As with most American interventionism there is a little-known historical backstory not told by court historians. In the case of the 1914 American invasion of Mexico by President Woodrow Wilson, it was the international “oil war” underway between the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil empire and that of the British Royal Dutch Shell-Rothschild combine. America’s 60 Families, that great old book by Ferdinand Lundberg, provides a keen insight:
8:06 pm on October 4, 2020The biggest problem confronting Wilson when he took office was the situation in Mexico. And it was in this connection that Cleveland H. Dodge, who owned big Mexican copper properties, first functioned significantly behind the scenes. In 1911 Porfirio Diaz, dictator of Mexico, was driven from an office in which for many years he had collaborated, along mutually profitable lines, with American mining and oil millionaires like Hearst, Doheny, Dodge, and Rockefeller. But it was Standard Oil that dislodged Diaz.
Percy N. Furbcr, president of Oil Fields of Mexico, Ltd., in 1918 told C. W. Barron that “the [Mexican] revolution was really caused by H. Clay Pierce,” who owned thirty-five per cent of the stock of the Fierce-Waters Oil Company, which Standard Oil controlled through a sixty-five per cent stock interest, and was a confidential Rockefeller henchman. “He wanted to get my property,” said Furbcr, who continued: “H. Clay Pierce demanded of Diaz that he should take off the taxes on oil imports” to enable Standard Oil to bring in products from the United States. “Diaz refused. . . . Pierce put up the money behind Francisco Madero and started the revolution . . . neither Clay Pierce or anybody else ever dreamed of what would follow.” 46
Standard Oil’s Francisco Madero was ousted on February 18, 1913, and was executed by Victoriano Huerta, pawn of British oil interests. The revolutionary movement deepened. To the north Carranza and his lieutenant, Pancho Villa, took the field against Huerta. The Carranzistas soon obtained backing from Cleveland H. Dodge and his companion magnates. Wilson from the outset refused to recognize Huerta’s government. But Dodge and others with large stakes in Mexico, alarmed by the threat of events, proposed that Huerta be given American recognition if he promised to hold elections, which would give them a chance to install friendly officials. A memorandum to this effect was relayed to Colonel House by Julius Kruttschnitt, chairman of the Southern Pacific Company. House sent it to Wilson. This memorandum, drawn by D. J. Haff, a Kansas City lawyer, was approved, before being sent to Washington, by Phelps, Dodge and Company, of which Cleveland H. Dodge was vice-president, the Greene Cananea Copper Company of Mexico, and E. L. Doheny of the Mexican Oil Company. 41 Haff then called to confer with Wilson, and was introduced by Dodge, whose “approval always went far with the President.” 48 There was one compelling reason why Huerta should be denied recognition if he refused to take orders from Washington, and he did refuse. The reason was simply that Huerta had been violently installed in place of Standard Oil’s Madero by Lord Cowdray, head of the British oil interests in Mexico. 49
Wilson, indeed, in a communication to Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, vowed that he would oust Huerta, whom the British government and various of its international satellites had hastily recognized. 50 Not until the early part of 1914 did Wilson give up hope of bringing Huerta under the thumb of Dodge, Rockefeller, and the National City Bank. A number of provocative acts by American armed forces disclosed the new temper in Washington. On April 9, 1914, American sailors landed at Tampico, ostensibly to replenish water and gasoline supplies. They were arrested by Huerta’s troops, but upon protest from Washington were released. There was some astonishment in the United States when Wilson insisted that Huerta salute the United States flag and apologize. Huerta refused. Under international law the circumstances gave Washington no occasion to demand a formal salute. On April 21, 1914, American warships, upon instructions from Washington, shelled Vera Cruz to prevent a German ship from landing munitions consigned to Huerta. There was loss of life and great property damage. On July 15, 1914, Huerta, the odds against him obviously too great, was forced out, and Venustiano Carranza took office on behalf of the National City Bank of New York. When it became clear to Carranza’s revolutionary adherents that he, too, had betrayed them, they took the field under Pancho Villa, portrayed in the American press as a common bandit but actually a social revolutionary.
In 1915 and 1916 the Wilson Administration tried by armed intervention to pluck this thorn in Carranza’s side. Villa’s border attacks on American towns were calculated, indeed, to provoke American intervention and thereby to undermine Carranza in the political esteem of the Mexican people. The story of Dodge’s collaboration with Carranza, fortunately, has been left on the record by Frank H. Blighton, a newspaper man whose personal integrity was formally vouched for by former Governor George W. P. Hunt and Senator Henry F. Ashurst, both of Arizona. 81 Blighton recalled that Dodge had a dubious record. In 1907 Dodge and Louis D. Ricketts were indicted in the Territory of New Mexico for attempting to alienate government mineral lands under fraudulent circumstances. W. H. H. Llewellyn, United States Territorial Attorney, refused to prosecute them, and was for this reason removed by Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte. Peyton Gordon, Llewellyn’s successor, was just getting ready to draw the legal net around Dodge and Ricketts when Wilson took office. He was precipitately removed by Attorney General James C. McReynolds, a railroad lawyer who entered the Wilson Cabinet on the recommendation of Colonel House and was soon afterward appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States, where he became the most outspoken reactionary of the American bench. Counsel for Dodge and Ricketts in this action were Albert B. Fall and Thomas B. Catron, both later made United States Senators by the oil and mining interests. Fall, an old school chum of Doheny, is known to history as one Cabinet member caught in venal intrigue with the millionaires and, mirabile dictu, convicted.
