Frank Tannenbaum and the Mexican Revolution

Alan Knight
St. Antonys College, Oxford University

Abstract
This article examines Frank Tannenbaums engagement with Mexico in the crucial years
following the Revolution of 1910 1920 and his first visit to the country in 1922. Invited
and fetedby the government and its powerful labor allies, Tannenbaum soon expanded
his initial interest in organized labor and produced a stream of work dealing with trade
unions, peasants, Indians, politics, and educationwork that described and often
justified the social program of the Revolution, and that, rather surprisingly, continued
long after the Revolution had lost its radical credentials in the 1940s. Tannenbaums
vision of Mexico was culturalist, even essentialist; more Veblenian than Marxist; at
times downright folkloric. But he also captured important aspects of the process
he witnessed: local and regional variations, the unquantifiable socio-psychological
consequences of revolution, and the prevailing concern for order and stability. In sum,
Tannenbaum helped establish the orthodoxagrarian, patriotic, and populistvision
of the Revolution for which he has been roundly, if sometimes excessively, criticized by
recent revisionist historians; yet his culturalist approach, with its lapses into
essentialism, oddly prefigures the new cultural history that many of these same
historians espouse.

As a young International Workers of the World (IWW) activist with a police

record, Frank Tannenbaum first traveled to Mexico in 1922, at a time when
the fires of the Mexican Revolution, ignited in 1910, were still smoldering.1
Like many American radicals, he went to Mexico to witness the birth of a
new revolutionary state and society;2 in particular, he went to observe and
assist the infant Mexican labor movement, which was already playing a major
role in the consolidation of the new revolutionary state.3 Thus, he came
armed with letters of introduction to the dominant Mexican labor confederation, the Confederacion Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM), and he soon
established good relations with its powerful leader, Luis Morones, and the
Interior (Gobernacion) Minister, Plutarco Elas Calles, who, following the election of 1924, became the first labour president of the American Continent.4
Indeed, Tannenbaum soon succumbed to the aphrodisiac of power, preening
himself on his personal access to top Mexican officials (who were adept at the
seduction of gringo intellectuals) and his role as a mediator between the
United States and Mexico at a time when bilateral relations were severely
strained.5 But his mediation achieved scant results,6 and his labor research
soon fizzled out. He wrote a couple of short articles for the American
review Survey,7 but it rapidly became clear that his chief interests lay elsewhere.
When he began doctoral research at the Brookings Graduate School in 1924, he
opted to study Mexican agriculture, and his 1927 doctoral thesis, when published
International Labor and Working-Class History
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# International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2010
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in 1929, was entitled The Mexican Agrarian Revolution.8 Thus,

Tannenbaums contribution to what might be loosely called Mexican revolutionary studies largely concerns peasants, Indians, and the countrysidenot
organized labor.9
Before considering that important but contentious contribution, it might be
worth saying a word about his disenchantment with organized labor. This combined both political and intellectual aspects. Like that other Central European
radical migrant, B. Traven (Ret Marut), Tannenbaum was initially seized with
enthusiasm for the Mexican labor movement and its radical potential.10 Here
was a working-class movement that boasted radical aspirations, an anarchist
lineage, andmost unusual for the 1920saccess to power. Over time,
however, the anarchist tendencies faded and power engendered a corrupt corporatism; by the early 1930s (when, in fact, the Mexican labor movement was
in the midst of a major leftward realignment), Tannenbaum ruefully concluded
that for the moment the labor movement in Mexico and even [sic] the leadership has declined, as so often everything seems to decline in Mexico, sacrificed to
political ends and personal fortune.11 His subsequent writings on labor are
brief and somewhat formalistic; they stress (and perhaps exaggerate) the nationalist and anti-imperialistic role of labor; they rehearse labor laws and regulations
with little regard for the great gap that separated both from practical reality;12
and, in contrast to some of his agrarian writings, they rarely engage with the particularities of the matterin other words, individual workers, factories, trade
unions, and working-class communities are scarcely mentioned.13
Tannenbaums workwhich, of course, covered a huge range of topics
(land, labor, education, penal reform, race, and slavery)often reflected his
current practical interests.14 Welcomed to Mexico by labor activists, he was
soon drawn into the different realms of popular education, land reform, and
Indian community life.15 These, it seems, also appealed to his intellectual
bent. As Michael Merrill argues, Tannenbaums approach was more
Veblenian than Marxian:16 he focused on culture rather than class, lamenting the dehumanizing effects of a soulless industrial society, stressing (in his
work on slavery) the importance of human dignity and cultural (e.g., religious)
norms. Like other progressive American Mexico-watchers, such as Stuart
Chase,17 he valued what he saw as Mexicos gemeinschaftlich cultural values,
rooted in small traditional rural (especially Indian) communities and threatened by the onward march of urbanism and industrialism. Like Robert
Redfield,18 he focused on folk society, which he saw as both dominant and
perennially enduring in Mexico.19 In contrast, labor was a modern minority,
whose early promise of popular emancipation had flattered to deceive. Rural
Mexico was therefore both more important and more appealing. Hence, most
of Tannenbaums Mexican work adopted a rural, peasant, and Indian slant.
Not surprisingly, he has come to be regarded as the pioneer of a distinctive
and influential view of the Mexican Revolutionroughly, the traditional or
populist viewthat sees the Revolution as a movement which welled up
from below, impelled by local and agrarian grievances, carrying the imprint of

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popular, peasant, and even Indian agency. He has also become the butt of revisionist critiques, which, to varying degrees, reject this view, stressing instead the
urban, elitist, top-down, careerist, middle-class, perhaps bourgeois character
of the Mexican Revolution.20
To identify Tannenbaum in these terms is not contentious; but to broach,
yet again, the thorny historiographical debates that surround the Revolution
and its sundry interpretations (populist, revisionist, postpopulist, and
postrevisionist) would be otiose and, in this forum, inappropriate.21 I will
therefore address the Tannenbaumian view of the Revolution with limited reference to those debates. It is, however, worth making a point of clarification at the
outset. Tannenbaum can be defended against revisionist critics on two counts:
first, on the grounds that his view of the Revolution is historically correct; and
second, on the grounds that critiques of his view are distorted (i.e., that critics
attribute to him things he did not say). While the first is more important, the
second also deserves attention. For, in some cases, the Tannenbaumian or
traditional view is presented in distortedabove all simplifiedform. In
this article, therefore, I will address Tannenbaums interpretation in order
partly to correct such distortions, partly to understand what that interpretation
was about, and partlythough in fact rather lessto match that interpretation
with historical reality, as presented in the plethora of revolutionary studies
published in recent years.
The Tannenbaumian view can be culled from three principal sources: The
Mexican Agrarian Revolution, Mexico: Peace by Revolution, and Mexico: The
Struggle for Peace and Bread.22 The first, published in 1929, is the most detailed,
footnoted, empirical, and (in places) tedious.23 The second (1933) and third
(1950) are much more interpretative, assertive, and discursive (at times rambling and repetitive). However, the three hang together pretty well. For
better or worse, there is no great inconsistency, no sign of Tannenbaum
having radically changed his opinions during his Mexican period (i.e.,
during the 1920s and early 1930s).24 Thus, it is reasonable to take these three
sources as representing the Tannenbaumian view of the Revolution.
Revisionist (and traditional) commentaries are correct to see Tannenbaum
as arguing for the popular, rural, agrarian, and spontaneous character of the
Revolution, in which respect he anticipates later theories of rural insurrection
and peasant war.25 The Revolution rises amid the anonymous masses and
the obscure, scattered rural communities, particularly the free villages of the
Mesa Central, Mexicos Central Plateau.26 It is a creature of the countryside,
not the cities; Mexico City, in Tannenbaums view, is like William Cobbetts
Great Wen, a sink of conservatism and opportunism, the great enemy of the
Mexican Revolution.27 Indeed, this stark urban-rural dualismagain redolent
of Redfield and derivative of the North American Jeffersonian and populist
tradition28is extended to the rest of Mexico and, later, to most of Latin
America.29
Tannenbaum thus sharply dichotomizes society andto anticipate a later
pointdoes so according to spatial and cultural criteria, rather than criteria

