by Jack Beatty
“A Sort of War” from Punch
President Wilson: “I hope you are not shooting at my dear friends the Mexicans?”
U.S. Gunner: “Oh, no, sir. We have strict orders only to aim at one Huerta.”
According to his press secretary, Joseph Tumulty, Wilson feared Huerta would use the arms “against American boys.” Wilson may also have believed that “he was forestalling ‘outside’ intervention in support of Huerta.” A British diplomat had cautioned Bryan that “public opinion in England would take a very serious view of the menace to immense British interests” if Huerta’s forces withdrew from the Gulf oil fields, which contained “practically the Navy’s whole supply.” The New York Times was thinking along similar lines when, writing two days after the occupation of Veracruz, it editorialized that “if nothing [was] done” after “the insult to the flag” “our European friends might conclude that the United States could not look after anybody’s interests in Mexico” and that they had better do the job themselves. Stopping the Ypiranga at sea risked a diplomatic row with Germany. So Wilson ordered the navy to seize the customs house at Veracruz.70
Lind had predisposed Wilson to believe that the eight hundred American invaders would be greeted as liberators from Huerta’s levas and punishing taxes. When the bluejackets were instead not only resisted by Huertista troops but also sniped at from rooftops and windows by outraged citizens of Veracruz, the president was “profoundly unnerved.” Huerta was emboldened. “Mexico,” he vowed, “will fight to the extreme limit of her power against the colossus.” He called on “all able-bodied citizens to bear arms” to repel the invader. A member of the Mexican house expressed the national passion with eloquence:
Gentlemen, at this time I have only curses on my lips, rage in my heart, and blows on my fists for the blond thieves who struck at Veracruz with a coward’s naval assault … Who are these Yankees, the same ones …, the eternal highwaymen, the eternal thieves; they are the same as those who blew up the Maine; the same [“Death to the thieves of 1848!” someone shouted] that committed the crime of the Philippines; the same that committed the crime of Nicaragua; the same that committed the crime of Cuba. They are guilty of all those crimes and today they begin the crime of Mexico.71
Bluejackets at Veracruz. The occupation of Veracruz has gone down as imperialism. Pancho Villa was the only Mexican leader (maybe the only Mexican, period) who defended it, telling reporters, “Your president is the best.”
“Three years of fratricidal war was forgotten in a day,” the London Daily Telegraph reported from Mexico City, where factory workers were drilling during their lunch hour and government clerks in military uniforms parading before Huerta. In the Huertista press, Mexico’s railroad workers were pledging Huerta 150,000 men, the beggars of Guadalajara mobilizing, and the pupils of a school for the blind offering “their bodies to build defenses.” Huerta sent emissaries to the Constitutionalists and to Zapata to join his crusade against the “pigs of Yanquilandia.”* Zapata had them shot. In Juárez, Villa warned his soldiers that anyone trying to start an anti-American demonstration would suffer the same fate.72
Outside Villa-controlled Mexico, anti-American demonstrations were the order of the day. Huerta’s son led a Mexico City mob that tore down a statue of George Washington. Circulars passed out in the capital called for all Americans to be shot. Americans in Tampico were afraid for their lives—and, the American fleet having sailed to Veracruz, the captain of the Dresden was obliged to send German marines ashore to evacuate American civilians. Of grave political concern to the Wilson administration was the reaction of Villa’s boss, the “First Chief of the Constitutionalist Army in Charge of Executive Power,” Venustiano Carranza, who threatened war if Wilson did not evacuate “our territory.”73
European reaction was scalding. “For the first time the veil is torn away from the pretence behind which the designs of American imperialism have been hiding,” the Paris Journal thundered. “Its conquest of Mexico has begun.” How valid was this charge of Yankee imperialism?74
