies Members of the Industrial Workers of the World

Pseudonyms Because several of the individuals who feature in this book use a variety of pseudonyms, it will be helpful to list them. Pseudonym followed by real name. Alfred Albrecht Arthur Albright Mike Gold Manuel Gómez Carl Johnson Martin Paley M. Paley Mischa Poltiolevsky Jesús Ramirez Charles E. Scott Frank N. Seaman Charles Shipman Edgar Woog

Bertram Wolfe Bertram Wolfe Irwin Granich Charles Francis Phillips Karl Jansen Herman Levine Herman Levine Herman Levine Charles Francis Phillips Karl Jansen Charles Francis Phillips Charles Francis Phillips Alfred Stirner

introduction

The American Left and the Mexican Revolution – A Testing of Political Theories and Strategies In this book, I follow the lives of a number of individuals associated with a variety of organisations – Protestant Churches of the social gospel, the American Federation of Labor, the Socialist Party, anarchist groups and the Communist Party – all of them in the broadest sense on the left of the political spectrum in the United States. Most would have described themselves as internationalists, though their concepts of internationalism varied greatly. Many of the individuals are quite famous figures in American history: Samuel Gompers and Eugene Debs, for example; then there are other well-known personalities in the history of American Socialism and Communism, such as John Reed, Louis Fraina (Lewis Corey), and Bertram Wolfe. Linked to the Americans in Mexico, we also find several international figures: Manabendra Nath Roy, Alexander Borodin, and Sen Katayama. In the period between 1900 and 1925, most of these organisations and individuals became allied with one faction or another of the revolutionary forces in Mexico and some – though not all – eventually became admirers of the new Mexican revolutionary government that emerged in 1920. So, this is a collective biography of the small groups of people who in these years worked individually or together in Mexico to turn the revolution in the direction they desired. It is also a history of these individuals and groups who tested the theories and the strategies of their organisations in the great laboratory of the Mexican Revolution providing us with a remarkable record of experiments in internationalism, some of the reformist variety and others of the revolutionary sort. Why focus on the Americans when there were others from Latin America, Europe, and Asia who were also involved in the Mexican Revolution in those years in one way or another? (The first draft of this book had chapters dealing with many South Americans who were touched by, linked intellectually to, or somehow associated with the Mexican Revolution: José Ingenieros, Manuel Ugarte, Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, José Carlos Mariateguí, and Julio Antonio Mella.) While it is true that other foreigners also either participated or took a great interest in the Mexican Revolution, the relationship between the Americans and Mexicans was most important for several reasons. First, because the two countries are contiguous, travel by railroad or steamship was easy after 1900, and Americans tended to go to Mexico first for work in the mines and

© Koninklijke Brill BV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004271333_00

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introduction

oil fields and later to evade the draft and the war. At the same time Mexicans went to the United States to work in the fields or the mines or were forced into exile to escape the revolution or political enemies. The migrations in both directions continued throughout this period of the first quarter of the twentieth century and the economic, political, social, and cultural influences were significant. Even when other foreigners were present in Mexico, they often worked closely with the numerically dominant Americans, even though it is true that groups such as the Spaniards were large and influential, as were some of the Latin American groups. I have divided the organisations of the Americans in Mexico into two groups operating in two different time periods and with fundamentally different methods. Part i deals with the first period, beginning around 1900 when, with the completion of the US and Mexican railroad systems and their connection at Laredo and later other points, Mexico became more fully a part of the USdominated North American political economy, with industry encouraging and facilitating the movement of Americans and Mexicans to each other’s countries, as the enormous US and other foreign investment transformed the Mexican economy while also deepening the social pressures within Mexico that would lead to the Mexican Revolution in 1910.1 The dramatic growth of industrial capitalism in the first two decades of the twentieth century had a tremendous impact on the society and politics of both countries. The end of the Civil War in the United States led to the victory of industrial capitalism and finance and the creation of what was virtually a new Constitution and a new state. In America, following the era of Robber Barons and political bossism, Progressives – upper- and middle-class reformers generally sharing the racial prejudices of American culture – were transforming the country from top to bottom, bringing greater government regulation, establishing more state intervention, and developing social programmes to lift up the masses of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe as well as Black people migrating from the South into northern cities. At about the same time in Mexico, Porfirio Díaz and his circle, los científicos, also established a stronger state that unified the country’s provinces, attracted foreign investment from Europe and America, and began the modernisation of the country. The expansion of American capitalism, linked to Europe, Latin America, and Asia, created a path of industry and commerce on which the world’s expanding working class travelled, challenging capital as it went. With the opening of the