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of socioeconomic class. The fundamental divide is between city and countryside

and, he seems to suggest, never the twain shall meet: this is the great mark of
Latin American culturethe city belongs to one culture and the rest of the land
to another.30 Tannenbaums Mexico thus resembles J.S. Furnivalls pluralist
colonial societies, sundered by a fundamental cultural and ethnic cleavage.31 As
a result, the rough-edged homespun revolutionaries who make it to the top
and thus to the centerare likely to experience either alienation or cooption.
The young campesino caudillos of the 1910s, skinny and unshaven, become
once they have succumbed to the citythe bloated, pomaded, gold-braided
generals of the 1920s.32 Womacks image of Zapata in Mexico Citysuspicious,
footloose, eager to return to his bucolic homeoffers a neat example of such
unsullied popular parochialism (c. 1915); Guzmans La sombra del caudillo, in
contrast, depicts the seduction and opportunism of the city a decade later.33
Similarly, Tannenbaums revolutionary intellectuals are a dubious lot: ambitious,
opportunistic, distinctly inorganic. Most intellectuals spurned the Revolution;
those who tagged along did so for the worst motives.34
Withoutas I have saidwishing to enter into grand questions of
interpretation, I would suggest that this view has a good deal to commend it.
It offers a convincing encapsulation of important elements of the Revolution,
particularly in its early (1910 1920) insurgent form. But, in important respects,
Tannenbaum goes too far. First, he appropriates some odd candidates for
popular, peasant, and indigenous status. In his propensity to see Indians everywheregeneralizing that small groups of Indians under anonymous leaders
were the Revolution35he practically turns Presidents Alvaro Obregon and
Plutarco Callesgo-ahead, self-made mestizo men of the Northinto rustic
Indians. The Sonoran duumvirate join a roster of revolutionary leaders, all
unknown, unheralded, children of peasants, of Indians, barefooted in their childhood, more or less illiterate.36 Obregon, the great general of the Revolution, is
termed a peasant (sic) rancher.37 Certainly he was a quintessential populist (in
the simple sense of that contentious term). But he was no peasant and he was far
from parochial; on the contrary, his combined military and political genius
depended on an open mind (and an eidetic memory), on a keen awareness of
both global trends and US business opportunities, and on a shrewd grasp of
political potential and innovationexemplified by his recruitment of the Red
Battalions in 1915 and his alliance with the CROM in 1919 1920.38 Calles,
the archnationalist and state-builder of the Revolution, was even more clearly
the antithesis of popular parochialism.
In casting his popular/parochial/Indian net thus widely and indiscriminately, Tannenbaum not only trawls in some anomalous individuals, but tends
to ensnare himself in an essentialist fallacy. (As I shall note in conclusion, culturalist interpretations seem particularly prone to essentialism.) The people,
particularly the Indians, are endowed with enduring, timeless, innate characteristics. All along the mountain tops in Mexico, from the borders of the US to
Guatemala . . . are tribes of Indians who live as they lived before the
Conquest.39 Gathered in self-contained internally unified communities,

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Mexicos Indians doggedly resist penetration and assimilation.40 But if they are
immovable objects,41 they have little of the unstoppable force about them.
Indeed, they are essentially inert, the objects rather than the subjects of
history, certainly until 1910.42 Indian and peasant communities, according to
Tannenbaum, have kept Catholicism at bay, have failed to internalize norms
of private property, and have refused to look beyond the narrow confines of
their tight, inert, egalitarian communities. The little communities know
nothing of the nation; the Mexican Indian is parochial. His universe is exceedingly limited; in the face of the liberal desamortizacion (the disentailment of
corporate property), the individual Indian proved himself a helpless child.43
These sweeping assertions need to be clarified, qualified, and at times
roundly rejected. Recent debates about the closed corporate peasant community, which have agitated both history and anthropology, are, in some senses,
glosses on Tannenbaums image of suspicious, introverted, egalitarian communities; and the tendency has been to play down community closedness.44
Similarly, recent scholarship has stressed the importance of Indian and
peasant agency (that is, the capacity of subaltern groups to think, act,
mobilize, and resist in ways that can be both autonomous and effective). In particular, those groups, for all their alleged parochialism, have proved receptive to
new ideas concerning the nation and citizenship and, throughout the nineteenth
century, marched beneath national banners in pursuit of political goals.45 While
the scale and character of village mobilization is, in any given context, open to
debate,46 it seems clear that Tannenbaum went way too far in denying subalterns both agency and ideas and that his broad-brush depictions of Indian/
campesino culture sometimes verge on essentialist caricatureas do his counterimages of restless, rootless, individualist mestizos.47
Tannenbaum also incurs an obvious contradiction: for if the Indians and
campesinos were so inert, reactive, and isolated, how did they become the
autonomous shock troops of revolution after 1910? Take, for example, his
emphasis on the parochialism of the common people, the collective actor that,
for him, stands center stage during the Revolution. Tannenbaums perspective
is strongly colored by his pervasive indigenismohis preoccupation with
Indian racial and cultural characteristics. He is, no doubt, correct to stress
the local concerns of many peasantperhaps particularly Indiancommunities.
But, like proponents of the closed-corporate-community thesis, Tannenbaum
tends to see communal introversion as a static cultural given, directly antithetical to national awareness and loyalty. I would suggest, however, that introversion was the result of a historical dynamicto the extent that it existed it had
to be worked at, constructed, and sustainedand, furthermore, that the local/
national antithesis is exaggerated and potentially misleading, certainly for the
Revolution and probably for the nineteenth century too.48
Parochial rebels by definition regarded the defense of the patria chica
the little fatherlandas the top priority; policies and alliances were often
judged in light of this supreme criterion. However, defense of the patria chica
was not incompatible with a lively sense of national patriotism: Take the case

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of Zapata again.49 Francisco Villa, too, was capable of expressing a bluff macho
Mexican patriotism. Even some Indian groups combined strong local attachments with proclaimed national allegiances.50 No doubt there were groups
particularly Indian groups in southern Mexicowhose grasp of and allegiance
to the Mexican nation were more tenuous. Tannenbaum is especially fond of
citing the Chamula and Lacandones of Chiapas.51 However, it would be risky
to generalize on the basis of these cases.
I would argue that the correct antithesis is not so much that of parochialism
versus patriotism but of parochialism (or, in Luis Gonzalezs useful phrase,
matriotismo)52 versus state-building. For what the parochials chiefly resented
and rebuffed was not the patria per se, but the centralized nation-state built by
Daz andafter a period of dissolutionrebuilt, along different lines, by the
revolutionary victors, the Constitutionalists, and Sonorans, after 1917.53
Furthermore, these parochial sentiments were not the monopoly of illiterate
Indian peasants: There were alsoagain, especially in the Southelites such
as the Yucateco plantocracy or the mapache (raccoon) rebels of Chiapas,
for whom localand classself-interest prevailed over sentiments of nationality and who strenuously resisted centralized state-building.
Finally, an excessive insistence on popular parochialism overlooks the
dynamic impact of the Revolution itselfsomething that Tannenbaum himself
rightly stressed. Communities that entered the revolutionary fray as dogged
parochials in 1910 or 1913 were hardly likely to emerge mentally untouched a
decade later.54 On the contrary, the Revolutionand I refer particularly to
the Revolution as a chaotic, unplanned, often traumatic process, not the
Revolution as a conscious state-building projectforced parochials to
become patriots in the simple sense of requiring them to move, fight, ally,
propagandize, and politick. This, too, was something Tannenbaum stressed.
Like many contemporary observersand unlike some recent analysts who
stress the planned, purposive goals of the RevolutionTannenbaum favored
natural metaphors of revolution. For him, as for Mexican intellectuals like
Mariano Azuela, Manuel Gamio, and Antonio Daz Soto y Gama, the
Revolution was like a force of nature: for Azuela, a hurricane; for Gamio, a turbulent sea; for Soto y Gama, an earthquake.55 Tannenbaum, with his penchant
for hydraulic metaphors, saw the revolution as a sea in motion, orin a memorable and apt metaphoras a series of waves that rose and fell, sometimes
surging forward, sometimes lapsing into calm.56 Groups and individuals, reacting to the arbitrary buffeting of such impersonal forces, necessarily shifted
their horizons and priorities. The (convincing) notion of a demanding and
dynamic revolution, compelling change and reaction, sits uneasily alongside
Tannenbaums (unconvincing) depiction of static popular communities, displaying timeless collective characteristics.
For these reasons, Tannenbaums emphasis on Indian/peasant parochialismeven passivityseems overdone, sometimes contradictory. It stems, in
part, from his emphasis on Indians, especially the Indian South, and his propensity to reify essential Indian qualitiesespecially telluric tenacity and

