The Great World Drama: The United States and Mexican Oil during World War I

“The world needs Mexico’s petroleum for its growth and comfort,” U.S. Shipping Board Director Edward Hurly told Saturday Evening Post readers in January 1919. Invoking a moral message that connected wartime to peacetime, Hurley enumerated the benefits of “making the Mexican oil supply available to mankind.” This paper analyzes the political-economic debate over the Mexican Revolution in the United States during and after World War I, in particular the response of U.S. corporations and the U.S. State Department to Article 27 of Mexico’s Constitution of 1917. Whereas antiwar progressives argued that the U.S. government would be better off preventing U.S. President Woodrow Wilson from “giving away the government’s naval oil reserves” to Great Britain than protesting Mexico’s right to “conserve her natural resources from the oil grabbers,” U.S. industrialists and the State Department protested Mexico’s “unwise and arbitrary” decision to “confiscate foreign-owned properties.” New lobbying groups, funded jointly by oil companies, began to work closely with the Department’s Bureau of Mexican Affairs to describe the “great danger” posed to U.S. national security and the international political economy by Mexican economic sovereignty. Diplomats joined other government officials and western U.S. Senators in supporting conservative Mexican caudillos in the oil region under “the banner of law and order.” Using research from the personal papers of Secretary of State Robert Lansing and World War I “oil czar” Mark Requa, the State Department files at the National Archives, hearings held by Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the records of Association of American Petroleum Producers in Mexico, the paper focuses on how the corporate arguments about Mexican oil became official policy and supported ongoing legal arguments about the protection of private property during and after World War I. The paper concludes with a discussion of the lasting consequences of that vision.