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The Entire History of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) | Sleep History with Rain Sounds · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

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[SPEAKER_00]: Good evening and welcome to Sleepless History.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are going to spend a long while in Mexico in the years between 1910 and 1920.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This was a decade in which a government that had stood for 35 years came apart, and in which the people who pulled it apart then spent six more years arguing in the most serious possible way about what should replace it.
0:26
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a story of railway time tables and land surveys.
0:30
[SPEAKER_00]: of provisional plans issued from small towns, of committees, of telegraph lines, of mining concessions and tax receipts, of men on horseback, who became generals and then became governors, and then more often than not, became names on monuments.
0:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It is also in its way a story about paperwork.
0:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Nearly every turning point in the Mexican Revolution was announced in a written document with a formal title.
1:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Usually named after the town where it was signed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The plan of San Luis Potosi, the plan of Ayala, the plan of Guadalupe, the plan of Agua Prieta.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Men would gather in a farmhouse or a dusty municipal office.
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[SPEAKER_00]: write out a list of grievances and demands, sign it, print it, and distribute it, and then go to war over it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We will read through many of these documents tonight, slowly, and consider what they actually said.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A few gentle warnings before we begin, so that nothing surprises you later.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This was a war and people died in it in very large numbers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We will not dwell on the details of that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is a program meant to help you sleep.
1:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And there is no version of history in which lingering over violence is restful.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We will treat the fighting the way a very old textbook might treat it with dates, with place names, and with troop movements.
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[SPEAKER_00]: there will be five chapters tonight.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 1 covers Mexico under Porfirio Diaz, the 35 years of stability and inequality that made a revolution thinkable.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 2 covers the fall of that government and the short unhappy presidency of Francisco Madero.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 3 covers the coup that ended him and the coalition that formed to undo it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 4 covers what happened when that coalition won
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[SPEAKER_00]: and then turned on itself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And Chapter 5 covers the constitution that came out of all of it, and the long, slow ending that followed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Before we start, one small thing.
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3:33
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, let us begin in the year 1876 with a general who had lost two elections and decided not to lose a third.
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[SPEAKER_00]: chapter 1, the long piece.
3:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Why did a revolution happen in 1910?
3:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It helps to understand why one had not happened in the 35 years before it, and to make sense of that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We need to go back to a country that had spent most of its independent existence in a state of near-continuous emergency.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the half century that followed, it had something on the order of 50 changes of government.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It had emperors, briefly, twice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It had a war with the United States between 1846 and 1848, that ended with the loss of roughly half its national territory, including what would become California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and parts of Colorado and Wyoming.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It had a bitter, internal conflict between liberals and conservatives called the War of the Reform, from 1858 to 1861.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then, when the country suspended payments on its foreign debt, it had a French invasion, and a European prince named Maximilian
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[SPEAKER_00]: and a guerrilla war against him that ended with his execution on a hill outside the city of Carataro in June of 1867.
5:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The man who led the resistance to the French was Benito Juarez, a lawyer from a Zapotec village in the southern state of Waxaca.
5:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Juarez was the great figure of Mexican liberalism.
5:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The president who had pushed through the reform laws stripping the Catholic Church of its enormous land holdings and its special legal privileges.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He died in office of a heart attack in July of 1872, and his death left a vacancy that the country spent the next four years arguing about.
5:58
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the men who had fought under him was a soldier from Wahaqa,
6:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Diaz was born in September of 1830 in the city of Wahaka to a family of modest means.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His father and innkeeper died when he was three.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was sent to a seminary.
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[SPEAKER_00]: decided against the priesthood, studied law for a while, and then found his real vocation in the army, where he turned out to be very good indeed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He fought the conservatives in the war of the reform.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He fought the French, and on the 5th of May, 1862, he commanded a brigade at the Battle of Puebla, the improbable Mexican victory that is still commemorated
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was captured, twice, and escaped, twice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By the end of the French intervention, he was one of the most celebrated soldiers in the country.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was also ambitious, and he did not care for losing elections.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He ran against Twaris in 1871, lost and rebelled, issuing a document called The Plan of La Nouria.
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[SPEAKER_00]: who central demand was that presidents should not be permitted to succeed themselves.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That rebellion failed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: While his died the following year, and was succeeded by Sebastian Ledo de Tajada.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Dears ran against Ledo in 1876, lost again, and rebelled again.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This time issuing the plan of Tuxedapek, who central demand was once more, that presidents should not be permitted to succeed themselves.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This time, the rebellion worked.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In November of 1876, Porfirio Diaz took Mexico City and in May of 1877, he was formally installed as president.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He then governed the country with one interruption until May of 1911.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The interruption came between 1880,
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[SPEAKER_00]: and 1884.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When, in reference to his own stated principle, about presidents not succeeding themselves, he handed the office to a loyal friend named Manuel Gonzalez, waited out the term and came back.
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[SPEAKER_00]: After that, he stopped pretending.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Constitution was amended in 1887
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[SPEAKER_00]: amended again in 1890 to allow unlimited re-election.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and amended once more in 1904 to extend the presidential term from four years to six.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was re-elected in 1884, 1888, 1892, 1896, 1910, 1904 and 1910.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This 35-year period is known in Mexican history as the poor Furriato.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What did he actually do with it?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And this is the part that makes the story genuinely complicated.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Porfiriato was by almost every measurable economic standard, a period of remarkable growth, start with the railways, because everything else follows from them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When Diaz took power in 1876,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Mexico had roughly 660 kilometers of railway track, which is to say about 410 miles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Essentially a single line from the port of Vera Cruz up to Mexico City.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By 1910, the country had roughly 20,000 kilometers, about 12,400 miles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The lines ran north to the United States border at Seudad Juarez and at Laredo and at Nogarles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They ran west to the Pacific.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They connected the silver districts and the copper districts and the coal fields to the ports and the frontier.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Freight that had once moved by Mule train over mountain roads at a cost that made most commerce pointless, now moved by rail at a fraction of the price.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The telegraph followed the tracks, so that by 1910 the government in Mexico City could send an order to a garrison a thousand miles away and receive an acknowledgement the same afternoon.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is not a small thing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A government that can move soldiers by train and orders by wire is a fundamentally different kind of government from one that cannot.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Where did the money come from?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Overwhelmingly from abroad.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Diaz government made attracting foreign investment its central economic policy and its succeeded beyond anything its predecessors have managed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: British and American capital built the railways.
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[SPEAKER_00]: American, British and French capital opened the mines.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1884, the mining code was rewritten so that subsoil rights, which under Spanish and early Mexican law, had belonged to the nation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: now belong to the owner of the surface land.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That single legal change, more than any other, made large-scale foreign investment in Mexican minerals and later Mexican petroleum attractive.
11:37
[SPEAKER_00]: an American named Edward Doheny brought in the first commercially significant oil well near Tampico in 1901.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A British engineer and contractor named Weatman Pearson later Lord Cowdrey developed enormous holdings in the same region.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By 1911, Mexico was among the largest oil producers in the world.
12:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Alongside oil there was copper at Cananea in Sonora, silver and lead across the north.
12:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Cole at Sabinus in the state of Coahueela, Henakwen Fibre in Yucatan, for the bind attwine that tied up the wheat harvest of the North American plains, coffee in Chiapas and Veracruz, sugar in Morelos, and cattle on enormous northern branches.
12:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The National Budget, which had been in permanent deficits since independence, was balanced for the first time in 1894 and remained in surplus for most of the following two decades.
12:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The man responsible for much of the financial management was Jose Eve Limontour, Minister of Finance from 1893 onward, a lawyer of French descent, careful, cold, and extremely competent.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He belonged to the circle of advisors, known as the scientific oss, the scientific ones.
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[SPEAKER_00]: who took their name from their belief that government should be run on scientific principles rather than on ideology or sentiment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They were disciples, more or less, of the French philosopher, Auguste Comte, whose positivism supplied the slogan that appeared on public buildings across Latin America in this period, order and progress.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Their conviction, stated plainly, was that Mexico was not ready for democracy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: that its people were too poor and too uneducated to govern themselves and that a period of firm administration under enlightened experts was the necessary precondition for eventual self-government.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was an argument
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[SPEAKER_00]: that had the convenient property of never specifying an end date.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Order was maintained by a combination of instruments.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There was the regular army, though it was smaller, and less impressive than it looked on paper.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There was a rural-mounted police force called the rural arlesse.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Several thousand strong recruited in part from former bandits on the theory that they
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[SPEAKER_00]: There were the Jefface Politico's, the political bosses appointed to run each district who answered to the state governor who answered to Diaz, and there was a system of accommodation and patronage in which regional strongmen were left alone in their own territory, so long as they delivered the vote, kept the peace and did not develop national ambitions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Diaz is supposed to have summarized his method with a phrase about bread or the club, meaning that a man could be bought or he could be beaten and that the first was cheaper.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Whether he ever said it is unclear, the system certainly operated as if he had.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now we come to the land, which is the heart of the matter, and which requires patience,
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[SPEAKER_00]: under Spanish colonial law and under the early Republic, a great many Mexican villages held land in common.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The village has a corporate body owned fields, woodland and water rights.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and allocated the use of them among its households according to custom.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This was the Ejido, and it was the basic economic fact of rural life for millions of people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Liberals of the 1850s regarded corporate land holding as an obstacle to progress.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Their target was primarily the church.