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taciturnity. This, in turn, perhaps derived from his old anarchist leanings, which
led him to exalt and glorify the small, self-governing, gemeinschaftlich local community. But it was also strongly reinforced by his contact with Mexican educationalists in the 1920s. While displaying an idealistic concern for Indian and
peasant welfare, they were also determined to educate and assimilate and
were shocked by the popular resistance and recalcitrance that they often
encountered. Tannenbaums firstand most scientificstudy is larded with
original citations culled from educational sources, which regularly lament the
Indians uncultivated and apathetic psyche, their profound hatred of the
mestizo, and their evaluation of education as a means to learn evil.57 And
this powerful stereotype, which runs through Mexican official thinking in the
period, recurs in Tannenbaums later work: [T]he Indian, he generalizes,
has been at the mercy of the white master so long, he has been exploited so
long, that . . . [he] has lost much of his self-respect, much of his confidence,
much of his sense of worth . . . so he has retreated into apathy, listlessness,
drunkenness, fear, humility, subjection [and] silence.58
My argument is not that Tannenbaum was wrong to stress local, decentralized initiatives. On the contrary, one argument on which virtually everyone
traditionalist, revisionist, neotraditionalist, postrevisionistwould agree is
that the Revolution comprised many revolutions and that any valid analysis
must take into account these local and regional variations. Of this, Tannenbaum
was precociously aware. Indeed, it is illogical for him to be criticized for assuming a monolithic Revolution when he stressed the enduring significance of local
particularisms, amply recognized the great variety of Mexican rural society in
regard not only to villages but also haciendas, and depicted the Revolution itself
not as a monolith but a mosaic. It has not been a national revolution in the
sense that all of the country participated in the same movement and at the
same time. It has been local, regional, sometimes almost by counties.59
In part, I have suggested that Tannenbaum thought the way he did because
of his concern for Indian Mexico. Indeed, perhaps the most striking aspect of his
analysis is the stress he places upon race and ethnicitythe two being, with
Tannenbaum as with many contemporary observers, hopelessly muddled up.60
One consequence is that the number of Indiansand the cultural weight of
Indiannessare consistently exaggerated.61 Thus, I repeat, Tannenbaum
does not write like an old-style Marxist. No Marxist, old-style or new, could
assert that the automobile has been more revolutionary in its consequences
than Marx, Lenin and Stalin combined.62 Tannenbaum is also briskly impatient
with isms of any kind; he does not engage in standard Marxistor indeed any
otherpatter.63 Class, furthermore, is not the touchstone of Tannenbaumian
analysis (hence, his later disagreement with Eric Williams over the character
and significance of Caribbean slavery).64 True, he talks a good deal about
peasants and labor, but these do not strike me as the fundamental categories
of his analysis. Rather, he emphasizes ethnicity, culture, even spirituality: the
Mexicans . . . spiritual and cultural values have been remodeled in the crucible
of internal strife; the chief by-product of the Revolution is therefore spiritual,

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a discovery by the Mexican people of their own dignity; Riveras murals are
the most striking single example of the profound change taking place in the
spiritual life of Mexico.65 Again, thisVeblenian?approach may reflect
something of the old anarchist who rejected Marxist economic determinism in
favor of a more voluntaristic commitment to human agency and creativity.
But it also reflects an antipositivist impatience with desiccated calibration.
Despite scattering a good many statistics throughout his work, Tannenbaum
anticipates todays cultural historians in his scorn for knee-jerk
number-crunching:
All that relates to the conceptual universe men live intheir values, their ethical
biases, their notions of right and wrong, their artistic sense, their ideas of the good
life, their . . . special sense of design, beauty and artall this is beyond the skill of
the statistician and beyond wholesale enumeration. A wide area of human competencies, possessions and beliefs lies beyond the easy reach of the sociologist and
economist.66

Yet it should also be noted that Tannenbaums cultural perspective on

the Revolution is quite partial. He has a lot to say about Indians, ethnicity,
nationalism, and nation-building.67 But Catholicism and anticlericalism are surprisingly neglected. The Church figures prominently in his sketchor
sketchesof colonial society. It forms an integral part of the damnosa haereditas
of the colony, which the Revolution is bent on liquidating. This should, logically,
set the scene for a positive evaluation of revolutionary anticlericalism, which
was going full blast while Tannenbaum researched and wrote (indeed,
Tannenbaum sought to mediate, not very successfully, between the leaders of
church and state).68 Butcompared, say, to Ernest Gruening69Tannenbaum
evades the church issue. The Cristero Rebellionthe Catholic revolt that
shook western Mexico in 1926 1929receives hardly a mention. What
Tannenbaum has to say about it is not only brief but also dismissive.
The Cristeros are armed marauders who harried the government and committed widespread acts of depredation, purportedly in defence of the
Church; the Church itself is termed a hierarchical skeleton, an institutional
has-been.70
How could Tannenbaum, researching and writing during the golden age of
revolutionary anticlericalism, arrive at these odd conclusions? First, although he
damned the colony, colonial racism, and the Catholic churchs contribution to
both, he also recognizedas the (future) author of Slave and Citizen was
bound to dothat the colonial church possessed certain redeeming virtues
and that Catholicism, by conceding the Indian a soul and, by extension,
certain rights, offered a measure of paternalist protection, which, in contrast,
the Indians of Anglo-Saxon North America lacked.71 The historical role of
the church had been ambivalent; therefore, the dogmatic onslaught of revolutionary anticlericalism could not be entirely justified. Indeed, in one revealing
passagewhich rings true and which should also appeal to todays social and

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cultural historiansTannenbaum equates both church and state as institutional

oppressors of a rich and particularistic popular culture.72
Second, Tannenbaum amply recognizes the religiosity of the Mexican
people: their shrines, pilgrimages, and cult of the saints. Given the intimate
association of religiosity and local community, and Tannenbaums commitment
to the latter, it was not easy for him to dissect, deride, and dismiss popular
Catholicism. His responsecommon to leftist and liberal observerswas
therefore to dissociate popular religiosity from the institutional church. The
formera heterodox syncretic hybridembodied a healthy gemeinschaftlich
parochialism (campanilismo, in Eric Van Youngs phrase).73 The patron saint
represented the local community, sanctioning parochial popular protest. The
institutional church, chronically weak if not altogether absent, stood for
creole conservatism, clerical authority, and class oppression. However, this
was not an entirely convincing response, especially for the 1920s and 1930s,
when revolutionary anticlericalism was busy assaulting not only the institutional
church, but also popular religious beliefs and practices (some of which were certainly underpinned and sustained by the institutional church).74 Tannenbaum was
presumably aware of the abortive Mexican Schismatic Church, official iconoclasm,
and the attempt to generate an entire anticlerical counterculture complete with
secular myths, fiestas, and rites of passage.75 Why did he remain silent? Why
did he persist in playing down the radical thrust and historical importance of anticlericalism?76 Perhaps because this ambitious project smacked too much of state
social engineering, of top-down cultural imposition on the part of the revolutionary elites, a phenomenon that Tannenbaum recognizes in passing77 but that
does not form an integral or congenial part of his overall analysis. Or perhaps
he recalledand regretted?his own youthful anticlericalism in New York City.78
However, it is not entirely surprising that Tannenbaum played down a
revolutionary policy, which, through the 1920s and 1930s, was salient,
contentious, andI would argueseriously espoused by many within the
revolutionary elite.79 For, like Gruening, Tannenbaum had a soft spot for that
eliteespecially, as he conceived it, the populist military. (Revolutionary intellectuals and licenciados were another matter.)80 He prided himself on his good
contacts: He lunched with President Calles, was embraced (literally) by labor
leader Luis Morones, considered Lazaro Cardenas, the radical president of
the 1930s, a good friend, and was lionized by Mexican officials, particularly
educational officials.81 He did not suspend all critical judgement, and he was certainly not blind to revolutionary failings. Tannenbaum criticized Calless
growing conservatism, the presence of conservative if not reactionary personnel in government, and, as already noted, the tendency toward revolutionary
embourgeoisement.82 Nor did helike some apologiststry to assimilate the
Revolution to United States cultureas, for example, Ambassador Josephus
Daniels did, equating Cardenas and Franklin Roosevelt, Cardenismo and the
New Deal. Tannenbaums American parallels are rather more piquant and,
perhaps, appropriate: the American Civil War, southern peonage, Mississippi
racism, Huey Long, and clan feuds in the hills of Kentucky.83