1 Hart 1989, p. 6.

the american left and the mexican revolution

3

twentieth century, new struggles for democracy and socialism swept Europe, as well as the Americas and Asia. Strikes spread across Europe and Russia, as they also broke out throughout the United States, while the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz faced the first tremors of the coming revolution as anarchists led rebellions, workers participated massively in strikes in metal mining and in textiles, as liberal reformers began to agitate for political democracy. Most of the first group of Americans to take an active political interest in Mexico became involved between 1900 and 1921 and were based in the US and usually directed their activity toward the US. While they mostly attempted to influence American public opinion, once the revolution broke out and then developed, they also attempted to influence the course of the revolution itself. The first group that I examine were the American Protestant missionaries influenced by the Social Gospel such as George B. Winson, Mary McOuat Wallace, and Samuel Guy Inman; they had been in Mexico but most left at the outbreak of the revolution in 1910, fleeing the violence. I then turn to the Socialist Party figures involved with Mexico – John Kenneth Turner, John Reed, and Eugene Debs. The Socialists first offered their support to the anarchists of the Mexican Liberal Party and later to the liberal Francisco Madero. I look too at the role of Samuel Gompers of the afl and what we might call American labour imperialism. I also briefly discuss the Progressive journalist Lincoln Steffens before taking up the anarchists: Emma Goldman, William C. Owen, Voltairine de Cleyre. All of these people, who are discussed in Part i, investigated, wrote about, and interpreted events in Mexico, primarily with an eye to influencing American public opinion as well as pressuring the US government in an attempt to change its policies. While Turner and Reed actually went to Mexico to investigate conditions and report on them, they did not stay long, returning to write and publish their books. Turner and the Los Angeles chapter of the Socialist Party did support and aid Ricardo Flores Magón and the Mexican Liberal Party. Still, these Americans mostly operating in the US did not become directly involved in organising in Mexico. Second, we have the groups of Americans who went to Mexico and worked in Mexico with Mexican leftists, workers, and social movements between 1921 and 1925. They are taken up in Part ii. By 1917 things had changed dramatically. In Mexico, Venustiano Carranza’s Constitutionalists were winning out over the Conventionists of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. The Russian February Revolution of 1917 overthrew the Tsar and made it possible for President Woodrow Wilson to lead the United States into the World War in April of 1917 on the side of the Triple Entente Alliance of Britain, France, and Russia. But then in Russia in October 1917 the Bolsheviks seized power and thrust it into the hands of the soviets or workers’ councils and refused to continue the war.

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introduction

It was in that context of the United States at war and revolutions roiling Russia and Mexico, that the first group of American socialist war resisters, known as ‘slackers’, crossed the border into Mexico, living there between April 1917 and the expulsion of most of them in 1921, among them Roberto Haberman, Linn A.E. Gale, Charles Francis Phillips, Eleanor Parker, Irwin Granich, Hendrik Glintenkamp, Herman Levine, and Evelyn Trent. Phillips became involved with the Indian nationalist M.N. Roy and the Russian Mikhail Borodin in the organisation of the Mexican Communist Party. Just as the first group of Americans were expelled, another group made up of Communists from the US arrived in Mexico, staying from 1921 until the departure of the last of them in 1927. In this group were the Italian American Louis Fraina (Lewis Corey), the Japanese Sen Katayama, and again Charles Francis Phillips. A little later came American Bertram Wolfe. These two groups of Americans, unlike the earlier pre-1917 group, not only took up residence in Mexico but also worked there with other foreigners and with Mexican leftists, workers, and peasants to organise with peasant leagues, labour unions, feminist groups, and the Mexican Communist Party. Also, in this period we find John ‘José’ W. Kelley of the International Association of Machinists and the Farmer Labor Party active in Mexico, collaborating with the Mexican government and the unions that it supported. While there was a good deal of overlap in the politics and activities of all of those who took an interest in Mexico, still their actual strategies and practices were distinctly different. Through the biographies of those involved, we look here at each political tendency’s ideology, its concept of social and political action, its view of the role of the working class, its relationship to the capitalist class and other classes, its conception of how social change would take place, and we examine the ultimate goal to which each group aspired. We see here the strengths and weaknesses of these various leftist approaches and we have therefore an opportunity to draw lessons from them, with the caveat that times and circumstances change and the application of the lessons to another period brings its own specific challenges. Each of the tendencies we examine here had its own ideology, its own organisational approach, its own strategy and often its own tactical repertoire applied during Mexico’s revolutionary period. Let me sketch out first the main developments of the revolution and then briefly describe the different organisations and their approaches before plunging into the story in all of its complexity and detail.

the american left and the mexican revolution

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5

The Mexican Revolution: A Brief Account

The Mexican Revolution is often dated from 1910 to 1920, the date when major violence had ended and a new government came to power, but it is also sometimes dated from 1910 to 1940, the latter being the year when the original goals of the revolution may be said to have been fulfilled, even if not to everyone’s satisfaction. The principal goals were land reform, labour rights, and lay public education, all of which were incorporated in the Constitution of 1917, though not achieved until the 1930s. The Revolution and the following civil war were fought out to determine just how far the revolution would go in transforming the old order, at the centre of which were the questions of property and labour. The Mexican Revolution overthrew an economic order based on mining and haciendas and the government that represented those who owned them; it replaced that order and its government with a new state, one that, while authoritarian and capitalist, responded to a greater degree to the subaltern groups of the society. Here is how it happened. Porfirio Díaz, the dictator of Mexico came to power in 1876. He and his inner circle of wealthy landowners and businessmen ruled the country in their own interest, taking land from the mestizo and indigenous peasantry to expand their haciendas. Most of the country’s peasants were reduced to landless day labourers earning miserable wages. Díaz encouraged American, British, and French financiers and industrialists to invest in Mexico, and they did, modernising the mines, building railroads, and developing the petroleum industry. To maintain his power, Díaz used the national army, los federales, and his militia, los rurales, to suppress rebellions of indigenous people such as the Yaquis as well as putting down peasant uprisings and worker strikes. Díaz modernised Mexico at the cost of the nation’s working people, exacerbating the already great economic inequalities. The result was that by the beginning of the twentieth century, Mexico had become a powder keg and all that was needed was a match to set it off. In 1906, Ricardo Flores Magón and his anarchist Mexican Liberal Party, followers of the ideas of Mikhail Bakunin, carried out insurrections in an attempt to detonate a revolution. While the insurrections failed disastrously, they were accompanied by mass strikes at the Cananea copper mine and in the Río Blanco textile mills that threatened the ruling elite. The rebellion of 1906 was suppressed, but its reverberations continued to be felt for years. Just as the Russian Revolution of 1905 was the ‘dress rehearsal’ of the revolution of 1917, so too the 1906 insurrections and strikes proved to be a preparatory exercise for the Revolution of 1910.

