Notice how some homes sell faster in your neighborhood? It's not luck, it's local know-how. REMAX agents know their streets, schools, and communities inside and out. And with REMAX, those local pros are everywhere.
Which means when you're ready to buy or sell, you'll get trusted neighborhood insight that puts you a step ahead. Reach out today. REMAX, the experts close to home. Each office is independently owned and operated.
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. Episode 9.6, The Presidential Succession of 1910. Last time, we discussed a growing disenchantment with the Porphyriato, wrapping things up with the infamous Creelman interview of 1908, when President Porphyrio Díaz just sort of casually mentioned that he was not planning to run for re-election in 1910. This was huge news, to say the least.
But I think the real kicker of the Creelman interview was not just Díaz saying he wouldn't run again. It was also the bit I quoted at the end of last week's show when he said, I would welcome a party of opposition in the Mexican Republic in the happy inauguration of a completely democratic government in my country. So he wasn't just saying, I won't run again, but by the way, here's my hand-picked successor who I expect you to support. Díaz was issuing an open invitation for a genuine political opposition to form.
This turned out to be a huge problem for Díaz because people took him at his word. They accepted the invitation. And so the little snowball started rolling down the hill and turning into a revolutionary avalanche. But wherever it was read and discussed, the question at the forefront of everyone's mind was, well, what happens now?
There were men and women in their thirties who literally had no memory of life without President Díaz. So what happens now? Both would-be opposition leaders and stalwart regime loyalists faced this question. Initially, Díaz inviting dissenting voices into the political discourse seemed genuine, and various authors were allowed to publish books and pamphlets that address how the coming election could be made truly representative and democratic, and what direction Mexico should take when Don Porphyrio stepped aside.
Many called for the creation of some kind of democratic party that would run on a platform of free and fair elections, the protection of civil rights, and the end of the petty tyrannies that have faced politicos. A few went so far as to address social issues, taking aim at the monopolization of land and the corrosive influence of foreign investors, but the most famous and influential of these books was called The Presidential Succession of 1910. And friends, it is time to meet the man who wrote that book and who would be at the center of the coming storm, Francisco Madero. Francisco Madero was born on a sprawling hacienda in Coahuila in 1873, the eldest of what would eventually be 15 children.
The Maderos were not some random provincial family. They were probably one of the 10 or 15 richest families in Mexico. The old patriarch of the clan, Evaristo, was still alive and kicking, even though he was a couple of years older than Porphyrio Díaz. The Maderos had owned extensive properties in the north for generations, and as a youth, Evaristo had watched a huge chunk of their property disappear into the Republic of Texas, never to be seen again.
Evaristo had been a patriotic liberal. He had fought in the armies of Benito Juarez against the French, and then when Porphyrio Díaz came to power, Evaristo served as governor of Coahuila from 1880 to 1884. But like many of the old liberal guard, he ran a foul of Díaz's personalist authoritarianism, and Evaristo retired from politics to focus on growing the family of states. And in many ways, the Maderos were the perfect Porphyrian family.
They made no trouble for Díaz politically, and the state focused on economic progress and modernization. The Maderos acquired vast and diversified estates and properties. They owned cotton plantations and mines, mills, distilleries, textile factories, a bit of everything that added up to a lot of wealth. And though they made no political waves, their wealth put them inside the elite of the elite.
So Francisco was born in 1873 with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was the crown prince of the Madero clan, and he was given a proper rich boy education. He was sent to the United States for school, and then on to Europe for five years, which he spent mostly in Paris, and then back to the United States where he went to Berkeley to study agricultural science. He returned home in 1893 at the age of 20, bursting with intelligence, energy, and ideas.
A restless reformer, Francisco further improved and modernized the family of states, and introduced the latest methods and technologies. In addition to the general enhancement of the family, Francisco was also given title to various properties in his own right, and by 1900 he had made a personal fortune for himself. Francisco Madero also, I must mention, cut a very eccentric figure. He was quite small even for his day.
