Revolutions - 9.23- The Constitution of 1917

Episode Date: February 11, 2019

In 1917 Mexico got a new constitution.  sponsor: audible.com/revolutions. 

and welcome to revolutions. Episode 9.23, the Constitution of 1917. In hindsight, we know that 1915 marked a great turning point in the Mexican Revolution. Looking back, it's easy to see that the revolutionary chaos had peaked, that the era of the Year of the Four Emperor-style cyclical regime change had drawn to a close. But as we discussed in last week's episode, in 1916, Mexico was in pretty bad shape, and the revolution seemed very far from over. Poncho Villa was resurgent in the north.

The Zapatistas continued their determined rebellion in the south. The American army remained planted on Mexican soil, humiliating Mexican national honor. The economy was in shambles. Harvests were bad. The money was no good, and disease was spreading. It would not be in any way surprising if this was all setting up the fall of Carranza, taking his place in the line running from Porfio Dias to Francis. Madero to Victoriano Huerta, that he who wins the crown wins only the right to be overthrown.

But Caranza is going to stick, and today I want to talk about how and why he managed to pull that off, as Mexico begins the slow, halting, and painful transition from revolution to reconstruction. At the core of his ultimate success was that the constitutionalist drew from a broad base of support, both in terms of class and geography. and this broad base of support was kept intact when Carranza moved into the presidential palace. Perferio Diaz had led a narrow oligarchy, Victoria Werta, a narrow military dictatorship. Neither of them had any real popular support. Now, Madero had broad national support, but remember he was so fixated on reconciling with the old regime

that he left most of his most passionate supporters out in the cold, most especially the soldiers who had won the war for him. So for all the talk of Carranza being hated by everyone, he had carefully built up a coalition that could sustain him in office. Using a deft mix of public pronouncements, private assurances, and rewards for loyalty, Carranza had support from large segments of middle-class liberals, upper-class landowners, and lower-class peasants and workers. Obviously, not everyone in those groups supported him, but he could claim supporters from at least a segment of all of them. In addition to the civilian support, he also, of course, had a strong, and loyal military operation, officers and common soldiers alike whose fortunes were tied to his.

Madero had demobilized the armed forces that had put him in power. Caranza did not make that mistake. But perhaps most importantly, Caranza had built the constitutionalist movement to be national in scope and unified under his control. Caranza's rivals like Via and Zapata had only limited interest in national power. Their outlook was so federalist that the conventionists, wound up being little more than a loose coalition of allies rather than a single unified force. In contrast, when Caranza had gone out looking for allies and supporters in different parts of Mexico, he looked for men willing to sign on to a more centralized chain of command. So when the constitutionalists defeated the conventionists,

it wasn't like, okay, we want everyone retreat to your corners and look after your own affairs. It was okay, we won, and we have a centralized organizational structure. Let's consolidate our hold on the whole country all at one. remember, Caranza had very little time for people who did not bend a knee to Caranza. It's why he had enemies in Via and Zapata. But it did mean the constitutionalists were more internally cohesive and unified when they took over. Now, those were the sort of positive reasons Caranza was able to succeed. But there were also negative reasons, too. Most especially corruption and repression. To keep all his underlings and supporters happy and loyal, Caronza

was happy to turn a blind eye as his men rewarded themselves for their efforts. Nearly everyone in the constitutionalist leadership, civilian and soldier alike, took the opportunity to skim, plunder, profit, and extort from anything that was under their control. And upon their victory, they were in control of a lot. The food supply, the railroads, all nationalized property. Anywhere that anything went or anything that was bought and sold, somebody was taking a cut. And that was just the above board stuff. Below board was the ever-present economies of vice, gambling, prostitution, drugs, and alcohol. Constitutionalist leadership took their cut of that, too.

Constitutionalist corruption was widespread and a constant source of complaint and unpopularity, but it was also a means of keeping all of those leaders out there loyal to the regime. Then there was the active repression of those who might threaten the new regime. This repression now targeted not just old Porfirians or Huerta stalwarts, but also Vistas and Zapatistas. Carranza adopted the familiar tactics of Mexican dictators, intimidation, arrests, disappearances, deportation, up to and including assassination. These were heady days for spies and informants who could make a little cash ratting out on their neighbors. Oh, you see that guy over there? I once saw him cheer for Pancho Villa. Or saying, oh yes, I know where the local rebel band is, let me tell you.

