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Welcome to the new books network. Welcome everyone to this episode of New Books in Latin American Studies. Today we're speaking with Dr. Dan LeBots about his newest book, Writing with the Revolution, the American Left and the Mexican Revolution, 1900 to 1925, just out here in 2024 with Brill.
Dan LeBots has his PhD in History from the University of Cincinnati in 1992. He taught most recently at the School of Labor and Urban Studies of the City University of New York. After several stints at other institutions now retired from teaching. In the 1970s, Dan LeBots was a founding member of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the TDU, about which he wrote the book, Rank and File Rebellion, Teamsters for a Democratic Union.
He's been for many years a writer and analyst of political and labor developments, mostly in the United States and Mexico. He was for 20 years, 94 to 2014 editor and principal writer of Mexican labor news and analysis publication supported by the United Electrical Workers Union, the U.E., a U.S. Union, and the Frente Altentico, Bel Trabajo de Faz, a Mexican labor confederation. He is co-editor of New Politics and continues to write for that journal and others.
Author of a dozen books, most recent history books are What Went Wrong, the Nicaraguan Revolution of Marxist Analysis from 2016, and then this year's Writing with the Revolution. Dan, don't let me forget at the end to ask you about your turn to writing novels most recently. But thanks for joining us today on New Books and Latin American Studies, Dan LeBots. Thank you for having me, Brad.
It's nice to meet you. And I look forward to talking about the book and I hope you're listeners will find it interesting. Pleasure to have the chance to talk to you. I wonder if we could begin by you telling us a little about the origins of this book.
Writing with the Revolution. What led you to researching and asking these particular questions about the U.S. left involvement in the Mexican Revolution? Well, I think a couple of things.
When is, I come from a pacifist socialist family. My father's family as I was growing up. My uncles and my father were conscientious objectors during World War II, and I myself was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. And I'm interested particularly in that socialist conscientious objector history.
And that's a good part of this book about the slackers. And that's how that was the way I got into this. I think a lot of people who are historians often start writing out of their own biographical background, their own interests of writing their life drives them to take up such a subject. And I'm one of those.
And then also some of the issues here, you know, intersect with some of your own background in Mexico, in union organizing, and in the kind of analysis you were doing for various publications. I mean, I was first exposed to Dan LeBots as an organizer myself years ago reading labor notes. But what about your own background, intersex here, Dan? Well, I think that's true.
I was a labor activist in the United States in the Teamsters and other unions. I worked in a steel mill. I was a truck driver. I was involved in public employee unions.
And then I became interested in Mexico. And I made friends with Mexican people in the left and labor movement in Mexico. I worked with Robin Alexander, who was the international affairs director for the United Electrical Workers. And she connected me up with labor activists in the Fot.
I had a good friend who was who introduced me to Arturo Al-Kalde and Bertal Lujan, Arturo a lawyer for the Democratic Al-Wagados Democratic, I think was the Democratic lawyers of Mexico. And his wife, Bertal Lujan was one of the three co-presidents of the Fot. So I was in that milieu of Mexican labor activists. At a time, in the United States, I was in the Teamsters Union dominated by the mafia.
In Mexico, I was talking to workers who were being threatened with murder by government unions. So there was a lot of similarity I could relate. I was going to say because, you know, there's the whole democratic tendency of the main union's electrical union, if I'm not mistaken, in Mexico, it's sort of mid-70s. Yes, right.
Rafael Galvan, who was the head of the Sturm, no longer extant union. He was put together, a lot of the Indian, the Democratic tendency, a broad number of Mexican unions. It was a very important development. I actually heard him speak once in Mexico in June of 1971, at right at the time of the massacre that took place by the Arcones, the Hawks, Boulevard, Mexico City, and everyone in that meeting was in terror that we might be attacked.
Oh, well, the June 1971 massacre there in Mexico City. Well, thanks, Dan. I wonder now if you could, I mean, say a little something about what you think the main takeaway or if there's main impact, potentially, that this book makes, how would you characterize it? What do you feel is most important here, right?
Towards the beginning. Oh, this book, this is the book here. It's a fact book and a lot of detail, and it's said you've said before to me. It's central.
We have a lot of books in the United States and in Mexico and some written in other countries about the American left in Mexico. We have books about, we have some books about the Protestant churches, which were progressive in the social gospel period. We have books about the AFFL. We have books about the IWW, the industrial workers of the world.
We have books about the anarchists, Ricardo Flores and my going in friends. We have, we just have books about every conceivable one of these groups and many individuals. It's a great, it's a rich literature, there's wonderful books there, but they don't connect up the American left and the Mexican left as a whole. And as a famous person once said, the true is the whole.
So if we're going to understand what really goes on, we have to understand that big context. The big context is, is the Mexican Revolution itself is the revolution in Mexico, but then also the entry of the United States into World War One and the Russian Revolution. So you have these three enormous world forces, the United States going into the war, the Russian Revolution, establishing the new Soviet state and the Mexican Revolution beginning to emerge and solidify the new Mexican state. And in this book, I think I hope connects all those provides a context and allows us to, that is in Mexico, they attempted to see, they attempted to see what their ideas about the government, about the society, social movements, the unions, and most importantly about international labor solidarity.