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The wealthy landlord and industrialist Francisco Madero initiated the Revolution of 1910 when he decided to challenge Díaz in the election scheduled for that year. Díaz imprisoned Madero, but the challenger escaped and called for a revolutionary uprising on 10 November 1910. Though Madero’s campaign began with a call for political reform, it became a peasant revolution whose principal demand was agrarian reform, that is, the distribution of land to the peasants and indigenous people from whom it had been taken. Initially and rapidly successful in 1911, Madero’s liberal revolution was overthrown within the year and Madero himself murdered by the counter-revolutionary Victoriano Huerta. But several regional revolutionary leaders – Venustiano Carranza, Pablo González, Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa and Emiliano Zapata – rebelled against the new dictator and overthrew him in July 1914. The revolution had been victorious twice, but now the revolutionary forces themselves divided into the wealthy state-builders, the Constitutionalists, led by Carranza and Álvaro Obregón, who were opposed by the plebian Conventionists led by Villa and Zapata. The Constitutionalists emerged victorious, Zapata was assassinated, and Villa retired to his ranch in Chihuahua, but then Carranza and Obregón fell out in what one might see as a struggle between the bourgeois and Jacobin wings of the revolution. After a brief contest, Obregón, the Jacobin, took charge while Carranza was assassinated. The victors of this last stage of the civil war, Obregón, Plutarco Elías Calles, and Adolfo de la Huerta – known as the Sonoran dynasty – began the construction of the new state. Obregón became president in 1920, but de la Huerta led a rebellion against the other two triumvirs. He failed and was crushed. Calles succeeded Obregón as president in 1924, and when the latter decided to run for president for a second time, he was assassinated in 1928. Calles would continue to be the power behind the throne until 1934, after the period under consideration here ends. He was succeeded by Lázaro Cárdenas, opening a new period that completed the nationalist revolution. All of the Americans and other foreigners who attempted to intervene in and influence the Mexican Revolution in this period found themselves confronting a rising Mexican nationalist sentiment and a new nationalist state that was a political chameleon often taking on the colour of its surroundings. The new revolutionary government sometimes appeared to be extremely conservative and at other times reformist, Socialist, syndicalist, or even Communist. And many people were fooled, at least for a while. As one historian wrote of the new government, ‘The conservative elements came to believe that there would be a return to the old time, and the radicals showed up at the national palace to run up the red and black flag’.2 The revolution was in reality Bona2 Puente 1994, p. 75.

the american left and the mexican revolution

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partist in character – that is a caudillo, a military man on a horse – Carranza and then Obregón – rising above the country’s contending social classes.3 No class proved strong enough to take power for itself – and the new government was particularly inclined to mimetic adaptations as it sought to keep each of the rival classes – peasants, workers, petite bourgeoisie and haute bourgeoisie – in a state of subordination. At the same time, like some invasive species the new state thrust its roots down into the cities, towns and villages, into the factories, the ranchos, and the indigenous ejidos, and out of the soil of the popular classes came the new regime’s caciques, spreading across the country like desert flowers after a rain. Or, to change metaphors, a pyramid of generals – often describing themselves as socialists and managing local political bosses – stood atop a vast base of impoverished peasants and workers whose constant agitation threatened at any moment to bring the whole structure down; and so, if one wished to change the new state, it became necessary to organise amongst those at the base of the pyramid. It was into this unstable situation that American and other foreign political and labour organisations attempted to insert themselves in order to influence the future direction of Mexico, of the Americas, and of the world.

2

The American Left Turns to Mexico, 1900–17

Before the Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910, Protestant missionaries from the United States had begun to take an interest in and express concern about the conditions of Mexican working people, and the ministers and lay workers would later support the liberal wing of the revolution led by Francisco Madero and then would back Carranza. American labour and left organisations such as the American Federation of Labor (afl) and the Socialist Party of America (spa) initially supported the Mexican Liberal Party (plm) led by Ricardo Flores Magón. Socialist Party members in Los Angeles played a key role in building US opposition to the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz. The afl and spa backed the plm because of the party’s name, its initial reformist programme, and its early publications that suggested it was primarily a labour-left opponent of the dictator Díaz. As the plm’s anarchist politics became clearer and when a genuine liberal capitalist leadership appeared in the form of Francisco Madero, the US left, with the exception of the anarchists and the Industrial Workers of the World (iww), virtually abandoned Flores Magón and the plm and turned to

