by Jack Beatty
Over his six years as prime minister Asquith had won the heart of every man in the cabinet with exquisitely tailored testaments like that. Leading by generosity helped him keep his party together in August 1914, when Britain entered the Great War as an undivided country behind an undivided government.66
On August 4, Britain gave Germany twelve hours to withdraw its forces from Belgium or face war. “Cheered from every quarter of the House,” Asquith read this ultimatum aloud to the House. Churchill, listening, cried.67
It had been a near-run thing. Austrian shells were falling on the Grand Hotel in Belgrade when Captain Craig, the UVF commander in Belfast, wired Carson in London that “you may take it that immediately you signify by the pre-arranged code that we are to go ahead, everything prepared will be carried out to the letter … All difficulties have been overcome and we are in a very strong position.” Anticipating that Churchill would order a blockade of Ulster as soon as the Ulster Provisional Government was proclaimed, Craig was arranging the delivery of mass quantities of flour, tea, and other staples from Glasgow to stockpile against scarcity when Churchill was moving to mobilize the Royal Navy for war against Germany. Russia had mobilized against Austria when Lord Milner, a Unionist ultra, was still at work designing the currency of the Provisional government. Berlin was about to implement its Period Preparatory to War measures when Asquith was in the cabinet room poring over maps of Ulster, preparing his speech for the last reading of the bill amending home rule. He was interrupted, he wrote to Ms. Stanley, by “a telephone message from (of all people in the world) Bonar Law, to ask me to come & see him and Carson at his Kensington abode … He had sent his motor car, which I boarded, and in due time arrived at my destination … It was quite an adventure, for I might easily have been kidnapped by a section of Ulster Volunteers.” Law proposed that “in the interest of the international situation” the home rule controversy be suspended. From that moment—the last moment!—the Ulster crisis began receding into the mists of history. Carson received Captain Craig’s telegram a few hours before this meeting. If he had wired back “Go ahead,” Ulster 1914 might be remembered still.68
“War Declared” by Max Beckmann
As it was, the Ulster crisis ranks as a cause of the world war rather than as a barricade to Britain’s participation in it. Impending civil war in Ireland signaled Berlin that “Britain was so deeply mired … that the danger of [its] becoming involved in a continental war was … negligible,” according to John C. G. Röhl, the kaiser’s biographer, who adds that “this grave miscalculation more than any other neutralized the deterrent effect till then implicit in the Triple Entente.”69
“I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know that the world will break your heart eventually,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan remarked after the death of John F. Kennedy. Ulster is an Irish story, and so it is fitting to end with heartbreak.
For the first time since Gladstone introduced his second home rule bill chairs were set out on the House floor on Tuesday, August 3, to accommodate the overflow crowd come to hear Sir Edward Grey make the government’s case for war on grounds of interest, honor, and the maintenance of the balance of power against German hegemony in Europe. Toward the end, after Grey called Ireland “the one bright spot in the very dreadful situation,” and declared that “the position in Ireland—and I should like this to be clearly understood abroad—is not a consideration among the things we have to take account of now,” John Redmond was seen conferring with members of his Irish party. “I am going to tell them,” he said, “that they can take all their troops out of Ireland, and we will defend the country ourselves.”