How were there those ideas function in Mexico in this revolutionary period? It was a big test, and it was extremely difficult. And none of these groups, by the way, they would all say we believe in proletarian internationalism or working class internationalism, yet none of them believed the same thing. All of them were rivals, that is every one of these groups, the syndicalists of the IWW, the, the anarchist, the AFL, the socialist party, the communist party, none of them shared the same view of what was international labor solidarity.
So that's the thesis, let's look at Mexico as a social laboratory, let's see what these groups did, let's see how they fared, what can be learned from them. Ultimately, I decide that they all failed, and I think they fail principally because of the rise of the Mexican nationalist ideology and the new Mexican state. That is such a tremendous force among these now 13, you know, in the Mexican Revolution, 1 million people die, 1 million people leave, but among the 13 million people that remain in Mexico, this is a tremendous force, and for labor unions and socialists and communists, they have to figure out what to do about that, and this force is just too great for them, I believe. But it's still an interesting laboratory, and we ought to go look at the test tubes and see what's happening there.
You write in the introduction, Dan, and I wanted to read a couple lines here from the very first page, and just as you mentioned, this laboratory that the different activists were entering into here in the Mexican social context, the title of the introduction, the American Left and the Mexican Revolution, a testing of political theories and strategies, and then you write, this is a collective biography of the small groups of people who in these years worked individually or together in Mexico to turn the revolution in the direction they desired. It is also a history of these individuals and groups who tested the theories and strategies of their organizations in the great laboratory of the Mexican Revolution, providing us with a remarkable record of experiments in internationalism, some of the reformist variety and others of the revolutionary sort. And then you mentioned that you argue at the end of the end of, but when you stop this study, the Mexican Revolution turns definitively in favor of the nationalist current, when it could have gone, you know, many ways given all the different factions over time, but that nationalist current sort of wins out for a number of reasons. I think your listeners probably know that in the revolution, the more we could call it plebeian and populist wings that represented by Francisco Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata were defeated by the state building faction of Benus Dea and El Carranza and Alvaro Overgón.
And that of course, that happens earlier on, 1914 to 1917, but it's that's what that's what turned to the revolution in that status direction. Yes, yes. And then in this collective biography that you develop here, and there are some fascinating profiles, and I think it's so helpful how you do that with many different figures from the US and Mexico, you know, kind of a little bit of a life story, look at them because it contextualizes things so well. But you have two groups, as you kind of said, group A, who is organizing around the Mexican Revolution, but for facing toward the US with that organizing, and then a second group sort of later in time, right, that is in organizing on the ground in Mexico itself.
Right. And the second group divides activists who spontaneously, they have to get the hell out of the United States because they will be beaten, jailed. There was tremendous campaign against them. Some of them went to prison, some of them went to jail, some were beaten, some were threatened with murder and so on.
They've got to get out. And so they go to Mexico spontaneously with that. Because you in that period, you wouldn't go to Canada as people did during Vietnam because Britain moves already at war. You're not going to go to the country at war.
If you can't get out of the United States because you don't have your draft documents, they're being checked at all the ships. And so they're going down and their their their their wetbacks going to Mexico. They're going through the real ground river or they're crossing at some other point that they're going to Mexico. The second group is quite different.
The first group is there from 1917 when the draft begins to 1921. The second group comes about 1921 and is there until about 1925 when they're in both groups are up being expelled. But the second group is much different. These are all conscious, Communist Party organizers sent by the Communist International based in Moscow, sent to go to Mexico to organize and build a communist movement there.
So you have you have the spontaneous movement and the more directed movement. And they overlap a little bit principally through one of the very important figures in this book who is known as Charles Francis, his birth name is Charles Francis Phillips. He also goes by Charles Shipman and he ends up being known in the Communist movement as Manuel Gomez. And he's a Communist Party organizer for a full decade.
And he is one of the only slackers and others that go to Mexico who avoid deportation later after. Yes, he they these people go to Mexico and they're welcome to buy the new Stiano Carranza because Carran says in a very tense relationship with the United States. And these people are fighting the United States as he is. And they're criticizing US imperialism as he does.
And so he's happy to welcome them. They come into the United States and they're educated people, most of them. Most of the ones I follow I should say, we think 10,000 Americans went to Mexico in that period. I can only follow the literary ones or the ones who are important enough that the FBI or the other intelligence that US military intelligence divisions spied on them.
Those who left a document trail some sort. Yeah, those who left a document trail one way or another. And so I try to construct the network of their relationships here. And Charles Francis Phillips who become is very central to this.
And he is, they're all deported in 1921, the spontaneous group. They're deported out of the country under article 33 of the Mexican Constitution, which says you cannot get involved in Mexican politics. They used to be a saying in Mexico, performers, we have the 33 for Mexicans, we have the 30 30, referring to shooting them with a carbine. So this, this group, this group is all expelled because they become persona non grata when they arrive Carranza likes them.
But by 1921, the new state is being formed by Alvaro Obergón and Plutarco Ellea Skyes, both of whom serve as presidents. And its new state is being formed and it's a state that wants to control the peasant organizations and the labor unions. And these Americans are now a pain because they are organizing in those million years and they are threatening the domination of the Mexican government. So at that point, they've got to go and they're detained and they're, they're, they're deported.
And the second group is deported similarly in 1925. And that's by that time, Plutarco Kayes is a Yeah, it's Kayes is in charge. And I found an incredible archive, the archive, Torre Blanco in Mexico City that has in had everything about these people. Wow.
