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[Assistant] So much so that when the second parliament was called, Wentworth was one of the members appointed sheriff to keep troublemakers out of Westminster.


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[Assistant] Which, so far, is, you know, not exactly the early career arc of someone who was about to become so identified with the tyrannies of King Charles.


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[Assistant] Because unlike other members of parliament who seem to be using Buckingham as a proxy through which they could wedge wider political, economic, and religious reforms, Wentworth really just hated Buckingham.


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[Assistant] Thought he was terrible for England. Refused the force loan because he thought Buckingham was going to embezzle half of it and blow the other half on embarrassing military boondoggles, which is pretty much what happened. When Buckingham was killed, Wentworth was satisfied.


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[Assistant] Charles was alerted to the fact that this smart, energetic, and capable member of the opposition could probably be had at the right price.


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[Assistant] So the king made Wentworth a Viscount, then appointed him Lord President of the North in 1628.


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[Assistant] The North, being the northern county centered around York, which at the time formed its own administrative district.


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[Assistant] He probably would have risen even higher, even faster. But as talented as he was, he was also harsh and despotic, and he alienated subordinates, colleagues, and superiors wherever he went.


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[Assistant] So some of those alienated rivals on the Privy Council convinced King Charles that Wentworth was the best man to run Ireland.


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[Assistant] Technically, being made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1633 was a promotion, but it also meant being shipped off to Dublin, which is a long way from Whitehall. Exactly where Wentworth's rivals wanted him.


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[Assistant] But still, he managed to stay in contact with the court, most especially through his friend Bishop Laud, because of course the two most friendless men in England would wind up becoming friends.


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[Assistant] Together, they hammered out what has become known to history as the thorough policy, which is basically a scheme to establish absolute monarchy in Britain.


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[Assistant] The religious aspects of this policy were spearheaded by Laude from his new position as Archbishop of Canterbury.


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[Assistant] As I mentioned last week, King Charles and his new Archbishop were of one mind about religion. It should be formal, it should be ceremonial, it should be exalted, and most important, it should be uniform across all the King's domains.


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[Assistant] So with Charles' blessing, Laud launched an effort to bring some uniformity and order to the Church of England.


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[Assistant] No more of this turning a blind eye to local custom as had been the norm since the Elizabethan settlement.


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[Assistant] Through the 1630s, Laud slowly but surely started to establish a harder principle of one set of religious practices for everybody, no exceptions.


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[Assistant] First, he focused on small fish, congregations of expatriates living in Holland, for example, who had started adopting the practices of their Dutch neighbors.


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[Assistant] Then he focused on foreigners living in England, who had been allowed to maintain their own forms of worship.


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[Assistant] In a flurry of letters, he demanded that both follow the liturgy of the Church of England or face prosecution.


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[Assistant] So this process then extended out to the various English counties where Puritan-leaning congregations faced demands that altars be placed on the east end of the church and that they be railed in, that parishioners approach the minister for communion rather than taking it at their seats,


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[Assistant] Basically, a slew of ceremonial tweaks that the Morpirit and congregations had ditched a long time ago because it all smacked of potpourri.


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[Assistant] The idea, like I said, was to bring some uniformity to religious worship in the king's domains.


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[Assistant] But to an awful lot of people, it came across as an attempt to undermine the Reformation, and paved the way for a return to Catholicism.


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[Assistant] And it did not help at all that through this same period, Charles was busy indulging the Catholicism of his French-born wife Queen Henrietta Maria.


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[Assistant] So on the one hand, you have godly Protestants being prosecuted for resisting Lod's popish innovations, and on the other, you have Catholics now practicing right out in the open. It did not look good.


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[Assistant] Especially to the Puritan-leaning lords who were also getting pretty ticked off at Charles' batch of illegal fundraising schemes, and who would form the core of opposition when Charles was forced to call a new parliament in 1640 after trying to extend his policy of religious uniformity up to Scotland, which, yeah, he should not have done that.


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[Assistant] So who were these Puritan-leaning lords who formed the opposition? And is it even fair at this point to call them an opposition?


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[Assistant] Historian Conrad Russell, who knows of which he speaks, makes the point repeatedly that right now we should think of these guys as forming a faction within the ruling party, rather than a distinct opposition party.


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[Assistant] Which is to say that they may have personally opposed the king's policies, but still dutifully carried them out back in the home counties.


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[Assistant] But subtleties of tension aside, in a few years there is going to be a civil war. So who formed the core of what became the parliamentary cause?


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[Assistant] In no particular order, we have, first of all, the Earl of Warwick, who was one of the largest landowners in England, and whose great grandfather had been one of the key figures in the English Reformation. After being raised to the peerage in 1619,


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[Assistant] Warwick had focused a great deal of his time and money on privateering expeditions against the hated Spanish and colonization projects in the New World.


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[Assistant] Then there was the Earl of Bedford, who had been a strong supporter of the petition of right, and stood as one of the main centers of gravity around which this network of dissenting Puritans swirled.


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[Assistant] Lord Brooke, for example, an up-and-coming young Puritan peer, married Bedford's daughter in 1631 and began working closely with his father-in-law on various commercial projects.


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[Assistant] Viscount Saint Sealy formed another center of gravity. And that's one guy. His name is Viscount Saint Sealy.


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[Assistant] Say and Brooke were also both heavy investors in New World colonization, and if you've ever been to old Saybrook, Connecticut, well, that's where the name comes from.


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[Assistant] Finally, I'll mention young Lord Mandeville, who married one of Warwick's daughters in 1626, and who we will get to know much better after he inherits his father's title in 1642 and becomes the second Earl of Manchester.


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[Assistant] As depressed as these lords were about the state of true religion in England, you'll notice that most of them looked to the Americas as a place where the godly could build communities untainted by heresy.


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[Assistant] And there was one colonization project in particular that kept them all tied together during the long years of personal rule. The Providence Island Company.


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[Assistant] Most of the Puritan Lords I've just mentioned were shareholders, and company business was, if not necessarily an excuse, then certainly a reason for them and their men of business to stay in regular contact.


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[Assistant] And if talk strayed into larger matters from time to time, well, you know, things happen.


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[Assistant] Of the men of business who were brought into the dissident godly circle by the Providence Island Company, two deserve special attention.


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[Assistant] The first is Oliver Syngen, whose name when you read it is clearly Oliver St. John, but apparently it was pronounced Oliver Syngen.


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[Assistant] Sinjin was brought in by Bedford to serve as a lawyer for the Providence Island Company, and he distinguished himself as a brilliant, if humorless, attorney.


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[Assistant] Sinjin is about to catapult to national fame when we get into the ship money case at the end of this episode.


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[Assistant] The other man of business we need to introduce is of course John Pym. John Pym. He is really important.


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[Assistant] Pym was born in 1584, so he's actually a little bit older than most of the guys I've just rattled off.


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[Assistant] The Earl of Warwick took notice of Pym and hired him to serve as treasurer for the Providence Island Company through the 1630s, where he earned the trust and loyalty of the godly Piers.


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[Assistant] The company formed a critical link between the men who would emerge as the leaders of the parliamentary opposition in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords in the 1640s.


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[Assistant] So broadly speaking, when we talk about the opposition, what we're talking about is an informal network of like-minded men connected by marriage, religion, and commerce who complained bitterly about the direction Charles was taking the country.


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[Assistant] Besides their obvious beef with Archbishop Laud for giving Satan the keys to the Church of England, the other thing these men complained about when they got together at Broughton Castle or wherever was the obnoxious schemes Charles and his royal treasurers had dreamed up to fund the monarchy without Parliament.


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[Assistant] Because if there was some small technical royal prerogative that could be exploited for profit, the king was all for exploiting it.


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[Assistant] And while Charles slept peacefully at night, satisfied that he was well within his rights as king, his subjects grew deeply annoyed by what they considered a batch of unjust and illegal money grabs.


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[Assistant] So, for example, there were things like monopolies.


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[Assistant] Monopolies were royal grants giving a corporation exclusive rights to trade or manufacture something. You know, a monopoly.


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[Assistant] These monopolies could apply to practically anything. Salt, coal, wine.


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[Assistant] There was a particularly hated one on soap that was particularly hated because the Monopoly soap was vastly inferior to the soap made by independent craftsmen in Bristol.


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[Assistant] The soap monopoly alone brought in something like 30,000 pounds a year, which was big money in those days.


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[Assistant] Besides the monopolies, Charles also revived long dormant medieval laws, and started applying them in pretty twisted ways.