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Nevertheless, Tannenbaum did defend the Revolution, adopting a relativist

andCarleton Beals thought84overgenerous stance. Tannenbaums defense
is interestingand still of relevance today. As a Central European migrant,
brought up in the Austro-Hungarian empire, he had a lively sense of cultural
diversity and particularism. Mexico, he declared, in forthrightly illiberal terms,
had never enjoyed democracy and never would so long as entrenched social,
ethnic, and class barriers remained. Writing like Barrington Moore avant la
lettre, he stressed the social bases ofand barriers togenuine democratization.
This argument, which Tannenbaum sustained well into the postwar period,85
easily led to a justification of revolutionary realpolitik. The Revolution might
be corrupt, violent, anticlerical, and, above all, incomplete. But it was a
stepor series of stepsin the right direction, and it was the necessary prerequisite of future democratization. In these terms, illiberal policies could be justified since it was utopian to apply the norms of developed industrial
democracies to a society emerging from the womb of feudalism. Therefore,
Tannenbaum turned a blind eye to revolutionary anticlericalism, had a good
word for the revolutionary military, and wrote up not only Obregon and
Calles, but also Emilio Portes Gil, the revolutionary boss of Tamaulipas,
andmost surprisinglyLuis Morones, the egregious labor czar of the 1920s,
whom he bizarrely compared to the peasant champion and martyr Emiliano
Zapata.86 Above all, he applauded Cardenas, one of the kindest and gentlest
of human beings, the most beloved and disinterested figure in modern
Mexico, with whom he chatted and vacationed, for whom he lobbied, and to
whom he proffered advice, information, and counsel.87
In thus defending the revolutionary regime, Tannenbaum located himself
within the old, still ongoing, debate about Mexican political development.
Could Western democratic norms apply, as both Education Minister Jose
Vasconcelos and historian Enrique Krauze advocated?88 Or was Mexico sui
generis, a distinct society and culture, which should no more import alien and
unsuitable political models than it should export them to other countries (e.g.,
Cuba).89 Tannenbaum clearly takes the second view. For him, como Mexico
no hay dos (theres only one Mexico). This relativist view colors
Tannenbaums entire view of the Revolution. Francisco Madero, the martyred
first president of the RevolutionKrauzes liberal herowas less a bold democratic reformer than a weak dreamer who failed to discern Mexicos pressing
social needs.90 Tannenbaum quotes the radical Francisco Mugicafavorably
to the effect that, had General Victoriano Huerta and the Federal Army not
overthrown Madero in 1913, the revolutionaries would have had to do so, and
that the ouster of the Apostle of Democracy was, in the terminology of Sellar
and Yeatman, A Good Thing.91 Indeed, Tannenbaum expresses skepticism
about Mexicos democratic potential, at least in the short and medium term:
Mexico has never been ready for political democracy, he writes (c. 1933),
[and] it is not ready for such a democracy at present; remarkably, the statement remains intact in the 1966 edition.92 The priorities of government, therefore, are not political liberalization (in part because talk of suffrage means

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nothing to the masses) but rather social reform and nation-building.93 In particular, Mexico needs peace and stability: The significance of the word
peace, which litters Tannenbaums text and titles, is clearly crucial, though
rarely commented on.94 Mexico, he repeatedly states, in oddly Hobbesian
tones, is flayed by political violence: all life, personal, social, political, even
cultural, is burdened by the expectancy of sudden injury, violence and
death.95 Peace is a sine qua non of social development, which in turn must
precede democratization. Cardenas is praised not just for his populist charisma
and social reforms, but alsocorrectlyfor his rejection of violence: Cardenas
. . . had qualities of leadership which made violence unnecessary and governed
Mexico that way . . . [as] no-one had been able to do so before.96 In a personal
letter to the president in 1936, Tannenbaum expresses the greatest admiration
and enthusiasm for the Laguna agrarian reform, remarking that it must be a
matter of no small pride that so important a change could have been achieved
peacefully and without any political disturbance.97 It is a valid and relevant
point; indeed, concern for peace and security now ranks high on any list
of Mexican political priorities. However, it has a curiously conservative ring for
a protagonist of popular revolution.
There is, I think, a powerfulif positivisticlogic at work here.
Tannenbaum certainly does not seek a restoration of the prerevolutionary
days of Porfirio Daz; there is no revisionist nostalgia for the Porfirian belle
epoque. He recognizes Dazs achievementspeace and material developmentbut excoriates the oppressive industrial feudalism upon which these
were based.98 The historic mission of the Revolution, therefore, is to destroy
feudalism (not, I repeat, a strictly Marxist feudalism) and to set about
nation-buildingforjando patria, in Gamios famous phrase.99 How valid is
this perspective? It is true that Tannenbaums depiction of Porfirian feudalism
is seriously flawed (though it is not surprising that this should be the case, since
he was writing barely a decade after the collapse of the old regime). We have
seen that he inflates the Indian population of the republic. He also exaggerates the scope of the hacienda, its economic irrationality, the size of the resident
hacienda population, and the abuses of peonage. For Tannenbaum, haciendas
controlled most of the land, about half the rural population, and the latter languished in semi-servitude (if not outright servitude).100 Haciendas were inefficient, serving the (absentee) owners lust for power and prestige as much as
profit.101 Although these old myths still enjoy a certain currency, recent research
has seriously qualified the picture. Haciendas were less dominant, especially in
terms of resident population; they maximized profits (albeit within circumstances which might encourage a degree of autarky); and peonage was a
varied, shifting, complex category, often far removed from serfdom or
slavery.102 In a similar manner, Tannenbaum exaggerates the inelasticity of
rural wages over the long nineteenth century, thus offering a secular explanation
of what was a more conjunctural phenomenon.103
Nevertheless, his rural, popular, decentralized, village-based view of the
Revolution retains its cogency. It also has the attraction of being a sociological

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explanation, one that stresses structural causes, and does not capitulate to contingency and happenstance.104 The fact that the hacienda was not the
all-embracing latifundio he suggested, or that the free (non-peon) population
was larger than he believed, does not detract fromindeed, arguably it
strengthenshis picture of the Revolution as a popular uprising, fueled by
agrarian discontent, organized by free villagers, and therefore particularly
strong in Central Mexico, where free villages were numerous but threatened.105
In addition, Tannenbaum caughtadmittedly, in sweeping, sometimes overly
assertive, brushstrokessomething of the character of the popular revolution.
He stressed, as already mentioned, the regional and local diversity of rural
protest. He recognized the chaos and violence of the process, noting that
some of the violence pitted village against village; he did not, in other words,
assert that the Revolution was a simple conflict of village versus hacienda, as
is sometimes imputed.106 He realized, too, that spatial and temporal diversity
went together: Over both time and space the Revolution was a mosaic rather
than a monolith. Individual revolutionary administrations embodied broad
diversity:
[S]o piecemeal has the Revolution proved to be, that no general movement affects
all of the states at the same time. National laws are enforced in one state and not in
another . . . While in one part of Mexico the central government may be supporting
and protecting labor, in another the local governor may be persecuting, hounding
and even shooting labor leaders, all in the name of the Revolution.107