It was President Kayes's archive kept by, I think, his secretary Torre Blanco. Well, let's go back for a moment to the part one of the book then and tell us a little bit about you mentioned some of the more progressive Protestant churches and activists clergy who spent time in Mexico in the early 1900s around turn of the century influenced by the social gospel. What did they find and how did they? Well, it's very interesting because you know, when the Civil War is over, American capitalism is now, is now becoming the robber baronades, it's becoming a great world power.
And the American churches are also in a stronger society, the Civil War is over and they're turning their eyes to proselytizing, to converting people in Mexico. And they're mostly Protestant churches, the Mormons also go who are not really part of the Protestant, they have a different entirely different theology, the Mormons go to, but the Protestant churches in this period all become what we call social gospel churches. That is all of the issues of poverty in American society, of labor unions, struggles and so on. People like Washington Galaddin, a great minister of that era, they say the church has to look outward, the church has to take a concern about social issues, it has to help the poor.
And so that those ideas are being now taught in the Protestant churches, it's a lot like the theology of liberation that begins in the 50s in Europe and Latin America, and in Latin America becomes a very big deal in the 60s and 70s. It's a lot like the theology of liberation, it's kind of a leftist social theology. So the new missionaries, the churches start going there in the 1870s and they start to establish basis. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these new social gospel missionaries are becoming critical of the portfolio, the ostricatorship, and they start to write articles about it in that social gospel way.
And then as the revolution breaks out, they become supporters of the more moderate wing of the revolution, first led by Francisco Yimadero and then by Minister Carranza, they become oriented toward that more recognizable to them government capitalist model. And the Protestant churches were important because several historians have noted a Mexican revolutionary's first stop into the movement was often to go to a Protestant church and to because the Protestant churches, unlike the Catholic church, taught poor people to read and write. The Protestant churches had a doctrine of equality of women, the Protestant churches talked about demise, some of them, most of them talked about democracy, at least in the American vein, some of them a more radical democracy. So the Mexican revolutionary often stopped there, got an education, I was able to read and write, and then could go into the revolution.
So they created some intellectual cadres of the revolution. So that's an important little stage. I don't spend a lot of time on it, but I thought it was interesting and I think it's significant as other historians have. But then I go on to look at there's kind of a wave of journalists that start writing very important things about Mexico.
This starts really when a Mexican anarchist group, the Ricardo Flores Magón, and his followers, they call themselves the Mexican Liberal Party, which was kind of a disguise because they were not liberals. Was it always a disguise? I mean, were they talking about anarchism from the beginning or were they initially part of the sort of more mainstream liberal? I believe they were anarchists from the beginning.
I think that a Jeff and Cockroft now deceased who wrote the precursors of the Mexican Revolution published in 1968. He was a person who I think established very well, that they had kind of sworn an oath to Baccunan when they were in Belen Prison. And that's very early on in their careers. And you can read things by Ricardo Flores Magón, letters to his brother in weekends on which he says, we're just going to tell them we're liberals.
That changes a little later around maybe 1908 or something that they then change. And now they come out and they more explicitly talk about their anarchist ideals. But for a long time it's a disguise, very consciously put on. But they are a very important group on the border.
And they're being persecuted and prosecuted, both in Mexico and in the United States by first by Fírst Bipar Fír Días and then by Taft, President Taft in the United States. And they're being tried, they're going to prison. And so. What are they being charged with?
I mean, there's the. They're being charged with planning to invade Mexico, organizing armed to bait, which they were doing. 1906, correct? Was one.
Right. They're in direction. In 1906. And it they also happened to coincide with and they're involved a little bit, not so much as leaders are, but they become involved in the couple great strikes of that period, the Coninea Coppermine strike and Rio Blanco textile strike.
So, and those big strikes take place in that same year and they they're organizing, they're they have a very simple and simple-minded I think strategy, which is we will, they believe, and I think this is a common anarchist thing, the people are always ready for revolution. And you have to spark the revolution. And so, it's called the propaganda of the deed. So we will do something and we'll show everybody, we're going to go shoot somebody below something up, invade someplace, and then everybody will see it and they will join us.
This seldom happens. And so, in fact, in their cases, it failed every single time. But they came to the attention of the Socialist Party of Los Angeles and the Socialist Party of Los Angeles became very supportive. And one guy, John Kenneth Turner, one guy from the Socialist Party went with people from the Margolis de Movement as an American investor undercovert to Mexico to examine working conditions.
And he started writing a series of articles later published as the book, Barbara's Mexico. This book became the bible of people who were doing any kind of solidarity with the Mexican people under the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. So, that's the first of a few very important books. So, Turner's book is published then late in the first decade of the 20th century or sorry, I shouldn't.
Yeah, I think that's not right. I'm sorry, I've forgotten the publishing date. Yes. Around the time that Diaz is overthrown, I'd say maybe 1908, something like that.
And then we have a wonderfully exciting cultural, intellectual, political milieu in New York around the Masses magazine, which is in Greenwich Village on McGoogol Street in Greenwich Village. And down there in Greenwich Village, they are hanging out with the IWW syndicalist with the Socialist Party. Max Eastman is the editor, very creative, brilliant man. His sister, Crystal Eastman, is really a modern kind of socialist feminist, very surprising that she writes books on this subject in the 19 teens.