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[SPEAKER_00]: which was the largest landowner in the country, but the law they passed in June of 1856, known as the Lerdo law, after Miguel Lerdo de Tahada, was written broadly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It required all civil and ecclesiastical corporations to sell their land to individuals.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Indian villages were civil corporations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The law applied to them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: because for two decades, the country was too disordered to enforce anything.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Under deers, it was enforced.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Village common lands were surveyed, divided into individual plots and titled.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Individual smallholders, unfamiliar with the paperwork, short of cash,
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[SPEAKER_00]: and facing neighbours with lawyers, sold or lost those plots with remarkable speed, and the land accumulated in the hands of the surrounding estates.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On top of the Lerdo Law came the Survey Law of December of 1883, and its successor of 1894.
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[SPEAKER_00]: These authorised private survey companies, the company's desolinder'dorers, to go out and identify vacant public land, and permitted them to keep a third of whatever they surveyed as payment, with the option to purchase the rest at favorable rates.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In practice, land was deemed vacant if the people living on it could not produce a title that satisfied a surveyor.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In enormous areas changed hands.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By the most commonly cited estimates, the survey companies handled something like
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[SPEAKER_00]: one fifth of the total land area of Mexico.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the northern state of Chihuahua, a single family, the Tarazas, together with their Creole relations, came to hold a state's measured not in hectares, but in millions of hectares.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There is an old line, probably two need to be true.
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[SPEAKER_00]: in which a visitor asks whether a certain man is from Chihuahua and is told, no, Chihuahua is his.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By the census of 1910, something close to 90% of rural households in Mexico held no land at all.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There were roughly 8,000 Haseenders, larger states, and around 50,000 villages.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and the great majority of country people lived as resident laborers on the estates, as sharecroppers, or as seasonal workers moving between them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The estate laborer, the peon, was typically paid partly in cash.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and partly in credit at the estate store, the Tien de D'Araire.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Prices at the store were set by the estate.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Wages were low, and in real terms, adjusted for the price of maize.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Agricultural wages in 1910 were probably lower than they had been a century earlier.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Dets recorded at the store were inheritable in practice if not in law, and a laborer who owed money could not lawfully leave.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the worst regions and the phrase worst regions is doing a great deal of work.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The arrangement was effectively unfree labor.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In Yucatan, on the hennaquin plantations, and in the Tobacco District of the Valle National in Wahaqa, workers were recruited by deception or supplied by the state, worked under guard, and died at rates that shocked the few outsiders who went looking.
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[SPEAKER_00]: An American journalist named John Kenneth Turner published an account of these places in 1910
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[SPEAKER_00]: under the title Barberus Mexico, which was serialized in the American press and did a great deal of damage to the Diaz government's reputation abroad.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There was also outright removal.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Yaki people of Sonora had resisted encroachment on the fertile valley of the Yaki river for generations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Beginning in the 1890s and intensifying after 1902,
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[SPEAKER_00]: The government responded with deportation, shipping Yaki family's south and selling them into labour on the hennaquin plantations of Yucatan and the sugar estates of Wohaka.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Estimates of the number deported range widely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: but the campaign removed a substantial share of the entire population.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Industrial labour feared better than rural labour, but not by as much as one might expect, and industrial workers had the advantage of being concentrated, literate, and able to organise.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Two episodes stand out.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The first was at the copper mine at Caninear in Sonora, close to the Arizona border, owned by an American named William Green.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In June of 1906, Mexican miners struck over the fact that American employees were paid substantially more for the same work and over their demand for a five-peso daily wage and an eight-hour day.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The strike was broken with the assistance of several hundred armed volunteers who came across the border from Arizona, an event that Mexicans remembered with particular bitterness.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Since it involved foreign armed men operating on Mexican soil with the acquiescence of the Mexican authorities, the second
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[SPEAKER_00]: was at the textile mills of Rio Blanco, in Vera Cruz, in January of 1907.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A dispute over factory regulations and company store debts escalated into a lockout across the region.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Workers who marched on the company store were fired on by federal troops.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The number killed has never been established with any confidence, and the estimates run from dozens into the hundreds.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Behind both episodes stood an organisation, the Mexican Liberal Party founded in 1905 in exile in St. Louis, Missouri by Ricardo Flores Magon
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[SPEAKER_00]: was smuggled into Mexico in quantity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Their program, published in July of 1906, is a remarkable document to read now, because it anticipates almost the entire agenda of the next 15 years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No reelection, an eight-hour working day, a minimum wage, the abolition of the company's store, restrictions on child labor, secular education,
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[SPEAKER_00]: the breakup of larger states and the restoration of village lands.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Flora's magon himself was an anarchist and would spend most of the rest of his life in American prisons, dying in one, in Kansas, in November of 1922.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He never held office, never commanded an army and never received much credit.
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[SPEAKER_00]: almost every demand he printed in 1906 ended up in the constitution of 1917.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, several pressures arrived at once.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The world financial panic of 1907 reached Mexico and closed mines and mills.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Poor harvests in 1908 and 1909 raised the price of
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[SPEAKER_00]: The government's decision in 1905, to move the currency from a silver-standard to a gold-standard, sensible in the abstract, hurt export producers and hurt debtors.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Unemployed workers came back from the northern mining districts, and there was a generational problem inside the regime itself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Diaz was 79 years old in 1910, his cabinet and his governors had aged with him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1910, the average age of a state governor in Mexico was somewhere in the mid-60s and several were over 80, ambitious younger men in the professions, and in provincial business had nowhere to go because nobody above them was leaving.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Into this situation, in February of 1908, Diaz dropped a remark that he almost certainly regretted.
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[SPEAKER_00]: which was published in Pearson's magazine in March.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In it, sitting on the terrace of Chipotle Pet Castle, he said that Mexico was now ready for democracy, that he welcomed the formation of opposition parties, and that he did not intend to run again in 1910.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He may have meant it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He may have been speaking to a foreign audience with no expectation that the interview would circulate at home.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It circulated at home, it was translated, reprinted, and read everywhere, and it was taken by a great many people as permission.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One of the people who took it that way was Francisco Ignacio Madero.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was born in October of 1873 in Paris.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the state of Coahuela, into one of the wealthiest families in northern Mexico.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Madero's own cotton land, vineyards, a smelter, a textile mill, and interests in mining and rubber.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Francisco was educated at a Jesuit school.
25:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Then in France, where he attended a business school near Paris, and then briefly at the University of California in Berkeley, where he studied agriculture and improved his English.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He came home and ran the family's cotton estate at San Pedro de Las Colonias, where he introduced American irrigation methods.
25:59
[SPEAKER_00]: planted new crop varieties, built a school and a hospital for the workers, and paid above the local rate.
26:09
[SPEAKER_00]: He was also, and this is not incidental, a vegetarian, a teetotola, a homeopath, and a spiritist.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He kept notebooks of automatic writing,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Messages that he believed came from spirits, including one he identified as his deceased brother role, urging him to sacrifice his private comfort for the good of his country.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Historians have argued for a century about how much weight to place on this.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It is enough to say that
26:44
[SPEAKER_00]: and that this belief made him unusually difficult to discourage.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In January of 1909, he published a book called The Presidential Succession of 1910.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It is not a revolutionary document.
27:00
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a mild, thorough, rather long book that reviews Mexican history.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Credit's deans with genuine achievements, argues that absolute power has none the less corrupted the administration of the country, and proposes a single specific remedy, effective suffrage and no re-election.
27:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Madero did not ask for land reform.
27:24
[SPEAKER_00]: He barely mentioned the condition of labor.
27:27
[SPEAKER_00]: He wanted honest elections and a limit on terms, and he was prepared to leave everything else to be settled afterward by a legitimate government.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The book sold well and made him nationally known.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Out of it came the anti-relectionist party.
27:45
[SPEAKER_00]: and in 1910, Madero campaigned across the country in a way no Mexican politician had done in living memory, traveling by train, speaking in provincial towns, drawing crowds that grew from hundreds into tens of thousands.
28:02
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a small man with a high voice and no gift for
28:10
[SPEAKER_00]: announced that he would run after all, with Ramon Carral as his vice president.
28:15
[SPEAKER_00]: In June of 1910, shortly before the election, Madero was arrested in Monterey on charges of insulting the authorities and inciting rebellion and moved to a prison in the city of San Luis Potosi.
28:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The election was held while he was in custody.
28:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The official returns gave Diaz something close to unanimity, and Madero, a few hundred votes nationwide, a figure so absurd that it damaged the government more than an honest defeat would have.
28:46
[SPEAKER_00]: That September, Mexico celebrated the centennial of the beginning of its independence.
28:53
[SPEAKER_00]: with a month of official festivities, parades, banquets, the dedication of the Angel of Independence on the Passo de la Reforma, foreign delegations, fireworks, and an enormous expenditure of public money.
29:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Diaz turned 80 during the celebrations.
29:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Photographs from that month show a government at the height of its confidence, and they were taken about eight weeks before it began to come apart.
29:25
[SPEAKER_00]: In October, released on bail with orders to remain in San Luis Potosi, Madero put on a railway worker's clothes, boarded a train, and crossed the border into Texas.
29:41
[SPEAKER_00]: chapter two, the plan, the president, and the ten tragic days.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Madero reached San Antonio, Texas, in the first week of October of 1910.
29:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And there, with a handful of relatives and supporters, he wrote the document that formally began the Mexican Revolution.
30:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It was called the Plan of San Luis Potosi, and it was dated the fifth of October 1910, which was the last day Madero had been legally in that city.
30:19
[SPEAKER_00]: This was a deliberate piece of legal theater.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A revolutionary manifesto written on Mexican soil had a different standing than one written in a hotel room in Texas.
30:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And it also, conveniently, avoided giving the United States authorities an obvious reason to prosecute him for organising an armed expedition from American territory.
30:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The plan is short.
30:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It declares the elections of 1910 null and void.
30:50
[SPEAKER_00]: It declares madero-provisional president pending new elections.
