The Mexicanization of American Politics

WHILE HISTORIANS TYPICALLY INTERPRET the disputed 1876 U.S. presidential election in terms of its impact upon postwar Reconstruction or its allegedly fraudulent outcome, many contemporaries instead saw the crisis as proof of the nation’s fundamental fragility. They worried that the line between violence and politics-obscured by the Civil War-might evaporate completely in the heat of a contested presidency. With the disintegration of democratic institutions and habits, the U.S. might fall into a spiral of civil wars. One anxious army general feared that the country might soon collapse like “Mexico and the Central American countries” unless party leaders tamped down the conflict. This turn to Mexican analogies to both describe anxieties about civil war and chart a path to stabilization was not an anomaly but part of a widespread, mostly forgotten discourse in the 1870s United States. The shorthand terms “Mexicanization” and “Mexicanized,” born during overlapping 1860s wars, spread rapidly after the disputed 1876 election, appearing in many hundreds of newspaper articles, in private correspondence, and on the floor of Congress. Soon-to-be president Rutherford B. Hayes grimly disavowed the possibility of Mexicanization, a Harper’s Weekly cartoon mocked the “Scarecrow” of “Mexicanism,” and The Nation made a solemn observation: “we hear every day strong expressions of a desire, and also of a determination, that this government shall not be ‘Mexicanized.’ ” Legal scholar John Codman Hurd, in his 1881 political handbook, defined a “Mexicanization of institutions” in which “all party contests have the character of civil war”: “The same thing would occur in this country,” he wrote, “if a party, on the theory of a ‘war of ideas,’ should attempt to retain the control of the general Government against the popular vote.”1

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