And out of that milieu comes John Reed. And he wants, he's a guy who when something's happening, he wants to be on the ground right there, reporter and he goes to Mexico, he gets a horse, he saddles up and he rides with Pancho Villain. He doesn't fight. He says, I remember he gets in control of some of the other guys, say, hey, Pancho, he's not fighting.
He doesn't carry a gun. And Pancho says he might be doing more than you are to let him go. So, he becomes a journalist writing about Pancho Villain. And this also shows something else that's going on, which is that every American left tendency is sort of choosing the group in Mexico, they think represents them.
So, for the socialist party, it was this anarchist revolutionary group, which was also at that time the dominant left group. So, maybe they didn't have so much sorting out to do. But for Pancho Villain, there's now several Mexican revolutionary groups. But why does Pancho Villain perhaps because Pancho Villain is made up largely of poor ranchers, ranch hands, mine workers, industrial workers, it's a working class army on the move.
And so, for a socialist like John Reed, this is his people. This is his revolution. It's interesting that Krause, the great Mexican historian who wrote this enormous monumental biography of Pancho Villain, he says, Pancho Villain carried out a kind of socialist policy in the areas that he controlled. He came in with the government to control aspects of industry and the economy.
So, Reed was right. And then a third writer, I might mention, is a much different guy who also wrote with the revolution. But he liked to ride in the Pullman Car first class. His name was Lincoln Steffens.
He was an American journalist, well-known journalist. He had written a book about poverty in American cities. And he was a household name practically from the Macraker era, as we call it, of American journalism. And he goes to Mexico and he is oriented toward Carranza.
He tries to hang out in Carranza's milieu. And he thinks he knows a lot about Mexico and he knows a lot less than he thinks. But those three writers, so that's another thing that's happening. You have a writer's reporting on Mexico from the American point of view.
And when he goes, for example, he gets access to Carranza, for instance, fairly easily. Like, that's one thing that struck me about this book is how important it seems that many of these Americans become, at least over time, once they get into Mexico. Well, he's like the equivalent today would be New York Times reporter. If a New York Times reporter goes anywhere in the world and wants to speak to somebody in the government, they'll get to speak to them because this is the most important newspaper in the United States.
It's one of the most important newspapers in the world, therefore. And so those reporters get entree. And I think that that's it. But it's also true that in times of upheaval, things are kind of in flux.
And so people can insert themselves into social groups that they might otherwise have been welcoming. What about the anarchist movement in the US, Dan? And where do they end up connecting up with the Magonistas? It's in St.
Louis, initially, isn't it? That's right. The Magonistas, as I mentioned earlier, these anarchists were being persecuted and prosecuted in the United States and Mexico. And they were afraid, at first, they were afraid to stay near the border because they thought that if they stayed near the border, that Porfirio Dias would send people to kidnap them, which he did sometimes.
So they were right. So they decided for a bit to get the hell out of the border, to go away, and they went to St. Louis. And in St.
Louis, they met Emma Goldman. And Emma Goldman, they recognized that these macoonanists were kindred spirits to her. And her mother Earth magazine, the important anarchist magazine, became promoters, and they published their manifestos in Mother Earth and so on. But then a little later, later in that between 1910 and 1920, we have another, we have two anarchist writers, both of them also published sometimes in Mother Earth.
One is a guy named William Owen. And the other is Voltarine Declare. And the two of them start writing on Mexico. And in my view, they write, they're much better than the socialist party intellectuals, because the socialist party intellectuals have a social democratic mentality.
Eugene Debs takes a very strong position on the Mexican revolution, and basically says, we're from Adero, we're for, Adero, because that will be creating a stable capitalism. And we want a stable capitalism in Mexico, where the growth of capitalist industry, a democratic society in which the unions can prosper. And this is a social democratic model that came from the German social democratic party and so on. And Debs espouses that.
And, but the anarchists, Owen and Declare, I think particularly Declare appeals to me more, but they both, they both analyze the Mexican revolution. They say, this is a peasant revolution. This is an upheaval of the peasants. And that's what gives it its character.
And I think they analyze that in various ways. And I think that's quite true. I think there's also, I happen to have read Cropotkin's history of the French Revolution, and you can, which is a great history of the French revolution, the uprising from below the masses. And I think they were influenced by Cropotkin's book.
But, but on the other hand, they were wrong about really who the, who the, who the Zapatistas were. They want to say the Zapatistas are kind of natural anarchists. There's a little bit of Indianaes mohair that the indigenous people are all communal and all good and kind of romanticization on which is also not true. But they believe that.
And so, they wanted to believe that that's a pata was an anarchist. But in fact, his movement, these people were very religious. Then when they read, the other revolutionaries were ridiculed down because when they wrote into Mexico City in 1914, in their successful taking in Mexico City, on their giant sombreros, they had these sombreros that would cover your whole body. On these giant sombreros, they had a card of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
And the Virgin of Guadalupe is the protectors of Mexico and Latin America. And, and they were, they were also fundamentally conservative. They wanted to preserve their peasant society and they were backward looking. They were not, they were not looking forward to a new society.
They wanted to go back to some notion of a peasant society, which was probably also not real because, because mohreros where they were from was a state that had already become highly commercialized, selling sugar to the international market and so on. But, but those anarchists provided a brilliant analysis of Mexico as a peasant revolution, but just didn't know who Zapata was. That's how I received it. And it must have been a peasant revolution.
