6

CARIBBEAN CONSTABULARY

Cuba

Panama

Nicaragua

Mexico, 1898–1914

With the capture of the Philippines and its growing role in China, the U.S. had established itself as a significant power in Asia—but just one of many. It was only in the Caribbean and Central America, in the years between the Spanish-American War and World War I, that U.S. hegemony, a Pax Americana, was created. The U.S. had played an active role in the Caribbean during the nineteenth century (see Chapters 23), but American involvement deepened considerably after 1898. No longer would U.S. sailors and marines land for a few days at a time to quell a riot; now they would stay longer to manage the internal politics of nations. The reasons for the growing U.S. role in the area were many—economic, strategic, ideological—and we shall examine them in turn, but we must not lose sight of the larger reality. American power had already filled up the chalice of North America and, overflowing its confines, naturally spilled into the adjacent region where there were no Great Powers to bar the way.

The American preference was to exercise power diplomatically and economically—sometimes in combination, as in “dollar diplomacy”—but when all else failed there was always the military might of the United States, the brass knuckles hidden beneath the velvet glove. And all else failed frequently enough that U.S. sailors and marines wound up fighting a series of “Banana Wars” throughout Central America and the Caribbean in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Изображение выглядит как карта

MAP 6.1Mexico, Central America and Caribbean, circa 1914

Cuba I

Between January 1899 and May 1902 the U.S. Army ruled Cuba, first under stolid Major General John R. Brooke, then under the more dashing Major General Leonard Wood, erstwhile commander of the Rough Riders. Unlike the Filipinos, the Cubans did not fight U.S. rule, in large measure because they were confident that it would be temporary; with the passage of the Teller Amendment in April 1898, Congress had eschewed any desire to annex the “pearl of the Antilles.” The Cuban insurrectos took a bonus of $75 a man and duly disbanded. The U.S. Army picked up the pieces after the Spanish left: Soldiers went around distributing food to a hungry populace, staging a sanitary campaign, erecting thousands of public schools (modeled on those of Ohio), rooting out corrupt officials, building roads and bridges, dredging Havana harbor, and generally attempting “to recast Cuban society, such as it was, in the mould of North America.”

The occupation’s most spectacular achievement occurred when Walter Reed, a U.S. Army doctor, confirmed the intuition of a Cuban physician that yellow fever was not transmitted by general filth or other factors but by one particular variety of mosquito, the silvery Stegomyia fasciata. A mosquito-eradication campaign undertaken by the Army Medical Corps produced immediate results: In 1902, for the first time in centuries, there was not a single case of yellow fever in Havana; just two years before there had been 1,400 known cases. Incidence of malaria, another scourge of the city, of all tropical cities, plummeted nearly as much. Such dramatic improvements in public health were to become a commonplace feature of American colonial administration.

Knowing that the U.S. military occupation would be brief, and determined to safeguard American interests in Cuba after the troops went home, Congress passed the Platt Amendment in 1901. Under its terms Cuba would be obligated to obtain Uncle Sam’s approval before signing any foreign treaty; maintain low foreign debt; ratify all acts of the U.S. military government; and give the American armed forces the right to intervene at any time to protect life, liberty, and property. In addition, Cuba would have to provide the U.S. long-term leases on naval bases; it was this provision that would lead to the creation of a naval station at Guantánamo Bay in 1903. In short, the Platt Amendment represented a considerable abridgment of Cuban sovereignty.

Havana went along because it had no choice. It was only when the Cubans pledged to honor the Platt Amendment that the U.S. Army left the island, though the U.S. Navy remained a looming presence offshore. Cuba now had its own government headed by Tomás Estrada Palma, a former schoolmaster who had spent years living in New York State, but it was in effect an American protectorate.

Panama

The Platt Amendment, following the outright annexation of Puerto Rico, signaled that the U.S. was intent on turning the Caribbean into an “American lake.” This desire grew stronger once an isthmian canal was under way. The story of how the republic of Panama was created is well known and need not be recounted in much detail here. As we have seen, U.S. troops had been frequent visitors to Panama, landing there thirteen times between 1856 and 1902 to guarantee freedom of transit for Americans. Although most of Panama’s population had long chafed under the distant rule of Bogotá, in the past U.S. forces had always preserved Colombia’s sovereignty over the isthmus. That would change in 1903.

At the time, Colombia’s congress and president were balking at the proposed U.S. terms for a canal treaty, demanding more money. The U.S., with its burgeoning power in the Pacific, considered a canal a strategic necessity, and President Theodore Roosevelt was furious at the “homicidal corruptionists” in Bogotá for reneging on their commitments to allow the project to proceed. Although they did not instigate a Panamanian revolution, the president and his secretary of state, John Hay, knew about it beforehand and tacitly encouraged the plotters. The revolutionaries counted on American military intervention and were not disappointed. On November 2, the gunboat Nashville, which had just arrived at Colón on Panama’s Caribbean coast, received secret orders from the Navy Department to “prevent landing of any armed force with hostile intent, either government or insurgent.” The remarkable thing about this telegram is that, when Commander John Hubbard of the Nashville received it, the revolution had not yet broken out. It would start the next day.

By the time Hubbard received his orders, 500 Colombian soldiers had already landed at Colón, but they still had to traverse the isthmus to reach Panama City, capital of the province. The American railroad superintendent dissembled and told them there were not enough rail cars available to take all of them, but he allowed the Colombian general and his staff to go by themselves. They arrived just in time to be captured by the rebels who took over Panama City on November 3. The success of the revolution was sealed when the USS Dixie appeared off Colón on the evening of November 5 and disembarked 400 marines under Major John A. Lejeune. The Colombian army detachment left at Colón decided not to tangle with the marines; instead their colonel accepted an $8,000 bribe from the Panamanian plotters to sail back to Cartagena with his men. Within the next week, eight more U.S. warships arrived at Panama, effectively foreclosing any possibility that Colombia would take the isthmus back by force.

On November 6, 1903, the U.S. government formally recognized the Republic of Panama. One of the new government’s first acts was to sign a treaty giving the U.S. permission to build a canal under extremely generous terms that turned the Canal Zone—a 10-mile-wide strip on either side of the waterway—into U.S. territory. It was as brazen—and successful—an example of gunboat diplomacy as the world has ever seen. When Teddy Roosevelt was subsequently accused of having committed (as the New York Times termed it) an “act of sordid conquest,” he asked Attorney General Philander Knox to construct a defense. “Oh, Mr. President,” Knox is said to have replied, “do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.”

War Plan Black

The isthmian canal, completed in 1914, gave the U.S. an invaluable strategic advantage—the ability to move its fleet quickly between the West and East Coasts, the Pacific and the Atlantic—but also a major headache: protecting the precious waterway. It was the same challenge Britain faced with the Suez Canal. London’s response was to assert control over Egypt, the Sudan, and virtually the entire Mediterranean. The U.S. took a similarly sweeping approach with Central America and the Caribbean.

