Revolutions - 9.22- The Punitive Expedition

Episode Date: February 4, 2019

In March 1916, the United States invaded Mexico. Again.  Dome and Bedlam: Ep. 27 Mike Duncan Unscripted Baseball Content Sponsor Link: away.com/revolutions20

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 9.22, the punitive expedition. On the morning of March 10th, 1916, Poncho Villa was riding south as fast as he could, trying to put as much distance between himself and the United States as possible. His raid on Columbus, New Mexico the day before, had already provoked the U.S. cavalry into crossing the border once, and a larger pursuit was likely being prepared. That's what Villa was gambling on anyway.

But even in his wildest dreams, Poncho Villa could not have imagined that that larger pursuit would come as fast as it did, nor that it would do so perfectly all that he hoped that it would do. But for the plan to work, he was going to have to avoid getting captured. And so he and his men rode south hard and fast. On that same morning, President Woodrow Wilson met with his cabinet in Washington, D.C., to discuss this brazen attack on U.S. soil and what ought to be done about it. it. Now, even though Wilson himself was resistant to reinvading Mexico because he didn't want to get

sucked into a war, his cabinet was unanimous that something had to be done. For reasons of prestige a national honor, they had to respond. Via needed to be punished, and the United States needed to be the ones to punish him. So, Wilson ordered the army to prepare for an invasion of Mexico. Their mission would be simple. Hunt down the bandit king Poncho Villa and capture him, or kill him. whichever. The Wilson administration alerted Carranza's representatives in Washington that they were going to cross the border and nothing was going to stop them. To smooth over diplomatic difficulties, the Americans publicly premised the looming invasion on a bilateral agreement that granted the armies of both the United States and Mexico the right to cross the border in hot pursuit of

hostile forces. So in theory at least, if the Mexican army was so inclined, they would be able to cross the border and fight their enemies on U.S. soil, though I wouldn't recommend the Mexican army ever try to avail themselves at those reciprocal rights, if they knew what was good for them. Down in Mexico City, Alvaro Obrugon, now Minister of War, ordered the generals in the North to cooperate with the Americans, but for the moment, all that really meant was don't actively hinder them. Obrugone and the other officers of the Constitutionalist Army were proud, patriotic, and they were furious that a foreign army was being allowed to operate in sovereign Mexican territory. But at least initially, they followed orders. But that didn't mean they had to like

it or that they were going to tolerate it for very long. What became known to history as the punitive expedition took shape over the next few days. The expedition would be led by Brigadier General John Blackjack Pershing, who was at that moment commanding Fort Bliss in El Paso. But who I'm sure you know, was on his way to becoming the commander of the American Expeditionary Force to Europe when the United States finally entered World War I in 1917. Pershing gathered up three brigades of mostly cavalry with some infantry support, and initially they totaled about 6,600 men. He formed these three brigades into two main columns that would travel south into Mexico by rail, flanked by a number of detached flying columns who would pick their way through the rugged

territory of northern Chihuahua. The plan was to penetrate deep into Mexico as quickly as possible to envelop the whole area where Via might potentially be hiding. Then they would close that circle and squeeze him out of whatever hole he might be hiding in. Pershing himself established a mobile headquarters and would spend the next few weeks and months riding around in a Dodge touring car to survey, inspect, and coordinate the manhunt. And I should mention here too that accompanying Purshing as an aide was a lieutenant who begged to be included on the mission, and that was 30-year-old Lieutenant George S. Patton, who was positively dying to get in on the action. On March the 15th, 1915, six days after VIA's raid on Columbus, the U.S. Army crossed the border

into Mexico. As they began to fan out south through the Mexican northern periphery, more units were called in from their various peacetime bases in the United States, and eventually 10,000 men were involved in the expedition, either as active combat patrols or as support units, linking those forward patrols back to Texas. Meanwhile, the National Guard was also mobilized in full force, and within a month, 100,000 National Guardsmen had massed along the border to act as, well, a National Guard, patrolling the border to prevent other attacks. Initially, the punitive expedition looked like it was going to be a quick and clean success.