With memorial masses for the Bachelor’s Walk victims held across Ireland on the Sunday, two days past, with ten thousand rifles for the Irish Volunteers just landed on the Wicklow Coast, with feelings still running high on the Nationalist back benches, Redmond, swept beyond his base by patriotic emotion, addressed the House. “I say to the Government that … Ireland will be defended by her armed sons from invasion, and for that purpose the armed Catholics in the South will only be too glad to join arms with the armed Protestant Ulster men,” he daringly pledged. He had a dream of Ireland united in England’s war: “Is it too much to hope that out of this situation a result may spring which will be good, not merely for the Empire, but for the future welfare and integrity of the Irish nation?” He finished to “deafening applause” even from the Unionists. Redmond not only lent political support to the British war effort; his son also enlisted and won a Distinguished Service Order for gallantry. Unlike one of Asquith’s sons, one of Grey’s, and two of Bonar Law’s, William Redmond survived the war.70
John Redmond: England’s Irish patriot
Initially Redmond wanted the Irish Volunteers to serve only in Ireland. But on September 20, addressing a body of East Wicklow Volunteers in the Vale of Avoca, he once more got carried away. It would, he said, “be a reproach to her manhood … if young Ireland confined their efforts to staying at home” to defend against “an unlikely” invasion. “I say to you, therefore, your duty is twofold”: to go on “drilling and make yourselves efficient for the work, and then account for yourselves as men, not only in Ireland itself, but wherever the firing-line extends.” Whether this, as F. S. L. Lyons writes, was a “reaction of gratitude for Home Rule’s having at last been entered on the statute books” (with its operation suspended until after the war) or “a gesture of competition with the Ulster Volunteers whom Carson had already urged to fight overseas,” it was a political debacle. It split the Volunteers, with eleven thousand rejecting any idea of fighting for England and lining up behind leaders like Patrick Pearse, who soon operated a “revolutionary cell” within the Volunteers, source of the foot soldiers of the Easter Rising.
John Redmond (as seen by Sinn Féin): England’s Irish traitor
From the Wicklow speech also dates the fall of the Nationalist Party, with their candidates losing key by-elections in 1917 to Sinn Féiners, including the lone survivor among the leaders of the rising, Éamon de Valera. “Dev,” free Ireland’s first president, ran on the Proclamation of the Irish Republic that Pearse read out to puzzled passersby in front of the Dublin General Post Office on Easter Monday 1916, which began: “IRISHMEN AND IRISH WOMEN: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.” Next to Irish freedom, home rule under Britain quickly lost its grip on Irish hopes, and Sinn Féin’s definition of the home rule politicians as “a body of green-liveried servants of the British connection” took hold.71
To Irish Republicans Redmond’s English patriotism was perfidy. An editorial voice of Ireland’s “exiled children in America,” as the Proclamation called them, was virulent. In 1912, when the House voted for the third home rule bill and the cause looked won at last, New York’s Irish World saluted Redmond as “the idol of the race.” Three and a half years later, after British firing squads had anointed the Republican cause with the martyrs’ blood of the rising, Redmond was reviled by the World: “We can almost pity the fallen leader and his followers, but what has Ireland done that she should be cursed with such a canting, cringing, cowardly crew? Ireland has had traitors before but none quite so despicable.”72
John Redmond died in March 1918 knowing that his “lifelong struggle to reconcile nationalist with Unionist and Ireland with England had ended in unrelieved failure.”73
A month later, needing men to check the Ludendorff offensive tearing holes in the British lines in France, an “order in council” from London extended conscription to Ireland. That inspired an Irish toast: “May the shadow of John Redmond never fall upon your sons.”74
4
THE UNITED STATES AND MEXICO
THE PRESIDENT AND THE BANDIT
He said his Mexican policy was based upon two of the most deeply seated convictions of his life. First, his shame as an American over the fi
rst Mexican war, and his resolution that there should never be another such predatory enterprise. Second, upon his belief … that a people has the right “to do what they damn please with their own affairs.” (He used the word “damn.”)
—From notes made by the journalist Ray Stannard Baker on a May 11, 1917, conversation with Woodrow Wilson
Before August, the world’s killing ground in 1914 was Mexico, where a violent revolution had been raging since 1910. Mexico was a portent of social upheaval for Europe’s possessing classes and of anti-imperialist revolt for Europe’s foreign offices. For European and American mining and oil companies with property there, fortunes were at risk in Mexico. The new American president who took office in March 1913 shared none of these fears. For Woodrow Wilson Mexico was a moral proving ground. On it he would show that U.S. hemispheric imperialism was a thing of the past. For the best of reasons, he wanted to stay out of the Mexican Revolution; for the best of reasons, he got pulled in. When Wilson intervened in Mexico, in April 1914, no one could have guessed that he was plunging the United States into a stream of events that, in April 1917, would sweep it onto the stage of world history. No other Great Power would follow so improbable a path to belligerency. The United States would enter the European war through Mexico.