John Reed asked readers of the New York Times to imagine the rage felt by the people of Veracruz seeing their streets shot up “because some foreign businessmen they had enriched were not satisfied and wanted it all.” John Mason Hart, a leading scholar of the Mexican Revolution, shares that view: Wilson intervened to protect U.S. businesses in Mexico, which had prospered in the Díaz years to the point where “Mexico had passed into the hands of foreign economic interests,” of which American railroad, mining, and oil companies represented the largest share. “The preparation for U.S. intervention at Veracruz began in November 1913,” Hart writes, “when William F. Buckley, Sr., wrote to [Colonel Edward M.] House as the chief legal counsel for the Texas Company in Mexico and an old friend.” In a sixteen-page letter to House, his Austin neighbor and Woodrow Wilson’s confidant, Buckley enumerated the damage the rebels had inflicted on American oil companies along the Gulf Coast and sundry other businesses across Mexico. Speaking for companies weary of paying protection to the rebels and afraid lest their oil fields become battlegrounds, Buckley demanded intervention.75
In January 1914, according to Hart, an irresistible cabal made up of Colonel House, the Texans in Wilson’s cabinet, New York investors in Mexico, and major campaign contributors to the Democratic Party convinced Wilson to take military action. But unless Colonel House lied to his diary, he opposed intervention, and he told Wilson as much the same month Hart has him caballing for it. (“I urged him to do what he could to settle the matter without intervention.”) Alan Knight, author of a two-volume study of the revolution, finds “little evidence” that either economic or military imperialism—the “conquest of Mexico”—motivated Wilson, the latter because it was beyond the capacity of the American military.76
The German General Staff reckoned that since an American attack would “unite the belligerent parties of Mexico … 150,000 men would hardly suffice to crush Mexico,” but the U.S. Army had only 31,500 men under arms while the 120,000-man National Guard was “raw” and “scantily trained.” At the president’s request, the army prepared can-do war plans to invade Mexico. But the army couldn’t do. General Tasker Bliss drew up an Alternative Plan for which the forces did not exist. A U.S. invasion of Mexico? As the general pointed out to Washington, the number of U.S. troops on the border was “trivial” compared to the Mexican armies, federal and Constitutionalist, across from them; therefore, a successful local Mexican invasion of the United States was a “foregone conclusion.”77
Critics who did not arraign Wilson for imperialism scored him for shedding blood over a “trivial point of honor.” Writing in Homme Libre, Georges Clemenceau denounced “the pacifist jurist, President Wilson, [for] knocking down [Mexican] houses with his shells” for a slight to the flag. Wilson had invited that criticism by claiming that he sent in the marines to vindicate the American honor allegedly insulted at Tampico, not to prevent arms from reaching the dictator Huerta. The arms of the Ypiranga disappeared behind the cloud Tampico cast over Veracruz. “By singling out this incident as an excuse for war,” Britain’s liberal Nation lamented, “Dr. Wilson has done more to lower the standard of international morality than all his fine utterances in the past have done to raise it.”78
At home progressives, pastors, and Andrew Carnegie joined the foreign chorus against what the editor of the Nation, in a letter to Wilson, called “the untenable and immoral position in which we find ourselves in Mexico.” Such high-minded criticism got under Wilson’s thin skin. At a May 11 memorial service for the American dead held in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the president displayed wounded narcissism when he declared, “I fancy that it is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you.”79
Wilson had as much to regret in his supporters as in his critics. The Confederate veterans of Huntsville, Alabama, wanted it known they were available to serve, as was Theodore Roosevelt, who volunteered to raise a brigade of Rough Riders to invade
Mexico. In a preview of scenes soon to be enacted in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg, men were reported “standing in lines a block long at Army and Navy recruiting stations” in Chicago, an example of a widespread “rush to enlist in the Army.”80
