World War I and the Federal Presence in New Mexico
Senator Fall, President Wilson, and the Mexican Revolution
The United States invaded Mexico three times during President Woodrow Wilson’s
tenure: 1914 (Veracruz); 1916-17 (Punitive Expedition); and 1919 (Ciudad Juárez). Each
military incursion encouraged Republican Senator Albert B. Fall in his hope that the
Democrat Wilson would expand the limited actions into full-scale invasion and occupation,
similar to U.S. actions in Cuba and Puerto Rico after the War of 1898. But the president
dispatched troops in response to specific security threats, and Wilson resisted entangling the
United States in what, after the summer of 1914, became a four-way contest among Mexican
revolutionary armies seeking supremacy in the country’s Revolution (1910-1920).
New Mexico’s Senator Fall played a central role in matters related to Mexico during
his congressional career (1912-1921). His colleagues selected him to serve on the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee and usually deferred to his expertise, borne of first-hand
experience spanning several decades. In 1914, about 75,000 Americans lived or controlled
businesses in Mexico, which were worth nearly half a billion dollars. Whenever the
Revolution surged into their lives or destroyed their economic holdings, Senator Fall stepped
in. He became their sympathetic supporter in demanding restitution and reprisal.
Fall began investing in Mexico in the 1890s, when that country passed a mining law
that duplicated the generous provisions of the 1872 U.S. mining law. By the time Fall
entered the Senate, he held successful and extensive enterprises in copper mining and
ranching in the northern state of Chihuahua. Under the economic liberalism of Mexican
President Porfirio Díaz, foreign investors such as Albert Fall had unfettered opportunity to
develop the country’s resources. But by the time Fall entered the U.S. Senate, the Mexican
Revolution had sent Díaz into exile and unleashed resentment against the excesses and
exploitation wrought by foreign capital in Mexico. Fall pined for the ancien régime and sought
to perpetuate foreign economic advantages bestowed under Díaz by pushing for U.S.
military occupation when, as soon proved the case, no revolutionary leader would do his
bidding.
Fall became the unofficial representative of Americans in Mexico. In speeches and
hearings before his Senate sub-committee on Mexico, he highlighted attacks upon
Americans with the aim of pressuring the Wilson Administration to occupy the country as
the only sure means of providing more protection. The titles of a few of his early speeches
convey the zeal with which he pursued a campaign against Mexico: July 22, 1912 “Outrages
Upon American Citizens” and on March 9, 1914 “Conditions in Mexico: Protection of
Americans and American Policy.”
Throughout 1913 and into 1914, Fall’s denunciations of Mexican President
Victoriano Huerta resonated with many of the President’s key advisors. At least two of his
cabinet members (secretary of agriculture and the postmaster general) also held large
investments in Mexico. In addition, the president’s principal political advisor, Texan Colonel
Edward M. House, personally recounted for the President the complaints voiced by
business interests of Texans, himself included, over threats to their investments in Mexican
oil, railroads, and banking. As one scholar noted, “The Wilson administration and Mexico
were deeply intertwined because of the shared economic interests on the part of key figures
in the cabinet, congressional leaders, presidential advisers, and Democratic party financiers.”
The beginning of 1914 opened a pivotal year in Mexican-U.S. relations as America’s
president sought to clamp down on the civil war and social upheaval unleashed by the
Revolution. He withheld diplomatic recognition, but Mexico’s current president, General
Victoriano Huerta, remained in office. President Wilson and his advisors believed Huerta
threatened not only U.S. economic interests but undermined America’s security. Huerta had
accepted large sums of money and substantial quantities of arms from Germany. Moreover,
to Wilson, the consummate advocate of democratic principles, Huerta had come to power in
a coup and had blood on his hands. Indeed, Huerta’s insurrection of February 1913 resulted
in the murder of Francisco Madero, who had been the first freely elected president of the
country in many decades. It was Madera’s call for uprisings against the dictator Porfirio Díaz,
beginning in November 1910, that forced Díaz into exile in late May 1911.
By early 1914, when Wilson’s cabinet seriously addressed Mexico’s growing
instability, four armies were arrayed against Huerta’s government—all with shifting alliances
among themselves: Emilio Zapata in the south, Francisco Villa in the center-north, Álvaro
Obregón in the western portion of the north, and Venustiano Carranza of the eastern part of
the country’s northern region. Of these four, only Carranza enjoyed broad support among
U.S. officials.
The first step in a U.S.-engineered regime change occurred in late April 1914, when
over 3,500 U.S. marines and sailors seized the Gulf port city of Veracruz to block delivery of
German armaments intended for Huerta. Over 200 Mexicans died defending their city, and
only the adroit diplomatic intervention of three Latin American countries averted outright
war. In mid-November 1914, U.S. forces withdrew from Veracruz, their mission
accomplished. Huerta fled the country in mid-July and Carranza soon became president.
Unlike Madero, Huerta survived being deposed and went into exile in Spain. There,
at about the same time U.S. troops left Veracruz, he began plotting a massive counterrevolution to restore him to power. Germany pledged active support in February 1915 and
arranged financing in excess of $800,000. Germany did so primarily to tie up U.S. troops
along the southern border with Mexico and secure a friendly country as a base of operations
should the U.S. enter the war in Europe. Both schemes had a major impact on New Mexico.