30:55
[SPEAKER_00]: It restates the principle of effective suffrage and no re-election.
31:00
[SPEAKER_00]: It contains in its third article, a brief and slightly ambiguous promise.
31:07
[SPEAKER_00]: that lands taken from small holders by abuse of the survey laws would be restored to them with compensation paid to those who had acquired them.
31:17
[SPEAKER_00]: That single paragraph, almost an afterthought in a document about voting, was the reason a great many peasants would take up arms
31:35
[SPEAKER_00]: 1910 at six o'clock in the evening when Mexicans were to rise against the government.
31:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea of scheduling a revolution for six o'clock on a particular Sunday evening has a certain charm and it did not work as intended.
31:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The first rising happened two days early and in the wrong place.
31:58
[SPEAKER_00]: In the city of Puebla, a shoemaker and organiser named Achilles Sardin had been storing weapons in his house.
32:06
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 18th of November, the police came to search it, the family resisted.
32:11
[SPEAKER_00]: In the fighting that followed, Sedan and most of his household were killed, and the government treated the affair as a satisfying demonstration that the conspiracy had been broken.
32:24
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 20th, Madero crossed the Rio Grande near Ciudad Pofirio Diaz, which is now called Piedras Negress, expecting to meet several hundred armed men.
32:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Fewer than a dozen were waiting.
32:40
[SPEAKER_00]: He went back to Texas, and for several weeks,
32:44
[SPEAKER_00]: it appeared that the whole enterprise had failed.
32:47
[SPEAKER_00]: What saved it was Chihuahua, the enormous dry cattle and mining state along the northern border where the grievances were sharpest and the terrain was best suited to men on horseback.
33:00
[SPEAKER_00]: There, a movement organized by a school teacher and businessman named Abraham González had already begun to take shape and it produced the two most consequential military figures of the entire revolution.
33:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The first was Pasquale Orozco, a muuleteer and small merchant from the mountain district of Guerrero in Western Chihuahua.
33:24
[SPEAKER_00]: He was in his early 30s, thin, quiet, and a very quick student of irregular war within weeks.
33:32
[SPEAKER_00]: he had taken several towns and defeated federal columns sent against him.
33:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The second was a man born Dorateo Arango in 1878 in the state of Durango, who by 1910 was known as Francisco Villa and universally as Pancho Villa.
33:52
[SPEAKER_00]: His early life is genuinely obscure and he told different versions of it at different times.
34:00
[SPEAKER_00]: is that he was a sharecropper's son who, as a teenager, shot a man from the estate over an assault on his sister, fled to the hills, and spent the next 15 years as a bandit, cattle rustler, an occasional butcher, and mule dealer in and around the city of Chihuahua.
34:20
[SPEAKER_00]: He could barely read, he did not drink.
34:23
[SPEAKER_00]: He had an extraordinary memory for terrain and for faces.
34:27
[SPEAKER_00]: an instinct for cavalry movement and a personal magnetism that historians who dislike him have never been able to explain away.
34:36
[SPEAKER_00]: By February of 1911, the Northern Rising was serious enough that Madero came back across the border to take command of it in person.
34:46
[SPEAKER_00]: He was not a soldier and he never became one.
34:49
[SPEAKER_00]: His first attempt to debattle at Cassas Grandes in March was a defeat in which he was wounded in the arm, what he brought was legitimacy.
34:59
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the recognized head of a movement, with a program and a name.
35:04
[SPEAKER_00]: and the local commanders needed that, at least as much as he needed their horsemen.
35:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, 600 miles to the south, an entirely separate rising had begun for entirely local reasons, and it would outlast everything else.
35:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The state of Moralos lies just south of Mexico City.
35:25
[SPEAKER_00]: a compact, warm, well-watered valley that was, by 1910, one of the most efficient sugar-producing regions in the world.
35:35
[SPEAKER_00]: 36 largest states dominated it, equipped with modern mills,
35:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And their expansion over the previous 30 years had absorbed the fields and the water of the surrounding villages, with a completeness that left very little room for anyone else.
35:52
[SPEAKER_00]: One of those villages was an Ennequilco, a settlement of a few hundred people with land titles going back to the 16th century, kept in a tin box in the care of the village council.
36:06
[SPEAKER_00]: In September of 1909, the villagers elected as their council president, a 30-year-old horse trainer named Emiliano Zapata.
36:17
[SPEAKER_00]: He was born in August of 1879.
36:20
[SPEAKER_00]: His family were not peons, but small, independent farmers, respectable, poor, and locally known.
36:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Zapata was a superb horseman.
36:31
[SPEAKER_00]: a vestidious dresser in the charo style and a man a few words and very fixed opinions.
36:37
[SPEAKER_00]: He had already been conscripted into the army once as punishment for local agitation.
36:42
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a part as approached to the land question was practical and had nothing to do with Madero.
36:48
[SPEAKER_00]: In the spring of 1910, before any revolution existed, he simply led a group of villagers onto disputed fields, tore down the estate fences, and redistributed the plots according to the old titles.
37:02
[SPEAKER_00]: When word of the northern rising reached Morelos,
37:06
[SPEAKER_00]: He and other local leaders joined it in March of 1911, because it seemed to offer national cover for what they were already doing.
37:16
[SPEAKER_00]: In May, they took the town of Kautler after nearly a week of fighting against one of the better federal units.
37:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And with that, the state was effectively theirs.
37:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Back in the north, the decisive action came at Ciudad Juarez on the border opposite El Paso, Texas.
37:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the most valuable prize in the region, a customs house, a rail junction, and a point of entry for arms.
37:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Madero's forces surrounded it in April of 1911, and Madero, worried that shells falling on El Paso would provoke American intervention, ordered his commanders not to attack.
37:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Arrosco and Villa attacked anyway, beginning on the 8th of May.
38:03
[SPEAKER_00]: and ended with the surrender of the Garrison on the 10th.
38:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It was an act of open-in subordination that Madera was in no position to punish, and it is usually taken as the first visible crack in the coalition.
38:17
[SPEAKER_00]: A Roscoe confronted Madero directly a few days later, over the distribution of offices, and there was a tense scene in which weapons were drawn.
38:27
[SPEAKER_00]: But the victory was decisive in the way that matters politically.
38:31
[SPEAKER_00]: A revolutionary government now held a major city and a customs post, rising was spreading in a dozen states, and the Diaz government examining its own position.
38:44
[SPEAKER_00]: concluded that its army was too small and too scattered to reconquer the country.
38:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Negotiations produced the Treaty of Ciudad Juarez signed on the 21st of May 1911.
38:57
[SPEAKER_00]: It's terms were, in hindsight, extraordinary.
39:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Diaz and his vice president would resign.
39:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The Foreign Minister, Francisco Leon de la Barra, would become interim president and would
39:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Revolutionary forces would be demobilized, and the federal army, the courts, the state governments, the bureaucracy, and the entire structure of the Porfirian state would remain exactly where they were.
39:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Madero accepted this, and it is the single most criticised decision of his life.
39:36
[SPEAKER_00]: He had won a war and then handed back everything except the presidency, which he did not yet hold.
39:44
[SPEAKER_00]: His own supporters were disarmed, while the institution that would eventually destroy him was left intact.
39:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Porfirio Diaz resigned on 25 May 1911.
39:57
[SPEAKER_00]: He left Mexico City by train, went to Vera Cruz, and on the 31st boarded a German steamship called the Iparanga for Europe.
40:08
[SPEAKER_00]: He settled in Paris and died there on the 2nd of July, 1915 at the age of 84.
40:16
[SPEAKER_00]: He is buried in the cemetery of Morpannas, and repeated proposals to repatriate his remains have never come to anything.
40:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Madero entered Mexico City on 7 June 1911, to crowds estimated at 100,000 or more.
40:35
[SPEAKER_00]: That same morning the city was shaken by a substantial earthquake, which people at the time found impossible not to interpret.
40:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Then came six months of interim government under Leon Delabara, and they were disastrous.
40:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Delabara was a career diplomat, personally courteous and politically conservative, and he had no interest in preserving Madero's coalition.
41:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The central dispute was disarmament and it came to a head in Morelos, where Zapata refused to demobilise until land was actually returned.
41:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Delabara sent federal troops into the state, under a general named Victoriano Wetter.
41:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Madera went south personally to negotiate, made progress and was undercut by the continued advance of the army.
41:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Zapata went back to the hills.
41:33
[SPEAKER_00]: the two men never met again.
41:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The election was held in October of 1911 and was the freest in Mexican history to that point.
41:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Madero won overwhelmingly, Jose Maria Pino Suarez became Vice President.
41:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Madero was inaugurated on 6 November 1911.
41:52
[SPEAKER_00]: His presidency lasted 15 months, and it was attacked from every direction at once.
42:00
[SPEAKER_00]: From the south, first.
42:02
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 28th of November, 1911, three weeks after the inauguration, Zapata issued the plan of Ayala, drafted with a village schoolmaster named Otilio Montano.
42:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It denounced Madero as a traitor to the revolution.
42:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Recognized a Roscoe as its proper leader and set out a land program of remarkable clarity.
42:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Villages holding titles to land that had been usurped would take immediate possession of it, with the burden of proof falling on the estates to disprove the claim in court afterward.
42:41
[SPEAKER_00]: One third of the land of the larger states would be expropriated with compensation for
42:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The property of anyone who opposed the plan would be nationalized outright.
42:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The slogan attached to it was land and liberty, and its final line that it was better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees is the sentence most often quoted from the entire revolution, from the north, second.
43:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Pasqual Arrosco passed over for the governorship of Chihuahua and increasingly resentful, rebelled in March of 1912 with the backing, it was widely believed, of the great land-owning families who preferred a manageable strongman to an unpredictable reformer.
43:31
[SPEAKER_00]: his manifesto issued from a packing plant in Chihuahua City and therefore known as the plan of the packing house, borrowed liberally from the labour and land demands of the Liberal Party Program.
43:45
[SPEAKER_00]: His forces called the Red Flaggers for their banners, defeated the first federal army sent against them.
43:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Madero then made the decision that killed him.
43:55
[SPEAKER_00]: He appointed Victoriano
44:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Wetter was a career officer of Weechol Indian descent from Helisco, a graduate of the military college, a competent artilleryman and engineer, a heavy drinker, and a man with no loyalty to the new order whatsoever.
44:16
[SPEAKER_00]: He was also undeniably effective.
44:20
[SPEAKER_00]: between May and July of 1912, he beat Arrosco at Kanéhos, at Relano and at Bachimba and drove him across the border.
44:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Serving under Huerta in that campaign was Pancho Villa commanding irregular cavalry in June of 1912, the two men quarreled over a horse by most accounts.
44:43
[SPEAKER_00]: and wherter ordered Villa shot for in subordination.
44:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Villa was standing against a wall, when a telegram from Madero's brother stopped the execution.
44:54
[SPEAKER_00]: He was sent instead to a military prison in Mexico City where he spent six months learning to read properly and in December of 1912
45:05
[SPEAKER_00]: He walked out with the help of a sympathetic clerk and made his way to El Paso.
45:11
[SPEAKER_00]: There were other revolts.
45:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Banado Reyes, an old Porfirian general, rose in December of 1911, failed and was imprisoned in Mexico City, Felix Diaz, nephew of the former president, seized Vera Cruz in October of 1912.
45:30
[SPEAKER_00]: failed and was imprisoned in Mexico City, Madero commuted both death sentences, which was decent of him and, as it turned out, fatal.
45:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it meant that in February of 1913 there were two experienced conspirators sitting in the capital's prisons with visitors.
45:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Madero also lost
45:58
[SPEAKER_00]: and the newspapers, which had spent 35 years praising Diaz, discovered that they could say anything at all and chose to say it about Madero.
46:07
[SPEAKER_00]: The mockery was constant and personal, and he had a problem in the American embassy.
46:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The Ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson, no relation to the incoming president, had close ties to American business interests.
46:23
[SPEAKER_00]: and had concluded that Madero was incompetent and dangerous to those interests.
46:29
[SPEAKER_00]: His dispatches to Washington were relentlessly hostile, and his conduct in February of 1913 went well past reporting.
46:38
[SPEAKER_00]: On 9 February, 1913, a group of officers freed Reyes and Felix Diaz and marched on the National Palace.
46:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Reyes was killed almost immediately in front of it.
46:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The survivors seized the citadel and arsenal about two kilometers away.
46:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Madero, riding through the streets, met Victoriano Huerta and appointed him commander of the loyal forces in the capital.
47:06
[SPEAKER_00]: What followed is called the DeSena Trajica, the ten tragic days, for ten days, two artillery forces shell each other across a densely inhabited district of a capital city.
47:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Both sides sent loyal units into fire that accomplished nothing.
47:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Civilian casualties were heavy, water and food supplies failed, and bodies were burned in the streets.
47:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It is now generally accepted that Werter was in contact with the rebels for most of this period and that the destruction was in part deliberate.
47:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It exhausted the units loyal to Madero, and it exhausted the patience of the city.
47:52
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 18th of February,
47:54
[SPEAKER_00]: We're to arrested Madero and Pino Suarez in the National Palace.
47:59
[SPEAKER_00]: That evening at the American Embassy, Quetta and Felix Diaz signed an agreement in the Ambassador's presence, dividing power between them.
48:10
[SPEAKER_00]: It is known as the Pact of the Embassy.
48:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Ambassador Wilson then presented Wetter to the assembled diplomatic corps.
48:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Madero and Pino Suarez resigned on the 19th.
48:23
[SPEAKER_00]: having been given assurances of safe conduct into exile.
48:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Madero's brother Gustavo had already been killed by soldiers at the Citadel.
48:32
[SPEAKER_00]: On the night of the 22nd of February, 1913, the two men were taken from the palace in cars, ostensibly for transferred to the penitentiary, they were shot behind it.
48:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The official account described an ambush by rescuers and a crossfire.
48:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody believed it then, and nobody believes it now.
48:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Francisco Madero was 39 years old.
48:57
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been president for 15 months.
49:01
[SPEAKER_00]: He had won an election, freed the press, tolerated his enemies, and refused to govern by force.
49:08
[SPEAKER_00]: and the historical judgment on him has always been divided between those who consider him naive and those who consider him the only person in the entire story who behave decently.
49:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Both judgments can be true at once.
49:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 3 The Constitutionalists
49:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Victoriano Wetter held power in Mexico for 17 months from February of 1913 to July of 1914.
49:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And in that time, he managed the considerable feat of uniting against himself nearly every political faction in the country, along with the government of the United States.
49:58
[SPEAKER_00]: His position at the start was not obviously weak.
50:01
[SPEAKER_00]: He had the federal army, the capital, the treasuring, the recognition of most European powers and the support of the landowners, the church hierarchy, and a great deal of foreign business.
50:13
[SPEAKER_00]: What he did not have was any claim to legitimacy that survived examination.
50:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And he made no serious attempt to construct one.
50:23
[SPEAKER_00]: He governed increasingly by decree.
50:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Expanded the army from a paper strength of around 50,000 to a nominal quarter of a million through forced conscription and financed it by borrowing and by printing.
50:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The break with any pretense of constitutional rule came in October of 1930.
50:44
[SPEAKER_00]: A senator from the state of Chiapas named Bellissario Dominguez, wrote a speech accusing Huerta directly of the murder of Madero and of ruining the country.
50:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And when he was not permitted to deliver it, had it printed and distributed.
51:03
[SPEAKER_00]: He was taken from his hotel on 7th October and killed.
51:08
[SPEAKER_00]: when the Chamber of Deputies demanded an investigation, where to dissolved Congress on the 10th of October and arrested roughly 100 deputies.
51:19
[SPEAKER_00]: From that point forward, there was no serious argument to be made that his was a lawful government.
51:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The resistance formed first in the north, and it's unlikely leader was the governor of Kohawila,
51:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Karanza was born on the 29th of December, 1859, in Quattro Sienegas, a small town in the desert of Coahueela, into a land-owning family of moderate wealth.
51:48
[SPEAKER_00]: He was 53 in 1913.
51:51
[SPEAKER_00]: He was tall, heavily built with a full white beard and blue tinted spectacles.
51:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And he had spent his entire adult life
52:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Municipal President of his hometown, State Deputy, Senator Under Diaz, then an early supporter of Madero and governor of his state.
52:15
[SPEAKER_00]: He was formal, slow, stubborn, intensely legalistic and possessed of an almost unlimited confidence in his own judgment.
52:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody has ever described him as charming.
52:29
[SPEAKER_00]: He was, however, the only figure of the period
52:33
[SPEAKER_00]: with a clear sense of how a state is actually assembled, and that turned out to matter more than charm.
52:41
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 19th of February, 1913, the day Madero resigned, the co-awelor state legislature at Carranza's urging refused to recognize where to, on the 26th of March,
52:56
[SPEAKER_00]: at a Hasiander called Guadalupe, Karanza and a group of officers issued the plan of Guadalupe.
53:04
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a strikingly bare document, and its bareness was intentional.
53:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It disavows wetter as president.
53:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Disavows the legislative and judicial branches.
53:16
[SPEAKER_00]: names Karanza first, chief of the Constitutionalist army, and provides that on victory he will assume the executive power provisionally and call elections.
53:29
[SPEAKER_00]: That is essentially all.
53:32
[SPEAKER_00]: There is nothing about land, nothing about labor, nothing about the church, nothing about foreign capital.
53:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Karanz's argument was that a revolution fought to restore constitutional order should not smuggle in a social program by the back door, and that questions of that kind should be settled by a lawful government afterward.
53:57
[SPEAKER_00]: His critics argued then and later, that this was a conservative landowner declining to promise anything he might have to deliver.
54:08
[SPEAKER_00]: The consequences of that omission would occupy the following seven years.
54:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The Constitutionalist movement drew on three main regions, and it is worth taking them one at a time, because their differences explain nearly everything that happened afterward.
54:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The first was Sonora in the Northwest.
54:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a state with a mining and commercial economy, a litter of population, close economic ties to Arizona and California, and a tradition of local self-government.
54:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Its revolutionary leadership was middle-class, organized and unusually capable.
54:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Alvaro Obergon was born in February of 1880 in the far south of the state.
54:55
[SPEAKER_00]: the youngest of many children in a family that had lost its money.
54:59
[SPEAKER_00]: He had worked as a mechanic in a sugar mill as a traveling salesman and as a chickpea farm and he had invented and manufactured a chickpea harvesting machine.
55:10
[SPEAKER_00]: He had no military training at all.
55:12
[SPEAKER_00]: He turned out to be the finest soldier produced by the Revolution, and possibly the finest of his generation anywhere, because he did something that almost none of his contemporaries did.
55:25
[SPEAKER_00]: He read carefully about the war, then being fought in Europe, understood what machine guns and barbed wire and entrenchments had done to cavalry and adjusted.
55:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Around him were
55:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Plutarcho Elias Caius, a former school teacher and hotel keeper who would later run the country for a decade.
55:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Adolfo Della Wetter, no relation to Victoriano, a bookkeeper and singer, and Salvador Alvarado, a pharmacist.