This too was a source of persistent unpopularity, but dictators wouldn't repress their people if it didn't often work. This too contributed mightily to Caranza's unpopularity, and not just out there with the people of Mexico who were being repressed, but also inside the ranks of the army who were the ones doing the repressing. Those soldiers had once been part of a noble cause fighting the forces of tyranny and depression. Now that they had won, they were forced to sink into the dull realities of garrison duty, defending the corrupt local magistrate not fighting against him, and it started to dawn on many in the army that they were no longer the good guys. Now, this is going to have long-term repercussions for Caranza, but in the short term, repression did help Caronza consolidate his hold-on power.

This repression, though, was meted out not just on Caranza's enemies, but also on those who thought that they were his friends. And specifically here I'm talking about organized urban labor. Remember, in the fight against Pancho Villa, Caranza had painted himself as the friend of labor. He had promised them rights, encouraged their strikes, and secured an allegiance with the House of the World Worker, the Casa, that radically anarchist labor union. And they provided him with the famous red battalions who then went off to serve under Obrugone in the battles of the Bahia. Well, now that these guys had served his purposes, Caranza turned on them quite ruthlessly. Given the dark economic times that had taken hold by 1916, there was obviously a lot of labor unrest to go along with it.

And in the spring of 1916, talk of a general strike was heating up. There was some expectation from the labor leaders that Carranza would be supportive of their efforts. But instead, they got the other thing. Karanza had no interest in establishing the principle that labor wielded independent power inside the state. So when the Kasa started planning its general strike, Karanza ordered the police and military to take action. They shut down union meetings, arrested leaders, and banned publications. Though this anti-labor crackdown was not the end of the Casa, they would go into sharp decline

and would be eclipsed by the coming regional confederation of Mexican workers, a new union which was more moderate in its goals and tactics. But the sense of betrayal among the workers remained, and when Obrigon needed support for his war against Carranza. Wait, whoops, I'm getting ahead of myself. So over the winter of 1916, 1917, despite all of those things I just told you, Karanz's position was still precarious. He had an organizational structure, and just enough people out there still buying his schick as first chief of the revolution to hold national power. But all over Mexico, he was challenged by local rebellions under still stubborn

leaders like Via and Zapata, and his falling out with the Americans was making it difficult to arm himself enough to go out and finish the job. And it is at this point that I must tell you that Karanza is also facing, in fact, a third major regional revolt that he would struggle to put down. This one was centered in the southeast, down between Veracruz and the Yucatan Peninsula. I think that maybe even Mexican history buffs lose track of this one, but it is a thing that happened, and I do need to talk about it, because it was led by Felix Diaz, nephew of Porfrio Diaz. Yes, that's right. Felix Diaz is. is back.

Last time we talked about Felix Diaz, he was at the center of the 10 tragic days coup. He walked out of the infamous pact of the embassy meeting with Huerta and U.S. Ambassador Wilson, believing that he would be elected president in the fall of 1913. But then, remember, Huerta double-crossed him, forced all of Diaz's allies out of the government, and sent Diaz himself on a special diplomatic mission to the moon. Then in episode 9.15, Dias returned briefly to contest the presidential election of 1913, but by then, Werto was putting the country on lockdown and dissolving the national Congress. So Dias went into meek exile and spent the next few years bouncing between Havana, New Orleans, and New York.

As the nephew of Porfirio Dias, Felix was still a valuable conservative asset, and during his time in exile, he was the center of his own reactionary plots to bring the old Porfirio. back. When the plot surrounding Huerta and Orozco got going in 1915, though, Dias, understandably refused to have anything to do with it because he now hated Huerta as much as anyone. Good thing he did, too, because Arosco and Huerta boarded a train to their doom while Felix Dias lived. In fact, now that Huerta was out of the equation, Felix Dias became the great focus of a would-be counter-revolution. So Diaz spied his opportunity to get back into the thick of things in early 1916. With the mighty Poncho Villa blasted to smithereens and the hated Huerta having kicked the bucket in American custody,

