In this short, tightly written monograph, the product of graduate research at the State University of New York, Jesús Velasco Márquez presents the best analysis to date of press opinion in Mexico during that country’s war with the United States. For simplicity he has confined his research to Mexico City newspapers, which dominated national thought and undoubtedly influenced policymakers far more than the provincial press. After an excellent survey of major newspapers, the author has organized chapters around principal themes—American expansionism, moral justifications of the war, nationalism and reform, defeat, and reconstruction.

It has been generally accepted that the Mexican press, more warlike than the various administrations in power, hampered such efforts as the government made to avoid hostilities and ignored or minimized the difficulties of fighting the United States. Velasco Márquez qualifies this thesis, showing, for example, that both conservative and liberal journalists feared United States expansionism and that they explained it in rather different ways, consistent with their respective attitudes toward the American liberal-democratic experiment. He even suggests that conservatives developed a kind of Manifest Destiny of their own, based on the desirability of spreading religious unity. He recognizes but does not emphasize Mexican abomination of American slavery and race prejudice. Some journalists, he points out, fully understood the staggering difficulties of war and expected defeat. During the succession of calamities, conservatives and liberals naturally blamed different persons and factors. Velasco Márquez concludes not only that many Mexicans sought war for carefully considered reasons, but that in the long run the war brought some substantial benefit to Mexico by compelling intensive self-examination and encouraging reform.

While some of this has been suggested by others, it is good to have impressions pinned down to specific newspapers and editorials. Studies of attitudes and ideas, however, have certain inherent weaknesses that should be kept in mind. In the first place, press opinion is not public opinion; although Joel Poinsett and Waddy Thompson told us long ago that most inhabitants of Mexico City above the léperos were literate, we shall never know how much attention they paid to these editorials. Secondly, in organizing press writings around themes, a historian is apt to give scattered arguments more system and logic than they probably conveyed at the time. Finally, Velasco Márquez tends to polarize opinions into “conservative” and “liberal,” despite his careful initial characterizations of newspapers. But any analyst of “public” opinion must occasionally act arbitrarily if he hopes to bring some sort of order out of chaotic primary sources. A fair reader will conclude that Velasco Márquez has given us an objective and highly useful study.