Naval planners looked at the map and realized that there were only a handful of main channels into the Caribbean, the most important being the Windward Passage between Cuba and Hispaniola. Control of Puerto Rico and Cuba gave the U.S. a chokehold over this “strategic center of interest” (to use Alfred Thayer Mahan’s words), though the navy remained interested in acquiring bases in Hispaniola as an insurance policy. By 1906 the U.S. Navy was big enough to ensure that no other power would contest control of its own backyard: It deployed 20 battleships, roughly the same number as Germany, and second only to Britain’s 49. The extent of American naval might was trumpeted by the cruise of the Great White Fleet around the world in 1907–1909.

Military planners are paid to be paranoid, and despite America’s growing power, they constantly saw threats looming, principally from Berlin. The leaders of the War and Navy departments lived in constant fear that Germany would establish bases in the West Indies or South America and then use them to attack U.S. shipping, the Panama Canal or—worst-case scenario—the American mainland itself. This was the basis of War Plan Black, completed in 1914 by the General Board of the U.S. Navy.

These worries were not entirely farfetched. The German navy, under the command of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, was constantly, if unsuccessfully, scheming to acquire a base in the West Indies. The German admiralty staff also drew up war plans between 1897 and 1905 for seizing either Puerto Rico or Cuba as a staging area for an attack on the East Coast of the United States. Operations Plan III, as the German Caribbean strategy was called, was mothballed after 1906, when rising tensions in Europe forced the German navy to focus its attention closer to home. But after World War I broke out, German U-boats did attack some shipping close to the American mainland (though in the Atlantic, not the Caribbean) and the German foreign office did concoct a wild plot for an alliance with Mexico, which would supposedly receive in compensation the return of the southwestern United States. (The Zimmerman Telegram, laying out this plan, was intercepted by British intelligence and helped draw the U.S. into the war.)

The modern-day reader is certainly entitled to doubt in retrospect how much of a threat Germany ever posed to U.S. control of the Caribbean, but the danger loomed large enough at the time and helps to explain American willingness to intervene in the region. These fears were crystallized in the Venezuela crisis of 1902–03.

“International Police Power”

The crisis was precipitated by Venezuela’s indebtedness to European creditors. When President Cipriano Castro refused to pay the country’s debt, Britain, Germany, and Italy sent warships that shelled a coastal fort, sank a Venezuelan gunboat and blockaded the coast. This was still a time when Europeans viewed defaulting on one’s debts as a moral failing and a crime; individual deadbeats were sent to debtors’ prisons, while weak foreign states (Egypt in 1876, Turkey in 1881, Serbia in 1895, Greece in 1898, Persia in 1907) were bullied into paying up. But in 1902 the Europeans’ designs were frustrated by President Roosevelt, who decided to dust off the hitherto largely moribund Monroe Doctrine.

Roosevelt sent the bulk of the navy (about 50 ships), under the command of Admiral George Dewey, the hero of Manila Bay, on “maneuvers” to the eastern Caribbean and privately informed Berlin that he would use force unless the Venezuela dispute were submitted to international arbitration. Britain and Germany, not wanting to risk a showdown, reluctantly agreed. (The international court at The Hague later ruled for the European powers.) Roosevelt took this action not out of any regard for Venezuela, whose president he derided in private as “an unspeakably villainous little monkey,” but in order to make clear that the U.S. would no longer tolerate European military intervention in Latin America.

It soon became clear to Roosevelt that if the U.S. was going to tell the Europeans to stay out, it would have to take steps to police its own backyard. The president thought the Latins incapable of preserving law and order. Some more “civilized” power would have to intervene to make sure that foreign debts were paid and foreign property protected. And in the Western hemisphere henceforward that role would fall to the U.S. “If we intend to say ‘hands off’ to the powers of Europe, then sooner or later we must keep order ourselves,” the president wrote to his secretary of state, Elihu Root, in May 1904.

Seven months later the president announced to Congress: “Chronic wrong-doing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrong-doing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”

This became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, and it would govern U.S. policy in the region for nearly 30 years, almost until the day when Roosevelt’s cousin, Franklin, was inaugurated as president.

Santo Domingo

The emerging Roosevelt Corollary received an early test in Santo Domingo (the Dominican Republic), a former Spanish colony that had been plunged into chaos in 1899 upon the assassination of its longtime dictator. The resulting revolutionary violence threatened foreign lives and property. The U.S. Navy responded in traditional fashion by frequently intervening to protect foreigners. At one point a Dominican rebel group fired on a U.S. launch and killed a seaman, precipitating an hour-long bombardment of rebel positions by two American warships. In November 1903, a new government led by General Carlos F. Morales consolidated power and promptly stopped payment on foreign debt, including some owed to a New York syndicate, in an attempt to negotiate a more favorable settlement of its outstanding loans. The European bondholders were not receptive and Teddy Roosevelt feared that, as in Venezuela, their governments would resort to force.

Roosevelt denied any interest in extending formal U.S. rule over Santo Domingo: “I have about the same desire to annex it as a gorged boa constrictor might have to swallow a porcupine wrong-end-to.” But in order to preserve order and keep the Europeans out, the president agreed to assume a customs receivership. Under a treaty signed in 1905, a retired U.S. army colonel took over customs collection for the Dominican Republic. The agreement called for 55 percent of the revenues to be turned over to foreign bondholders, but because the American collectors were more honest than their predecessors, the Dominican government actually received more money than ever before. The U.S. Senate balked at ratifying the treaty until 1907, but in the meantime Roosevelt simply implemented it by executive fiat.

The Dominican arrangement became a model of how the U.S. could try to use financial rather than military means to establish stability in the Caribbean.

Cuba II

Much as Roosevelt wanted to avoid armed intervention in the region, he found that America’s commitments in Cuba made it impossible to stay out. Tomás Estrada Palma won reelection as Cuba’s president in a rigged 1905 election boycotted by the opposition Liberal party. (Estrada Palma represented the Moderates, but there were few discernible ideological differences between the parties; like many political parties in the U.S. at this time, they were merely rival gangs of spoilsmen.) The next year, the Liberals raised the banner of revolt, fielding a force of perhaps 24,000 men. The government had no standing army, only an ineffectual Rural Guard that did police work.

Estrada Palma begged Roosevelt to send soldiers to help. The president dispatched some naval vessels to Cuban waters, but after the experience of the Philippines, he had no desire to get involved in another difficult pacification campaign. Instead he sent Secretary of War William Howard Taft and Assistant Secretary of State Robert Bacon to Havana to try to negotiate a truce between Estrada Palma and the Liberals. Estrada Palma and his vice president scotched any hope of a settlement by resigning on September 28, 1906. Cuba now had no government, and as Estrada Palma wanted, the U.S. was forced to intervene.