55:56
[SPEAKER_00]: The second region was co-a-healer and the northeast, Carranza's own base.
56:02
[SPEAKER_00]: which supplied political legitimacy and a route to the sea at Tampico, and which was militarily the weakest of the three.
56:11
[SPEAKER_00]: The third was Chihuahua, where Pancho Villa had returned from El Paso.
56:16
[SPEAKER_00]: in March of 1913, with, by the standard account, eight companions, nine horses, and a small quantity of coffee and sugar.
56:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Within six months, he had assembled the largest and most formidable army in Mexico.
56:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The division of the north, formally constituted at the end of September of 1913, was a genuinely remarkable organization,
56:45
[SPEAKER_00]: because it was unlike anything else in the war.
56:48
[SPEAKER_00]: It was built around cavalry, several thousand strong at first, and eventually far more, including Villa's personal escort of about 200 picked men known as the Golden ones.
57:02
[SPEAKER_00]: It had artillery and...
57:04
[SPEAKER_00]: crucially, it had trains.
57:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Villa understood railways the way Obrigon understood entrenchments.
57:12
[SPEAKER_00]: He moved his army by rail with its horses, its guns, its ammunition and its followers.
57:19
[SPEAKER_00]: He operated hospital trains, staffed with doctors, and innovation nobody else in Mexico had bothered with, which meant that his wounded had a reasonable chance of surviving and knew it.
57:31
[SPEAKER_00]: He seized the cattle of the great northern estates, and sold them across the border for arms.
57:38
[SPEAKER_00]: When he ran short of money he printed his own, large plain notes that people called bedsheets.
57:45
[SPEAKER_00]: and he enforced their acceptance by decree.
57:48
[SPEAKER_00]: He also acquired the one thing he lacked, which was a trained staff officer.
57:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Philippe Angeliz was a professional artilleryman, a graduate of the military college, a former director of it, and one of the very few senior officers of the old army, who had been genuinely loyal to Madero.
58:08
[SPEAKER_00]: He joined Villa in 1914.
58:11
[SPEAKER_00]: and the combination of villas instinct and angeles' gunnery accounted for much of what followed.
58:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The campaign in Chihuahua ran through the winter of 1913.
58:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Villa took the city of Torion, the great rail junction of the north, on the first of October.
58:30
[SPEAKER_00]: In November, he needed Shudad Huarez, and he took it by one of the more memorable tricks of the war.
58:37
[SPEAKER_00]: His men captured a southbound cold train, sent false telegrams up the line, reporting that the track ahead was blocked, and requesting permission to return north,
58:53
[SPEAKER_00]: and rode the train straight into the station at Ciudad Juarez in the middle of the night.
58:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The garrison was overrun before it was properly awake.
59:03
[SPEAKER_00]: He then destroyed a much larger federal force sent to retake the city at Tierra Blanca.
59:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And in January of 1914, he cleared the last federal garrison out of the state at Oginaga.
59:22
[SPEAKER_00]: and he governed it in a manner that was, depending on one's view, either practical populism or improvisation.
59:31
[SPEAKER_00]: He confiscated the estates of the terraces and other great families, but rather than distributing the land which he intended to do after the war for the benefit of veterans and widows, he ran them as state enterprises to fund the army.
59:47
[SPEAKER_00]: He fixed the price of maize and beef in Chihuahua City.
59:52
[SPEAKER_00]: He opened schools, a great many of them, because he had an almost religious respect for literacy that came from having lacked it.
1:00:01
[SPEAKER_00]: In the south, meanwhile, Zapata simply continued.
1:00:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The Zapatistas rejected Wetter as they had rejected Madero, and Wetter's response in Morelos was harsher
1:00:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Under General Huvencio Robles, the army adopted a policy of concentration, burning villages and moving their populations into guarded towns, on the theory that a guerilla movement deprived of its civilian base would starve.
1:00:33
[SPEAKER_00]: It did not work.
1:00:35
[SPEAKER_00]: It drove more people into the hills, and the Zapatistas ended 1913, holding more of
1:00:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the United States enters the story properly, and it does so in a way that Mexicans have not forgotten.
1:00:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Woodrow Wilson became president of the United States on the 4th of March 1930, two weeks after Madero's murder.
1:01:06
[SPEAKER_00]: He recalled Henry Lane Wilson and refused to recognize
1:01:13
[SPEAKER_00]: that his government had come to power by assassination.
1:01:16
[SPEAKER_00]: This was a departure from ordinary diplomatic practice, which had generally been to recognize whoever controlled the capital, and it was framed in moral terms that Wilson genuinely believed, and that his neighbors found intolerably condescending.
1:01:33
[SPEAKER_00]: He sent a personal envoy John Lind to press Werter to resign and hold elections.
1:01:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Werter declined, Wilson settled into what he called watchful waiting.
1:01:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And in February of 1914, he lifted the American arms embargo.
1:01:52
[SPEAKER_00]: which allowed the constitutionalists to buy weapons legally across the border, while the where-to-government could not.
1:01:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Then came two incidents in April of 1914.
1:02:04
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 9th of April, a party of American sailors from a naval squadron went ashore at Tampico to load fuel and were briefly detained by a Mexican officer.
1:02:16
[SPEAKER_00]: They were released within an hour, with apologies from the local commander, and from where to himself.
1:02:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The American Admiral Henry Mayo, demanded, in addition, a formal salute of 21 guns to the American flag.
1:02:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Where to, offered to do it, if the Americans returned the salute.
1:02:37
[SPEAKER_00]: The dispute over this ceremonial detail was still unresolved when Washington learned that
1:02:46
[SPEAKER_00]: The same vessel that had carried Diaz to exile was approaching Vera Cruz with a large cargo of arms and ammunition for Huerta.
1:02:56
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 21st of April, 1914, American forces landed at Vera Cruz and occupied the city.
1:03:04
[SPEAKER_00]: They were resisted, unexpectedly, and fiercely, by cadets from the naval academy and by armed civilians, roughly 20 Americans, and something between 150 and 200 Mexicans were killed.
1:03:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The occupation lasted until November.
1:03:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The political effect was the opposite of what Washington intended.
1:03:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Wetter, whom the intervention was meant to remove, was briefly strengthened by a wave of national feeling.
1:03:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Karanza, whom it was meant to help, publicly and furiously demanded that the Americans withdraw, which was politically necessary, and which permanently colored his relations with Wilson.
1:03:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The arms on the Yipiranga were landed elsewhere and reached wetter anyway.
1:03:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Argentina, Brazil and Chile offered mediation, and a conference met at Niagara Falls in Canada in May and June of 1914, achieving nothing except the avoidance of a wider war.
1:04:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile,
1:04:13
[SPEAKER_00]: the actual war was being won, Villa Retuk Torion in a long and costly battle between March and April of 1914, then destroyed a federal force at Parodon in May, opening the route toward the centre of the country.
1:04:31
[SPEAKER_00]: and hear the coalition began to break.
1:04:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Karanza could see perfectly well that whoever took Mexico City would have an unanswerable claim to lead the revolution and he did not intend for that person to be villa.
1:04:47
[SPEAKER_00]: In June of 1914, he ordered Villa to detach a large part of his force to assist elsewhere and forbade him to advance on the city of Zacatecas,
1:04:58
[SPEAKER_00]: which sat astride the main railway to the capital, Villa resigned in protest.
1:05:04
[SPEAKER_00]: His entire officer corps refused to accept the resignation, reinstated him by acclamation and marched on Zacatek as anyway.
1:05:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The Battle of Zacatekers, fought on the 23rd of June, 1914, was the largest and most complete victory of the Revolution.
1:05:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Angeles placed his guns on the hills above the city.
1:05:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The cavalry came in behind the federal positions, and the garrison.
1:05:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Some 12,000 strong was destroyed as a fighting force.
1:05:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The road to Mexico City was open.
1:05:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Carranzas' response was to close it.
1:05:47
[SPEAKER_00]: He controlled the supply of coal in the northeast, and he simply stopped sending it north.
1:05:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Without coal, the division of the north could not move its trains, and without trains, it could not advance.
1:06:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The greatest army in Mexico sat in Zacatecas for weeks in Mobile, while somebody else won the war.
1:06:10
[SPEAKER_00]: That somebody was over gone, coming down the western side of the country with the army of the northwest, taking Kulia Khan and Teppic and then defeating the main federal force in the west at Aurindine, outside Guadalajara in early July.
1:06:27
[SPEAKER_00]: where to understood that it was finished.
1:06:30
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 15th of July, 1914, he resigned, handed power to a caretaker named Francisco Carbohol.
1:06:39
[SPEAKER_00]: and left for Veracruz and then for Europe, a border German cruiser.
1:06:44
[SPEAKER_00]: He lived in Spain and then in the United States was arrested in New Mexico in 1915 for conspiring to return and died in El Paso in January of 1916.
1:06:56
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 13th of August 1914, at the village of Taylor or Yucan just outside the capital.
1:07:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The caretaker government signed the treaties that dissolved the federal army of Mexico.
1:07:10
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the single most consequential document of the entire decade.
1:07:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The institution that had survived independence, the empire, the reform, the French, the fall of Dias, and the fall of Madero, simply ceased to exist by agreement.
1:07:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Its officers were dismissed, its units disbanded, its arsenals handed over, overagon entered Mexico City on the 15th of August.
1:07:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Karanza followed on the 20th.
1:07:42
[SPEAKER_00]: The revolution had won,
1:07:45
[SPEAKER_00]: with the common enemy gone and no agreement whatsoever about what came next, four victorious armies were standing in the same country.
1:07:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter four, the war of the winners.