He stood at just five foot three. He was also an enthusiastic adherent of every fashionable pseudoscientific fad that was swirling around at the turn of the century. Spiritualism, theosophy, homeopathy. It was not a combination because Francisco was as fervent a believer in the latest in real science and progress as he was in the crank new agey style pseudosciences.
But he managed to hold them both in his creative and clever little head. He was also not strictly an economic liberal, and he believed that the welfare of the people must go hand in hand with economic growth. So he paid high wages and benefits and provided social services to his workers, employees, and residents of the towns where Madero's held property. According to Madero's own account, he first turned his attention to politics in 1903 when he read about the brutal treatment of demonstrators in neighboring Nuevo León by General Reyes.
We talked about that incident last week. Though to mention again Madero's eccentricities, he also said that this revelatory call to politics was aided by some helpful advice given to him by the ghost of his dead brother who urged him to liberate Mexico from tyranny. Now 30 years old, Francisco Madero broke with the family's apolitical turn and he re-embraced their liberal roots. Now this was a bit dangerous given that the liberal congresses we talked about last week had just been broken up.
But Madero went ahead and formed his own liberal political club. He called it the Club Benito Juarez, cloaking it in the memory of a man who would now become something of a patron saint of Mexican liberalism. The Club Benito Juarez endorsed real elections, real democracy, and constantly used the restoration of the Constitution of 1857 as a baseline for what freedom ought to look like. Madero's emerging ideology, such as it was, was a mix of classical liberalism augmented by the kind of progressive social reforms he had tried to implement on the family of states.
The efforts of the Club Benito Juarez were initially aimed at local politics. In 1904, Madero and his friends tried to oust the unpopular and corrupt mayor of San Pedro, but they lost thanks to a mix of police tactics, voting booth shenanigans, and ultimately the authorities just declaring the incumbent mayor the winner. Undeterred, Madero and his friends moved on to a bigger fish, the very unpopular governor of Coahuila, Miguel Cardenas. Cardenas was deeply unpopular and causing a lot of problems, and when Madero launched his bid to unseat him in 1905, he first tried to negotiate with Dias' agents and said, look, your boy is making you look very bad, so drop your support for him and back us instead.
But instead, the regime dug in its heels. Not only was Cardenas re-elected, but Madero's newspaper was shut down and a warrant went out for his arrest. But this is the Maderos we're talking about, and they used their many powerful friends in Mexico City to get the warrant for Francisco quashed. The next few years were particularly difficult for everyone in northern Mexico, from the lowest peasant to the great Madero clan.
American landowners continued to proliferate, gobble up more land, and divert precious water to their foreign-owned, for foreign export and foreign profit, estates. And the Maderos was a whole state out of politics, but they clashed with American agents and investors. They were locked in lawsuits and lobbying and counter-lobbying efforts in Mexico City and Washington, D.C. And then remember from last week, at the end of 1907, Mexico got hit hard with the double whammy of the panic of 1907 and resulting recession, and the crop failures and drought that were leading to hunger, poverty, and increased dislocation and desperation, particularly in northern Mexico.
All of this was just getting started when the Creelman interview dropped in March of 1908, and having cut his teeth in local politics, 34-year-old Francisco Madero decided this was the invitation he had been waiting for to take his program and his ambitions to the national level. The president just said, I would welcome a party of opposition in the Mexican Republic and the happy inauguration of a completely democratic government in my country. Madero was among those who accepted this invitation. Madero spent a good chunk of 1908 working on what became the short book, The Presidential Succession of 1910, which was published in January of 1909.
It was presented as a brief analysis of Mexican history. Madero, of course, lauded Benito Juarez, the Constitution of 1857, and other heroic liberals. He lamented the slip into authoritarianism, the rise of petty tyranny. The book was principally focused on political issues of democracy and liberty, but most importantly, Madero honed in on the necessary return of the principle of no re-election, that we must prevent men from entrenching themselves in power indefinitely.
He also made a point of not directly criticizing Dias too much, and in fact went out of his way to laud the president for presiding over an era of unparalleled economic growth and modernization. But the cost of lost liberty was now outweighing the benefits of material progress. The Presidential Succession of 1910 would become the most prominent of the opposition literature that sprouted up in 1908 and 1909, and Madero used it as an excuse to start going out on speaking tours. He had come to believe more than anything that as long as opposition groups in several states remained disunited, that they could be individually crushed by the center.