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[Assistant] For example, once upon a time gentry worth more than 40 shillings annually were supposed to be knighted so that they would be ready for service if, you know, the vikings invaded. If they skipped knighthood, the king levied a fine.


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[Assistant] The fine was supposed to prod the unwilling in the direction of doing their duty to the king.


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[Assistant] But when Charles revived the fine, it was not to prod men in the direction of their duty.


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[Assistant] Because the king didn't want the men to get knighted, he wanted them to stay unknighted so he could collect the fine every year. It was clever, but it was also annoying.


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[Assistant] Another example were finds levied for living in royal forests and building outside designated zones in London.


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[Assistant] With the demographic bloat of the previous century, restless squatters had taken root in various forests in the country, and urban dwellers had thrown up houses beyond the walls in the city.


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[Assistant] The King's advisors found ancient finds still on the books for both activities.


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[Assistant] These finds were meant to keep families from squatting in the forests or living outside the city walls.


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[Assistant] But Charles didn't want these people to move, you see. He wanted them to stay, so he could find them for staying.


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[Assistant] The spirit of the law was being upended to service the lucrative letter of the law.


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[Assistant] It may have been technically legal, but it felt petty and unjust.


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[Assistant] In the sub tedium of English property law, some states were held by families through a grant from the king.


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[Assistant] But this grant had long since ceased to mean anything.


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[Assistant] Except that if a family held one of these properties and the head of the household died and left only a minority heir, the land technically reverted to the crown, from whom the family then had to repurchase it.


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[Assistant] So Charles sent out royal agents to hunt around in county records, digging up properties that were technically royal grant, despite the fact that no one, not even the king, was actually aware of it anymore.


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[Assistant] Again, Charles was acting within the technical bounds of the law, and he was putting his regime on sound financial footing, but he was endearing himself to exactly no one.


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[Assistant] But of course, the most infamous of Charles' financial expedience was a thing called ship money. In theory, ship money worked like this.


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[Assistant] There was a national security crisis. The Spanish are on their way, that sort of thing.


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[Assistant] The king goes to the coastal counties and says, okay, we need to build a Navy in a hurry and there's no time to call a parliament. So you each owe me one ship.


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[Assistant] If you don't have the facilities to build a ship, then you owe me enough money to build one ship. And please do hurry, the Spanish are on their way.


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[Assistant] So the two key points here are one, it's an emergency, and two, it applies to the coastal counties.


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[Assistant] What struck everyone is a little crazy because one, there's no emergency, and two, I don't live anywhere near the coast, why am I paying ship money?


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[Assistant] But Charles was developing a pretty modern notion of the national interest, and reason that there was no difference between coastal counties and inland counties were all in this together.


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[Assistant] Whereupon Charles, or more accurately Charles' lawyers, produced a nice body of precedents establishing that it was the king and the king alone who decided what did and did not constitute an emergency.


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[Assistant] So if he said emergency, it was an emergency, and that was that.


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[Assistant] So now everyone is rolling their eyes, but wow, okay, neat trick, here's your stupid ship money. But then ship money came back the next year, and now we have a problem.


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[Assistant] Because, as you'll recall, legally only parliament can levy a tax.


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[Assistant] But if you try to make it a regular annual thing, I'm sorry, it's a tax. I don't care how you dress it up, it's a tax, and it's illegal, and we're not going to pay it.


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[Assistant] In 1637, the two main sources of tension during personal rule came to a head.


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[Assistant] The religious tensions burst out into the open in June 1637, with the very public punishment of three radical Puritans who had been found guilty by the Archbishop Laude-controlled Star Chamber.


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[Assistant] The particular beliefs and crimes of William Prynne, Henry Burton, and John Bastic are not nearly as important as the sentence that was handed down on them.


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[Assistant] They were marched through the streets of London, surrounded by a large sympathetic crowd.


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[Assistant] Tossed into the stocks with pillories thrown across their necks.


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[Assistant] Then, after a couple of hours, the executioner came along and cut their ears off.


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[Assistant] Then the three broken men were exiled to distant castles, the idea being that they would never be heard from again.


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[Assistant] The crowd roared at sympathy for the suffering of the three men, and underground circulars started getting passed around, wondering aloud what kind of kingdom England was becoming when Catholics walked free while godly men suffered such gruesome punishment.


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[Assistant] The political tensions burst into the open when John Hamden was brought to trial in November 1637 for refusing to pay ship money.


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[Assistant] He, like Pym, served in all of Charles's initial parliaments and had garnered a reputation as a man of both strong will and strong principle. He refused to pay the forced loans and was imprisoned, but was released on the eve of Charles's third parliament.


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[Assistant] He kept his head down through the 1630s, but when Charles rolled out shit money, Hamden decided to take a stand.


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[Assistant] Even though his share of ship money was one measly pound, he refused to pay. But this was not just some random point of pride.


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[Assistant] The network of dissident Puritans had been looking for someone to run a test case through, and Hamden, blameless, well regarded, well spoken John Hamden, seemed like the right guy for the job.


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[Assistant] Now Hamden was not the only one refusing. Viscount Saint Seely, for example, was also refusing in the hopes that the king would prosecute him, but Charles let it go because he didn't want to give the Lord to say the spotlight, much to say his great annoyance.


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[Assistant] So November 1637, John Hamden was brought before the court of Exchequer and tried for his refusal to pay.


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[Assistant] The case was a bona fide national sensation, and crowds in London thronged to hear the arguments of both sides, and then waited impatiently for the verdict. Hamden was represented by a group of lawyers.


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[Assistant] But the most famous of them was Oliver Syngen, whose eloquent, and let's face it, damn convincing argument that ship money was a tax, and therefore illegal without parliamentary approval, made the Puritan lawyer a legal rockstar.


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[Assistant] On the other side, Hamden was prosecuted by the Attorney General himself. This case was a big deal.


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[Assistant] The twelve judges of the Exchequer listen carefully to both sides, and then retire to consider how they would rule.


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[Assistant] In the weeks that followed, their decisions began to be published one by one, with the crowds of London hanging on every yea or nay.


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[Assistant] In the end, the court found seven to five against Hamden, which was, yes, a win for the king, but only by the narrowest margin possible.


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[Assistant] It was another of Charles' Pyrrhic victories, and despite the legal triumph, the Court of Public Opinion found decisively for Hamden.


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[Assistant] So, just as the king was reveling in the legal sanctioning of Shipmai,


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[Assistant] The number of men refusing to pay shot up dramatically.


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[Assistant] Charles had been doing a fine business with Ship Money Receipts until he won the Hammond case. Then, revenue dropped off a cliff.


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[Assistant] The ironic part was that ship money was about to die due to massive popular resistance right at the moment when England was actually facing a national emergency.


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[Assistant] Because in between the punishment of Brin, Burton, and Bastic in June, and the shit-money trial in November,


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[Assistant] Charles had gone and shot himself in the foot up in Scotland, shot himself in both feet, shot himself in the head, and then fired himself out of a cannon.


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[Assistant] Next week, we will see the attempt to establish religious uniformity head north, where the Scots and their beloved Presbyterianism had long been left to their own devices.


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[Assistant] But in July 1637, Charles and Laud would attempt to force the Scots to bend to the Church of England.


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[Assistant] It was an attempt as ill conceived as it was ill fated and it would mark the beginning of the end for King Charles.


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[Assistant] Ethan sits alone at the dining table, waiting for Trisha.


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[Assistant] Happy anniversary, Debbie. House explodes. Goes up in flames.


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[Assistant] So they are showering subpoenas all over town and ordering reporters to come to Baltimore and tell where they got their news. Those responding so far say they will tell nothing.


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[Assistant] And turning the attention and some abuse on the press.


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[Assistant] I forget who had to deliver the letter to Peter Rodino.


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[Assistant] I was concerned and, uh, I think my concern at that time based on my frame of mind after being seven months in a pressure cooker of, uh, attempts to get me to resign office gave me reason to be concerned. I brought along with me this testimony from the select committee.


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[Assistant] I've never said it was a probability that my life was in danger. I said it was one of the factors that crossed my mind and it was the straw that broke the camel's back after all the pressures that had been put on me.


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[Assistant] No, I've never carried a handgun. I thought it was sufficient that people would know I had to permit to carry one.


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[Assistant] He bought his way out of jail with the vice presidency, but they don't know what a penalty I paid. They don't understand I lost my right to practice law. I lost my pension.


