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.Footnote ¹ Like many American radicals, he went to Mexico to witness the birth of a new revolutionary state and society;Footnote 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.Footnote ³ Thus, he came armed with letters of introduction to the dominant Mexican labor confederation, the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM), and he soon established good relations with its powerful leader, Luis Morones, and the Interior (Gobernación) Minister, Plutarco Elías Calles, who, following the election of 1924, became “the first labour president of the American Continent.”Footnote 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.Footnote ⁵ But his mediation achieved scant results,Footnote ⁶ and his labor research soon fizzled out. He wrote a couple of “short articles” for the American review Survey,Footnote 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 in 1929, was entitled “The Mexican Agrarian Revolution.”Footnote ⁸ Thus, Tannenbaum's contribution to what might be loosely called “Mexican revolutionary studies” largely concerns peasants, Indians, and the countryside—not organized labor.Footnote 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.Footnote ¹⁰ Here was a working-class movement that boasted radical aspirations, an anarchist lineage, and—most unusual for the 1920s—access 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.”Footnote 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;Footnote ¹² and, in contrast to some of his agrarian writings, they rarely engage with the particularities of the matter—in other words, individual workers, factories, trade unions, and working-class communities are scarcely mentioned.Footnote ¹³

Tannenbaum's work—which, of course, covered a huge range of topics (land, labor, education, penal reform, race, and slavery)—often reflected his current practical interests.Footnote ¹⁴ Welcomed to Mexico by labor activists, he was soon drawn into the different realms of popular education, land reform, and Indian community life.Footnote ¹⁵ These, it seems, also appealed to his intellectual bent. As Michael Merrill argues, Tannenbaum's approach was more “Veblenian” than “Marxian”:Footnote 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,Footnote ¹⁷ he valued what he saw as Mexico's gemeinschaftlich cultural values, rooted in small “traditional” rural (especially Indian) communities and threatened by the onward march of urbanism and industrialism. Like Robert Redfield,Footnote ¹⁸ he focused on “folk” society, which he saw as both dominant and perennially enduring in Mexico.Footnote 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 Tannenbaum's 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 Revolution—roughly, the “traditional” or “populist” view—that sees the Revolution as a movement which welled up from below, impelled by local and agrarian grievances, carrying the imprint of 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 distorted—above all simplified—form. In this article, therefore, I will address Tannenbaum's interpretation in order partly to correct such distortions, partly to understand what that interpretation was about, and partly—though in fact rather less—to 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.Footnote ²² The first, published in 1929, is the most detailed, footnoted, empirical, and (in places) tedious.Footnote 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).Footnote 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.”Footnote ²⁵ The Revolution rises amid the anonymous masses and the obscure, scattered rural communities, particularly the free villages of the Mesa Central, Mexico's Central Plateau.Footnote ²⁶ It is a creature of the countryside, not the cities; Mexico City, in Tannenbaum's view, is like William Cobbett's Great Wen, a sink of conservatism and opportunism, “the great enemy of the Mexican Revolution.”Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, this stark urban-rural dualism—again redolent of Redfield and derivative of the North American Jeffersonian and populist traditionFootnote ²⁸—is extended to the rest of Mexico and, later, to most of Latin America.Footnote ²⁹

Tannenbaum thus sharply dichotomizes society and—to anticipate a later point—does so according to spatial and cultural criteria, rather than criteria 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 culture—the city belongs to one culture and the rest of the land to another.”Footnote ³⁰ Tannenbaum's Mexico thus resembles J.S. Furnivall's “pluralist” colonial societies, sundered by a fundamental cultural and ethnic cleavage.Footnote ³¹ As a result, the rough-edged homespun revolutionaries who make it to the top—and thus to the “center”—are likely to experience either alienation or cooption. The young campesino caudillos of the 1910s, skinny and unshaven, become—once they have “succumbed to the city”—the bloated, pomaded, gold-braided generals of the 1920s.Footnote ³² Womack's image of Zapata in Mexico City—suspicious, footloose, eager to return to his bucolic home—offers a neat example of such unsullied popular parochialism (c. 1915); Guzmán's La sombra del caudillo, in contrast, depicts the seduction and opportunism of the city a decade later.Footnote ³³ Similarly, Tannenbaum's 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.Footnote ³⁴

