by Conrad Black
Much more complicated, and instructively more intractable, were the problems of Mexico, which erupted into the lap of the United States following the overthrow of the 34-year dictatorship of President Porfirio Díaz in 1911, and Díaz’s departure from Mexico. Diaz was another amiable scoundrel, only marginally more pure of motive, if significantly less absurd a mountebank, than General Antonio L. de Santa Anna, subduer of the Alamo and unsuccessful opponent of Sam Houston and of Winfield Scott. Diaz achieved great material progress for Mexico and coined the famous lamentation that Mexico was “so far from God and so close to the United States,”96 but he ignored social reform and was inappropriately close to the big landowners and foreign investors. Santa Anna, Benito Juárez, the authentic and relatively disinterested patriot who overthrew the French in Mexico and executed the “Emperor” Maximilian, and Diaz were the three leading figures of Mexican public life from independence to 1911, principal political figures in the country from, respectively, 1833 to 1855, 1858 to 1872, and 1877 to 1911. Diaz was a successful leader in many ways, but after 34 years his regime was ripe to fall.
The opposition to Diaz was led by Francisco Madero, a moderate reformer and classic Kerensky type (Kerensky was the initial leader of the Russian revolution in 1917), who unleashed forces he could not control. Madero was overthrown and executed by the reactionary front for foreign and large domestic investors, led by Victoriano Huerta, in 1913. Wilson refused to recognize Huerta, whom he rightly saw as very unrepresentative of Mexican popular opinion, and preferred the less tainted Venustiano Carranza.
There was the usual sort of absurd incident that long bedeviled American relations with its “sister republics,” as successive American presidents hopefully referred to them, when an American shore party at Tampico, on April 9, 1914, seeking only some supplies, strayed into an excluded area and was arrested. They were promptly released, but the U.S. squadron commander, Admiral Henry T Mayo, in the sort of conduct that has irritated relations with Latin America for nearly two centuries, demanded a formal apology, punishment of the officer responsible, and a 21-gun salute to the American flag flying above Tampico. Huerta refused; Wilson allowed himself to be persuaded that he had to support Mayo in order not to advantage Huerta, and the apology was provided, but not the salute. Wilson secured the authority of Congress on April 22, 1914, to use force to redress grievances, and Bryan had just advised that a German ship carrying munitions was approaching Vera Cruz, in contravention of the blockade Wilson had taken it upon himself to impose. American ships and Marines bombarded and occupied Vera Cruz, and Huerta broke off relations, Wilson having managed to unify Mexican opinion against the United States. Wilson did accept the mediation offer of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, and at a meeting in Niagara Falls, Ontario (Canada), in May and June, the mediating countries proposed the retirement of Huerta, his replacement by a reform government, and no indemnity to the U.S. Huerta refused and had himself elected president; neither the mediating powers nor the U.S. accepted this, and Huerta resigned a few days later.
A month later, General Álvaro Obregón led a Constitutionalist army (the Carranza party) into Mexico City, and Carranza was recognized as president by the United States and other countries. Carranza’s supposedly loyal lieutenant in the north, Francisco “Pancho” Villa, revolted, as did the leading warlord in the south, Emiliano Zapata. Carranza and Villa traded control of Mexico City as chaos prevailed in much of Mexico from 1915 to 1917. In his freebooting activities, Villa ignored the Mexican-U.S. border, other than as a refuge when Carranza and Obregón’s loyalists succeeded in chasing him right out of the country. On January 10, 1916, Villa murdered 18 American mining engineers whom Carranza had invited to help reopen mines, and Villa’s forces killed 17 Americans in a raid against Columbus, New Mexico, in March.
