Friday, September 25, 1874. The Act of September 1874.

Tilmahtli from the 1531 apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico.

Mexico enacted  The Act of September 25, 1874 making the provisions of the Reform Law constitutional.

The act provided "liberal" reforms basically on the French model, following the results of the bitter Reform War of the late 1850s, and were hostile accordingly to the Church in certain ways.  They provided:

• The State and the Church were independent of each other.
• Congress could not enact laws, establishing or prohibiting any religion.
• Marriage was a civil contract.
• No religious institution could acquire real property or capital taxes on them, with the sole exception established in Article 27 of the Constitution.
• A promise to speak the truth and to fulfill contracted obligations replaced a religious oath.
• No one could be compelled to give personal works without their full consent. 
• The State could not allow any contract, covenant or agreement that provided for the loss or irrevocable sacrifice of the freedom of man, whether due to work, education or religious vow.

Anti Catholicism as an element of Mexican politics dated back to its earliest independence movements, and like the rise of protestantism in France and England, a desire to appropriate the property and wealth of the Church had a great deal to deal with it, although taking over the Church's obligations to the poor on the other hand were typically left to political theory, save in England where it was simply ignored.  Mexico's first Constitution (1824) provided that it was to perpetually be a Catholic state, but hostility set in by 1857 when Benito Juárez attacked the property rights and possessions of the Church. Many of the figures of the 1854 1855 Revolution of Ayutla had been Freemasons and anticlericists.  

This had caused the supporters of tradition and religion to back the Second Mexican Empire, which of course turned out badly.  Anticlericalism was moderated under Porfirio Díaz, but revived during the Mexican Revolution, save for the followers of Zapata.

Ultimately, this would lead to the Cristero War, but even with its end, the Mexican government remained strongly hostile up until very recent years to the Catholic Church, having an overall impact on the practice of the faith in Mexico.  Open repression mostly ended with the election of Catholic Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–46) and most of the remaining official repressive statutes ended under  President Carlos Salinas in 1992.

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Tuesday, September 22, 1874. 1874 Hong Kong Typhoon.

Labels: 1870s, 1874, China, Disaster, Hong Kong, Weather

Sunday, July 6, 1924 Plutarco Elias Calles elected.

Plutarco Elias Calles of the Partido Laborista Mexicano won Mexico's presidential election with 84.1% of the vote.  Before the emergence of the PRI, which Calles founded, it was the labor party, a democratic socialist party, was the most powerful party in Mexico.

That Mexico, which had just endured a violent attempt at overthrowing the government, was able to successfully stage an election was a triumph of democracy, albeit a temporary one as the PRI would later lock the country up into being a one party state with the PRI as the official party.

Calles was a left wing figure who had come up as a general in the Mexican War.  A controversial figure, he's admired by some for his work on social and institutional changes in Mexico, and an attempt, albeit only partially successful, to reform a military then dominated by revolutionary generals who were a threat to the government itself.  His administration, however, attacked the Church which lead to the January 1, 1927 Catholic rebellion known as the Cristero War, arguably the last chapter of the Mexican Revolution, in which 200,000 Mexicans died and would ultimately bring about the reelection of Alvaro Obregón in 1928.  He was exiled to the United States in 1936 but returned in 1941 when the PRI was firmly in power.  By that time, closer to death, he had become a spiritualist.

The Johnstown Meteor fell to earth in Colorado and interrupted a nearby funeral.  It's only one of eleven such events that have been witnessed.

Johnstown is famous today for the Buc-ee's located there.

Last edition:

Saturday, July 5, 1924. Hitting a concrete wall.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, 1924 Olympics, Art, baseball, Brazil, France, Germany, J. C. Leyendecker

Blog Mirror: Bricklayer Legacy

 Bricklayer Legacy

April 12, 1920 Sonora rebels, the Ruhr Rebellion ends.

The revolution in Mexico, and that's what it now was, was back on the front page of American newspapers.

As part of this process, Sonoran Governor Adolfo de la Huerta resigned his office in preparation for taking up the part of a revolutionary soldier once again.  In his place, Plutarco Elías Calles became Governor.  Calles was already a figure in Sonoran politics and had been a general in the Mexican revolution and a supporter of Carranza. At this time, he was supporting Obregon and De La Huerta.

Plutarco Elías Calles, who later took Mexico to the edge of fascism and across the line of sectarian brutality.

Calles was a true radical and his policies were brutal, particularly against the Catholic Church.  He'd later become the President of Mexico from 1924 to 1928 when his policies resulted in the Cristero War, which might be regarded as the final stage of the Mexican Revolution as well as the point at which Mexican democracy basically essentially a joke in some ways, so much so that when his policies resulted in the assassination by a Cristero supporter of Obregon, who was set to resume office, he became a type of dictator and founded the National Revolution Party, which governed Mexico from its founding until 2000.  Calles himself at this point flirted with fascism, which had an influence upon him.

Calles would ironically fall at the hands of an associate, Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, who became President of Mexico in 1934.  Cárdenas proved to be independent of his patron and acted against Calles' supporters.  Ultimately Calles was charged with being a member of revolutionary conspiracy and deported, ironically, to the United States in 1936.  Supposedly Calles was reading Mein Kampf at the time of his arrest.  As an exile, he made contact fascists in the United States although he rejected their anti Semitism and of course their hostility to Mexicans.  He was allowed to return to Mexico, in retirement, in 1941, and began to modify his views, supporting Mexico's entry into World War Two.

Cárdenas, for his part, remained a revolutionary, but not a fascist, and continued the suppression of the Catholic Church throughout his Presidency.  That feature of Mexican politics would not abate until 1940 when Manuel Ávila Camacho became President.

While this site is not, obviously, the history of Mexico website, all of this ties into the purpose of this blog which was to look at events in the 1890 to 1920 time frame with a particular focus (among other focuses) on the Border War with Mexico.  While this phase of this time frame and the attendant history are clearly winding down, the events described here are critical elements of it.  Over time, we've seen a democratic revolution that took the eclectic Francisco I. Modero into office as a true democrat devolve into continual revolutionary cycles which at one time promised to put a collection of democrats in power, only to have that fall apart and leave the radical Venustiano Carranza in charge.  In 1920, that was flying apart as Carranza schemed to control who would replace him as President of Mexico. That would ultimately see the more radical Obregon come to power followed by Calles, who was an extremist who flirted with fascism during his lifetime.  Only beginning in 1940 did Mexico begin to turn away from that direction, although it would take sixty years for real democracy to return to the country after that date.  In 1920, it was dying.

Oskar von Watter.  He commanded German government forces that entered the Ruhr to put down the Communist rebellion there.  In 1934 he'd cause a monument to be put up in Essen in honor of Freikorps soldiers who had died in the 1920 rebellion.  He died in 1934 and was buried in Berlin's Invalid Cemetery, a cemetary associated with Prussian military figures.

On the same day the Ruhr Rebellion in Germany came to an end with the German government firmly in control  General von Watter ordered his soldiers to abstain from "unlawful behavior", but it was too late.  Reds caught with firearms were simply killed in many instances.