But if they joined together, maybe they could collectively fight back. And so Madero set out to build a national movement. Now even though I've spent the last eight minutes or so talking about Francisco Madero, in early 1909, he hardly looked like he was going to be a major player in the coming elections of 1910. I mean, nobody paid much attention to eccentric outsiders like Madero who were looking to challenge the regime, to change it, reform it, transform it.
The real action was going to be among those inside the regime looking to inherit the regime. The key point here is that Porfirio Dias was approaching his 80th birthday, and even if he did what everyone expected him to do and say, oh, wait, yes, I am actually going to run again, it was unlikely he was going to survive his next term. Those on the inside knew the president was slipping. He was getting slower both physically and mentally.
He was old and tired and stuck in his ways. And this was all hidden from the public, of course, but with the old man clearly deteriorating, getting named to the vice presidency was now the prize to be won because that guy was going to become president whenever Dias died. So the jockeying to become Dias' heir was where the real action was, and that struggle re-opened the rift between the científicos in Mexico City and an array of outsiders who, while loyal to Dias and the regime, wanted political changes made. And we set this up a bit last week because if you were in this loyal opposition camp, the man whose name was now on the tip of your tongue was the guy we introduced in our last episode, General Bernardo Reyes.
In many ways, Reyes was the perfect candidate to succeed Dias. He had an extensive military background. He held porphyrian beliefs in both order and progress. As governor of Nuevo Leon, Reyes had displayed a zeal for economic modernization coupled with some patrician concern for the poor.
But he also had no love for popular politics and was always happy to wield the porphyrian stick when the porphyrian bread was rejected. And above all, Reyes was scrupulously and unconditionally loyal to Dias. Over the years, Dias had subjected Reyes to various slights and public humiliations, and Reyes had borne it all without making a peep. So when Dias said, I am not going to run again in 1910, a lot of people said, ha, it's time for President Reyes.
Now the guys who coalesced around Reyes are a mixed bunch, but they all shared one thing in common. They, like Reyes, were rivals of the científico clique in Mexico City that had held such an influential hold on Dias these last few years. Remember, Reyes and the científicos had clashed over the years going back even before Reyes' brief stint as minister of war, which, remember, the científicos had helped make a brief stint as minister of war. So even though everyone I'm about to talk about is loyal to Dias and wants to basically continue the regime, there were subtle ideological and personal differences between them that lined them up into this loyal oppositional camp.
So early supporters of Reyes included men who wanted more progressive political and social reform, who wanted to believe what Dias himself claimed, that Dias' own run of successive re-elections was meant to be the transition period, and when he stepped down, that would be the end of authoritarian Mexico, which had always been portrayed as a necessary evil. Also among Reyes' early supporters were members of the government who yearned for a turnover in the upper rungs of power. These all tended to be younger men whose ambitions were being stifled by the continued presence of a bunch of old fuddy-duddies monopolizing every office and ministerial post. Also looking to Reyes were provincial elites who had long ago made their personal peace with Dias, but who did not like the científicos who surrounded him or their haughty condescension.
These provincial elites saw the old man's departure as a way to get back into power and then sprinkled into the growing Reyes' movement as there always are in movements like this were an array of guys prosecuting personal grudges and rivalries. In January of 1909, a core group of a loyal opposition formed an organization called the Partido Democrático, the Democratic Party, and though Reyes made no public move to join them and they in turn made no declaration of support for any particular candidate, the Democratic Party was assumed to be a stalking horse for Reyes. And when they spread out to get allies in other cities in Mexico, they were among the first to be shocked at how enthusiastic and receptive the people were to their message. They discovered that much of what had driven the formation of the liberal clubs back around the turn of the century was still out there.