Via had kept most of his forces together, and after, riding like a bat out of hell south from Columbus, he was now 250 miles south of the border. But to keep the hornet's nest stirred up, he decided to go poking at the constitutionalist garrisons in the area. Those constitutionalist garrisons were now transforming from partisan revolutionary armed forces into just the official Mexican army. On the night of March the 27th, Avia and his men launched a series of raids against some garrison towns west of Chihuahua City. In one of those skirmishes, Via himself was wounded. in the leg, specifically he was hit in the kneecap, and he and his men had to fall back to

the town of Guerrero. These probably ill-advised attacks gave Pershing his first solid lead about Via's whereabouts, and he ordered a troop of close to 400 American cavalry to write with all haste for Guerrero. 17 hours and 55 miles later, these guys arrived at the outskirts of the city on the morning of March the 29th, where they found Via's men sleeping off their hangovers. At 8 a.m., The Americans attacked, and though they inflicted disproportionate casualties, killing 50 of Via's men and wounding another 35 against just five wounded Americans, Via and most of his men evacuated the city and rode away. This near-miss felt like the first step of the end game. They were hot on Via's trail, but instead the Battle of Guerrero wound up being the only time the Americans

came anywhere close to capturing Poncho Villa. Though Pershing and his officers expected that Via would soon be in hand, after Guerrero, he just up and vanished, and the Americans got no help from the local population in trying to track him down. At a minimum, the civilian inhabitants of Chihuahua were wary of this gringo army now running around in their backyards, and at maximum, they were actively trying to hinder the expedition. But it wasn't just hostility towards the Americans that led to a near total lack of cooperation. As much as Poncho Villa's national ambitions had collapsed, this was still his home turf. His name still meant something and many people still loved him. So the idea that the Americans were going to get help from the local population to hunt via down did not survive contact with the actual local population.

Not even a $50,000 bounty was enough to induce anyone to turn Via in. And I mean, $50,000 is a boatload of money. And this is good money too, U.S. dollars backed by U.S. goal. which we'll talk about in a second is a big deal in 1916. But all Pershing and his officers found was sullen malice and a pack of lies. The Americans dashed this way and that chasing down the latest news or rumor that seemed to put via here and then there and then no over there. And then when you get over there, nope, they haven't seen Poncho Villa. The encirclement plan was failing because there was no center to collapse on.

The Americans even used newfangled aeroplanes to go out on reconnaissance flights to try to to spot Villa and his vanished army, but they found nothing. Via could be anywhere, and so he was nowhere. The punchline, of course, is that Villa was not leading, perishing around on a merry wild goose chase, always one step ahead of his pursuers, laughing like Bugs Bunny and waggling a carrot like it was a groucho-Marx cigar. After retreating from the Battle of Guerrero, Via had broken up his army into dozens of small bands and ordered them to disperse into the mountains or any safe spot they knew about and just sort of lay low for a couple months until the heat was off. Via himself, now injured, couldn't even ride a horse, and he confined

himself to mountain caves where he just sort of hung out while the Americans scoured northern Mexico looking for him. There is at least one story, probably apocryful, but totally plausible, that on at least one occasion, Via watched an American cavalry patrol go by from his cave, and they had no idea how close they were. So instead of capturing via quickly and withdrawing from Mexico, the American punitive expedition stayed and stayed and stayed. By mid-April, they were not just hovering around the border. American units went wherever they wanted, and they wound up as far south as the border between Chihuahua and Durango, some 500 miles south of El Paso. And every day they stayed, and every new place they went, resentment at their presence grew.

and pressure on Caranza to do something grew. It was having exactly the effect that via hoped that it would. Caranza was getting frustrated with the Americans for not departing quickly, and to hasten their departure, he actually forbid further use of the Mexican railways. The Americans, meanwhile, getting frustrated with Caranza for not supporting them more. The Mexican army was getting frustrated with both the Americans and Caranza, the former for humiliating Mexico, the latter for letting Mexico be humiliated. The Mexican people were generally frustrated with everyone, and Via just sat in his cave and laughed and waited.