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[Assistant] HelloFresh is a meal kit delivery service that shops, plans, and delivers step-by-step recipes and pre-measured ingredients so that you can cook, eat, and enjoy. There's something for everyone with HelloFresh's selection of meal plans. You can choose from the classic, the veggie, or the family.


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[Assistant] Each box will be made up of fresh, responsibly obtained ingredients from carefully selected farms and high rated trusted sources.


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[Assistant] You can make family dinners fuss free with HelloFresh's picky eater, kid tested and approved family plan recipes. Or each week there's a 20 minute meal on the classic menu for when you really don't have time for anything more than that.


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[Assistant] All the ingredients come pre-measured in handy labeled meal kits so that you know which ingredients go with which recipe.


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[Assistant] You can enjoy not having to plan dinner, spending money on takeout for an easy night, or worry about gathering ingredients week after week. And what we always liked, which was getting out of a recipe rut. And you can just start cooking outside of your comfort zone by discovering new, delicious recipes in each week's box.


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[Assistant] Now of course, since we have moved, we have managed to move ourselves out of our food rut zone, but Mrs. Revolutions and I both agree that as charming as it is to shop every day for ingredients and come up with recipes and meal plans for every night of the week, we do kind of miss just not having to worry about that stuff. It was nice not having to worry about that stuff.


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[Assistant] So right now on HelloFresh, there's a sweet honey chicken, there's pancetta mac and cheese, there's balsamic pork chops, and all of it will just be delivered right to your doorstep.


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[Assistant] So the deal we have for you is you get a total of $60 off when you sign up. That's going to be $20 off your first three boxes. All you have to do is visit hellofresh.com slash revolutions60 and enter revolution60. The 60 is for the $60 off that you get.


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[Assistant] It will start today by continuing my promotional plugging because I just have to keep at it. The Storm Before the Storm comes out in paperback on October the 16th, 2018. It's a great gift for yourself. It's a great gift for everyone you know.


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[Assistant] I will be in Toronto on October the 15th at Ben McNally's, on October the 16th in New York City at The Strand, on October the 17th in Nashville at Parnassus Books, and then finally October the 18th in Atlanta at an event at the Carter Center hosted by Acapella Books.


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[Assistant] I also wanted to mention that a few of you have asked if there are any foreign language versions of the book available, and yes, yes there are. There's a Korean version, two Chinese versions, and one in Turkish.


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[Assistant] Now, foreign publishers are notoriously difficult to keep track of, and I honestly have no idea how to get any of those copies.


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[Assistant] Uh, but there is a Spanish language translation that just hit the shelves on September the 18th. And the good people at that publisher, Ariel, have been great about promoting it and getting in touch with me about how to promote it. And so it's actually out there. I've got a link up for the Spanish language version of the Storm Before the Storm. They are calling it


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[Assistant] Asia la tormenta, or just into the storm. It looks really cool, and if you've got any Spanish language friends or you want a Spanish language copy of the book, by all means, go get it.


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[Assistant] So last time, we got into the effects of the infamous Creelman interview on Mexican national politics. At Porfirio Diaz's explicit invitation, opposition parties started to form to challenge the existing regime.


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[Assistant] This opposition coalesced first around Bernardo Reyes, and then when Reyes meekly accepted political exile, they moved on to Francisco Madero.


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[Assistant] But by the end of last week's episode, we saw that Dias had never meant a word of it. Elections were still too important to be left to the voters, and the presidential election of 1910 skidded into a pile of intimidation, harassment, fraud, and ultimately the mass arrest of opposition leaders, including Francisco Madero himself.


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[Assistant] Well today what I want to do is increase our level of magnification and focus on the single state of Morelos. A state which was a microcosm of everything that we've been talking about really since episode 9.4.


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[Assistant] All the successes, failures, contradictions, and hypocrisies of the Porfiriato existed in concentrated form in the tiny state of Morelos. In fact, as we'll see later in today's episode, the Morelos governor's race of 1909 was in many ways a dress rehearsal for the presidential election of 1910.


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[Assistant] And the fact that Morelos was a concentrated microcosm of the Porfiriado put that little state on course to be one of the two great centers of the Mexican Revolution. The other was of course the northern periphery, which we'll get back to next time when Francisco Madero, native son of the northern periphery, goes into rebellion.


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[Assistant] Today though, we are going to talk about Morelos and its most famous native son, Emiliano Zapata.


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[Assistant] Morelos is located in south central Mexico, less than a hundred kilometers from Mexico City.


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[Assistant] And the first thing I want to say here is that there were, on the eve of the Mexican Revolution, 27 states in Mexico, and Morelos was the 27th and last of these states to be created. It was carved out of the larger state of Mexico in 1869.


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[Assistant] Now we'll get to that here in a second, but I just want to say that I'll be saying Morelos this and Morelos that for the next little bit, but I'm talking about the geographic region. Morelos the state doesn't exist until very late in the game.


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[Assistant] But even though Morelos, the state, was young, the region had deep historical roots. Archaeological signs of habitation date back to 6000 BC with settled agricultural communities appearing around 1500 BC.


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[Assistant] Many of the indigenous villages in Morelos thus predated not just the Spanish conquest of the early 1500s, but the Aztec conquest of the early 1400s.


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[Assistant] But despite the fact that Morelos was located less than a hundred kilometers to the south of Mexico City, the infamously difficult terrain of Mexico kept the region isolated.


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[Assistant] Morelos straddles two major mountain ranges, keeping a steep geological barrier to getting to and from the central plateau upon which Mexico City sits.


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[Assistant] Rising anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 feet above sea level, Morelos is an almost even mix of steep mountainous terrain, flat valleys, and rough hill country in between.


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[Assistant] And while you will get alpine meadows up in the high country, almost 75% of Barrelos is warm and humid and wet, mostly subtropical rainforest. Which means that when the Spanish arrived, one of the first things they noticed was how great the region would be for growing sugar cane.


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[Assistant] Now the arrival of the Spanish was a demographic catastrophe for the indigenous inhabitants of Morelos, as it was for the rest of the Americas, and it took centuries to rebuild the population.


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[Assistant] But on the eve of the Mexican Revolution, Morelos was one of the most densely populated rural areas in all of Mexico.


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[Assistant] Most of the agricultural produce of pre-Columbian morales was maize and cotton for local consumption, but the Spanish looked around and said, aha, we can grow sugar here. And so sugar became the crop most immediately identified with the region.


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[Assistant] But though this of course led to the creation of large sugar haciendas, during the colonial period there was a pretty stable equilibrium between those large estates and the free indigenous villages who owned and farmed their own communal lands.


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[Assistant] This local population provided a flexible workforce for the haciendas while meeting most of their own basic survival needs through their own work on their own lands.


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[Assistant] By the end of the colonial era, all of them in fact had written promises, titles, and deeds drawn up by various viceregal officials over the years, guaranteeing the villages their collective possession of this orchard or that field, claims which were, get this, even upheld in Spanish courts.


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[Assistant] But that does not mean that the peasants and villagers of Morelos liked the Spaniards or the Ascendados.


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[Assistant] When Father Hidalgo let forth the cry of Dolores, men and women in Morelos enthusiastically joined the call to arms.


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[Assistant] So much so, remember, that after Hidalgo and the other original leaders from the Bahia were executed in 1811, the main theater of the Wars of Independence moved to south-central Mexico. And Morelos was at the center of all that.


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[Assistant] Where the terrain and the character of the population led to guerrilla armies operating successfully against the viceregal forces for years. And those armies were now under the direction of the man who would later give his name to this little state, Jose Maria Morelos, who we talked all about in episode 9.2.


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[Assistant] And the fact that this region, again right at Mexico City's doorstep, remained for so long un-pacified was a source of great frustration for the viceregal officials.


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[Assistant] After independence, Morelos was caught up in the larger struggle between federalists and centralists, liberals and conservatives that we talked about in episode 9.3.


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[Assistant] The old viceregal capital of Cuernavaca tended to be conservative and centralist. It was practically a suburb of Mexico City and plenty of rich families had second homes there. Meanwhile, the more interior city of Coahuila tended to be federalist and liberal.


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[Assistant] Generally speaking though, the population was always fertile recruiting grounds for rebel fighters. Rebelling against what? Well, whatever you got.


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[Assistant] So for example, Morelos became one of the main bases of rebel support for Juan Alvarez when he launched his great liberal revolt against Santa Anna in 1854.


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[Assistant] When this temporary triumph of the Liberals gave way to the War of Reform, the region was divided between the Conservatives who held Cuernavaca and Liberals who held Coahuila, and bloody destructive chaos reigned in between.


