The anti-Americanism of the Mexican Revolution is usually associated with the actions of Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson during the decena trágica, with the occupation of Veracruz, or with the Pershing expedition against Francisco Villa. In fact it had been a problem since the earliest days of the Revolution. Not simply a reaction against American military intervention, it also resulted from inherited antagonisms, from resentment against American feelings of superiority, and from dislike of the treatment given to Mexican citizens in the United States. During the Madero and Huerta administrations, two of the most powerful stimulants to anti-Americanism were personal animosities against American revolutionary fighters and the attempts of Mexican factions to win popular support through appeals to xenophobic nationalism. In the short run this anti-Yankeeism prepared Mexicans for resistance to Woodrow Wilson’s Mexican policy. In the long run it has lastingly strengthened the bonds of Mexican nationalism, even though its old stridency has largely disappeared.
Even before the fall of Porfirio Díaz, the Department of State was apprehensive about Mexican antagonism to the United States. In response to a request for information on anti-Americanism during March 1911, American consuls in many parts of Mexico reported it to be deep and widespread. Consul Samuel E. Magill at Guadalajara told Secretary of State Philander C. Knox that “the anti-American sentiment is almost universal among rich and poor alike.” He added that at national celebrations, such as the commemoration of Hidalgo’s Grito de Dolores on the night of September 15, Mexican mobs paraded through the streets crying “Death to the Americans.”1 Linking anti-Americanism with general xenophobia and with hostility to the Díaz regime, Consul Clarence A. Miller reported considerable anti-American, anti-foreign, and anti-government feeling throughout the state of Veracruz.2 Lewis W. Haskell at Salina Cruz believed the state of Oaxaca to be decidedly anti-American,3 while Consul Charles M. Freeman at Durango wrote that “this district is 95% anti-American, and that is a most conservative estimate, for I have yet to meet a Mexican who has any love for the people of the United States as a whole. There are eases where individual Mexicans have a real affection for individual Americans, but even such cases are not common.”4
Antipathy to Americans appeared even in the most remote regions of Mexico. One of the most isolated peasants whom John Reed met while traveling in Mexico told him that he had heard that the United States of the North coveted his country and that gringo soldiers would come in the end and take away his goats.5 In Yucatán, where strong separatist sentiment during the nineteenth century had inhibited Mexican nationalism, people hissed films of the American flag and threatened maltreatment of Americans in the event of intervention.6 Anti-Americanism pervaded even the southern section of Baja California, a region then cut off from national life. In January 1913 the American consul at La Paz noted a complete lack of political or revolutionary disturbance in his district at any time during the two years of the Madero administration. Even so, he detected a strong undercurrent of anti-American feeling which, fanned by the “little paper printed in La Paz,” had grown sharply throughout his district and seemed especially strong back in the interior.7 As the revolutionary struggle continued, and fears of American intervention mounted, reports of deep hostility toward Americans came from Acapulco, Veracruz, Aguascalientes, and what is now Piedras Negras.8
Examples of this hostility are numerous. In April 1912 Mrs. Anna Sherwood, the American proprietress of a hotel in Manzanillo, reported to the American consul that the Mexican railroad employees who boarded with her were constantly threatening and “speaking ill” about Americans. She had become excited when the Mexicans told her that at the first sign of United States intervention they would shoot her and seize the American consul, tie weights to his feet, and throw him off the end of the wharf.9 One of the locally best-known incidents of anti-Americanism occurred in Zacatecas when Judge Marentes, believed to be “notoriously anti-foreign,” sentenced an American mechanic, J. A. Farrell, to ten years in prison for lending a pistol which later became a murder weapon. Farrell’s lawyer and the secretary of the American embassy declared that there was “not sufficient evidence against Farrell to justify his being detained for one hour,” while the American residents of Zacatecas sent out an appeal for aid on the basis of judicial prejudice.10
Incidents like these and the revolutionary atmosphere of incipient violence caused many Americans and wealthier Mexicans to leave the country, so that in many areas the American population declined sharply. For example, between 1910 and 1912 the number of American residents in the consular district around San Luis Potosí fell from 1,500 to less than 600.11 The departing Americans reported an intensification of nationalism and its antiforeign overtones as prime reasons for their exodus. M. S. Largey, a banking and mining operator from Butte, Montana, exclaimed after his return: “The great masses of the population hate Americans with an intensity that is awful to contemplate.”12 Men who were born and raised in Mexico came to the United States pointing out that Mexicans were becoming “an intensely patriotic people.”13