Dias wrote and published what was dubbed the Plan of Tierra Cororado in February 1916, and then he sailed south from Galveston headed for Veracruz. From there, he planned to move on to Oaxaca, the ancestral homeland of the Dias clan. but his ship sank almost soon as it left port and Diaz himself nearly drowned. He and his men washed up on shore in far northeastern Mexico. They were arrested, but they managed to talk their way out of jail without the police realizing that they literally had Felix Diaz in custody. From there, he made a dangerous journey south, passing through Carranza's Mexico City,

still bound for Wohaka, and he managed to slip through the capital undetected. When Diaz got to Wahaka, he found plenty of men willing to. to rally to his banner. But I must stress that though Dias was an agent of counter-revolution, he was not running around out there pitching counter-revolution per se. I mean, that's not going to fly for mass recruitment. Instead, Dias's plan of Tierra Colorado emphasized the liberal constitutionalism of Benito Juarez, liberal constitutionalism that had once motivated and defined his own famous uncle. In fact, if you go through Dias's public program point by point, it's virtually indistinguishable from Carranzas. So you might be asking then, if it's the same program,

then who's flocking to his banner? How does he sustain a rebellion in southeastern Mexico for the next few years? The most important element by far was regional resentment against the Carranzistas, most of whom were considered alien northerners who had come down south to cheat and abuse the locals, rich men poor alike. So in many ways, Diaz was simply giving his name to a regional revolt against Carranz's men. The second most important element was ex-federal army officers, career soldiers who had lost their jobs back in 1914 and now wanted to rebuild the old federal army under the old command structure, which Felix Diaz promised to do.

Finally, Diaz drew international support, particularly because he was far more openly in favor of the Allies. The old Porfarian elite had always been on great terms with the British and the French, and Diaz promised to bring all those good terms back. Not only that, but there were major concerns among the allies that Caranza's antagonistic relationship with the United States was pushing him closer to the Germans. So Diaz was thus able to harness regional unpopularity against Carranza with the military skill of professional soldiers and covert support from powerful international interests.

Now, spoiler alert, Felix Diaz is not going to emerge from the Mexican Revolution bringing back the Porfiriato, but he would be a persistent headache for the next couple of years. So though Mexico was still a hot mess of chaos and rebellion, and Kranza's hold-on power might slip at any moment, in the fall of 1916, he decided it was time to slap at least the veneer of triumphant legitimacy onto his regime. It was time to draft a new constitution for Mexico. Since the fall of Huerta back in 1914,

it had never been entirely clear who or what the government of Mexico was, nor under what authority that government might be operating. And though the war against Huerta had begun as a defense of the old constitution, I mean, that's how they got their name, the constitutionalists. As the Revolutionary War continued, that defense morphed into a promise that when the fighting was done, a new constitutional order would be established. This was partly the rationale behind the Aguas Calientis Convention, to get the ball rolling on a discussion of what post-revolution government would look like. But the convention had devolved into civil war, and the constitutional can't had been kicked down the road. But even after the constitutionalist victory

in 1915, Carranza had not immediately drafted a new constitution. Instead, he said Mexico needed a brief period of pre-constitutional government to ensure the restoration of order. And I think here that he was hoping that Villa and Sapata and the rest would be soon stamped out. But when they weren't stamped out, Carranza decided, partly for propaganda reasons, to pretend like Mexico was secure and orderly again, and so the time had in fact come to restore constitutional order with a new post-revolutionary constitution. Though Mexico had been operating outside of constitutional government since at least the death of Madero, when Carranza called for a constitutional Congress in the fall of 1916, he did not want them to drag out the process. So he implemented

an aggressive timeline. Delegate elections would be held in October 1916. The Congress would convene in November and deliberate until January, and then they were to have a finished document ready to promulgate in February 1917. So the framers of the Constitution of 1917 were not going to have time to carefully deliberate over their work. I mean, the Constitution of 1857 had taken a full year to develop. Carranza wanted this one done in a couple of months. The very very very quick pace of deliberations allowed things to slip in that kind of by accident made the Mexican constitution of 1917 up to that point anyway, like the most radical constitution in the history of Western civilization. So the elections for this Congress took place in October 1916.

Voting was technically on the basis of universal manhood suffrage and followed the districts laid out for the 1912 election. But these elections were not very well publicized, nor did they generate much excitement. Most people didn't know that they were happening, and those who did often cynically assume that Carranza was just going to present a draft of a constitution for the Congress to rubber stamp, so why bother participating in an orchestrated sham? Added to the cynicism was the assumption that the elections themselves would be a staged farce, which tended to lead to a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as officially partisan

constitutionalists swept the election because nobody else bothered to participate. ultimately, 220 delegates were elected, which was not anywhere close to the full complement that was expected, and many of the delegates were elected with just a few thousand votes, some with as few as a couple of hundred. Unlike the Aguos Calientis Convention, which was exclusively, purposefully an all-military affair, the constituent Congress was almost entirely civilian. Only 70 of the delegates held any military rank at all, and most of them were like third-tier colonels or lieutenants, not the great revolutionary generals. Obrugan, for example,

did not participate. The rest of the delegates were civilians, and more specifically, middle-class professionals, right? Doctors and journalists, and of course, the lawyers, who on their own made up 25% of the delegates. The lawyers provided what historian Alan Knight humorously dubbed, quote, the usual indigestible lump of legal expertise. Only a handful of delegates might be called working class, and only a handful of delegates might be dubbed rich ascendado types. So the men who gathered in November were ideologically and socially aligned with each other. They were mostly middle-class professional liberals. It's hard to say that they came in with a broad democratic mandate or represented the population of Mexico.