With Via nowhere to be found, conflict finally erupted between the Mexicans and the Americans. On April the 12th, so just about a month after they first crossed the border, an American cavalry unit passed near the town of Paral, deep in southern Chihuahua. They were looking for some food and forage, but the local constitutionalist garrison was hostile and uncooperative. A fight broke out between some of the men, and soon the two sides were shooting at each other. Now, the American officer was under strict orders not to be fighting with the regular Mexican army, and so he retreated quickly. But it was still a bloody wake-up call to the Americans that their presence was not going to be tolerated indefinitely. Pershing was furious that his men had been attacked, though,

and he recommended that he be allowed to occupy the whole state and put it under martial law. But the politicians back in Washington wanted no part of that. Remember, as a rule, the Wilson administration thought that a second Mexican-American war was a bad idea. So instead, they ordered Pershing to briefly halt offensive operations, offensive in both senses of the word. A few weeks later, on May the 9th, Obergoen traveled up to El Paso for direct talks, during which he told the Americans, pull out of my country or I will attack your supply lines. Now, this was partly a bluff. Carranza and Obergaon did not want a war.

with the Americans any more than the Americans wanted a war with the Mexicans. So the Mexican army did not attack, but Pershing was ordered to pull all of his men back into the far north of Chihuahua. But they did not order him to pull out of Mexico, at least not until American honor was satisfied. Through May and June, there was light skirmishing between the Americans and various Vista guerrillas and bandits that they happened to come across. But though the fighting was supposed to be confined to Americans against Vistas, tensions with the official constitutionalist garrisons remained very high. In fact, tensions rose so high that the second Mexican-American War very nearly broke out on June the 21st, 1916. Seriously, all the pieces are in place for me to be delivering

my oft-repeated line about how all the gunpowder was in place and all it took was a spark. The Mexican resentment, American frustration, the concentration of stressed-out troops on both sides, the scheming politicians, officers eager for action. On June the 21st, a contingent of about 200 Americans approached the city of Carrizal. They wanted to pass through the town moving south, but the constitutional garrison commander refused them permission, so the American commander said, screw it, I'm going through anyway. When he did, the Mexicans opened fire. The resulting battle of Carrizal was the single hottest engagement of the whole punitive expedition,

and it wasn't even fought against Via. In the fighting, 50 Americans were killed, another 39 wounded, and 24 captures, so that was like half the force. The Mexican list was 27 dead and 11 wounded. The leadership on both sides were absolutely outraged. Pershing demanded that Wilson untie his hand so he could go occupy the whole state. The constitutionalist generals were now begging Cranza for permission to expel the gringoes. but this was not the opening shot of the second Mexican-American War because neither Caranza nor Wilson wanted it to be.

It instead marked the end of active American campaigning. Instead, they would sit tight, they would not move, but they also would not leave. At this point, General Pershing was very frustrated because of the constraints Wilson had now put him under. And for the rest of his life, Pershing would always be annoyed that the punitive expedition was portrayed as a failure and his officers and men as hapless bunglers. He believed that they could have accomplished their mission if their hands had not been tied. At least that's what he said later. It is worth pointing out, though, that at the time, he was privately admitting that the Americans

had been, quote, outwitted and outbluffed at every turn. Purshing also kept his frustrations with Wilson mostly to himself, though, because he was angling for a promotion to Major General and possibly command of the American army in Europe, should the Americans enter World War I. Lieutenant Patton was much less diplomatic, and he wrote to a friend that Wilson, quote, has not got the soul of a louse, nor the mind of a worm, or the backbone of a jellyfish. But in the ensuing tense and recrimination-filled talks that followed, the Americans were aware that things might still devolve into war. So for about the 47th different time during the Mexican revolution, the Americans embargoed all arms sales to Mexico.