The frustrated, educated middle classes whose dignity and self-respect were constantly challenged by the farce of democracy and the arbitrary petty rule of the FAs politicos and the corrupt officials that surrounded them. So when the Democratic Party guys showed up preaching the mildness of liberal reforms and a push for a bit more democracy and whispering the name Bernardo Reyes, they found lots of enthusiastic support. Reyes himself remained totally silent and let all of this work be done by surrogates never so much as hinting that he had any connection to any of it and that it was all quote-unquote spontaneously to call for Dias to run for president once again and right on cue Dias let it be known that despite his misgivings and honest desire to step away from the presidency that this was simply not yet the time and so by the time the Democratic Party was forming in January of 1909 most everyone was assuming that Dias would in fact be running for president again so the object was not necessarily to make Bernardo Reyes president but to force a political marriage between Dias and Reyes to get Dias to make Reyes vice president. Their campaign was meant to publicly demonstrate Reyes' popularity to say to the president look how much support Reyes has throughout Mexico with the implication of course being all of that support can be yours if you name Reyes vice president and if you don't you can bet all this popular support will be against you but if this was the idea then it backfired.
The sudden rise in popular support for Reyes made Dias paranoid that if he tapped Reyes for vice president that a coup would probably be the next step so Dias rejected the proposed marriage with Reyes in April of 1909 the various re-electionist clubs sent delegates to a national convention where they formally nominated Porfirio Dias for what would be his seventh re-election for vice president they went again with Ramon Corral who remember was a personally unpopular member of the scientifical clique his continuation as vice president meant that Dias thought he was inoculating himself against the possibility of the coup he so obviously feared but it's not like he was doing anything to groom Corral for the presidency Corral was kept in the dark he was not consulted about anything or given any real power or responsibility when Dias both accepted the nomination for another re-election and passed over Reyes for the vice presidency the Reyes club only redoubled their efforts and they started moving out from loyal opposition to disloyal opposition because while some of them really did want political reform for its own sake most of them looked at the continued rule of the scientificals as closing the door not just on reform but on anyone else ever getting a chance to wield power and so included among the Reyes as now were not just private citizens but also mayors and state governors and senior army officers Through the summer of 1909, Maristas continued to send out speakers, organize events, and distribute literature. And the tone of their attacks was getting sharper. They were not just gone for political reform or lambasting a hated corral. They were also criticizing Díaz himself.
And thousands now were turning up to Marista events throughout Mexico, with particularly strong showings of support around Monterrey in Nuevo León and Guadalajara in Reyes' home state of Jalisco. Now, Reyes himself continued to play no public role in this campaign on his behalf, and only ever publicly supported Díaz and Corral. But despite Reyes' professed loyalty, the insulting tone of the Marista opposition was getting a bit much for the president, and Díaz's paranoia only grew. To Díaz, this democratic party looked like the beginning of a broad, national, popular political movement that was coalescing around one of the most popular men in Mexico, which is, to say, a giant threat to his continued rule.
To try to counter the popular Reyes movement, the regime tried to beat them at their own game. The re-electionists sent out their own speakers. They organized their own events and distributed their own literature. But the results were a bit embarrassing.
Pro-Díaz rallies and speeches were often poorly attended, and often only attended by those scared not to show their faces for fear of getting marked down as a troublemaker by the local jefe politico. Meanwhile, the few pro-regime periodicals couldn't keep up with the increasing torrent of mockery and attacks on old Don Porfirio and his cronies in the opposition presses. When some re-electionist speakers came to Guadalajara, they were greeted by 3,000 jeering demonstrators. It sparked low-key unrest.
It took the local jefe politico four days to fully restore order. So with this brief foray into popular politics getting them nowhere, the regime supporting re-electionists went back to their more traditional tactics. Local bosses and police shut down the opposition political clubs, they seized printing presses, and when they could think of a plausible reason, they would arrest opposition leaders and potential troublemakers. So by the end of the summer in 1909, the Reyes were being harassed, intimidated, and even arrested.
They could feel the hard pinch of repressive authoritarianism returning after the brief, and clearly fake, open invitation for them to form a real opposition in the Mexican Republic. Meanwhile, Dias was also moving personally against Reyes. In July of 1909, the president appointed an old retired general named Geronimo Trevino to head the third military zone of Mexico. This was a large regional area that included Reyes' base of operations in Nuevo Leon.