An important reason for the early anti-Americanism of the Revolution was a brutal act of injustice in Texas which turned Mexican sentiment sharply against the United States. On November 4, 1910, a mob in Rock Springs lynched twenty-year-old Antonio Rodríguez of Las Vacas, Mexico, by burning him at the stake. According to news reports, Rodríguez had asked Mrs. Lem Henderson, a rancher’s wife, for food while neighboring ranchers were away on a roundup. When Mrs. Henderson “talked mean” to him, he had shot and killed her. After Rodríguez confessed to the crime and entered the Rock Springs jail, a mob of ranchers battered down the jail doors and took him out. The mob had a fire waiting for him, watched while he burned, and then dispersed. The coroner’s jury reported only that “an unknown Mexican met death at the hands of an unknown mob.”14
When news of the lynching spread through Mexico, it inflamed popular resentments, causing passionate Mexican newspaper attacks on Americans and a burst of violence in Mexico City and Guadalajara. El Diario del Hogar called the people of the United States “giants of the dollar, pigmies of culture, and barbarous whites of the North.” After an inflammatory editorial in El Debate on November 5, unrest and agitation appeared in the cafes and public places of Mexico City. The agitation broke into violence three days later when, after a number of inflammatory speeches and the passage of resolutions, a crowd of one thousand marched on the offices of the Mexican Herald, an American-owned daily newspaper printed in English for the American colony. Amid cries of “Down with the Gringos” and “Death to the Yankees,” the crowd attacked the Herald building with stones, broke a number of windows, and pelted the Herald’s, managing editor with mud and rocks when he tried to make a speech from the balcony. On the morning of November 9 a crowd, which originally gathered at the Municipal Palace, assaulted about a dozen Americans including the son of the ambassador and attacked American houses, hotels, and other establishments such as Sanborn’s drugstore and the American Club. Seeing an American flag flying in front of the Imperial Restaurant, members of the mob pulled the emblem down, tore it into pieces, and trampled and spat upon it, while ten Mexican policemen stood by, mute and inactive, and the chief clerk of the American embassy witnessed the scene. Mexicans even hurled rocks at a streetcar carrying American schoolchildren, shattering windows and seriously injuring one child. Police finally curbed the rioting on the night of November 9 after a large and unruly mob had demolished the offices of the pro-American newspaper El Impartial and committed other acts of vandalism. On this occasion the police made many arrests and charged the crowd with drawn swords, seriously wounding one Mexican.15
In Guadalajara Mexican students, like the several hundred university and medical students who participated in the Mexico City riots, organized a demonstration in which hundreds of Mexicans shouted “Mueran los Gringos.” They went on to smash windows in the Masonic Hall, in several American companies, and in a Methodist college.16 Rioters burned an American flag and beat and kicked American railroad employees, while causing damage to American property estimated at between $5,000 and $10,000. The musicians of Guadalajara even signed an agreement not to play American music.
Describing the deeply felt Mexican hostility toward the United States, the vice consul at Mexico City significantly commented that the anti-American rioting was not so much a protest against the Rodríguez burning as it was a sign of “jealousy of American success” and the fact that Americans had come to control some of Mexico’s most productive industries and lands.17 Confirming this viewpoint, Consul Samuel E. Magill reported that the riots resulted primarily from “a deep-seated jealousy or hatred of all things and persons American.” “The lynching of an alleged Mexican was only incidental,” he said, “and a large proportion of the populace engaged in the riots knew little and cared less about it.”18
The Rodríguez incident demonstrated mutual antagonisms which made both Mexican and American mobs potentially dangerous. Like the centennial celebrations of the Hidalgo revolt two months before, the incident also helped to set the tone of Mexican sentiment which pervaded the years of revolutionary struggle launched by Francisco Madero later in November 1910. As the oratory, publications, and parades of the centennial celebration had impressed ideas of Mexican brotherhood and national grandeur, so the burning of Rodríguez brought to the surface underlying jealousy and antagonism toward Americans and gave to later events between 1910 and 1917 an anti-American slant.
As the Madero revolt gained momentum along the northern tier of Mexican states in 1911, the mobilization of American troops along the border stirred widespread Mexican fears of military intervention and sustained the intense hatred aroused by the Rodríguez burning. Although the Taft administration had called out the troops primarily to limit filibustering and protect American citizens, Mexicans claimed to see signs of impending invasion and territorial expansion. Gonzalo Rivero, for example, regarded the troop movements as mobilization for war rather than simple frontier vigilance,19 and Consul Alphonse J. Lespinasse at Frontera (now Álvaro Obregón) reported that all classes expected American intervention at any moment.20 Although the Taft administration never ordered invasion of Mexican territory, both American and Mexican newspapers continued to speculate about imminent military intervention after the 1911 mobilizations.