I mean, what, what other kind of exactly because as you know, the social makeup of Mexico in the first couple of decades of the 20th century, still 80% rural. Yes, absolutely. It was a peasant revolution for sure. That was, but a peasant revolution, all revolutions, all social movements were peasant movements until we get to the 20th century.
And so the question isn't who makes up the army. The question is, who is in the leadership? So the Mexican revolution was a peasant revolution. In some places led by peasants, like Zapata was pretty close to a peasant.
He was actually a horse trainer. And as a horse trainer who worked for different people, he knew more about his more sophisticated his understanding of his little local society than the peasants were. But yes, he would, that was a peasant led peasant movement. And Pancho Villa is a not a peasant movement, it's a farmers movement, and a landless people movement.
And he's, and it's led by this former bandit who understands those people very well and who wants to help them and likes them and so on. But other parts of this peasant revolution were led by big scale farmers like Alvaro Obregón by very wealthy and powerful people or Francisco Madero, the Madero family were both engaged in oil, they were close to standard oil and so on. And all those men from the north as well, from northern Mexico? Yes, a lot of the northern Mexico was more modern and southern Mexico.
And sometimes we think they talk about the revolution is led by the northern dynasty. And that's because in Sonora, right across from Arizona, you have, you had people were beginning to do things like in the United States where you could have pump well water to irrigate and so on, things like that. So a pump and pipe irrigation, which didn't exist in central Mexico. And the liberals among them sort of became interested for whatever reason in a kind of bourgeois democracy, at least.
Yes, I think that's true. I think because, but what did that mean for them? Or Frio the I said excluded them. So bourgeois democracy meant for the elite, when Francisco Madero writes his key explosive book, Suffrage on Suffrage, the right to vote.
That's because he wants to make sure he gets included in this democracy. Bourgeois democracy means the bourgeoisie runs this democracy. And that's true in Holland in the 17th century, England in the 18th and 19th century, the United States forever. So the bourgeoisie, except for the not under slavery, the slaveholders had a good part of that and they were not bourgeois.
But the capitalist class, yes, they're interested in getting included. Bourgeois, when the book is published, the peasants read that book. If somebody reads it to them or it's discussed with them, and they say, oh, he means give us the land. So everyone reads that and so for the bourgeoisie, bourgeois democracy means they get included.
For the peasants, it means give us our land. We want our land back. Land had the peasants have lost their land under Dias. That is the central issue.
They gave laborers overwhelmingly and they want to have their land back. And that's what the revolution ultimately accomplishes when it finally ends in 1940, you know, during the Carranza finishes the revolution in the six anyway, six year term from 34 to 40. Cardenas with some degree of land redistribution, right? Yeah, not some degree.
He gave all the ASE into the peasants. I mean, finally, it was a great depression had destroyed the ASE into. So, and the revolution had fought for that land and so on. I mean, it was an enormous amount of land.
Of course, the generals also said, oh, well, I have to find the revolution. I think I need a little more of that land. Right. So yeah, some of that land was taken by people in the in the new ruling class.
That's delivered on. I mean, it's after the period that you're looking at it. Right. Right.
That's delivered on and it's seen as a kind of finally, you know, addressing the central demand. Yes, absolutely. The three great demands of the Mexican Revolution, secular education, take the schools away from the church or create public schools for people, lay, they can expose say, lay schools. Secondly, the distribution of land to the peasants and the recognition of the rights of workers to organize labor unions and strike.
Those three things are won by the revolution, and that's why it's over after cardiness. And also, I guess we have to add the nationalization of the foreign oil companies. That's kind of a later demand, but it'd be as part of it. Which is an extension of a lot of the anti-imperialist.
Right. I mean, maybe you could see it this way. The anti-imperialist impulse that you track throughout this book. Right.
And in this period, in the early Communist Party, as it's getting organized in Mexico, when that second intentional group of Americans go to Mexico to organize, most important among the people might know, Louis Frena, who later becomes the great economic historian, Louis Corey. He changes his name to Louis Corey. And Bertram D. Wolfe, it's in that period.
And let's talk a little about Samuel Gompers. For example, in the AFL, how did they approach the Mexican Revolution and the labor scene in Mexico? Yeah, that's very important. They're a big chunk of my book at the earlier part of the book.
Samuel Gompers, well, let's say we're Gompers have been a Marxist. But in the period of the 1870s and 80s, he watched the failure of the Knights of Labor. And after the Haymarket at the Knights of Labor begins to die, the Knights of Labor was a powerful industrial union, very democratic, very from below union, offered a significant role for women in the movement and so on. But the Knights of Labor begins to die.
And Gompers and his friends are converted to the notion we can't organize all of these industrial workers. We can organize workers who have a skill, a craft, like Gompers himself, who was a cigar roller. So we're going to organize the craft unions. And then Gompers takes that as the model.
And those unions have certain advantages. If you fire those people, maybe you can't get what you want done, done, because you can't go out on the street. If everybody sticks together who's a plumber, and you don't have a plumber, you're out of business. So if you have a skill like being a plumber, like being an electrician, like being a carpenter, like being a teamster, somebody who drives a team of horses in that period, if you have a skill of that character, then you can be organized.