And many of them were well aware that the constitution that they were about to write might just land with a hollow thud. The Congress opened in the city of Kertaro at the Palace of Fine Arts in November 1916, and after the usual fights about credentials and who would be sat, they finally got down to real actual business. On December the 1st, Carranza himself delivered an opening draft that was based on the liberal constitution of 1857. I mean, it basically was the constitution of 1857, just reworded and reworked a bit. It had all the hallmarks, a federal system with a division of power between the national government and individual states, each with their own rights and responsibilities. In keeping with Kranz's own philosophy, his constitution had a strong presidency at the center,

but it was checked by a two-house legislature on one side and an independent judiciary on the other. The draft also included the standard list of liberal civil rights and private property guarantees. Elections would be broadly democratic and based on universal manhood suffer. and because this all goes back to the very, very, very beginning of the revolution written into the Constitution was the principle of no re-election. But despite the cynicism that surrounded the Congress, Carranza presented his draft as a starting point that he expected would be amended to reflect current realities. But though his critics were wrong that Carranza would demand his draft simply

be rubber-stamped, they were right to be cynical and doubt his sincerity. Coranza knew it would be political suicide to not take some constitutional notice of the expectation of the population after years of revolution, he just figured that anything that went into the Constitution that he didn't like could just be quietly rewritten, amended, and ignored as he and his advisor saw fit in the years to come, which is exactly what's going to happen. But in being flexible about went into the Constitution now, some stuff slipped in that turned out to be incredibly radical. With this starting point in hand, the delegates then got to work in committees, working as fast as they could to go through everything line by line and approve individual articles by the

February 1st deadline. Now, a lot of what comes out is just a rubber stamping of the 1857-style liberal framework, so I won't go through all of that. And instead, we're going to focus on the two famous articles that wound up making the Constitution of 1917 so radical, and then dwell on one very contentious point that would have a major impact on post-revolutionary power consolidation in the 1920s. So first of all, we have Article 27. That again is Article 27, which dealt with the all-important question of land. Article 27 asserted, among other things, that state and federal governments could confiscate and distribute land as they saw fit if they deemed it to be in the national interest. This first clause was rooted in a bit of ex post facto CYA.

Carranza and the gang had confiscated a lot of property during the revolution and they were still holding it. They wanted a firm constitutional basis to legitimize those confiscations. Article 27 then went on to say, though, that the government could seize land in the future if it was just sitting idle and unused. This was meant to spark development because it established a kind of use it or lose it doctrine. But Article 27 then went even further and went on to entrench the philosophy of economic nationalism. It stated that oil, mineral, and other subsurface resources were owned by the nation and could only be extracted with permission and do concessions from the government. So though you could profit from the extraction, you could never own the resources that you were extracting.

And then we go even further down that road because Article 27 said that those concessions could only be granted to Mexican citizens, not foreigners. And in fact, Article 27 established that foreign ownership of land in Mexico was now forbidden. All foreign titles to land would now be converted to mere leases. So Article 27 was a sweeping declaration of the state's control over the land and resources of the nation. The other famously radical part of the Constitution is Article 123. That again, Article 123, and this one dealt with labor. Article 123 required states and the federal government to pass laws guaranteeing worker rights.

It stipulated that those laws must include minimum wages, maximum hours, regulations on the labor of women and children, guarantees for the safety of mines and factories, the abolition of debt peonage, wages must be paid in cash, not company scrip, and finally, the right to strike. This was the first time anything resembling labor demands had ever been incorporated into a political constitution. But the key thing to keep in mind is that Article 123 did not guarantee those things. It only said that the government needed to pass laws to guarantee them. And if the government didn't pass those laws, well, good luck on insisting what it says on a piece of paper. This is a cease quoting laws to those of us with machine guns. Now, the funny thing is that both Article 23 and Article 123, the two most famous parts of the Mexican Constitution of 1917, both passed late at night after almost notice. debate in late January. The deadline was approaching to finish the draft, the clock was running out,

