Jack Sweetman

"The Psychological Moment"

“As incidents go, [Tampico] was a most innocuous affair.”—The Landing at Veracruz: 1914

What really happened at Tampico?    On April 7, 1914, there was a skirmish between Constitutionalist and Federalist troops at the Inturbidé bridge over Panuco river, a train trestle of the Tampico-Victoria line.  Afterwards, federalist colonel Ramón Hinojosa ordered the area to be secured by Tamaulipas guardsmen.  All unauthorized persons were to be arrested.  Two days later, on a routine mission to buy some gasoline, paymaster Charles Copp of the USS Dolphin came ashore under the bridge with 8 bluejackets pulling at the oars of a whaleboat, where they were promptly arrested.

Veracruz Invasion: Following in the Footsteps of Winfield Scott

Winfield Scott at Veracruz

To the men in the Wilson administration who ordered American troops to seize the Mexican port of Veracruz, the world appeared a very different place than we imagine :

"It was 1914, an Age was approaching an unsuspected and violent end.  The comforting vision that had illuminated the Edwardian world was about to be lost in a darkness from which none other has emerged.  One August dawn, [the lights would go out] across Europe, and afterwards it would be impossible for anything to be quite the same again.  [..] At the time, there seemed no reason to fear that the most colossal accident in mankind’s experience was soon to occur."  —The Landing at Veracruz: 1914

Cuba, Nicaragua, the Philippines and Haiti had been theaters of war in the years preceding the Veracruz expedition.   Hawaii had been annexed and Puerto Rico and Guam seized.  American interests had been upheld by force of arms in the Dominican Republic, Panama, Argentina, Chile, Korea and China by the generation of soldiers, sailors and marines who were called upon to intervene in the Mexican Revolution.

Nationalist Reaction to April 1914 U.S. Invasion of Veracruz

Carranza shocked Woodrow Wilson with his statement that his Constitutionalists would join forces with Huerta to oppose the Americans, should they extend their occupation out of Veracruz.  

Pancho Villa, on the other hand, told Wilson's agent, George Carruthers

"...all Europe would laugh at us if we went to war with you.  They would say 'that lillte drunken Huerta has drawn them into a tangle at last".   ... Honest, I hope the Americans bottle up Veracruz so tight they can't even get water into it." —The Landing at Veracruz

To Pancho Villa, Lucio Blanco and Alvaro Obregon go the credit for avoiding the terrible catastrophe which would have inevitably occurred if the revolutionaries had joined with Huerta in a war against the United States. This astute analysis of Ivor Thord-Gray in “Gringo Rebel” reveals an aspect of the April 1914 US invasion of Veracruz which has been generally overlooked. Not all the revolutionary leaders were so cool headed, and many fell victim to a nationalistic fever where their hated for the gringo invaders obscured the danger of allowing Victoriano Huerta to consolidate his power.

The opportunity was not lost on Huerta, who in his “sick, alcohol bathed brain”, played it for all it was worth. Zimmerman’s German spy network sprung into action, inciting an already inflamed Mexican nationalism to ravanche for war of 1846.  The situation was confused:

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