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[Assistant] This dynamic continued as the reform war gave way to the patriotic war against the French, with Cuernavaca again being the main base of conservative imperialist support.


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[Assistant] In fact, after Maximilian arrived, he took a second home in Cuernavaca, which led to great improvements to the roads linking Mexico City to the region, as well as the first telegraph lines being installed.


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[Assistant] When the French were expelled and Maximilian was executed, the triumphant President Benito Juarez decided to peel off this still mostly isolated chunk of the state of Mexico and create a new state in 1869.


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[Assistant] So what had once been a large sub-province of Mexico became the second smallest state in Mexico, checking in at just 5,000 square kilometers.


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[Assistant] Its first governor was a local liberal war hero named Francisco Leyva. That's Leyva with a V. He had fought all through the war of reform and the patriotic war against the French. And in that first governor's race, Leyva actually defeated another young and ambitious hero of the wars, Porfirio Díaz. We'll talk way more about that in a second.


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[Assistant] The ascendancy of the liberals would have profound consequences for the population of the new state of Morelos.


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[Assistant] Remember, one of the big things the liberals wanted to do was end the corporate ownership of property, whether it was owned by the church or by a village. They wanted to divide it up into individually owned plots of private property as a way to stimulate economic growth.


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[Assistant] This also came with reforms in how land titles would be assessed and validated


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[Assistant] The move to modernize and rationalize the real estate laws led many ancient village grants, drafted sometimes hundreds of years ago by some random vice regal official, to be increasingly ignored by the courts.


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[Assistant] There also began under the liberals a major push to identify all previously unclaimed national public land and auction all that off too. The villages of Morelos would bear the brunt of these efforts particularly hard.


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[Assistant] It was a densely packed region with 120 recognized pueblas in the small 5,000 square kilometer area, much of which was uncultivatable mountain land.


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[Assistant] So, with only so much land to go around, a lot of villages needed everything they owned to be viable. And even the simple loss of access to what had once been unclaimed public land might be the difference between life and death for a village.


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[Assistant] In spite of this, though, individual villages were able to maintain through persistence their claims to communal property. But because there was a lot of inter-village rivalry, there was never any larger coordinated response to the threat, even if they all faced the same threat.


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[Assistant] But despite this liberal push beginning in the late 1860s and early 1870s, it was not until the triumphal accession of Porfirio Díaz to the presidency in 1876 that things accelerated.


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[Assistant] And as I said at the beginning of this episode, Morelos is a concentrated microcosm of what was happening throughout Mexico as order and progress became the law of the land.


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[Assistant] In Morelos, order and progress meant the mass expansion of sugar cultivation.


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[Assistant] First, the introduction of rail lines connecting Morelos to Mexico City linked the heretofore isolated region instantly to the urban metropolis.


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[Assistant] As the railroad spread throughout Mexico, it did two things for the sugar planters.


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[Assistant] First, it allowed them to import new, efficient, modern machines and steam driven mills to extract and refine sugar ever more efficiently. And then second, it gave them access to a larger national market. Eventually, maybe even an international market.


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[Assistant] So, given every Porphyrian encouragement to expand and modernize and profit, the sugar ascendatos of Morelos expanded and modernized and profited.


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[Assistant] Railroads brought in new technology and carried away mountains of newly produced sugar.


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[Assistant] Sugar production increased five-fold, and the osandados started looking for ways to expand their operations.


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[Assistant] Once the unclaimed national land had all been sold off by the Ministry of the Interior, there was only one other place to acquire new land, and that was to take it from the villages.


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[Assistant] Starting in the 1880s, the villages of Morelos came under sustained assault from expanding haciendas. With the help of friends on the courts and in key interior ministry posts, haciendas started challenging the claims of various villages.


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[Assistant] They said ancient titles were invalid, or that the land under dispute was actually vacant and up for grabs.


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[Assistant] Out in the countryside, oceanda managers started throwing up fences and enclosures and simply asserting ownership of orchards and fields and grazing land that had been used by a community for literally centuries.


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[Assistant] A hundred acres here, a thousand acres over there, was claimed and parceled out, until some villages were reduced to merely their own town boundaries, with no land of their own to sustain themselves.


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[Assistant] Over the next few years, villages began to disappear from the map.


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[Assistant] In one infamous case, an Asandado angry resistance from a local village directed his irrigation into a nearby lake. The lake overran its shores. It flooded the village.


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[Assistant] Only the church spire was left visible above the water line.


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[Assistant] The ancient populations were thus broken into dislocated relocation. Most of them were forced to take jobs as resident wage workers on the very hacienda that had just enveloped their village.


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[Assistant] Now the village leaders and councils fought all this in court all the time. But they were rebuffed. They were ignored. Their titles were declared too ancient to be valid and recognized.


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[Assistant] An illustrative anecdote of how this process played out concerns a village that bordered one of the haciendas owned by the rich and powerful escandone family.


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[Assistant] The Escondón family were old Mexico City conservatives, and it's a wonder they were even still around, because the family, in fact, shows up in the ranks of the imperial administration of Maximilian, rather than the patriotic rebel armies that were trying to expel him.


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[Assistant] In 1903, Pablo Escondón ordered a manager to enclose about 3,500 acres of disputed land that had been used by the villagers for grazing.


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[Assistant] The villagers got mad when they ran into these new fences. They tore them down and went back to grazing as they always had.


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[Assistant] In retaliation, the herds were confiscated and fines were issued for trespassing.


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[Assistant] So the villagers tapped an educated farmer they trusted to take their case to the magistrates. They had ancient titles and claims to the land that this oceanda was now trying to claim. The farmer agreed.


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[Assistant] So he appealed to the federal Supreme Court in Mexico City.


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[Assistant] So now it's 1904, it's like a full year later, and this guy is leading a small delegation to plead their case. He even got a meeting with President Diaz himself, who listened sympathetically and said, oh, that's not right, I'm sure this will all work out in your favor.


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[Assistant] But the farmer never got to plead his case before the Supreme Court.


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[Assistant] Just before the trial, he was arrested, and all his papers, documents and evidence were seized. Then he just disappeared.


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[Assistant] In June of 1904, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Escandon family.


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[Assistant] A few months later, the farmer's family finally got a letter. He had smuggled it out of a jail cell in Vera Cruz where he was awaiting deportation to the infamous labor camps in Quintana Roo. That was the only letter they ever got.


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[Assistant] The farmer died in those camps in November 1905.


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[Assistant] And that is what Porphyrian order and progress meant to the peasants of Morelos.


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[Assistant] So let us turn now to the political side of things, where we will find the spark to light that angry powder keg.


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[Assistant] We saw last week how a host of socioeconomic grievances were unleashed by a political crisis, mostly revolving around the issue of the presidential succession.


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[Assistant] Well, here in Morelos, again a microcosm of Mexico, the same thing was happening on a smaller scale. A political succession crisis over the winter of 1908 and 1909 was going to open up the first crack of what ultimately became a violent social revolution.


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[Assistant] The succession crisis was kicked off by the death of the long-serving Governor Manuel Alarcon, who had been in office since 1894 and who had just been re-elected for the fourth time.


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[Assistant] In mid-December 1908, the governor unexpectedly died, and so a new governor had to be found.


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[Assistant] About a week after the death of the old governor, Díaz met with the prominent Ascendado families of Morelos to work out who the next governor should be.


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[Assistant] And despite a half dozen names that would have been perfectly fine, the planters decided to insist upon elevating Pablo Escondón, the guy who I just mentioned kickstarting that horrible story about the farmer getting sent off to the labor camps.


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[Assistant] Escondón was at that point serving as the president's chief of staff. He was one of the heirs of the great Escondón estates. He had been educated at Stonyhurst in England, and when he returned to Mexico in the 1880s, he spent all of his time palling around with his buddies in the elite circles of Mexico City.


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[Assistant] Pablo joined the army as an officer, but that was mostly just for the social benefits. He wasn't actually, like, a soldier.


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[Assistant] Dias brought Eskandon onto his staff, but politics was not really his thing. He was a glorified social secretary, and Eskandon excelled at organizing state events and parties. But he was not much interested in the hard work and cut and thrust of real politics.


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[Assistant] So when the Morelos planters approached him about running for governor, he tried to say no.


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[Assistant] Though his family was one of the largest landowners in Morelos, he himself had practically never been there, and by his own admission knew nothing about the state.


