by Jack Beatty
Madero escaped lynching. He was shot dead in February 1913 following a coup, “the forerunner of the many similar twentieth-century coups in which reform-minded presidents, such as Romolu Gallegos in Venezuela, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, and Salvador Allende in Chile, would be toppled by the military with varying degrees of covert or even overt support from foreign, mainly U.S., sources.” Military cadets freed Félix Díaz, the nephew of the late dictator, from his Mexico City prison, and then marched on the national palace, where Maderist forces repulsed them. There followed the Ten Tragic Days of fighting during which the heart of Mexico City was torn open by exchanges of artillery fire between the Maderists under General Huerta and the cadets under Díaz. Encouraged by the American embassy, Huerta changed sides, joining forces with Díaz to oust Madero. Surviving the assault on the palace, he was taken prisoner, and ordered killed by Huerta, who blamed Madero’s death on supporters trying to rescue him. Defying the Taft State Department, Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson, who loathed Madero for failing to impose “order,” had orchestrated the coup, and when his wink could have saved Madero’s life did not wink.*30
The news of Madero’s death reached Villa in El Paso. With the help of former Porfirian officials who hoped he would lead a rebellion against Madero, on Christmas Day 1912 he had sawn through the bars of his cell in a Mexico City prison and after a harum-scarum journey found refuge in the United States. The proprietor of an El Paso club, a revolutionary haunt, recalled Villa as a man “of unstable temper … who liked ice cream and got it almost every day at the elite confectionary. He was also fond of peanut brittle and always carried a supply in his pocket … Pancho said he had a very delicate stomach and had to almost live on squab. He kept a box of live pigeons in his rooms at my father’s hotel.”31
The pigeons were not for eating but for communicating with his friends in Chihuahua. From one of these, Abraham González, now governor of Chihuahua, who had recruited him for Madero in 1910, Villa received the summons to return to Mexico to oust the usurper and assassin Huerta. This was a fight Villa could warm to.
On March 6, with eight companions and nine rifles and on nine rented horses, Villa crossed the Rio Grande. From just inside Mexico, he telegraphed the local commander of Huerta’s federal army: “Knowing that the government you represent was preparing to extradite me, I have saved them the trouble. I am now in Mexico, ready to make war upon you. Francisco Villa.” In less than a year he’d be back on the border, to attack El Paso’s sister city Juárez, leading an army.32
While Villa, in his hotel room in El Paso, packed his peanut brittle to fortify himself for the hard ride into Chihuahua, in Princeton, Helen Woodrow Wilson was writing Jesse Woodrow Bones about their cousin Woodrow, like Pancho Villa poised to make history. Woodrow Wilson and his family had lived in Princeton since 1890, when he arrived as a young professor of jurisprudence and political economy. Helen had news of the small army of undergraduates following the former president of Princeton to Washington to serenade him at his inauguration as president of the United States:
March 1, 1913
The time for leaving Princeton has actually come; we start for Washington Monday morning … The morning of the 4th they march behind the carriage in which cousin Woodrow rides to the W. H. door. They wish to sing “Old Nassau” as a good-bye; that depends on Mr. Taft’s feeling about it. I rather think he’ll let them do it, he’s such a dear old soul—and if he doesn’t let them their hearts will be broken.
The author of these gushing lines inhabited a different moral universe from Pancho Villa. Cousin Woodrow, raised a minister’s son, lived in a genteel society. Yet Woodrow Wilson was not genteel. When traces of the knight still survived in the idea of the gentleman, he was a gentleman. It does not fit the received image of Woodrow Wilson, for example, to find him warning reporters that only his position restrained him from “thrashing” them for buzzing over the romantic lives of his daughters. Like Pancho Villa he tried to live by a code of honor, which lent unexpected steel to his character. “In fact, arguments, however soundly reasoned, did not appeal to him if they were opposed to his feeling of what was the right thing to do,” Robert Lansing, his future secretary of state, wrote of him. “He once said to me,” a Princeton contemporary remembered, ‘I am so sorry for those who disagree with me.’ When I asked why, he replied, ‘Because I know they are wrong.’ ”33
Taft hands Mexico to Wilson, from Puck, March 5, 1913.