3 Aguilar Mora, 1982, passim.

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introduction

Madero. After 1911 and certainly by 1914, the politics of both the US and the Mexican organisations and their projects had developed and become more distinct. The left, which had initially been united in its support for the revolution, divided into its constituent parts: Progressive and Socialist reformers, revolutionary syndicalists, and anarchists, and the Communists and the Farmer Labor Party. Each of these groups had a distinct vision, strategy, and practice of intervention in Mexico, each competing for the fulfilment of its policy. Let me summarise their various views. The American Federation of Labor led by Samuel Gompers had, by the time of the Mexican Revolution, a 20-year history that made clear its acceptance of the capitalist system and its partnership with capital. Moreover, Gompers had thrown the afl’s political support to the Democratic Party and strongly backed Woodrow Wilson’s vision and strategy in world affairs. Just as the United States government and its dollar diplomacy provided sword and shield for US investments, so Gompers and the afl attempted to extend US-style, classcollaborationist labour unionism throughout Latin America. Gompers had already extended the US labour organisation to Canada and had carried his model to Puerto Rico. With the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution, he would work with the post-revolutionary Mexican government to extend his sort of unionism to Mexico as well, while also cooperating with the Mexican government and its loyal unions in the fight against anarchist, syndicalist, and later Communist labour organisations. In 1918, Gompers and Puerto Rican and Mexican allies created the Pan-American Federation of Labor with the goal of extending American business unionism to the entire hemisphere, from the Hudson Bay to Tierra del Fuego. The Socialist Party of America, whose most prominent figure during the era of the Mexican Revolution was Eugene V. Debs, held the view that socialism was possible in the United States and could be achieved through a combination of political and economic action, that is, through elections and union organisation. These were the politics of the Second International and of its leading organisation, the German Social Democratic Party led by Karl Kautsky. At the same time, Debs and other spa leaders believed, in accordance with social-democratic doctrine, that socialism was impossible in Mexico, which had not yet achieved a capitalist level of development. The task, therefore, was to support a political force that would bring capitalism and bourgeois democracy to Mexico, and that force was at first mistakenly identified as Ricardo Flores Magón and the Mexican Liberal Party, but then the spa turned to suppot Francisco I. Madero’s Democratic Party and later Venustiano Carranza’s Constitutionalists. The spa’s left wing, as exemplified by John Reed, identified with Mexican workers’ and peasants’ struggles from below and at first found their cham-

the american left and the mexican revolution

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pion in Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa, the brilliant military leader of the revolutionary armies of northern Mexico. Villa’s army of miners, railroad workers, small ranchers, day labourers, and the drifters of the northern plains seemed to represent the Mexican incarnation of Marx’s proletariat with little to lose but their chains. Reed and the spa left wing, just emerging at that time, without a clear analysis, programme, or strategy, found its own yearning for a radical movement in Villa, just as those same radicals had found their American champions in the strikes of the Industrial Workers of the World. They ignored Villa’s initial alliance with the capitalist state-builders like Madero and Carranza, his friendly relations with US mining companies, and his flirtation with the Wilson administration. They admired Villa romantically as the heroic leader of the mounted proletariat, sweeping across northern Mexico, a worker’s movement, inchoate but class-conscious at its base. Reed went off to ride with them, to write about them, and to champion them. The US anarchist movement, whose central figure was Emma Goldman, first supported the anarchist Mexican Liberal Party led by Ricardo Flores Magón and then the peasant movement in Morelos and the South of Mexico led by Emiliano Zapata. Goldman and friends had opened the anarchist offices in St. Louis, Missouri to Ricardo Flores Magón and other plm leaders when they fled into exile. Somewhat later, other anarchists such as Voltairine de Cleyre and William C. Owen recognised the anti-working class and anti-peasant politics of Madero and Carranza and saw problems with Villa, while Zapata and his movement seemed to them to exemplify the revolutionary people organising autonomous producers’ communities, the seeds of a future libertarian communist society. The anarchist analysis of Mexican society and politics, and especially of Carranza, proved to be far more insightful than that of the Socialists, though the anarchists completely misunderstood Zapata and the Morelos movement, projecting onto the traditionalist peasants and their conservative, Catholic agrarian community the anarchists’ own libertarian communist ideology. In any case, the anarchists by and large proved to be unable to establish a strong connection to the Mexican movement, their intervention was limited largely to good will, small financial contributions, and a small-scale, armed anarchist foray. The Industrial Workers of the World (iww), a revolutionary syndicalist organisation that used on-the-job action and strikes to build industrial unions, was committed to organising both men and women workers of all nationalities and races, no matter what their work, with the ultimate goal of using the general strike to overthrow capitalism and usher in a socialist society. The iww, whose members were known as Wobblies, organised immigrant factory workers and the armies of labourers, who mined metal, cut timber, harvested