Now, Gompers also brought into the AFL miners and needle-strade workers, people in clothing and sewing. They were different. They were actually bigger employers, more industrial organized. But the union was fundamentally a union of skilled craftsmen who were all white men.
And Gompers was therefore able to create a stable organization, represented a small part of the American American class, but was stable and had influence. And then he said, God, this is such a wonderful idea. I've got to take it to Canada. So they can learn about it.
But in Canada, he had to compete with the British model of the trade union, Congress in Canada. But he succeeded in building some US-controlled unions in Canada. And then he met a guy from Puerto Rico named Santiago Iglesias, who was a socialist party member there, but became Gompers ally and building the F of L in Puerto Rico. So then, Gompers decides with the Mexican Revolution.
Well, let's go to Mexico. And Gompers is very closely allied after 1906 or so. But certainly by this time of the Mexican Revolution with Woodrow Wilson and the Democratic Party. He's allied with the Democratic Party really on, but with Wilson in this period.
And Wilson is building an anti-imperialist movement. That is, it's the United States ideology is anti-imperialist as its building, its empire. It's anti-emperialist. It's opposed to the old- Everybody else's imperialism.
It's opposed to the old formal imperialism with colonialism. And Woodrow Wilson is building a new kind of empire where you don't take over the country. You just take over the running of the country through your control of the finances and the politics and so on. And Gompers goes to Mexico.
This is very much in the Woodrow Wilson perspective. And Gompers goes to Mexico. Sen's agency doesn't go personally, at least only for a meeting or two. But he sends agents to Mexico.
They come from the left. They come from the socialist party usually. But they're won over to him. And they go and they meet with the Mexican unions.
The Mexican unions, the most important Mexican union at the time of the revolution is called the Casa del Oberro Mundial, the House of the World Worker. And it's an anarchist, an anarcho-syndicalist union federation. But when the revolution takes place, they have to decide. Are we going with Via and Zapata or going with Carranzo and Obrigón?
And Obrigón comes to those anarchist unions and Mexicans and says, I've got to deal for you. Anywhere you go, you can organize unions. We'll recognize them. We'll give you the local churches, as union halls.
We'll give you print shops. We'll help you. You can do your organizing. And a good piece of that, not all of them.
A good piece of the anarchists go with the new government. That new government then creates a little later a new union called the regional confederation of Mexican workers, the chrome. And the chrome led by a very corrupt guy named Luis Morones. That becomes the relationship, Gompers Fiennes.
Gompers Fiennes, I want to be with the state, I want to be with the new state, with Caias and Obrigón, and with the chrome and Luis Morones. So he makes this alliance with the Mexican unions to try to bring them craft unions through the state. So it's a very, from above, I know what's best for you. The American model of unionism is the right model.
And he uses that now that he has Mexico in it. He reaches out to a few other countries and gets little, really, unrepresentative representatives of those countries to organize the Pan-American Federation of Labor, P-A-F-L, the Pan-American Federation of Labor, which becomes his vehicle for dumb. But it collapses with the end of his life and it's never really successful because in Mexico, in Latin America for a long time, until the 30s in Latin America, anarchism and syndicalism are dominant. And he can't defeat them.
And he hates the I-W-W, which he's always attempting to head off and crush. So his is, I call it labor imperialism. He's an imperialist for the A-F-of-L. He wants the A-F-of-L to go in other countries and dominate their labor unions.
The highlight 1917 as a particular turning point, I mean, you mentioned at the beginning kind of the various world reshuffling developments of that particular decade, but particularly the Russian Revolution in 1917, the revolutions, as you say, there's kind of two there, February and November. But then with the Bolsheviks becoming the dominant faction there and beginning to dispatch people to different places in Latin America, how does that then shape the U.S. left activists who are in Mexico and, well, Mexicans involved in the revolutionary process themselves? Yeah, yes.
This is a very, very important development. And of course, particularly the second revolution in October 1917. And that revolution brings to power, at first it brings to power a multi-party leadership of these institutions called the Soviets, the word Soviet meant a workers' council. Today it's hard to get that word Soviet out of our head for Soviet Union, but it meant representatives of the workers' councils who have a government.
But the Bolsheviks soon become dominant because they're better organized and because their ideology is one where they want to control everything. It's very much Lenin's conception and the Bolsheviks' conception, I believe. And then they call a couple world congresses of socialist parties from around the world who want to join the new communist party. And some anarchists also come to those.
And I would have to say that I think that throughout the world millions of people see this revolution in Russia that overthrows a monarch, a dictatorship of the Russian monarchy. It leaves the first world war. It's a nation as pacifist. The nation says we are done with war.
That's another huge aspect of it, right? And it rejects any foreign treaties to take territory. And so millions of people around the world go, wow, look what's happening in Russia. And it says this country is going to be run democratically by workers and peasants.
Oh my god. So this affects everyone in the world. And the socialist parties around the world begin to have congresses and some of them affiliate, some don't affiliate, many of them split. In Mexico, there's not much of a socialist party.
In the United States, the socialist party is big and influential. I mean, for the left, it's not big like the Democrats, but the socialist party had about 100,000 members in the United States. It won about a million votes. It had some very prominent leaders in different states and cities.
It's presidential. Many times, presidential candidate Eugene Debs was very well known. So the socialist party debates and splits. And the people who support the Russian revolution out of the left wing of the of that movement leave to form the communist party.