The selection of Trevino was Dias coming back full circle. An old liberal veteran of the reform war and the war against the French, and thus an old comrade-in-arms of Dias. Trevino had clashed with Dias after Dias became president, and it was partly to undermine the local power base of General Trevino that Dias had first sent Renato Reyes to Nuevo Leon back in the mid-1880s. And now here he was being recalled to do the reverse.
Trevino was being called in to contain Reyes. And he did. So in this moment of crisis for the Reyes, they naturally looked now for Reyes to lead them. They saw these moves and were like, OK, they're coming for us.
Let's do this. Let's fight back. Now is the time. They wanted Reyes to speak out, to mount his horse and lead a counterattack.
But Reyes was not the man they wanted him to be, and he was never going to be the man they wanted him to be. His supporters were trying to cast Reyes in a role that he refused to play. He was loyal to Dias. He was opposed to popular politics.
He was never going to put himself at the head of a popular uprising. Bernardo Reyes was ambitious. He did want to be president, but not this way. He wanted Dias to name him vice president, to recognize him as a worthy heir so that he could inherit the regime from the inside, not overthrow it from the outside.
To put it bluntly, Reyes was never the threat that Dias believed him to be. And so Dias' treatment of Reyes really is one of the old president's biggest mistakes. Reyes was the perfect successor. He was almost a spitting image of Dias, the same beliefs, the same style.
He offered nothing but total loyalty. But rather than seeing all this as an asset, Dias decided it was a threat. And so not only did he miss a chance to pass power to a pretty popular, intelligent, and capable heir who would have continued much of Dias' own policies, he disowned and banished Reyes. In November 1910, Dias ordered Reyes to go on a fact-finding mission Not only did this deny Dias his most worthy successor, when the chaos of the revolution came about a year later, Reyes, the best general and most popular leader on the Porfirian side, was in Europe.
Oh, and one more thing before we move on. Old General Trevino? Yeah, he's an old-school liberal, and he's already in regular friendly contact with Francisco Madero. Meanwhile, in the background of all this played out some state elections that hinted that Dias' invitation for a democratic opposition to join the Mexican Republic was complete BS.
Of particular note for us, though I'm only going to mention it in passing, was the governor's race in Madero's home state of Coahuila, which saw the government-backed candidate challenged by a Reyesa liberal named Venustiano Carranza. Carranza ran a strong campaign and it looked like he might win, but when election day finally came, the ballots disappeared into the hands of the local officials who then simply announced that Carranza had lost. Anyway, remember that name, Venustiano Carranza. He's important.
The other race I'll mention will actually get far more attention next week, and that's the race for the governor in the state of Morelos. Next week, we are actually going to dedicate an entire episode to Morelos because Morelos is really important. For now, though, just know that the state and local elections of 1909 revealed the regime had no interest in real democratic challenges. It was the same old story, and many people were now sick to death of that story and looking for anyone to help them write a new story.
But with the local elections of 1909 won handily and Reyes out of the picture, Porfirio Díaz comfortably believed that he was now untouchable, and he even hosted a state visit from President William Howard Taft at the end of 1909 to celebrate the continued alliance between Mexico and the United States and hopefully unruffle some of the feathers Díaz and José Lehmintur had recently been ruffling, particularly among the executives at Standard Oil and Texaco. Díaz believed he could clearly handle his own internal political security, but if the United States decided that they had grown tired of him, he might have a real problem. And so the state visit with Taft was outwardly a success, but as we will see in the episodes to come, it's not like there were very many American interests in Mexico who were exactly sad to see Díaz coming under furious attack the next year. In fact, they might even give those attackers a helpful nudge or two.
Díaz, though, was not expecting any further trouble in 1910. His principal obsession had been with Reyes, and Reyes was now sidelined. But while the departure of Reyes did lead some in the loyal opposition who were more loyal than opposition to call it quits, there were those who were more opposition than they were loyal, and they were now adrift and looking for somewhere to channel their energy. Similarly, those frustrated by the regime's conduct during the recent state elections were now angrier than ever that the promise of democratic reform had been dangled, only to be cruelly snatched away.
