Kiev Communard
18th August 2011, 19:31
Another article at Questia I have found to be rather interesting. It deals with the involvement of American left-wing radicals in the spontaneous movement of draft-evading "slackers" during WWI. As a lot of "slackers" found refuge in Mexico, so did these activists. The article describes their attempts to participate in the popular movements during the 1910-1917 Mexican Revolution, and the impact of their revolutionary experience in Mexico on these activists' concepts of future revolution in the U.S. For some reason, the article lacks the references list.
American "slackers" in the Mexican Revolution: International Proletarian Politics in the Midst of a National Revolution
by Dan La Botz
In the spring of 1917, shortly after the United States entered World War I and adopted universal, male, military conscription, American war resisters and draft dodgers known at the time as "the slackers" began to arrive in Mexico.1 Senator Albert Bacon Fall claimed there were 30,000 slackers hiding out in Mexico, and slacker Linn A.E. Gale agreed with him.2 When American adventurer, reporter and writer Harry L. Foster passed through Mexico City in 1919, he noted that there were hundreds of Americans, many of them slackers, loitering in the city's parks and plazas.3 M.N. Roy, the Indian nationalist revolutionary, described the scene in his memoir:
Hundreds of pacifists, anarcho-syndicalists, socialists of all shades, had escaped to Mexico in order to evade compulsory military service, which was introduced soon after America joined the war. They were derogatorily called the slackers. According to their respective persuasion and predisposition, some wanted to join the Zapatistas, others to go to the El Dorado of Yucatan, and the rest to try their luck anywhere. Most of the Radical refugees, however, ultimately drifted toward the capital and congregated there.4
The New York Times reported in June of 1920 that there were still 10,000 slackers in Mexico, afraid to come home and face the justice that awaited them.5 These were only a few of the almost four million men who in one way or another evaded the draft in the United States during World War I.6
While many of the draft dodgers simply wanted to save their skins, or to avoid killing someone they had never met, others were American anarchosyndicalists and socialists who opposed the draft, militarism and war on principle. Linn A.E. Gale wrote in Gale's Magazine what he saw as the slackers' self-conception.
Like many other criminals, "we slackers" labored under a hallucination. We were obsessed with an idea. The idea was that there was no good reason why we should go to Europe, and fight for the Allies. We insisted with irritating obstinacy that the war was simply a disgusting wrangle between two gangs of robbers, one headed by the late lamented Kaiser, the Krupps and the junkers of Potsdam, and the other headed by the moneyed men of Lombard Street, London and Wall Street in the United States.7
The slacker radicals, that is, tended to be internationalists who felt they had more in common with workers in other countries than the ruling classes of their own country.
Among the thousands of slackers in Mexico there must certainly have been many such radicals. We should remember that the Socialist Party of America had a significant following in that era. The party had about 100,000 members. In the election of 1912 the Socialist candidate, the railroad worker and strike leader Eugene V. Debs, had won almost one million votes (897,000), six percent of the total.8 The SP controlled about one third of the unions in the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and SP members held office as mayors and aldermen in 1,200 cities and states throughout the country. The SP published 323 English and foreign language newspapers, the largest with a circulation of 750,000.9
The Socialists had, moreover, taken a strong anti-war stand. When the United States declared war, the Socialist Party passed a strong resolution against the war and called upon its members to actively oppose it.10 Many Socialist Party members became national or local anti-war and anti-draft leaders, for which some, including Debs himself, were jailed, while others were fired from their jobs or beaten, and in a few cases killed by angry patriots. " Moreover, the Wilson administration's severe political repression, the worst in the history of the country, and more severe than that of Britain, France or Germany, made it extremely difficult to be left-wing activists in the United States.12 With their alternatives as the Army or jail, some Socialists fled to Mexico. In doing so, they became part of an international revolutionary movement that transcended national borders.
Over the last 40 years historians have produced a considerable body of literature dedicated to the study of the international revolutionary movements that transcended the U.S. and Mexican border during the period from 1900 to 1925. Some of this literature, such as Gregg Andrews' Shoulder to Shoulder"?, has taken the form of institutional studies of labor unions and political parties and their relationship with similar organizations on the other side of the border.13 Part of this literature of international revolutionary movements could be called "border studies," for it deals with incidents, events and developments around the U.S.-Mexico border. For example, there is Lawrence Taylor's study of the combined Magonista-IWW raid on Tijuana.14 Then there are books like Dirk W. Ratt's Revoltosos that reach beyond the border to look at Mexican radicals in the United States and U.S. policy toward them.15 Other authors emphasize the mutual interaction between the Mexican and U.S. revolutionaries, or put their actions within the broader context of international diplomatic developments. Javier Torres Parés' La Revolution sinfrontera: El partido Liberal Mexicano y las relaciones entre el movimiento obrero de Mexico y los Estados Unidos. 1900-1923 puts its emphasis on the reciprocal relations between American anarchists and Mexican revolutionaries.16 While not focused on the radicals, Daniela Spenser's The Impossible Triangle: Mexico, Soviet Russia, and the United States in the 1920s provides an essential context for understanding their ideas and actions.17 In this essay, I attempt to show how American socialist "slackers" or draft evaders and resisters brought their Progressive Era ideals and anti-war experiences from the United States and attempted to create a revolutionary socialist movement in Mexico, but found themselves confronting the emerging Mexican national state. I am particularly interested in the way in which revolutionary socialist internationalism was thwarted by Mexican nationalism.18
Why Mexico? Without papers, American draft dodgers couldn't leave the country by ship, nor would they have wanted to in the era of submarine warfare. Canada was out of the question because as part of the British Empire it was at war in 1914 and would adopt a draft in 1918. Mexico, on the other hand, was attractive because it was close, cheap, warm, easy to enter and hospitable to the slackers. Moreover, though it was a foreign country, it was in many ways familiar. U.S. corporations and U.S. church missionaries had been colonizing Mexico since the 1880s.19 Many American workers had for decades been working in Mexico, on the railroads, in mines, in the oil fields or in the ports and on ships that docked there. American workers had carried with them their labor union membership in the AFL unions, the Railroad Brotherhoods, the Western Federation of Miners, or the Industrial Workers of the World. Sometimes they organized Mexican workers into those unions, especially into the International Workers of the World (IWW), or Wobblies. At other times Mexicans imitated or borrowed from the foreign workers' labor experience, creating unions of their own modeled on the Americans'.20 The Americans' labor unionism and revolutionary syndicalism (and the Spaniards anarchism) became, as the Mexican revolutionary and philosopher José Vasconcelos observed, the common politics of much of the secondary leadership of the Mexican Revolution.21 For some Americans Mexico was already familiar territory.
American Socialists, anarchists and labor unionists had a sense of identification with the struggles of the workers and peasants of Mexico.22 Samuel Gompers, head of the AFL, and Mother Jones, the United Mine Workers organizer, had defended the Madero phase of the Mexican Revolution. The Socialist Party also defended the Madero revolution, with the lead being taken by Debs, though the SP, like the AFL, eschewed the radicals.23 The Los Angeles Socialist Party pursued a different line, allying itself with the anarchists. Just before the outbreak of the revolution, John Kenneth Turner of the Los Angeles branch of the Socialist Party traveled to Mexico with leaders of the anarchist Mexican Liberal Party (PLM) and wrote a series of magazine articles unmasking the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, later published as Barbarous Mexico.24 John Reed, the Socialist journalist who wrote for The Masses had ridden with Pancho Villa and wrote his account of the revolution, Insurgent Mexico.25 Socialist Congressman Victor Berger introduced into the U.S. Congress a resolution opposing U.S. intervention in Mexico's revolution.26 Hundreds of Americans are estimated to have fought in the Mexican revolution, most of them probably mercenaries and soldiers of fortune, but others radicals who had gone south to the support of the revolution.27 Dozens of American Wobblies joined the Mexican Liberal Party's assault on Tijuana and Mexicali in Baja California in 1911.28 American Anarchists, like Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, and William C. Owen also supported the Mexican Revolution, though they leaned toward Emiliano Zapata and the commune of Morelos. Some anarchists also crossed the border of Texas to participate in the revolution.29 Many American leftists already felt an identification with Mexico and its revolution even before some of them went there in exile. The labor movement and the left, then, had some experience with and some history in Mexico, and that may have helped to make exile in Mexico seem possible, though in fact most of the slackers had never been there before.
Among the thousands who went into exile in Mexico for the duration of the war, I am particularly interested in a group of about a dozen individuals who became political activists there and whose history we know both because they wrote and others, including government spies, wrote about them. Most of them were American socialists, though a few were foreigners who had lived in or passed through the United States. Most came from New York City, and many of them were immigrants, several Jewish, and virtually all were opponents of the war and the draft. A number were founding members or at least early members of the Communist Party in Mexico and the United States. A few were famous in their time and several achieved notoriety at least briefly. The central figures of this group-Roberto Haberman, Linn A.E. Gale, Charles Francis Phillips (Charles Shipman or Manuel Gomez), Herman P. Levine (M. Paley), Irwin Granich (Mike Gold), Hendrik Glintenkamp, and Carleton Beals-all formed part of the milieu of slacker activists in Mexico around between 1917 and 1921. Another group, Louis Fraina (Lewis Corey), and Bertram Wolfe, were American socialists opponents of war but did not go to Mexico until after the war was over but then became part of the same radical milieu. Several of these Americans who would become exiles in Mexico had earlier been immigrants to the United States. Also in the picture are three non-Americans, M.N. Roy, the Indian nationalist and later Communist, Mikhail Borodin, the Russian Communist, and Sen Katayama, the Japanese Communist, who were all in Mexico in the years between 1917 and 1926, where they were closely involved with the American slackers. All the of them had spent some time in the United States and spoke English; Borodin and Katayama and both lived in the United States for many years and had been members of the Socialist Party of America, while M.N. Roy had spent some months living in the states.30
Why is this group of particular interest? I think this group, particularly the first wave who went to Mexico in 1917 and 1918, interesting and important because they show us how a middle layer of activists-that is neither rank and filers nor important national leaders-played an important role in the Mexican labor and social movements. They raised (and in fact they embodied) the idea of international working class solidarity. They helped to bring together different labor, peasants and women's organizations, linking them to each other, and to the international revolutionary movement represented by the new Communist Party. They developed a new internationalist current in Mexico, different than the existing anarchist tendency. They found, however, that their internationalist ideas and organization could not compete successfully with the emerging power of the nationalist Mexican state.
