Undoubtedly, T. H. Fehrenbach is not a household word to readers of the HAHR. After publishing books on Franklin Roosevelt, Swiss banks, the Korean War, and the United Nations, Fehrenbach, a Texan by birth and education, bursts into the crowded arena of Mexican history with Fire and Blood. It is difficult to determine the readership to which the work is directed. The study is destined for display in the book shops of the Hotel Geneve, the María Isabel, and the Del Prado. While the tourist in the Valley of Anáhuac, suddenly seized with pains of ignorance, could do worse than perusing the 650 pages of well-written narrative text, the patronizing tone of the study makes a highly qualified recommendation necessary even for the general reader.
As one ascends the scale of needed sophistication, the recommendation must become still more guarded. The scholarly community will find Fehrenbach’s entrée insufficiently tantalizing to invite another course. Fire and Blood is not suitable as a college text. The approach is even less analytical than Henry Bamford Parkes’s A History of Mexico and, although written almost thirty-five years later, is scarcely more up to date. While it is perhaps unbecoming to point out minor mistakes in a book which runs the gamut from the Pleistocene forests to the Matanza de Tlaltelolco, it is not improper to indicate that an entire series of sterile generalizations result from the author’s failure to consult Paddock and Spores on ancient Oaxaca, Riley and Barret on the Cortés estates, Chipman on Nuño de Guzmán, Greenleaf and Farris on the colonial church, Warren on Vasco de Quiroga, Bakewell, Hamnett, Brading, and Florescano on colonial economic life, Gibson and Padden on Spanish-Indian relations, and Chevalier on the development of the great estates. The record in the post-independence period does not improve. The treatment of the first half of the nineteenth century reads as if Hale, Costeloe, Hamill, Flores Caballero, Bazant, Harris, and Potash had never written a word. With this record, the reader will not be surprised that Cosío Villegas’s new conception of the formation of modern Mexico is not acknowledged as the narrative ventures into the second half of the nineteenth century.
Failure to consult two decades of monographic scholarship is nowhere more readily apparent than in Fehrenbach’s chronicle of the twentieth century. Had he bothered to familiarize himself even with the basic works of Ross, Cumberland, Bernstein, Quirk, Wilkie, and Womack, the Revolution that emerged would more nearly have approximated historical reality. While we might all profit from rereading the early appreciations of Tannenbaum and Gruening, in the 1970s we can no longer approach our task with the view that they have written the last word.
While I do not wish to burden the reader with a list of trifling errors (each Mexican historian can easily compile his own), one final observation seems to be in order. At times the author writes with understanding and even appreciation of his subject matter. But the snide comments on the nature of the Mexican, the gratuitous observations on the Hispanic value system, and the sarcastic and often inaccurate disparagement of historical figures are never far away. When Fehrenbach offers that Mexicans had become paranoid by the 1820s about losing Texas, one is prompted to add that even if that were true, paranoids sometimes have enemies too. What do we learn from his characterization of nineteenth-century Mexicans “high and low” as “vain, childish . . . irresponsible” (p. 356) ? Is it not an affront both to social psychology and the Mexican intelligentsia to intone that “the Hispanic mentality did not easily grasp the concept of separation of powers” (p. 446)? Do we understand Mexican history better by reading that Mariano Paredes was “a drunken incompetent” (p. 391), that Francisco Madero, who stood up to his assassins without showing fear, was “bird-like and quivering” (p. 489), that Pascual Orozco was “a bandit by nature” (p. 501), or that Plutarco Calles was “dirty in his personal habits, gross in his appetites” (p. 555)? That Mexico experienced more than her share of chaos and violence few would deny. But the basic problem here is one of historical selectivity. To accentuate the treasons and betrayals, to insist upon the malevolence and misanthropy, to dwell upon rape and depredation, and to emphasize the Fire and Blood without a sufficiently corrective dose of the best in the historical tradition is to distort the record and do a disservice to Mexico’s past.