And Pancho Villa sat in his cave and laughed. While Caranza dealt with the punitive expedition in the north and cursed the name Pancho Villa, he also had to deal with the thorn that had stuck in the side of every national administration for the past five years. And Caronzo was learning, too, to properly curse the name Emiliano Zapata. Here, Caronzo was trying to project an image of a leader of a state, regime providing over now peaceful and stable Mexico, and Via, the Americans, and Zapata were making his pretensions and proclamations into a joke. So to turn back to Zapata and Morelos,

we've been neglecting a bit, partly because they're up to the same thing they've been up to since they first signed on to the plan of San Luis back in March of 1911. By the fall of 1915, Sapata and his guerrilla army were back out on campaign. And even with the victories against Via, having freed up an additional 10,000 troops that Caranza then placed under the command of General Pablo Gonzalez, the Zapatistas were able to hold them all at bay. Then in December of 1915, the old reliable Zapatista chief de la O launched a campaign southwest that successfully carried them all the way to Acapulco. But the Zapatistas faced a real crisis in January of 1916,

when Caranza broke out Porfirio Dias' old Pan-O-Palo policy. the old bread or stick. Caranza announced a revision to his land redistribution plan that would allow villages, and most especially the old villages of southern Mexico, the right to keep their communal lands and hold them as a community without them being broken up into individual private plots. For most Zapatista rebels, this was the thing they had been fighting for. It was their single issue. And when Karanza made the announcement, it undercut Zapatista's estimation that Karanza could not be trusted

and that they all must fight on. So that was the bread that was meant to lure them out of the fields. The stick that was meant to hurry them along was the announcement that joining the 10,000 troops already maneuvering around Morelos would be another 20,000, and they would be executing a full encirclement of the tiny state. So January and February 1916 were troubling times for the Zapatistas. Many leaders openly wondered if they shouldn't be making a deal with Carranza,

to sign on to his landry distribution plan, to recognize his national authority in exchange for some local autonomy. The nervous tension and long years of fighting also started to crack their unity and old grudges and hostilities between Zapatista's lieutenants started to break out into the open. Zapata himself was gloomy and moody, and he refused to consider a deal with Karanza. Zapata managed to remain in control of Kornavaka until the end of April,

when General Gonzalez renewed his advance. And troublingly, one of Zapatista's chiefs who was holding a strategic line between that advancing army and the capital suddenly backed away from his position and the road was opened up. Zapata had to abandon the city for Hootla. This time the previous year, they had been occupying Mexico City. They held the future of Mexico, the whole country, in their hands. And now they were back down to only controlling a few cities and their mostly rural hideouts. Morale among the Zapatistas was waning.

All that was left now was a grim resolve to fight on. There was no exuberant expectation of victory any day now. De Laot was convinced that Kornavaka had been lost as a result of secret treachery, and though Sopata tried to stop him, De La O tracked the guy down who had abandoned his position and had him shot. On May the 6th, things looked bad enough for the Zapatist that General Gonzalez reported back to Carranza and Obrugone that the war is over. I am installing a new governor, and all that's left is some of the same.

mop-up operations. But if there's one thing that all of you know by now, is that if you're fighting a war against Zapatista guerrillas in Morelos, that the war is never over, and you're probably never going to win it. So in the summer of 1916, the Mexican Revolution was rolling along on a sort of unstoppable inertia. Civil war was now the default state of being, and the country was paying a price for it. Civil war is the greatest social and economic catacly that can befall a country. There is no natural or man-made disaster that quite rivals it for the scope and reach of its destructive power, made all the worst by the fact that Civil War rarely brings people together, as other shared disasters do, hurricane, foreign invasion, flood, epidemic, whatever. Instead, Civil War forces everyone to retreat inward into isolated bitterness or crass them outwards, angrily seeking revenge against all their enemies. Civil War is atrocious. It is a It wrecks the physical, social, and economic connections that make a society possible. Now, in the early days of the revolution, the fighting had often been a mass popular surge