We should sketch a few of their biographies to give the reader a feel for the group. Most of the American slackers in Mexico on whom this paper focuses had been members and in some cases leaders of the anti-war and anti-draft movement in the United States, or at a very minimum they had been conscientious objectors for reasons of their Socialist anti-war views. Several came from New York City, where they had been active in and around the Socialist Party. Charles Francis Phillips, a young socialist and journalism student at Columbia University in New York, had become the leader of the anti-draft movement among students throughout the state. He had been a passenger on Henry Ford's "Peace Ship" fiasco, edited the student paper War?, and organized the distribution of anti-draft leaflets for which he was twice arrested, and was indicted for failure to register for the draft. For these activities he was jailed for five days, expelled from Colombia University, forcibly registered for the draft, drafted but then expelled from the military, personally attacked in an editorial in the New York Times, and then received an anonymous death threat. He fled to Mexico with his girlfriend Eleanor Parker in early 1918.31
Another New York slacker was Herman P. Levine, a New York schoolteacher and Socialist Party member who on June 5, 1917 also refused to register for the draft on the national registration day, and turned himself in to authorities. Levine, who also studied at Columbia University while teaching, belonged to the Addison Socialist Club in Brooklyn, and was involved in its anti-war work. In April 1917 he had participated in lobbying Congress in Washington, D.C. as part of a peace delegation. He also served as the Addison Socialist Club delegate to the First American Conference for Democracy and Terms of Peace organized by the Peoples' Council, the American anti-war umbrella organization that took its name (Council) from the Russian Soviets. Arrested, tried and convicted for refusing to register or the draft, he was sentenced to 11 months, 29 days in prison with no time off for good behavior, and he was forcibly registered for the draft. The New York State commission of education also fired him from his teaching job at Public School 160. He apparently left for Mexico immediately after his release from prison in June 1918 in order to avoid being drafted again.32
Carleton Beals, another slacker, had been a student at the University of California at Berkeley, where he belonged to the Socialist Party and wrote for the campus newspaper. After graduating from Berkeley, we went off to graduate school at Columbia University Teachers College in New York and then took a student teaching job in New Jersey. When ordered to report to the local draft board, he chose instead to report to the draft board in Berkeley, as was his right. He informed the Berkeley board that he was a conscientious objector and refused to register for the draft. He was arrested and held for a few days, then released, then re-arrested on charges of desertion, but released after six days. On December 11 he received another notice to report to his draft board which he ignored, and on December 17 he was arrested by a U.S. Marshall and jailed in the San Francisco Presidio military prison. The bureaucracy lost track of him, while his mother found help through Roger Baldwin of the National Civil Liberties Bureau (forerunner of the ACLU). The commander of the base considered Beals' presence a nuisance and had him discharged with classification 5-G as totally unfit for military service. Beals then took a job with Standard oil, but was worried about being drafted again and worried about his brother Ralph Beals, who still remained eligible for the draft. With their parents' blessing the two young men got in Beals' car and drove south into Mexico in July 1918. Carleton first got a job with a German businessman in Culiacán, Sinaloa, and then went south by burro and railroad to Mexico City.33
Roberto Haberman's experience was somewhat different than Phillips, Levine and Beals, if only because he was older. A Romanian Jewish immigrant, Haberman had served in the Spanish American war and later become a pharmacist and a lawyer. He first went to Mexico in 1917 at the outbreak of the war as a reporter for the Socialist Party newspaper, The Call. There he developed a close relationship with Felipe Carrillo Puerto, the head of the Socialist Party of the Southeast and the governor of the state. Carrillo Puerto offered Haberman the job of administrator of the state's cooperative program, and Haberman accepted. Later he took a job as assistant to Luis N. Morones, head of the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers and moved to Mexico City. While not actually a draft evader, Haberman became part of the slacker milieu.34
Slackers like Phillips, Levine and Beals were young socialists whose convictions led them to resist or evade the draft, and finally to go into exile in Mexico. Haberman was also a committed socialist. Linn A.E. Gale, who was at the time perhaps the best known of the slackers because of his publication Gale's Magazine, does not fit that pattern. He and his wife Magdalena were involved in the Democratic Party in upstate New York, where Gale used his literary talents to serve Governor Glynn. When Glynn lost the gubernatorial election to Charles S. Whitman, Gale lost his work as a publicist and his wife lost her job as a stenographer in state government. Gale began writing bad checks, one of them to Saks & Co., which filed a complaint and had him arrested. He was also wanted for using the mails for illegal purposes. He was a follower of Margaret Sanger, and had sent a birth control pamphlet through the mail, which was against the Comstock law. While trying to extricate himself from his legal problems, Gale registered for the draft, and avoided induction for a while by claiming he was going to have an operation on his nose. In December 1918 he was reclassified 1-A, that is fit for duty, and ordered to report for a new physical exam on January 1918. When he didn't show up, he was inducted in absentia on April 4, 1918. He and Magdalena left Oxford, New York in April 1918, went to live in a socialist community in Sables, Louisiana for a while, and then "waded the Rio Grande in a shallow place near Laredo," thus entering Mexico, probably in the summer of 1918. Gale seems to have discovered his socialist politics after leaving New York, perhaps during his stay in the idiosyncratic socialist commune in Louisiana.35 By about mid-1918, the slackers had arrived in Mexico, which was still in the last violent phases of the revolution.
José Allen was also considered part of the slacker milieu, though he was not in fact a slacker, and was not even an American, though he was sometimes taken for one. Alien was a Mexican citizen raised in a bi-lingual and bi-cultural Anglo-Mexican family. An electrical engineer, he was working in a Mexican government munitions plant when Major R.M. Campbell recruited him to work as a spy for the U.S. Military Intelligence Division (USMID). Alien's perfect English and Spanish made him an ideal person for working the slacker milieu. Alien's first job was simply to provide information to the U.S. Army on the operation of the Mexican military factories. Then USMID asked Alien to join the Great Central body of Workers, a labor union formed during the revolutionary period. Alien did so and became the liaison between the union and the Socialist Party of Mexico. When Phillips and Roy came around the Socialist Party they met Alien, and thus with his perfect English and Spanish, he came to be considered one of the slackers.36
THE FORCE OF WAR AND REVOLUTION
To understand the slackers and their experience we have to locate them in the context of the great upheavals of their time, and the political and social forces acting upon them. First, the slackers had left the United States because of its entry into World War I, and entered Mexico just as the Mexican Revolution that had begun in 1910 was moving toward a resolution. At about the same time in 1917 Russia passed through two revolutions, a democratic or bourgeois revolution in February and a working class, Soviet or Bolshevik Revolution in October. These three great forces: the United States as a great imperial power, Mexico and its emerging nationalist government, and the Soviet revolution would push and pull at the slackers.
The slackers were moving away from the United States and its war policy, into the Mexican Revolution, and politically toward the Bolshevik or Soviet revolution. The slackers were repelled by the United States, attracted by Soviet Russia revolutionary social internationalism, and would look for a way to fight for their view of socialism in Mexico. Several of the American slackers wanted to be Bolsheviks in Mexico, but they did not understand Mexico nor did they know exactly what it meant to be a Bolshevik. Victor Serge writing about the years 1919 and 1920 in Europe said, "To tell the truth, outside Russia and perhaps Bulgaria, there were no real Communists anywhere in the world."37 If that was true in Europe, it was even more true in the United States and Mexico. The slackers would have to learn and would have to create their identity.
The slackers' experience in Mexico tended to pass through three stages.38 First, they found political patrons in the Mexican government who protected and financed or employed them. second, breaking from their patrons, they found Mexican and other foreign collaborators with whom they could work to build a Communist or other revolutionary organization. Third, in order to develop their small Communist and labor groups they reached out to other forces in society to create a Communist movement. They specifically sought alliances with radical state governors, the leaders of the agrarian movements, and labor union activists. Given their small numbers and the newness of their group, they proved remarkably successful in being taken seriously and establishing close ties with significant political and mass leaders in several regions of Mexico. Through those relationships, within a few years they had reached with their propaganda thousands of workers, peasants and women and involved some in their project in one way or another, though the party itself remained quite small.
The first matter, however, was how to survive as leftist political activists in Mexico. When they first arrived in Mexico, they found that they were welcome, particularly in government and political circles. "Gringos were resented and hated in Mexico," wrote Phillips. "But we were gringos with a difference. As refugees from the American war power, we were enemies of the American establishment, and consequently Mexico's friends."39 The Carranza government, locked in a struggle with the United States, welcomed the American slackers, and patronized some of them. State governments and revolutionary generals did as well.40 They saw the Americans and other foreigners, with their ties to labor unions and political parties in the United States and later with ties to Moscow and Soviet Russia, as potentially useful allies. Moreover, in a nation of mostly illiterate peasants and semi-literate workers, the American slackers with their college education and professional training, their experience in the labor unions, the anti-war movement or the socialist party, appeared to be political intellectuals who could be put at work in the service of the cause of one or another faction of the Mexican Revolution.
Carranza's Minister of the Interior, Manuel Aguirre Berlanga, became the first principal political protector of the American war resisters. He became the secret patron of Linn Gale, publisher of Gale's Magazine, and the discreet sponsor of the Indian nationalist M.N. Roy who had come to Mexico to buy arms for India's nationalist movement. The Carranza government, which criticized U.S. and British imperialism, and which attempted to organize an alliance of Latin American states against the U.S. government's Pan-American imperialism, found it useful to have its arguments buttressed by American radical critics of the United States and by Indian critics of the British Empire. Sponsorship meant financial support for the slackers and their publications, opportunities to publish in newspapers friendly to the government, and doors opened to Mexican government leaders.
Gale, who later found himself in hot water with the Mexican government, tried to explain his relationship to Minister of the Interior Berlanga in a letter to President Galles: "Of course I had accepted assistance from Berlanga, as well as from Adolfo de la Huerta when he was president) and from various laborites in the cabinet of President Obregon. This doesn't mean that I was a supporter of Berlanga or any other individual. I accepted the protection of any Mexican government with gratitude."41 Gale's Magazine supported the Mexican government, opposed U.S. intervention, criticized European imperialism and the war, and promoted Gale's Industrial Workers of the World and Communist Party organizations. He also pursued his particular causes: vegetarianism, birth control, spiritualism and the occult.42 While nominally a Communist, he put anti-imperialism above the domestic class struggle. "The greatest danger faced by the Mexican working class today, is the danger of intervention," he wrote. "If the Carranza government were overthrown today, American and British capital would come into this country and rule it with a rod of iron."43 "Carranza is not a Socialist," wrote Gale, "but there is good reason to believe that a moderate policy of state Socialism would have been put into place if he had not been constantly menaced by the Damocles' sword of intervention."44 This was after all, the position he was being paid to support.
Other government leaders from a variety of factions also sponsored slackers. General Salvador I. Alvarado, the former governor of the Yucatan and at the time a presidential hopeful, hired Charles Phillips to be the editor of the English language page of his Mexico City newspaper, El Heraldo de Mexico. Between June and November, 1919 Phillips edited and wrote most of the English page of El Heraldo, publishing literary criticism, poetry, news coverage and political analysis. In his political articles he argued an antiimperialist and anti-war position, and put forward a position virtually identical to that of the Communists. He attacked British and American imperialism, and derided the proposal for a League of Nations. In many articles, he called upon Americans in Mexico to act to stop U.S. intervention. He also called upon U.S. labor unions to support the Mexican Revolution. For six months he had an opportunity to work as an editor analyzing the situation of Mexico and its revolution within the context of World War I and the Russian Revolution. It was an excellent training ground for a radical activist finding his way in a new country.45
Felipe Carrillo Puerto, head of the peasant Leagues of Resistance and of the Socialist Party of the Southeast and governor of Yucatan, hired the American Socialist Roberto Haberman to head his cooperative organizations. Later Haberman became an assistant to the powerful labor leader Luis N. Morones, head of the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM). Morones made Haberman his liaison to the Socialist Party of America and more importantly to Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor. President Obregón's Minister of Education José Vasconcelos also hired Haberman to head his foreign language department. Haberman's positions with Carrillo Puerto, then Vasconcelos, and finally Morones proved an excellent training ground in Mexican politics, which he used to become an advisor not only to Haberman but also to presidents Obregon and Galles.46 As he rose up through the institutions of Mexican politics, Haberman adapted to the nationalist politics of those for whom he worked.