Throughout the twentieth century and with ideologically charged vigor during the Cold War, the United States acted as a counterrevolutionary power in Latin America, intervening either directly or by proxy against Marxist-Leninist revolutions (Cuba, Nicaragua), leftist guerrilla movements (El Salvador), and democratically elected socialist governments (Guatemala, Chile). Brazilian generals, Panamanian, Paraguayan, and Chilean strongmen found friends in Washington. The apocryphal quip attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt, that Nicaraguan strongman Anastasio Somoza was an SOB but “our SOB,” captured the cynical maxim guiding the conduct of a succession of American presidents toward right-wing dictators who plundered their people but protected U.S. economic interests.
Woodrow Wilson, too, intervened in the hemisphere, sending marines to protect U.S. businesses in Haiti in 1914, occupying Santo Domingo in 1916, and, in aid of American bankers, concluding a treaty with Nicaragua that according to Senator George W. Norris made the “dollar diplomacy” of Wilson’s predecessor in the White House, William Howard Taft, “look like the proverbial 30 cents.”1
However, in Mexico Wilson allowed arms to flow to a peasant revolution against a military dictator. More through understanding its genesis in “the great and crying wrongs the people have endured,” he accepted that the overthrow of the existing unjust order must precede the American nostrum of free elections. The president even defended the revolutionary violence perpetrated by the rebel general and sometime bandit Francisco “Pancho” Villa.2
Historical empathy moved Wilson to reach out his hand to Villa. The bandit made himself acceptable to the president by protecting American businesses in areas he controlled, deporting union organizers from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), for example, at the request of the Guggenheims’ American Smelting and Refining Company. In addition, Villa buffed his image with a propaganda campaign focused on Hollywood and progressive journalists. By late 1913, the susceptible organs of the American press had transformed the bandit into a robin hood, the butcher into a brilliant commander, the subliterate muleteer into a plausible statesman. Regarding Villa as “the greatest Mexican of his generation,” Woodrow Wilson briefly saw in him the lineaments of Mexico’s next president.
“In the Interest of Peace.” Sykes in the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Well might Uncle Sam look puzzled. What was an American president doing arming Mexican revolutionaries?
Villa cast himself as an American progressive in a hurry. When he told an El Paso newspaper that he wanted Mexico to be like the United States “where all men are equal before the law and where any man who is willing to work can make such a living for himself and his family as only the wealthy in Mexico [now] can enjoy,” he might have been Wilson speaking in the 1912 campaign about America under “The New Freedom,” the slogan for his program of progressive reform.3
In early 1914, Wilson tilted decisively toward Villa and the rebels by lifting the arms embargo imposed in March 1912 by President Taft. Smuggling had poked holes in the embargo, the revolutionary armies paying Mexican men, women, and children three cents for every cartridge smuggled across the border, the women carrying hundreds in belts under skirts that hung nearly to their knees. But Wilson’s decision opened the tap. Muscled up with a shipment of fifteen million rounds of ammunition, fourteen thousand rifles, and four machine guns long waiting in New Orleans, in late March, General Villa’s Division of the North attacked Torreón, a key rail junction in northern Mexico. Villa entered the city on April 3. Meanwhile, to prevent a shipment of arms from reaching the dictator General Victoriano Huerta in Mexico City, on April 21 Wilson ordered American bluejackets and marines to occupy the port city of Veracruz. These two military actions finished Huerta, who fled Mexico in July.4
Few, though, would have predicted that outcome on April 22, for not only did soldiers of Huerta’s federal army resist the landing of the Americans; Mexican civilians, too, defended their city, their country. The streets of Veracruz were strewn with the bodies of at least 126 Mexican soldiers and civilians killed by U.S. sailors and marines, who themselves lost seventeen dead and sixty-three wounded in house-to-house fighting. Huerta used Veracruz to rally nationalist anger around him, even appealing to the rebels to join in a war against the Yankee invader, whose troops, the Huerta-controlled Mexico City papers falsely reported, were pouring across the Rio Grande. Wilson swore that Huerta was his target, that by seizing their leading seaport and killing scores of them he intended no harm to the Mexican people; but in all Mexico, it seemed, only Pancho Villa swallowed that farrago. Risking a forfeit of the nationalist card to Huerta, Villa told a U.S. consul in northern Mexico that “as far as he was concerned we could keep Veracruz and hold it so tight that not even water would get in to Huerta.”5
The seizure of Veracruz sped the exit of the dictator and the victory of the revolution. But south of the border it went down as an imperialist grab, La Nación of Buenos Aires accurately predicting that “the memory of this conflict will live in the history of the relations between the U.S. and Latin America.”