and the delegates were just kind of saying yes to whatever came along. But there was another aspect of the Constitution that was also pretty radical, but which did stir heated debate. And that was the status of the Catholic Church. From Carranza on down, the constitutionalists as a rule were pretty anti-clerical. They were coming from a long tradition of Spanish liberalism that saw the church as a pillar of the conservative order breeding superstition and ignorance while monopolizing land and property. That old anti-clerical liberalism now combined with nationalist impulses that naturally saw the international Catholic Church as an obstacle to the Mexicans pursuing their own national self-interest unimpeded. So scattered across half a dozen articles in the Constitution of 1917

were clauses severely limiting the power, prestige, and wealth of the church. So for example, the Constitution stipulated that education would be universal and mandatory, but it would also be secular. No religious organization could run a primary or secondary school, so the church was just out of the education business. The church was also stripped of any formal legal status, and it was not allowed to own property. So all Catholic churches became national property. Furthermore, any ordained priest had to be born in Mexico, and they would only be allowed to minister if they accepted restricted political rights. They would not enjoy freedom of speech or assembly, and they could not vote. All of these clauses were hotly debated.

On the one side, you had strong anti-clerical liberals, and on the other, not so much conservative Catholics. There weren't any of them around, but moderates, who thought that these clauses would upset the social order too much and invite counter-revolution. But the anti-clericals won out, and so the Constitution of 1917 emerged very anti-Catholic. This wasn't just the separation of church and state. This was the political and legal obliteration of the church. The new Mexican constitution, and still the Mexican constitution, I should add, was ratified

and signed on February 5th, 1917. It was, thanks to Article 27 and Article 123, the most radical political constitution existing in the world at that moment, though it would shortly lose that distinction first to the Bolshevik Constitution of 1918 and then the Weimar Constitution of 1919. But the Mexican Constitution was the first of a new breed of constitutions. Ever since written constitutions had become a thing back in the age of the Democratic revolutions, they had always focused strictly on the legal and political organization of the nation, the balance of power within the state, the relationship of the state and the individual,

the actual mechanisms of passing, enforcing, and reviewing laws. But now for the first time you have social rights and obligations and collective economic nationalism asserted alongside the rules of just how a bill becomes a law. But though the Constitution of 1917 would be quickly denounced as red and socialist and, in short order, Bolshevik, it never really was in practice. For one thing, most of the language required the government to take additional lawmaking action, and Carranza and his successors were happy to pick and choose what they would prioritize. But even in its basic organizing philosophy, the Constitution was not about social revolution,

so much as social cohesion. Having emerged from the shadows of a generation-long dictatorship, and then six years of revolution, at the heart of the Constitution of 1917, was an attempt to put the government in the middle of mediating and resolving conflict between various interests so that the chaos could be put in the past and replaced with a cohesive social order. So including worker rights and a new philosophy on how to deal with land, property, and resources was about ensuring that those who had been so frustrated that they had been driven into rebellion and revolution would now find constitutional recognition of their grievances.

The Constitution was promulgated in February 1917, and elections were held in March for a new national government. Like the delegate elections to the constituent Congress, these elections generated low turnout and little enthusiasm. It went without saying that Carranza was elected president, finally achieving the dream. he had been striving for since February of 1913. He was no longer operating under some vague first chief title. He was now president of Mexico, elected to a four-year term that would expire in 1920. The only man who could have plausibly challenged Carranza was Obrugone, who astutely declined to run. Obrugone wanted to be president.

He planned on being president, but four years isn't that long. So why have a confrontation with Carranza now, when you can just wait a little, and re-election finally forces the old man to go away. So in the spring of 1917, President-elect Carranza, though now operating under a constitutional mandate, was still in a precarious position, and his regime could still be toppled at any moment. And I want to wrap up today not with Caranza's myriad domestic woes. We'll talk about those next week, but with an international crisis that put Caranza in a very tight spot. The Americans were still, as we know, not very happy with Carranza because he refused to show them his belly when they had demanded the right to invade Mexico whenever they wanted.