On September 29, 1906, 2,000 marines under the command of Colonel Littleton W. T. Waller landed, met no resistance, and set up camp just outside Havana. The same day, Taft established a provisional government run by the U.S. Both the Liberals and Estrada Palma were happy with this outcome—the former because Estrada Palma was out of power, the latter because the Liberals were not in power either.

Roosevelt still had no desire to annex Cuba: “I loathe the thought of assuming any control over the island such as we have over Puerto Rico and the Philippines.” But for the next 29 months, the 5,000-man Army of Cuban Pacification would administer the island under the direction of a civilian governor general, Charles Magoon. A Nebraska lawyer who had previously run the Canal Zone, Magoon has gotten a vile reputation in Cuban history for tolerating corruption, but he was not personally venal. His sin, if it was that, was to appoint large numbers of Liberal politicians to patronage posts. They acted in the traditional fashion of patronage politicians everywhere, including in the U.S., by stealing from the public purse.

Another presidential election was held in 1908, this one won by the Liberal candidate, José Miguel Gomez. U.S. troops left in January 1909, turning the government of Cuba back to the Cubans. The most lasting legacy of the second U.S. occupation was the creation of a Cuban army trained by U.S. officers—the first of many that Americans would create around the Caribbean.

Dollar Diplomacy

The Roosevelt administration had pursued two complementary policies in the Caribbean: armed intervention under the Platt Amendment and the Roosevelt Corollary, and various peaceful means of exerting control over the region, such as the Dominican customs receivership and a Central American peace conference convened by Secretary of State Elihu Root. President William Howard Taft and his secretary of state, the peppery Philander C. Knox, who took office in 1909, wanted to emphasize economic influence above all, a policy that came to be known as “dollar diplomacy,” first by its critics, then by its supporters as well.

Assistant Secretary of State Francis M. Huntington-Wilson explained in 1911 that this meant “the substitution of dollars for bullets . . . taking advantage of the interest in peace of those who benefit by the investment of capital.” As part of this policy, the Taft administration encouraged Latin American states to take out loans from Wall Street, not European, banks. The administration also encouraged American investment in the region in the hope that growing prosperity would make revolutionary unrest a thing of the past and hence obviate the need for armed U.S. intervention.

Critics argue that dollar diplomacy represented the subordination of American policy to the interests of Wall Street bankers and American-owned companies such as United Fruit (forerunner of Chiquita) that were bent on exploiting the defenseless peons of Latin America. By extension, critics also argue—echoing the J. A. Hobson/V. I. Lenin thesis that imperialism was driven by a search for markets—that American soldiers and sailors were dispatched to the Caribbean at the behest of American capitalists. There is some truth to both charges—but only some.

The Taft administration, like its immediate predecessors and successors, looked at things in a different way. In their view—an American echo of civis Romanus sum (I am a Roman citizen)—American citizens and property abroad were entitled to the same protection that the police provided back home. Thus since the early days of the Republic, marines had been landing to protect Americans from revolutionary violence all over the world. In the Caribbean, this protection was extended not only to Americans but to Europeans as well. Government officials did not view this as a subsidy for profiteering. They saw it as protecting property rights, the cornerstone of civilization. Most of the European states took a similar attitude.

Occasionally the government did more than protect U.S. business abroad by arranging loans for Central American states from Wall Street banks. Washington had no choice but to work through private financial institutions in these days before the existence of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. But policymakers did not think they were exploiting less-developed countries; they thought that fostering greater American trade and investment would benefit both the U.S. and the target country (a view shared by most U.S. officials to this day). Secretary of State Knox carefully scrutinized loan arrangements to make sure that they were not “unconscionably profitable” for Wall Street. Even when, as in the Dominican Republic in 1904, the U.S. government used its power to help collect payment for U.S. banks, the claims were usually much reduced from their original level and the government was intervening more to forestall European meddling than to satisfy the bankers. In general, the government was using Wall Street at least as much as Wall Street was using the government. As veteran American diplomat Alvey Adee put it: “We are after bigger game than bananas.”

This is not to deny that economic motives played a role in U.S. military interventions, merely to suggest that other factors—from protecting the Panama Canal to taking up “the white man’s burden”—generally mattered more. It is no coincidence that two of America’s most interventionist presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, were united in their contempt for corner-cutting businessmen, the “malefactors of great wealth,” in Roosevelt’s cutting phrase.

It is also telling that the greatest level of U.S. investment in Central America prior to World War I was in Guatemala, followed by Costa Rica and Honduras. The U.S. never intervened militarily in Guatemala and Costa Rica, and in only a very limited way in Honduras (one of those interventions, in 1924, was in opposition to an attempted coup backed by United Fruit). Nor did the U.S. send troops to the large South American republics where Americans had large financial stakes, even though they were hardly models of political stability. “It seems to be a historical fact,” wrote one distinguished historian of an earlier generation, “that the more capital a country of the New World has accepted from private investors in the United States the less danger there has been of intervention.” There is an obvious explanation for this: Big business was generally quite capable of looking after its own interests without help from Washington, especially in the small states of Central America and the Caribbean that came to be derisively known as “banana republics.” It was precisely in those countries where the least American capital was invested—Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic—that the U.S. undertook its biggest, most protracted military operations.

Cuba III, IV

The place where U.S. military and economic interests overlapped the most was in Cuba—and yet even there most of the American business community had been either indifferent or outright hostile to the first intervention of 1898, fearing that war would harm an already ailing U.S. economy. After the USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor, Teddy Roosevelt exulted to the Washington press corps, “We will have this war for the freedom of Cuba despite the timidity of the business world and of financiers” (italics added).

The one section of the business community that favored U.S. intervention was the small number of companies with investments in Cuba. In the years to come, those investments would grow, with large landholdings by United Fruit, the Cuban Cane Sugar Corporation, and other firms. Since most of the Cuban sugar crop went to the U.S., Cuba became almost entirely dependent economically on the norteamericanos. And because of its location athwart the Windward Passage and only 70 miles from Florida, Cuba was of great strategic concern to the U.S. Since the Platt Amendment had made it a virtual protectorate, it should be no surprise that U.S. military interventions did not end in 1909.

On May 20, 1912, the Independent Party of Color, representing Cuba’s dispossessed black population, staged a revolt against the Liberal government of José Miguel Gomez. The “Negro revolt” was swiftly crushed everywhere except Oriente province, home to many U.S.-owned sugar mills. Secretary of State Knox worried that the revolutionaries would threaten American-owned sugar estates and mines, so on May 31 U.S. Marines under the command of Colonel Lincoln Karmany landed at Daquiri in Oriente, the very place where 14 years before the American invasion of Cuba began. It turned out that the Cuban army needed no American help in crushing the revolt, and by mid-July the marines were withdrawn.