Wilson had tried to fob off the whole Mexican imbroglio, including these unhappy episodes, with a policy of “watchful waiting,” but these outrages blew the lid off that humbug and, as happens from time to time in American affairs, the Congress got well ahead of the president in aroused belligerency. Wilson mobilized 150,000 militia to guard the Mexican border, and authorized, with Carranza’s arm-twisted approval, a punitive raid into Mexico by General John J. Pershing at the head of 15,000 men. It was essentially a fiasco, aroused immense hostility in Mexico, and made a hero out of Villa, and Carranza rejected Wilson’s unctuous attempts at agreed withdrawal and joint guarantees of the border. Finally, in early 1917, as European war threatened to involve the United States, Wilson quietly withdrew American forces, and Pershing prepared to head a hundred times as large a force against a thousand times as formidable an enemy.
Former president Huerta died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1916, as he approached the U.S.-Mexican border from the American side, with a view to launching another coup. (His nickname was “the jackal.”) Carranza was elected president, and recognized, in 1917, and successfully arranged to have Zapata murdered in 1919. But Obregón turned against him and President Carranza was assassinated in 1920. Villa made peace with Obregón and retired to luxury, but was also assassinated in 1923. Obregón had a legitimate and very successful term as president from 1920 to 1924, and was succeeded by the talented and devious General Plutarco Calles in 1924. Consecutive terms were not permitted, but President Obregón was elected to succeed Calles in 1928, but was, in conformity with the now well-established tradition, assassinated before being reinaugurated the third of four presidents of Mexico to die violently, a record rarely challenged in any semi-serious jurisdiction since Roman times.
Calles remained the power in the country, and was known as Maximato until the election of General Lázaro Cárdenas in 1934. Calles founded the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, which ruled until 2000 in a virtual one-party state (and was democratically restored in 2012). He also conducted an anti-clerical campaign, known as the Cristero War, in which nearly 100,000 people were killed, including nearly 5,000 priests. Calles on the (anti-clerical) right and Zapata on the left, and Villa in the lore of outlawry, continue to be revered figures. These matters are recounted here because Mexican-American relations became an intermittently recurring matter of concern in Washington—little wonder, given the tumultuous devolution of events in Mexico and the illegal entry of perhaps 20 million Mexicans into the United States in the last half of the twentieth century.
10. WORLD WAR I
The Panama Canal opened officially on August 15, 1914. The Congress had passed a statute excluding U.S. flag ships from tolls, and the British objected that this was a violation of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, which promised equal treatment for all countries. Wilson agreed with the British and had the Panama Tolls Act repealed. It was presumably not entirely coincidental that the British thereafter approved everything the United States did in Mexico. By this time, the Great War had begun. Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated by an anarchist, Gavrilo Princip, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on June 28, 1914. Princip was acting for the Black Hand, a Serbian Pan-Slavic group, and the Serbian government was somewhat aware of the conspiracy, though it took no direct part in it. The German emperor gave Austria what he called “a blank check” to deal with Serbia as it wished. The Austrians investigated thoroughly but failed to find evidence of Serbian government complicity. The world was outraged and sympathetic to the Habsburgs. President Raymond Poincaré and Premier René Viviani of France visited St. Petersburg, July 20 to 23, and the French urged a strong hand to restrain Vienna. As soon as the French leaders had left the Russian capital, Austria served its ultimatum on Serbia, demanding suppression of hostile (to Vienna) organizations and publications, and dismissal of hostile officials, prosecution of accessories to the plot, sanitization of school curricula, and abject apologies. Serbia’s reply was apparently conciliatory but evasive, and declined the requirement of prosecutions.
Serbia was the leader of Pan-Slav opposition to Austro-Hungarian incursions into the South Slavic lands grudgingly and forcibly vacated by Turkey, and Russia aspired to
be the champion of the Slavs against Vienna, as it had been against the Turks. The British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, proposed a conference on Austro-Serb problems, which France and Russia accepted but Austria-Hungary declined as unsuitable to matters of the honor of their empire, and they were supported by Germany. Both Vienna and Berlin believed the czar was bluffing, and Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28. There was perfervid maneuvering, as France urged a strong response on Russia, and Berlin promised not to enter France or Belgium if Britain remained neutral. The British government declined. Between July 29 and August 3 all the five main powers were raising the ante while offering conditional reductions of tension but inching toward general mobilization, including a Russian order of full mobilization, which was then reduced to mobilization against Austria-Hungary only. This still attracted a German ultimatum to cease preparations for war on the German frontier, which caused a Russian reescalation, and Germany declared war on Russia on the evening of August 1. Belgium declined to give Germany free passage on its territory and was invaded by Germany, and Germany declared war on France on August 3. Britain declared war on Germany on August 4 and Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia on August 6. Italy declined to join the war, though some weeks later Turkey joined the war on the side of the Central Powers.
