Riding with the Revolution. The American Left in the Mexican Revolution, 1900–1925

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Published Jul 2024

Dan La Botz

Author: Dan La Botz

Riding with the Revolution tells the story of Americans who from 1900 to 1925 became involved with the Mexican Revolution. John Reed actually saddled up and rode with Pancho Villa. Later, American war resisters crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico, where they helped found the Communist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, and a Feminist Council. Protestant ministers, Socialist Eugene Debs, Samuel Gompers head of the AFL, the anarchist Emma Goldman, and Communists John Reed, Louis Fraina, Bertram Wolfe, as well as foreign politicos M.N. Roy, Sen Katayama, and Alexander Borodin all took a hand in the Mexican labor movement.

Biographical Note

Dan La Botz, Ph.D (1998), is a retired historian who last taught at the School of Labor and Urban Studies of the City University of New Yok. He is the author of several books on Mexico and Nicaragua, including The Nicaraguan Revolution: What Went Wrong? (Brill, 2016).

Readership

Riding with the Revolution will be of immediate interest to academic libraries, historians of the United States and Latin America, political scientists, and graduate students in Latin American history.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Pseudonyms

Introduction: The American Left and the Mexican Revolution – A Testing of Political Theories and Strategies

Part 1 The American Left Supports the Mexican Revolution

American Protestantism, Progressivism, and the Mexican Revolution

The Mexican Anarchists of the PLM and the American Left

Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party, and the Mexican Revolution

American Anarchists and the Mexican Revolution

Riding with Pancho Villa: The Radical Socialism of John Reed

Lincoln Steffens: An American Progressive in Mexico

American Labour Imperialism: Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor

Part 2 Americans Organise on the Ground in Mexico

Introduction to Part 2

Conscription, Repression and Flight: America’s First Revolutionaries in Exile

‘Socialist and Internationalist’: Four American War Resisters Who Chose Mexico

10 Political Refugees in Revolutionary Mexico: Socialists and Spies

11 American Slackers and the Organisation of the Mexican Communist Party

12 American Slackers and the Industrial Workers of the World

13 The Slackers, the Feminist Council, and the Revolutionary Peasant Leagues

14 The Expulsion of the ‘Pernicious Foreigners’

15 American Communists as International Agents in Mexico: Louis Fraina and Sen Katayama

16 Bertram Wolfe, the Communists, and a Right Turn in Mexico

17 Joseph ‘José’ W. Kelley: The Farmer Labor Party in Mexico

18 Failed Movements and Varied Fates: Slackers and Communists after the World War

Epilogue

Bibliography and Works Cited
Index