American xenophobes exercised their patriotism on Mexicans and labor radicals protesting the intervention. In New York a mob pulled two Mexican Americans off a streetcar and a Mexican American baseball player was killed by his YMCA teammates. At Notre Dame, eleven Mexican boys were thrown into a river. Students at a Topeka high school forced Mexican railroad workers to salute the flag. Appleton, Wisconsin, youth marched in a torchlight parade under banners reading AVENGE THE FLAG! Wilson received a string of letters urging him, in the words of a Philadelphia piano tuner, to “let Uncle Sam take off his coat, roll up his sleeves, and pitch into those Mexicans … and teach them to behave themselves.” Senator William E. Borah, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, evoked Manifest Destiny: “Once the U.S. forces enter Mexico as an armed body, we are starting on the march to the Panama Canal.”81
Wilson recoiled from the jingoism incited by his demagogic address to Congress. “I had a feeling of uneasiness as I read the papers this morning as if the country were getting on fire with war enthusiasm,” he remarked at a press conference. “I have an enthusiasm for justice and for the dignity of the United States, but not for war.” The army had “plans” to march on Mexico City from Veracruz, but he would not hear of that now; wiser by experience, the president who had tried to outsmart tomorrow in Mexico said, “Events must take their course.” When Argentina, Chile, and Brazil offered to mediate the conflict, he accepted with alacrity.82
His Mexican ally had other ideas. “Asked if he will accede to an armistice requested by the ABC powers,” the Times reported, “Villa says he had never heard the word.” Told what it meant, he pointed toward Mexico City “and said only when he’s there and Huerta’s gone would he consider an armistice.” Villa wanted to be the first rebel commander to occupy the capital, but after his victory at Torreón, Carranza, to stop his general from converting his military fame into political power, ordered him to clean out federal army redoubts in the north. By July, though Huerta was in Havana, the fighting in Mexico was just beginning.83
Villa was the big loser from Veracruz. After Carranza’s bellicose response to U.S. intervention, the State Department reimposed the arms embargo on the Constitutionalist rebels; the embargo blocked arms shipments by land but less effectually by sea, hurting Villa, not Carranza, who held the Gulf Coast throughout the “war of the winners” that broke out between the rivals in 1915.
The Ypiranga eventually landed its arms at Puerto Mexico on the Yucatan Peninsula and Huerta received them before his final collapse. “It was to the Navy like a blow in the head,” Wilson’s navy secretary Josephus Daniels wrote. “Our chief incentive in seizing the customs house was to prevent the [arms] … from becoming available to the unspeakable Huerta.” The Americans did find warehouses of arms stockpiled at Veracruz and kept these out of Huerta’s hands, turning them over instead to Carranza’s Constitutionalist army. The Constitutionalists used the arms of Veracruz first to defeat Villa in three big battles in 1915 and then to subdue Zapata in 1918–19: “The Americans’ transfer of the arms stored at Veracruz to the Constitutionalists in November 1914 turned the tide of the revolution.” Administering the coup de grace to Villa, Wilson granted de facto recognition to Carranza’s government in October 1915.84
The defeat of Villa and Zapata ended Mexico’s peasant revolution. As from time immemorial in Mexico, the revolutionary elites betrayed the peasants after riding them into power. They had “forced their way into a history that had previously unfolded above them,” and then history closed over them again and over Woodrow Wilson’s solidarity with them. The peasant armies had fought for land, but whereas in 1910 haciendas of over a thousand acres occupied 71 percent of the land, in 1920 they occupied 77 percent. A peasant-soldier expecting land would have to wait twenty years for the reforming government of Lázaro Cárdenas. While “the power and legitimacy of the landlord class—which had underpinned Porfirian rule—never recovered,” after the revolution an elite of Constitutionalist generals and officials replaced it, their status legitimized by the protective mystique of the revolution. Pancho Villa himself, ending his days as a hacendado ruling Canutillo, a 163,000-acre government-supplied estate at the headwaters of the Río Conchos in Durango, was a symbol of the new order.85
After a Constitutionalist army led by Álvaro Obregón shattered the Division of the North in 1915, Villa waged a guerrilla campaign against the Carranza and Obregón governments. To destabilize Carranza, he staged his notorious March 8, 1916, raid on Columbus, New Mexico. Woodrow Wilson rose to Villa’s bait, dispatching General Pershing’s Punitive Expedition to find Villa—and triggering a war crisis with the Carranza government.