Recent regional studies have abundantly confirmed thisif you likeprotorevisionist argument. Tannenbaum also grasped the importance of generations:
the Revolution was conceived by young men, it was fought by young men, it
has been controlled and guided by young men.108
Finally, he placed great emphasis on the psychological, unquantifiable consequences of the Revolution. Though he did not, of course, talk in terms of mentalite, his analysis implied a cognitive shift that could easily be described in such
terms. Alongside the material and formal changes wrought by the Revolution
went a series of psychological changes, which affected classes, ethnic groups,
and the nation as a whole. The passions of the [revolutionary] conflict,
Tannenbaum declares, citing Gomez Morn, stirred a nation into selfconsciousness.109 And this collective prise de conscience endured, certainly
through the 1930s, perhaps beyond: [W]ith all of its failings the Revolution
has come to mean a profound spiritual and social change in the total attitude
and relationship of the different classes.110 This was notlike some of
Tannenbaums generalizationsmere assertion or wishful thinking. He cites
supportive evidence: how the landless peons of San Benito, Chiapas, are
lacking in cheerfulness which is displayed by those who have their own lands.
He quotes Vasconcelos and Pedro Enrquez Urena on the newfound assertiveness
and independence of Indians and campesinos.111 The evidence may be soft,
impressionistic, and far from overwhelming. But Tannenbaums conclusionthat,

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irrespective of material changes, the Mexico of today [c. 1928] appears different
from the Mexico of the Daz regimeoffers a useful corrective to narrowly positivistic evaluations of revolutionary change (or lack of change) and, in my view, is
broadly convincing.112 Revisionist historians are right, therefore, to see
Tannenbaum as a proponent not only of a popular revolution, but also of a genuinely social, transforming revolution. Whether they are right to dispute this
interpretation is another matter, which it would be inappropriate to enter into here.
Instead, I want to end on a conjectural note. Much of Tannenbaums writings on the Revolutionclustering, as they did, in the later 1920s and early
1930sdisplay a clear coherence. With time, his opinion, understandably,
shifted. By the late 1940s he was deploring the headlong growth of cities and
industry, the loss of zeal and faith, and the mood of cynicism that
accompanied this process.113 He advocatedwithout, it seems, placing much
faith in the success of his advocacyan alternative development model based
on small, decentralized, rural units whereby industry would be ancillary to agriculture.114 Nothing of the sort happened, of course. Such Jeffersonian visions
wilted as Mexico took a resolutely Hamiltonian path toward big industry, big
cities, and big government. Yet, as President Aleman (1946 1952) reneged
on social reform, boosted business, and broke the independent unions,
Tannenbaum could still convince himself that a feeling of equality and democracy is the prevailing tone in Mexico; and, nearly twenty years later, he could
draw comparisons between the conservative Mexico of Gustavo Daz Ordaz
and Castros Cuba, which flattered the former.115
In short, while Tannenbaum was not blind to Mexicos failings, he retained
a livelysome would say excessiveoptimism concerning the regime born of
the Revolution. Had he lived to be a hundred, would this optimism have survived? That is hard to believe. Mexico City, the Great Wen, has become just
about the greatest wen on the planet. Cities and industries have sucked labor
from a declining rural sector; ostensible peasants, tied to monopsonistic
markets, have become de facto piece workers; land reform is finished and the
ejido (the agrarian reform community), long neglected, now faces formal dissolution. In Chiapas, which Tannenbaum traveled by burro in the 1920s, noting the
exploitation of the Maya, a major popular rebellion began in 1994. But the protagonists were not parochial defenders of a traditional folk culture but rather
media-savvy nationalistssome of them mestizos and many of them recent
migrants to the Lacandon frontierwho condemn the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and neoliberalism while adroitly cultivating
world opinion on the Internet and proposing a new form of popular democracy.
The vigorous economic nationalism of the 1930s, which Tannenbaum
applauded, has given way to gung-ho North American integration and a cosmopolitan corporate capitalism. Millions of Mexicans, voting with their feet, have
quit Tannenbaums gemeinschaftlich villages and migrated to the soulless
citiesof both Mexico and the United States. The populist generals, with
whom Tannenbaum hobnobbed and backslapped, gave way, first, in the 1940s,
to civilian party apparatchiks, and then, in the 1980s, to Harvard-educated

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technocrats, and, finally, since the victory of the Partido Accion Nacional in
2000, to conservative businessmen and political Catholics, the political descendants of the Cristeros whom Tannenbam disdained. And populismthe ideological matrix of Tannenbaums own political thoughthas become a dirty
word.
In short, the Tannenbaumian vision ofand forMexico has withered.
Even the incongruous liaison of economic neoliberalism and political neopopulism, which, with its Tannenbaumian emphasis on decentralization, autogestion,
and popular empowerment, briefly flourished in the 1990s, proved to be more
rhetorical than real.116 As a prophet and advocate, therefore, Tannenbaum
was wide of the mark; his quasi-Gandhian philosophy of gemeinschaftlich
village culture could not withstand Mexicos relentless social, economic, and
demographic change even if, in its fashionable new green incarnation, it
helped the Chiapas rebels win support from people around the word who
knew little of Mexico and even less of Chiapas. A failed prophet and advocate,
Tannenbaum was a better contemporary reporter, in which capacity he got some
things (roughly) right and should command the cautious respect of historians.
Since the Mexico he witnessed in the 1920s and 1930s was very different from
the Mexico of the economic miracle of the 1960s, or from todays Mexico of
NAFTA and narco-violence, Tannenbaum could usefully report what he saw,
while palpably failing to foresee what would come after. Thus, the traditional,
populist Tannenbaumian portrait of the Revolution captures important features of the period 1910 1940, which recent revisionistsperhaps overly influenced by post-1940 trendshave ignored to their cost.
And, for better or worse, Tannenbaum evinces an additional relevance for
todays historians of Mexico (and Latin America). Though a leftist, he rejected
Marxian economic determinism in favor of culturalist explanations that stressed
ethnicity, ideas, and (though he did not use the term) identity. At times, he
lapsed into an intellectually lazy essentialism whereby whole social groups
(not classes) were invested with enduring characteristics that determined their
behavior. What determined those characteristics in the first place, however,
remained obscure. Merrill (in his article in this issue) is surely right, therefore,
when he sees Tannenbaum as an early harbinger of the culturalist turn in
labor history. Whether, to revert to Sellar and Yeatman again, that it is A
Good Thing depends, no doubt, on what one thinks about the culturalist
turn, its promises and pitfalls.117 What it also suggests, however, is that the
new cultural history, its assumptions and preoccupations, are not quite as
new as sometimes supposed.
NOTES
1. For useful accounts of Tannenbaums Mexican connection, see Helen Delpar, Frank
Tannenbaum: The Making of a Mexicanist, 1914 33, The Americas 45 (1988): 163171. See
also Charles A. Hale, Frank Tannenbaum and the Mexican Revolution, Hispanic
American Historical Review 75 (1995): 215 46.
2. See Helen Delpar, The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican. Cultural Relations Between
the United States and Mexico, 1920 35 (Tuscaloosa, 1992).