Long before the direct intervention of American troops in 1914, revolutionary participation by American private citizens also aroused Mexican animosities. A large and militarily significant contingent of foreign volunteers originally formed part of Francisco Madero’s revolutionary army. Well-intentioned fighters from many foreign countries came to join what seemed to them to be a struggle for democracy against dictatorship. A large number responded to advertisements in United States newspapers which regularly solicited the services of young Americans. The proclamation of Maderista principles aroused liberals in the United States, and the American press printed petitions like that from fifty signers in San Antonio, Texas, attacking the “old despot Díaz.” “There is not an honest, liberty-loving man in this country knowing the cause of this revolution, but who is heart and soul in sympathy with those revolutionists,” they exclaimed.21 American volunteers in Mexico became so numerous, in fact, that all foreign participants came to be spoken of as Americans.22 The foreigners’ military experience or mechanical know-how often raised them over the native Mexicans to positions of leadership and prestige in the early Revolution.
Exemplary volunteers who stood out from surrounding Mexicans included W. H. McKenzie, a Canadian who led the famous Maderista attack on Ciudad Juárez on May 8, 1911, Giuseppi Garibaldi, the grandson of the Italian liberator, and General Ben Viljoen, the Boer War veteran. A foreign contingent of ex-soldiers from the United States, Canada, and Europe, led by Garibaldi and called the “American Legion” or the “Foreign Legion,” distinguished itself in the heavy fighting for Ciudad Juárez, whose capture by Madero’s forces toppled the Díaz regime. It was Garibaldi who received General Juan J. Navarro’s sword at the surrender of the city. Garibaldi and Viljoen became brigadier generals in Madero’s army of five thousand—the only ones besides Pascual Orozco and José de la Luz Blanco. Díaz’ Minister of Finance, José Yves Limantour, lamented with only partial exaggeration: “If it had not been for American filibusters and adventurers the revolt in Mexico would have been put down in two weeks.”23
Jealousy of the alien revolutionaries underlay the hostility which many Mexicans developed toward them. Mexican subordinates became suspicious of the high rank, publicity, and accolades awarded to the foreigners in a struggle which after all was being fought for Mexican liberation. It became apparent even to Mexican foot soldiers that foreigners usually got the more important and more prestigious jobs like handling the machine guns. The national ethnocentrism of both Mexicans and foreigners also set them apart. The foreign volunteers, such as General Viljoen, often knew no Spanish or spoke it with considerable difficulty.24 An Anglo-Saxon spirit of adventure and enjoyment of robust activity estranged some volunteers from the more dedicated Mexican revolutionaries. Other volunteers caused misunderstanding by assuming that they had come to bring Mexicans a brand of “liberty” and political democracy which the Mexicans themselves did not wish or only dimly understood. Further resentment against the Americans serving with the revolutionists sprang up in individual cases of American irresponsibility, as when a disgruntled volunteer set fire to a Mexican flag and then swam across the Rio Grande. Later an American cavalry patrol prevented his punishment.25
The increasing jealousy of Mexican Maderistas toward the Foreign Legion under Garibaldi coincided with a personal animosity which Francisco Villa felt for Garibaldi himself. Three days before the battle of Juárez, Villa arrested Garibaldi and a group of Americans under his command at gunpoint, only to have Madero release them. After the battle Villa and two companions crossed over into El Paso hunting for Garibaldi, but members of the United States Secret Service disarmed them and sent them back to Juárez. Mexican Maderistas derided the significance which the American press gave to Garibaldi’s force in the battle of Juárez. Villa made it plain to Roque González Garza, at that time a major designated as the historian of the battle of Juárez, that he, rather than Garibaldi, should receive proper credit in the battle reports. When Villa and Pascual Orozco threatened Madero for allegedly slighting their interests after the Juárez victory, General Viljoen and other members of the Foreign Legion protected Madero. Resentment also flared when Americans who had served under Madero tried to recross the Rio Grande into Juárez after a one-day visit to El Paso for which they had obtained permission. The Mexicans refused to admit them, saying that since their services were no longer needed, they could not reenter Mexico for the duration of hostilities.26
For these various reasons Mexican revolutionaries came to resent the foreigners. After the victory at Ciudad Juárez the volunteers realized that they were not welcome in the Mexican success and would henceforth be a liability to Madero. The officers of the Foreign Legion—including Garibaldi and Viljoen—sent their resignations to Madero.27 Chronicling the military campaign against Díaz, Maderista writers rejected charges that Madero was “soft” on foreigners and proclaimed that his revolution was eminently Mexican. Pedro Lamicq, for example, stoutly defended Madero’s patriotism by pointing out that even Garibaldi and Viljoen were still subordinate to their Mexican chiefs. He cited the example of foreigners such as Lafayette in America, Byron in Greece, and Cochrane in Chile who had lent valuable aid to other national revolutions.28 Antagonism toward the foreigners spread, however, despite such advocacy and despite the fact that a segment of the Yankee press similarly denounced the volunteers as common criminals.29