The final American landing in Cuba came five years later. In 1916 General Mario García Menocal, closely identified with U.S. interests, won reelection to the presidency by fraud. This led to a Liberal uprising the next year. President Woodrow Wilson, with his interest in fostering democracy abroad, might have been expected to look more favorably upon the victims of electoral fraud than his Republican predecessors had done in 1906. But the U.S. had just entered World War I and needed assured access to the Cuban sugar crop. So the Wilson administration backed Menocal’s suppression of the revolt and, at the Cuban president’s request, landed 2,600 marines in Oriente and Camaguey provinces in 1917. Some marines remained until 1922 to protect American-owned property. As in the 1906–09 and 1912 interventions, no fighting was done by the American forces.

Nicaragua

In Cuba, as in most of Latin America, the U.S. supported the incumbent government against attempts to usurp power by force. But occasionally Washington got angry enough at a Latin government to try and force its ouster. No Latin ruler enflamed passions in Washington more than Nicaraguan dictator José Santos Zelaya, who had been in power since 1893. He was hostile to Yankees and forged closer links with Germany and Japan, whom he tried to entice into financing another isthmian canal to compete with the one planned in Panama. Zelaya also constantly undermined Washington’s attempts to impose order and stability in Central America. He overthrew the government of Honduras and openly proclaimed his desire to unite the five Central American republics under his thumb. Since Nicaragua’s neighbors did not want Zelaya in control of their region, a general Central American war loomed until Secretary of State Elihu Root convened a peace conference in 1907.

Two years later, in October 1909, General Juan J. Estrada proclaimed a rebellion against his fellow Liberal, Zelaya, in the town of Bluefields. Located on the Mosquito Coast, far from Managua, Bluefields was only nominally part of Nicaragua; it was a center of rubber, banana, and gold-mining companies owned by Americans, Britons, and other foreigners, and had been occupied by British troops for many years. American residents of Bluefields, including the U.S. consul, backed the revolt because they were fed up with Zelaya, a corrupt and tyrannical ruler with a habit of awarding monopolies on various goods to his (non-American) cronies.

Zelaya sent an army to crush the rebellion. His forces captured two American mercenaries working for the rebels and executed them despite State Department attempts to save their lives. This caused the Taft administration to break off relations with Managua. Secretary of State Knox bluntly told the Nicaraguan chargé d’affaires that the Zelaya regime was “a blot upon the history of Nicaragua.”

Under U.S. pressure, Zelaya resigned the presidency on December 17, 1909, turning the job over to a protégé, José Madriz, who renewed the campaign against the Bluefields revolt. With Zelayista forces on the march, Estrada, the rebel leader, told the U.S. consul that he could no longer protect the town. The consul sent out a call for military help—and before long the marines arrived, led by a scrawny young major (just 5 foot 9 inches tall, 140 pounds) “with a hawk’s beak of a nose, steel-blue eyes and a thatch of unruly black hair,” not to mention a Marine Corps globe-and-anchor emblem tattooed on his chest. His name was Smedley Darlington Butler, and he was already well on his way to becoming a legend.

“If he had been born an Englishman he would have been a Clive or a Rajah Brooke,” a fellow marine officer once wrote of Butler. Instead he was born into a prominent Philadelphia Quaker family. Both his father and grandfather were congressmen. Although the Butlers were Hicksite Quakers, they were no pacifists. Smedley’s father, Thomas, who was to enjoy a long reign as chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee (where he would work hand-in-glove with his marine son to protect funding for the navy and marines), was a staunch advocate of a big navy. Once, after making a bellicose speech on the floor of Congress, he encountered in the corridor a pacifist who told him, “Thee is a fine Friend!” The flinty congressman shot back: “Thee is a damn fool!” Smedley was cast very much in that pugnacious mold. “‘The fighting Quaker’ is what my friends and enemies call me,” he wrote in his memoirs, “and I’m proud of both titles—fighter and Quaker.”

Another thing Smedley was proud of was his lack of schooling; he would later brag that he was one of the few general officers in the armed forces who had never attended college. When the USS Maine blew up in February 1898, the event that would lead to war with Spain, Butler was just 16 years old, a student at Haverford School. “I was determined to shoulder a rifle and help free little Cuba,” he recalled, even though he was underage. Turned down by the army, he decided to try the Marine Corps, which had no minimum age for new officers. His mother took him to meet the commandant, Brigadier General Charles Heywood, a friend of his father. Butler lied and told him he was 18. Heywood did not believe him but declared, “Well you’re big enough anyway. We’ll take you.”

Smedley was trained under the eye of an old sergeant major who had fought with Kitchener in the Sudan before retiring and joining the U.S. Marines. After just six weeks’ preparation, Smedley was commissioned a second lieutenant, and, with some other young officers, shipped off to Cuba in July 1898. Here he was introduced to soldiering by the “old war birds” who still dominated the corps, many of them aging Civil War veterans. Perhaps because he was so young himself, and in spite of his upper-class background, Smedley began to identify more with enlisted men than with officers—an outlook that he would carry with him all his life, even as he advanced to the rank of major general.

Smedley was lucky to enter the Marine Corps when he did. In the years between 1865 and 1898, the Corps seldom exceeded 2,000 men, and promotion occurred at such a glacial pace that 60-year-old captains were not unusual. Upon the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, however, the corps rapidly expanded, and, with the old veterans retiring, this created lots of opportunities for eager young bucks.

Unfortunately for Butler, the war against Spain was almost over. He saw no action in Cuba and returned home after just eight months. But he liked soldiering and did not want to go back to school. So he accepted a first lieutenant’s commission and shipped out for the Philippines. Here he saw his first fighting, leading a company into combat, and became a protégé of L.W.T. “Tony” Waller, whose exploits on Samar would later make him infamous. Butler went with Waller when the marines hastily cobbled together a force to send to China during the Boxer Rebellion. “I am the happiest man alive,” Smedley wrote to his mother when he found out he was headed for a real scrap. It was in North China that Butler really blossomed as a soldier. He displayed great heroism on numerous occasions and was twice wounded. The second time, the bullet would have hit his heart were it not for a serendipitous brass button, which Butler carried for years afterward as a souvenir. As a reward for his outstanding performance, he was breveted to captain at age 19 (see Chapter 4).

