Pan American Women. Megan Threlkeld
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political repression and sank deeper into poverty. By 1910, U.S. owners controlled 27 percent of Mexican land, and U.S. investments in Mexico totaled over $1 billion.36
The volatile history of U.S.-Mexican relations intensified with the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Fueled in part by nationalist resistance to the economic domination of the United States, the Revolution represented for many Mexicans an opportunity for political and social change.37 To U.S. policy makers, on the other hand, it signaled a challenge to decades of uncontested land acquisition and access to valuable natural resources, including copper, silver, iron, and oil. Concerned about the effects of successive short-term governments and the threat of potentially radical land reforms on U.S. property owners and investors—not to mention the danger of European, especially German, influence—Woodrow Wilson and his successors tried to influence the course of the Revolution by supporting or opposing various factions, and by ordering or threatening military intervention four times between 1914 and 1927.38 The two countries severed diplomatic relations between 1920 and 1923 over the issue of Article 27 of the revolutionary 1917 Mexican Constitution, which declared all subsoil resources to be vested in the Mexican nation. One of the most dramatic but little known moments of crisis came in early 1927, when both countries seemed prepared to wage war over the implementation of Article 27. Following the peaceful resolution of that crisis, the United States and Mexico resumed some of their old Porfirian patterns in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as the United States again began to expand its financial holdings. But the revitalization of the Revolution under Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas after 1935, which culminated in the nationalization of the oil industry in 1938, once again threatened the two countries’ relationship and the integrity of Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy.
U.S. interference over the course of the 1910s and 1920s in a popular and ostensibly democratic revolution drew criticism from several quarters, but internationalist women in the United States were particularly concerned about its negative effects. Mexico was one of the most significant countries for U.S. women trying to create inter-American networks. Given its proximity and accessibility, it was a logical place to start, and its relationship to the United States demanded the attention particularly of U.S. women peace activists. Mexican women, for their part, began by the mid-1910s to organize and to develop a feminist consciousness. Many of them were eager to reach out to feminists in other parts of the world for solidarity and guidance.39 Several U.S. and international organizations wanted to take advantage of this moment to establish contacts and extend their work in Mexico, but U.S. interventions hindered their efforts by provoking resentment in both countries. As a result women internationalists also devoted significant time during the interwar period to lobbying the U.S. government to modify its Mexican policy.
Mexico is integral, therefore, to understanding the nature of U.S. women’s internationalism during this period. Internationalist ideals, imperialist methods, revolutionary nationalist aspirations, and the contested rhetoric of Pan Americanism coalesced in the interactions between U.S. and Mexican women as they did nowhere else. The interplay between all of these factors was what made it impossible for U.S. women to realize their goals. In the end, their own assumptions of nationalist superiority forestalled their internationalist ambitions. But the ways in which they sought to negotiate these dynamics, and the varied approaches they took in Mexico, illuminate both the possibilities as well as the limitations of inter-American cooperation during this period.
Chapter 1
The Best Kind of Internationalism
Though she was not the first to practice it, the author of the new internationalism in the World War I era was Jane Addams. In her closing remarks to the Women’s Auxiliary Conference of the Second Pan American Scientific Congress in January 1916, Addams commended the attendees for fostering “a new type of internationalism.” Earlier philosophers and politicians, she argued, had dreamed of “a rather formal undertaking” in which they would “pass resolutions and found a constitution, and so forth and so on.” But present circumstances demanded a different approach, one stemming “from the point of view of human experience and mutual interests.” Drawing on her experiences at Hull-House, she pointed out that immigrants from Europe and South America and elsewhere came to the cities of the United States every day and eventually learned to live together and understand each other through common interests and activities. If this could be done “by simple peasants from Germany and Italy, Slavs and Latins, Anglo-Saxons and whoever you please—if they can achieve this internationalism—then certainly it can be done by other people living in these various countries.” Advances in technology, which made travel and communication easier than ever before, opened up new possibilities for those kinds of exchanges even when the participants did not live in the same neighborhood. “We have an opportunity such as never faced the world before,” Addams announced, “to found human internationalism.”1
Addams contrasted her new brand of internationalism with the formal, diplomatic approach that characterized the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before 1914, the hallmark of this approach was the Hague System, which produced the first international agreements on the laws of war and war crimes, and formed the basis for the beginnings of international law in the early twentieth century. Conservative men increasingly dominated this legalistic internationalism; they pursued contacts with government leaders and eschewed input from ordinary citizens. The minutiae of diplomatic treaties and arbitration agreements were too complex, they felt, to allow for meaningful contributions from most men and women.2 In 1913, Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University and head of the Carnegie Endowment, contended, “We must face the fact that our rather scientific and intellectual program is on too high a plane to be understood and sympathized with by large numbers of persons.”3 Addams implicitly painted this approach as “inhuman”—devoid of personal interactions, producing sterile treaties rather than interpersonal understanding and broad commitments to peace.
Her internationalism centered on the activism of ordinary citizens. In the same way that she had mobilized settlement house workers and immigrant residents to transform the neighborhood around Hull House, Addams sought to galvanize peace activists to transform relations among nation-states. Informed by pragmatist philosophy, she blended her commitments to peace and social justice to pursue not just the absence of war but a lasting and just peace.4 She was the principal architect of the women’s peace movement that emerged during World War I and relentlessly pressured the Wilson administration and later the delegates to the Versailles conference to pursue mediation, compromise, and arbitration. Extending to the international realm her belief that “the cure for the ills of Democracy is more Democracy,” she wanted arms production, trade agreements, and “foreign politics” brought under democratic control. Addams’s human internationalism was a practice, not just a theory; it expanded her vision of social democracy to encompass the globe.5
And women were its natural practitioners. Addams’s gendered belief in women’s special mission to preserve peace informed human internationalism. As she explained to her audience at the Women’s Auxiliary Conference, “From the beginning of time this understanding of peoples, of natural intercourse, of social life versus political life, has largely been in the hands of women, and therefore it is an obligation which women have in this generation as peculiarly their own.”6 This assertion echoed closely the sentiments both Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt had expressed at the international women’s peace conference at The Hague the previous spring. Catt deliberately appealed to the “common bonds” of sisterhood and to women as the “World’s Mothers.”7 Such inclusive, communal language was prevalent among women in organizations trying to build solidarity across national boundaries during the early twentieth century.8 Addams’s human internationalism represented an opportunity for women to lead the way toward a more cooperative, peaceful world. Women internationalists’ qualifications, she felt, stemmed not from legal or diplomatic expertise but from settlement work, from moral reform campaigns, from agitation for woman suffrage, and most important, from their inherent nature as women and their desire to connect with women in other countries to promote