1:08:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The period from the autumn of 1914 to the summer of 1916 is the part of the Mexican Revolution that is hardest to summarize.
1:08:12
[SPEAKER_00]: because it is not a story of a government against a rebellion.
1:08:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a story of four allied movements discovering that they wanted incompatible things and then settling the question in the way such questions were settled at the time.
1:08:28
[SPEAKER_00]: There had been an attempt to prevent it.
1:08:30
[SPEAKER_00]: In July of 1914, delegates from Villa and from Karanza had met at Torion and produced an agreement recognizing Karanza as provisional executive while requiring him to convene a general convention of revolutionary commanders that would fix a program and a date for elections.
1:08:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Karanza signed it and had no intention of being bound by it.
1:08:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The convention met anyway.
1:09:00
[SPEAKER_00]: It opened in Mexico City on the 1st of October 1914 under Carranzas Supervision, and the Velista delegates refused to attend on the reasonable ground that it was being held in a city Carranzas troops controlled.
1:09:14
[SPEAKER_00]: It was therefore moved to Aguascalientes, a neutral city, where it reconvened on the 10th of October.
1:09:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The Convention of Aguascalientes
1:09:25
[SPEAKER_00]: is one of the genuinely interesting political gatherings of the 20th century.
1:09:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And it lasted about a month, roughly 150 voting delegates attended, all of the military commanders or their representatives, and they declared themselves sovereign.
1:09:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Each delegate signed his name on a large national flag as a pledge to abide by the decisions taken.
1:09:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Into this, arrived the delegation from Morelos.
1:09:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The Zapatistas had not fought for Karanza and owed him nothing, and they came with a single demand.
1:10:02
[SPEAKER_00]: that the convention adopted the land articles of the plan of Ayala as binding policy.
1:10:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Their principal speaker was a lawyer named Antonio Diaz Soto-Wigama, and he provided the convention's most famous scene.
1:10:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Invited to sign the flag, he declined.
1:10:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Delivered a speech arguing that the flag was a symbol of the clerical and reactionary past and that what mattered was land for the villages and set off an uproar in which several delegates drew pistols.
1:10:36
[SPEAKER_00]: He then signed and the convention remarkably adopted the land principles of the plan of Ayala.
1:10:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It also removed both of the men who had brought it into being.
1:10:48
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 28th of October it resolved that Caranza should cease to hold executive power and that Villa should cease to command the division of the north.
1:10:59
[SPEAKER_00]: On the first of November, it named a provisional president.
1:11:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Yulaleo Gutierrez, a former minor and a general of no particular faction.
1:11:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Chosen precisely because he was not a threat to anyone.
1:11:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Villa accepted the decision, which is not what most accounts of him would lead one to expect.
1:11:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Carranza rejected it.
1:11:20
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 26th of November 1914, he left Mexico City for Vera Cruz, which the Americans had evacuated three days earlier, handing him a port, a customs house, and a great deal of abandoned equipment.
1:11:38
[SPEAKER_00]: From there, he declared that the convention had exceeded its authority and the country divided.
1:11:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Broadly, the conventionists held the North and the South, villas territory in Chihuahua, Jurango, and much of the centre, and Zapaters in Morelos, and the region around the capital.
1:12:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The constitutionalists held Veracruz, the northeast, the northwest, and the Yucatan Peninsula.
1:12:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Roughly speaking, Carranza had the ports, the customs revenue,
1:12:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Villa had the largest army.
1:12:17
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 4th of December 1914, Villa and Zapata met for the first time at Zochi Milco on the southern edge of the capital and the transcript of their conversation survives because a stenographer recorded it.
1:12:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a strange document.
1:12:37
[SPEAKER_00]: The two most powerful men in Mexico
1:12:44
[SPEAKER_00]: principally about their shared dislike of educated politicians in general, and Karanza in particular.
1:12:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Villa was tall, heavy, and in a plain uniform.
1:12:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Zapata was slim in a charo suit with an enormous hat.
1:13:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Villa did not drink and had to be persuaded to accept a small brandy they agreed to cooperate.
1:13:08
[SPEAKER_00]: They did not agree.
1:13:10
[SPEAKER_00]: on anything resembling a plan of campaign, and there is no evidence that either of them thought of himself as a candidate to run the country.
1:13:20
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 6th of December, their combined forces, perhaps 50,000 men, paraded through Mexico City, afterward in the National Palace.
1:13:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone suggested a photograph, Villa sat down in the gilded presidential chair, grinning, supporter sat beside him, looking directly at the camera without any expression at all.
1:13:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the single most reproduced image of the revolution, and it is usually read as a joke about power that neither man wanted.
1:13:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Within weeks, the conventionist government began to fall apart.
1:13:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Gutierrez had no forces of his own and no ability to restrain either of his protectors.
1:14:06
[SPEAKER_00]: In January of 1915, he left the capital with what remained of the treasury and issued a statement denouncing everyone.
1:14:14
[SPEAKER_00]: He was replaced by rock Gonzales Garza and then in June by Francisco Lagos Hazaro and by then the government was a title without a country.
1:14:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Karanza in Vera Cruz did what Villa and Zapata did not do.
1:14:32
[SPEAKER_00]: He governed and he legislated and he took the social program away from his opponents by simply adopting it.
1:14:40
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 12th of December
1:14:43
[SPEAKER_00]: He issued additions to the plan of Guadalupe, promising agrarian reform, labor legislation, judicial reform, municipal autonomy, and the dissolution of larger states.
1:14:59
[SPEAKER_00]: On 6 January, 1915, he issued the agrarian law drafted principally by Luis Cabrera, which declared the alienation of village lands under the old survey laws to be null and void.
1:15:13
[SPEAKER_00]: and created a legal mechanism by which villages could petition for restitution or for a grant of land.
1:15:20
[SPEAKER_00]: In practice, very little land moved under Karanza.
1:15:24
[SPEAKER_00]: As a political instrument, it was extremely effective because it meant that a peasant no longer had to join Zapata to have a land claim heard.
1:15:35
[SPEAKER_00]: In February of 1915, he made an arrangement with the House of the World Worker,
1:15:41
[SPEAKER_00]: the anarcho-sindicalist labour organisation of Mexico City, which supplied six so-called red battalions of industrial workers to the Constitutionalist army in exchange for recognition and organising rights.
1:15:57
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a marriage of convenience on both sides and it did not last, but it meant that in 1915 the urban labour movement fought against the peasant armies rather than
1:16:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Then came the campaign that decided the revolution and it decided it in a way that would have been familiar to anyone reading about Flanders.
1:16:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Obergon marched north from Veracruz through Puebla and Mexico City, and in April of 1915 took up a position around the small city of Salaya, in the Bargios, the fertile plain of Central Mexico.
1:16:40
[SPEAKER_00]: He chose the ground deliberately.
1:16:42
[SPEAKER_00]: It was flat, cut by irrigation ditches, and could be flooded.
1:16:47
[SPEAKER_00]: He dug trenches, he strung barbed wire, thousands of meters of it, bought across the border.
1:16:54
[SPEAKER_00]: He placed his machine guns for infallating fire.
1:16:57
[SPEAKER_00]: and held a large cavalry reserve, well back on the Cesareo Castro.
1:17:02
[SPEAKER_00]: He then waited to be attacked, which was the one thing he could count on.
1:17:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Villa attacked Celia on the 6th and 7th of April, 1915, and again, in greater strength, from the 13th to the 15th.
1:17:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Philippe Angeles,
1:17:19
[SPEAKER_00]: advice strongly against both attacks and was overruled.
1:17:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The division of the north charged prepared positions across open ground in daylight, repeatedly, and was destroyed doing it.
1:17:33
[SPEAKER_00]: casualty figures for these battles are unreliable, but villa lost thousands of men, a great deal of artillery, and, more importantly, the aura of invincibility that had been
1:17:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The two armies then fought a longer and even more costly series of engagements around Leon and the Trinidad Ranch from April into early June.
1:18:01
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 3rd of June, 1915, Obergon was standing at an observation post when an artillery shell landed nearby and took off his right arm.
1:18:14
[SPEAKER_00]: He is said to have reached for a pistol to shoot himself and to have found that an aid had removed the cartridges the day before to clean it.
1:18:24
[SPEAKER_00]: He survived, recovered, and was back in command within weeks.
1:18:29
[SPEAKER_00]: In later years, he kept the preserved arm in a monument and made a great many jokes about it.
1:18:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The best known being his remark that the way to find it was to hold up a gold coin, where upon it would come out on its own.
1:18:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Villa was beaten again at Aguascalientes in July.
1:18:48
[SPEAKER_00]: He fell back on Chihuahua with what was left.
1:18:51
[SPEAKER_00]: and his forces began the transition from an army into a regional insurgency.
1:18:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The year 1915 was the worst year of the revolution for people who were not fighting in it.
1:19:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Mexico City changed hands repeatedly and was hungry throughout.
1:19:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Rail lines were cut.
1:19:11
[SPEAKER_00]: The surrounding farmland was fought over and the currencies issued by the various factions.
1:19:17
[SPEAKER_00]: circulated at wildly varying and frequently zero value, so that people with money could not necessarily buy food with it, typhus spread.
1:19:28
[SPEAKER_00]: So did other epidemic disease, and there is a reasonable argument that more Mexicans died in this decade of hunger and illness than of gunfire.
1:19:42
[SPEAKER_00]: The United States extended formal recognition to the Carranza government, along with several Latin-American states.
1:19:50
[SPEAKER_00]: This mattered practically, because it meant Villa could no longer legally buy arms across the border while Carranza could.
1:19:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The blow that followed was worse.