When he was leaving China in October 1900, Butler contracted typhoid fever, and by the time he reached Manila he weighed just 90 pounds. Catching, and surviving, severe tropical diseases was to be a recurrent theme in his life. In 1902, while serving on an island near Puerto Rico, he came down with Chagres fever and for a time he “believed that my end was near.” But the indestructible marine bounced back, as always. In 1905 Captain Butler married Ethel Conway Peters (“Miss Ethel”), a society belle from another old Philadelphia family; Waller was his best man. The newlyweds were assigned to garrison duty in the Philippines, where one of Butler’s tasks was to supervise the building of gun emplacements on a remote hill overlooking Subic Bay. Before long the marines had eaten all their food, and the navy failed to resupply them. An infuriated Butler hopped into a canoe with a couple of sergeants, intending to row across Subic Bay to get supplies for the men. They were immediately engulfed in a tropical squall that lasted for hours. They got the supplies but almost drowned in the process. The conservative naval establishment decided, based on his rash actions, that young Butler might be mentally unstable. A doctor diagnosed him with a “nervous breakdown,” and he was sent home in 1908 on nine months’ sick leave.

Smedley did not spend his time lounging around the house in pajamas. He took a job offered by a family friend to run a coal mine in West Virginia. Although Butler was almost killed by a drunken mine superintendent, his tenure in business proved a great success: Production rose and the workers were satisfied. But even though Smedley had an offer to stay in the mining business, he could not ignore the siren song of his beloved corps. He accepted a promotion to major and a posting to the Panama Canal Zone, where in 1909 he took over command of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Regiment.

On the morning of May 27, 1910, Mrs. Butler had taken their two children, Ethel (“Snooks”) and Smedley Jr. (“Tommy”), on a shopping expedition to Panama City. When she got home at noon she found her husband gone; a note informed her that he been sent suddenly to Nicaragua and did not know when he would be back. Butler had received his orders at 8:30 A.M. By 11:30 A.M. he was on his way with 250 officers and men.

Butler and his battalion landed in Bluefields, a Cape Cod-style village “with quaint little New England houses with steep roofs and no porches, all built of wood.” The town was held by just 350 rebels who were under siege from 1,500 Zelayistas. But as long as the U.S. Marines were in Bluefields the government forces were afraid to enter, and U.S. warships commanded by Rear Admiral W. W. Kimball prevented the government’s navy from attacking the town. Although the U.S. was officially neutral, to Butler “it was plain that Washington would like the revolutionists to come out on top.” Accordingly, the enterprising marine major wrote a letter to the Zelayista generals besieging Bluefields to inform them that they could attack—but without firearms, “because their soldiers were poor marksmen and might accidentally hit American citizens.” The government generals wrote back: “How are we to take the town if we can’t shoot? And won’t you also disarm the revolutionists defending the town?” Butler suavely replied: “There is no danger of the defenders killing American citizens because they will be shooting outwards, but your soldiers would be firing toward us.”

This act of bravado helped finish the Zelayista government. Since the U.S. armed forces protected Bluefields, the rebels had an invulnerable base of operations. Before long the rebels were in Managua, and, after a personnel shuffle, Adolfo Díaz, a former executive of a U.S.-owned mining company and a leader of the Conservative Party, emerged as president. Díaz agreed to sign a treaty giving the U.S. a customs receivership modeled on the Dominican example. Under State Department pressure, a consortium of New York banks arranged a $1.5 million loan for his government and received in return control of the national bank, railroad, and steamship company. Nicaragua was fast becoming a U.S. protectorate like Cuba.

Predictably, Adolfo Díaz’s close relations with the gringos did not increase his popularity back home. In July 1912 the Liberal war minister, General Luis Mena, launched a revolution against him. President Taft ordered 100 sailors put ashore from the USS Annapolis to protect the U.S. legation in Managua. They arrived in the capital on August 4. Two days later cable and rail lines into the city were cut. On August 11 the rebels surrounded Managua and began an intense artillery bombardment that wound up killing hundreds of people.

President Díaz pleaded for help from Washington, and by now Taft was getting thoroughly alarmed. He thought the situation was “analogous to the Boxer trouble in China” and wanted to send in the U.S. Army. Secretary of War Henry Stimson dissuaded him, arguing that dispatching the army would be tantamount to a declaration of war, whereas the marines, with their long history of landings abroad, could be sent with fewer international repercussions.

Once again the call went out to Major Smedley Butler and his Panama battalion. On August 14, 1912, he reached Managua with his 354 men and found the government garrison in a sorry state. “Poor little fellows,” Butler wrote, “they are scared to death, and their faith in me and my men is pathetic, and I would rather lose my life than to fail them.” The American major took over informal command of the capital and on his own initiative began issuing orders to the encircled Nicaraguan defenders.

Commander Warren Terhune of the U.S. Navy tried to break out of Managua with 40 sailors and 10 marines. He wanted to get back to his ship, the Annapolis, anchored at Corinto, 75 miles away on the Pacific coast. But when Terhune’s train reached León, a rebel stronghold, a mob commandeered the train. Terhune and his men had to suffer the ignominy of walking back to Managua, earning the hapless naval officer the sobriquet “General Walkemback.” A disgusted Smedley Butler decided that, in order to repair the damage done to American prestige, he had to get the train back and reopen the rail line. The timid Terhune balked at Butler’s request, arguing that it was too dangerous, but when the determined marine threatened to resign his commission on the spot, the navy commander gave in.

Butler piled 80 marines and 40 bluejackets onto a train and set out from Managua at midnight on August 25, 1912. The train chugged along slowly, with Butler’s men repairing track as they went. Outside León, at about 10 A.M., the train was stopped by a rebel barricade. Butler hopped down, briefly parlayed with “twenty excited soldiers, who threatened all sorts of violence,” and then kept on rolling till he reached the port of Corinto. Here he took on reinforcements from a U.S. warship and headed back to Managua. Rebel outposts once again challenged the leathernecks as they were passing through León on the way back, but Butler “waved two little bags of sand in the air yelling ‘dynamite.’” The rebels, Butler recalled, “took to the bushes and we sailed serenely on our way.” Smedley paused long enough to convince the rebel chiefs to give back the train Terhune had abandoned. He reached Managua on September 1, 1912, without a shot being fired.

Though Butler managed just 17 hours of sleep and lost 10 pounds during his tense, weeklong passage to and from Corinto, he “enjoyed it more thoroughly than any like period of activity since the Boxer campaign.” He wrote to his “Darling Bunny Wife”: “My passages through León, coming and going, were, I think, the best jobs I ever pulled off. The slightest slip or sign of weakness on my part would have meant a slaughter for, all agree, that my show of verve or bluff was what made the expeditions absolutely bloodless.”

Meanwhile, marine reinforcements were pouring into the country. By mid-September there were 1,150 marines in Nicaragua, under the command of Colonel Joseph H. Pendleton, a beloved officer known throughout the corps as “Uncle Joe.” His orders, relayed from President Taft by Admiral William H. Southerland, were to reopen the railway line from Managua to Granada and take all rebel-held towns along the rail tracks. Pendleton gave the job to Butler.