Stung by Villa’s charges in the villages of Chihuahua that he was a tool of the “gueros,” Carranza demanded that the Americans leave Mexico. A skirmish at Carrizal inflicted one hundred casualties on both sides. With war appearing imminent, Carranza sent “a plea for help … to the Germans.”86
To keep the United States embroiled in Mexico, Germany had considered supporting a 1915 attempt by General Huerta to regain power. It had shipped arms to Villa for the Columbus raid and there are suspicions that his German-born physician and translator manipulated his illiterate patient into the raid by falsifying a bank statement to make it look like the Columbus State Bank was cheating Villa, who maintained an account there. Then, when it seemed that Carranza would make more trouble than Villa for the Americans, the Germans courted him. For his part, Carranza had played Germany off against the United States, hinting in August 1916 that Mexico would provide a submarine base to Germany if it declared publicly against American intervention.87
In January 1917, a new German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, answered Carranza’s plea with his infamous telegram proposing that Mexico join with Germany in a war against the United States, in fantastic return for which Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona would be restored to Mexico. Achieving the war’s greatest intelligence coup, Britain’s code breakers at Room 40 of the Admiralty had intercepted the telegram and given it to Washington. According to Ray Stannard Baker, the journalist Wilson chose to write his biography, “No single more devastating blow was delivered against Wilson’s resistance to entering the war”—not even Germany’s February 1, 1917, declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare on American vessels.88
Neither had unleashing the U-boats swung majority American opinion toward war with Germany. “The mass of Americans, who never saw a seacoast, could not be worked into a war fever over an international lawyer’s doctrine [the rights of neutral vessels] nor aroused to a fighting mood over persons who chose to cross the ocean on belligerent boats in wartime … It was all very confusing and—to the majority of the country—remote,” Barbara W. Tuchman explains. “But the Prussian Invasion Plot, as the newspapers labeled the Zimmermann telegram, was as clear as a knife in the back and near as next door.” Heartland papers like the Chicago Daily Tribune, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the Oshkosh Northwestern that since August 1914 had called for U.S. neutrality in the European conflict now declared, with the Detroit Times, “It looks like war for this country.” If Wilson had recognized Huerta in 1913, Zimmerman would not have sent his telegram. Would the United States have gone to war? If it had it would have been as a more divided country. On March 17, the Literary Digest summed up editorial comment on the telegram in the headline HOW ZIMMERMANN UNITED THE UNITED STATES.89
In eleven months of searching, Pershing’s horse soldiers never found Villa, a failure that had a “profound effect … on world history,” Friedrich Katz, citing German sources, contends. “The military incompetence of the United States has been revealed by the campaign against Villa,” the press office of Germany’s armed forces concluded. “The United States not only has no arm
y, it has no artillery, no means of transportation, no airplanes, and lacks all other instruments of modern warfare.” This scathing assessment helped the military persuade the kaiser that Germany had little to fear in loosing its U-boats on American shipping, Britain’s lifeline. At the January 9, 1917 session of the kaiser’s Privy Council that decided for unrestricted submarine warfare, the admirals predicted that within six months Britain would be starved into submission; meanwhile, U-boat “wolf packs” would feed on American troop transports. Inevitably some American units would reach the continent but the American army was not a serious fighting force, Field Marshal von Hindenburg told the kaiser (a viewpoint adopted by German cartoonists, who depicted American soldiers as cowboys and billionaires riding sea horses). Ineffectual as ever, rightly afraid for his job if he resisted, Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg acceded to a policy that as a friend noted spelled “finis Germaniae.”90
As for Pancho Villa, the bandit whose 1914 alliance with the president tangled the United States in the toils of the Mexican Revolution, the now “angry, beaten, rheumatic bushwacker” remained at large, reverting to terror and banditry. Finally Obregón had enough and bought him off with Canutillo.91
Villa shared his life there with a rotation of wives and a sample of his progeny. He founded a school for Canutillo’s three hundred children, and a night school to teach their parents to read and write. “Ah, friends, if my parents had only educated me,” he was heard to say. In its Villa obituary, the New York Times seconded his regret: “An educated Villa might have been president of the republic.” Villa ran his hacienda on military lines, assuring the teachers he imported from Mexico City, “Look, here in Canutillo nothing is lost, for if anyone steals I have him shot.” His constant worry was that he’d be shot; he had so much to be shot about.92