American slackers Gale and Phillips found themselves able to publish radical critiques of U.S. foreign policy and articles sympathetic to the Russian Revolution, so long as they did not directly criticize their patrons. This initial period of official patronage proved extremely valuable to the American slackers. These positions as journalists gave slackers Phillips and Gale an opportunity to survey the Mexican scene, to meet some of the leading personalities of the revolution close up, and to follow domestic and international events. Those roles also gave them a reputation among a small number of political activists and leaders as writers, editors, organizers and politicians. But such positions were not viable in the long run because the Americans socialists who were sympathetic to Communism, such as Phillips and Gale, did not share the politics of their sponsors.
Within a few months Gale, Phillips and Roy were ready to venture out into the world of the Mexican revolution and see if they could find collaborators in building a Communist Party. As foreigners they were welcome in the union movement. The Mexican labor movement, mostly led by anarchists and anarchosyndicalists, held a view that all luchadores sociales, that is union and social movement activists, were welcome in Mexico and in its unions. For example, when Huerta in 1913 had expelled some foreigner labor militants from Mexico, the Casa del Obrero Mundial organized a protest at the House of Deputies at which they read this statement:
We want those so-called foreigners by reason of their birth-who with perfect right reside in our Territory, collaborating with our work for the universal good of man and sharing with us the bitter penalties of the struggle for human needs-to be treated with respect.
The barbarous Article 33, applied against them, is an ignominious law against which we energetically protest with an anguished heart on seeing them brutally taken from their homes, leaving their families completely distraught.47
This was the tradition of internationalism, mainly promoted by the anarchists, which existed in the Mexicans unions and made it possible for the American slackers to become involved. They were not foreigners; they were brothers.
The slackers soon found their first collaborators in the Socialist Party of Mexico led by Adolfo Santibáñez. The Mexican socialist movement had been founded by Pablo Zierold, a German immigrant brewer, in 1911 as the Partido Socialista Obrero, modeled on the European Socialist parties. Santibáñez had been a founder.48 But socialism was a minority tendency in the Latin anarchist world, and Adolfo Santibáñez was delighted to welcome the American socialists, and their new friend, the Indian revolutionary M.N. Roy. The two foreigners, Phillips and Roy, not only joined the Mexican Socialist Party, but almost immediately became its most active and leading members. Under the guidance of the Soviet Communist emissary Mikhail Borodin, who had recently arrived in Mexico, Phillips and Roy carried through a split of the Mexican Socialist Party, creating the Communist Party of Mexico.49 They proceeded to elect José Alien to be the party's general secretary, the top officer, unaware of course that he was a USMID spy. Thanks to Alien's reports, preserved in the U.S. National Archives, we have a much better picture of the early party and its activities.
We get a feel for the Socialist Party of Mexico and the milieu in which it existed during the Revolution in the Memoirs of a Rebellious Youth by José Valadés. He describes a meeting of the anarchist Egalitarian Youth in 1919 at the gathering place for Mexico's foreign political activists on the left, the Bakery Workers Union in Mexico City. Genaro Gómez, one of Mexico's few socialists, headed the union, and allowed the Bakers' "Netzahualcoyotl Hall" (named after the great Aztec sage) to be used by a variety of radical organizations. One of those radical groups was the anarchist Egalitarian Youth organized by Valadés. His account captures the international character of the radical slacker community in Mexico City at the time:
Here was Linn A.E. Gale, general secretary (so he said) of the Communist Party of Mexico [PC de M]. With him were two or three others from the United States, who muttered their names between clenched teeth. Beside Gale there was Roberto Haberman. Behind Haberman, Calogero Speziale, the Italian anarchist. After him, Leopoldo Urmachea, the Peruvian anarchist. Followed by José Allen, general Secretary of the Mexican Communist Party [PCM]. Accompanying Alien, Frank Seaman [Charles Francis Phillips], a Communist from the United States. Afterwards came Martin Paley [Herman P. Levine] a Jew, representing the Industrial Workers of the World in Mexico, as well as Joseph Ellsworth, delegate of the Socialist Party of the United States. Finally I greeted Pablo Pablos, a bearded Russian with a beautiful profile who held the hand of his lovely daughter Helen. With Pablo was Alfred Stirner [Edgard Woog].50
Valades' memoir locates the American and Mexican socialists in a world of European and Latin American anarchists. Spanish anarchists in particular played a leading role in some parts of the Mexican labor movement, and anarchist and anarchosyndicalist ideas were widely discussed among the activists. Out of this milieu the American slacker Communists made some of their first recruits to their new party, among them one of their most dedicated, young Valades himself.
Other slackers were also finding their collaborators in other political milieus and in other parts of Mexico. Herman P. Levine, though he had been a socialist in the United States, had by the time he got to Mexico rejected socialism for the anarchosyndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World. Levine found his home in the IWW in Tampico. The IWW had come to Tampico through merchant seaman. The C.A. Canfield's crew, belonging to the IWW Marine Transport Workers union, many of whom were Spanish speaking, arrived in Tampico in 1916 and began to recruit to their union. Pedro Coria, a Mexican who had lived in the United States for many years and spoke English, arrived in Tampico in 1917 and founded IWW-MTW Local 100. By the time Levine arrived in Tampico in 1919 or 1920 the union was an established organization among workers there and one with an already legendary militancy. Levine, using the name M. Paley (and sometimes called Mischa Poltiolevsky in police reports) took on the job of editing the group's newspaper El Obrero Industrial.
Levine's two closest allies in the IWW in Tampico were Coria and Charles King, an American. A U.S. government spy, possibly José Alien, described King.
He is an American Communist. He has been in Mexico approximately eighteen months. He is five feet eight inches tall; weight about one hundred and sixty pounds; dark hair; dark eyes; swarthy complexion. He is very sarcastic and cynical. He appears to be very well educated; he speaks Spanish and English equally well. Trade unknown.
The same spy went on to give a similar sketch of Coria.
Corea (sic) is a Mexican of the railroad man type; age about forty; about five feet eight inches tall; weight about one hundred and eighty pounds; thick, black hair, black eyes; slightly florid complexion. He has traveled very widely in the United States and South America; he speaks English very well. He is said to speak Portuguese fluently. For many years he has been a political leader. He is said to have been imprisoned in South America. He is not a very well educated man, but an active mind and great personality make him a leader.51
Levine, working with Coria and King, first carried out a coup to oust Gale and his friends in the Mexico City IWW by passing a resolution that only wage workers could be members of the union. Levine and his correligionarios then proposed an alliance between the IWW, the anarchists, dissident anarchosyndicalists from the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM), and the Roy-Phillips Communist Party.
So the American slackers in Mexico City and Tampico concluded a second stage of their exile. Having moved away from their government patrons, they had found political collaborators among Mexicans and foreigners living in Mexico, and they had created a new Communist Party of Mexico and in Tampico a new and more serious IWW organization. This was also a period of political sorting out for the American slackers, as they went their separate ways, often in competing or hostile organizations. The Roy-Phillips Communists and their ally Levine and his IWW broke with Gale, whom they considered a dilettante, an opportunist and a buffoon. They had also broken with Roberto Haberman, who had become an important secondary figure not only in the CROM of Morones, but also as an advisor to the governments of Obregon and Galles.
With their Mexican and foreign collaborators and their new Communist and IWW organizations, the most radical group of the American slackers were now ready to reach out more broadly into Mexican society in an attempt to assemble the social forces of workers' revolution. In Communist terminology, they were attempting to move from a small propaganda sect to the creation of an agitational organization engaged in mass work. In less than two years, that is between mid-1917 to 1919, the slackers had become Spanish speakers, succeeded in learning the political lay of the land, established ties to Mexican left and labor activists and created their own embryonic Communist and syndicalist organizations. In 1919 and 1920 they began to establish contact with the agrarian radicals and the state governors, who were just then launching what would become the agrarian revolt of the early 1920s. This would prove to be the most challenging and most interesting stage of their involvement in Mexico, but it was here that their vision of building a revolutionary Communist movement came into contact with and into conflict with the emerging nationalist government of Mexico.
The slacker Communists naturally reached out to organize industrial workers and peasants, the people of the hammer and the sickle. The slackers and other foreigners, working with Mexicans, established ties to railroad workers, port workers, and petroleum workers, as well as urban workers of various trades and industries in Mexico City. Surprisingly they were able to establish, at least briefly, an alliance with some of the leading agrarian organizers, and indirectly with the governors with whom they worked closely.52
The attempt to organize peasants-a complicated category that included indigenous communities, small farmers, and day laborers-grew out of the influence of the IWW, the Bolshevik Revolution, and, of course, the experience of the Mexican Revolution itself. In 1914 and 1915 the IWW in the United States had made the organization of farm laborers a central part of their activities and had had significant success among workers in the wheat belt, efforts that were being expanded in 1917, just when the United States entered the war.53 In Russia, peasants formed the overwhelming majority of the population and any revolution would have in some sense to be a peasant revolution. When he returned to Russia in 1917, Lenin called for a program of "Peace, Land and Bread,"-land to the peasant-and argued that the Bolsheviks should create a "workers' and peasants' government." Finally, of course, the Mexican revolution was largely a peasant revolution, driven by the peasants' desire for land. Emiliano Zapata and his Plan de Ayala represented the clearest expression of this peasant revolutionary movement with its demand of land to the tiller. All of these influences acted upon the slacker Communists and led them to undertake to reach the new agrarian reform movement that began around 1919 or 1920.
What did the American slacker Communists want? What were they trying to accomplish when they contacted the agrarian radicals and the state governors? They wanted revolution, and it seemed tangible. The collapse of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, the victory of the Russian Revolution, and the international strike wave extending from Europe to Asia and to North and South America all made the notion of world revolution seem very possible to many. The seething cauldron of the Mexican Revolution which had been going on for ten years, made it seem to them and to some Mexican radicals as if there might yet be another eruption, the final revolutionary proletarian communist wave. seeing this possibility, the American leftists wanted to draw peasant leaders toward the program of workers' revolution and international socialism. They wanted to draw the agrarian leaders and state governors into the process of constructing a Communist Party in Mexico that would be linked to the Communist International and the process of world revolution.
The political instability and fluidity of the situation in the period from 1917 to 1925, made it possible for American radicals to enter into political discussions with leaders of mass peasant movements as well as with a few of the most radical state governors. Several radical governors and the agrarian organizers did not accept the limits of the revolution being set by president Obregon. Some considered themselves socialists or communists of one sort or another, as did some of the peasant organizers. Felipe Carrillo Puerto, governor of Yucatan, had led his Socialist Party of the Southeast to establish a fraternal relationship with the Communist International, though he hesitated to affiliate formally because of the opposition of President Obregon.54 The governors and agrarian organizers looked for levers to move the national government to the left. In the complex and volatile world of that historical moment, everyone was looking for talent, for allies, for political forces. The American slackers with their implied ties to both Soviet Russia and its revolution and to U.S. political parties and labor unions must have appeared potentially useful in moving Mexico's revolutionary movement to the left. Moreover they were comrades in the struggle.