While this New Mexican case was pending Dodge, Ricketts, Arthur Curtiss James, copper and railroad magnate by inheritance and allied by marriage with the Dodge family, and James McLean, vice-president of Phelps, Dodge and Company, were indicted in Globe, Arizona, by a grand jury sitting under J. R. B. Alexander, Assistant United States Attorney General Grounds of action were similar to those in the New Mexican case. Soon after Wilson was inaugurated the two Federal indictments were dismissed upon formal order of McReynolds. Dodge then proceeded to plunge into further illegal adventures; but his operations now concerned Mexico, where he had big properties, and involved gunrunning to the Carranzistas. Dodge was a director and big stockholder of the Winchester Arms Company, the Union Metallic Cartridge Company, and the Remington Arms Company, as well as of Phelps, Dodge and Company, the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad, and the National City Bank. In May, 1913, the manager of Phelps, Dodge and Company at Bisbee, Arizona, supplied J. L. Perez, a Carranza lieutenant, with ninety thousand rounds of cartridges this in violation of a munitions embargo proclaimed by Taft on March 14, 1912.
As the ammunition was being transported to Mexico it was intercepted by an American border patrol. Perez and his co-workers confessed and pleaded guilty. United States Attorney Joseph E. Morrison promptly lodged complaints against Dodge, certain of his employees, and Winchester Arms officials, and prepared to ask for their indictment. The Department of Justice thereupon requested Morrison’s resignation, which he refused to submit. On October 22, 1913, McReynolds peremptorily ordered Morrison not to indict the Winchester Arms Company. A copy of this interesting message is preserved. 62 Morrison complied with McReynolds’ order. But he brought indictments against two local officers of Phelps, Dodge and Company and others, and not long after this he was removed from office by McReynolds. Morrison thereupon dispatched a long telegram to Washington in which he accused the Attorney General and the Department of Justice of obstructing the course of justice. This message, a copy of which is preserved, gave many details of the case. 53 On August 7, 1913, President Wilson had appointed W. H. Sawtelle, of Tucson, to the Federal District Court of Arizona. The case against the Dodge employees was tried before him, and, despite a mass of evidence and a host of witnesses, Sawtelle brusquely dismissed the action.
President Wilson, having found it impossible to wean Huerta from Cowdray and the British Foreign Office, on February 12, 1914, lifted the Mexican arms embargo with the pious explanation that conditions had changed since Taft imposed it. Thereupon a stream of cartridges, rifles, and miscellaneous war materials moved steadily to Carranza from Remington Arms and Winchester Arms. And on July 15, 1914, Huerta, his European arms supply cut off by the United States Navy, fled his office before the advancing Carranzistas. Wilson had made good his threat to the British Foreign Secretary. Representative William A. Rodenberg, of Illinois, on September 6, 1916, formally charged that Dodge was personally responsible for the shipment of one million rounds of cartridges to Carranza. Rodenberg said Dodge had visited the State Department the day before Wilson lifted the arms embargo. The Dodge ammunition enterprises were to figure significantly but not prominently in the Wilson Administration. After the merchant liner and British naval auxiliary Lusitania had been sunk in 1915, and after Wilson had dispatched the indignant note to Germany which did much to crystallize American public sentiment against Germany, Dodge became chairman of the “Survivors of the Victims of the Lusitania Fund.”
Dudley Field Malone, Collector of the Port of New York, testified that the vessel was loaded with ammunition and was therefore a legitimate prey of war, although Wilson failed to give due weight to this important fact. The shipping manifests showed, moreover, that the ammunition came in part from Dodge’s own Winchester, Remington, and Union Metallic Cartridge companies. In many ways Dodge, the only one of his close advisers from whom Wilson never was estranged, throws a queer retrospective light upon Wilsonian liberalism. In 1915 Dodge’s Arizona miners struck for higher wages and were violently beset by gunmen brought in from city underworlds. Governor Hunt opposed Dodge; the strikers won. Up for re-election, Hunt, Arizona’s first Governor, was opposed by Dodge’s political machine. He was counted out by thirty one votes!