Without—as I have said—wishing 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 everywhere—generalizing that “small groups of Indians under anonymous leaders were the Revolution”Footnote ³⁵—he practically turns Presidents Alvaro Obregón and Plutarco Calles—go-ahead, self-made mestizo men of the North—into 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.”Footnote ³⁶ Obregón, the great general of the Revolution, is termed a “peasant (sic) rancher.”Footnote 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 innovation—exemplified by his recruitment of the Red Battalions in 1915 and his alliance with the CROM in 1919–1920.Footnote 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.”Footnote ³⁹ Gathered in “self-contained” “internally unified communities,” Mexico's Indians doggedly resist penetration and assimilation.Footnote ⁴⁰ But if they are immovable objects,Footnote 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.Footnote 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 desamortización (the disentailment of corporate property), “the individual Indian proved himself a helpless child.”Footnote 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 Tannenbaum's image of suspicious, introverted, egalitarian communities; and the tendency has been to play down community “closedness.”Footnote 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.Footnote ⁴⁵ While the scale and character of village mobilization is, in any given context, open to debate,Footnote 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 caricature—as do his counterimages of restless, rootless, individualist mestizos.Footnote 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. Tannenbaum's perspective is strongly colored by his pervasive indigenismo—his preoccupation with Indian “racial” and cultural characteristics. He is, no doubt, correct to stress the local concerns of many peasant—perhaps particularly Indian—communities. 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 dynamic—to the extent that it existed it had to be worked at, constructed, and sustained—and, furthermore, that the local/national antithesis is exaggerated and potentially misleading, certainly for the Revolution and probably for the nineteenth century too.Footnote ⁴⁸

“Parochial” rebels by definition regarded the defense of the patria chica—the “little fatherland”—as 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 of Zapata again.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁵⁰ No doubt there were groups—particularly Indian groups in southern Mexico—whose grasp of and allegiance to the Mexican nation were more tenuous. Tannenbaum is especially fond of citing the Chamula and Lacandones of Chiapas.Footnote 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 González's useful phrase, matriotismo)Footnote 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 Díaz and—after a period of dissolution—rebuilt, along different lines, by the revolutionary victors, the Constitutionalists, and Sonorans, after 1917.Footnote ⁵³ Furthermore, these parochial sentiments were not the monopoly of illiterate Indian peasants: There were also—again, especially in the South—elites such as the Yucateco plantocracy or the mapache (“raccoon”) rebels of Chiapas, for whom local—and class—self-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 itself—something 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.Footnote ⁵⁴ On the contrary, the Revolution—and I refer particularly to the Revolution as a chaotic, unplanned, often traumatic process, not the Revolution as a conscious state-building project—forced “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 observers—and unlike some recent analysts who stress the planned, purposive goals of the Revolution—Tannenbaum favored natural metaphors of revolution. For him, as for Mexican intellectuals like Mariano Azuela, Manuel Gamio, and Antonio Díaz 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.Footnote ⁵⁵ Tannenbaum, with his penchant for hydraulic metaphors, saw the revolution as a “sea in motion,” or—in a memorable and apt metaphor—as a series of waves that rose and fell, sometimes surging forward, sometimes lapsing into calm.Footnote 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 Tannenbaum's (unconvincing) depiction of static popular communities, displaying timeless collective characteristics.

For these reasons, Tannenbaum's emphasis on Indian/peasant parochialism—even passivity—seems overdone, sometimes contradictory. It stems, in part, from his emphasis on Indians, especially the Indian South, and his propensity to reify essential Indian qualities—especially telluric tenacity and 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. Tannenbaum's first—and most “scientific”—study 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.”Footnote ⁵⁷ And this powerful stereotype, which runs through Mexican official thinking in the period, recurs in Tannenbaum's 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.”Footnote 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, postrevisionist—would 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.”Footnote 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 ethnicity—the two being, with Tannenbaum as with many contemporary observers, hopelessly muddled up.Footnote ⁶⁰ One consequence is that the number of “Indians”—and the cultural weight of “Indianness”—are consistently exaggerated.Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁶² Tannenbaum is also briskly impatient with “isms” of any kind; he does not engage in standard Marxist—or indeed any other—patter.Footnote 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).Footnote 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 Mexican's … spiritual and cultural values have been remodeled in the crucible of internal strife”; “the chief by-product of the Revolution is therefore spiritual, a discovery by the Mexican people of their own dignity”; Rivera's murals are “the most striking single example of the profound change taking place in the spiritual life of Mexico.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Again, this—Veblenian?—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 today's cultural historians in his scorn for knee-jerk number-crunching:

