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
1 American Protestantism, Progressivism, and the Mexican Revolution
2 The Mexican Anarchists of the PLM and the American Left
3 Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party, and the Mexican Revolution
4 American Anarchists and the Mexican Revolution
5 Riding with Pancho Villa: The Radical Socialism of John Reed
6 Lincoln Steffens: An American Progressive in Mexico
7 American Labour Imperialism: Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor
Part 2 Americans Organise on the Ground in Mexico
Introduction to Part 2
8 Conscription, Repression and Flight: America’s First Revolutionaries in Exile
9 ‘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