For a brief period of time, between 1917 and 1925, Mexican nationalism, a broad opposition to foreign imperialism, and a kind of international revolutionary solidarity could coexist in Mexico. During that period, the concepts of nationalism, anti-imperialism, and internationalism all seemed to be versions of the same thing. The individuals and forces involved in fighting for Mexican nationalism and against U.S. imperialism could seem as if they were driving toward the same goal of internationalism. Only in the course of the struggles of the early 1920s would it become clear that the Mexican state's nationalism, while it was anti-imperialist, would not be genuinely internationalist. During this moment of historical flux, however, slacker communists could get the ear of peasant leaders and radical governors.
As they considered the notion of reaching out to the peasant movement, the slackers, now functioning as Communists, identified the three most important regions of agrarian upheaval: the state of Yucatan under Felipe Carrillo Puerto, the state of Michoacan under Governor Francisco Múgica, and Veracruz ruled by Governor Adalberto Tejeda. Carrillo Puerto had already made his decision for support of the Communist International, if not for formal affiliation. The slackers easily established friendly relations with Carrillo and his supporters, but their own organizing efforts focused on the movements in Michoacan and Veracruz.
In Michoacan, Primo Tapia had returned after living and working several years in the United States, first as bodyguard to Enrique and Ricardo Flores Magón of the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM) and then as an organizer of the Industrial Workers of the World and perhaps as a member of the Communist Party in the United States. In his hometown of Naranjo, Michoacan, he first founded the Committee for Material Improvement, fighting for agrarian reform against Spanish landlords and also created the Feminine League (La Liga Feminil). Out of those movements came the League of Agrarian Communities in 1923 and also the League's takeover of local militias.55
In 1917 Francisco Mugica, an important figure in the Constitutional Convention of 1917, had organized the Socialist Party of Michoacan. Tapia's grassroots movement became an important base of support for Mugica, and the governor in turn helped push through the Tarascan Indian communities' demands that hacienda land in the Zacapa Valley be given to them in the form oiejidos. Tapia's League became part of the Socialist Party of Michoacan, and its armed militias were an important force in defending Mugica against landlords or the increasingly hostile Federal government of Obregón. Tapia and Múgica both worked closely with Lázaro Cárdenas, the future president of Mexico.
The slacker Communists decided to seek out Tapia and Múgica in early 1920, perhaps at the time of the May Day celebration. A delegation of American slackers, apparently including Linn A.E. Gale and José Alien, attended a meeting of the Socialist Party of Michoacan, presumably with Múgica's approval.56 The Americans' attempt to win the agrarian leaders to the Communist International was made easier by the fact that the Mexicans with whom they dealt had themselves lived and worked in the United States, some spoke English, and were familiar with the American labor union and socialist traditions. As already mentioned, Primo Tapia, the leader of the agrarian movement in Michoacan had lived and worked in Los Angeles, California and later in the states of the Great Plains where he had been a Wobbly, and maybe a member of the Communist Party of the United States. It appears that at that first meeting, the slackers may have succeeded in recruiting Tapia to the new Communist movement of Mexico.
Allen and the Spanish anarchist Sebastian Sanvicente attended the May Day celebration in the state capital of Morelia, Michoacan, and the Communists were allegedly responsible for hanging a red and black strike flag from the Cathedral, scandalizing and infuriating Catholics and conservatives. Four days later the Catholic right exacted its revenge for the blasphemy-and for the local socialists' radical land reform-by assassinating sixteen radicals, including Isaac Arriaga, one of the leaders of the Socialist Party of Michoacan. The slackers escaped the massacre, but their involvement was used later by Obregon to justify their expulsion under Article 33 of the Mexican Constitution. Almost all of the slackers we have been discussing (Phillips, Levine, Gale and others) were expelled in 1921, though Phillips soon returned.57 Not much later Primo Tapia found himself in an increasingly violent confrontation with the Spanish owners of the hacienda in the area of Naranjo. His ally, Governor Mugica, ordered the establishment of a militia and provided Tapia's agraristas with arms. The increasing conflicts with the landlords, however, led Obregon to have General Estrada drive Múgica from power.58
After joining the Communist Party, Tapia attended party meetings in Mexico City and worked with other Communist peasant organizers such as Úrsule Galván, He founded the Communist Local of Michoacan in 1923, and became the secretary of propaganda. The Local's manifesto called for "armed insurrection of the proletariat" to overthrow capitalism, establish a "dictatorship of the proletariat," and begin to institute the communist order. At the same time, Tapia also maintained his close ties to Governor Múgica and General Lázaro Cárdenas. While the slacker Communists talked about building an independent and internationalist movement of the proletariat and the peasantry, absolute political independence was a luxury that local leaders such as Tapia could not afford. However much he may have believed in internationalism-and he seems to have very sincerely believed in it-Tapia had to have the political and military support of Cárdenas and Múgica. Cárdenas and Múgica, of course, would a decade later be the principal architects of the modern Mexican state. They would later lead the forces that Tapia had organized into the new Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM) and into the Mexican government. In fact it was precisely the ability to control and channel left wing forces such as those of Tapia into political movements such as those led then and later by Múgica and Cárdenas that made it possible for them to build the post-revolutionary Mexican state.
The same sort of situation existed on the Gulf Coast of Mexico. Úrsulo Galván, the leader of the peasant movement in Veracruz, had been apprenticed as a boy to Manuel Almanza García, a carpenter who was also a union member and his first political mentor. Galván joined the revolution, fighting with the Constitutionalists, but when his faction suffered a defeat by the Villistas, he fled to the United States where he worked until 1917. He returned to Veracruz to work in the city sanitation department, joining the union, and falling under the influence of a Spanish anarchist; he joined the Casa del Obrero Mundial, the principal labor union. Galván participated in electoral politics-but became disillusioned; later he joined an agricultural cooperative-but it failed. Then in 1919 the Casa sent him to organize petroleum workers in the oil fields around Tampico and he became involved in the strike against the Huasteca Petroleum Company. Through the strike he became more involved with regional union leaders and anarchists.
About this time, he came into contact with through Manuel Díaz Ramírez, a member of the Communist Party. Díaz Ramírez had lived and worked in the United States, where he had been a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. After he returned to Mexico, he worked with the Communist Party's underground headquarters, led by Phillips and second wave slackers Louis Fraina and Sen Katayama. At least at that moment, these activists all seemed to speak the same language. That is, they had all been exposed to the revolutionary syndicalist and socialist currents out of which the Communist Party emerged in both the United States and Mexico. They were part of a common movement of working people and labor union activists that transcended the border, and that developed a common politics that made it possible for them to evolve together toward Communism.59
Galván and other communists joined the Veracruz tenants' rent strike, an important social movement of the era, led by anarchist Herón Proal. Out of the rent strike movement came a peasant organizing project headed by Úrsulo Galván called the Comisión Organizadora de la Central Campesina. The radical governor of Veracruz, Adalberto Tejeda, contacted Galván and apparently suggested he organize la Liga de Comunidades Agrarias, the peasants' union.
With the backing of Tejeda, Galván's peasant organizing efforts proved successful, and the League became one of the largest and most powerful agrarian reform movements in Mexico. Galván remained a Communist linked to the slackers, but his local efforts were entirely dependent upon Tejeda. Tejeda remained a radical, but his survival depended upon maintaining a modus vivendi with president Obregón. How things worked can be seen by an incident in 1923, when Galván's movement was suppressed and Federal troops arrested him. It was Tejeda who appealed to Obregón to have Galván released.60 Later in the 1920s, when the Communist Party's line changed from the united front to unilateral insurrectionism, Galván broke with the party, preferring to keep and strengthen his ties with Tejeda.61
What was the significance of the impact of the American slackers of 1917 and 1918 on the Mexican peasant, labor and left movements? Historian Paco Ignacio Taibo II argues that, having been chosen in a secret meeting by a minority of the national committee of the Socialist Party and led by a group of foreigners mainly interested in their own country and careers, the new Mexican Communist Party was nothing more than a small sect.62 But if the Communist Party that the slackers helped to form and lead was a sect, it was also a seed, and one that sometimes flourished. Barry Carr, however, argues that the PCM "quickly achieved a significant (although sometimes short-lived) presence among several important segments of the urban, and especially peasant, population as well as among vanguard artists and intellectuals."63 Daniela Spenser believes that 'The Comintern group left little imprint on labor organizing and less on the campesinos."64 Yet, true as that may be, the slackers together with other foreigners and Mexicans organized the Communist Party had initially some remarkable successes, until they ran into the limits posed by the congealing out of the revolutionary magma of the Mexican state.
These two cases of Tapia and Múgica in Michoacan and of Galván and Tejeda in Veracruz, give us an idea of the parameters of power, that is, of the limits of agrarian reformers and local governors both of whom depended on the good will of the central government. They show us how the slacker communists' remarkable success in meeting, recruiting and working with leaders such as Tapia and Galván reached certain limits determined by the relationship between the governors and the central state. The slacker Communists' idea of working class internationalism reached its limits in the practical nationalist politics of the period.
We might say that the Mexican state was emerging as a national force out of just such conflicts. The state would only have power if it could impose its will throughout the national territory, and it could only impose its will if it could keep both the forces of reaction and the forces of a more radical revolution at bay. While the greatest danger came from the forces of reaction and the possibility of foreign intervention, there was also the threat of a radical revolution on the left. Obregón and later Calles wanted to show that they would not permit the revolution to escape from the economic, social and political channels into which they were directing it. Their ability to maintain order and preserve stability was key to getting diplomatic recognition from the United States and attracting foreign investment. To create and maintain those channels, they had to keep the governors in line, and get the governors to keep the agrarian reformers in line. The agrarian leaders and the radical governors thus found themselves torn between their desire for a more radical revolution and the much more immediate power of the emerging Mexican state.
In reality, however, there would be no contest between the Communist International and the Mexican state. The Communist International, based in Moscow was distant and newly formed, an international in the early 1920s in name only, with very few real national parties, even in Europe. In Latin America, it was mostly an idea. Only in the 1930s would the Communist International have the organizational base, personnel, and resources to support the by then small but real Communist Parties in Latin America. The Mexican state just emerging from the cauldron of the revolution was a powerful and immediate force, even if still one in formation in the early 1920s. Obregon and Calles succeeded in eight years, between 1920 and 1928, in transforming the rag-tag armies, guerrilla bands, and raiding parties of the revolution into a genuine army (and in pensioning off many of its generals). They created a national government and a federal bureaucracy, supplemented by the state governments and their public employees. The Constitution of 1917, and particularly its Articles 27 and 123, supplemented by state labor laws and federal regulations, legitimized peasants' and workers' struggles for a better life. The state intervened to become the arbiter of relations between the social classes, between patrones and obreros, and between hacendados and campesinos. The Federal government rose above and balanced among the social classes, veering between the scylla of the status quo ante of the conservative past and the charybdis of an unknown and threatening radical future.
The slackers proved capable of taking advantage of a period of government tolerance and patronage to get their bearings. They subsequently succeeded in finding other foreign and Mexican collaborators in the project of building Mexican communism. Finally, they proved remarkable able in their ability to reach out to other much larger and more weighty political forces in the form of the agrarian organizers and state governors, and to lay the basis for an alliance. The fact that they were foreigners did not stop them from establishing strong relationship with Mexican left and labor activists. They even succeeded in recruiting the two key agrarian organizers of Mexico in the 1920s-Primo Tapia and Úrsulo Galván-to the Communist Party of Mexico and to the Communist International. What they could not do with all of their idealism and talent was offer those organizers the material means and the political power to advance their members' interests. The Mexican state, however, could provide just those things - and it would use those same things, political power and material force, to crush those who would not accept the new nationalist order. For that reason, the struggle in the labor and peasant movement between Communism and nationalism would be won by the latter.