Ill-will toward the volunteers developed in other revolutionary factions besides the Maderistas. The backers of Pascual Orozco frequently attacked the foreigners’ influence in public statements intended to discredit Madero. A manifesto dated March 25, 1912, and bearing Orozco’s name (although later repudiated by him) was filled with bitter anti-Madero and anti-filibuster outbursts.30 It declared that Madero had received fourteen million dollars from the millionaires of Wall Street, thus profaning the Mexican flag with the “sacrilegious hand of the yankee,” while he used “as principal elements of combat yankee money and the phalanx of mercenary filibusters, who without law, without honor, and without conscience have been assassinating our brothers.”31 Only a small number of Mexicans following Ricardo Flores Magón supported Stanley Williams, Simon Berthold, and their crew of largely English and American socialist adventurers who tried through insurrection to establish a separate socialist republic in Lower California.32
As the Revolution progressed, the resentment which built up against non-Mexicans in each faction tended to curtail their participation and to make that participation far less evident. Venustiano Carranza refused to let any “foreigners” serve in the Constitutionalist ranks, and he forced the Japanese and other aliens actually serving under him to become Mexican citizens.33 The new ferocity of Mexican nationalism after 1913 prevented the reconstruction of fighting units like Garibaldi’s Foreign Legion. This Mexican antipathy toward foreign participation developed, of course, not only as the foreigners stimulated xenophobia against themselves, but also as the foreigners became objects of the wider Mexican nationalism and xenophobia which forces outside the control of the expatriates were producing.
One such force was factional wrangling among the revolutionaries. From the beginning, revolutionary groups charged that rival factions were led by Americans, trying in this way to gain support by making the opposition seem unpatriotic. Thus a Porfirista circular attacking the American press in Mexico said that the Monterrey News had the “smell of Maderoism” and declared that it was Americans who gave the Madero mutiny the character of a revolution.34 Governor-elect Gallardo of Jalisco and other Porfirista officials publicly accused Americans of participation in the Madero revolution.35 The United States served as a scapegoat in a variety of later factional disputes, as when Querido Moheno, leader of the government faction in the Chamber of Deputies after Huerta’s take-over in 1913, announced that the secessionist movement defying Huerta in Sonora was in fact a preliminary step in a plan by former President Theodore Roosevelt and “Yankee bankers” to partition Mexico into several small republics which would be at the mercy of the United States.36 Sometimes American reactions to Mexican xenophobia helped to increase the hatred. For example, when Madero eliminated American personnel from Mexican railroads, his action aroused severe protest and brought proposals for intervention in the United States. These American statements further inflamed Mexican fear and animosity.
As xenophobia thus maintained its own momentum, President Wilson’s refusal to recognize Huerta further alienated former supporters of the United States. The nonrecognition policy cut the United States off from those Mexicans who were willing to continue Porfirio Díaz’ policy of encouraging American business interests in exchange for cordial American friendship. Many Constitutionalists were glad that nonrecognition weakened Huerta. American Military Attaché Burnside in Mexico City even maintained that nonrecognition pleased nine-tenths of the “native population.”37 But Huerta’s later defeat within Mexico reduced evidences of the support which he once had, and one should not underestimate the size or the power of the faction which the United States antagonized by its opposition to him. Huertistas and Mexicans desiring an end to civil war expressed increasing hostility toward Americans with the initiation and maintenance of the nonrecognition policy.38 When Huertista propagandists charged Villa with “betrayal of the motherland,” they used cartoons, such as one which showed statues of Villa and Wilson in a public park with an attendant telling an inquisitive woman that both figures were on the same level.39
Huertistas found it especially easy and profitable to stimulate anti-Americanism among Mexican youth. Like the militant students of other Latin American countries later in the twentieth century, Mexican students as a group proved to be outspoken nationalists and particularly fierce opponents of American encroachments. Through education the students had already developed an allegiance to the national community. At the time of the Rodríguez burning in November 1910 Mexican students predominated in the Mexico City riots. They paraded through the streets of the capital and were responsible for pulling down the American flag and trampling upon it.40 In early 1911 Consul General Arnold Shanklin stressed to Secretary Knox that students, like the lower and middle classes in Mexico City, combined strong anti-Americanism with their resolute support for the Madero revolution.41 During the anti-American campaign by Huerta’s newspapers in July 1913 a poster signed by student representatives appeared in all the public schools of Mexico City asking students to carry Japanese flags and to be at the railway station to greet the new Japanese Minister. It called on the students to show support for Japan, the United States’ rival, “now that our nationality is put to the test by the imperialistic ambition of strong peoples.”42
