Trouble followed trouble in the north, which, be it remembered, runs to a distance of over a thousand miles from Mexico City itself.
Continuing Diaz Falls in Mexico,
Today is our final installment from Mrs. E.A. Tweedie and then we begin the second part of the series with Dolores Butterfield.
Previously in Diaz Falls in Mexico.
Time: 1911
Place: Mexico City
As soon as opportunity offered, Madero escaped to the United States, and from that vantage-ground kept up a correspondence with his friends and partizans. Though the election had been held in July, the inauguration of the President did not take place until December, 1910. A fortnight before that date, a conspiracy, at which Madero probably connived, was discovered in Puebla. The first victim was the Chief of the Police at Puebla. He was shot dead by a woman who at his knock had opened the door of a house wherein the revolutionists were holding a meeting. The revolution had begun. Risings took place in different parts of the Republic, but were quickly quelled, with the exception of one in the State of Chihuahua, where the rebels had a special grievance against the all-powerful family of the great landowner, General Terrazas. These large landed proprietors are a subject of hatred to the new Socialist party.
Trouble followed trouble in the north, which, be it remembered, runs to a distance of over a thousand miles from Mexico City itself. But nothing very serious occurred, until suddenly, in the early weeks of 1911, President Taft mobilized a force of 20,000 American troops to watch the Mexican frontier. From that time events developed rapidly till the end of the Diaz regime in May. One thing became clear, that the revolution was rapidly making its way to victory, and that Diaz, prostrate with an agonizing disease, an abscess of the jaw, was in no condition to rally his disheartened followers in person. He saved his honor, as the phrase goes, by a declaration that he would not retire from office until peace was declared, and he kept his word. He was too ill to leave his simple home in one of the chief streets of the city, where he lived less ostentatiously than many of his fellow citizens, but this did not prevent the mob from firing upon his home. On the afternoon of May 25, 1911, he resigned, and Señor De La Barra, formerly Minister at Washington, became provisional President until the next election, fixed for October.
Madero was the hero of the hour. He entered Mexico City in triumphal procession, June 7, 1911. His entrance was preceded by the most severe earthquake the capital had known in years. Many buildings were wrecked and some hundreds of people killed. An arch of the National Palace fell, one beneath which Diaz had often passed.
Three days after signing his abdication, General Diaz was well enough to leave Mexico City. In the early hours of the morning three trains drew up filled with his own solders and friends, in the middle one of which the ex-President, his wife, the clever and beautiful Carmelita, Colonel Porfirio Diaz, his son, with his young wife, several children, and their ten-days-old baby, were seated. Along the route the train came upon a force of seven hundred rebels. A sharp encounter ensued. The revolutionists left thirty dead upon the field; the escort, which numbered but three hundred, lost only three men. The old fighting spirit returned to the old lion, and, unarmed, the ex-President descended from his car and took part in the engagement. He entered Mexico City fighting, and he has left her shores with bullets ringing in the air. This was but the second time that Diaz had left the land of his birth.
His work is now imperishable. Mexicans, I am sure, will regret the pitiful circumstances under which his fall has come about, and he will live long in the hearts of his countrymen. Nothing can alter the fact that he made modern Mexico. It was no easy task; the Mexicans are a cross-breed of Spaniards and countless Indian tribes. There are still half a million Aztecs. Diaz has given this strange mixed race education, and a high order of education for such a people; he has brought his country to a financial position in which the Government can, or could, borrow all the money it wanted at four per cent. Railways intersect the land in every direction. The largest financial interests are American, the next in importance are British. Except Germany, no other foreign country has much capital invested in Mexico.
Thus closes one of the most wild and romantic episodes of the world’s history — a peasant boy who became a soldier, a general who became a President — a President who became a great autocrat, who raised a country from obscurity to greatness, and was finally driven from power by the very people he had educated, and to whom he had brought vast blessings.
The great Diaz in his eighty-first year has passed from power, the power he used so well. Verily a moving spectacle from first to last.
In contemplating the present situation in Mexico there is a tendency of late to deplore the Madero revolution and the overthrow of Diaz, and to overlook the fact that the Diaz regime itself not only made and forced, by its political abuses, the revolution that overthrew it, but, by its economic abuses, prepared the country for the anarchy now rife in it; and also that it is the very same ring of men who surrounded Diaz and finally rendered his rule unbearable who are now financing and fomenting the present rebellion against a Government not in sympathy with them nor subservient to their interests.
Porfirio Diaz attained the presidency of Mexico thirty-five years ago by overthrowing Lerdo de Tejada. He put an end to brigandage, which was at that time wide-spread. Such bandits as he could not buy he exterminated. His political opponents he also bought or exterminated, so that without the slightest disturbance to the national peace he could be unanimously reelected whenever his term expired. Out of bankruptcy he established credit; he put up schools; he invited foreign capital into his country and made it possible for foreign capital to go in; and so he gradually built up a material progress which won him the name of “nation-builder.” There were railroads and telegraphs; the cities were graced with beautiful edifices, with theaters and parks, with electricity and asphalt. There was the appearance of a civilization and progress, which, considering the time in which it was compassed, was indeed marvelous.
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