And they include people like John Reed, who's been to Mexico. And they include people like Louis Frina, who will later go to Mexico and so on. So, and so this reorients everyone. And the communist international says we're going throughout the world.
They send this guy, Michael Borodin, to go to Latin America to organize and they give him the crown jewels to pay for it. And somebody steals the crown jewels for him. That's an amazing story. Yeah, I thought Naseo Taibou, I think first I told it where I read it in his book, Los Molshevikis, but it's a great story.
And but Borodin is a very, very first rate communist international representative. He gets to Mexico. He meets this little group in the socialist party there led by a guy named Santi Banias, who's a nice guy, who's been running a tiny socialist party in Mexico with, as I say, Los Cinco, got those, you know, with five guys, whatever, five cats, and, and, and, and, and, and Charles Francis Phillips. And it happens that sort of by coincidence, there's an Indian nationalist who wants to buy guns so that India can rise in revolution against Great Britain.
His name is Manavendra Nath Roy, we usually call him M. N. Roy, and M. N.
Roy goes to Mexico to make contact with German generals to get guns, to go back to India and make the revolution. But when he's there, he meets Charles Francis Phillips, then Michael Borodin, and the rest of the guys, the slackers, and their women friends who were with him in some cases. And he's come with his own woman friend who marries, who he marries, Evelyn Trent Roy, he met her up at Stanford, as he stopped in Stanford on his way to get guns for the, for the revolution. So this little kernel of people, that is this handful of people from the socialist party, this handful of American slackers, this Russian agent, first class Russian agent, and this now converted Indian nationalist who now becomes a communist and later becomes the representative of India, so the communist international and an important figure, a somewhat important figure in India, they create the Mexican Communist Party, which is very, a very odd, a very odd thing in a way, that is created by all these foreigners.
And so their job then, if it wasn't created out of the anarchist movement, that's one of the problems, the anarchists were the dominant ideology and the dominant activist group and had they had these people been active in their casa del de rambre mundial, the house of the world worker of the anarchists, perhaps they would have built immediately a bigger group, they do as they go on, gradually recruit some very talented Mexican labor organizers, and they do learn how to, they do find and relate to the two biggest peasant movements in Mexico, topia's movement in Michoacán and Galvainza movement in, in Veracruz. So they do make those connections, but it takes them a while, and they, and they're still pretty small, they're only a few hundred people. Yeah, but the Communist Party in Mexico, the PCM originally founded by Americans and then Roy essentially in a couple of others. Yeah, there were always a few Mexicans like Santi Vanias, they're from the beginning.
But yes, striking that, and they were the delegates to a couple of those. Yeah, to the Second Congress of the Communist International, they went there, and there's a little fame there because well, Charles Francis Phillips asked to speak to Lenin, and Lenin's giving appointments to everybody to bring everyone together in this group, and he asked, and Lenin knows nothing about Mexico, you can find it on the map, and that's about it, and he asks Phillips, well, what's going on in Mexico, and who are these peasants, and Phillips says, well, they're mostly, they're largely Indians, they're Indian peasants, and Lenin says, do you speak their languages? Do you organize among them in their languages? And Phillips goes, oh, there's something we've got to do, and it's very much like Jose Carlos Mariatiki will do in Peru, where he makes that a key thing that you have to organize the indigenous people.
And then the other thing is M. Enroy in the Congress gets in a debate with Lenin over what is the proper strategy to organize colonies? Do you only organize the workers and peasants, or do you block with the bourgeoisie? Lenin's in the workers and peasants category, and M.
Enroy is saying, look, you've got to have a block with the bourgeoisie in these countries as well. They have to be part of this. And what's interesting is there's no vote on that, I think as Lenin would just assume not have a fight with a major guy who has now there who's representing India, and both positions are published as the outcome of the Congress, and no decision is made. Maybe lastly, Dan, in terms of the kind of meat of the book here and all the great developments and details, could you say something about the degree of repression coming from the U.S., especially after it enters World War I, 1917, forward?
And I'm thinking here of the spying and surveillance in particular, and we talked a little about the arrest of certain people that was sort of always going on, but for example, key figures in the early Communist Party, like Jose Allen, ended up being a spy for what the U.S. military intelligence division was at the name of it. Right, it's a very, very car, the historian of the Mexican Communist Party discovered that some years before I wrote my book, but Jose Allen was an American Mexican, but grew up in Mexico. So like we say, Mexican-American for Mexicans, you know, he's an American Mexican.
And he spoke English and he spoke Spanish and he had a job of industrial type. And so he becomes a spy for the U.S. military intelligence division, and he's a very, he's a very good spy. He can make friends with people, he gets along with everyone, he keeps good records, and he's a good kind of secretary at any meeting.
So when the Communist Party gets organized, they elect him to be the head of the Mexican Communist Party. And he is a spy for the U.S. military intelligence division. So, so yes, that's quite a, it's quite amazing.
But they were, of course, there were other spies. I mentioned in the book Roberto Haberman, it's a very interesting guy. A Romanian Jew who was a pharmacist in New York, fought in the Spanish-American War, and then afterwards became a pharmacist. He's a little older than the other people.
He goes to Mexico as a reporter for the socialist newspaper, the Call, and while in, while in Mexico, he becomes an advisor to Felipe Carillo Puerto in Yucatan, who's like in the far left wing of the Mexican Revolution. And it was quite amazing. This guy shows up and then, and then he goes to Mexico City, where he becomes later a very close to Marones and Pius and the whole government-controlled union. And Roberto Haberman is a spy for them.