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3. Tannenbaum had already written a study of American labor, The Labor Movement: Its
Conservative Functions and Social Consequences (New York, 1921). Mexican organized labor,
though it had played a secondary role in the armed revolution (19101920), displayed a precocious ability to ally with the emerging revolutionary leadership and thus to secure a prominent
place in the new regime: see Barry Carr, El movimiento obrero y la poltica en Mexico (Mexico,
1981); Jaime Tamayo, La clase obrera en la historia de Mexico. En el interinato de Adolfo de la
Huerta y el gobierno de Alvaro Obregon (Mexico, 1987); and Ramon E. Ruiz, Labor and the
Ambivalent Revolutionaries. Mexico, 191123 (Baltimore, 1976).
4. Hale, Frank Tannenbaum, 233.
5. Delpar, Frank Tannenbaum, 162 163.
6. Given the intransigence of US Ambassador James R. Sheffieldwho considered
Tannenbaum to be a hireling of the Calles governmentit is not surprising that the results
of Tannenbaums mediation were meagre: Delpar, Frank Tannenbaum, 163 164.
7. Hale, Frank Tannenbaum, 231 232, which also notes that, on his first trip to Mexico,
Tannenbaum and his wife spent most of their time travelling, not studying labor.
8. Frank Tannenbaum, The Mexican Agrarian Revolution (Washington, DC, 1929;
reprinted 1968); I shall cite this as MAR.
9. In his later comparative study, A Philosophy of Labor (New York, 1950), Tannenbaum
focuses on Britain and the United States and makes no mention of Mexico or Latin America:
Hale, Frank Tannenbaum, 244 n. 63. Of course, there were plenty of rural workers in Mexico;
hence agrarian studies, like Tannenbaums, necessarily dealt with labor, broadly defined; but
most of that (rural) labor was unorganized, none of it was industrial, and much of it was
deployed on small peasant plots. The relevant themes, especially as Tannenbaum chose to
treat them, were therefore very different from those of classic labor history/studies. See
Michael Merrill, Even Conservative Unions Have Revolutionary Effects: Frank
Tannenbaum on the Labor Movement, ILWCH, this issue.
10. Tannenbaums first reportage from Mexico in 1923 exudes optimism and engagement: Hale, Frank Tannenbaum, 232. On Ret Marut, alias B. Traven, a survivor of the
1919 Munich soviet, see Heidi Zogbaum, B. Traven. A Vision of Mexico (Wilmington, 1992).
11. Frank Tannenbaum, Peace By Revolution: Mexico After 1910 (New York, 1966, first
published as Peace By Revolution: An Interpretation of Mexico, 1933), 246. I shall cite this
text as PBR.
12. PBR, 225 266; Frank Tannenbaum, Mexico: The Struggle for Peace and Bread
(London, 1965; first published, New York, 1950), 113 121, 222228. Frank Tannenbaum,
Ten Keys to Latin America (New York: 1966, first published, 1962), contains no chapter,
section, or index entry for labor, trade union, or sindicato. I shall refer to these two
texts as SPB and TKL.
13. One conspicuous individual absence is leftist Vicente Lombardo Toledano, the leading
Mexican labor leader of the 1930s (thus, the successor of Tannenbaums chum, Morones), a key
ally of President Cardenas, cofounder of both the (Mexican) Confederacion de Trabajadores de
Mexico (1936) and the (pan-Latin American) Confederacion de Trabajadores de America
Latina (1939), who, in the entire Tannenbaum oeuvre, seems to get only two references, both
brief and bibliographical (PBR, 117, 309).
14. Hence, it often tends to be descriptive, anecdotal and casual in the conventions of
scholarship: Hale, Frank Tannenbaum, 223.
15. Tannenbaums switch from labor to agrarian research seems to have been influenced
by the invitation which he received from the Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio to study
Mexican rural education in 1924: Delpar, Frank Tannenbaum, 160.
16. Merrill, Even Conservative Unions Have Revolutionary Effects. Perhaps a case
could also be made that Tannenbaum was truer to the early Marxthe humanistic,
neo-Hegelian Marx of the 1840s.
17. Stuart Chase, Mexico. A Study of Two Americas (New York, 1950; first published
1931).
18. Robert Redfield, Tepoztlan, Mexican Village: A Study of Folk Life (Chicago, 1930) and
The Folk Culture of Yucatan (Chicago, University of Chicago 1941).
19. An indication of Tannenbaums belief in Mexicos enduring rusticity (and, perhaps, of
his own intellectual inertia?) is his 1946 article describing rural Mexico, which is wholly based on
data collected in 1931 1933, his justification being that the rural picture drawn here is substantially unchanged, has remained so for the last century, and will, in the nature of the case, change

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very slowly in the future. Rural ways and traditions yield very slowly: Technology and Race in
Mexico, Political Science Quarterly LXI (1946): 366. We are meant to assume that railways,
roads, Porfirian development, the Revolution, the Depression, Cardenismo, urbanization,
mass migration, and the Second World War all had scant impact on rural Mexico.
20. Alan Knight, Interpretaciones recientes de la revolucion mexicana, Secuencia
(Mexico, Instituto Mora), n. 13 (enero-abril 1989).
21. For discussions of recent historiographical labels and trends, see Mary Kay Vaughan,
Cultural Politics in Revolution. Teachers, Peasants and Schools in Mexico, 1930 40 (Tucson,
1997), 8 9; Ben Fallaw, Cardenas Compromised. The Failure of Reform in Postrevolutionary
Yucatan (Durham, 2001), 1 2; and Enrique Plasencia de la Parra, Un recorrido por la
historiografa de la Revolucion Mexicana, in Alicia Mayer, coord., Mexico en tres momentos:
1810-1910-2010 (Mexico, UNAM, 2007, 2 vols.), vol. 1, 409 419.
22. As already noted, I shall refer to these as MAR, PBR, and SPB.
23. Laura Randall, Introduction, in Laura Randall, ed., Reforming Mexicos Agrarian
Reform (New York, 1996), 3, seems slightly hyperbolic in referring to The Mexican Agrarian
Revolution as a stunning work of scholarship.
24. Although a moderate shift in opinion is noticeable by the late 1940s, as might be
expected, it is the moderation rather than the shift that demands attention. Even in his Ten
Keys to Latin America, Tannenbaum recycles a good deal of his earlier Mexican work, dating
back thirty years. See also n. 19 above.
25. MAR, 2, 315; PBR, 115, 118, 127. For Tannenbaums exposition of the thesis of
peasantas against proletarianrevolution, see TKLA, 222223; and cf. Eric R. Wolf,
Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1969), ch. 1. There were, of course, powerful
forces in the real world that generated this preoccupation with the revolutionary potential of
peasants rather than workers.
26. MAR, 4, 53.
27. PBR, 117, 121 123.
28. On Tannenbaums populist lineage, see the interesting article of Mauricio Tenorio,
Viejos gringos: radicales norteamericanos en los anos treinta y su vision de Mexico,
Secuencia 21 (oct.-dic. 1991), 96, 98, 103106. Such a lineage strengthens suggestions of
Tannenbaums Veblenism.
29. MAR, 8990; PBR, 4, 23, 117, 122; TKLA, 2425.
30. TKLA, 207.
31. J.S. Furnivall, Netherlands India: A Study of Plural Economy (Cambridge, 1939).
32. See the graphic passage in PBR, 124.
33. John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York, 1969), 219; Martn
Luis Guzman, La sombra del caudillo (Madrid, 1929).
34. PBR, 16, 128. It should be made clear that Tannenbaum tends to define intellectuals in
conventional terms (i.e., as educated, citified litterateurs and the like); he does not countenance
the possibility of organic peasant intellectuals. However, this is not just a question of definitionor ignorance of Gramsci. Tannenbaums Indians and peasants, though they may be
the salt of the earth, are not overendowed with cognitive faculties. Note that pejorative stereotypes of revolutionary intellectuals pervade the novels of the Revolution: John Rutherford,
Mexican Society during the Revolution: A Literary Approach (Oxford, 1971), 84 129.
35. PBR, 119.
36. PBR, 119.
37. SPB, 55.
38. Linda Hall, Alvaro Obregon. Power and Revolution in Mexico, 1911 1920 (College
Station, 1981).
39. PBR, 11. Zapata, Tannenbaum goes on to say (PBR, 179) was obeyed affectionately
. . . like an old Aztec king, which suggests that Tannenbaumwhatever we may think about his
portrait of Zapatawas scarcely knowledgeable about Aztec kingship.
40. PBR, 33, 67, 102.
41. Manuel Gamio, Forjando Patria (Mexico, 1916). Gamios pioneering work exerted
a strong influence on Tannenbaum; Gamio himself had helped steer the novice Mexicanist
in a rural/educational direction (see n. 15 above); and he figures in the acknowledgments of
SPB.
42. In Tannenbaums scenario the Indian peasantry, having played such a conspicuous role
in the armed revolution after 1910, appears to lapse into quiescence again by the 1920s;