And so it was that they turned to Francisco Madero, the only guy continuing to run a national challenge to Díaz, however quixotic it might be, and however eccentric he might personally be. Madero's relentless energy and refusal to quit turned a lot of these bitter Reyes into Maderises. It was another consequence of Díaz sidelining Reyes. Instead of reformist energy being channeled through a leader absolutely loyal to the regime, it was now being channeled through an outsider looking to supplant the existing order.
So getting back now to Madero. Madero understood that despite his words in the Creoleman interview, that Porfirio Díaz was very likely to run again for president in 1910. And though this was something of an inevitability, Madero used it to his advantage and made his signature issue no re-election. That would in fact be the simple and easy to grasp name of the political party Madero was now organizing.
They were the party of no re-election. And so it is of course dripping with historical irony that this movement that will ultimately bring Díaz down marched out under the same simple slogan that Díaz himself had not once but twice gone into open revolt for back in the 1870s. No re-election. But Madero's call for no re-election was not just a threat to Díaz.
It was also a threat to all those national and state and local officials now being re-elected in perpetuity year after year. That natural history museum that was the National Congress, all the old governors, all the old mayors, Madero was proposing to dump all of them en masse and bring in an entirely new cohort of leaders, all hopefully younger, reformist, and liberal. So Madero himself was never a revolutionary but what he was promising looked a lot like a political revolution to those who stood on the other side. But for most of 1909, if Madero was thought of at all, he was dismissed as a goofy eccentric.
He was no real threat to anyone. His own grandfather who hated that Francisco was getting the Maderos back into politics said that his grandson stood a microbe's chance against an elephant. Everyone knew that that Reyes was a false prophet. He was not interested in real reform at all.
Madero was in fact very frustrated that so many would-be supporters were tying themselves to Reyes. And so through 1909, Reyes got all the press, all the attention, all the popular rallies, but also, critically, all the reactionary repression. For like a full year, Madero was able to fly completely under the radar. After Dias formally accepted the nomination to be re-elected, Madero went out on a national speaking tour evangelizing the gospel of no re-election.
And wherever he went, he found willing supporters who were going to help him form local clubs to support the idea of no re-election. And these guys benefited from the disdain shown to them by all the respectable political elites who dismissed them as a non-entity. Ah, let the harmless goofballs meet. They are no threat to us.
Things started to change in the fall of 1909 when two things coincided. First, the refusal of Reyes to lead an opposition campaign and second, the clearly rigged state elections. Both drove a lot of bitter and disillusioned souls into the waiting arms of Madero, who was still out there stumping for no re-election. He was still calling for liberal reform.
And it was over the winter of 1909-1910 that the Malorista coalition really started to gain momentum. And where once the Reyes had been presiding over large rallies in the thousands, it was now Madero who was drawing those crowds. His principal base of support was always going to be those dissatisfied, mostly urban, educated professionals who were always a part of these liberal democratic revolutionary mixes, the lawyers and the doctors, the accountants, the engineers, the students, the professors. A lot of them were true believers in democratic reform, the extension of civil rights and participatory government.
They had been the types who had gotten in on the liberal clubs around the turn of the century and then been frustrated when the authorities cracked down. The period after the recession of 1907 had been hard on them economically and now their resentments were more acute than ever. But Madero was also able to increasingly call on working class supporters who had also been hard hit since 1907. In particular, he got support from the artisan classes who I have not talked much about but like their counterparts in Europe who we talked a lot about in 1848, Mexican artisans had been getting pummeled by industrial competition, much of that produce being brought in by new railroads.
These artisans had long been independent, they'd been proud and literate and they liked the idea of liberty and rights and participatory government, the kind of thing that Madero was preaching. But Madero was also getting support from the growing industrial working classes, from the miners and from the railroad workers. Madero would sprinkle his correspondence and speeches with references to the Cananea and Rio Blanco strikes as proof of the regime's political tyranny. But Madero did not actually have much of the substance to offer these working class supporters.