1:20:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Villa moved against the border town of Agua Prieta in Sonora, expecting a small garrison.
1:20:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Washington had granted permission for Carranzas troops to travel to Sonora by rail through United States territory, which allowed the position to be reinforced far beyond anything Villa anticipated.
1:20:22
[SPEAKER_00]: He attacked on 1 November, 1915, at night, and the defenders illuminated the
1:20:31
[SPEAKER_00]: which villas men had never encountered.
1:20:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The attack failed completely, and a further defeat at Hermosio finished the campaign.
1:20:40
[SPEAKER_00]: By the end of 1915, the division of the north had effectively ceased to exist as a conventional army.
1:20:49
[SPEAKER_00]: What villa did next has been argued about ever since.
1:20:53
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 10th of January, 1916, Velista forces stopped to train at Santa Yisabel in Chihuahua and killed a group of American mining engineers traveling under Carranz's safe conduct to reopen a mine.
1:21:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, before dawn on the 9th of March, 1916, several hundred of villas men cross the international boundaries.
1:21:22
[SPEAKER_00]: and attack the town of Columbus, New Mexico, and the cavalry camp beside it.
1:21:27
[SPEAKER_00]: They burned part of the town, and roughly 18 Americans, and perhaps a hundred of the attackers were killed.
1:21:35
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the first foreign attack on the continental United States in over a century.
1:21:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The motives remain disputed.
1:21:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The most common explanations are that Villa needed arms and horses and expected an easy raid.
1:21:50
[SPEAKER_00]: That he was retaliating against a merchant there.
1:21:53
[SPEAKER_00]: who had taken his money without delivering goods and that he wanted deliberately to provoke an American intervention that would expose Karanza as unable to defend Mexican soil.
1:22:07
[SPEAKER_00]: If the last was the intention, it worked.
1:22:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Six days later, an expedition of United States Army troops crossed into Mexico under Brigadier General John Pershing.
1:22:19
[SPEAKER_00]: eventually reaching around 10,000 men.
1:22:22
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, in military terms, an interesting operation.
1:22:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The first American use of aircraft in a combat role, in the form of eight fragile airplanes that nearly all crashed within weeks, and one of the first large uses of motor trucks for
1:22:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It marched more than 500 kilometers into Chihuahua, fought several actions with Vallista bands, and spent most of its time being obstructed by the local population and by the current sister authorities, whose consent to the expedition had been grudging and limited.
1:23:03
[SPEAKER_00]: At peril, on the 12th of April, 1916, an American column was attacked by townspeople and by Mexican regulars.
1:23:13
[SPEAKER_00]: At Carizel, on the 21st of June, a detachment of American cavalry fought a full engagement with Caranzas' federal troops in which the American force was mauled and a number of soldiers taken prisoner.
1:23:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The two countries came very close to war.
1:23:30
[SPEAKER_00]: and a joint commission spent the autumn negotiating.
1:23:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The last American troops withdrew on the 5th of February 1917.
1:23:39
[SPEAKER_00]: By which point, the United States had a far more pressing matter developing in the Atlantic.
1:23:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The one effect of the expedition that everyone agrees on is that it restored villas standing in northern Mexico, where a man who could raid the United States and then vanish while an American army looked for him, became a folk figure of a kind that no amount of battlefield defeat could dislodge.
1:24:15
[SPEAKER_00]: something close to what the plan of A.R.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.
1:24:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It ended in 1916.
1:24:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Karanza sent Pablo Gonzalez into Morelos with a large force, and the campaign that followed was systematic.
1:24:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Counts were occupied, the mills were dismantled, and their machinery shipped away, and thousands of people were deported to labor elsewhere.
1:25:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The Zapatistas fell back into the mountains and kept fighting, but the experiment in local self-government was finished.
1:25:11
[SPEAKER_00]: The urban labor movement discovered the limits of its arrangement in the same year.
1:25:16
[SPEAKER_00]: In July of 1916, faced with wages paid in worthless paper,
1:25:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The unions of Mexico City called a general strike.
1:25:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Karanza declared it a capital offence to strike against the government, arrested the leadership, and closed the House of the World Worker.
1:25:35
[SPEAKER_00]: the alliance of 1915 was over.
1:25:38
[SPEAKER_00]: By the end of 1916, Karanza controlled most of Mexico.
1:25:44
[SPEAKER_00]: He had beaten Villa with Obrigon's army, contained Zapata, broken the unions, and outlasted an American expedition.
1:25:53
[SPEAKER_00]: What he had not done was give the country a legal foundation, and he now turned to that, with results he did not intend.
1:26:05
[SPEAKER_00]: the Constitution and the Long Ending.
1:26:10
[SPEAKER_00]: In September of 1960, Caranza called for the election of a Constitutional Convention.
1:26:18
[SPEAKER_00]: His stated purpose was modest.
1:26:21
[SPEAKER_00]: to amend the liberal constitution of 1857 so that it reflected the reforms already decreed and to give his provisional government a lawful successor.
1:26:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The convention met in the city of Carataro in the old theater there from the first of December 1916.
1:26:42
[SPEAKER_00]: to the 31st of January 1917, around 200 delegates attended, supporters of Villa and of Zapata were excluded, which meant that the assembly represented the winning side only.
1:26:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Karanza opened it by presenting a draft.
1:26:59
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a careful, moderate document, essentially the Constitution of 1857 with a stronger presidency and a few adjustments.
1:27:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Had it been adopted as written, the Mexican Revolution would be remembered as a political rearrangement.
1:27:16
[SPEAKER_00]: it was not adopted as written.
1:27:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The convention split almost immediately between the moderates around Karanza and a younger, more radical block.
1:27:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of them officers from Obergon's Army, led by Francisco Mugica of Micheal Khan.
1:27:33
[SPEAKER_00]: and including Heroburto Jara and Esteban Bacca Calderon.
1:27:38
[SPEAKER_00]: They had spent six years being told by peasants and workers what the revolution was supposed to be for, and they had no intention of going home with a document about voting procedures.
1:27:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Over eight weeks, they rewrote the crucial sections from the floor, four articles matter.
1:27:58
[SPEAKER_00]: and they are worth going through slowly because they governed Mexico for the rest of the century.
1:28:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Article 3 placed education under state control and required that it be secular, free and compulsory at the primary level.
1:28:15
[SPEAKER_00]: and it barred religious corporations and ministers of any faith from establishing or directing primary schools.
1:28:25
[SPEAKER_00]: This was a direct assault on the church's role in Mexican life and it would produce a civil war within a decade.
1:28:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Article 27 is the longest and most consequential.
1:28:38
[SPEAKER_00]: It begins by declaring that ownership of all land and water within the national territory belongs originally to the nation, which has the right to transmit it to private parties and to impose on private property whatever limits the public interest requires.
1:28:57
[SPEAKER_00]: From that principle, it draws several conclusions.
1:29:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Village lands taken unlawfully were to be restored, and villages lacking land were to receive it, with large holdings subjected to division.
1:29:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Subsoil resources, including petroleum, were declared the inalienable property of the nation, reversing the mining code of 1884, only Mexicans by birth or naturalization could acquire land or obtain concessions, and foreigners
1:29:31
[SPEAKER_00]: could do so only by agreeing to be treated as Mexicans with respect to those holdings and to renounce the protection of their own governments, a provision known as the Calvo Clause.
1:29:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Foreigners were barred entirely from owning land within 100 kilometers of a border or 50 kilometers of a coast.
1:29:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Religious institutions were forbidden to own real property at all.
1:30:01
[SPEAKER_00]: is the labor article and it was one of the first constitutional labor codes anywhere in the world.
1:30:08
[SPEAKER_00]: It set a maximum eight-hour working day and a seven-hour night shift, a six-day working week, a minimum wage sufficient to meet the ordinary needs of a worker.
1:30:20
[SPEAKER_00]: and provide for the education of children equal pay for equal work regardless of sex or nationality.
1:30:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Employer liability for industrial accidents and occupational disease restrictions on the employment of children protection for women before and after childbirth.
1:30:40
[SPEAKER_00]: the right to organize and to strike, compulsory arbitration boards with employer and worker representation and the abolition of company stores and of debts inherited from a laborist family.
1:30:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Written in 1917, it promised things that most industrial nations would not legislate for another generation.
1:31:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Article 130 stripped the church of legal personality, denied ministers the vote, forbade them from criticising the fundamental laws of the country, or from wearing clerical dress in public.
1:31:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Gave state legislatures the power to limit the number of clergy in their territory.
1:31:24
[SPEAKER_00]: and required that ministers be Mexican by birth.
1:31:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Karanza accepted the result, having very little choice and promulgated the constitution on the 5th of February 1917.
1:31:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It remains with many amendments the constitution of Mexico today.
1:31:45
[SPEAKER_00]: He was elected president in March under it and took office on the 1st of May 1917.
1:31:54
[SPEAKER_00]: to enforce the parts he disliked.
1:31:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Land distribution under Karanza between 1917 and 1920 amounted to a very small fraction of what article 27 contemplated.
1:32:07
[SPEAKER_00]: on the order of 200,000 hectares in total.
1:32:11
[SPEAKER_00]: The labor article awaited implementing legislation that would not arrive until 1931.
1:32:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The petroleum provisions were not applied retroactively to existing foreign holdings, which was the practical question everyone cared about.
1:32:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Karan's view consistently was that a country recovering from six years of civil war could not afford a confrontation with foreign capital or with the church, and that the constitution described a destination rather than an itinerary.
1:32:45
[SPEAKER_00]: That same winter, Mexico received an unexpected offer.