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[Assistant] Being governor not only meant having to do real work, it also meant he would actually have to live there, which kind of turned his stomach.


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[Assistant] Indeed, it has been observed that even though Escondón and his social circle were all native Mexicans, they had a very colonialist outlook on everything outside of Mexico City.


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[Assistant] Eskandun basically self-identified as a civilized European, while everyone out there was a sandal-wearing, hut-dwelling native savage.


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[Assistant] Still clinging to the old caste system mentality, Eskandone was pretty much a straight up racist.


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[Assistant] But the planters insisted on elevating him, because they knew he was one of them, and that he would not get in their way.


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[Assistant] The powerful Osandado families had spoken. Escondón would be elected in a democratic charade scheduled for February 1909, and that would be that. Except that was not that.


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[Assistant] As was the case all over Mexico. The triumph of the Porfiriato had only obscured the existence of a political opposition. It had not eliminated it.


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[Assistant] In Morelos, there were families, some of them quite rich and influential, who had accepted the negotiated détente offered by Díaz as he built up his stable, quasi-feudal authoritarian system back in the 1880s.


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[Assistant] These were the families who had agreed to mostly stay out of politics, as long as Dias did not try to micromanage their affairs.


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[Assistant] In Morelos, we are talking about the Lava Clan.


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[Assistant] The old patriarch of that clan was Francisco Leyva, whose name I just dropped a couple of minutes ago.


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[Assistant] Now 73 years old, he was an old liberal veteran of the reform war and the war against the French. But Leyva had been a partisan of the Benito Juarez and Miguel Lerto faction of the liberals, against whom Porfirio Diaz had launched his rebellious challenges in the early 1870s.


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[Assistant] Leiba's brother, in fact, had been killed fighting rebels during Dias's abortive Norea rebellion in 1872.


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[Assistant] So there was no love lost between these two. And when Dias came to power in 1876, Labour was forced out of power.


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[Assistant] But though Laba was kept out of the state house, Dias looked the other way when families in the state continued to take their cues from the Laba family.


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[Assistant] This detente between Leyva and Díaz lasted all the way to the end of 1908, when the ol' long-dormant opposition Imarelos came to Leyva, then living in Mexico City, and asked him to run for governor.


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[Assistant] Leiva, in something of a subtle dig at Dias, said he was too old to run. But he gave his blessing for his son Patricio to challenge Escondón.


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[Assistant] Just to make sure this was all cool though, Labour scheduled a meeting with Dias about a week after the president met with the planters.


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[Assistant] Leiba asked Dias directly what he thought of his son running, and Dias said, oh yes, sounds great, don't you know, I'm all about democracy now.


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[Assistant] So on January the 7th, a little convention got together of village leaders, along with some middle-class types, teachers and merchants and storekeepers, and they nominated Patricio Leyva for governor.


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[Assistant] The primary was scheduled for February the 7th, 1909, and then a second vote of the electors was scheduled for February 21st.


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[Assistant] Both of these votes were supposed to be mere formalities.


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[Assistant] There had been other state and local elections in 1908, since the Creelman interview had happened, and those had gone smoothly for the regime.


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[Assistant] But that was just because it had taken a little while for opposition types to really stick their necks out.


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[Assistant] By 1909, the coast really did look clear. Dias kept saying all the right things. So, here we go, let's challenge the election.


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[Assistant] And one of the things that made the Morelos election different is something we talked about last week. The formation of that Raista-leaning Democratic Party right now at this very moment in January 1909.


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[Assistant] Having just come together, the Morelos election was the first opportunity for these guys to go get in on some action, and various agents were sent into the state to work the election.


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[Assistant] That election turned out to be a preview of the presidential election that would proceed the following year.


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[Assistant] At first, there was a lot of surprising popular support for Lava.


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[Assistant] Meetings and rallies have a lot of energy and passion that made the local F.A.'s politicos very nervous.


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[Assistant] So the supporters of Eskandone tried to bolster his popular image by having him parrot some liberal reformist talking points that were actually written by a raised a member of the Democratic Party.


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[Assistant] But nobody was really buying it, and Ascandone wasn't exactly selling it. Things came to a dramatic head on February the 1st.


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[Assistant] With about a week left in the election, a trainload of pro-Escandón speakers came through Cuautla.


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[Assistant] When they got off the train to make their speeches, they were heckled by the crowd. So the speakers got mad and they yelled back at the crowd. Then the crowd threw some rocks. And then in came the police. Now no shots were fired, but arrests were made and the whole place was cleared.


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[Assistant] After this little quote-unquote riot, the Labistas intentionally backed off some of their more rabble-rousing rhetoric because they wanted to avoid getting jailed for inciting rebellion.


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[Assistant] But the local Hefe's politicos were way over all of this.


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[Assistant] When Election Day came on February the 7th, they broke out every trick in the book. Police were out intimidating voters and controlling access to the polls. Voting locations and times were changed at the last minute. Ballots pre-filled out for Escondón were distributed widely.


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[Assistant] And then of course the cherry on top was right before the election they went out and arrested or drove into hiding any prominent levista they could find.


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[Assistant] So in this tightly controlled atmosphere, the quote unquote opposition Dias had personally welcomed was swamped by fraud and violence. And so Escondón won the governor's race in a rigged blowout.


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[Assistant] For one thing, he never wanted the job, and certainly did not want to actually live in Morelos. He wanted his country club in Mexico City, and he constantly requested permission to leave the state on a variety of pretexts.


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[Assistant] So the land of absentee landlords now had an absentee governor.


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[Assistant] This allowed the local jefes and politicos to just kind of do whatever they wanted. And what a lot of them wanted to do was go out and get vengeance on those who had defied them during the election. So they targeted families and villages who were strong labistas.


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[Assistant] And then, even when he was in Cuernavaca, Escondón was just a cipher for the asandatos.


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[Assistant] He put through legislation in June 1909 aimed at artificially depressing real estate value so that the planters could pay lower taxes. But this shift the burden mostly to those few middle class town types, the merchants and the lawyers and the shopkeepers. It engendered a lot of resentment.


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[Assistant] Then near the end of 1909, Escondón demanded changes to the state constitution which would allow for even more executive control and authority. Basically erasing whatever thin checks the state legislature still had on the governor.


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[Assistant] The entire administration and bureaucracy of the state was then converted into being a relentlessly and uniformly supportive machine for the Ascendatos. They opposed the villagers at every front.


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[Assistant] Now, Evgeny Don's predecessor had at least occasionally ruled for the villagers or reigned in flagrant abuses of power. But that was all over now.


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[Assistant] And the thing is, had it not been for the aggressive greed of the Asandatos, they might have avoided the revolution. Because they were helping provoke it right now.


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[Assistant] The village was located a bit southwest of Kwa'utla, and at the time of his birth, the village was over 700 years old, predating even the Aztec conquest.


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[Assistant] Now being born in 1879 meant that Zapata is among that generation of men and women I mentioned last week who could not remember any president but Porfirio Diaz.


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[Assistant] Zapata also knew of no other life than the post-1880s massive encroachment and enclosure campaigns.


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[Assistant] And there's an apocryphal story that at the age of nine, he watched his father break down sobbing as they watched an orchard being enclosed. And young Emiliano swore that day to always be the enemy of Rome.


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[Assistant] Oh wait, that's a different apocryphal story of youthful vengeance swearing. Sorry, I get them mixed up sometimes.


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[Assistant] Anyway, the Sabatas were well known and a well respected Mestizo family.


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[Assistant] As a child, his maternal grandfather had helped Jose Maria Morelos in the War of Independence. Two of his uncles had been liberal partisan fighters in the War of Reform and the French War.


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[Assistant] And the Zapata's were not dirt poor peasants. They were in fact at least moderately prosperous by the standards of the village. Emiliano grew up in a house, not a hut. He had decent clothes and shoes. He got a rudimentary education, he was literate, and he could do math.


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[Assistant] And though of course he worked for a living, neither he nor his brothers and sisters were ever mere wage laborers.


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[Assistant] His parents died less than a year apart when Emiliano was still in his late teens. So he inherited a bit of property and took it over with an entrepreneurial spirit.


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[Assistant] He worked some land as a tenant farmer, growing at one point watermelons at a decent profit.


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[Assistant] He also bought a team of mules that he ran during the off-season, carting corn from farm to town and bricks from town to hacienda.


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[Assistant] He got to be well known and trusted, even though he was still in his early twenties.


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[Assistant] But Zapata really made his local reputation with horses.