Wilson took office with an exalted view of his mandate (informing the chairman of his party the day after the election, “Remember that God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States”) and he hoped to end “dollar diplomacy” in the hemisphere and make a fresh moral start. “President Wilson has served plain notice that foreign interests and concessions are no longer to be the first consideration in the relations between the U.S. and the Southern Republics,” a journalist paraphrased Wilson after interviewing him. “Foreign interests” meant American as well. Since the late nineteenth century, Mexico had become a satellite of the United States, which used it, the wife of an American diplomat stationed there wrote, “as a quarry, leaving no monument to God nor testaments to man in place of the treasure that we have piled on departing ships or trains.” Challenging the grip of the “special interests” at home, Wilson took a wider view of his responsibilities than to serve as their political arm in Mexico. “If American enterprise in foreign countries … takes the shape of imposing upon and exploiting the mass of the people in that country, it ought to be checked,” he declared in his 1914 Fourth of July oration in Philadelphia. He was “willing to get anything for an American that money and enterprise can obtain, except the suppression of the rights of other men.” If Americans lost property in Mexico, if some were killed in the revolution, that was of course regrettable, “but back of it all is the struggle of a people to come into their own.”
The blood and obloquy of Veracruz has obscured both the lost story of an American president arming a popular revolution in Latin America and the long reach of Wilson’s decision and its lasting consequence. Entering the Mexican labyrinth as
a hemispheric hegemon, the United States would exit it as a world power.6
From the Stone Age to the Age of Capital, the history of Mexico was a violent struggle for the land of Mexico. In the century before the Spanish Conquest in 1520, the Aztecs exploited peasant revolts against local elites to build their empire. Expropriating land as they conquered it, they forced subject peoples to work in the fields for the Aztec state. “Every year many of their sons and daughters were demanded of them for sacrifice, and others for service in the houses and plantations of their conquerors,” the ruler of a Totonac town complained to Hernán Cortés.
Revolts were frequent, and savagely repressed. Prisoners taken in battle had their beating hearts ripped out to propitiate Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec war god. The conquistadores arrived during an anti-Aztec revolt, and exploited it to supplant the Aztecs as Mexico’s rulers. The pattern of revolt was set for the next five hundred years. Aztec emperors, rebellious Indian aristocrats, Spanish conquistadores, the bourgeois political leaders of both the war of independence and the revolution—elites rode the peasants into power, then betrayed them.7
Greeted as liberators, the Spaniards soon recognized the utility of slavery, modeling the encomienda system of forced Indian labor on the grimmest features of the Aztecs’ “despotic tributary regime.” Slaves were branded with their owners’ initials like cattle—on the face. The gold and silver mined by the pre-Conquest peoples under the Spanish lash financed the commercial revolution of the Age of Discovery. The money god proved hungrier than Huitzilopochtli. In central Mexico, out of an aboriginal population estimated at eleven million in 1500, by 1650 only a million and a half had survived the fatal impact of European colonization.8
Using the Indians up in the mines, the Spanish could not exploit their labor in the fields. Yet the growing colony had to be fed. So, by bestowing huge swathes of land on throne-connected grandees, the Spanish created the hacienda system, “the centre of gravity of the Mexican economy for the next two-and-a-half centuries.” The haciendas first expropriated the land of exterminated Indians and then, with legal cover after the villages lost the protection of the Spanish crown, annexed the communal land of mixed-race settlers. Land seizures accelerated in the nineteenth century, provoking a hundred village revolts against haciendas and a score of regional and two national rebellions. One of these brought independence from Spain after 1810, another, the last and greatest, revolution in 1910.9