Yet it should also be noted that Tannenbaum's “cultural” perspective on the Revolution is quite partial. He has a lot to say about Indians, ethnicity, nationalism, and nation-building.Footnote ⁶⁷ But Catholicism and anticlericalism are surprisingly neglected. The Church figures prominently in his sketch—or sketches—of 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).Footnote ⁶⁸ But—compared, say, to Ernest GrueningFootnote ⁶⁹—Tannenbaum evades the church issue. The Cristero Rebellion—the Catholic revolt that shook western Mexico in 1926–1929—receives 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.Footnote 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 church's contribution to both, he also recognized—as the (future) author of Slave and Citizen was bound to do—that 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.Footnote 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 passage—which rings true and which should also appeal to today's social and cultural historians—Tannenbaum equates both church and state as institutional oppressors of a rich and particularistic popular culture.Footnote 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 Tannenbaum's commitment to the latter, it was not easy for him to dissect, deride, and dismiss popular Catholicism. His response—common to leftist and liberal observers—was therefore to dissociate popular religiosity from the institutional church. The former—a heterodox syncretic hybrid—embodied a healthy gemeinschaftlich parochialism (campanilismo, in Eric Van Young's phrase).Footnote 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).Footnote 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.Footnote ⁷⁵ Why did he remain silent? Why did he persist in playing down the radical thrust and historical importance of anticlericalism?Footnote 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 passingFootnote ⁷⁷ but that does not form an integral or congenial part of his overall analysis. Or perhaps he recalled—and regretted?—his own youthful anticlericalism in New York City.Footnote ⁷⁸

However, it is not entirely surprising that Tannenbaum played down a revolutionary policy, which, through the 1920s and 1930s, was salient, contentious, and—I would argue—seriously espoused by many within the revolutionary elite.Footnote ⁷⁹ For, like Gruening, Tannenbaum had a soft spot for that elite—especially, as he conceived it, the populist military. (Revolutionary intellectuals and licenciados were another matter.)Footnote ⁸⁰ He prided himself on his good contacts: He lunched with President Calles, was embraced (literally) by labor leader Luis Morones, considered Lázaro Cárdenas, the radical president of the 1930s, a good friend, and was “lionized by Mexican officials,” particularly educational officials.Footnote ⁸¹ He did not suspend all critical judgement, and he was certainly not blind to revolutionary failings. Tannenbaum criticized Calles's growing conservatism, the presence of “conservative if not reactionary” personnel in government, and, as already noted, the tendency toward revolutionary embourgeoisement.Footnote ⁸² Nor did he—like some apologists—try to assimilate the Revolution to United States culture—as, for example, Ambassador Josephus Daniels did, equating Cardenas and Franklin Roosevelt, Cardenismo and the New Deal. Tannenbaum's 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.Footnote ⁸³

Nevertheless, Tannenbaum did defend the Revolution, adopting a relativist and—Carleton Beals thoughtFootnote ⁸⁴—overgenerous stance. Tannenbaum's defense is interesting—and 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 of—and barriers to—genuine democratization. This argument, which Tannenbaum sustained well into the postwar period,Footnote ⁸⁵ easily led to a justification of revolutionary realpolitik. The Revolution might be corrupt, violent, anticlerical, and, above all, incomplete. But it was a step—or series of steps—in 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 Obregón and Calles, but also Emilio Portes Gil, the revolutionary boss of Tamaulipas, and—most surprisingly—Luis Morones, the egregious labor czar of the 1920s, whom he bizarrely compared to the peasant champion and martyr Emiliano Zapata.Footnote ⁸⁶ Above all, he applauded Cárdenas, “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.Footnote 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 José Vasconcelos and historian Enrique Krauze advocated?Footnote 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).Footnote ⁸⁹ Tannenbaum clearly takes the second view. For him, como México no hay dos (“there's only one Mexico”). This relativist view colors Tannenbaum's entire view of the Revolution. Francisco Madero, the martyred first president of the Revolution—Krauze's liberal hero—was less a bold democratic reformer than a “weak dreamer” who failed to discern Mexico's pressing social needs.Footnote ⁹⁰ Tannenbaum quotes the radical Francisco Múgica—favorably—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.Footnote ⁹¹ Indeed, Tannenbaum expresses skepticism about Mexico's 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.Footnote ⁹² The priorities of government, therefore, are not political liberalization (in part because “talk of suffrage means nothing to the masses”) but rather social reform and nation-building.Footnote ⁹³ In particular, Mexico needs peace and stability: The significance of the word “peace,” which litters Tannenbaum's text and titles, is clearly crucial, though rarely commented on.Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Peace is a sine qua non of social development, which in turn must precede democratization. Cárdenas is praised not just for his populist charisma and social reforms, but also—correctly—for his rejection of violence: “Cárdenas … had qualities of leadership which made violence unnecessary and governed Mexico that way … [as] no-one had been able to do so before.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 powerful—if positivistic—logic at work here. Tannenbaum certainly does not seek a restoration of the prerevolutionary days of Porfirio Díaz; there is no revisionist nostalgia for the Porfirian belle époque. He recognizes Díaz's achievements—peace and material development—but excoriates the oppressive “industrial feudalism” upon which these were based.Footnote ⁹⁸ The historic mission of the Revolution, therefore, is to destroy “feudalism” (not, I repeat, a strictly Marxist “feudalism”) and to set about nation-building—forjando patria, in Gamio's famous phrase.Footnote ⁹⁹ How valid is this perspective? It is true that Tannenbaum's 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).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Haciendas were inefficient, serving the (absentee) owner's lust for power and prestige as much as profit.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ¹⁰³