The threat of military invasion by the United States caused Mexican youth to volunteer widely in the preparations for Mexican-American conflict. In May 1911 correspondent Stephen Bonsai reported that patriotic societies had arisen all over Mexico, and that they stimulated “excitement among the younger generation” to resist any United States invasion. In societies with such names as Friends of the Country, Lives of the Country, and the Society for National Integrity, Bonsal “conservatively” estimated that between twenty and twenty-five thousand men were drilling half an hour every day.43 At Tampico, great enthusiasm among Mexicans and some anxiety among Americans arose when an estimated two thousand Mexicans signed a paper which was circulated by a committee of young nationalists with the sanction of the military commander. The circular called for volunteers to meet daily at the barracks for military drill and instruction in preparation to defend Tampico.44 On the morning after the circular was issued, about fifty young men reported for drill.45
Student activity remained strong throughout the Republic in response to periodic scares of Yankee invasion. In Durango during May 1912, when the populace generally believed American intervention to be inevitable, students drilled actively and showed considerable enthusiasm for the prospective fight.46 At a night rally in August 1913 three thousand residents of Nuevo Laredo heard Huertista agitators proclaim that a war with the United States was imminent, since “the noble and illustrious Huerta would brook no insult or humiliation from the Yankees.” About eighty persons in Nuevo Laredo thereafter underwent an initial training course given by an army officer whom General Joaquín Téllez appointed to instruct citizens desiring military training.47 In Acapulco during September 1913, with the same prevailing impression that war was inevitable, about one hundred “young men of the better class” drilled with Mexican army troops after volunteering for anti-invasion service.48
An underlying reason for the rousing of Mexican youth appears in the fact that, as Vice Consul Richard M. Stadden explained in an interesting dispatch to Secretary Bryan, the local volunteer forces, raised and drilled allegedly for local use in the event of American invasion, were actually collected as a means to get men into Huerta’s army. Stadden observed that Mexican federal, state, and local authorities throughout the Republic had used patriotism to make clerks and laborers drill and march through the streets in preparation for a Yankee invasion. The three hundred volunteers who gathered at Colima in the summer of 1913, for example, had been led to believe that they would be used for the defense of Colima alone. Gradually these men were given arms and uniforms and treated more strictly until in September they became part of the federal troops and were listed as the irregular infantry of the Thirteenth Regiment. Although these volunteers like other Huerta conscripts resented being sent away from their patria chica, they nevertheless gained a heightened sense of Mexican nationalism from their travel to new regions and their active participation in the anti-gringo cause.49
Journalistic reporting and editorial opinion in the United States further stirred up Mexicans against Americans. In early 1911 American newspapers along the border such as the Del Rio Herald, the Eagle Pass News-Guide, the San Antonio Light, and the Texas Republic (San Antonio) provoked Porfiristas by supporting Madero’s movement and complaining that United States border patrols kept revolutionaries out of Mexico.50 Literate Mexicans of all factions resented the frequent warlike rumors, such as an article in the New York American during April 1912 which declared that President Taft had decided upon immediate invasion of Mexico and quoted warlike statements from interventionists like Representative Curry of New Mexico.51 When the 1910 Revolution stirred the American press and periodicals to recount American glories and Mexican adversity, Mexicans too thought of the bad old days. An article in the New York Times on the War of 1847, appropriately entitled “How American Armies Marched Conquering Through the Southern Republic, Defeated Forces Many Times Their Size, and Then Dismembered Her,” might gratify American patriots, but in doing so also strengthened a spirit of resistance and national unity in Mexico.52
Looking back on the coverage of the 1910 Revolution in the United States, Mexicans still denounce the American press for defending Anglo-Saxon imperialism and for renting newspaper columns to Mexican reactionaries.53 They particularly criticized the newspaper chain of William Randolph Hearst, a spokesman for American interventionists, who had himself inherited a large ranch in northern Mexico. Juan T. Burns, a onetime Mexican consul general in New York and a violent opponent of trusts and American capitalism, called Hearst “the fiercest enemy of Mexico” and “a veritable boss of public opinion in the United States.”54