On February 8, 1913, General Huerta had “the honor to inform” President Taft “that I have overthrown this government.” Huerta expected diplomatic recognition. Taft wanted to trade recognition for Huerta’s agreement to settle long-standing American economic and territorial claims, but before a deal could be reached his term expired. Recognition became Woodrow Wilson’s decision.34
Since the days of Thomas Jefferson, the United States had applied a de facto principle of recognition—that “the mere existence of a government was sufficient for recognition.” Mere existence was rarely good enough for Woodrow Wilson.* The United States had the right “to inquire fully whether [a foreign government] had come to power because its leaders were motivated by personal interests and ambitions,” Wilson maintained in a speech a week after taking office.35
Requiring new foreign governments to prove the purity of their motives before the United States favored them with an ambassador—this novel test of legitimacy harmonized with the moralism of Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, who helped Wilson draft the speech. Bryan owed his unlikely job to delivering party regulars to Wilson at the 1912 Democratic National Convention. The three-time Democratic presidential candidate “was endowed with such an excess of virtue that he found it difficult to recognize evil in other men.” Still, Bryan and his chief saw Huerta for the “murderer” he was, and, overruling the State Department, refused to recognize his government.36
Huerta exceeded their worst expectations. By the end of 1913, at least thirty-five of his political opponents had been assassinated, including a member of the Chamber of Deputies who, “after providing for the future care of his son,” had attacked Huerta as one “who snatched power by means of treason.” A March exposé in the New York World of Ambassador Lane Wilson’s role in the coup had only strengthened Woodrow Wilson’s conviction that Huerta must go. That European powers with economic interests at stake in Mexico recognized his government proved their iniquity. “The force of America is moral principle,” Wilson declared. “There is nothing else … for which she will contend.”37
In early 1914, Wilson asked his diplomats to canvass foreign opinion on the Mexican crisis. The chargé d’affaires in St. Petersburg reported that the tsar believed “the only satisfactory solution is [U.S.] annexation, and this action Russia would see with approval.” Nicholas’s imperial solution was shared by the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO), one of whose directors openly called for the United States to absorb northern Mexico. The financier Otto Kahn would have settled for the north becoming a separate country. Robert Lansing, then counsel to the State Department, warned that with nonrecognition and the lifting of the arms embargo the United States was on a path to war with Huerta. Annexation—of California and the Southwest—had crowned victory over Mexico in the 1846–48 war, and history might repeat itself in 1913–14. Woodrow Wilson confessed his shame over the Mexican War and in a major speech on Latin America before the Southern Commercial Congress in Mobile pledged that the United States would “never again” seek “one additional foot of territory by conquest.” Yet his anti-imperialist policy, twisted back on itself by contact with the tenebrous reality of Mexico, seemed headed toward war and conquest.38
If not Huerta, who? In 1913, Wilson sent “executive agents” to Mexico to find out. Washington suspected the leader of the so-called Constitutionalist rebels, Venustiano Carranza, a hacendado and former governor of Coahuila, of anti-Yankee nationalism. Pancho Villa hid his nationalism under a mask of subservience calculated to flatter Americans’ be
lief in their superiority over “half-breed” Mexicans like him. “In Villa they have an intrepid and resourceful general. He is the highest type of physical, moral, and mental efficiency that the conditions—and the environment—could reasonably be expected to produce,” the most influential of Wilson’s agents, former Minnesota governor John Lind, reported to Bryan. “An aristocrat ruined his sister; [Villa] killed him … Pictured as a demon in the Mexico City press principally because he executed some officers and some spies … employed by Huerta to assassinate him.” Though Villa admittedly shot prisoners, “the Federals shot over 30 rebels in their cots in the hospital at Gomez Palacio in the presence of an American doctor.”39