10

introduction

crops, and travelled North America on the vast railroad networks of Canada, the United States and Mexico. The iww reached Mexico even before the revolution and became strong in the period between 1914 and 1925. The American progressive journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote in December 1915, ‘The iww s are getting control of labour here. That will be a big factor in the future of Mexico’.4 While that was an exaggeration, wartime persecution in the US pushed more Wobblies, war resisters, draft dodgers, and leftists over the border by 1917. iww members, both Mexicans and Americans, then became the leadership of various groups of workers in Mexico with its strongest presence in the Faja de Oro, the oil-rich region on the Gulf Coast, the centre of which was the city of Tampico. The iww’s concentration on industrial workers to the exclusion of all else (in a society where 80 percent of the population lived by agriculture) and its opposition to political action in a nation in the midst of a political revolution meant that it had little ability to compete in the society at large with the dominant Mexican revolutionary nationalist parties or with the more wide-ranging anarchist organisations who also organised peasants, or later with the Communists with whom it competed for the industrial workers’ loyalty. The iww could lead massive strikes in Tampico and organised in some mines in northern Mexico, but it was otherwise largely disconnected from Mexico’s revolutionary upheaval.

3

The American Left, the Russian Revolution, and Mexico

The slaughter of World War i created around the world at first a movement of resistance and then a new revolutionary left.5 Following the Russian October Revolution of 1917, the eyes of workers and leftists around the world turned toward the east.6 The Bolshevik Party, later called the Communist Party, which had led the October Revolution, and the soviets or workers’ councils which had formed the foundation of worker and peasant power, became mythic ideals – mythic because virtually no one had any idea what either ‘Bolshevik’ or ‘soviet’ actually meant.7 By 1919, however, the newly formed Communist International had sent Mikhail Borodin to Latin America and he made contact with US

4 5 6 7

Steffens 1938, vol. 1, p. 364. Prezioso 2017, passim. Ferro 1967, passim. Serge 1984, p. 104.

the american left and the mexican revolution

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and foreign activists in Mexico, sowing the first seeds of Communism in Latin America. The Communist International sent other organisers in the early 1920s and the small Mexican Communists Party soon established relations with leaders and activists among workers and peasants, but government repression, the rise of Mexican nationalism, and the weakness of the international meant that this revolutionary socialist tendency proved capable of establishing only a small, struggling Communist Party. In the early 1920s, the Farmer Labor Party and the International Association of Machinists, which formed an important part of it, also made an intervention in Mexico. Some flp activists saw the Mexican revolutionary government of Álvaro Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles as a farmer-labour government in power. The identification with the new Mexican state led them to support the government and its efforts to subordinate the Mexican unions to the new revolutionary leadership. The flp activists worked on both sides of the border, with the workers in Mexico to strengthen their unions and with unions in the United States to demand recognition and preferential treatment for the Mexican government. While the effort was brief, lasting only a couple of years, it demonstrated the Farmer Labor Party’s tendency to look toward government to solve the problems of working people – even when that government tended toward populist authoritarianism and worked to suppress the left unions and worker movements. While the iam organiser John ‘José’ Kelley was a dynamo of energy, still his small project does not compare in importance to the work of the early Communists. Yet the Communists would find much of their work largely swept away by the Mexican Revolution’s nationalism. By 1927, Russia had suffered a counter-revolution that rapidly overturned the institutions of workers’ power, a process completed by 1937. Stalin became the dictator of Soviet Russia and the actual leader of the Communist International. Communist Party politics around the world became subordinated to the Stalinist ruling class’s domestic and foreign policy. We do not deal here with the Stalinist Communist period, but the pcm’s political vicissitudes, its constant twists and turns – from Third Period sectarianism and ultra-leftism, to the Popular Front alliance with bourgeois politicians, to the alliance with Hitler, to the return to the Popular Front once more – tended to make party building difficult.8 In the late 1930s, the Communists’ Popular Front policy led to their dual subordination, first, to Stalin and the Soviet Union, and second, to a lesser extent, to the Mexican government of Lázaro Cárdenas, though that did not protect the Communists from repression through the Cold War period of the

8 La Botz, 2018, passim.

12

introduction

1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s the Mexican Communists revived, turned toward Eurocommunism, that is, toward social democracy, and then in the 1980s its members euthanised the party and entered the reformist Party of the Democratic Revolution. One might perhaps like to think that the US left’s labour solidarity always tended to further the cause of workers’ power and of the struggle for international socialism, that is, one might like to look at the labour left rather ecumenically and argue that everyone did their little bit to advance the cause. In fact, the various left organisations, divided on questions of strategy and end goals, could not collaborate and several of the US left’s interventions in Mexico led to serious failures while others contributed to disasters, as you will read in the following pages in some detail. Ricardo Flores Magón’s politically illconceived invasion of Baja California from the United States with the support of US-based iww s, other leftists, and soldiers of fortune would prove a fiasco that destroyed his reputation and ruined the plm organisation. Eugene Debs’s and the Socialist Party’s support for Madero and later for Carranza put them on the side of the new capitalist government in Mexico, even as that state fought and destroyed the plebian forces of Villa and Zapata and the leftist labour unions. American anarchists supported their co-thinkers in Mexico but found that Mexican anarchists had succumbed to rising Mexican nationalism. And while the iww led massive strikes on the Gulf Coast for a few years, the unions loyal to the new Mexican government ultimately won the battle for control of the working class in that period. The Farmer Labor Party, like the Socialists, put itself on the side of the Bonapartist regime in Mexico, an authoritarian capitalist state, even as that government worked to crush the anarchist and Communist left. Finally, the Communists of the early 1920s, though they represented a genuinely revolutionary socialist impulse, proved to be too small to have much of an impact and, despite their generally correct analysis of the developments, ultimately proved incapable of fully understanding and politically navigating the nationalist revolution that was underway all around it. Their support of the Obregón government during the de la Huerta rebellion failed to save the party and fundamentally compromised its principles. The American left had not always advanced the causes of democracy and socialism, but in any case, the weight of any or even all of the foreign leftist forces in Mexico, from the afl to the Communists, was simply insignificant compared to the power of the enormous social and political Revolution that had thrust up the generals who now became presidents – sometimes calling themselves socialists – as they created a new capitalist state in Mexico. Politics is always about vision and strategy. The key point for socialists is always the political independence of working-class movements from the cap-