Nevertheless, his rural, popular, decentralized, village-based view of the Revolution retains its cogency. It also has the attraction of being a “sociological” explanation, one that stresses structural causes, and does not capitulate to contingency and happenstance.Footnote 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 from—indeed, arguably it strengthens—his 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.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In addition, Tannenbaum caught—admittedly, in sweeping, sometimes overly assertive, brushstrokes—something 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.Footnote 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:

Recent regional studies have abundantly confirmed this—if you like—“proto-revisionist” 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.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Finally, he placed great emphasis on the psychological, unquantifiable consequences of the Revolution. Though he did not, of course, talk in terms of mentalité, 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 Gómez Morín, “stirred a nation into self-consciousness.”Footnote 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.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ This was not—like some of Tannenbaum's generalizations—mere 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 Enríquez Ureña on the newfound assertiveness and independence of Indians and campesinos.Footnote ¹¹¹ The evidence may be “soft,” impressionistic, and far from overwhelming. But Tannenbaum's conclusion—that, irrespective of material changes, “the Mexico of today [c. 1928] appears different from the Mexico of the Díaz regime”—offers a useful corrective to narrowly positivistic evaluations of revolutionary change (or lack of change) and, in my view, is broadly convincing.Footnote 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 Tannenbaum's writings on the Revolution—clustering, as they did, in the later 1920s and early 1930s—display 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.Footnote ¹¹³ He advocated—without, it seems, placing much faith in the success of his advocacy—an alternative development model based on small, decentralized, rural units whereby industry would be ancillary to agriculture.Footnote 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 Alemán (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 Díaz Ordaz and Castro's Cuba, which flattered the former.Footnote ¹¹⁵

In short, while Tannenbaum was not blind to Mexico's failings, he retained a lively—some would say excessive—optimism 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 nationalists—some of them mestizos and many of them recent migrants to the Lacandón frontier—who 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 Tannenbaum's gemeinschaftlich villages and migrated to the soulless cities—of 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 technocrats, and, finally, since the victory of the Partido Acción Nacional in 2000, to conservative businessmen and political Catholics, the political descendants of the Cristeros whom Tannenbam disdained. And populism—the ideological matrix of Tannenbaum's own political thought—has become a dirty word.

In short, the Tannenbaumian vision of—and for—Mexico has withered. Even the incongruous liaison of economic neoliberalism and political neopopulism, which, with its Tannenbaumian emphasis on decentralization, autogestión, and popular empowerment, briefly flourished in the 1990s, proved to be more rhetorical than real.Footnote ¹¹⁶ As a prophet and advocate, therefore, Tannenbaum was wide of the mark; his quasi-Gandhian philosophy of gemeinschaftlich village culture could not withstand Mexico's 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 today's 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 revisionists—perhaps overly influenced by post-1940 trends—have ignored to their cost.

And, for better or worse, Tannenbaum evinces an additional relevance for today's 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.Footnote ¹¹⁷ What it also suggests, however, is that the “new” cultural history, its assumptions and preoccupations, are not quite as new as sometimes supposed.