PETER: Throughout most of this show, we’ve focused on how the US and Mexico have defined themselves against each other. But our final story, today, is about a time when Americans saw the US as very similar to Mexico, in some alarming ways.
BRIAN: In the 1860s, both the United States and Mexico faced serious political crises. In the US, southern secession had sparked a civil war. In Mexico, a European invasion led to the installation of a French-backed emperor.
ED: By 1867, the Mexican Liberal Party had managed to reinstate Republican government. But their control was shaky. In some parts of the country, warlords had much more authority than a government did.
PETER: Meanwhile, Republican politicians in the US were struggling to control the defeated South. These Republicans noticed Mexico’s warlord problem, and thought it looked disturbingly familiar.
GREG DOWNS: And so they make very direct analogies, to say that our Ku Klux Klan leaders are exactly the same as these Mexican warlords who are plaguing the liberal government there.
ED: This is Greg Downs, a historian at the City University of New York. He says that the Republicans who were worried about postwar instability in the US started using a new word, Mexicanization. They said that white Southern resistance to federal control was, quote, “Mexicanizing the US.”
BRIAN: Democrats, meanwhile, looked to Mexico and drew a different conclusion. They pointed out the threat of dictatorship– too much federal power, not too little. And all their worst fears were confirmed when Republican Ulysses S Grant, former Commander of the US Army, was elected president, in 1868.
GREG DOWNS: And quickly, Grant emerges in democratic discourse as a United States Santa Ana, referring to this Mexican leader who had been multiple times president and general, who’s, sort of, lurking in the shadows throughout much of these 1860s crises. You know, available and eager to come back, to march back as a dictator. And so it’s a military takeover of the civil government.
BRIAN: And so they have, the Democrats, have the actual reconstruction legislation pretty assertive control by the central government in the United States. That’s what they have in mind.
GREG DOWNS: That’s correct.
BRIAN: And also, the actual military occupation of the South during Reconstruction.
GREG DOWNS: That’s correct. Absolutely.
BRIAN: So you have these two very conflicting uses of Mexicanization.
GREG DOWNS: And then bespeak how tumultuous the post Civil War period was in the United States. Both ideas had a certain resonance. To us, we’d take for granted that the United States wasn’t going to enter into a series of escalating civil wars. But it’s exactly this fear that both Republicans and Democrats are speaking about. And they’re using Mexico to raise the possibility that a republic good disintegrated into a multitude of civil wars. So they have a common condition. And they’re creating exactly opposite diagnoses.
BRIAN: So Mexicanization becomes the language that the Republican and Democratic parties use to battle out one of their central differences, that’s national power versus states’ rights.
GREG DOWNS: That’s right. And if you want to hear something that truly shows you how strange– that reminds you how strange language works– in the midst of this, something else hits American newspapers, which is that, in Mexico, right? You know the thing about referring to Mexico, all the time and their language, is that Mexico is, itself, a place with its own history and its own present change.
And in the midst of this, in December 1876, Porfirio Diaz, who will become the central figure of the next 50 years– almost 50, 40 years of Mexican history– overthrows his rival, Lerdo de Tejada, and asserts his control over the Mexican government. And amazingly, the way that American newspapers refer to this, is Mexico has been Mexicanized.
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GREG DOWNS: In retrospect, it’s clear that the American newspapers exactly misunderstood Diaz. Because what actually emerges out of Diaz’s rule of Mexico, is the opposite, in what we would look back now and say an excess of stabilization. That Diaz moves toward a single party state. He not only eliminates ongoing civil wars and peripheral fights against the center, but he eliminates a great deal of politics, itself.
BRIAN: But wouldn’t that correspond to one of the two meanings of Mexicanization?
GREG DOWNS: That’s exactly right. Yeah. That they haven’t connected. They imagine that Diaz is overthrowing Lerdo de Tejada, and there’ll be another one coming.
BRIAN: So the newspapers, they are using Mexicanization in the Republican way.
GREG DOWNS: That’s right.
BRIAN: That it’s a never ending series of one revolution after another. But in fact, as I recall, Diaz remains president for something like 35 or 40 years. In fact, the history of it was the way the Democrats were using Mexicanization. Meaning, there’s going to be this rule from the center and it’s going to stifle local initiative.
GREG DOWNS: That’s right. So during the ’70s, any time when there’s a disputed election in Maine– I mean, in Maine, of all places– where they say, look how far we’ve come. Even New Englanders are being Mexicanized. It’s not just the South. When there’s discussion of the overthrow of the last Reconstruction government, Mexicanization has kind of become the default go-to word to say why your opponents are behaving illegitimately. And that ends in the early 1880s, especially in the aftermath of the assassination of Garfield.
Because immediately, once he’s assassinated, Mexicanization is used to describe it all the time, right? Assassination is the way that Mexicanization happens. Over time, as Garfield takes a long time to die, and as the presumption becomes that he was killed, not by a conspiracy, but by a lone individual, he becomes this rallying point, of a cross-partisan rallying point. And Mexicanization fades in its usage, over the 1880s and 1890s, until it becomes–
BRIAN: And as this settlement begins to take hold, the South kind of begins to implement Jim Crow. And really does assert states’ rights. Yet the nation remains whole. There are not civil wars.
GREG DOWNS: That’s right. One of the ironies of this is that, at the moment they give up on comparing the United States to Mexico, the countries are actually taking quite similar paths. There’s a difference in degree. But if we look at with the benefit of hindsight, what you see is that both countries emerge out of periods of civil wars, with a fear that the problem that caused the Civil War was essentially democracy. And so the growth of an anti-democratic push-back as a way of stabilizing, of stopping civil wars.
For the Poririoto, that became through the creation of a one party state. And then, eventually, of a, basically, permanent president. The United States retains the two parties to date on a national level, but moves toward a one party state in the South. And quickly, over the ’80s, and then especially over the ’90s and early 1900s, toward the restriction of who can participate in politics. So on the largest level, the participation of African American men in the South is dramatically restricted in disfranchisement.
BRIAN: So just to pause there, you’re talking about the rise of Jim Crow legislation in the South?
GREG DOWNS: That’s right.
BRIAN: And in the North?
GREG DOWNS: You can see the restrictions that are put on immigrant voting. So that one of the leading scholars of national voting calls it a national disfranchisement campaign. And that the overall voting in presidential elections drops by about a third over the early 1900s. And so we face this irony, which is, that the United States and Mexico, in some ways, are continuing to follow similar democratic paths. And yet, at exactly that same moment, the United States is losing its sense that it’s like Mexico.
That because of the persistence of the two party system, the United States starts to see Mexico as a military dictatorship, and the United States as this flourishing democracy, even as democracy is dying.
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BRIAN: Greg Downs is a historian at the City College of New York, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. We’ll link to his article, “The Mexicanization of American Politics” on our website, backstoryradio.org.