Witness to War

Auteur

Susan Toomey Frost is a major collector and authority on Mexican and Mexican American photography and decorative art. She has taught English and linguistics at universities in Mexico and Texas. She is the author of Colors on Clay: The San José Tile Workshops of San Antonio, Timeless Mexico: The Photographs of Hugh Brehme, and Roberto de la Selva: Modern Mexican Masterpieces in Wood. She lives in San Antonio.

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A stunning visual account of the 1914 U.S. invasion of Mexico

Résumé
A stunning visual account of the 1914 U.S. invasion of Mexico

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Witness to War:

Mexico in the Photographs of Walter Elias Hadsell

At the height of its mining boom, Mexico must have been an enticing place for young American mining engineers who yearned for adventure and wealth. The then president, Porfirio Díaz, encouraged foreign investment in his push to turn his country into a progressive, modern nation that vaunted its capital as a "City of Palaces." Foreigners — particularly ones from the American Midwest— were taken on tours aimed at touting investment in land development, while other potential foreign investors were persuaded to put money into expanding Mexico's infrastructure, including its telephone and railway systems. Skilled workers were sought for both the newly discovered oil fields and the already established mines, extracting resources that benefitted Mexicans and foreigners alike.

After completing his studies at the University of Arizona's Mining School at the age of 25, Walter Elias Hadsell (1880–1967) took a job as a shift foreman in a cyanide mine in Tombstone, Arizona. Shortly after that, in 1906, he became a mining engineer in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, quickly rising to the position of refinery foreman in what was then considered to be the world's largest gold mine. El Oro Mining & Refining Company ran the mine, located in the town of El Oro, about 100 miles northwest of Mexico City.

Hadsell remained in El Oro until 1911, all the while drawing on the experience he had acquired in his college days as an employee of the Buehman Photography Studio in Tucson, Arizona. To hone his photography skills, he took out a subscription in 1909 to the monthly journal, Camera Craft, and began exchanging postcards with other photography buffs around the world. 

Influenced by pictorialism, Hadsell produced painterly landscapes and rural scenes, depictions of buildings, parks, and monuments in Mexico City and Toluca, photographs of rivers and lakes in Ocotlán and Chapala in the state of Jalisco, and empathetic portraits of indigenous people. Also, having become familiar with the properties of cyanide during his time in Arizona, he printed blue-toned cyanotypes. He also extensively photographed the El Oro mining operations in the state of Mexico, and in Tlalpujahua in the neighboring state of Michoacán, two of the most productive mining districts in North America.

Walter Hadsell's prolific use of a panoramic camera distinguishes his work from that of all the other photographers who were active in Mexico at the time, save one, an Irish-American named Charles A. Hamilton, who, like Hadsell, was a mining engineer in the early 1900s. Hamilton used a panoramic camera to take elongated photographs in Oaxaca City and its environs. One of the many foreign entrepreneurs who acquired Mexican mining concessions during the Porfirian regime, he left a significant album whose images document Oaxacan mining operations as well as everyday social life.

In 1911, Hadsell set up his own business as a professional photographer by obtaining the Kodak franchise for Veracruz, Mexico's principal port. He and his growing family moved from El Oro to Veracruz, where he photographed in both standard and panoramic formats not only the coastal landscape but also the tropical interior and the ruins, in La Antigua, of what is said to be Hernán Cortés' first house in Mexico. His training in engineering is evident in his photographs of bridges and railroads penetrating the lush vegetation of Atoyac, Córdoba, and Jalapa. 

Hadsell also traveled to Tierra Blanca, near the border with Oaxaca, to photograph the rebel revolutionary, Panuncio Martinez. Mexico had descended into a civil war and, in 1913, he documented the damage done to Mexico City during the Decena Trágica, a ten-day rebellion that tragically culminated in General Victoriano Huerta's assassination of President Francisco Madero, in which the American ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson, was complicit. At least a dozen of his Decena Trágica images survive.

Diplomatic relations between the United States and Mexico broke down following the so-called "Tampico Incident." On April 9, 1914, Mexican officials mistakenly arrested some American sailors in Tampico, some 300 miles north of Veracruz. Although Mexico later apologized, Admiral Henry Mayo, the commander of the Atlantic Fleet, overreacted and demanded that Mexicans formally salute the American flag on their own soil. President Huerta apologized for what he considered to be a minor incident, but he refused to comply with Wilson's demand that Mexico fire a humiliating 21-gun military salute to the American flag. Although Huerta's failure to do so hardly justified going to war with Mexico, President Woodrow Wilson responded by ordering his country's enormous Atlantic Fleet to sail to the Gulf of Mexico, a drastic action that was unanimously supported by the US Congress.

A few months earlier, Wilson had lifted an embargo on the shipment of arms to Mexico, permitting delivery only to his favored faction in Mexico's civil wars, the Constitutionalists under Venustiano Carranza. However, he maintained the embargo on weapons shipments to Huerta, whom he was trying to undermine. Although Huerta posed no direct threat to the United States and would have eventually been deposed anyway, Wilson resolved to change the Mexican regime, thus beginning another chapter in the history of US meddling in the internal affairs of the countries to its south.

While feelings raged in both countries, Wilson received word that a German arms shipment was on the way to Veracruz to aid Huerta's forces. Unbeknownst to the president, it was Remington Arms, an American company, that had sold the weapons to Huerta. To evade Wilson's embargo on the shipment of military supplies to Huerta, Remington cunningly routed the guns and munitions first to Russia and then to Germany, for transfer and delivery to Mexico on a German ship named Ypiranga.

Wilson's animosity toward Huerta was by no means a reason to violate Mexico's sovereignty, but an arms shipment destined for Huerta gave him the excuse he needed to intercept the German ship and seize the Veracruz customs house, railway yards, and telegraph station. Ironically, the Ypiranga was only temporarily detained before leaving Veracruz and sailing southeast to Puerto México (now Coatzacoalcos) to unload the Remington shipment, which then made its way to Huerta in Mexico City.

On April 22, 1914, Wilson won congressional authorization to invade Mexico. Eleven battleships and two cruisers carrying US Army, Navy and Marine forces were waiting offshore for the go-ahead. News agencies rushed to Veracruz, but the military action was so sudden that international war correspondents, including Jimmy Hare, Frederick Palmer, Jack London, and Richard Harding Davis, arrived too late to cover the invasion. Unfortunately, the communications between Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels in Washington and Admiral Frank Friday Fletcher in Veracruz were faulty, and Fletcher launched the invasion one day before it was approved by Congress.  

Hadsell, by then a long-standing resident of Veracruz and the owner of the Kodak franchise there, took the first photographs of …