Mexico's rebel patriot Pancho Villa was portrayed in American newspapers and the movies as a Robin Hood. The photograph above is a 1914 still shot by Mutual Films, which paid him $25,000 to allow its cameras at his battles. He promised to fight by daylight, and when the film crews were not ready for his attempt to take the city of Ojinaga, he delayed the attack. Ojinaga fell to Villa and film. Villa, adored by his men for his bravery and his coarse, blunt humor, was a military innovator. He was the first Mexican to abandon the custom of taking the women and children along with the army. He made swift forced marches of bodies of cavalry, which struck terror into the enemy.
Even President Wilson joined the fan club, in midsummer 1914. When Villa started a new round of civil war against his former revolutionary ally Venustiano Carranza, following the exile of Huerta, Wilson thought Villa would win. He secretly encouraged him. He seemed a neighborly revolutionary, on the side of the peons but also a protector of the considerable American property in the northern area he controlled. Unlike Carranza, he had even backed Wilson's seizure of Veracruz. John Reed rode with Villa and admired him, but another reporter presciently remarked that he had "the eyes of a man who will some day go crazy." He seemed to Americans to go crazy when he lost the big civil war battles and Wilson gave de facto recognition to Carranza. On January 10, 1916, Villa stopped a train at Santa Ysabel in Mexico and murdered 17 American miners and engineers on board.
On March 9, he crossed the border to sack the town of Columbus, New Mexico. Nineteen Americans died before he was driven off. The madness had a cause. Villa felt betrayed by Wilson. Carranza had been able to make an end-run around Villa's forces only by getting American permission to go through U.S. territory.
Villa's intention was to provoke America into war with Mexico so that he could exploit the turmoil. He might have succeeded but for Wilson. The president ordered General "Black Jack" Pershing to cross the Rio Grande with a force of 5,800 men in pursuit of Villa.
Wilson's interventions in Mexico embittered relations for years, but he was,
for all his mistakes, a friend of the Mexican Revolution. When Carranza became president in March 1916, Wilson, against business protests, gave Mexico full recognition, despite a new constitution that vested mineral and oil rights in the state. If Taft had been in the White House, Huerta might have been preserved in his dictatorship and the Mexican Revolution could have been even longer and bloodier
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by Barbara W. Tuchman