against the federal army and a small group of elite oligarchs in Mexico City. So there was a lot of optimism and unity of purpose. While leading up to the expulsion of Huerta, the split among the revolutionary factions had created a real, bitter, and destructive civil war. By 1916, the Mexican economy was in the process. process of tanking, and everyone was now as miserable as they had been during the recession years that immediately preceded the overthrow Porfirio Dias in the first place. So what we're going to do is run through some of the miserable things that the Mexicans

were enduring to get a sense of just how bad things had gotten. To start off with, Mexico is an agrarian economy that needs to grow things, both to feed itself and have a stable economic base. Well, unfortunately, the recent wars had done huge. huge damage to the breadbasket of the country. Those campaigns in the Bahia, where Obergon was picking battle sites in the irrigated fields because they made for good trench building, yeah, you can just take all that out. Nothing's growing there. But that was just the beginning. The chaos and mutual destruction had led to huge swaths of cultivatable Mexico simply going unplanted in 1914 and 1915 and

1916. And then on top of that, what was harvested would for sure just be confiscated or seized if an army happened to be in the area. It would be consumed by requisition and without profit. Then on top of that, the 1916 harvest and coming 1917 harvest would be subjected to severe weather, droughts in the summer, cold snaps in the fall, and at least one random massive hailstorm. It's estimated that in 1917, Mexico harvested about 35% of what they had harvested in 1910. That is very bad. Adding to this agricultural crisis is what I might with some understatement call the currency issue. The currency issue is that Mexico no longer had a currency. I haven't talked much about this, but throughout the revolution, there stopped being one single Mexican peso. There was, of course, the one that would be

issued by whatever government happened to be in Mexico City, whether it was Dias or Madero or Huerta, but their revolutionary enemies always had competing currencies that they would issue to pay their own bills. So they were via pesos and constitutionalist pesos, backed by the land and resources that their armies had gotten control of. But mostly, like all revolutionary currencies, these pesos were backed by the promise of victory. And it's one way that you can actually kind of put a quantitative measure on Via's fortunes. In 1914 and 1915, he was printing out Via pesos that were accepted, not just in Mexico, but also the United States, and traded solidly at about 30 cents to the U.S. dollar. Well, after Overgone kicked the hell out of Via in the summer 1915, the value of the

Visa crashed. If it was even now accepted at all, it was trading at slightly more than zero cents on the dollar. Though I did agree that you could get a tortilla, for 20,000 via pesos in the summer of 1915. The new worthlessness of these via pesos joined other worthless paper money that was floating around out there. Huerta had printed millions upon millions in paper money. None of it was now any good. Old Perthirian notes? No good.

They're not backed by anything anymore. Carranza and the constitutionalists had their own currency, but to pay their bills, they had printed out just unlimited reams of paper. And you add to all the counterfeit bills that were, of course, also now, circulating, and there's just no good paper money in Mexico anymore. Gold and silver were being hoarded and driven out of circulation, so there's practically no means of exchange. Barter and in-kind payments became the order of the day. Coranza tried to fix this by saying, okay, all the paper money out there right now is worthless. You can just burn it. But we're going to print out

800 million pesos worth of new money that we're going to call unfalsifibles because they were supposed to be able to beat the counterfeiters. This was supposed to be the stable currency for the new regime, and it was pegged at 10 U.S. cents. But after being rolled out in May of 1916, these unfalsifiable also became basically worthless, and they had to be abandoned by the end of the year. No one took them or believed in them. A social impact of all this involved actually some of the most revolutionary leveling of the whole Mexican revolution. As we'll see more next week, Carranz's promises about land redistribution were never actually going to be followed through in practice. But the uncontrollable hyperinflation and destruction of the national currency

wiped out the savings and material wealth of most of the old Perfurian oligarchy. Some of these families would come back, thanks to their landed wealth in real estate holdings, but cash was worthless, and you often had to hawk valuables just to pay for basic necessities. And the gold and silver that might be backing you up somewhat, the stuff you had deposited in the banks? Well, to pay the army, Caranza was now routinely seizing those gold and silver deposits and just nationalizing it, so all of that was gone too. It was neither planned nor premeditated, but there was a sort of rapid destruction of wealth