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reformist effortseducation, labor and agrarian legislationrun up against popular indifference, if not hostility. Land reform, for example, is confounded by the behavior of people
whose habits of personal direction are limited, and whose provision for tomorrow is notoriously childlike (MAR, 257). Although there are ways of trying to resolve this ostensible contradiction between Indian insurgency and incapacity (for example, by arguing that the armed
struggle was genuinely popular and autonomous, while post-1920 reform was elitist and authoritarian), a substantial contradiction remains at the heart of Tannenbaums interpretation of the
Revolution.
43. PBR, 61, 129, 203; MAR, 14.
44. Eric R. Wolf, Closed Corporate Communities in Mesoamerica and Central Java,
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 13 (1957): 1 18, is the fons et origo from which a
torrent of literature has flowed; a succinct review, with reference to Mexico, is provided by
James B. Greenberg, Santiagos Sword: Chatino Peasant Religion and Economics (Berkeley,
1981), ch. 1.
45. Friedrich Katz, ed., Riot, Rebellion and Revolution. Rural Social Conflict in Mexico
(Princeton, 1988): and, for two case studies of early popular politicization, see Peter
Guardino, Peasants, Politics and the Formation of Mexicos National State: Guerrero, 180057
(Stanford, 1996), and The Time of Liberty. Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750 1850
(Durham, 2005).
46. This question lies at the heart of my debate with Eric Van Young and his magisterial
study, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology and the Struggle for Mexican
Independence, 1810 21 (Stanford, 2001): see Eric Van Young y Alan Knight, En torno a la
otra rebelion (Mexico, 2007), which contains articles originally published in Historia
Mexicana 214 (oct.-dic. 2004).
47. For mestizo stereotypeswhich, of course, draw on a rich tradition, including another
of Tannenbaums favorites, Andres Molina Enrquezsee MAR, 143; SPB, 15; TKLA, 4243,
114, 121. Alejandro de la Fuente, From Slaves to Citizens? Tannenbaum and the Debates on
Slavery, Emancipation, and Race Relations in Latin America, ILWCH, this issue. On Molina
Enrquez and mestizaje, see Agustn Basave, Mexico mestizo. Analisis de la mestozofilia mexicana en torno a Andres Molina Enrquez (Mexico, 1992).
48. Alan Knight, Peasants Into Patriots: Thoughts on the Making of the Mexican
Nation, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 10 (1994): 135 161.
49. Womack, Zapata, 186, 300.
50. For example, Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo, Ciudadanos imaginarios (Mexico City,
1992), 68, 7071. This, of course, raises the thorny question of whether popular proclamations
and petitions (i.e., the public transcripts of popular movements) were genuine and expressive,
or contrived and instrumental. Perhaps it was good politics to sound patriotic (even if you
werent), and popular protesters realized as much. On the problem of public and private transcripts, see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New
Haven, 1990).
51. MAR, 49 50; PBR, 5, 129.
52. Luis Gonzalez, Patriotismo y matriotismo, cara y cruz de Mexico, in Cecilia Noriega
Elo, ed., El nacionalismo en Mexico (Zamora, 1992), 477 496.
53. A roughly similar argument is advanced, for nineteenth-century Mexico and Peru, by
Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley,
1995).
54. I would make a similar argument (on the basis of less expertise) for the Independence
movement: Van Young and Knight, En torno a la otra rebelion, 32, 35 38.
55. PBR, 112, 183. Azuela also suggested a hurricane: Rutherford, Mexican Society, 122.
56. PBR, 112, 147.
57. MAR, 45 51. On the blatantly deprecatory attitudes of educational officials toward
Indian peasants in the 1930s, see Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution, 64.
58. PBR, 26.
59. PBR, 45, 121122; note also MAR, 72, 85, 110, 127, where Tannenbaum stresses the
complexity of agrarian society, in which labor has the intricacy of a cobweb and haciendaswhile displaying common characteristicsvary according to crop, labor supply, and
local custom or tradition.
60. For example, in PBR, 7, Tannenbaum seems to refer to differences in stature, pigmentation and social institutions [my emphasis] as the only categories for which the term race has

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any meaning. Not that this confusion of genetic and social attributes was at all rare at the time;
on the contrary, it was the norm, even among progressive thinkers who spurned the crude forms
of racism: Alan Knight, Racism, Revolution and Indigenismo: Mexico, 191040, in Richard
Graham, ed., The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870 1940 (Austin, 1990), 71114.
61. PBR, 1921.
62. TKLA, 202.
63. TKLA, 115 116, 127128.
64. Humberto Garca Muniz, Los ultimos treinta anos, 1898 1930: un manuscrito
inedito de Frank Tannenbaum sobre Puerto Rico, Op. Cit. (San Juan, Puerto Rico), no. 7,
1992, 155. I am grateful to Dr Garca Muniz for making this interesting study available to me.
65. PBR, 181; MAR, 135.
66. Tannenbaum, Technology and Race in Mexico, 365.
67. I have largely avoided the vexed question of nationalismin the sense, not of
inward-oriented nation-building, but of outward-looking antiforeign and anti-imperialist sentiment. Tannenbaum asserts the importance of popular xenophobia, linking it to foreign ownership of Mexican assets; but his evidence is thin (and relates largely to the
less-than-revolutionary South): PBR, 136, 229; SPB, 54. MAR, 358392, contains detailed
data on foreign landholding and nationalist legislation, post-1915, but these data do not constitute proof of popular xenophobia. I do not, therefore, find his discussion of this topic entirely
convincing. More important, perhaps, there is an inherent contradiction in Tannenbaums
picture of a nationalistand popularrevolution, mounted by essentially parochial, antinationalist peasants.
68. Hale, Frank Tannenbaum, 239; Delpar, Frank Tannenbaum, 163.
69. Ernest Gruening, Mexico and Its Heritage (New York, 1928), 275286. Interestingly,
Tannenbaum considered Gruening overly anti-Catholic: Delpar, The Enormous Vogue, 59.
70. SPB, 66; PBR, 6466. For a generally persuasive revisionist account of the Cristero
revolt, which stresses its popular authenticity, see Jean Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion: The
Mexican People Between Church and State, 1926 9 (Cambridge, 1976).
71. PBR, 3637; TKLA, 54 55. There is an obvious comparison here with Tannenbaums
of slavery in Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York, 1946).
72. PBR, 44.
73. MAR, 11, 49; PBR, 38, 57. Van Young, The Other Rebellion, 62, 483, 491.
74. Jean Meyer stresses precisely the religious orthodoxy of the Cristeros, minimizing syncretic pre-Columbian elements. Perhaps he exaggerates; but the notion that the Cristeros were
quasipagans wont wash. See Jean Meyer, La Cristiada, t. III, Los cristeros (Mexico, Siglo XXI,
7th ed., 1985, first pubd. 1974), 272 315.
75. For recent explorations of church-state conflict in this period, which, in general,
confirm the high stakes and sincere convictions involved, see Matthew Butler, ed., Faith and
Impiety in Revolutionary Mexico (New York and Basingstoke, 2007).
76. MAR, written as the Cristero War was fought, omits all reference; PBR, completed a
few years after its termination, contains chapters entitled Conflict of Church and State and
The Defeat of the Church, 44 67, which focus on the prerevolutionary period and assume
that the defeat had already occurred. For the revolutionary period, Tannenbaum ventures
only one brief (half paragraph) reference to Catholic opposition to Federal schooling. Oddly,
it is Tannenbaums last (Mexican) bookSPB, 133134that contains the fullest account,
although this, too, is brief, neglects the Cristero rank-and-file, and dwells on the Caruana
missionan abortive mediation in which Tannenbaum himself was directly involved.
77. PBR, 44; TKLA, 101 offers a critique of educational bureaucrats who issue long reglamentos to teachers off in the jungle or in some mountain crevice, thus fill[ing] the air with
sounds of activity . . . with little meaning for those far distant from the capital; a critique
which stands somewhat at odds with Tannenbaums previous close association withand
reliance uponMexican educational bureaucrats of the 1920s and 1930s, who often did precisely this.
78. Garca Muniz, Los ultimos treinta anos, 156157; Delpar, The Enormous Vogue,
27.
79. One ploynot confined to Tannenbaumis to dismiss revolutionary anticlericalism
as a smokescreen put out by conservative elites to distract the masses from more important
issues. Having lost their faith in the people, Tannenbaum writes of Calles and his new aristocracy of gilded socialists, they salved their consciences by a systematic persecution of the