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[Assistant] He was a natural rider. He was gifted and fearless. He competed in races and rodeos and bullfights.


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[Assistant] And his preternatural understanding of horses made him one of the most sought after trainers in Morelos. He was much in demand on the haciendas in the area.


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[Assistant] The image that a lot of people have of Zapata is him as this, like, ascetic peasant warrior. He ate bread and drank water, bare feet and a pure heart.


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[Assistant] But that was not Emiliano Zapata at all. He was actually quite a snappy dresser. It was one of the few things he used his disposable income on.


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[Assistant] He had spit-polished boots, sharp creased pants, good quality shirts. He loved silver buckles and spurs and ornamented saddles. And of course he paid particular care and attention to his illustrious mustache, which he took enormous pride in. And Zapata's glorious mustache is definitely one of history's most famous mustaches.


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[Assistant] But all that said, in his biography of Zapata and the Zapatistas, John Womack makes the point that though Zapata was this like fancy pants dandy, he literally had fancy pants, there was never an air of condescension or superiority about him. Nobody ever called him Don Emiliano.


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[Assistant] The people of Morelos looked at Zapata and said he is one of us. And, despite his fancy clothes, he really was.


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[Assistant] And part of this affection and trust comes from him taking an early interest in village politics.


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[Assistant] At the time, village politics meant defending the villages claims against the encroaching Oceandas.


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[Assistant] As early as 1906, he was sitting in on delegations as a junior member to learn the ropes and get used to what being a village leader was like.


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[Assistant] He spent the next three years sitting on these meetings, making the rounds to district, state and national officials.


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[Assistant] He conferred with other tribal leaders about their shared grievances


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[Assistant] And when the election of 1909 came around and was unexpectedly contested, Zapata naturally threw his lot in with labor. And so he spent even more time traveling around, meeting people, and then back home receiving visitors. He got to know allies in the opposition and they got to know him.


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[Assistant] But after the election, the village council of, uh, okay, let's see if I can do this, Ononokuyuko, could see how much tougher the fight was going to be now that Eskandone had been elected. And in September of 1909, they announced that they were going to step down and give way to the next generation.


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[Assistant] In the brief, subsequent discussion and vote, Emiliano Sapata, just a few days past his 30th birthday, was elected president of the village council.


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[Assistant] He was entrusted most of all with the collection of ancient documents that spelled out the village's claims and rites, which he would keep as his sacred labor for the rest of his life.


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[Assistant] All through the revolution, Zapata took enormous care to ensure the safety of these precious village documents.


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[Assistant] For the next few months, he carried on with the standard game of petitions and meetings and demanding legal redress of their grievances. And Zapata proved troublesome enough that he was hit with one of the standard Porphyrian tactics used to punish opposition. He was drafted into the army.


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[Assistant] But Zapata only served a brief stint in the cavalry in early 1910 before somehow managing to secure a discharge, very possibly through some well-placed bribes.


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[Assistant] By the spring of 1910 he was back home, very frustrated and ready to change tactics.


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[Assistant] And very possibly the old village elders had anticipated the need for this kind of change of tactics. And that's why they had stepped aside, to let a younger man like Zapata take the lead.


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[Assistant] With the rains approaching and planting needing to start, the villagers had been told by the neighboring Asindado that if they tried to farm on a disputed hillside that they would be run off, by force if necessary.


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[Assistant] So the villagers appealed to the state government for permission to farm this hillside. But the bureaucrats dragged their feet. They delayed. They asked for additional information.


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[Assistant] And they were basically stalling until the rain started and it would be too late.


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[Assistant] Then the asundado brazenly brought in workers from other villages to come do the planting, and Sapata had had enough.


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[Assistant] He led about 80 men, some of them armed, out to the field and demanded the workers leave.


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[Assistant] He told them, look, we don't want any trouble with you, but you know this is our land, not the Oceandas. So get out of here. And so they did.


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[Assistant] Amazingly, the Asundado actually backed down from this confrontation, though Zapata himself had to go into hiding for about three months after being denounced as a bandit and an outlaw and a highwayman.


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[Assistant] Which is where he was, laying low in the summer of 1910 when Francisco Madero's campaign ran into the wall of repression that it now in retrospect always seemed destined for.


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[Assistant] Madero's movement had never penetrated much into Marelos. It was mostly centered in the north and in the coastal cities.


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[Assistant] But the people of Morelos knew it was going on. They were thrilled that somebody was challenging Dias. And then they muttered with resigned frustration when the repressive regime kicked in and all hope seemed to be snuffed out. But all hope had not been snuffed out.


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[Assistant] And next time, we will pick back up with Madero, as he decided the time had finally come to give Dias some of his own, probably very old and expired medicine.


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[Assistant] But I say next time because revolutions will be taking next week off.


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[Assistant] Until then, please mark your calendars for my tour dates in October, and then we will be back here in two weeks, when the Mexican Revolution officially begins.


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[Assistant] He was asked why he, more than other politicians, was accused of dividing the country.


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[Assistant] Agnew said it was because he was the foremost destroyer of liberal dogma.


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[Assistant] When liberals are attacked, they salivate like Pavlovian dogs.


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[Assistant] Richard Nixon chose governor Spiro Agnew of Maryland for his vice president until two years ago he was unknown outside Maryland county politics.


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[Assistant] This week's episode is brought to you by Care Of.


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[Assistant] Care of is a monthly subscription vitamin service that delivers completely personalized vitamin and supplement packs right to your door.


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[Assistant] This year, make health and wellness a top priority with the help of CareOv's monthly subscription vitamin service, whether you're focused on glowing skin, boosting your energy levels, getting more sleep, or just generally being more healthy.


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[Assistant] Your subscription package will be personally designed for you.


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[Assistant] Using care of fun online quiz that asks you about your diet and health goals and lifestyle choices. And it only takes five minutes to find out your personal scientifically backed vitamin and supplement recommendations.


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[Assistant] I took the quiz, it was fun, it was easy, and apparently, given my health profile and the answers I provided, I should be taking vitamin D, fish oil, magnesium, B complex, and garlic, which all that sounds fine.


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[Assistant] Carol delivers daily vitamin and supplement packs customized to your recommendations that will promote your personal health and your subscription boxes will get sent right to your door every month. So it's great for a busy on the go lifestyle. It's simple. It's easy. It's convenient.


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[Assistant] And on top of that, a portion of every sale goes towards the Good Plus Foundation, which provides expectant mothers in need with valuable prenatal vitamins. Which, speaking from our own experience, prenatal vitamins are a pretty important part of any pregnancy. So we fully support that program.


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[Assistant] So take advantage of this month's special New Year's offer. For 50% off your first month of personalized care of vitamins, go to takecareof.com and enter revolutions as your promo code.


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[Assistant] Welcome back to the show. My break was great, my vacation was great, I hope everyone out there is doing great, and let's just get right back into it.


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[Assistant] We left off last time with the fall of Victoriano Huerta, who had been president of Mexico from the ten tragic days in February 1913 until his realization that he had lost the war with the constitutionalists and needed to make a run for it in July of 1914.


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[Assistant] Where does usurpation of power had not returned Mexico to the porphyrian dream of order and progress? Instead, it had triggered further chaos and revolution.


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[Assistant] Huge constitutionalist armies campaigned in the north. Zapatista guerrillas permeated the south. And as if that wasn't bad enough, the American army continued to occupy the port of Veracruz.


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[Assistant] By the time the Federal Army formally surrendered in August of 1914, Huerta was long gone, and as we have seen so often, the removal of a shared enemy led the victorious revolutionaries to turn on each other.


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[Assistant] One of the first things General Alvaro Obregón did upon entering Mexico City was visit the grave of Francisco Madero and connect the constitutionalist victory to the memory of the noble apostle democracy who had been martyred by the enemies of freedom.


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[Assistant] But as I said a few episodes back when the constitutionalist revolt first got going, its leaders were not going to be following Madero's suicidal instinct for compromise and conciliation. Officials who had served under Diaz or Huerta were going to have no place in the new order. The federal army would be disarmed and then dismantled.


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[Assistant] Unlike in 1910 when Madero had failed to make the revolutionary armies the armed forces for his presidency, the constitutionalist armies, most of them now operating under good discipline and clear chains of commands, would seamlessly become the armies of the Mexican state.


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[Assistant] Economic and social reforms would be implemented at the expense of the old Porfirian oligarchy. The refusal of Carranza and Obregón, Villa and other constitutionalist generals to even consider a Madero-style compromise with their enemies led to an exodus of rich, conservative, elite families out of the country.