General Pershing and his punitive expedition continued to sit up in Chihuahua, but it became increasingly clear that Caronzo was never going to give in, and increasingly likely that the United States was headed into World War I. So President Wilson ordered Pershing to withdraw once and for all, and on February 7, 1917, U.S. Army pulled back across the border into the United States. The punitive expedition had been a complete failure. It had succeeded in neither its stated objective of capturing Poncho Villa, nor its unstated objective of exerting more dominance over Mexico. And so U.S. history books would just prefer you didn't know about it. The withdrawal of the Americans was a political victory for Carranza to be sure, but he was still embargoed by the Americans. They not only continued to cut off his access to weapons, but now added additional economic blockades as like

punishment for standing up to them. So his relationship with the largest and most dominant power in the Americas was pretty bad, and that is not good. It was thanks to this breakdown in relations between Mexico and the United States that the Germans spied an opportunity. Increasingly frustrated about the debilitating stalemate in Europe, hardliners in the German high command were recommending the return of unreasonably. restricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic to destroy the allies's ability to resupply from the

Americas, particularly the United States. Critics of the plan said that's going to immediately bring the United States into the war. But in one of those fun moments where all history connects to all other history, the fate of the punitive expedition actually played a small role in German calculation. Because the hardliners were now able to make the argument that even if the Americans do join the War. So what? They're a paper tiger. Look, they can't even control their own border or hunt down a few dirty bandits. This is not to say that Poncho Villa was directly responsible for German strategy in the latter days of World War I, but in his own small way, he was indirectly responsible. So the plan to restart unrestricted submarine warfare was approved, and along with that decision

came the now infamous Zimmerman Telegram. Well, infamous if you're an American high school student studying American history because the Zimmerman telegram is one of those phrases you have to memorize to correctly answer the question, why did the United States enter World War I? The answer is, of course, being the Lusitania, unrestricted submarine warfare, and the Zimmerman Telegram. Not that anyone knows what the Zimmerman Telegram actually is, you just need to memorize it and put it on the test. The Zimmerman Telegram was a cable from Arthur Zimmerman, an official in the German Foreign Office, to the German ambassador in Mexico, and it was dated January the 17th, 1917. It told the German ambassador to tell Carranza that if the United States joined the war with the allies,

that Mexico was invited to join the central powers and attack the exposed underbelly of the Colossus of the North. If Carranza did so, he was promised a generous supply of money. money and guns. And then, when the Central Powers won the war, Mexico's reward would be their lost territories of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. So this was a promise to help Mexico avenge the humiliating invasion and dismemberment of their country back in 1848. So the German ambassador relayed this message to Carranza, who then ordered a little committee to study the question. This committee came back and said, yes, this is insane and we should absolutely not do it. They outlined three scenarios, all of them disastrous.

First, if we declare war on the United States, the United States is just going to give Poncho Via an unlimited supply of guns and industrial war material. Can we withstand Poncho Vio with an unlimited supply of guns and industrial war material? Who knows, but we do not want to find out. Second, if, God forbid, we actually get into a war directly with the U.S. Army, a fully mobilized and very angry U.S. Army, can we win? No, of course not. And third, if by some miracle the central powers win and we survive and we get Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, what are we going to do?

Occupy them? Occupy Texas? How the hell are we going to do that? And just a note, if anybody's listening out there and working for a foreign power who's thinking about invading and occupying the United States, good luck occupying Texas. So the unanimous conclusion of this committee was the German proposal was crazy and Karanza agreed. which was smart, especially because the Zimmerman telegram had been intercepted by British intelligence and shown to the Americans. It sparked immediate outrage, and combined with the February 1st, 1917 declaration by the Germans reinstating unrestricted submarine warfare, the United States entered World War I on the side of the Allies. Oh, also because of the Lusitania, even though that was back in 1914, but you still got to put it on the test.

Caranza was then able to parlay his own desire to stay neutral in the war. war into a promise of recognition and normalized relations with the United States. So he was put in a very tight spot, and he played it very well. But the United States was still not thrilled with him personally, and after World War I was over, they would go looking for viable alternatives. On May 1, 1917, Caronza was formally inaugurated as President of Mexico, a country that was still riven by conflict. And next week we will continue the seemingly endless rounds of domestic rebellion and foreign meddling. Caronza's inauguration also coincided with the retirement, or at least alleged retirement, of his most important, if not exactly most faithful general, Obrugone.

Obrugone and Caronza had been through a lot together, and their fortunes were tied to one another, and Obrugone had been smart enough to not try to run against Carranza for president now. But when he resigned his minister of war in May of 1917 to go home and be a chickpea farmer, which he said was all he had ever wanted to be, he was transparently setting himself up to be called from his pastoral retirement, like Cincinnati or George Washington. And though this pastoral retirement was calculated, I do think that Obrugone truly hoped that he would never have to pick up a gun again.

But, spoiler alert, he is again going to have to pick up his gun.