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5045009726
American "slackers" in the Mexican Revolution: International Proletarian Politics in the Midst of a National Revolution
by Dan La Botz
In the spring of 1917, shortly after the United States entered World War I and adopted universal, male, military conscription, American war resisters and draft dodgers known at the time as "the slackers" began to arrive in Mexico.1 Senator Albert Bacon Fall claimed there were 30,000 slackers hiding out in Mexico, and slacker Linn A.E. Gale agreed with him.2 When American adventurer, reporter and writer Harry L. Foster passed through Mexico City in 1919, he noted that there were hundreds of Americans, many of them slackers, loitering in the city's parks and plazas.3 M.N. Roy, the Indian nationalist revolutionary, described the scene in his memoir:
Hundreds of pacifists, anarcho-syndicalists, socialists of all shades, had escaped to Mexico in order to evade compulsory military service, which was introduced soon after America joined the war. They were derogatorily called the slackers. According to their respective persuasion and predisposition, some wanted to join the Zapatistas, others to go to the El Dorado of Yucatan, and the rest to try their luck anywhere. Most of the Radical refugees, however, ultimately drifted toward the capital and congregated there.4
The New York Times reported in June of 1920 that there were still 10,000 slackers in Mexico, afraid to come home and face the justice that awaited them.5 These were only a few of the almost four million men who in one way or another evaded the draft in the United States during World War I.6
While many of the draft dodgers simply wanted to save their skins, or to avoid killing someone they had never met, others were American anarchosyndicalists and socialists who opposed the draft, militarism and war on principle. Linn A.E. Gale wrote in Gale's Magazine what he saw as the slackers' self-conception.
Like many other criminals, "we slackers" labored under a hallucination. We were obsessed with an idea. The idea was that there was no good reason why we should go to Europe, and fight for the Allies. We insisted with irritating obstinacy that the war was simply a disgusting wrangle between two gangs of robbers, one headed by the late lamented Kaiser, the Krupps and the junkers of Potsdam, and the other headed by the moneyed men of Lombard Street, London and Wall Street in the United States.7
The slacker radicals, that is, tended to be internationalists who felt they had more in common with workers in other countries than the ruling classes of their own country.
Among the thousands of slackers in Mexico there must certainly have been many such radicals. We should remember that the Socialist Party of America had a significant following in that era. The party had about 100,000 members. In the election of 1912 the Socialist candidate, the railroad worker and strike leader Eugene V. Debs, had won almost one million votes (897,000), six percent of the total.8 The SP controlled about one third of the unions in the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and SP members held office as mayors and aldermen in 1,200 cities and states throughout the country. The SP published 323 English and foreign language newspapers, the largest with a circulation of 750,000.9
The Socialists had, moreover, taken a strong anti-war stand. When the United States declared war, the Socialist Party passed a strong resolution against the war and called upon its members to actively oppose it.10 Many Socialist Party members became national or local anti-war and anti-draft leaders, for which some, including Debs himself, were jailed, while others were fired from their jobs or beaten, and in a few cases killed by angry patriots. " Moreover, the Wilson administration's severe political repression, the worst in the history of the country, and more severe than that of Britain, France or Germany, made it extremely difficult to be left-wing activists in the United States.12 With their alternatives as the Army or jail, some Socialists fled to Mexico. In doing so, they became part of an international revolutionary movement that transcended national borders.
Over the last 40 years historians have produced a considerable body of literature dedicated to the study of the international revolutionary movements that transcended the U.S. and Mexican border during the period from 1900 to 1925. Some of this literature, such as Gregg Andrews' Shoulder to Shoulder"?, has taken the form of institutional studies of labor unions and political parties and their relationship with similar organizations on the other side of the border.13 Part of this literature of international revolutionary movements could be called "border studies," for it deals with incidents, events and developments around the U.S.-Mexico border. For example, there is Lawrence Taylor's study of the combined Magonista-IWW raid on Tijuana.14 Then there are books like Dirk W. Ratt's Revoltosos that reach beyond the border to look at Mexican radicals in the United States and U.S. policy toward them.15 Other authors emphasize the mutual interaction between the Mexican and U.S. revolutionaries, or put their actions within the broader context of international diplomatic developments. Javier Torres Parés' La Revolution sinfrontera: El partido Liberal Mexicano y las relaciones entre el movimiento obrero de Mexico y los Estados Unidos. 1900-1923 puts its emphasis on the reciprocal relations between American anarchists and Mexican revolutionaries.16 While not focused on the radicals, Daniela Spenser's The Impossible Triangle: Mexico, Soviet Russia, and the United States in the 1920s provides an essential context for understanding their ideas and actions.17 In this essay, I attempt to show how American socialist "slackers" or draft evaders and resisters brought their Progressive Era ideals and anti-war experiences from the United States and attempted to create a revolutionary socialist movement in Mexico, but found themselves confronting the emerging Mexican national state. I am particularly interested in the way in which revolutionary socialist internationalism was thwarted by Mexican nationalism.18
Why Mexico? Without papers, American draft dodgers couldn't leave the country by ship, nor would they have wanted to in the era of submarine warfare. Canada was out of the question because as part of the British Empire it was at war in 1914 and would adopt a draft in 1918. Mexico, on the other hand, was attractive because it was close, cheap, warm, easy to enter and hospitable to the slackers. Moreover, though it was a foreign country, it was in many ways familiar. U.S. corporations and U.S. church missionaries had been colonizing Mexico since the 1880s.19 Many American workers had for decades been working in Mexico, on the railroads, in mines, in the oil fields or in the ports and on ships that docked there. American workers had carried with them their labor union membership in the AFL unions, the Railroad Brotherhoods, the Western Federation of Miners, or the Industrial Workers of the World. Sometimes they organized Mexican workers into those unions, especially into the International Workers of the World (IWW), or Wobblies. At other times Mexicans imitated or borrowed from the foreign workers' labor experience, creating unions of their own modeled on the Americans'.20 The Americans' labor unionism and revolutionary syndicalism (and the Spaniards anarchism) became, as the Mexican revolutionary and philosopher José Vasconcelos observed, the common politics of much of the secondary leadership of the Mexican Revolution.21 For some Americans Mexico was already familiar territory.
American Socialists, anarchists and labor unionists had a sense of identification with the struggles of the workers and peasants of Mexico.22 Samuel Gompers, head of the AFL, and Mother Jones, the United Mine Workers organizer, had defended the Madero phase of the Mexican Revolution. The Socialist Party also defended the Madero revolution, with the lead being taken by Debs, though the SP, like the AFL, eschewed the radicals.23 The Los Angeles Socialist Party pursued a different line, allying itself with the anarchists. Just before the outbreak of the revolution, John Kenneth Turner of the Los Angeles branch of the Socialist Party traveled to Mexico with leaders of the anarchist Mexican Liberal Party (PLM) and wrote a series of magazine articles unmasking the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, later published as Barbarous Mexico.24 John Reed, the Socialist journalist who wrote for The Masses had ridden with Pancho Villa and wrote his account of the revolution, Insurgent Mexico.25 Socialist Congressman Victor Berger introduced into the U.S. Congress a resolution opposing U.S. intervention in Mexico's revolution.26 Hundreds of Americans are estimated to have fought in the Mexican revolution, most of them probably mercenaries and soldiers of fortune, but others radicals who had gone south to the support of the revolution.27 Dozens of American Wobblies joined the Mexican Liberal Party's assault on Tijuana and Mexicali in Baja California in 1911.28 American Anarchists, like Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, and William C. Owen also supported the Mexican Revolution, though they leaned toward Emiliano Zapata and the commune of Morelos. Some anarchists also crossed the border of Texas to participate in the revolution.29 Many American leftists already felt an identification with Mexico and its revolution even before some of them went there in exile. The labor movement and the left, then, had some experience with and some history in Mexico, and that may have helped to make exile in Mexico seem possible, though in fact most of the slackers had never been there before.
Among the thousands who went into exile in Mexico for the duration of the war, I am particularly interested in a group of about a dozen individuals who became political activists there and whose history we know both because they wrote and others, including government spies, wrote about them. Most of them were American socialists, though a few were foreigners who had lived in or passed through the United States. Most came from New York City, and many of them were immigrants, several Jewish, and virtually all were opponents of the war and the draft. A number were founding members or at least early members of the Communist Party in Mexico and the United States. A few were famous in their time and several achieved notoriety at least briefly. The central figures of this group-Roberto Haberman, Linn A.E. Gale, Charles Francis Phillips (Charles Shipman or Manuel Gomez), Herman P. Levine (M. Paley), Irwin Granich (Mike Gold), Hendrik Glintenkamp, and Carleton Beals-all formed part of the milieu of slacker activists in Mexico around between 1917 and 1921. Another group, Louis Fraina (Lewis Corey), and Bertram Wolfe, were American socialists opponents of war but did not go to Mexico until after the war was over but then became part of the same radical milieu. Several of these Americans who would become exiles in Mexico had earlier been immigrants to the United States. Also in the picture are three non-Americans, M.N. Roy, the Indian nationalist and later Communist, Mikhail Borodin, the Russian Communist, and Sen Katayama, the Japanese Communist, who were all in Mexico in the years between 1917 and 1926, where they were closely involved with the American slackers. All the of them had spent some time in the United States and spoke English; Borodin and Katayama and both lived in the United States for many years and had been members of the Socialist Party of America, while M.N. Roy had spent some months living in the states.30
Why is this group of particular interest? I think this group, particularly the first wave who went to Mexico in 1917 and 1918, interesting and important because they show us how a middle layer of activists-that is neither rank and filers nor important national leaders-played an important role in the Mexican labor and social movements. They raised (and in fact they embodied) the idea of international working class solidarity. They helped to bring together different labor, peasants and women's organizations, linking them to each other, and to the international revolutionary movement represented by the new Communist Party. They developed a new internationalist current in Mexico, different than the existing anarchist tendency. They found, however, that their internationalist ideas and organization could not compete successfully with the emerging power of the nationalist Mexican state.