the american left and the mexican revolution

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italist class, and by the 1930s also from the bureaucratic Communist class. The failure to establish that principal of political independence either in the United States or in Mexico would inevitably lead to failure and sometimes to catastrophic failure for some groups. But politics is also about organisation and power, and small organisations, if they cannot grow quickly enough, become irrelevant to the tidal movements of history. The Socialist Party’s left wing and the Communists came closest to the ideal of working-class political independence and to international labour solidarity, but the former remained undeveloped and trapped in the reformist Socialist Party, while the latter was in the 1920s simply too small and still too immature to have a significant impact. By the time the period we discuss here had ended, the Mexican Revolution had produced a new nationalist government with which the left could not compete, while the Russian Revolution had created a new ruling class that used the Communist International to serve itself and the Soviet Union’s national goals.

part 1 The American Left Supports the Mexican Revolution

∵

chapter 1

American Protestantism, Progressivism, and the Mexican Revolution Protestant Christianity and the American Progressive movement are two of the most important and often neglected influences of the left on the Mexican Revolution. Starting in the 1870s, missionaries carried Protestantism to Mexico while US government officials, diplomats, and businessmen in Mexico provided the first contacts with American Progressivism. Mexican exiles in the United States were also exposed to Protestant and Progressive America during the period from 1900 to 1920, and they absorbed the socio-political views and concepts that would later influence Mexico’s revolutionary movement, its labour unions, and its leftists. We examine in this chapter how these two movements understood and attempted to influence Mexican society and US policy toward Mexico. America was fundamentally a Protestant country, and even Catholics and Jews often found themselves protestanised, that is, acculturated and assimilated and finally transformed into modern individualists competing in the capitalist struggle and consuming in the capitalist market – even if they subsequently went on to become socialist collectivists. Protestantism in America played a large part in the development of secularism and in the creation of a democratic society, as well as in the development of the notion of individual rights, and a particular conception of humanism based on individual opportunity and self-fulfilment. Protestantism, particularly that strain of Protestantism that believed in human perfectibility,1 drove American reform movements – abolition of slavery, women’s rights, prison and insane asylum reform, abstention from the consumption of alcohol, workers’ rights, urban reform, and socialism – also contributed to the rise of Progressivism. Progressivism in the United States was an upper- and middle-class reform movement concerned with financial and corporate power and its abuse, with political bossism and its corruption, and with the state of the working class and particularly immigrants. These American bourgeois and petit-bourgeois reformers sought to use the capitalist state to solve their own economic problems of profitability, to break the populist power of party bosses (usually Demo-

1 Passmore 2000, Chapters 6 and 7.

© Koninklijke Brill BV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004271333_00

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crats but sometimes Republicans or Socialists), and to bring discipline to the working classes, in particular through Americanisation programmes aimed at the assimilation of Eastern and Southern European immigrants and blacks. Progressives advocated state intervention in and regulation of the capitalist economy, while at the centre of American Progressivism was the notion that capital and labour had to be partners in reforming the political and economic system.2 Protestantism and Progressivism dominated late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American life and they formed the social, cultural, and intellectual context for the rise of the progressive, labour, and socialist left in the United States during the period under consideration here, from 1900 to 1925. Those two ideologies carried by missionaries and by businesspeople would also, though to a lesser degree, influence Mexican culture and Mexican leftists. The impact of both Protestantism and Progressivism was broad and yet quite significant, and at the same time it was in the end contradictory, since a reformed American government would still come into conflict with a reformed Mexican government led by nationalists who wanted to assert their country’s sovereignty.3 One could argue that American imperialism carried Protestantism to Mexico, since, as John Mason Hart has noted, when American corporations invested in Mexico after 1870, so too did the American Protestant missionaries.4 Yet at the same time, it was the Mexican anti-Catholic Liberal Party,5 which believed in religious toleration as part of the process of establishing a democratic society, that encouraged the American missionaries. And leaders like liberal Mexican President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada (in office 1872–76) welcomed and supported the Protestant missionaries in their efforts. When he became president in 1876, Porfirio Díaz continued the policy, even after he made peace and formed an alliance with the Catholic Church. The Liberals, who were admirers of nations like Great Britain and the United States, hoped that the Protestants’ presence in Mexico ‘would help to create a new national consciousness’.6 And so it did, though it was not necessarily the consciousness that the Liberals initially hoped for.

