Understanding the Enigmatic Calles: A Review of Jürgen Buchenau’s Plutarco Elías Calles and the Mexican Revolution. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007

UNDERSTANDING THE ENIGMATIC CALLES: A REVIEW OF JÜRGEN BUCHENAU’S Plutarco Elı́as Calles and the Mexican Revolution. LANHAM, MD: ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD, 2007 John A. Britton Plutarco Elı́as Calles, one of the most important leaders in twentieth century Mexico, has remained an enigmatic figure – the subject of varied and sometimes conflicting assessments by his contemporaries as well as scholars who, over the last few decades, have attempted to delineate his place in history. Many of these judgments have been negative. For example , in his early years in Mexican politics, Calles had to serve as a military leader, a role for which he had very little preparation. His fellow Sonoran, Alvaro Obregón, applied ridicule to explain his shortcomings on the battlefield as the results of the questionable leadership of a mill owner from the town of Fronteras trying to command troops in combat. Yet the same Calles commanded troops that repulsed a Villista cavalry charge. During his term as president (1924–1928) Calles was the subject of hostile hyperbole from United States Ambassador James Sheffield and Secretary of State Frank Kellogg who called him a Bolshevik who wanted to undermine the United States in the Western Hemisphere and who also threatened the free enterprise system in Mexico. Two generations later, however, respected historian Ramón Eduardo Ruiz characterized Calles as a friend of foreign (especially U.S.) corporations.1 Henry Bamford Parkes, whose Englishlanguage survey textbook on Mexican history was widely used from the 1930s to the 1960s, made an argument for Calles as a manipulative dictator during the Maximato (1928–1935), a period in which Mexico had three short-term presidents following the assassination of Obregón.2 Mexican historian and political commentator Enrique Krauze further darkened the shadows that often dominate our understanding of Calles’s personality with the assertion that internalized memories of his illegitimacy deeply troubled Calles into adulthood and accounted for his hostility towards the Catholic Church and the anti-clericalism that helped spawn the Cristero War.3 If we try to assemble these images of Calles into a coherent portrait, we are confronted by a jumble of inconsistent, fragmentary perceptions that does little to clarify and much to confuse. This inept military man somehow managed to rise to prominence during a period of violent revolution in which factional struggles were often resolved on the battlefield. Calles stepped into the presidency to face accusations of Bolshevik inclinations 155 SECOLAS Annals, Volume 52, 2008 while two generations later an historian would look at the same person in the same period and label him a capitalist collaborator. In the last years of his presidency and for several years thereafter, the enigmatic Calles is alleged to have acted as a clever, calculating, manipulative dictator while harboring deep psychological wounds from his childhood that led to an irrational, impulsive persecution of the Catholic Church. It is a scholarly challenge of the first magnitude to make sense of these conflicting views. Jürgen Buchenau brings considerable skill in research and historical analysis to this task. Buchenau consulted over twenty archives and collections of documents from Mexico City to Washington, London, and Berlin to establish a solid foundation for this study. He surveyed the extensive array of published books and articles to consider the work of other scholars. This depth and breadth of preparation is matched by his perceptive, nuanced view of Calles as a dominant leader whose political acumen, ideological orientation, and personal struggles help to explain the extent and also the limits of his power. Buchenau has pieced together a narrative of Calles’s military career that places Obregón’s criticism in its proper context. Obregón expressed reservations about the capacity of his fellow Sonoran as a battlefield commander , but Calles gave evidence of other skills that were vital to the conduct of a military campaign. Faced with a lengthy struggle to clear Sonora of dictator Victoriano Huerta’s federal army, Calles proved effective in the procurement and distribution of arms, ammunition, and clothing including large shipments from across the U.S. border. Logistics were strong points for Obregón’s right-hand man. And in November 1915, Calles commanded a force of 4000 that...