We should sketch a few of their biographies to give the reader a feel for the group. Most of the American slackers in Mexico on whom this paper focuses had been members and in some cases leaders of the anti-war and anti-draft movement in the United States, or at a very minimum they had been conscientious objectors for reasons of their Socialist anti-war views. Several came from New York City, where they had been active in and around the Socialist Party. Charles Francis Phillips, a young socialist and journalism student at Columbia University in New York, had become the leader of the anti-draft movement among students throughout the state. He had been a passenger on Henry Ford's "Peace Ship" fiasco, edited the student paper War?, and organized the distribution of anti-draft leaflets for which he was twice arrested, and was indicted for failure to register for the draft. For these activities he was jailed for five days, expelled from Colombia University, forcibly registered for the draft, drafted but then expelled from the military, personally attacked in an editorial in the New York Times, and then received an anonymous death threat. He fled to Mexico with his girlfriend Eleanor Parker in early 1918.31
Another New York slacker was Herman P. Levine, a New York schoolteacher and Socialist Party member who on June 5, 1917 also refused to register for the draft on the national registration day, and turned himself in to authorities. Levine, who also studied at Columbia University while teaching, belonged to the Addison Socialist Club in Brooklyn, and was involved in its anti-war work. In April 1917 he had participated in lobbying Congress in Washington, D.C. as part of a peace delegation. He also served as the Addison Socialist Club delegate to the First American Conference for Democracy and Terms of Peace organized by the Peoples' Council, the American anti-war umbrella organization that took its name (Council) from the Russian Soviets. Arrested, tried and convicted for refusing to register or the draft, he was sentenced to 11 months, 29 days in prison with no time off for good behavior, and he was forcibly registered for the draft. The New York State commission of education also fired him from his teaching job at Public School 160. He apparently left for Mexico immediately after his release from prison in June 1918 in order to avoid being drafted again.32
Carleton Beals, another slacker, had been a student at the University of California at Berkeley, where he belonged to the Socialist Party and wrote for the campus newspaper. After graduating from Berkeley, we went off to graduate school at Columbia University Teachers College in New York and then took a student teaching job in New Jersey. When ordered to report to the local draft board, he chose instead to report to the draft board in Berkeley, as was his right. He informed the Berkeley board that he was a conscientious objector and refused to register for the draft. He was arrested and held for a few days, then released, then re-arrested on charges of desertion, but released after six days. On December 11 he received another notice to report to his draft board which he ignored, and on December 17 he was arrested by a U.S. Marshall and jailed in the San Francisco Presidio military prison. The bureaucracy lost track of him, while his mother found help through Roger Baldwin of the National Civil Liberties Bureau (forerunner of the ACLU). The commander of the base considered Beals' presence a nuisance and had him discharged with classification 5-G as totally unfit for military service. Beals then took a job with Standard oil, but was worried about being drafted again and worried about his brother Ralph Beals, who still remained eligible for the draft. With their parents' blessing the two young men got in Beals' car and drove south into Mexico in July 1918. Carleton first got a job with a German businessman in Culiacán, Sinaloa, and then went south by burro and railroad to Mexico City.33
Roberto Haberman's experience was somewhat different than Phillips, Levine and Beals, if only because he was older. A Romanian Jewish immigrant, Haberman had served in the Spanish American war and later become a pharmacist and a lawyer. He first went to Mexico in 1917 at the outbreak of the war as a reporter for the Socialist Party newspaper, The Call. There he developed a close relationship with Felipe Carrillo Puerto, the head of the Socialist Party of the Southeast and the governor of the state. Carrillo Puerto offered Haberman the job of administrator of the state's cooperative program, and Haberman accepted. Later he took a job as assistant to Luis N. Morones, head of the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers and moved to Mexico City. While not actually a draft evader, Haberman became part of the slacker milieu.34
Slackers like Phillips, Levine and Beals were young socialists whose convictions led them to resist or evade the draft, and finally to go into exile in Mexico. Haberman was also a committed socialist. Linn A.E. Gale, who was at the time perhaps the best known of the slackers because of his publication Gale's Magazine, does not fit that pattern. He and his wife Magdalena were involved in the Democratic Party in upstate New York, where Gale used his literary talents to serve Governor Glynn. When Glynn lost the gubernatorial election to Charles S. Whitman, Gale lost his work as a publicist and his wife lost her job as a stenographer in state government. Gale began writing bad checks, one of them to Saks & Co., which filed a complaint and had him arrested. He was also wanted for using the mails for illegal purposes. He was a follower of Margaret Sanger, and had sent a birth control pamphlet through the mail, which was against the Comstock law. While trying to extricate himself from his legal problems, Gale registered for the draft, and avoided induction for a while by claiming he was going to have an operation on his nose. In December 1918 he was reclassified 1-A, that is fit for duty, and ordered to report for a new physical exam on January 1918. When he didn't show up, he was inducted in absentia on April 4, 1918. He and Magdalena left Oxford, New York in April 1918, went to live in a socialist community in Sables, Louisiana for a while, and then "waded the Rio Grande in a shallow place near Laredo," thus entering Mexico, probably in the summer of 1918. Gale seems to have discovered his socialist politics after leaving New York, perhaps during his stay in the idiosyncratic socialist commune in Louisiana.35 By about mid-1918, the slackers had arrived in Mexico, which was still in the last violent phases of the revolution.
José Allen was also considered part of the slacker milieu, though he was not in fact a slacker, and was not even an American, though he was sometimes taken for one. Alien was a Mexican citizen raised in a bi-lingual and bi-cultural Anglo-Mexican family. An electrical engineer, he was working in a Mexican government munitions plant when Major R.M. Campbell recruited him to work as a spy for the U.S. Military Intelligence Division (USMID). Alien's perfect English and Spanish made him an ideal person for working the slacker milieu. Alien's first job was simply to provide information to the U.S. Army on the operation of the Mexican military factories. Then USMID asked Alien to join the Great Central body of Workers, a labor union formed during the revolutionary period. Alien did so and became the liaison between the union and the Socialist Party of Mexico. When Phillips and Roy came around the Socialist Party they met Alien, and thus with his perfect English and Spanish, he came to be considered one of the slackers.36
THE FORCE OF WAR AND REVOLUTION
To understand the slackers and their experience we have to locate them in the context of the great upheavals of their time, and the political and social forces acting upon them. First, the slackers had left the United States because of its entry into World War I, and entered Mexico just as the Mexican Revolution that had begun in 1910 was moving toward a resolution. At about the same time in 1917 Russia passed through two revolutions, a democratic or bourgeois revolution in February and a working class, Soviet or Bolshevik Revolution in October. These three great forces: the United States as a great imperial power, Mexico and its emerging nationalist government, and the Soviet revolution would push and pull at the slackers.
The slackers were moving away from the United States and its war policy, into the Mexican Revolution, and politically toward the Bolshevik or Soviet revolution. The slackers were repelled by the United States, attracted by Soviet Russia revolutionary social internationalism, and would look for a way to fight for their view of socialism in Mexico. Several of the American slackers wanted to be Bolsheviks in Mexico, but they did not understand Mexico nor did they know exactly what it meant to be a Bolshevik. Victor Serge writing about the years 1919 and 1920 in Europe said, "To tell the truth, outside Russia and perhaps Bulgaria, there were no real Communists anywhere in the world."37 If that was true in Europe, it was even more true in the United States and Mexico. The slackers would have to learn and would have to create their identity.
The slackers' experience in Mexico tended to pass through three stages.38 First, they found political patrons in the Mexican government who protected and financed or employed them. second, breaking from their patrons, they found Mexican and other foreign collaborators with whom they could work to build a Communist or other revolutionary organization. Third, in order to develop their small Communist and labor groups they reached out to other forces in society to create a Communist movement. They specifically sought alliances with radical state governors, the leaders of the agrarian movements, and labor union activists. Given their small numbers and the newness of their group, they proved remarkably successful in being taken seriously and establishing close ties with significant political and mass leaders in several regions of Mexico. Through those relationships, within a few years they had reached with their propaganda thousands of workers, peasants and women and involved some in their project in one way or another, though the party itself remained quite small.
The first matter, however, was how to survive as leftist political activists in Mexico. When they first arrived in Mexico, they found that they were welcome, particularly in government and political circles. "Gringos were resented and hated in Mexico," wrote Phillips. "But we were gringos with a difference. As refugees from the American war power, we were enemies of the American establishment, and consequently Mexico's friends."39 The Carranza government, locked in a struggle with the United States, welcomed the American slackers, and patronized some of them. State governments and revolutionary generals did as well.40 They saw the Americans and other foreigners, with their ties to labor unions and political parties in the United States and later with ties to Moscow and Soviet Russia, as potentially useful allies. Moreover, in a nation of mostly illiterate peasants and semi-literate workers, the American slackers with their college education and professional training, their experience in the labor unions, the anti-war movement or the socialist party, appeared to be political intellectuals who could be put at work in the service of the cause of one or another faction of the Mexican Revolution.
Carranza's Minister of the Interior, Manuel Aguirre Berlanga, became the first principal political protector of the American war resisters. He became the secret patron of Linn Gale, publisher of Gale's Magazine, and the discreet sponsor of the Indian nationalist M.N. Roy who had come to Mexico to buy arms for India's nationalist movement. The Carranza government, which criticized U.S. and British imperialism, and which attempted to organize an alliance of Latin American states against the U.S. government's Pan-American imperialism, found it useful to have its arguments buttressed by American radical critics of the United States and by Indian critics of the British Empire. Sponsorship meant financial support for the slackers and their publications, opportunities to publish in newspapers friendly to the government, and doors opened to Mexican government leaders.
Gale, who later found himself in hot water with the Mexican government, tried to explain his relationship to Minister of the Interior Berlanga in a letter to President Galles: "Of course I had accepted assistance from Berlanga, as well as from Adolfo de la Huerta when he was president) and from various laborites in the cabinet of President Obregon. This doesn't mean that I was a supporter of Berlanga or any other individual. I accepted the protection of any Mexican government with gratitude."41 Gale's Magazine supported the Mexican government, opposed U.S. intervention, criticized European imperialism and the war, and promoted Gale's Industrial Workers of the World and Communist Party organizations. He also pursued his particular causes: vegetarianism, birth control, spiritualism and the occult.42 While nominally a Communist, he put anti-imperialism above the domestic class struggle. "The greatest danger faced by the Mexican working class today, is the danger of intervention," he wrote. "If the Carranza government were overthrown today, American and British capital would come into this country and rule it with a rod of iron."43 "Carranza is not a Socialist," wrote Gale, "but there is good reason to believe that a moderate policy of state Socialism would have been put into place if he had not been constantly menaced by the Damocles' sword of intervention."44 This was after all, the position he was being paid to support.
Other government leaders from a variety of factions also sponsored slackers. General Salvador I. Alvarado, the former governor of the Yucatan and at the time a presidential hopeful, hired Charles Phillips to be the editor of the English language page of his Mexico City newspaper, El Heraldo de Mexico. Between June and November, 1919 Phillips edited and wrote most of the English page of El Heraldo, publishing literary criticism, poetry, news coverage and political analysis. In his political articles he argued an antiimperialist and anti-war position, and put forward a position virtually identical to that of the Communists. He attacked British and American imperialism, and derided the proposal for a League of Nations. In many articles, he called upon Americans in Mexico to act to stop U.S. intervention. He also called upon U.S. labor unions to support the Mexican Revolution. For six months he had an opportunity to work as an editor analyzing the situation of Mexico and its revolution within the context of World War I and the Russian Revolution. It was an excellent training ground for a radical activist finding his way in a new country.45
Felipe Carrillo Puerto, head of the peasant Leagues of Resistance and of the Socialist Party of the Southeast and governor of Yucatan, hired the American Socialist Roberto Haberman to head his cooperative organizations. Later Haberman became an assistant to the powerful labor leader Luis N. Morones, head of the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM). Morones made Haberman his liaison to the Socialist Party of America and more importantly to Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor. President Obregón's Minister of Education José Vasconcelos also hired Haberman to head his foreign language department. Haberman's positions with Carrillo Puerto, then Vasconcelos, and finally Morones proved an excellent training ground in Mexican politics, which he used to become an advisor not only to Haberman but also to presidents Obregon and Galles.46 As he rose up through the institutions of Mexican politics, Haberman adapted to the nationalist politics of those for whom he worked.