The marine major had caught malaria during his previous expedition outside Managua. He lay shivering in bed, chewing on ice to decrease his fever, which spiked up to 104 degrees. When his orders arrived, Butler got off his sickbed and on September 15, 1912, stumbled onto a train loaded with his men and some Red Cross relief supplies. “I wasn’t strong enough to stand up,” Butler recalled. His feverish appearance earned him a new nickname: “Old Gimlet Eye.”

It was to be a perilous journey. While passing through the town of Masaya on September 19, the train was attacked by gunmen on horseback. The marines blazed away at the attackers with machine guns mounted on the roof, but they had some rough moments. One mounted assailant aimed at Butler with a revolver from just 10 yards away but wound up hitting a corporal sitting next to him.

Finally the train reached the outskirts of Granada, headquarters of General Luis Mena, leader of the rebellion. Butler arranged a meeting with Mena’s delegates. To impress them, he staged what he later described as an elaborate ruse: He had his men put tent poles into the muzzles of two small field guns to make them look like 14-inch artillery pieces. Then Butler lined up his 250 marines in a tight-packed semicircle so that it would be impossible to see over their heads—and hence to know how many men he had. Mena’s delegates were led blindfolded into the middle of this circle, where they found Butler sitting on a wooden camp chair with long legs. From atop this ersatz throne, Old Gimlet Eye grandly demanded that the rebels surrender the entire railroad along with some steamers belonging to the railroad that they had captured on Lake Managua. If they didn’t, Butler threatened, he would attack Granada “with my big guns and all my regiments.”

Whether or not it happened just as recounted—Smedley’s war stories need to be treated with caution—the result was indisputable. The next day, September 22, Mena capitulated. The rebel leader, who was ill, agreed to surrender the railroad and Granada to the Americans. He even agreed to leave the country for exile in Panama. It was a supreme triumph for the Fighting Quaker and a vivid demonstration of how effectively verve and bluff could be deployed as weapons of war.

Although Mena was now out of the picture, the rebellion was not quite over. Another rebel general, Benjamin Zeledón, was still in the field. His men were entrenched atop Cayotepe and Barranca, two fortified hills overlooking the rail tracks just north of Managua. The order went out from Washington: Take those hills! They were a formidable objective, especially Coyotepe, which was 500 feet tall and steep. About 800 rebels were dug in on the two hills with machine guns and rifles.

Colonel Pendleton arrived from Managua with 600 marines; Major Butler came from Granada with 250 more. They gave Zeledón an ultimatum: surrender by 8 A.M. on October 3, 1912—or else. Smedley was worried that Zeledón would give up “and again cheat us out of a scrap.” But as Pendleton and Butler anxiously scanned the hills at 8 A.M. they saw no white flags, so they ordered an all-day artillery bombardment to commence. In the predawn darkness of the next day, October 4, the infantry attacked. The Nicaraguan government troops hung back but the marines boldly advanced up Coyotepe, cutting barbed wire as they went. “As we charged up the hill, the rebels opened fire and kept up a devilish hot blazing fire,” Butler wrote. “But in exactly forty minutes, we climbed the hill, killed twenty-seven of their men in the trenches at the top, captured nine and put the rest to flight. Then we turned the Coyotepe guns on the Barranca fort opposite, and that garrison fled too.”

General Zeledón was killed after the battle, though it was not clear by whom. The official explanation was that his own men shot him trying to escape, but there is some evidence that government forces captured and killed him, while Butler turned a blind eye. Four Americans died and 14 were wounded in this assault, somewhat reminiscent of the Rough Riders’ more famous charge up Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill 14 years before in Cuba. Three days later the remainder of the rebellion was snuffed out when sailors and marines occupied León. The total toll of the 1912 intervention: Five marines and two sailors killed, 16 marines wounded, out of 1,150 deployed.

Thanks to this armed intervention, Adolfo Díaz was more secure in the presidency then ever before. In November 1912 presidential elections were held. Since the Liberals (split between competing candidates) boycotted the balloting, Díaz’s Conservatives naturally won, even though by all accounts the Liberals enjoyed more popular support. By the end of the month almost all of the marines were withdrawn, leaving only a 100-man legation guard to maintain an American presence in Managua. This force would be sufficient to assure relative peace and stability in Nicaragua for the next 13 years.

Veracruz

Woodrow Wilson’s accession to the presidency in 1913 might have been expected to overturn the interventionist trend of the Roosevelt and Taft years. Though he had supported the war of 1898 and the annexation of the Philippines, Wilson had been critical of “gunboat diplomacy” and “dollar diplomacy,” often denouncing foreign economic exploitation of Latin America. His first secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, had been one of the leading opponents of American imperialism. And Senate Democrats had opposed the customs treaties with the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua.

Yet far from renouncing the interventionist policies of his Republican predecessors, Wilson expanded them. The stern Presbyterian professor believed that America had a duty to export democracy abroad, and he was prepared to act on it. “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!” the new president confidently boomed to a startled British envoy, who later declared, “If some of the veteran diplomats could have heard us, they would have fallen in a faint.”

A great deal has been written about the differences between Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. It has even been suggested by Henry Kissinger, in his magisterial Diplomacy, that the two men were the yin and yang of American diplomacy, Roosevelt representing European-style Realpolitik and Wilson the voice of naïve American ideology. This is a misleading assessment. “Roosevelt,” concludes the foremost study of his diplomacy, “was prone by instinct to approach issues in terms of right and wrong and . . . he was just as much of a preacher as Woodrow Wilson.” Indeed when he was police commissioner of New York, Roosevelt had atop his desk a tablet inscribed with these words: “Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.” Roosevelt acted on this belief when he helped whoop America into a war to liberate the Cuban people from “murderous oppression,” and when he refused to support a pro-American president of Panama who had gained power through election fraud.

The difference between Roosevelt and Wilson was not primarily over ends but means. Wilson believed in the efficacy of international law and moral force. Roosevelt believed that American honor could be protected, and its ideals exported, only by military force. His famous slogan was “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Wilson almost inverted this aphorism. The irony is that Wilson would wind up resorting to force more often than his famously bellicose predecessor had. This may not have been entirely accidental, for Roosevelt believed that his buildup of the military, and his well-advertised willingness to use it, deterred potential adversaries from challenging U.S. power. Wilson, by contrast, he condemned as one of those “prize jackasses” who combined “the unready hand with the unbridled tongue,” and hence made war more likely. This may be an overly harsh judgment—there was abundant personal animus between Roosevelt and his successor—but there is little doubt that Woodrow Wilson came into office little realizing how often and how much military force would be required to implement his ideals.

He would find out soon enough.