Despite the fact that Madero had long personally been a liberal with a social conscience, his employees and neighbors could attest to that, he was, and his movement was, essentially a political project. And we talked about this particular dynamic a lot in 1848 and now it's just playing out here in Mexico. Madero is out there primarily preaching democratic political reform as the necessary precondition for social and economic advancement. That the establishment of democracy was the goal and everything else would just work itself out after that.
And in fact, far from attacking the Porfiriotos' economic program, remember that's an area Madero specifically praised them for, only regretting the sacrifice of political liberty. In fact, one of the things Madero said out there on the trail, partly to LA's suspicions that he was a social revolutionary, was that the people did not want bread, they wanted liberty. But for the moment, this political message was more than enough to garner Madero a popular following. And in the spring of 1910, he went out again for another long speaking tour.
And ultimately, over the course of about a year, Madero wound up visiting 22 of the 27 Mexican states in an almost unprecedented whirlwind of traveling as he whipped up the first truly national political campaign Mexico had practically ever seen. In April of 1910, the anti-reelectionists held a convention in Mexico City. And though a few of the delegates were arrested before they got there, the convention was allowed to proceed. Madero was nominated to be the presidential candidate with Dr.
Francisco Vasquez Gomez, a prominent doctor and former Reista, nominated as vice president. Now at this point, Madero was himself a bit ambivalent about running directly against Díaz. And so through intermediaries, he arranged a personal meeting with President Díaz to discuss whether a compromise could be reached. At this meeting, Madero offered to simply be Díaz's vice president if Díaz promised free and open elections.
But Díaz refused. And Madero walked away convinced that Díaz was never going to give up power and never allow for real democratic elections in Mexico. Now when Díaz and his advisor decided to draw all pretenses I have not yet pinpointed, whether it was before or after this personal meeting. What I do know is that Madero then went off on one more speaking tour, now as an official candidate for president.
And he was drawing crowds in the tens of thousands. Everywhere he went, there was enthusiasm, energy, and passion. He was a phenomenon. Local authorities did what they could to hinder him, to deny him access to public meeting spaces and things like that.
But Madero kept on trucking right up to the day of the election, which was scheduled for the end of June 1910. But for sure, by the end of June 1910, Díaz had decided that he was done playing games. After entering Monterey on June 16th, 1910, Francisco Madero and a few members of his entourage were arrested. The charges were insulting the president and fomenting rebellion.
As they would later find out, Madero himself was just the tip of the iceberg. In a coordinated roundup across Mexico, the authorities arrested party leaders and club members who were linked to the anti-reelectionist campaign. Conservative estimates put it at about 5,000 total arrests, more generous estimates say 60,000. So probably somewhere in between those two numbers.
In any case, with the election just a few days away, most of the anti-reelectionist party leaders were either in hiding or in jail, including their presidential candidate. So of course, after this crackdown, election day came, replete with further accusations of fraud, intimidation, and corruption. Now tried to contain your shock, but Porfirio Díaz was overwhelmingly re-elected president of Mexico. While sitting in jail, Madero came to the conclusion that maybe he was going to have to take all this to the next level.
Díaz had been lying about welcoming opposition and democracy. This was an authoritarian regime that would never allow itself to be reformed from the inside. So possibly, it needed to be toppled from the outside. Madero was released on bail once the authorities believed the coast was clear now that the election was safely over.
But the coast was not clear. Madero was not yet ready to quit the field. Two months after his release from jail, he slipped out of town and headed north, following the path of so many Mexican revolutionaries before him. But we will leave Madero there, and next week turn our attention to the critical state of Morelos.
This heavily populated rural region full of sugar haciendas dubbed the Planter's Paradise was not really ever connected to Madero's national movement. They had their own concerns, their own problems, and their own leaders. And when Madero's revolution came, they would launch their own revolution. But before we go, I want to remind you that the storm before the storm, the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic, comes out in paperback on October the 16th, 2018, and that in support of this, Parnassus Books in Nashville, and finally October the 18th at an event at the Carter Library in Atlanta, hosted by Oconella Books.
I cannot wait to see you there. Thank you.