He writes reports on everything. He meets all the Americans. He sorts them out, which out for this guy, we can use that guy sort of thing. So yes, there's spying going on on all parts.
The other kind of repression, of course, is that you have the two U.S. invasions of Mexico, one in 1914 in Veracruz by the U.S. fleet, and one by general Blackjack Persian, who rides into Mexico to punish Pancho Via for having crossed the border in Columbus and shot up Columbus and killed some people. So he goes into Mexico in a fruitless running around chasing Pancho Via in Pancho Via's territory.
But both of those are, and what happens in Paralcihuahua, the Mexicans come out and shoot back at him. So he meets popular resistance in Mexico. But those are two invasions of Mexico by this non-imperialist imperial power. And Woodrow Wilson, who he kept us out of war, he brought us peace.
That's that guy. Sure, sure. You said to not let you end without talking about my novels. Yeah, that's just what I was going to ask you.
What are you doing next seems to be novels and anything else you might want to mention? I'm working on a couple things. One is I have an unfinished book I started to write years ago. And since I was an activist in Cincinnati with the Black civil rights movement at a time that the police were jailed and killed, about 15 people, some killed in jail, some on the street.
No white people killed, 15 black people killed in a row. And I became involved. And so I became interested in the history of the Black community of Cincinnati. And I started to write a book called struggle for justice about Black Cincinnati.
I've written a few hundred pages, those aren't right and there's more to write. So the other thing is I turned to writing novels a while ago. A couple of years ago, I published a book. I grew up right on the Mexican border by Tijuana.
And I know Tijuana pretty well as an outsider hasn't been there for years now, but though I was invited there to give a talk on this book that I wrote a book called Trotsky and Tijuana. And the book Trotsky and Tijuana is based on a it's a counterfactual novel based on the idea what if Trotsky had not been assassinated by Stalin's agent, America, there in August of 1940, but had been but Carranza shows up his bodyguard who's an American baseball player Trotsky is saves Trotsky. And then Carranza comes and says, Jesus Christ, this is such a problem. I've got to do something about you.
I've got to get you away from Mexico City where there's a lot of communist here. I'm going to send you to the Siberia of Mexico, which is a tiny town nobody knows with no population that you can't even get to by a road or railroad from Mexico called Tijuana. And so Trotsky is sent to Tijuana then a tiny town and a few thousand inhabitants. And there Trotsky wants to continue to lead the fourth international and the world revolution.
But he's still he's still Trotsky. And though he's worried about his his book, he's written on what's going on there. And he's he does get into a lot of affair with a a woman who is a Jewish comedian, kind of a stand up who pretends to be Irish. And then he so he has a series of adventures there.
And then he gets the diseases that old people get because he's getting older. He doesn't and he dies on the same day as Stalin in 1953 in my novel. And then he went into Mexico. And then the other book I've written is called Radioactive Radicals.
And it resembles this book writing with the revolution in that it is also a novel about a period in a generation. And it's and a is into the union left. And it's about me and my generation of 1968. And it's about a couple of us fictional versions of a couple of us who are not exactly us who go into the Teamsters Union, one character named Wes and a character named Dirk.
And those two characters spend years organizing in and around the Teamsters as people in the political left. So that's what I'd be doing lately. I love writing a novel. You get up in the morning and you go, they're in this room.
Who else is there? Where did that guy come from? What's on the table? What are they drinking?
I love the whole idea of the construction of this fictional situation. Lots of imagination used but informed by these very real context and experiences. Yeah. And the situations and characters that you knew in real life suggest ideas to you and suggest problems to you.
I have the character who very much resembles me in the book, goes to work for Seyse Archaves. I never worked for Seyse Archaves. But my character in radioactive radicals goes to work for Seyse Archaves for a year. And he finds out that Seyse Archaves, he learns he already knew this but now he learns it from the inside.
Chavez is against what Chavez calls them the wetbacks who are taking jobs from American work. He finds out that Chavez operates as a kind of dictator in the union. So Chavez even says, I think I'm going to have to become a Stalin. And so those are all quotes from Chavez that I used in the book too.
So a real situation, I supported the farm workers and I was active with the farm workers later. This allows me to take the suggestion from my life to let's look more deeply at Chavez. About whom I also wrote a biography. Ah, yes, that's right.
That's right. Well, everyone check out Dan LeBott's extensive list of publications already, author of more than 12 books, including the one we've been examining today, just out this year with Brill writing with the revolution, the American left in the Mexican revolution, 1900, the 1925. And I would also note Dan, if I should here, check out his website too for a good quick place to go for his writings and other info, Dan LeBott's writings.com is not correct. And LeBott's is spelled L-A-B-O-T-Z.
And it's all one word there, Dan LeBott's writings is all one word, unto com.com. Thank you very much. It's been a great talking with you Brad. It's a nice conversation.
I appreciate it. I had to think about my book again and remember all these people and what they did. And I have to say, I enjoyed meeting them again. So I look forward to talking with you more in the future, apart from any interviews here.
Absolutely, absolutely. Thanks so much, Dan. Real privilege. Thank you to everyone for joining us on this episode of New Books in Latin American Studies.