1:32:50
[SPEAKER_00]: In January of 1917, the German Foreign Secretary, Arthur Zimmerman, sent a coded telegram to the German Minister in Mexico, proposing that in the event of war between Germany and the United States, Mexico should join Germany and would recover Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.
1:33:13
[SPEAKER_00]: British intelligence
1:33:19
[SPEAKER_00]: where its publication in March helped bring the United States into the World War.
1:33:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Karanza referred the proposal to a military commission, which reported sensibly that the plan was impossible and Mexico remained neutral for the duration.
1:33:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The remaining business of the Revolution was the removal of the people who had made it, and it was carried out with a certain grim efficiency.
1:33:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Zapata was first.
1:33:48
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1919, he held a shrinking area of Morelos and was reduced to raiding.
1:33:55
[SPEAKER_00]: In March of that year, he published an open letter to Karanza, an extraordinary document in which he accused the president of having turned the revolution into an instrument for enriching his friends.
1:34:09
[SPEAKER_00]: of distributing Hasienders to generals rather than land to villages and of governing exactly as Diaz had governed and told him plainly that he should resign.
1:34:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Colonel Hazu Squahado, an officer under Pablo Gonzalez, then let it be known that he was dissatisfied and wished to change sides.
1:34:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Zapata was cautious and demanded proof.
1:34:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Guahado supplied it by attacking a garrison of former separatists who had gone over to the government and executing them, which satisfied the test.
1:34:47
[SPEAKER_00]: A meeting was arranged at the Haseyender of China Mecca on 10 April 1919.
1:34:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Zapata rode in through the gate with a small escort.
1:34:57
[SPEAKER_00]: the honor guard drawn up to receive him presented arms and then fired.
1:35:02
[SPEAKER_00]: He was 39 years old.
1:35:05
[SPEAKER_00]: His body was taken to Quartler and photographed and displayed because the government understood perfectly well that otherwise nobody would believe he was dead and a great many people did not believe it anyway.
1:35:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And for years afterward there were reports in Morelos of a man
1:35:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Felipe Angelis was next.
1:35:28
[SPEAKER_00]: He had returned from exile in the United States to rejoin Villa, was captured in November of 19.
1:35:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Tried by court martial in Chihuahua, in a preceding, he turned into a public defense of his position and executed on the 26th of November.
1:35:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, Karanza destroyed himself over the succession.
1:35:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Alvaro Obergon had resigned as Minister of War in 1917 and gone home to Sonora to grow chickpeas and wait.
1:36:04
[SPEAKER_00]: In June of 1919, he announced his candidacy for the presidency in the elections due in 1920.
1:36:12
[SPEAKER_00]: He had the army, the labor movement, and the reputation.
1:36:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Karanza, who was constitutionally barred from succeeding himself and who regarded all generals as a threat to civilian government, backed instead a nearly unknown civilian, Ignacio Bonillas, the ambassador to Washington, a man's so obscure and so associated with the United States
1:36:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Karanza then applied pressure to Sonora.
1:36:46
[SPEAKER_00]: In a dispute over the waters of the Sonora River and over the appointment of a federal commander in the state.
1:36:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The Sonorans, who had supplied the army that won the war, declined to be treated as a province.
1:37:01
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 23rd of April, 1920.
1:37:05
[SPEAKER_00]: They issued the plan of Agua Prieta, drafted principally by Callis and Adolfo Delawareta, disavowing Caranza and naming Delawareta, then governor of Sonora as provisional head of the movement.
1:37:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The army went over almost in its entirety within three weeks.
1:37:26
[SPEAKER_00]: It was less a civil war than a resignation.
1:37:29
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 7th of May, 1920, Karanza left Mexico City by train for Vera Cruz with his cabinet, the National Archives, the contents of the Treasury in gold and silver, and a considerable body of loyal troops.
1:37:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The trains were attacked and the track was cut, and near Al Jeebs the party abandoned them.
1:37:54
[SPEAKER_00]: and continued on horseback into the mountains of Puebla.
1:37:58
[SPEAKER_00]: On the night of the 20th of May, they stopped at a village of a few huts called Tlaxcalantongo in the rain.
1:38:07
[SPEAKER_00]: A local commander named Radolfo Herrero, who had presented himself as a supporter, had provided the shelter.
1:38:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Before dawn on the 21st of May, 1920,
1:38:20
[SPEAKER_00]: The hut in which Carranza was sleeping was fired into and he was killed.
1:38:27
[SPEAKER_00]: He was 60.
1:38:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Herero was arrested, released and later exonerated and no serious investigation was ever conducted.
1:38:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Adolfo de la Wetter became provisional president on the 1st of June 1920 and in 6 months did more to end the fighting than anyone had managed in 10 years.
1:38:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Mostly by being reasonable, he negotiated with everyone on the 28th of July 1920.
1:38:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Pancho Villa signed an agreement to lay down his arms in exchange for a larger state at Canutillo in Jurango, a personal escort of 50 men kept on the army payroll and a pension for his troops.
1:39:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Villa retired there, farmed, ran a school and was assassinated in his car.
1:39:20
[SPEAKER_00]: in the town of Parallel on 20 July 1923, in an ambush that was almost certainly arranged by people close to the government, and for which one deputy publicly took responsibility and served a very short sentence.
1:39:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Alvaro Obrigon was elected president and took office on 1 December 1920.
1:39:45
[SPEAKER_00]: That date is the conventional end of the Mexican Revolution.
1:39:49
[SPEAKER_00]: and it is as good as any, though nothing about the country was settled.
1:39:54
[SPEAKER_00]: What followed was another decade of consolidation.
1:39:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Obragon's education minister, José Vascon Selos, launched a national program of rural schools, libraries and public art, and commissioned the murals of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Seceros
1:40:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Obergon distributed more land than Carranza had, though still modestly.
1:40:26
[SPEAKER_00]: He was succeeded by cows in 1924.
1:40:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Adolfo de la Wetter rebelled unsuccessfully in 1923.
1:40:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Calers enforced the religious articles of the Constitution strictly.
1:40:41
[SPEAKER_00]: which produced the Cristero War of 1926 to 1929.
1:40:48
[SPEAKER_00]: A bitter conflict in the centre and west of the country.
1:40:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Obergon.
1:40:53
[SPEAKER_00]: was elected again in 1928 and was shot at a banquet in Mexico City before he could take office.
1:41:02
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1929, cows founded the National Revolutionary Party to settle the succession by negotiation rather than by rifle and that party renamed twice held the presidency
1:41:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The promises of 1917 were finally cashed in large part under Lizarro Cardenas between 1934 and 1940.
1:41:32
[SPEAKER_00]: He distributed roughly 18 million hectares of land, more than all his predecessors combined, largely as collective Egydos.
1:41:43
[SPEAKER_00]: He backed the unions.
1:41:45
[SPEAKER_00]: and on the 18th of March 1938, in Voking Article 27, he expropriated the foreign petroleum companies and created the national oil company, an event still commemorated annually.
1:42:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The cost of it all is difficult to state precisely.
1:42:07
[SPEAKER_00]: The census of 1910,
1:42:09
[SPEAKER_00]: counted a population of just over 15 million.
1:42:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The census of 1920 counted about 14 and a third million.
1:42:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The gap, when set against the growth that would otherwise have occurred, is usually rendered as excess mortality and lost births of somewhere between one and two million people.
1:42:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And it includes
1:42:37
[SPEAKER_00]: which struck a country already weakened by famine and dislocation, hundreds of thousands more left for the United States, establishing communities in Texas, California and the industrial cities of the Midwest that shape North America to this day, and there is the other inheritance, the one that is harder to count.
1:43:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The Corritos, the narrative ballads sung about Villa and Zapata and about Battles at Torion and Celaya, which are still sung.
1:43:10
[SPEAKER_00]: The photographs of Augustine Casasola, whose archive fixed the images by which the whole period is remembered.
1:43:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The novel Lostea Barro, The Underdogs, written by Mariano Azuela, a doctor who served with villas forces and published in a newspaper in El Paso in 1915, which describes a peasant fighter who is asked why he keeps fighting and who answers by throwing a stone into a canyon and watching it roll.
1:43:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Zapata's name is the one that traveled furthest.
1:43:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It was taken up by a movement in Chiapas in 1994, and his portrait still appears at land protests.
1:43:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The particular thing he wanted that a village should hold its fields because it had always held them, was not a modern demand and was never entirely satisfied.
1:44:03
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was written into Article 27 and the article outlived nearly everyone who argued about it.
1:44:12
[SPEAKER_00]: That is where we will leave it.
1:44:15
[SPEAKER_00]: A country of 15 million people that spent 10 years arguing at enormous cost about who owned the land.
1:44:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And that ended by writing the argument into a constitution.
1:44:28
[SPEAKER_00]: If you are still awake, you may have noticed that almost nobody in this story got what they wanted.
1:44:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Madero wanted honest elections and was killed by his own general.
1:44:42
[SPEAKER_00]: and an equilco, and was killed at a gate.
1:44:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Villa wanted to be left alone with a ranch, and was killed in a car.
1:44:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Karanza wanted a lawful republic run by civilians, and was killed in a hut in the rain.
1:44:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Obergon wanted to be president twice and managed it briefly.
1:45:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Porfirio Diaz, who wanted order above all things, died in a rented apartment in Paris.
1:45:08
[SPEAKER_00]: while the country he had ordered took itself apart.
1:45:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, the document they produced in a theatre in Carataro in the winter of 1916 is still in force, more than a century later, amended several hundred times, but never replaced.
1:45:26
[SPEAKER_00]: That is not nothing.
1:45:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Most revolutions do not leave a filing cabinet behind.
1:45:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for spending this time with us.
1:45:35
[SPEAKER_00]: This has been sleepless history.