American slackers Gale and Phillips found themselves able to publish radical critiques of U.S. foreign policy and articles sympathetic to the Russian Revolution, so long as they did not directly criticize their patrons. This initial period of official patronage proved extremely valuable to the American slackers. These positions as journalists gave slackers Phillips and Gale an opportunity to survey the Mexican scene, to meet some of the leading personalities of the revolution close up, and to follow domestic and international events. Those roles also gave them a reputation among a small number of political activists and leaders as writers, editors, organizers and politicians. But such positions were not viable in the long run because the Americans socialists who were sympathetic to Communism, such as Phillips and Gale, did not share the politics of their sponsors.
Within a few months Gale, Phillips and Roy were ready to venture out into the world of the Mexican revolution and see if they could find collaborators in building a Communist Party. As foreigners they were welcome in the union movement. The Mexican labor movement, mostly led by anarchists and anarchosyndicalists, held a view that all luchadores sociales, that is union and social movement activists, were welcome in Mexico and in its unions. For example, when Huerta in 1913 had expelled some foreigner labor militants from Mexico, the Casa del Obrero Mundial organized a protest at the House of Deputies at which they read this statement:
We want those so-called foreigners by reason of their birth-who with perfect right reside in our Territory, collaborating with our work for the universal good of man and sharing with us the bitter penalties of the struggle for human needs-to be treated with respect.
The barbarous Article 33, applied against them, is an ignominious law against which we energetically protest with an anguished heart on seeing them brutally taken from their homes, leaving their families completely distraught.47
This was the tradition of internationalism, mainly promoted by the anarchists, which existed in the Mexicans unions and made it possible for the American slackers to become involved. They were not foreigners; they were brothers.
The slackers soon found their first collaborators in the Socialist Party of Mexico led by Adolfo Santibáñez. The Mexican socialist movement had been founded by Pablo Zierold, a German immigrant brewer, in 1911 as the Partido Socialista Obrero, modeled on the European Socialist parties. Santibáñez had been a founder.48 But socialism was a minority tendency in the Latin anarchist world, and Adolfo Santibáñez was delighted to welcome the American socialists, and their new friend, the Indian revolutionary M.N. Roy. The two foreigners, Phillips and Roy, not only joined the Mexican Socialist Party, but almost immediately became its most active and leading members. Under the guidance of the Soviet Communist emissary Mikhail Borodin, who had recently arrived in Mexico, Phillips and Roy carried through a split of the Mexican Socialist Party, creating the Communist Party of Mexico.49 They proceeded to elect José Alien to be the party's general secretary, the top officer, unaware of course that he was a USMID spy. Thanks to Alien's reports, preserved in the U.S. National Archives, we have a much better picture of the early party and its activities.
We get a feel for the Socialist Party of Mexico and the milieu in which it existed during the Revolution in the Memoirs of a Rebellious Youth by José Valadés. He describes a meeting of the anarchist Egalitarian Youth in 1919 at the gathering place for Mexico's foreign political activists on the left, the Bakery Workers Union in Mexico City. Genaro Gómez, one of Mexico's few socialists, headed the union, and allowed the Bakers' "Netzahualcoyotl Hall" (named after the great Aztec sage) to be used by a variety of radical organizations. One of those radical groups was the anarchist Egalitarian Youth organized by Valadés. His account captures the international character of the radical slacker community in Mexico City at the time:
Here was Linn A.E. Gale, general secretary (so he said) of the Communist Party of Mexico [PC de M]. With him were two or three others from the United States, who muttered their names between clenched teeth. Beside Gale there was Roberto Haberman. Behind Haberman, Calogero Speziale, the Italian anarchist. After him, Leopoldo Urmachea, the Peruvian anarchist. Followed by José Allen, general Secretary of the Mexican Communist Party [PCM]. Accompanying Alien, Frank Seaman [Charles Francis Phillips], a Communist from the United States. Afterwards came Martin Paley [Herman P. Levine] a Jew, representing the Industrial Workers of the World in Mexico, as well as Joseph Ellsworth, delegate of the Socialist Party of the United States. Finally I greeted Pablo Pablos, a bearded Russian with a beautiful profile who held the hand of his lovely daughter Helen. With Pablo was Alfred Stirner [Edgard Woog].50
Valades' memoir locates the American and Mexican socialists in a world of European and Latin American anarchists. Spanish anarchists in particular played a leading role in some parts of the Mexican labor movement, and anarchist and anarchosyndicalist ideas were widely discussed among the activists. Out of this milieu the American slacker Communists made some of their first recruits to their new party, among them one of their most dedicated, young Valades himself.
Other slackers were also finding their collaborators in other political milieus and in other parts of Mexico. Herman P. Levine, though he had been a socialist in the United States, had by the time he got to Mexico rejected socialism for the anarchosyndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World. Levine found his home in the IWW in Tampico. The IWW had come to Tampico through merchant seaman. The C.A. Canfield's crew, belonging to the IWW Marine Transport Workers union, many of whom were Spanish speaking, arrived in Tampico in 1916 and began to recruit to their union. Pedro Coria, a Mexican who had lived in the United States for many years and spoke English, arrived in Tampico in 1917 and founded IWW-MTW Local 100. By the time Levine arrived in Tampico in 1919 or 1920 the union was an established organization among workers there and one with an already legendary militancy. Levine, using the name M. Paley (and sometimes called Mischa Poltiolevsky in police reports) took on the job of editing the group's newspaper El Obrero Industrial.
Levine's two closest allies in the IWW in Tampico were Coria and Charles King, an American. A U.S. government spy, possibly José Alien, described King.
He is an American Communist. He has been in Mexico approximately eighteen months. He is five feet eight inches tall; weight about one hundred and sixty pounds; dark hair; dark eyes; swarthy complexion. He is very sarcastic and cynical. He appears to be very well educated; he speaks Spanish and English equally well. Trade unknown.
The same spy went on to give a similar sketch of Coria.
Corea (sic) is a Mexican of the railroad man type; age about forty; about five feet eight inches tall; weight about one hundred and eighty pounds; thick, black hair, black eyes; slightly florid complexion. He has traveled very widely in the United States and South America; he speaks English very well. He is said to speak Portuguese fluently. For many years he has been a political leader. He is said to have been imprisoned in South America. He is not a very well educated man, but an active mind and great personality make him a leader.51
Levine, working with Coria and King, first carried out a coup to oust Gale and his friends in the Mexico City IWW by passing a resolution that only wage workers could be members of the union. Levine and his correligionarios then proposed an alliance between the IWW, the anarchists, dissident anarchosyndicalists from the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM), and the Roy-Phillips Communist Party.
So the American slackers in Mexico City and Tampico concluded a second stage of their exile. Having moved away from their government patrons, they had found political collaborators among Mexicans and foreigners living in Mexico, and they had created a new Communist Party of Mexico and in Tampico a new and more serious IWW organization. This was also a period of political sorting out for the American slackers, as they went their separate ways, often in competing or hostile organizations. The Roy-Phillips Communists and their ally Levine and his IWW broke with Gale, whom they considered a dilettante, an opportunist and a buffoon. They had also broken with Roberto Haberman, who had become an important secondary figure not only in the CROM of Morones, but also as an advisor to the governments of Obregon and Galles.
With their Mexican and foreign collaborators and their new Communist and IWW organizations, the most radical group of the American slackers were now ready to reach out more broadly into Mexican society in an attempt to assemble the social forces of workers' revolution. In Communist terminology, they were attempting to move from a small propaganda sect to the creation of an agitational organization engaged in mass work. In less than two years, that is between mid-1917 to 1919, the slackers had become Spanish speakers, succeeded in learning the political lay of the land, established ties to Mexican left and labor activists and created their own embryonic Communist and syndicalist organizations. In 1919 and 1920 they began to establish contact with the agrarian radicals and the state governors, who were just then launching what would become the agrarian revolt of the early 1920s. This would prove to be the most challenging and most interesting stage of their involvement in Mexico, but it was here that their vision of building a revolutionary Communist movement came into contact with and into conflict with the emerging nationalist government of Mexico.
The slacker Communists naturally reached out to organize industrial workers and peasants, the people of the hammer and the sickle. The slackers and other foreigners, working with Mexicans, established ties to railroad workers, port workers, and petroleum workers, as well as urban workers of various trades and industries in Mexico City. Surprisingly they were able to establish, at least briefly, an alliance with some of the leading agrarian organizers, and indirectly with the governors with whom they worked closely.52
The attempt to organize peasants-a complicated category that included indigenous communities, small farmers, and day laborers-grew out of the influence of the IWW, the Bolshevik Revolution, and, of course, the experience of the Mexican Revolution itself. In 1914 and 1915 the IWW in the United States had made the organization of farm laborers a central part of their activities and had had significant success among workers in the wheat belt, efforts that were being expanded in 1917, just when the United States entered the war.53 In Russia, peasants formed the overwhelming majority of the population and any revolution would have in some sense to be a peasant revolution. When he returned to Russia in 1917, Lenin called for a program of "Peace, Land and Bread,"-land to the peasant-and argued that the Bolsheviks should create a "workers' and peasants' government." Finally, of course, the Mexican revolution was largely a peasant revolution, driven by the peasants' desire for land. Emiliano Zapata and his Plan de Ayala represented the clearest expression of this peasant revolutionary movement with its demand of land to the tiller. All of these influences acted upon the slacker Communists and led them to undertake to reach the new agrarian reform movement that began around 1919 or 1920.
What did the American slacker Communists want? What were they trying to accomplish when they contacted the agrarian radicals and the state governors? They wanted revolution, and it seemed tangible. The collapse of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, the victory of the Russian Revolution, and the international strike wave extending from Europe to Asia and to North and South America all made the notion of world revolution seem very possible to many. The seething cauldron of the Mexican Revolution which had been going on for ten years, made it seem to them and to some Mexican radicals as if there might yet be another eruption, the final revolutionary proletarian communist wave. seeing this possibility, the American leftists wanted to draw peasant leaders toward the program of workers' revolution and international socialism. They wanted to draw the agrarian leaders and state governors into the process of constructing a Communist Party in Mexico that would be linked to the Communist International and the process of world revolution.
The political instability and fluidity of the situation in the period from 1917 to 1925, made it possible for American radicals to enter into political discussions with leaders of mass peasant movements as well as with a few of the most radical state governors. Several radical governors and the agrarian organizers did not accept the limits of the revolution being set by president Obregon. Some considered themselves socialists or communists of one sort or another, as did some of the peasant organizers. Felipe Carrillo Puerto, governor of Yucatan, had led his Socialist Party of the Southeast to establish a fraternal relationship with the Communist International, though he hesitated to affiliate formally because of the opposition of President Obregon.54 The governors and agrarian organizers looked for levers to move the national government to the left. In the complex and volatile world of that historical moment, everyone was looking for talent, for allies, for political forces. The American slackers with their implied ties to both Soviet Russia and its revolution and to U.S. political parties and labor unions must have appeared potentially useful in moving Mexico's revolutionary movement to the left. Moreover they were comrades in the struggle.
For a brief period of time, between 1917 and 1925, Mexican nationalism, a broad opposition to foreign imperialism, and a kind of international revolutionary solidarity could coexist in Mexico. During that period, the concepts of nationalism, anti-imperialism, and internationalism all seemed to be versions of the same thing. The individuals and forces involved in fighting for Mexican nationalism and against U.S. imperialism could seem as if they were driving toward the same goal of internationalism. Only in the course of the struggles of the early 1920s would it become clear that the Mexican state's nationalism, while it was anti-imperialist, would not be genuinely internationalist. During this moment of historical flux, however, slacker communists could get the ear of peasant leaders and radical governors.