If Villa impressed Wilson’s agents, he seduced American reporters. Favorites traveled in a “luxurious” sleeper in Villa’s private train, refreshed themselves in a salon car, and enjoyed the services of “Fong,” our “beloved Chinese cook,” the well-fed John Reed testified. With funds raised by selling cattle from confiscated haciendas, Villa bribed journalists, funded American and Mexican papers, hired American publicists, and sold his life story to Hollywood along with the rights to film his battles. “No great man in the public eye at present understands the value of publicity to greatness better than Francisco Villa,” the New York Times, which thrived on front-page stories about Villa, observed in February 1914. In Pancho Villa’s story, as related by his agents in Mexico and romanticized by publicity, Woodrow Wilson saw the history of Mexico.40
Throughout 1913 Wilson took no side in Mexico’s revolution, his policy one of “watchful waiting.” In vain had he waited for Huerta to hold elections, even offering what Mexico’s foreign minister condemned as “a bribe” if Huerta agreed not to run. After nearly a year of ignoring the Constitutionalists, Wilson in late 1913 began waiting for them to commit to holding elections as a condition of lifting the embargo. Carranza, the “First Chief” of the revolution, sought through a skillful Washington envoy, Luis Cabrera, to disabuse Wilson of his “foolish hope of settling a revolution with an election.” And by degrees Wilson shifted toward the Constitutionalist position that the only way forward for Mexico, in his own hard words, was “civil war carried to its bitter conclusion.”41
“He had come to the conclusion that the real cause of the trouble in Mexico was not political but economic,” Cecil Spring Rice, the British ambassador in Washington, summarized the president’s thinking to Edward Grey, the foreign secretary. “So long as the present system under which whole provinces were owned by one man continued to exist, so long would there be perpetual trouble in the political world.” Wilson had felt his way into Mexican history, into the struggle for the land that in John Reed’s words, “had been smoldering since the Spanish crown gave Cortez a province for a garden,” and in that struggle the American president sided with the Mexican peasant. “This … was a fight for the land—just that and nothing more,” Wilson told a Saturday Evening Post interviewer. “My ideal is an orderly and righteous government in Mexico, but my passion is for the submerged eighty-five per cent of the people of that Republic.” As he said this, he slammed a clenched fist on his desk, and “a few open letters stirred a bit from the jar of the blow.”42
By January, Spring Rice was sadly informing Grey that “Mr. Bryan considered Villa was now the only alternative to Huerta.” Villa was unacceptable to the British, whose substantial oil concessions in Mexico, a source of the fuel for the newest ships in Winston Churchill’s navy, were put at risk by the fighting and menaced by the revolution.
In February, the secretary to Britain’s legation in Mexico City, T. B. Hohler, sought to set Wilson straight about Villa. In a two-hour White House meeting, the diplomat instanced the killing of a Huerista messenger as proof of Villa’s barbarism. “Mr. Wilson interrupted me and said that the messenger had come to move Villa from his allegiance to his chief [Carranza] and to his duty.” Wilson pressed on. “Supposing a man came into this room at this moment and offered him a million dollars to desert … the best interests of his country, would [the president] not kick him out?” “Yes, I said,… but hardly into the next world.” Indeed, Wilson, joined by the virtuous Bryan, insisted, into the next world. There was a war on; the messenger was a traitor. A thug and killer to Thomas Hohler, Villa was “a patriot and an honorable gentleman” to Woodrow Wilson.43
Extenuating murder, Wilson had left behind the genial moral code of Cousin Helen’s world to endorse revolutionary morality, as defined by General Arroyo in The Old Gringo, the necessity of “the new violence to end the old violence.”
By the turn of the year, Woodrow Wilson had watched and waited long enough. Dropping his condition of elections first, he lifted the arms embargo on February 3, 1914. No sooner had the president reassured a doubting senator that this step would not trigger a “bloodbath” than Pancho Villa bathed his name in blood.44
On February 17, 1914, William Benton, a belligerent English hacendado, entered Villa’s home in Juárez to demand payment for cattle that villagers (or Villa’s men) had rustled from land taken by Benton on the eve of the revolution. At the Villa residence, a British soldier of fortune, Francis Michael Tone, was inventorying weapons in a room adjoining Villa’s office when he overheard Benton and Villa shouting. From Tone’s account:
MR. BENTON: Give me money for my cattle, sir.
