Like Cuba and the Philippines

Abstract

This chapter explores how investors based in Los Angeles expected the U.S. government to intervene on their behalf to protect personal and urban interests from the unrest caused by the Mexican Revolution and the rewriting of the Mexican Constitution in 1917. Drawing on a history of imperial interventions on the part of the United States across Latin America and the Caribbean as well as in the Philippines and Hawaii, Los Angeles investors rolled out a forceful lobbying campaign to push the federal government, particularly President Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane, to intervene militarily in Mexico. The effort was led by Los Angeles lawyer Thomas Gibbon and oil producer Edward Doheny, and through a lobbying organization formed in Los Angeles, the National Association for the Protection of American Rights in Mexico. These maneuvers for intervention placed Angelenos at the forefront of American foreign policy toward Mexico between 1910 and 1930.