2 On American Progressivism see: Hofstadter 1955; Croly 1909; Weinstein 1968; Kolko 1963; Sklar 1988; Williams 1966. 3 Ridge 2012, passim. 4 Hart 2002, p. 43. 5 This Mexican Liberal Party of the 1850s to 1870s should not be confused with another party of the same name led by Ricardo Flores Magón in the early twentieth century. 6 González Navarro 1994, vol. 2, p. 24.

american protestantism

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Beginning in the 1870s, hundreds of American missionaries from the major Protestant denominations, from the various Bible societies, and from several sects as well went to Mexico – generally to the northern states – buying land, building churches, organising Sunday schools as well as primary and high schools, establishing presses and periodicals, and publishing millions of pieces of literature.7 By 1913 one could find in Mexico Episcopalian, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Disciples of Christ, Friends (Quakers), and Adventists proselytising and leading congregations in prayer.8 The missionaries’ influence extended throughout the North of Mexico, from the US-Mexico border south to Zacatecas and between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, that is, throughout the entire northern region known to geographers as Arid Mexico, though America Protestants could also be found proselytising in Veracruz and Mexico City. Many of the early Protestant churches and schools were built near the northern railroad lines and amidst the mining communities and ranches. By the time of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 there were still just 700 Protestant congregations and only 75,000 Protestants in Mexico9 while the country had 15 million inhabitants most of whom were nominally Roman Catholic, though there were also many who practised indigenous religions. Nevertheless, while the numbers were small, the influence of the Protestants was very significant. Who joined the Protestant churches in Mexico? The missionaries tended to have most success among ‘certain social layers in transition: mine workers, textile industry workers, the hired hands of the agricultural sector, casual labourers, and some small rural landowners’.10 The Protestant churches made little or no headway with the indigenous villages or peons on the haciendas, nor with the bourgeoisie or the oligarchs, but rather they were most successful with those ‘who had precarious economic situations because of their link to capitalism and the nascent class of wage-earners’.11 Some of the Protestant converts, coming as they did from the working class, participated in or even became leaders of the workers’ mutual societies and labour unions.12 The Prot-

7 8

9 10 11 12

Baldwin 1990, p. 24, Table 1; Winton 1913, pp. 182–3. Baldwin 1990, p. 35, Table 2. In addition to the Protestants, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, went to Mexico as colonisers, buying land and establishing Mormon communities. Ludlow 1992. The Mormons, however, did not carry the same social values as the Protestants. Baldwin 1990, pp. 58 and 87. Bastian 1993, p. 15. Ibid. Bastian 1993, pp. 63–73.

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chapter 1

estant missionaries’ activities often anticipated and later paralleled those of the various labour and left organisations that followed. The first Protestant missionaries who went to Mexico in the 1870s and 1880s tended to be quite conservative. They had no criticisms of the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, the president whose government tolerated and even encouraged them. Indeed, they expressed their approval of Díaz who kept order and put down the occasional rebellion. One is struck in reading the letters of the earliest missionaries by their apparent lack of interest in Mexico’s situation; they express no concern about the lack of political democracy or the atrocious social conditions. Their letters deal almost solely with buying land, building churches, and proselytising. If they mention conversations with people in Mexico, they are always with other Americans or wealthy Mexicans. Yet even in those early years the missionaries introduced into Mexico elements that had not existed in Mexico before and that had an impact, such as the women’s missionary organisations, schools that taught the poor how to read and write, and later hospitals that treated patients even from the lower classes.13 After 1900, however, American Protestantism in the United State became profoundly social, political, and reformist. Some of the Protestant churches of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had in response to the savage capitalism of the Gilded Age broken with the laissezfaire economic model and criticised the American plutocracy. They developed a new theology with economic and political implications called the Social Gospel.14 The great railroad strike of 1877 and other industrial conflicts, the growth of the cities and of the sweatshops, and the widening gulf between rich and poor led Protestant pastors and theologians to argue that the church had to play a role not only in saving souls but also in solving these problems. While the pastors preached the new morality, the institutional church had to provide social services for the poor.15 Pastors, lay leaders, and entire congregations took up ‘the social question’, that is, the issue of the inequality of wealth and poverty and the state of the working class and the poor in America. Washington Gladden, a Congregationalist pastor and one of the early advocates of the Social Gospel, wrote in 1908, for example: The redemption of the social order is, then, the problem now before us. Can it be accomplished? President [Theodore] Roosevelt thinks that it

13 14 15

Ada M.C. Drees 1913, passim. Hopkins 1940, passim. Degler 1940, pp. 338–51.