Mexican journalists played up the hostility aroused by the American press. Reports of American diplomatic representatives and content analysis of selected Mexican newspapers show that one of the most constant stimulants to anti-Americanism was the Mexican press. From the early months of the Maderista revolt constant denunciations appeared not only in the Mexico City press but also in local newspapers throughout Mexico. Like Filomeno Mata’s strongly anti-American articles in El Diario del Hogar early in 1911, the two dailies published in Chihuahua City lost no opportunity to inflame public opinion against Americans. They attacked Americans’ alleged hatred of Mexicans and their designs upon Mexican territory.55 Newspapers in other parts of the country such as La Opinión and El Dictamen in Veracruz similarly seized upon every opportunity to incite Mexicans against Americans.56 As journalistic attacks on Americans continued, they created what Consul Lespinasse described as an atmosphere of “subdued but tense strain” which required only trivial circumstances to spark conflagrations of anti-Americanism.57
The Mexican press projected an ideal of national unity before a large segment of the Mexican people during a period when the successive contests of civil war belied actual unity. For Tampico’s El Insurgente consciousness of the Yankee menace seemed to be “the only thing which can raise us to harmony, the only thing which will permit these Mexicans to exhibit their capacities to sacrifice everything and to see yesterday’s enemy as an ally and a brother when trying to defend the honor and integrity of the nation.”58 Echoing fear of the American troops at the Río Bravo ready to invade Mexico, an article in La Noticia of San Luis Potosí warned that “Mexico does not need piles of gold, nor millions of soldiers to defend her soil from profanation. We, her sons, would fight like lions in the unequal contest of one against a hundred. But our inflamed patriotism would not count the number, and who knows if the Yankee conqueror might be left bleeding and overcome.”59
Posters stuck up on walls and billboards throughout the Republic similarly incited Mexicans against Americans. A few examples will suffice. At the very beginning of Madero’s revolt cards covered Pachuca reading “Death to the Yankees!” “Down with Gringos!” and “Kill Díaz and his Yankee friends.”60 An editorial published in El Tiempo on April 28, 1912 was reproduced and widely distributed in Mexico City as a twelve-by-sixteen-inch poster. It denounced supposed plans for an immediate American invasion and called upon the Mexican people to rise up, repel the invaders, and make sure that “each bullet fired goes to strike the heart or the forehead of the profaner of our soil.”61 Similarly, a twenty-four-by-thirty-inch poster entitled “The Motherland is in Danger!” declared, in type an inch and a half high, the impending invasion of that “foreign power, the Colossus of the North.” It asked Mexican “Fellow Citizens” to “give an example of the solidarity and union which makes us strong and respectable,” to “swear before our Glorious National Banner that Mexico will belong to the invader when on her soil no single Mexican remains alive.”62
Recruiting handbills and fliers appealed to illiterates through devices like the pictures of President Wilson and the American eagle and shield carried in one of the Huertista handbills which in the summer of 1913 invoked “our” national glory and announced that the “enemy attack has already begun.” As part of Huerta’s anti-American recruiting campaign, another handbill urged men to volunteer for informal military training, asked them to defend the “immaculate national colors,” and suggested that those from all occupations and social groups, “being Mexicans,” should hurry to apply.63 On February 9, 1914, a month before the Tampico crisis, a bitter but not atypical flier was sold on the streets of Saltillo at ten cents per copy. In violently anti-American language it attacked historical and contemporary American invasions of Latin America and suggested nine ways of repelling American invasion, which included the extermination of all American residents in Mexico, counterinvasion of American territory, and the propagation of smallpox, yellow fever, and other diseases along Mexico’s frontiers and coasts.64
Books and plays portrayed the United States as a predator intent on destroying Mexico’s national independence. Books published before the decena trágica attacked the United States’ determination to hold Mexicans strictly responsible for loss of American lives and property and depicted Uncle Sam as a gleeful observer of Mexican destruction.65 Subsequent accounts of the Revolution described the United States as plotting with betrayers of the Mexican motherland to divide the states of Mexico from one another.66 A number of plays and short stories such as Tenorio-Sam and Filiberto C. González’ Proyectos de un yankee, produced in the atmosphere of revolutionary xenophobia, showed Uncle Sam bested by a Mexican Indian girl and described villainous Americans speaking very bad Spanish and trying to grab Mexican territory.67 Gonzalo G. Travesí’s study of Mexican-American relations, which was written before the Veracruz occupation, declared that Wall Street controlled the American government and that it was forcing President Wilson to armed intervention in Mexico.68 Books like Professor Enrique E. Schulz’ El porvenir de México y sus relaciones con Estados Unidos were outspoken pleas for greater Mexican nationalism and national unification. Since history, geography, and race had made the United States and Mexico unalterable enemies, Schulz and other nationalists argued, Mexicans must group together in resistance through military preparations and through an educational system which would make all Mexican citizens unwaveringly loyal to the Motherland.69
