Mexico: the forgotten issue of the Republican presidential campaign of 1916

With Woodrow Wilson's inauguration as President of the United States in 1913, the course of relations between the United States and Mexico underwent a dramatic change. Wilson's predecessor, Republican William Howard Taft, had dealt with turbulent Mexico, a country torn by the violence of military revolution since 1910, with traditional diplomatic methods. Wilson saw the role of the United States as a crusader for liberty and justice and applied this concept to United States-Mexican relations. The leaders of the Republican Party grew gradually disenchanted with Wilson's application of these diplomatic concepts to Mexico. In April, 1914 Republicans openly broke with the President when he directed the United States Navy to seize the Mexican port of Vera Cruz. For the next two years in Congress and in the press the Republican Party expressed open disagreement with Wilson's foreign policy. In 1916, a presidential election year, the Republicans and their presidential candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, sought to develop what they saw as Wilson's failures in Mexico into a significant campaign issue. The Democrats responded by questioning Hughes alternatives and intimated that the Republicans desired a military invasion of Mexico. In the light of horrors of the war in Europe, the American electorate grew more concerned with future peace than past diplomatic errors, and Mexico as a Republican issue ultimately failed.