The Great Call-Up

Following the March 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico, by Francisco “Pancho” Villa and the sending of the ineffective “Punitive Expedition” into Mexico to capture or kill Villa, President Woodrow Wilson decided in June 1916 to mobilize the National Guard and send almost 150,000 men to protect the US side of the Mexican border. While the so-called Punitive Expedition has received considerable attention, the National Guard call-up has not. Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, Charles Harris and Louis R. Sadler's The Great Call-Up: The Guard, the Border, and the Mexican Revolution fills a lacuna in the historiography of the border during the Mexican Revolution. The treatment is detailed and thorough, and though the authors eschew the idea of attempting a definitive history, this book should remain the prime source on the call-up, in particular, for some time.The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 is titled “Border Problem” and includes a brief synopsis of the Mexican Revolution and the conditions that led to the guard's deployment on the border. It is much shorter than part 2 but offers interesting insight into events associated with the Mexican Revolution, especially in South Texas. Originally specialists on Mexico, the authors see things such as the January 1915 Plan de San Diego, which called for Mexicans, Native Americans, and other marginalized groups to violently rebel against Anglo rule, through the lens of the conflagration in Mexico. Although they do not deny the local and domestic reasons for Hispanic resistance and social and ethnic strife, they do not explore the history of Anglo landgrabs and the widespread lynching and murder of Mexicans by Texas Rangers and Anglo vigilantes that was endemic to South Texas and created a hellish status quo for the Mexican and Mexican American population of the region. Doing so would have provided deeper context for the authors' valuable insight into the ways in which the plan became a vehicle for Venustiano Carranza, leader of one of the main revolutionary factions in Mexico and the self-proclaimed interim president of Mexico, to gain US recognition and strengthen his position vis-à-vis Villa and other more radical revolutionary factions, including that headed by Emiliano Zapata. Based on their use of Mexican sources, the authors present convincing evidence of Carranza's manipulation of the Plan de San Diego. Read alone, part 1 diminishes the local realities prevailing in South Texas; read in conjunction with other scholarship focused on the ways that Mexican Americans experienced this troubled time, it offers valuable information and a more complete picture.Part 2 represents the bulk of the book, 16 chapters, compared to 4 in part 1. Part 2 does not delve deeply into either the Mexican Revolution or border society. It is primarily about the guard, the states that the various units came from, the differences in their equipment and training, the logistics of deployment, and life in the camps and host towns from Corpus Christi, Texas, to San Diego, California. The authors know the area that they are writing about and provide vivid imagery of the landscape, from desolate, hot, and dusty border towns to the rugged beauty and isolation of the Big Bend. The book presents detailed, case-by-case treatments of 17 different camps, with special emphasis on South Texas and El Paso. The interactions between towns and guard camps are explored, and the case studies make clear that the presence of the guard boosted local economies and led to the paving of streets, the suppression of prostitution (or at least the moving of it out of town), and other civic improvements. The 150,000 men in the call-up represented a slice of American diversity, with a few all-black units, a unit heavy with members of the New York upper crust, Native Americans in Arizona units, and Klansmen from Alabama parading in Nogales, Arizona.Events derived from the Mexican Revolution precipitated the guard's mobilization, but the larger significance of the call-up, from a military perspective, is that it provided an opportunity to train and equip the guard and turn it into a functioning reserve of the US Army. The mass deployment revealed army weaknesses in aircraft, machine guns, and artillery as well as its slowness to mechanize from horses to trucks and other motor vehicles. Fortifying the border also required logistics to be improved and officers trained, and it provided valuable lessons about how to effectively mobilize large numbers of men quickly. When the United States entered World War I, the guard provided 17 of the 43 American divisions, and the regular army continues to need the guard to fight wars

Economic history · Guard (computer science) · Political science · Punitive damages · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law