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[Assistant] But when the Americans declined such further involvement, these families kept moving, and most fled to exile, either in the United States or Europe.


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[Assistant] The surrender of the federal army and the revolutionary capture of Mexico City naturally led to some old scores being settled violently and a few necessary executions,


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[Assistant] But in the main, this would not be a violent and bloody purge. It would be a house cleaning, not a massacre. And though at least one radical paper suggested it, the guillotine would not be erected in the capital.


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[Assistant] It was however made very clear that the political and social dominance of the former Porfirians was over.


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[Assistant] The exact nature of the new order, that would replace the old order though, was not entirely clear yet.


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[Assistant] The remaining rump of the National Congress attempted to convene and assert some sovereignty in the political vacuum, but they were just ignored.


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[Assistant] In August of 1914, there was no government of Mexico.


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[Assistant] There was the chain of command in the constitutionalist armies and the authority of state governors who had been appointed by Carranza, but all of this was operating on martial law and arbitrary fiat.


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[Assistant] On what sovereign basis all of this rested, other than the assertions of the plan of Guadalupe, no one could say.


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[Assistant] There were supposed to be elections, but when they would be held, who could be a candidate and under what authority the elections would take place was not established.


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[Assistant] The only thing that had been established was the deal that had been struck at the Torreón conference in early July.


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[Assistant] That was the little summit between the representatives of Villa, Carranza, and a few other generals. And they had agreed that after the war was won, that a convention of leading revolutionary officers would convene to shape the political future of Mexico.


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[Assistant] But this had been vague language, meant to paper over divisions inside the constitutionalist camp in the final minutes before the sunset of the old order. Now that it was the dawn of the new order, they were going to have to start making specific decisions.


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[Assistant] It was at this uncertain moment that Obregón took his first real independent political steps of the revolution.


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[Assistant] Up until now, Obregon had been almost exclusively a military man. First a colonel in the state militia, then a general in the constitutionalist army. His days and nights had been spent focused on defeating his enemy.


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[Assistant] But now that his enemy was defeated, a different overgone emerged. One clearly aware of the fact that he had become one of the two or three most powerful men in the country.


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[Assistant] He currently led one of the best trained armies in Mexico and controlled the capital.


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[Assistant] Now thanks to the nature of Obregón's character, specifically that he was not an idiot, this did not lead him to like declare himself dictator for life and dare anyone to dislodge him.


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[Assistant] I do feel comfortable saying, however, that by the summer of 1914, Overgun was looking around at the competition, his own record in the field, and now fancying himself a pretty plausible candidate for president.


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[Assistant] But first and foremost, Obregón wanted peace. And it was becoming very clear to everyone that the personal hostility to Carranza from a lot of other revolutionary leaders, most especially Pancho Villa, was promising nothing but future war. And so Obregón prepared to ditch Carranza in the interest of peace.


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[Assistant] And also of course in the interest of his own growing political ambitions.


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[Assistant] From this desire to not let the country fall back into civil war, Obregón took the bold step of seeking, if not an alliance, then at least détente with Pancho Villa, and he was willing to put himself at Villa's mercy to do it.


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[Assistant] Soon after taking Mexico City, Obergón took the train up to Chihuahua City, where Villa was making his headquarters, to embark on personal negotiations between the two best generals of the constitutionalist movement.


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[Assistant] For his part, VIA was amused that Obregon was coming up, and thought this was going to be nothing but a photo-op, another show of fake constitutionalist unity for outsiders as they both continued to sharpen the long knives.


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[Assistant] If VIA was willing to not mess around with local politics in Obregon's home state of Sonora, which VIA very much was doing at the moment,


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[Assistant] Then Obragan would support an initiative to force Karanza to relinquish power.


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[Assistant] Obregón said he and his fellow officers were prepared to force Carranza into becoming provisional president only for the purposes of holding elections. Elections that Carranza himself would not be allowed to participate in.


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[Assistant] VIA perked right up at this offer. This was not some staged photo-op. This was a real opportunity to build a new revolutionary axis at the expense of the man VIA now hated more than anyone else in the world. VIA probably hated Carranza more than he hated Huerta at this point, which is really saying something.


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[Assistant] But this nascent Obdragone Via alliance never really got off the ground because neither was able to deliver on the promises they made in Chihuahua City.


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[Assistant] Carranza outright rejected any notion that he could be removed so easily. I mean, Obregón was his best general, but not his only general, and Carranza was not about to be turned into a footnote in history.


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[Assistant] Meanwhile, in Sonora, the bargain agreed to by Obregon and Villa was ignored by all of their allies and proxies, and tensions and skirmishing in the state only escalated.


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[Assistant] So a few weeks later, Obrago went back to Chihuahua City, but this time he employed a different and more dangerous strategy.


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[Assistant] In between continued personal talks with Villa, Obrador met with other Division del Norte generals.


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[Assistant] Telling them, not incorrectly, that the private conflict between Via and Carranza was now becoming a public hazard, Ubergone sounded out their willingness to defect away from Via in the interest of peace. And more than a few of them indicated they were willing to do it.


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[Assistant] Via caught wind of this, and believing Obergon's previous promises had been a pack of lies, he blew up into one of his towering rages at their next meeting and said, I have a firing squad ready to go so prepare to be executed.


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[Assistant] It took the combined imploring of Felipe Angelis and then ultimately Villa's wife, Luz Corral, to convince Villa that so brazenly murdering Obregón would be a fatal mistake.


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[Assistant] Obregón continued to coolly insist that he was absolutely ready to dump Carranza into the dustbin of history, saying most especially that whenever the convention of revolutionary generals took place, that Carranza would not be able to control their deliberations.


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[Assistant] Via calmed down a bit, and agreed not to execute Obdurgan, and not to boycott the convention when it convened, and he allowed his rival to leave the city alive.


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[Assistant] But though he had calmed down, Via's murderous wrath was apparently undiminished, and it looks like he only wanted to avoid the impropriety of murdering somebody who was his guest.


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[Assistant] Via had probably already at this point determined that a future war between him and Carranza was unavoidable, and that Obergone would clearly be his most formidable adversary.


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[Assistant] But just as Villa himself had once escaped Huerta's order to have him killed on a train to Mexico City, that was back in episode 9.13, the officer's task with actually carrying out the execution did not act either out of a miscommunication or outright insubordination.


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[Assistant] Hope they're gone. Was allowed to continue on alive and well.


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[Assistant] VIA's attempt to kill Obragoen was part fit of peak, but also based on a solid prognostication. And in fact, VIA's belief that Obragoen would be his most formidable and dangerous adversary would come true.


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[Assistant] Now as Obregón attempted detente with Villa, another group of constitutionalist leaders attempted detente with Emiliano Zapata.


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[Assistant] There would never be peace as long as the Zapatistas held themselves aloof from everyone. And so, in late August 1914, a small clique of generals with more radical inclinations than First Chief Carranza reached out to Zapata to see what it would take to get the Morelos guerrillas to stand down. This turned out to be nearly an impossible sell.


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[Assistant] Carranza considered the Zapatistas to be barefooted barbarians who were much more of a threat to civilization than the old porphyrian oligarchy. I mean, Carranza had political beefs with the porphyrians, and so was purging them from government, but he had like, metaphysical disagreements with the Zapatistas.


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[Assistant] It's why the one condition of the federal army surrender had been that the federal army along the southern line of Mexico City would stay in place until they were relieved by constitutionalist forces to stop the Zapatistas from entering the capital.


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[Assistant] So, for Zapata, Carranza was just another Madero, and probably even less trustworthy than Madero had been.


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[Assistant] But still, Zapata allowed a small delegation of Carancista generals who had proven track records of land reform in areas that they controlled to come to Cuernavaca for a meeting.


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[Assistant] But when this little group got to Zapatista Occupied Cuernavaca, they found the Zapatista outright hostile to the lawyers and the politicians and the tricksters who surrounded Carranza.


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[Assistant] Zapata said that any alliance with him and his liberating army of the south would have to be based on two fundamental principles.


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[Assistant] First, any potential ally had to accept the plan of Ayala, and second, Karanza had to resign.


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[Assistant] And that would be the preliminary demands for future negotiations. That was not the negotiations themselves. That was just what had to be established before Zapata would even talk to you.


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[Assistant] Now since Carranza was obviously never going to meet those demands, the group of commissioners left empty-handed, and on September the 5th, Carranza gave an interview blasting and scoffing at Zapata.