Newman, New Mexico, twenty miles northeast of El Paso: there on Sunday
morning, June 27, 1915, U.S. officials took into custody former President of Mexico
Victoriano Huerta and his foremost military commander, General Pascual Orozco. The two
were about to return to Mexico and carry out major military plans: mobilize a new army,
march on and capture Chihuahua City, and eventually push on to Mexico City and retake
control of the government. The audacious scheme unraveled most unceremoniously. Federal
investigators from the Department of Justice and the military tracked Huerta and Orozco as
they converged in southern New Mexico and linked them to an illegal arms cache recently
uncovered in El Paso.
Initially detained at Newman, they soon were arranged and jailed in El Paso. There
Orozco and Huerta chose different deaths. Orozco quickly broke out and two months later,
on August 30, 1915, a posse that included a former marshal of Roswell ambushed and killed
Orozco and his four companions in West Texas. Huerta seems to have given up on both his
plans and himself and, aided by excessive alcohol, died in mid-January 1916. William Keleher
of Albuquerque covered Huerta’s death watch as his last newspaper assignment. Years later,
in surveying the larger drama glimpsed in Huerta’s death, Keleher wrote that the Mexican
politician represented “one of President Woodrow Wilson’s more important casualties, a
victim of Wilson’s calculated determination to smash Huerta’s political power in Mexico.”
In early January 1916 Senator Fall secured approval of a Senate Resolution calling on
the president and his new Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, to justify continued military
inaction against Mexico. In mid-February Lansing rebuffed Fall’s call for armed invasion, but
less than four weeks later an ill-conceived raid by revolutionary commander Francisco
“Pancho” Villa against Columbus, New Mexico, forced the president to dispatch troops in a
ten-month incursion known as the Pershing Punitive Expedition (the subject of a later
entry).
A final and poignant encounter on December 5, 1919 brought together Woodrow
Wilson, Albert Fall, and Mexico’s revolution. On that afternoon, a constitutional crisis and
international diplomatic impasse quickly ended at a meeting between Wilson and Fall in the
president’s dimly light bedroom. Two months earlier, President Wilson had suffered a
debilitating stroke, and Senator Fall, joined by a Democratic colleague, Gilbert Hitchcock of
Nebraska, met him in his bedroom to address two issues: the response to a diplomatic stand-
off with Mexico over the illegal arrest of an American consular agent in the city of Puebla
and, for the Senate, an effort to assess whether the president was mentally competent to
fulfill his duties.
A carefully briefed and prepped President Wilson acquitted himself ably. The
senators found him cheerful, alert, and “in mental and physical trim to meet emergencies as
they arose.” Moreover, during the meeting word arrived that Mexican President Carranza
had released the consular officer. By the time the senators departed the White House late
that fall afternoon, both America and Mexico had taken a large step back from the
brinkmanship that had marked their affairs for the previous decade. They also made a first
small step forward in normalizing diplomatic and bilateral relations, a move that grew
gradually during the 1920s and more vigorously in the 1930s.
Senator Fall’s nearly eight-year campaign to impose reprisal and reparations upon
Mexico diminished markedly in influence during 1920 and thereafter. His 3,551 page report
wrapping up hearings held between September 8, 1919 and May 20, 1920 to “demonstrate
the alleged perfidy and iniquity of the Carranza government in its dealings with the United
States and its citizens” met with indifference on the part of the Wilson administration.
© 2008 by David V. Holtby
Albert B. Fall (on far right) and two unidentified men at a mining site, photograph, Albert
Bacon Fall Collection (PICT 000-131-0002), Center for Southwest Research, University
Libraries, The University of New Mexico.
President Diaz in the Executive Chair. Godoy, Jose F. Porfirio Diaz, President of
Mexico: The Master Builder of a Great Commonwealth. (New York and London, G.P.
Putnam's Sons, 1910) p. 68.
A U.S. official included this tribute to President Diaz in a laudatory biography published
in 1910. His praise for the dictator resonated with U.S. government and business elites
but not with the majority of Mexicans. Their discontent fueled a decade of revolution.
Godoy, Jose F. Porfirio Diaz, President of Mexico: The Master Builder of a Great
Commonwealth. (New York and London, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1910) pp 166-167.
These three graphs tell the same story: Mexico welcomed foreign investment during
President Diaz’s rule (1876-1910). During his reign, U.S. investors came to dominate
three key sectors of the Mexican economy: mining, railroads, and banking. Godoy, Jose
F. Porfirio Diaz, President of Mexico: The Master Builder of a Great Commonwealth.
(New York and London, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1910) p.128.
The Mining Industry graph. Godoy, Jose F. Porfirio Diaz, President of Mexico: The
Master Builder of a Great Commonwealth. (New York and London, G.P. Putnam's Sons,
1910) p. 200.
The Production of Gold and Silver graph. Godoy, Jose F. Porfirio Diaz, President of
Mexico: The Master Builder of a Great Commonwealth. (New York and London, G.P.
Putnam's Sons, 1910) p. 116.