that did have a measurable and revolutionary impact on the old elite. The duration of the revolution in the Civil War and then outbrewing economic crisis fed directly into a further social and public health crisis, as these things so often do. There were now food shortages, grain riots, and a proliferation of beggars, especially in the cities. There was some attempt to set up some charity drives and soup kitchens, but it was all improvised and frankly just not enough. Into these malnourished populations, diseases and epidemics started popping up, especially because the breakdown in public order had led to the breakdown in public order had led to the breakdown in public sanitation. The streets of almost every city in Mexico were just an unwashed mass,

sewage and manure and garbage and dead bodies and rodent infestations. All of it have been left unattended for years. So all the old favorites started coming back, smallpox, influenza, measles, a bit of cholera. And then the big one that got going was typhus, which spread rapidly through the population, killing at least as many people as bullets did. It's frankly kind of a miracle that Caranza survived as long as he did, given that his reward for having quote-unquote won the revolution was the right to be blamed for all of this. And next week we're going to talk about how he managed to arrest the cycles of national governments collapsing. But for now, we're going to turn back to Pancho Villa, who looked to be the beneficiary of Mexico's humiliation and misery, because he could now pin it all on Caranza. Via hammered Caranza for his corruption and for the failing economy, for the famine, the rising

prices, the falling wages, and most especially he hammered Caranza for the humiliation of allowing the Americans to treat Mexico like one of their colonies. And though via's public rhetoric and occasional public speeches hammered on patriotic and nationalist themes and a hatred of the gringoes, his principal accusation was that Caronzo was their stooge and puppet. And so he directed all of his attacks on Kranza's forces, never the Americans. He actually studiously avoided tangling with the Americans. An attack on Pershing's inert troops would now be counterproductive. Via had provoked them into coming. And there they sat like an infected wound in northern Chihuahua that Via could blame for everyone's problems. And he never

even really talked about the fact that he was the one who had led the raid on Columbus. He never actually took public credit for it. It was always just sort of a thing that had happened. So, mostly ignoring the Americans, Via made his return to the field in the summer of 1916. It had been four months since his not publicly claimed raid on Columbus. His leg still hurt, and he now sported a huge mountain man beard, but everything else was going swimmingly. Circumstances in Chihuahua had now changed quite a bit since Poncho Villa had been reduced to a cornered animal who was abandoned by all his old friends. The breakdown between Caranza and the Americans

and the unpopularity of both among the citizens of Chihuah had opened a big old vacuum for the great hero Villa to ride back into. Via sent word round that it was time to get the band back together, and many of his old comrades remembered the thrill and success of riding with Pancho Villa. He also had weapons, caches all over the place, and despite the build-up on the Mexican-American border, he was able to do a pretty good smuggling trade. Meanwhile, Carranza's forces were now hindered by poor morale, bad leadership, and the sudden

embargo on arms from the United States. Back in Washington, D.C., the mission of the punitive expedition had now changed. Catching Via would be nice, but it was no longer their principal goal. This was no longer about a hot pursuit for justice and avenging American honor. Not wanting to start a war by continuing to operate an offensive. campaign, the Wilson administration now hoped to exert dominance over Caranza and Mexico by refusing to withdraw the army until certain concessions were granted. The punitive campaign was now a bargaining chip. In September, representatives from both sides met in New London, Connecticut. Neither side wanted war,

but the Americans now demanded further assurances about American lives and property. Specifically, they wanted Caranza to agree that the Americans could come back into Mexico. any time they wanted if they felt like they had to protect American lives and property. And there was no way that Caranza was going to agree to this. And I mean, again, though VIA is constantly accusing Caranza of being an American stute, he was really not. Caranza and his negotiators instead dug in their heels. Basically, you can sit in northern chihuahuas for as long as you want, doing irreparable damage to your international reputation and likely risking another war, or you can do the smart thing and just withdraw unconditionally.