The first foreign crisis to confront the Wilson administration occurred in Mexico. Since 1876, America’s southern neighbor had been ruled by Porfirio Díaz, a dictator who had established a climate conducive to foreign investment and friendly relations with Washington. By 1910 Mexico was the site of more than a billion dollars in U.S. investment and home to more than 40,000 American expatriates. The 80-year-old Díaz was ousted in 1911, setting off a violent upheaval that would last a decade and permanently transform the face of Mexico.

Díaz’s initial successor was the idealistic and ineffectual Francisco I. Madero. In February 1913 Madero was overthrown and murdered by the ruthless General Victoriano Huerta. Woodrow Wilson, who took office just 10 days later, was so offended by the violent takeover of this “desperate brute” that he broke with longstanding tradition that held that a sovereign government would receive international recognition regardless of how it came to power. Wilson not only refused to recognize the Huerta regime, he lifted an arms embargo and allowed U.S. weapons to flow to Huerta’s opponents, the Constitutionalists led by Venustiano Carranza. Wilson made it the object of American policy to overthrow the dictator and extend self-government to the Mexican people.

The first open clash between the U.S. and the Hueristas occurred in Tampico, a foreign-dominated Gulf port that was a center of Mexico’s oil industry. On April 9, 1914, a party of nine American sailors in a whaleboat flying the U.S. colors was arrested by a Huerista shore patrol for being in a restricted military area without permission. As soon as the Mexican military governor found out, he ordered them released and apologized profusely for the mistake. But this was not good enough for Rear Admiral Henry T. Mayo, the obdurate old cuss who commanded the local U.S. Navy squadron. Lacking a direct radio or telegraph link with Washington, he took the initiative, and in the navy’s nineteenth-century tradition (think of David Porter in Puerto Rico), demanded that the Hueristas fire a 21-gun salute to the Stars and Stripes in order to cleanse this stain upon American honor. The local Mexican commander balked at this imperious demand. Wilson, sensing a pretext that he could use to force a showdown with Huerta, made Mayo’s intemperate ultimatum his own. “The salute will be fired,” he grimly vowed, and ordered both the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets to steam toward Mexico. Huerta finally offered to stage a “reciprocal” salute—first a Mexican battery would salute the U.S. flag, then U.S. ships would salute the Mexican flag—but Wilson deemed this insufficient.

On Sunday, April 19, 1914, Wilson decided to break off a week of negotiations with Huerta, and at 3:00 P.M. the next day he appeared before a joint session of Congress to ask for a blank check to use armed force against Huerta. The House immediately approved the resolution Wilson wanted, but the Senate adjourned that night without voting.

At 2 A.M. on Tuesday, April 21, the president was awakened and informed that a German cargo ship, the Ypiranga, was heading toward Veracruz and would arrive later that morning with a load of munitions for the Hueristas. This would increase Huerta’s power and make him harder to dislodge. Wilson did not want to intercept a foreign ship on the high seas; in an odd bit of legal reasoning, he decided it would be better to seize the wharves where it was going to unload. This had the added advantage of denying Huerta customs revenues from Mexico’s largest port, which might help to dislodge the dictator. Later that morning, Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels sent a radiogram to Rear Admiral Frank Friday Fletcher, in command of the naval squadron off Veracruz: “Seize custom house. Do not permit war supplies to be delivered to Huerta government or to any other party.”

April 21 dawned gray and windy. With a storm brewing, Admiral Fletcher lost no time in executing his orders. Just after 11 A.M., whaleboats were hoisted over the side, and more than 700 marines and bluejackets plowed through the choppy surf toward Pier Four, Veracruz’s main wharf. A large and curious crowd of Mexican and American civilians assembled to watch the spectacle. The invaders, organized into a marine regiment and a seaman regiment, encountered no resistance as they clambered out of their boats, formed ranks, and began marching toward their objectives.

From a distance Veracruz looked beautiful, a picture postcard of beaches and pastel buildings surrounded by “indigo waters, sand hills, white walls and coconut palms, mountain peaks piercing the clouds, [and] an island scarred with the grim old fortress of San Juan de Uloa.” But upon closer examination the sailors and marines found the narrow cobblestone streets littered with garbage and rotting animal carcasses. Giant black vultures called zopilotes circled overhead and mongrel dogs ran wild. A powerful stench pervaded everything in this town of 40,000.

Wilson had counted on a peaceful occupation; he assumed that the Mexican people—“the submerged 85 per cent of the people of that Republic who are now struggling toward liberty”—would welcome American intervention to topple their dictator. This view turned out to be dangerously naive. Veracruz’s military commander, General Gustavo Maass, was determined to resist. He distributed arms to local militiamen and convicts from local prisons, and sent 100 of his soldiers to the waterfront with orders to “repel the invasion.” Just after they set out, he received orders from Mexico City to withdraw his force without a fight. Maass evacuated most of his 1,000 men, but by then it was too late to prevent a clash.

Just after noon on April 21, 1914, a shot rang out near the railway yard, a U.S. Navy signalman fell dead, and general firing erupted. The battle of Veracruz had begun. Mexican snipers took up positions on rooftops and in windows and began raining bullets down on the Americans. Americans began falling—by 2 P.M. four were dead, 20 wounded—and the sailors, unused to street fighting, bogged down.

Admiral Fletcher hoped to negotiate an armistice but he could find nobody to bargain with. A messenger discovered the mayor of Veracruz cowering in his bathroom, but the mayor said he had no authority over his armed countrymen. On the night of April 21, Fletcher decided that he had no choice but to expand his original mission from simply taking the waterfront to taking all of Veracruz. He was able to accomplish this goal the next day thanks to the arrival of 3,000 marine reinforcements, among them Major Smedley Butler.

“At daylight we marched right through Vera Cruz,” Butler remembered. “Mexicans in the houses, on the roofs, and in the streets peppered us from all directions. Some fired at us with machine guns. Since the Mexicans were using the houses as fortresses, the Marines rushed from house to house, knocking in the doors and searching for snipers.” Sailors trying to flush out the defenders had been mauled because they had simply walked straight down the middle of the street, but the marines employed sounder tactics. “Stationing a machine gunner at one end of the street as lookout, we advanced under cover, cutting our way through the adobe walls from one house to another with axes and picks,” Butler wrote. “We drove everybody from the houses and then climbed up on the flat roofs to wipe out the snipers.”

Although the navy also participated in this mission, the sailors proved less adroit at street fighting. A naval regiment led by Navy Captain E. A. Anderson, who had no experience in land warfare, advanced in parade-ground formation upon the Mexican Naval Academy, making his men easy targets for the cadets and other defenders barricaded inside the two-story building. The bluejackets’ advance was repulsed with casualties, the situation only being saved by three warships in the harbor that pounded the academy with their long guns for a few minutes, silencing all resistance. The bombardment killed 15 cadets, including José Azueta, the son of a commodore. He became a great Mexican martyr; a monument to him still stands in Veracruz.