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Church: SPB, 68 (in TKLA, 63, he extends this critique to Latin American anticlericalism in
general). Such an interpretation greatly exaggerates both the cynical instrumentality of
Callista anticlericalism and the naive gullibility of the people: see Alan Knight, The
Mentality and Modus Operandi of Revolutionary Anticlericalism, in Butler, Faith and
Impiety, 2156.
80. PBR, 166; SPB, 54.
81. Delpar, The Enormous Vogue, 27 29, 60.
82. PBR, 153; SPB, 68 70.
83. Tannenbaum to L. Duggan, Oct. 13, 1938, Archivo General de la Nacion, Mexico City,
Ramo de Presidentes, Fondo Lazaro Cardenas (henceforth: AGN, R-P, F-LC), 711/121; PBR,
104; TKLA, 139, 165, 231. These, incidentally, are interesting parallels that would repay comparative research; but Mexican and United States historiography tends to advance on parallel
lines, with few or no intersections.
84. Delpar, The Enormous Vogue, 60. Over the years, Beals and Tannenbaum also parted
company on (1) the question of US policy toward Latin America, of which Tannenbaum was
more supportive, Beals more critical; and (2) Latin American economic strategy, in that
Beals stressed industrialization, whereas Tannenbaum clung to his Jeffersonian vision of autonomous rural communities: see John A. Britton, Carleton Beals. A Radical Journalist in Latin
America (Albuquerque, 1987), 161, 200.
85. In the mid-1960s Tannenbaum was still arguing that anyone who believes that an egalitarian democracy can be developed in ten years in Guatemala is due for an unhappy awakening: TKLA, 231. Defenders of Mexicos ruling party, the PRI, sometimes justified
presidentialism and the one-party monopoly of national power in terms of pragmatism,
realism, stability, and the lack of preferable or feasible alternatives: see, for example, the interview with Beatriz Paredes (sometimes seen as the progressive face of PRIsmo), El presidencialismo ofrece estabilidad y gobierno fuerte, in Este Pas, 16 (1992): 28 36.
86. PBR, 126 127, 246247. In the case of the CROM leader, Tannenbaum patted himself
on the back for really making a friend of Morones and developing an influence with him
even to the extent of arranging meetings between Morones and both the US Ambassador
and the papal Apostolic Delegate (to little effect, it should be added). Tannenbaum did,
however, decline Moroness offer that he (Tannenbaum) become an official publicist for the
Mexican government: Delpar, The Enormous Vogue, 29.
87. SPB, x, 71 75; Tannenbaum to the New York Times, n.d., June 1936, AGN, R-P, F-LC
135.1/2; Tannenbaum to Cardenas, May 6, 1940, AGN, R-P, F-LC, 135.1/3. Tannenbaums correspondence with Cardenas displays both a degree of personal intimacy and fluentbut far
from perfectSpanish.
88. I am referring to the liberal-democratic Jose Vasconcelos of 1929, not the philofascist
of a decade later. Cf. Enrique Krauze, Por una democracia sin adjetivos (Mexico, 1987). Despite
Mexicos recent democratization, the (historical) debate still simmers: in his highly critical
review of Alicia Mayer, Mexico en tres momentos, Krauze essays a counter-factual exercise,
suggesting that, had things turned out slightly differently in 1913, or 1929, a civilian path to
democratic political stability and peaceful social reform was entirely possible: see Enrique
Krauze, La UNAM y el bicentenario, desvaros historicos (Dec. 2007), at http://www.letraslibres.com/index.php?art12530.
89. TKLA, 218ff.
90. Enrique Krauze, Mstico de la libertad: Francisco I. Madero (Mexico, 1987); MAR, 158.
91. PBR, 150.
92. PBR, 151. Note that this sentiment is repeated unchanged in the 1966 edition.
93. PBR, 150.
94. Peace By Revolution; The Struggle for Peace and Bread. What is Mexicos most insistent need? Peace! Internal peace, a sense of stability, of permanence, of security: PBR, 111.
95. SPB, 16 19; PBR, 102 105. These two passages display a marked similarity.
96. TKLA, 144; see also SPB, 7576.
97. Tannenbaum to Cardenas, Dec. 16, 1936, AGN, R-P, F-LC, 135.1/3. The Laguna land
reform of 1936, involving the major cotton plantations near the north-central city of Torreon,
became the showcase of Cardenista agrarianism, particularly with regard to collective ejidos
(land reform communities).
98. MAR, 11, 142.

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153

99. Cf. Gamio, Forjando patria. Gamio is frequently cited by Tannenbaum: e.g., MAR, 143;
PBR, 27, 112, 117.
100. MAR, 28 31; PBR, 187 195.
101. MAR, 105ff.; PBR, 196.
102. Jean Meyer, Haciendas y ranchos, peones y campesinos en el Porfiriato. Algunas
falacias estadsticas, Historia Mexicana, 35 (1986): 477 509; Francois-Xavier Guerra, Le
Mexique: De lancien regime a` la revolution (2 vols., Paris, 1985), v. II, annexe V; Alan
Knight, Mexican Peonage: What Was It and Why Was It?, Journal of Latin American
Studies, 18 (1986), 4174.
103. MAR, 116; PBR, 144.
104. MAR, 144. I mention this because some recent revisionist theories of revolution
have tended to stress the role of accident and contingency as against structural (usually socioeconomic) factors. Accident and contingency are, of course, important. But it is difficult to
believe that the presence or absence of social revolution is due entirelyor even primarily
to random factors, and that revolution is a purely stochastic outcome. Cf. Alan Knight,
Revisionism and Revolution: Mexico Compared to England and France, Past and Present,
134 (1992): 185 6.
105. MAR, 193 197.
106. MAR, 63 64.
107. PBR, 119.
108. PBR, 133.
109. MAR, 175 176.
110. PBR, 180.
111. MAR, 111, 135. Cf. Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, Counterrevolution and
Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1986), 519526.
112. MAR, 134 135.
113. SPB, 244.
114. SPB, 242 245, sets out Tannenbaums philosophy of little things (e.g., fish farms
and hydroponics), criticizes all-out industrialization (while, at the same time, advocating an
increase in the rate of capital accumulation), and urges Mexico to turn its eyes to
Switzerland and Denmark rather than to the United States as a model. Note also PBR,
223224, for an early anticipation of this thesis.
115. SPB, 79; TKLA, 218221.
116. I am not just being wise after the event: Alan Knight, Solidarity: Historical
Continuities and Contemporary Implications, in Wayne Cornelius, Ann Craig and Jonathan
Fox, eds., Transforming State-Society Relations in Mexico. The National Solidarity Strategy
(La Jolla, 1994), 2946.
117. On the cultural turn in Latin American, especially Mexican, history, see the special
number of the Hispanic American Historical Review edited by Gilbert Joseph and Susan
Deans-Smith, 79 (1999). Latin American labor history in particular has been the focus of
robust debates between protagonists and critics of culturalism (roughly speaking): early
exchanges, in what has become a long-running argument, are John Womack Jr., Doing
Labor History: Feelings, Work and Material Progress, Journal of the Historical Society, 5
(2005): 255296; and John French and Daniel James, The Travails of Doing Labor History:
The Restless Wanderings of John Womack Jr., Labor: Studies in Working Class History of
the Americas, 4 (2007), 96 115.

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