But this now being September 1916, we're leading right into a presidential election. So Wilson didn't want to do anything that would, one, start a war because he was currently running on a platform of he kept us out of war, or two, pull out without anything to show for their efforts. So the talk stalled, but the Americans stayed in Mexico. This meant that General Pershing got a front row seat for Pancho Villa, not only running around free, but rebuilding his army.

When he first came out of hiding in July, Via had about a thousand men under his command. By September, that number was up to 2,000 directly under him, with another couple thousand scattered around operating under Allied commanders. And while Pershing was hindered by the constraints he was under, Via flourished, thanks to the constraints that he was under. Via was good as the wily chief of a guerrilla army. It focused him. It made him plan and think things through in a way that he had just sort of given up on when he bought into his own hype and thought that the Division del Norte would just steam roll to victory.

Operating against a much superior army, there was like 10,000 constitutional troops in Chihuahua, made VIA a better general. It also helped that the commanders he was squaring off against were not of overgun's caliber, and VIA started leading them into trap after trap. His now regular move was to send in a small force, have those guys feign a disordered retreat to draw the enemy into an ambush just down the road. Via did this repeatedly, and it just kept working. Eventually, Via did get a little bit more ambitious, and he got it into his head that he could score a major PR victory if he captured Chihuahua City and showed everyone that the Karan Sista takeover of the state was not inevitable. Via planned his attack for September the 16th, so it would coincide with Mexican Independence Day. At midnight, when the city was in the throes of its celebrations and the garrison was distracted, Via and about 2,000 men penetrated the city.

Their targets were the barracks, the government palace, where Via used to sit in his days as governor, and the penitentiary, where they planned to spring all the prisoners. The Constitutionalist garrison was completely taken by surprise, And for at least a few hours, Via successfully occupied most of the key parts of the capital. But this plan was never to hold the city for any length of time. And by dawn, Via and his men were pulling out. But as they rode off, they left in their wake the unmistakable impression that had been growing since summer, that Pancho Villa was back.

And it was true. For a bit, Pancho Vio was back. Via's re-ascendency would last at least through the end of 1916, and the next few months would see him victorious in battle after battle. By late November 1916, he probably had 10,000 men under his command throughout the state, and he decided to make a second and even more direct assault on Chihuahua City. Over the course of four days from November the 23rd to November the 26, the city was engulfed by a running battle, and eventually the garrison commander decided he was running too low on ammunition

and pulled out with his senior staff, not telling many of the men under his command that he was giving up and leave. When the men realized that they had been abandoned, they surrendered, and VIA was for the second time master of Chihuahua City. This comeback would be short-lived, however. Many of the same factors that were contributing to Carranz's unpopularity would also contribute to Via's unpopularity. The population was sinking more and more into resigned exhaustion rather than a desire to really go set the world back on fire. The inertia of revolution and civil war was starting to be. to find some resistant friction. So next week, we will talk more about how Caranza managed to ride

a kind of cynical exhaustion to power, though there was something of the old spirit left. And certainly when Caranza convened a constitutional convention at the end of 1916 to make some cosmetic alterations to the old constitution of 1857, he did not anticipate just how radical and visionary the result would be. Before we go this week, I do want to be. I do want to to mention that I recorded one of my most favorite podcast interviews that I've ever participated in last week. You guys know that I am a baseball fan, and specifically a Mariners baseball fan. Well, me and the guys at the Dome and Bedlam podcast recorded an episode where we talked about the long overdue election of Edgar Martinez into the Hall of Fame.

And then we did a draft of our favorite Mariners of all time, which started out very normal and predictable. You know, I take Randy Johnson and then you take King Griffey Jr. But then it devolved into a lot of silliness. And I'm just happy to say that I got Ricky Henderson in left field because I love Ricky Henderson and technically he played for the Mariners. So if you want some unscripted Mike Duncan baseball content, please check out Dome and Bedlam. They're on iTunes, they're on Stitcher, they're on SoundCloud, and I will put a link in the show notes. Until then, I will see you next week for the Constitution. of 1917.