There is some danger that such literary outbursts may cause the historian to overestimate the extent of anti-Americanism in the first years of the Revolution. In March 1911 while other American diplomats were reporting underlying hostility toward Americans, the consuls in Monterrey, Hermosillo, Mazatlán, Acapulco, and Tapachula were reporting hostility only in specific and personal incidents.70 At various times throughout the remainder of the Revolution observers in some areas reported that anti-Americanism was slight or that government officials were effectively stemming such sentiment.71 Occasionally the United States even received outspoken praise rather than invective from Mexican leaders. Francisco Madero, now one of Mexico’s most widely respected national heroes despite his attitude toward Americans, stands out for the consistency of his attempts to maintain American friendship. In an interview published in the New York Times Madero said that the “great and honest sympathy of the American people for the revolutionists of Mexico is a beautiful thing. About 95 per cent of Mexicans appreciate it and return their sympathy to Americans. Honestly; we like Americans. I do, anyway.”72
Mexican leaders after Madero acted to maintain as much American support as possible without alienating Mexican nationalists. Huerta persistently sought American recognition, while Villa’s violence against Americans erupted only after the rival Carrancistas received American backing. The Santa Ysabel massacre and Columbus raid of 1916 came because Villa, like Huerta before him, had suffered United States rejection and turned from courting the United States to rallying supporters against it. In his memoirs José Vasconcelos denounced the lack of greater anti-Americanism and national loyalty among the northern leaders.73
Looking back more recently upon the events of the 1910 period, Mexican statesmen like Isidro Fabela have expressed their conviction that imperialists formed only a tiny fraction of the American people and that most of them were pacific, fair, and respectful of foreign rights.74 Despite such protestations, however, it is clear that the anti-Americanism which gripped Mexico during the Revolution significantly shaped the growth of Mexican nationalism. Even in the first years of the 1910 Revolution, anti-Americanism strongly increased Mexicans’ awareness of the need for national unity and for a unifying national mystique.
Samuel E. Magill to Philander C. Knox, March 20, 1911, State Department Files, National Archives, 812.00/1126. Unless otherwise indicated, all correspondence of the Department of State will be from the 812.00 files and will be identified only by the slash number.
Miller to Knox, March 18, 1911/1106.
Haskell to Knox, March 20, 1911/1135.
Freeman to Knox, March 19, 1911/1105.
John Reed, Insurgent Mexico (New York, 1914), 170.
Wilbur T. Gracey to William Jennings Bryan, September 3, 1913/8730.
Lucien N. Sullivan to Knox, January 4, 1913, State Department Files, National Archives, Post Records (La Paz) 800.
Luther T. Ellsworth to Knox, September 27, 1911 /2392; William W. Canada to Knox, March 12, 1912 /3314; Clement S. Edwards to Knox, February 12, 1913/6110; and Gaston Schmutz to Bryan, January 29, 1914/10897.
Milton B. Kirk to Henry Lane Wilson, May 1, 1912/3823.
New York Times, March 2, 1911.
Wilbert L. Bonney to Knox, April 30, 1912 /3814.
“Took Hint and Left Mexico Just in Time,” New York Times, February 17, 1913.
U. S., Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Investigation of Mexican Affairs, 66th Cong., 2nd sess., Sen. Doc. 285 (2 vols., Washington, 1920), I, 1278.
New York Times, November 11, 1910.
Extensive descriptions of the reaction in Mexico City to the Rodríguez burning appear in Wilson to Knox, November 9, 1910 /357; Wilson to Knox, November 10, 1910 /385; and New York Times, November 10, 1910.
Mexican Herald, November 10, 1910.
New York Times, November 12, 1910.
Magill to Knox, January 11, 1911 /615.
Gonzalo G. Rivero, Hacia la verdad, episodios de la Revolución (México, 1911), 62.
For a definitive statement of the Mexican belief that intervention was imminent, with the added imputation that Mexicans should openly defy the United States since intervention was inevitable, see Lespinasse to Knox, March 9, 1912 /2981; and Lespinasse to Knox, April 8, 1912 /3649.
New York Times, February 28, 1911.
Canada to Bryan, December 5, 1913/10067.
New York Times, March 12, 1911; May 9, 1911; May 10, 1911; May 14, 1911; June 1, 1911.
Rivero, Hacia la verdad, 38.
New York Times, May 7, 1911.
Ibid., May 14, 1911; May 18, 1911; May 21, 1911.
Ibid., May 14, 1911.
Crater [Pedro Lamicq], Madero por uno de sus íntimos (México, 1914), 116-117.
New York Tribune, March 15, 1911, in U. S., Library of Congress MSS collection, Newspaper Clippings pertaining to Mexico, 1911-1913, 3 vols., III-48-C.1, Ac. 6194, Vol. I.
El Paso Herald, April 3, 1912.
A copy of the manifesto is enclosed in Marion Letcher to Knox, April 3, 1912 /3539.
See Rómulo Velasco Ceballos, ¿Se apoderará Estados Unidos de América de Baja California? (La invasión filibustera de 1911) (México, 1920); and Lowell L. Blaisdell, The Desert Eevolution: Baja California, 1911 (Madison, 1962).