By noon on Wednesday, April 22, 1914, the sailors and marines had complete control of Veracruz. In the process, the Americans suffered 22 killed and 70 wounded. The exact Mexican losses are unknown, but at least 126 died and 195 were wounded.

The Navy Department was so ecstatic about this victory that it gave away medals by the bushel. Congress for the first time authorized the Medal of Honor for naval and marine officers as well as enlisted men. Smedley Butler was awarded one of 55 Medals of Honor handed out for this minor two-day engagement, the most for any battle before or since. He was incensed at this “unutterably foul perversion of Our Country’s greatest gift,” and tried to return his decoration, but the Navy Department insisted he keep it. The irony is that Butler had deserved a Medal of Honor for his actions in the Boxer Uprising, but had never gotten one.

The army and navy brass assumed that the occupation of Veracruz would be a prelude to an advance on Mexico City, as called for in their war plans, and as had actually happened in 1847 during the last war with Mexico. Otherwise, the occupation made no strategic sense in their minds. They had not even drawn up any plans for a military intervention in Mexico short of all-out war. But President Wilson had lost his stomach for more bloodshed, and unlike his European counterparts in that fateful year, he refused to subordinate important political decisions to the demands of military timetables. He decided to head off a war with Mexico by not advancing beyond Veracruz. But he also did not want to relinquish the port, at least while Huerta was still in power. Army and navy officers were perplexed by what Admiral Mayo called a “decidedly strange . . . state of affairs,” under which the U.S. could occupy the principal port of a country it was not at war with. But the armed forces followed the commander-in-chief’s orders, even if they did not agree with them, and the U.S. Army moved in to administer Veracruz.

Chosen to command the port city was 49-year-old Brigadier General Frederick Funston. His career had languished since his daring capture of the Filipino leader Emilio Aguinaldo 13 years before. He had returned from the Philippines to San Francisco in January 1902 to recuperate from chronic ulcerative appendicitis. He immediately tried to cash in on his fame by going on a lecture tour, but before long a backlash against him set in. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s committee, investigating the conduct of the Philippine War, heard testimony that Funston had ordered prisoners to be tortured and sometimes shot. Funston did nothing to help his own cause. In one speech he declared that critics of the war ought to be strung up on the nearest lamppost. This caused such a furor that his old friend and admirer, President Theodore Roosevelt, sent word that he should shut up. This he did, but he got into more hot water with Secretary of War William Howard Taft in 1906, who ended his command of the Army of Cuban Pacification almost before it had begun.

Funston’s luck did not go permanently AWOL. When the 1906 earthquake struck San Francisco, Funston was deputy commander of the military district of Northern California. Since the commanding officer was out of town, Funston personally took charge of the relief effort. He once again became a hero, but was passed over for further promotion owing to the jealousy of older officers and concerns among his superiors about his temperament. Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels was hesitant to appoint “Fighting Fred” Funston as commander of the Veracruz occupation for fear that “he may do something that may precipitate a war.” This worry was reasonable enough but turned out to be unfounded. Funston was itching to proceed on to Mexico City—“Merely give the order and leave the rest to us,” he begged the secretary of war—but when no such order was forthcoming, he contented himself with running the port city.

Where possible, Funston tried to keep the original Mexican bureaucrats in place, but few of them would serve an army of occupation. Most of the jobs had to be filled by army officers. Their main task, as an American weekly newspaper noted, was fighting “not the Mexicans, but the enemies of the Mexicans and all mankind, the microbe.” Veracruz, which suffered from a polluted water supply and lack of adequate sewage, was swept regularly by epidemics of yellow fever, malaria, dysentery, smallpox, tuberculosis, and other diseases. Funston, following the example of the army in Cuba, the Philippines, and elsewhere, imposed sanitation at gunpoint. He even imported 2,500 garbage cans from the United States. As a result the death rate among city residents plummeted, and the vultures left town. In general the Americanos proved more efficient and honest than the Huerista officials they replaced; the police, for instance, no longer took bribes and actually cracked down on crime. It was, concludes one American historian, “a benevolent despotism, the best government the people of Veracruz ever had.”

The occupation quickly became a boring routine. The thousands of American soldiers had little to do. They marched hither and yon, and spent much time frequenting cantinas, bordellos and cinemas exhibiting new-fangled moving pictures. One of the few Americans to enjoy an adventure was an army captain named Douglas MacArthur, son of old General Arthur MacArthur of Philippine War fame. Assigned to Funston’s staff as an intelligence officer, Douglas decided to slip out of Veracruz with a few Mexican railroad workers to bring back some locomotives, which were in short supply in Veracruz. MacArthur returned with three locomotives—and an amazing tale of having shot it out with a party of Mexican cavalry that had attacked his little band. MacArthur was “incensed” that he did not win a Medal of Honor for this exploit.

Just 10 weeks after the occupation began, on July 15, 1914, the Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta resigned from office. The occupation of Veracruz—which denied him vital customs revenue—was undoubtedly a factor in his decision, but more important was the thrashing Venustiano Carranza’s rebel forces had administered to his army. Carranza replaced him as president, and although he refused to hold elections, Wilson nevertheless pledged on September 16 to withdraw U.S. forces from Veracruz. The actual pullout was delayed for a couple of months until Carranza agreed not to retaliate against civilians who had aided the occupation.

On November 23, 1914, all 7,000 U.S. troops in Veracruz unceremoniously marched down to the piers and boarded transport ships. By 2 P.M. they were gone, leaving behind copious stocks of arms for the Carrancistas, meticulous records of all administrative actions and not a few wailing girlfriends. Constitutionalist troops moved in, and before long the residents were once again tossing garbage into the streets.

What did this seven-month occupation accomplish? It did nothing to stop the delivery of arms to the Huerista regime. The Ypiranga simply diverted from Veracruz and offloaded its cargo south of the city on May 27, 1914; Wilson no longer cared. The occupation also did nothing to resolve the incident at Tampico that had started the whole affair. Admiral Mayo never did get his 21-gun salute. Instead he was forced to call on British and German warships to help evacuate all 2,600 American residents of Tampico because of anti-gringo rioting. The anti-American reaction was not limited to Mexico; the events of 1914 stirred up rioting across Latin America. An Argentine political cartoon summed up the prevailing Latin view when it depicted a menacing Uncle Sam demanding of a Mexican: “Salute my flag like it deserves or I’ll take off your hat with a cannon shot.”

For all these reasons the wife of the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Mexico City described the occupation of Veracruz as a “screaming farce.” But Wilson had reason to be satisfied anyway, for the occupation had contributed to the downfall of his nemesis, that “brute” Victoriano Huerta. Contrary to the expectations of America’s admirals and generals, a limited intervention in Mexico had more or less achieved its purpose.

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