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[Assistant] So whenever Carranza took up the presidency, he could expect to be the latest national leader to have to deal with continued revolution in the South.


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[Assistant] And it was now becoming a more aggressive revolution in the South.


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[Assistant] On September the 8th, Zapata announced that he was invoking Article 8 of the Plan of Ayala, which promised total nationalization of land and property belonging to anyone who opposed the Plan of Ayala.


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[Assistant] Up until now, Zapatista controlled areas had seen a lot of reclamation or recovery of land. Villages making claims about property that had been stolen from them by the Osandados.


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[Assistant] But up until this point, Zapata had helped his chiefs back from going further than restoration.


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[Assistant] He didn't even allow them to seize land for their own personal enrichment as many expected would be the reward for their service. But after invoking Article 8,


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[Assistant] Real revolutionary land distribution would commence in the south.


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[Assistant] Survey teams would be organized to go out, take stock of all the land, and more or less do to the Oceandas what the Oceandas had done to the villages.


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[Assistant] With Zapata remaining aloof from the constitutionalists in the south, tensions between the constitutionalists in the north continued to escalate.


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[Assistant] Carranza decided to literally break ties with Villa, ordering men under his command to cut telegraph lines and literally rip up the railways, connecting areas controlled by Villa from areas controlled by Carranza.


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[Assistant] Villa then issued a declaration saying that he no longer recognized Carranza as first chief of anything, and that Mexico, all of Mexico, should join in Villa's call for a new civilian government to take over the country as soon as possible.


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[Assistant] With the rift between Villa and Carranza now becoming a real problem, the next rung of officers down the ladder became very concerned that this was going to lead to open war, which neither they nor they suspected Mexicans generally really wanted.


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[Assistant] So about 50 of these senior generals, including, eventually overgone, signed a proclamation demanding that the agreement made at Torreon back in July be fulfilled. That a convention of leading revolutionary generals be held immediately.


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[Assistant] A convention where the leadership of the revolution would be able to come together as a group not as members of individual factions.


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[Assistant] And determine the best way to settle a peace for Mexico.


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[Assistant] Carranza tried to wiggle his way out of this by agreeing that a convention should be called, and then he scheduled this convention for October the 1st in Mexico City.


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[Assistant] But he tried to keep tight control over it by stipulating that the convened members should be composed of constitutionalist generals, or their designated representatives, all state governors, and other officials who had been appointed by Carranza since the beginning of the rebellion, and then other just sort of loose advisors to the first chief.


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[Assistant] This was clearly meant to be a rubber stamp convention, designed to ratify the legitimacy of Carranza's move towards the presidency.


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[Assistant] But showing the weakness of Carranza's position, almost all the rest of the revolutionary generals, including Obregón, refused to go along with this rubber stamp.


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[Assistant] The October 1st convention would take place, and it did take place, but a second convention was arranged for October the 10th.


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[Assistant] This convention would be held in the neutral city of Aguas Calientes, and this one would be attended only by revolutionary generals, who would be there representing themselves and Mexico.


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[Assistant] Carranza did not have the ability to stop the Aguascalientes convention, and could only insist with frustration that it would be merely advisory and not bind him personally in any way to anything.


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[Assistant] The Aguascalientes Convention convened on October the 10th, 1914 to decide the fate of Mexico.


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[Assistant] Unlike the Matarista era, when the soldiers had been shunted aside so the civilians could take over, this time it would be reversed.


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[Assistant] Civilians were barred from participating in the convention. The soldiers had risked their lives, spilled their blood, and won the war. And they were going to have the last word.


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[Assistant] About 150 total delegates showed up, either the senior generals themselves or delegates appointed to represent them, on the basis of one representative per 1,000 soldiers.


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[Assistant] Now were there 150,000 revolutionary soldiers under arms at that moment?


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[Assistant] No, probably not, and credentials were inflated.


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[Assistant] But still, nearly all the factions, save for the moment the Zapatistas, were represented.


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[Assistant] It was a dangerous moment as Mexico had a long history of military rule.


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[Assistant] But while the men who gathered at Aguascalientes were all military men now, most of them were civilians who had been converted into soldiers by the revolution, and they all assumed some kind of civilian government would inherit the country.


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[Assistant] There was no support for setting up a permanent military dictatorship. That was not on the table.


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[Assistant] Pancho Villa himself stayed away, but he did send a group of about 40 dedicated vistas who would be there to ensure that the boss wasn't screwed over, but most especially to make sure that Carranza was screwed over.


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[Assistant] Obergang was there in person as a strong, moderate presence inside a group oriented towards peace.


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[Assistant] That group included most of the generals who had signed the proclamation calling for the convention in the first place, and they formed the bulk of the membership of the convention.


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[Assistant] A much smaller minority were hardcore carancistas, whose fortunes and careers were tied to their patron, and who were there to ensure the convention did not get rid of the first chief.


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[Assistant] After convening on October the 10th, they all swore an oath and affixed their signatures to a Mexican flag, stating that they would abide by the convention's collective decisions. Then two days later, they declared themselves sovereign.


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[Assistant] The Aguascalientes Convention would now constitute the sovereign authority of Mexico.


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[Assistant] Carranza refused to recognize this bold claim, and continued to insist that it was merely an advisory body, and that as First Chief, sovereign authority still rested with him.


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[Assistant] But Pancho Villa took a different approach. He came down to Aguascalientes. He fixed his own signature to the flag and announced that he would abide by the decisions of the convention.


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[Assistant] Avia went back to his headquarters, but while he stayed away, he left his interests in the capable hands of Felipe Ángeles. And Ángeles became one of the most dominant players at the convention.


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[Assistant] Angelus led the Vistas in pursuit of conciliation and compromise with everyone else in the room.


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[Assistant] This was a cunning strategy that would further draw a contrast between Via and Carranza.


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[Assistant] Because the Carranza guys were there offering no compromise and no conciliation. They were there to insist that Carranza was now the supreme national leader of Mexico and demand that everyone else signal their due fealty and submission.


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[Assistant] The Vistas meanwhile had no such lordly demands.


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[Assistant] And the reason the Vista's had no such lordly demands comes down to one of the vaguely articulated but still supremely relevant ideological distinctions between Via and Carranza.


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[Assistant] Though he may himself had only been dimly aware of it, Villa was in the middle of trying to revive federalism as a major political philosophy in Mexico.


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[Assistant] As we saw way back in the first couple episodes of this series, and all of the Believer episodes, the conflict between centralists and federalists in the 19th century was the dividing line of any number of civil wars, coups, revolts, and revolutions in Latin America.


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[Assistant] In Mexico, federalism had been permanently abandoned when Benito Juarez and the liberals, in their struggles first against conservatives and then against the French, embraced strong central authority. This was obviously cemented by Juarez's successor, if not exactly heir, Porfirio Díaz.


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[Assistant] Federalism had been virtually extinct in Mexico since the 1860s. But now Villa was trying to bring it back, thanks mostly to his own natural proclivities.


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[Assistant] Pancho Villa does not seem to have had any national ambitions, and you can count me as among those convinced that Villa was not interested in becoming president. That was never his ambition.


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[Assistant] He wanted local power in Chihuahua, of course, but beyond that he had no interest in imposing his will on anyone, and readily invited generals and other political leaders from various parts of Mexico to go home and do as they pleased. That's the future of Mexico that Pancho Villa envisioned.


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[Assistant] Carranza, on the other hand, was a strong executive centralist, whose hero was the liberal centralist Juarez, and who, in another life, probably winds up as an obscure minister in the cabinet of alternate reality president Bernardo Reyes.


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[Assistant] For Carranza, a strong central government was essential to order in progress.


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[Assistant] So Via was able to compromise on all kinds of things. Tell everybody, hey, go home and do what you want.


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[Assistant] Carranza could not and would not make those same compromises.


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[Assistant] Now, all of that said, Villa may not have personally had national ambitions, but his man Felipe Ángeles sure did. And Ángeles recognized a way to turn this vaguely neutral convention into a vehicle of purvismo, a machine that would propel him to the presidency. And that would be to bring in the Zapatistas.


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[Assistant] With one delegate per thousand soldiers, a Zapatista delegation, aligned with the Vistas, could pop Carranza out of the leadership of the revolution and settle all things in their own favor.


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[Assistant] So Angela stepped forward and proposed that on moral grounds, on political grounds, and for reasons of revolutionary honor, that the not present Zapatistas be formally invited to send a delegation.