VILLA: Mañana, hombre.
BENTON (IN ENGLISH): I am a damned sight better man than you, any way you’d like to take it.
VILLA: No, muchacho.
A second or two later a shot was fired and … I rushed through the folding doors … into Villa’s office … Benton was lying in front of [Villa’s] desk … Blood was coming from a wound in his right breast, he appeared to be dead.45
At first Villa claimed that Benton started to draw his pistol but that Rudolfo Fierro, Villa’s psychopath in residence, shot him before he fired. Tone saw only Villa and Benton in the room. After sifting a welter of conflicting stories, Friedrich Katz believes Villa shot Benton, possibly through his desk, citing Villa’s admission months later that Benton had been reaching for his handkerchief, not his gun.
Benton’s death made no end of trouble for Villa, the London Times detecting a growing belief in Washington “that intervention to restore order is practically inevitable.” Benton also bedeviled Wilson, branded “obstinately stupid … and obstinately wicked” by the Los Angeles Times for lifting the arms embargo on the “bandit and murderer.” The Asquith government faced questions in Parliament. Since the United States had “undertaken the obligation of protecting British subjects in those places in Mexico at which we have no Consular representatives,” the Times maintained, British opinion expected the American government to “secure the just punishment” of Benton’s killer. Fanning the tension between London and Washington, Le Temps in Paris warned that “Mexico is on the eve of European intervention because President Wilson and Mr. Bryan have prevented the re-establishment of order.”46
An impetuous bullet had imperiled Villa’s one foreign policy objective: by pro-American acts and pro-Wilson rhetoric (“You have the greatest government in the world and your president is the best”) to get the arms embargo lifted, and win American support for the rebels. Though he assured American reporters that “I know I am not competent to hold high office because of my lack of education,” Villa undoubtedly also nurtured dreams of being Mexico’s next president.
To give himself—and Woodrow Wilson—political cover, Villa concocted a story for American consumption. Benton, he told a U.S. envoy, had pulled a gun on him; he was disarmed, given a court-martial, for which Villa produced the bogus transcript, and executed by a firing squad. When the Americans asked to see the body (“An examination would … prove whether he was killed by a firing party or by a revolver bullet,” the Times pointed out), Villa ordered Fierro to dig it up and shoot it full of holes.47
Woodrow Wilson had to accept Villa’s story. To do otherwise would have licensed calls to intervene, which Villa energized when he declared
that “out of respect for the dead” he would not disinter Benton after all. Benton’s posthumous execution, Villa had concluded, would not disguise the cause of death from the American surgeons sent by the State Department to examine the body. When, at a February 26 press conference, a reporter asked Wilson’s opinion of Benton, the president impugned the dead man’s character: “He seems, so far as I can gather, to have been a very aggressive sort of person,” who got, Wilson implied, what he asked for. The alliance of choice arranged by necessity between the president and the bandit had survived the Benton controversy—and U.S.-purchased arms flowed across the border to Villa’s army.48
Drawn to Villa by his success, by the promise of land, and by exploits like “stealing pretty women” that “have brought [him] a renown among Mexicans like the old legends of Robin Hood or Dick Turpin,” in the words of a U.S. military intelligence agent, Villa’s band of eight, in the year since crossing the dark river, had multiplied into an army of ten thousand. Villa’s strategy had correspondingly expanded from raiding communications to attacking federal garrisons. In November 1913, he had pulled off the exploit of his career: capturing the fortified border city of Ciudad Juárez.
Fresh from a serious repulse at Chihuahua City, where machine guns and shrapnel shells had decimated his cavalry, Villa moved on to Juárez, which was also defended by machine guns and artillery. Since Juárez backed up to the Rio Grande, Villa knew a frontal attack might harm property and people in El Paso. Collateral damage in the United States risked alienating Woodrow Wilson. Yet Villa needed a victory to sustain the morale of his troops and attract recruits. He got his victory and with it won overnight fame. Capturing a train that ferried supplies between Chihuahua City and Juárez, Villa forced the conductor to wire Juárez that Villa was in the vicinity: Please advise.