Almost all the leaders of the five initial Great Power belligerents were erratic and reckless about what they were getting into, like children playing with dynamite, without a thought of the human and material damage they might be about to cause. The expectation was for a brief war. The United States had talented ambassadors in the major capitals, who reported events accurately, but the United States was not consulted and claimed no right to intervene diplomatically. Wilson declared U.S. neutrality and on August 19 asked his countrymen to be “impartial in thought as well as in action.” The British were more responsible and wary, but knew that they could not tolerate a German victory over France, Russia, and Belgium, and entered what their leaders feared would be an unprecedented hecatomb, with the capable foreign secretary, Grey, famously remarking: “The lights are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Crisis of Democracy
World War, Isolationism, and
Depression, 1914–1933
1. THE WESTERN FRONT
The German war plan, devised by Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, the former chief of the German General Staff, was to advance in overwhelming strength along the Channel coast of Belgium and France (“Let the last man on the right brush the Channel with his sleeve!”) and encircle Paris from the north and west, severing Britain from France, and France from its capital. Schlieffen, like America’s Admiral Mahan, was a student of the Punic Wars and wrote a learned treatise on Hannibal’s masterpiece of encirclement, the Battle of Cannae, which was emulated in his plan for France and was partially revived in the great German blitzkrieg in France a generation later. The French plan, Plan XVII, devised by their commander, (subsequent) marshal Joseph Joffre, was to advance into the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, and then into Germany. The Germans aimed at a quick knockout of France, while holding the eastern front against the Russians with relatively light forces.
Although Schlieffen’s last words allegedly were “Keep the right wing strong!,” his successor, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, nephew of the victor of the Franco-Prussian War, weakened the right wing and revised the German plan to pass before Paris. After about two weeks of war, it became clear that the Germans were advancing well beyond the French in the north, and the French attack in Alsace and Lorraine was repulsed. Recognizing late, but not quite too late, the great danger in which France suddenly was, Joffre, with imperturbable coolness, abandoned his long-prepared Plan XVII and devised a new one, which consisted of a hasty but orderly retreat, keeping his armies intact, and surprising the Germans with a defense of Paris that would, if necessary, be fought to the last cartridge and the last man.
Moltke considered a French recovery impossible as his armies rolled inexorably toward Paris, and began to detach a few divisions and send them by rail to Russia. When the German armies arrived on and just north of the Marne, just 15 miles from Paris, they were attacked from the north and west and south with unsuspected force. Units totaling 1.485 million German soldiers and about 1.1 million Allied soldiers, 90 percent of them French, were engaged, and in five days of intensive fighting, the French, dramatically reinforced at the height of the battle with the Paris militia dispatched to the front in 600 requisitioned Paris taxis, defeated the Germans, who fell back 40 miles. The armies then extended their fronts to the English Channel and the Swiss border, and settled into more than four years of horribly bloody trench warfare, where the advantage was with the defense, and attacks were in the face of massed machine gun and artillery fire on both sides. There would be decisive fighting on the Russian and Turkish fronts, but in the greatest theater, in France, blood-letting would be without precedent and beyond imagination, and without decisive result. In the five days of the first Battle of the Marne, each side would endure 250,000 casualties, a ghastly prefiguring of the horrors and prodigies of courage and sacrifice to come.
