Mexican Revolution



Mexican Revolution

Introduction

In 1913 John Reed (1887-1920), who was later to gain fame in the Russian Revolution and become one of the founders of the American Communist Party, joined Pancho Villa's troops in Northern Mexico and wrote the best English language reportage on the Mexican Revolution. Jack London funneled his socialism and revolutionary idealism into the short story "The Mexican" (1911) and a year later followed Reed to Mexico to cover therevolution. The irascible and irreverent Ambrose Bierce, who was suspicious of all ideological cant and often mocked the left-wing politics of Reed, London, and other American writers, wrote letters from war-torn Mexico—including one in which he imagined ending his turbulent life "against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags" (p. 196)—and then he simply disappeared. Lincoln Steffens, the renowned journalist and one of the first muckrakers, turned his social criticism from the "shame of the cities" to the chaos and political quagmire of the revolution; in 1914 he also went to Mexico, and he produced astute observations on the American involvement there. Richard Harding Davis, journalist, novelist, and the leading reporter of his day, personified the romantic image of the foreign correspondent. Handsome and always impeccably dressed, he had cut a dashing figure covering the Turko-Greek War of 1895 and the Sino-Japanese War of 1899. When he arrived in Mexico to report on the revolution he was bloated and dissipated; his state of being seemed to augur the corruption, disenchantment, and failed dreams of the revolution itself .

Mexican rebels. From a newspaper photograph dated 9 March 1911. THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS  

Writers from many countries, of every temperament and political stripe, flocked to this first major revolution of the twentieth century and made it the century's first media event. The drama just south of the border was a great story, in which the United States played a constant role .

Discussion

The Seeds Of Revolt

The U.S. involvement in the Mexican Revolution came on the heels of its imperialistic venture in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and marked the beginning of a long and often ignoble history of political and military intervention in Latin America. All along, United States foreign policy and American business interests had supported the thirty-year dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, known as the Porfiriato. Díaz had opened Mexico to foreign interests, mainly American and British, and an oligarchy ruled Mexico during the Díaz regime. The great disparity between the wealth of the ruling oligarchy and the widespread poverty of the Mexican peonage system laid the seeds for revolution; the people's bitterness was aggrandized by the knowledge that Mexico's abundant natural resources were being plundered by foreigners. The historian John Mason Hart calculates that "about 130 million acres, more than 27 percent of Mexico's land surface, came into the possession of American owners," and concludes that "the overwhelming commitment of American capital to Mexico and the subordinate origins of the Díaz regime underscore the deeper significance of the Mexican Revolution: a war of national liberation against the United States" (p. 320). With the overthrow of the Díaz regime in 1910 and the dismantling of the oligarchy that had ruled Mexico, Americans and American property were placed ...