Woodrow Wilson’s well-known crusade against Victoriano Huerta continues to fascinate historians of the Mexican Revolution. Although several recent studies have touched upon this confrontation, Kenneth J. Grieb’s solid monograph adds understanding and an abundance of detail. His revisionist examination of Victoriano Huerta reflects current trends in the historiography of the Mexican Revolution. His treatment of Woodrow Wilson is more conventional and adds relatively little that is new.
Most significantly Grieb abandons hackneyed clichés and partisan pejoratives in his discussion of Mexican politics. Much as William L. Sherman and Richard E. Greenleaf suggested in Victoriano Huerta: A Reappraisal, he views the Mexican general as a typical Latin American caudillo whose methods, though scarcely laudable, were not much worse than those of countless other military strong men. This interpretive scheme, a much-needed antidote to the rash of anti-Huerta polemics, allows the author to counteract the rhetoric of the revolution, which has given Huerta an undeserved reputation as the physical embodiment of evil.
Nevertheless, Grieb does not permit revisionism to degenerate into apologetics. For example, he leaves little doubt that Huerta knew of plans to eliminate Francisco I. Madero after the coup d’état and probably favored assassination as the best means of removing a potential rival. But such occasional excesses notwithstanding, the author argues that undue censure on moralistic grounds is unwarranted. In his phrase, Huerta “might have accomplished much for Mexico if given the opportunity, but Woodrow Wilson never allowed him the chance” (p. 192).
The American president, portrayed in more traditional terms, is viewed as a moralistic idealist who rejected self-interest as a criterion of foreign policy, and chose instead to pursue ideological abstractions. With the advancement of democracy as his goal, he refused to accept Victoriano Huerta’s government as legitimate, and sought by various means—all carefully described—to isolate the Mexican leader from foreign support, to oust him from power, and to create a more acceptable regime.
In Grieb’s judgment, the crusade against Huerta was significant because it constituted the first test of Wilson’s “diplomacy of morality,” and in the end, moralism failed miserably. The president pursued misguided goals without restraint. Ultimately he carried paradoxical and self-defeating moralism to a logical but absurd conclusion with the intervention at Veracruz. By so doing, he inadvertently placed the United States in opposition to burgeoning Mexican nationalism, and “committed a moral transgression in search of moral rectitude” (p. xi).
On the basis of this analysis, the author argues that the president’s actions contradicted his ideals, although he seems not to doubt the genuine altruism of Wilson’s motives. According to Grieb, President Wilson was “in reality pursuing the traditional American policy of dominance in the Caribbean,” but he did it “unwittingly” and never would have admitted it to himself (p. 44). When interpreted in this way, Woodrow Wilson emerges as an astonishingly naive policymaker with an enormous capacity for self-deception.
There is no faulting Grieb’s research. He has utilized pertinent secondary accounts and has worked extensively with appropriate archival materials in the United States, Mexico, and Great Britain. His work, however, does raise some intriguing questions. Historians who interpret Wilson’s moralistic rhetoric as pious rationalization will dispute Grieb’s findings. Furthermore, one wonders if the Huerta period was significant only as “the testing ground” for the president’s moralistic diplomacy. Some additional comment on Huerta’s role in the development of the Mexican Revolution would have provided perspective. Nevertheless, such issues aside, The United States and Huerta deals ably with an important encounter and constitutes a welcome complement to the literature of Mexican-American relations.
