Pan American Women. Megan Threlkeld
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All these internationalist organizations recognized the power and importance of nationalism and patriotism. Even the peace organizations, which decried the aggressive nationalism that fueled the great power rivalry, understood its significance not only in the United States and Western Europe but also in regions such as the Balkans and the Middle East. But for these U.S. women, the time had come when internationalism had to be equally if not more important than nationalism. At The Hague in 1915, Jane Addams envisioned “a spiritual internationalism which surrounds and completes our national life.”28 Ultimately all these groups sought lasting peace, and believed with Addams that women’s cooperative efforts could help secure it. In the meantime, each organization pursued its own methods of putting human internationalism into practice not just in Europe but closer to home as well.
Revolutionary Mexico
As U.S. women internationalists sought to extend their influence in the Western Hemisphere, they looked first to Mexico, not least because its proximity made it more accessible than countries further south. From the East Coast of the United States, travel to Mexico City was usually accomplished via train through Texas, though steamships also made frequent trips between New York and the port of Veracruz. A few intrepid U.S. women even traveled by car. Furthermore, the idea of promoting neighborliness lent itself nicely to broader schemes of interaction and cooperation. Long before the Good Neighbor Policy of the 1930s, U.S. women internationalists invoked the shared border between the United States and Mexico as justification for their work in that country. As Emily Greene Balch wrote to a Mexican colleague in 1921, “I cannot tell how much I feel the need of active cooperation of Mexican women and of earnest and effective efforts … between two peoples who are to be such good neighbors.”29 Balch’s assertion was all the more compelling given the contentious relationship between the United States and Mexico over the previous ten years, and the fact that in 1921 the two countries did not have a diplomatic relationship.
Two factors prompted U.S. women to strengthen their ties with Mexico, even as those same factors posed significant challenges to their internationalist agendas. First, the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 had led to increasingly tense interactions between the United States and successive revolutionary governments. Revolutionary nationalism, especially economic nationalism directed against the United States, proliferated in the early years of the war in slogans such as “Mexico for the Mexicans!” A series of U.S. military interventions and threats of interventions between 1914 and 1919 further inflamed that nationalism. As supporters of peaceful interstate relations, U.S. women wanted to promote goodwill between the two countries in order to counter diplomatic tensions, but the nationalism engendered by the Revolution and stoked by the U.S. government was at odds with their own internationalism. Second, a nascent feminist movement was brewing in Mexico, and many U.S. women used that movement to identify contacts and forge connections with Mexican women. But while not all Mexican feminists cleaved wholeheartedly to a Revolution that tended to marginalize their political roles in society, many of them echoed the political and economic nationalism that was growing in strength and popularity. Their frustrations with the United States created potential points of conflict with U.S. women internationalists over priorities and U.S. policies.
Revolutionary nationalism and U.S. interventions in Mexico escalated in a vicious cycle between 1910 and 1920. Economic nationalism had been building in Mexico during the final years of the Porfiriato, the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Frustrated by decades of partnerships between U.S. businesses and the Díaz regime, which modernized Mexico at the expense of democratic processes and the well-being of poor and working-class Mexicans, reformers pressured Díaz to hold free elections in 1910. After Díaz was ousted in 1911 and his democratically elected successor Francisco Madero proved unable to consolidate power, the United States grew increasingly alarmed about potential threats to U.S. businesses and landowners, not only from the general violence of the war but from campaigns to target foreigners. Repeated attempts on the part of the United States to intervene in and dictate the course of the Revolution only engendered more resentment and hostility. In 1914, citing the illegal arrest of several soldiers in Tampico, U.S. troops occupied the eastern port of Veracruz. Wilson’s goal was to land troops on the eastern shore and advance toward Mexico City to force a change in government, but U.S. troops were unable to hold Veracruz, and Wilson was forced to withdraw. In 1915, revolutionary leader Pancho Villa provoked Wilson by attacking the town of Columbus, New Mexico, and killing seventeen U.S. citizens. As a result, Wilson directed General John Pershing’s “Punitive Expedition” to invade northern Mexico to break up Villa’s army and capture the revolutionary himself. Pershing could not achieve either goal. In 1919 tensions flared again when the U.S. vice-consul in Puebla, William Jenkins, was reportedly kidnapped by Mexican rebels and then accused of having staged the incident to provoke U.S. intervention.30
Wilson also feared that anti-Americanism would lead Mexico into alliances with nations at odds with the United States—first Germany, and later the Soviet Union. Between 1914 and 1917, Germany worked hard to establish ties with individuals and groups in Mexico and then to use those relationships to destabilize the Mexican government in order to distract the United States. For instance, in 1915, German agents in Mexico tried to restore deposed military leader Victoriano Huerta to power, in an effort to cause trouble for the United States. In February 1917, German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann instructed the German ambassador to approach president Venustiano Carranza about a German-Mexican alliance against the United States. The telegram was intercepted and decoded by the British, and subsequently published in the United States, hastening U.S. entry into World War I.31 After November 1917, many Mexican intellectuals openly expressed admiration for the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Two years later, the Mexican Socialist Party changed its name to the Mexican Communist Party; in 1922 the group was accepted as a formal member of the Communist International, also known as the Third International. Throughout the 1920s, U.S. policy makers worried about what they saw as a growing affinity between Mexico and the Soviet Union.32
But by far the most contentious issue between the two nations was Article 27 of the 1917 Mexican Constitution. Promulgated by Carranza, the constitution institutionalized the anticlericalism and economic nationalism of his administration. It also elevated the status of the majority of Mexicans by promising sweeping land reforms, and by giving the government unprecedented power to intervene on behalf of workers against employers. Article 27 declared all land and subsoil resources vested in the Mexican nation. To what extent Carranza intended to implement the article is not clear, but on paper it represented a direct and significant threat to U.S. businesses and landowners. In August 1919, the U.S. Senate established a subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations to investigate the Mexican situation. Senator Albert B. Fall, who strongly supported the idea of U.S. military intervention, chaired the subcommittee. The subcommittee released a report in June 1920 recommending that the United States refuse to recognize any Mexican government without an agreement protecting U.S. landowners and financial investments. When Mexican President Á lvaro Obregón refused in 1920 to exempt U.S. interests from Article 27, U.S. President Warren Harding severed diplomatic ties and refused to recognize Obregón. The two countries did not restore their formal relationship until 1923.33
Revolutionary nationalism and patriotism also grew among ordinary Mexicans, who sought to claim the promises of the Revolution for themselves. This included feminist activists, who began to organize themselves during these years. Many of them were reacting against a late nineteenth-century traditional feminine ideal, according to which women’s lives centered on the home and the church, and remained separate from the male spheres of political and intellectual activity. Encouragement for women’s political participation first arose among opponents of the Díaz regime. Some Díaz opponents supported expanded education for women and emancipation from the yoke of tradition, particularly as part of a larger effort to attack the power of the Catholic Church. During the Revolution, the Constitutionalists, led by Venustiano Carranza, likewise saw feminists as a potential ally against the Church. None of these revolutionary factions were particularly interested in equality or advancing women’s rights. But they did offer feminists a new political language of constitutionalism and representative government to advance their cause. In the mid- to late 1910s, activist women began to co-opt revolutionary ideals of womanhood to argue for greater individual freedoms, greater access to education, and