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can, and those who stand with him and support him assume that the existing competitive régime can be moralised and made to represent the interests of equity and fair dealing. If this can be done, nothing more is needed. If it cannot be done, the existing régime must make way for something better. The conviction that it can be done is finding expression just now in the vigorous efforts that are being made to amend and strengthen the laws which restrain plunderers and oppressors, so that opportunities may be equalised and the paths to success be kept open for men of all ranks and capacities. This is simple justice, and for this the church of God must stand with all the might of her influence.16 This Christian minister’s statement – that ‘If it cannot be done, the existing régime must make way for something better’ – represented a new development in American Protestantism. Gladden then expatiated on the role that the Christian church – that is the Protestant church – has to play in establishing racial equality, in bringing about economic justice, in ending political corruption, and in inaugurating an era of world peace. Such notions of social reform, once transported by the missionaries to Mexico, found a ready audience among many during the era of the Porfirian dictatorship. Walter Rauschenbusch, the Baptist pastor and theologian, wrote one of the classic theological texts of the Social Gospel, The Social Principles of Jesus published in 1917. More radical than Gladden, Rauschenbusch went further; he argued that it might be necessary to overturn the political and economic elite. In one passage he wrote: Every demand of God for righteousness in the history of Israel had been resisted by those in power. What title, then, did they have to the rights they claimed? Unless they fulfilled the function of true leaders, why should they not be put out of power and brought to justice?17 Rauschenbusch could certainly be interpreted here as calling for the overthrow of the existing economic and political leadership of the country who had enriched themselves at the expense of the people. And indeed, he was. While this was not actually a call for class struggle and revolution, it was a powerful demand for profound reform. The Protestant Social Gospel of the early twentieth century called upon Christians to stand up against oppression

16 17

Gladden 1908, see Chapter vii. Rauschenbusch 1917, p. 102.

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and exploitation, to stand with working people and the poor, and to take up what Rauschenbusch called a ‘revolutionary mission to society’.18 So, in the early years of the twentieth century, Christian ministers in Mexico carried with them this new theology, which dominated the principal Protestant denominations of the era. While Gladden and Rauschenbusch and the Christian socialists were not translated into Spanish at the time, no doubt many of the Protestant ministers who went to Mexico had studied Gladden and Rauschenbusch and other such Social Gospel theologians in the seminary. With these ideas so important in the Protestant churches in the United States in the period from 1900 to the 1920s, the Social Gospel principles were also carried to Mexico. This new Protestantism tended to become a civic religion that carried with it something that resembled a social and political programme which included public education, improvement in the lives of workers, respect for individual rights and human rights, the notion of the equality of women, and, of course, temperance, along with the famous Protestant work ethic, and also an end to corruption in politics, but above all it expressed a concern for the well-being of society as a whole, and especially the downtrodden and the poor.19 There had also developed in the United States out of this Social Gospel a Christian socialist movement.20 Christian socialists supported the unions, their strikes and boycott, called for social reforms and even socialism, and some Christian socialist ministers and lay people joined the Socialist Party. Missionaries, consciously or unconsciously, actively or passively, brought the Social Gospel to Mexico.21 Historian John Mason Hart notes in Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution that, ‘In the late 1890s deepening workers’ unrest led to increasingly frequent strikes, sometimes linked to radical Protestantism. The violence at Cananea and Río Blanco began with Protestant anti-Catholicism, secular humanism, and plm [Mexican Liberal Party] anarchism in the same meeting halls.’22 While there is no doubt that some of the missionaries shared the view of US political leaders and American corporate executives that the United States, racially superior, politically more progressive, and technologically more advanced, should guide Mexican development,23 at the same time the mis-

18 19 20 21 22 23

Rauschenbusch 1917, p. 185. Bastian 1993, pp. 303–15. Weinstein, 1967, pp. 19–23. Bastian 1993, p. 158. Hart 1987, p. 357. González 2004, pp. 94–6.

american protestantism

23

sionaries’ Protestant theology also carried other ideals and values that would influence Mexico’s emerging nationalist ideology. We see the impact of this new theology on the missionaries who had worked in Mexico and the education being given by the churches and Bible societies to those planning to work in Mexico. We have, for example, George B. Winton’s Mexico To-Day: Social, Political, and Religious Conditions which was published in 1913, a few years into the Mexican Revolution, as part of the Forward Mission Study Courses of the Missionary Education Movement, a book intended to be used in the education of missionaries. Winton makes it clear in the preface to the book that he places himself on the side of the Mexican Revolution (at the time he was writing the book, that is the Madero revolution): The Mexican people are engaged in a struggle for freedom. Political independence has been achieved; liberal freedom of conscience is at last realised; a liberal constitution guarantees human rights. But the burden of popular ignorance and of industrial helplessness has not yet been lifted. That load must be taken off. It has grown insufferable. The paroxysms that are now shaking the country to its centre are but blind struggles after this liberty.24 Winton, exaggerating the actual success that had been achieved, sees the Mexican Revolution as part of a global movement for democracy, writing, ‘The day of government by the people, the plain people, the common people is dawning in all the world’.25 He calls on Americans to help Mexico: Mexico needs help, especially the help of her nearest neighbours to the north. To know her condition, to sympathise, to lend a hand in the work of education and in the spread of the true religion, is far better than to criticise and to threaten her with armed intervention.26 Winton went on to provide a comprehensive critical analysis of Mexico. While he condemned the Aztecs, the Spanish, and the French for their violent conquests, Winton justified the American depredations – the incorporation of Texas into the United States and the US-Mexico War – and even found some merit in Porfirio Díaz’s long, dictatorial reign, but he is also a sharp critic of

24 25 26

Winton 1913, p. ix. Winton 1913, p. 26. Winton 1913, pp. ix–x.

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Mexico’s political, economic, and social conditions at the time that he was writing. While finding virtue in some Spanish landlords who could sometimes be kind, he goes on to criticise the system of debt peonage: On the great plantations conditions prevailed almost identical with those in the south of our own country during slavery da