Ellsworth to Bryan, July 9, 1913 /8046.
Ellsworth to Knox, April 26, 1911/1555.
Wilson to Knox, February 10, 1911/769.
New York Times, March 12, 1913.
William A. Burnside to John E. McMahon, August 11, 1913 /8338.
See, for instance, Wilson to Bryan, April 25, 1913 /7273; Letcher to Bryan, May 3, 1913/7427; Lespinasse to Bryan, May 18, 1913 /7732; and Canada to Bryan, May 31, 1913 /7662.
Manuel González Ramírez (ed.), Fuentes para la historia de la Revolución Mexicana, Vol. II: La caricatura politica (México, 1955), figure 425.
Arnold Shanklin to Knox, November 9, 1910 /356.
Shanklin to Knox, March 21, 1911 /1104.
Mexican Herald, July 12, 1913.
New York Times, May 13, 1911.
Clarence A. Miller to Knox, May 10, 1911 /1716.
Miller to Knox, May 11, 1911 /1728.
Theodore C. Hamm to Knox, June 1, 1912 /4240.
Alonzo B. Garrett to Bryan, August 31, 1913 /8641.
Edwards to Bryan, September 19, 1913 /8926.
Stadden to Bryan, September 25, 1913 /9212.
Ellsworth to Knox, February 26, 1911 /876.
New York American, April 6, 1912, in Newspaper Clippings pertaining to Mexico, Vol. III.
New York Times, May 7, 1911.
María del Carmen Ruiz Castañeda, “El periodismo y la Revolución Mexicana,” Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, IV (October-December 1958), 449.
Juan T. Burns, El Pulpo (Madrid, 1921), 349.
Letcher to Knox, April 14, 1911 /1430.
Canada to Knox, March 20, 1911 /1110.
Lespinasse to Knox, September 18, 1912 /5114.
El Insurgente, March 16, 1912.
La Noticia, February 7, 1912.
New York Times, November 23, 1910.
A copy of the poster is enclosed in Wilson to Knox, May 6, 1912 /3875.
Enclosure in Wilson to Knox, May 4, 1912 /3847.
Enclosures in William B. Davis to Bryan, July 18, 1913 /8210.
John R. Silliman to Bryan, February 11, 1914 /10928, and enclosures.
Héctor Ribot, Las últimas revoluciones…. (México, 1910-1911), 258-259.
G. Núñez de Prado, devolución de México; La decena trágica (Barcelona, 1913), 298-299.
Tenorio-Sam. Humorada satírica de autores mexicanos, escrita en un acto dividido en tres cuadros, sobre el drama de Zorilla y contra la tragi-comedia yankee. Estrenada en el Teatro Principal de México, con éxito extraordinario, la noche del 28 de febrero de 1914 (México, 1914); and Filiberto C. González, Proyectos de un yankee (México, 1914).
Gonzalo G. Travesí, La revolución de México y el imperialismo yanqui (Barcelona, 1914), 219-220.
Enrique E. Schulz, El porvenir de México y sus relaciones con Estados Unidos (México, 1914), 1, 32-35, 49.
William E. Alger to Knox, March 19, 1911/1113; Harry K. Pangburn to Knox, March 19, 1911/1136; Albert W. Brickwood to Knox, March 19, 1911/1412; Philip C. Hanna to Knox, March 20, 1911/1111; and Louis Hostetter to Knox, March 25, 1911 /1134.
For reports indicating limitations on anti-Americanism and effective government action, see Magill to Knox, September 13, 1912/5035; and Hostetter to Knox, November 9, 1912/5549.
New York Times, February 20, 1911.
José Vasconcelos, La tormenta. Segunda parte de Ulises criollo (7th ed., México, 1948), 96. On Mexican attitudes immediately after the 1910 to 1913 period, see Robert E. Quirk, An Affair of Honor; Woodrow Wilson and the Occupation of Veracruz (Lexington, Ky., 1962); Robert E. Quirk, The Mexican Revolution, 1914-1915; The Convention of Aguascalientes (Bloomington, 1960); Floyd Ford Ewing, “Carranza’s Foreign Relations: An Experiment in Nationalism” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, 1952); Frank Tompkins, Chasing Villa: The Story Behind the Story of Pershing’s Expedition into Mexico (Harrisburg, Pa., 1934); H. A. Toulmin, With Pershing in Mexico (Harrisburg, Pa., 1935); and Clarence C. Clendenen, The United States and Pancho Villa; A Study in Unconventional Diplomacy (Ithaca, 1961).
Isidro Fabela, Historia diplomática de la Revolución Mexicana (1912-1917) (2 vols., México, 1958-1959), I, 369.
Author notes
The author is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. During 1967-1968 he is also a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Yale University.