It was quickly a stalemate. The French and the Germans, in their supreme struggle, a declining France and surging a Germany, met where the addition of the British Commonwealth forces and the unshakeable determination of France enabled that country to hold its own against what was now a larger and stronger German Empire. As the war continued on in sanguinary indecision, Europe’s great nationalities bleeding themselves white (including Italy, which was unwisely seduced by offers of Allied favors and territorial gains in the Alps and on the Adriatic, to enter the war in 1915, though the horrible nature of the war was by then clear), it was inevitable that thoughts should focus on the United States, the mighty unengaged power, which had excluded itself from European affairs or interests in the Monroe Doctrine of 90 years before but possessed the power to determine the victor.
The British, although the Germans had built a formidable navy, announced an absolute blockade of Germany, which they shortly extended to include neutral countries that could pass on imports to or receive exports from Germany overland or in coastal waters—Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The agreed but unratified Declaration of London of 1909 detailed items that could be embargoed in war, but these did not include foodstuffs and other goods not normally regarded as the sinews of war. We were now in an era of total war, and Great Britain was not about to relax its blockade policy, which had been rigorously exercised since the Seven Years’ War, now more than 150 years before. On August 6, 1914, in the first few days of the war, Secretary Bryan asked that the belligerents accept the Declaration of London as written.
The Central Powers agreed, unsurprisingly, and the Russians and French said they would conform to the British position, which was also unsurprising, since without the British, the German navy would have prevailed over them without much difficulty. (France had the world’s fourth navy, after Britain, Germany, and the U.S., but it was a distant fourth and concentrated in the Mediterranean.) The British, on August 20, 1914, accepted the Declaration, but with a radical expansion of what it considered contraband. This scandalized Bryan, who thought it smacked of the British attitude during the Napoleonic Wars, which led to the War of 1812. His sharp rejoinder was intercepted by Wilson’s confidant in international affairs, (honorary) colonel Edward Mandell House, and toned down to a warning to the British of the severe effects on American public and political opinion of too restrictive a blockade. The British quietly ignored the warning and in November 1914 declared the North Sea a war zone and mined it entirely. This again outraged Bryan, who considered the British antics to be in no way less hostile and belligerent than the German recourse to submarine warfare against merchant shipping, which began in earnest when Germany declared the waters around the British Isles a war zone in retaliation, in February 1915.
The Bryan
position had some merit, but in practical terms American trade with the Central Powers had been about $170 million in 1913, while trade with France and Britain in the same year had been about $800 million—a figure that ratcheted almost vertiginously upwards from there, to about $3 billion in 1919, while trade with Germany and Austria-Hungary declined in the same period by over 99 percent, to under $2 million. The U.S. banking industry was also something less than even-handed. It was obvious that whatever happened, Great Britain was not going to be conquered and her loans could always be collected, if needs must, from prosperous bits of her empire that could come within the maw of America, such as the hardy perennial in the American appetite, Canada, which had been salivated over intermittently by American leaders since Washington and Franklin and Jefferson. Canada was now independent, but there were extensive British assets in it. By April 1917, the American financial community had made loans to or bought bonds from Britain, France, Italy, and, to a slight degree, Russia, totaling $2.3 billion. This was a much more profitable version of the high-handedness of the British on the high seas than Jefferson and Madison had had to contend with.
The British position was made a good deal more tolerable by the typically abrasive methods of the Germans. The British were imposing an embargo, running ships into port, inspecting them, but not threatening American lives or property. The Germans warned on February 4, 1915, that neutral ships would enter the war zone around the British Isles at their own risk. Six days later, the United States, showing favoritism certainly based on kinship, the democratic bona fides of the British and French, their status as the defenders rather than aggressors in the war, and, not to be altogether put out of mind, their status as huge and profit-generating importers and borrowers, responded to Germany that attacks on American ships and the endangering or taking of American lives on the high seas would be considered “an indefensible violation of neutral rights.” Germany would be held “strictly accountable.” This was uneven treatment of the warring powers, but the Germans were threatening to sink ships and the British were only claiming a right to embargo certain cargoes.