As they considered the notion of reaching out to the peasant movement, the slackers, now functioning as Communists, identified the three most important regions of agrarian upheaval: the state of Yucatan under Felipe Carrillo Puerto, the state of Michoacan under Governor Francisco Múgica, and Veracruz ruled by Governor Adalberto Tejeda. Carrillo Puerto had already made his decision for support of the Communist International, if not for formal affiliation. The slackers easily established friendly relations with Carrillo and his supporters, but their own organizing efforts focused on the movements in Michoacan and Veracruz.
In Michoacan, Primo Tapia had returned after living and working several years in the United States, first as bodyguard to Enrique and Ricardo Flores Magón of the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM) and then as an organizer of the Industrial Workers of the World and perhaps as a member of the Communist Party in the United States. In his hometown of Naranjo, Michoacan, he first founded the Committee for Material Improvement, fighting for agrarian reform against Spanish landlords and also created the Feminine League (La Liga Feminil). Out of those movements came the League of Agrarian Communities in 1923 and also the League's takeover of local militias.55
In 1917 Francisco Mugica, an important figure in the Constitutional Convention of 1917, had organized the Socialist Party of Michoacan. Tapia's grassroots movement became an important base of support for Mugica, and the governor in turn helped push through the Tarascan Indian communities' demands that hacienda land in the Zacapa Valley be given to them in the form oiejidos. Tapia's League became part of the Socialist Party of Michoacan, and its armed militias were an important force in defending Mugica against landlords or the increasingly hostile Federal government of Obregón. Tapia and Múgica both worked closely with Lázaro Cárdenas, the future president of Mexico.
The slacker Communists decided to seek out Tapia and Múgica in early 1920, perhaps at the time of the May Day celebration. A delegation of American slackers, apparently including Linn A.E. Gale and José Alien, attended a meeting of the Socialist Party of Michoacan, presumably with Múgica's approval.56 The Americans' attempt to win the agrarian leaders to the Communist International was made easier by the fact that the Mexicans with whom they dealt had themselves lived and worked in the United States, some spoke English, and were familiar with the American labor union and socialist traditions. As already mentioned, Primo Tapia, the leader of the agrarian movement in Michoacan had lived and worked in Los Angeles, California and later in the states of the Great Plains where he had been a Wobbly, and maybe a member of the Communist Party of the United States. It appears that at that first meeting, the slackers may have succeeded in recruiting Tapia to the new Communist movement of Mexico.
Allen and the Spanish anarchist Sebastian Sanvicente attended the May Day celebration in the state capital of Morelia, Michoacan, and the Communists were allegedly responsible for hanging a red and black strike flag from the Cathedral, scandalizing and infuriating Catholics and conservatives. Four days later the Catholic right exacted its revenge for the blasphemy-and for the local socialists' radical land reform-by assassinating sixteen radicals, including Isaac Arriaga, one of the leaders of the Socialist Party of Michoacan. The slackers escaped the massacre, but their involvement was used later by Obregon to justify their expulsion under Article 33 of the Mexican Constitution. Almost all of the slackers we have been discussing (Phillips, Levine, Gale and others) were expelled in 1921, though Phillips soon returned.57 Not much later Primo Tapia found himself in an increasingly violent confrontation with the Spanish owners of the hacienda in the area of Naranjo. His ally, Governor Mugica, ordered the establishment of a militia and provided Tapia's agraristas with arms. The increasing conflicts with the landlords, however, led Obregon to have General Estrada drive Múgica from power.58
After joining the Communist Party, Tapia attended party meetings in Mexico City and worked with other Communist peasant organizers such as Úrsule Galván, He founded the Communist Local of Michoacan in 1923, and became the secretary of propaganda. The Local's manifesto called for "armed insurrection of the proletariat" to overthrow capitalism, establish a "dictatorship of the proletariat," and begin to institute the communist order. At the same time, Tapia also maintained his close ties to Governor Múgica and General Lázaro Cárdenas. While the slacker Communists talked about building an independent and internationalist movement of the proletariat and the peasantry, absolute political independence was a luxury that local leaders such as Tapia could not afford. However much he may have believed in internationalism-and he seems to have very sincerely believed in it-Tapia had to have the political and military support of Cárdenas and Múgica. Cárdenas and Múgica, of course, would a decade later be the principal architects of the modern Mexican state. They would later lead the forces that Tapia had organized into the new Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM) and into the Mexican government. In fact it was precisely the ability to control and channel left wing forces such as those of Tapia into political movements such as those led then and later by Múgica and Cárdenas that made it possible for them to build the post-revolutionary Mexican state.
The same sort of situation existed on the Gulf Coast of Mexico. Úrsulo Galván, the leader of the peasant movement in Veracruz, had been apprenticed as a boy to Manuel Almanza García, a carpenter who was also a union member and his first political mentor. Galván joined the revolution, fighting with the Constitutionalists, but when his faction suffered a defeat by the Villistas, he fled to the United States where he worked until 1917. He returned to Veracruz to work in the city sanitation department, joining the union, and falling under the influence of a Spanish anarchist; he joined the Casa del Obrero Mundial, the principal labor union. Galván participated in electoral politics-but became disillusioned; later he joined an agricultural cooperative-but it failed. Then in 1919 the Casa sent him to organize petroleum workers in the oil fields around Tampico and he became involved in the strike against the Huasteca Petroleum Company. Through the strike he became more involved with regional union leaders and anarchists.
About this time, he came into contact with through Manuel Díaz Ramírez, a member of the Communist Party. Díaz Ramírez had lived and worked in the United States, where he had been a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. After he returned to Mexico, he worked with the Communist Party's underground headquarters, led by Phillips and second wave slackers Louis Fraina and Sen Katayama. At least at that moment, these activists all seemed to speak the same language. That is, they had all been exposed to the revolutionary syndicalist and socialist currents out of which the Communist Party emerged in both the United States and Mexico. They were part of a common movement of working people and labor union activists that transcended the border, and that developed a common politics that made it possible for them to evolve together toward Communism.59
Galván and other communists joined the Veracruz tenants' rent strike, an important social movement of the era, led by anarchist Herón Proal. Out of the rent strike movement came a peasant organizing project headed by Úrsulo Galván called the Comisión Organizadora de la Central Campesina. The radical governor of Veracruz, Adalberto Tejeda, contacted Galván and apparently suggested he organize la Liga de Comunidades Agrarias, the peasants' union.
With the backing of Tejeda, Galván's peasant organizing efforts proved successful, and the League became one of the largest and most powerful agrarian reform movements in Mexico. Galván remained a Communist linked to the slackers, but his local efforts were entirely dependent upon Tejeda. Tejeda remained a radical, but his survival depended upon maintaining a modus vivendi with president Obregón. How things worked can be seen by an incident in 1923, when Galván's movement was suppressed and Federal troops arrested him. It was Tejeda who appealed to Obregón to have Galván released.60 Later in the 1920s, when the Communist Party's line changed from the united front to unilateral insurrectionism, Galván broke with the party, preferring to keep and strengthen his ties with Tejeda.61
What was the significance of the impact of the American slackers of 1917 and 1918 on the Mexican peasant, labor and left movements? Historian Paco Ignacio Taibo II argues that, having been chosen in a secret meeting by a minority of the national committee of the Socialist Party and led by a group of foreigners mainly interested in their own country and careers, the new Mexican Communist Party was nothing more than a small sect.62 But if the Communist Party that the slackers helped to form and lead was a sect, it was also a seed, and one that sometimes flourished. Barry Carr, however, argues that the PCM "quickly achieved a significant (although sometimes short-lived) presence among several important segments of the urban, and especially peasant, population as well as among vanguard artists and intellectuals."63 Daniela Spenser believes that 'The Comintern group left little imprint on labor organizing and less on the campesinos."64 Yet, true as that may be, the slackers together with other foreigners and Mexicans organized the Communist Party had initially some remarkable successes, until they ran into the limits posed by the congealing out of the revolutionary magma of the Mexican state.
These two cases of Tapia and Múgica in Michoacan and of Galván and Tejeda in Veracruz, give us an idea of the parameters of power, that is, of the limits of agrarian reformers and local governors both of whom depended on the good will of the central government. They show us how the slacker communists' remarkable success in meeting, recruiting and working with leaders such as Tapia and Galván reached certain limits determined by the relationship between the governors and the central state. The slacker Communists' idea of working class internationalism reached its limits in the practical nationalist politics of the period.
We might say that the Mexican state was emerging as a national force out of just such conflicts. The state would only have power if it could impose its will throughout the national territory, and it could only impose its will if it could keep both the forces of reaction and the forces of a more radical revolution at bay. While the greatest danger came from the forces of reaction and the possibility of foreign intervention, there was also the threat of a radical revolution on the left. Obregón and later Calles wanted to show that they would not permit the revolution to escape from the economic, social and political channels into which they were directing it. Their ability to maintain order and preserve stability was key to getting diplomatic recognition from the United States and attracting foreign investment. To create and maintain those channels, they had to keep the governors in line, and get the governors to keep the agrarian reformers in line. The agrarian leaders and the radical governors thus found themselves torn between their desire for a more radical revolution and the much more immediate power of the emerging Mexican state.
In reality, however, there would be no contest between the Communist International and the Mexican state. The Communist International, based in Moscow was distant and newly formed, an international in the early 1920s in name only, with very few real national parties, even in Europe. In Latin America, it was mostly an idea. Only in the 1930s would the Communist International have the organizational base, personnel, and resources to support the by then small but real Communist Parties in Latin America. The Mexican state just emerging from the cauldron of the revolution was a powerful and immediate force, even if still one in formation in the early 1920s. Obregon and Calles succeeded in eight years, between 1920 and 1928, in transforming the rag-tag armies, guerrilla bands, and raiding parties of the revolution into a genuine army (and in pensioning off many of its generals). They created a national government and a federal bureaucracy, supplemented by the state governments and their public employees. The Constitution of 1917, and particularly its Articles 27 and 123, supplemented by state labor laws and federal regulations, legitimized peasants' and workers' struggles for a better life. The state intervened to become the arbiter of relations between the social classes, between patrones and obreros, and between hacendados and campesinos. The Federal government rose above and balanced among the social classes, veering between the scylla of the status quo ante of the conservative past and the charybdis of an unknown and threatening radical future.
The slackers proved capable of taking advantage of a period of government tolerance and patronage to get their bearings. They subsequently succeeded in finding other foreign and Mexican collaborators in the project of building Mexican communism. Finally, they proved remarkable able in their ability to reach out to other much larger and more weighty political forces in the form of the agrarian organizers and state governors, and to lay the basis for an alliance. The fact that they were foreigners did not stop them from establishing strong relationship with Mexican left and labor activists. They even succeeded in recruiting the two key agrarian organizers of Mexico in the 1920s-Primo Tapia and Úrsulo Galván-to the Communist Party of Mexico and to the Communist International. What they could not do with all of their idealism and talent was offer those organizers the material means and the political power to advance their members' interests. The Mexican state, however, could provide just those things - and it would use those same things, political power and material force, to crush those who would not accept the new nationalist order. For that reason, the struggle in the labor and peasant movement between Communism and nationalism would be won by the latter.
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