Porfirio Díaz assumed the office of President of Mexico, on November 28, 1876, and for the next thirty-four years, he acted as the nation’s Strong Man, a tyrant, a despot, an autocrat. He won elections in 1877, 1884, 1888, 1892, 1896, 1900, 1904, and 1910. 

     Díaz’s rule was by force. His slogan was “Pan o palo,” meaning “Bread or Bludgeon.”

     The Latin-American historian from California, Lesley Bird Simpson, wrote this about Porfirio Díaz, in his book Many Mexicos, “The benefactors of Díaz’s tyranny and strong-armed rule were to enjoy the most efficient despotism ever seen in the western world.” How did he do that? 

     Simpson says, “He gave his generals little jobs and restored them to their rightful place at the public trough; he kept them apart and played them off against each other.”

     Díaz set up the Rurales, a national police force composed of gunmen from the cities and towns loyal to him only. “They were given showy uniforms, good salaries, and the power to shoot on sight, and no questions asked.” 

     By them, he eradicated the bandits. “Mexico was now the best policed country in the world.”

     Díaz next encouraged foreigners from the United States, England, and France to bring money to Mexico, to build railroads, mines, smelters, and to set up massive plantations where the well-healed hacendados grew coffee, sugar, and bananas. “The foreigner was king.”

     Soon, “There was no law but the will of Porfirio Díaz. Elections were such a farce that hardly anyone took the trouble to vote.”

     Then, “Between 1883 and 1884, Díaz gave away to foreigners and friends 134,500,000 acres of the public domain, about one-fifth of the entire area of the Republic. Only a smattering of the Indian communities had any land whatsoever.” Foreigners clamored to grab even that land.

     This was a massive plunder, “a denial of elementary justice to a large part of the population.”

     In essence, Porfirio Díaz was skillful at political manipulation. He kept the church under his control. He pampered foreign investors. He crushed and silenced all opposition. He controlled the generals. He protected the wealthy, the families that owned the huge haciendas.

     Simpson writes, “As the years rolled by, Mexico lay quiet in her straight jacket.”

     In 1908, a young businessman from a wealthy family in Coahuila, just south of Texas, named Francisco Madero, wrote a book, The Presidential Succession in 1910. In it, he asked an innocent question, “who would succeed Díaz?” What? Will Díaz not live forever?

     Although Madero stood only five feet, two inches tall, spoke in a squeaky voice, and lacked biceps, he dared to mobilize a political campaign for himself as Mexico’s next President. His slogan, Effective suffrage, No re-election! Enthusiastic crowds followed him across Mexico.

     On September 30, 1910, Porfirio Díaz won the election. His Rurales jailed Madero for four months, but while incarcerated the young man wrote his “Plan of San Luis Potosi,” calling for a revolt against Díaz. Madero escaped prison on October 6, 1910, and fled to San Antonio, Texas. 

     There, he learned that others—in pockets around Mexico—also wanted a revolution: two men from the state of Chihuahua, in northern Mexico, Pascual Orozco and a vicious bandit nick-named Pancho Villa; and also Emiliano Zapata, from the state of Morelos, south of Mexico City.

     Zapata urged the Indians to take back their land. His motto: Land and Liberty, and Death to the Hacendados! He wore a leather belt, slung over a shoulder, lined with bullet cartridges.

     Madero urged the armies to revolt against Díaz’s regime on November 20, 1910.

     Orozco and Villa’s armies pushed aside Díaz’s army at Ciudad Juarez, south of El Paso, and marched to Mexico City. Porfirio dated his resignation letter May 23, 2011, and fled to Paris.

     Mexico’s citizens celebrate November 20, the anniversary of when Mexico’s Revolution began. Next time, I will look at how Mexico’s Revolution progressed over the following decade.

Ulysses S. Grant was first elected President in 1868, as a Republican, from the state of Illinois. According to an old college history textbook, “Grant’s military triumphs during the Civil War did nothing to prepare him for the Presidency. 

     “He was probably the least experienced and most naive citizen ever to hold that position. He chose his advisers based upon their loyalty to him, rather than for their administrative ability. His choices for his Cabinet officers were disastrous.

     “His White House staff was dominated by old army friends who had no political experience.”

     In addition, Grant “did not grasp the the potential of the great office which the voters had bestowed upon him.” Instead, “he believed that Congress should make all the decisions, because they represented the people’s will. A president should only execute the will of Congress.”

     Right away, those close to Grant understood that he would look the other way when well-healed businessmen came calling to bribe politicians throughout his Federal Government, heaping bags of money and favors upon them. 

     “By Grant’s negligence in office, he allowed a general moral laxity to flourish.”

     As Grant’s first term drew to a close, a group of Republicans, who were disappointed with the corruption that swirled around this President, formed a new political party, calling themselves the Liberal Republicans. They only agreed on one issue, their disgust for Ulysses S. Grant. 

     The Liberal Republicans chose for their Presidential candidate Horace Greeley, a long-time New York City newspaper editor, but an eccentric who applauded any and all types of reform.

      “He committed himself, all at once, to utopian and artisan socialism, to land and dietary reform, and to anti-slavery.” Of Greeley, Grant said, “He is a genius without common sense.”

     The Democrats decided to join the Liberal Republicans and endorse Greeley as their candidate also, even though he was a Republican, because they were most anxious to see Grant unseated and driven out of the White House.

     Despite the corruption inside his administration, Grant remained popular among voters.

     Then, tragedy struck the Horace Greeley family. His wife Mary returned from Europe in late June of 1872, feeling poorly. Greeley gave up speaking and appealing to voters, to instead care for Mary, but then she passed away on October 30, five days before the election. 

     Greeley’s campaign for President for a new political party sputtered to a stop.

     On November 5, 1872, Grant won the popular vote, 3,595,235 to Greeley’s 2,834,761, which meant that Grant would receive 286 electoral votes to Greeley’s 66.

     However, before the Electoral College could meet and count those ballots, Horace Greeley also passed away, on November 29. 

     Forty-two of his 66 electoral votes went to Thomas Hendricks, a Democrat from Indiana, 18 went to Benjamin Brown, and Horace Greeley retained 3, although he was deceased. The Liberal Republican Party succumbed to defeat and ceased to exist. 

     Grant served another four years as President, but instances of corruption continued. 

     The worst was the Credit Mobilier scandal. It was a construction company that assisted in building the transcontinental railroad. Company officials gave away its stock to Congressmen and officials as a bribe to stop them from investigating their company’s business transactions.

     A footnote to this history. On November 5, 1872, a women’s rights advocate named Susan B. Anthony walked into a voting precinct and cast her vote for Ulysses S. Grant. Two weeks later, officials arrested Anthony, and fined her $100 for voting illegally, because of her gender. 

     She explained her position, “I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty.” She never did. By the 19th Amendment, adopted in 1920, women received the right to vote, and more than 8 million women voted in the 1920 election, 48 years after Susan B. Anthony voted for Greeley.  

John D. Ratcliff was one of the most prolific magazine writers in the United States throughout the twentieth-century. He contributed more than 200 articles just to Reader’s Digest. Of those, his best known was a set of 33 articles that he entitled, “I Am Joe’s Body.”

     Each article was written from a first person viewpoint of an organ that explains its duty inside Joe’s body: “I Am Joe’s Liver,” “I Am Joe’s Heart,” “I Am Joe’s Lung,” “I Am Joe’s Pancreas.”

     Joe’s heart says, “I’m certainly no beauty. I weigh 12 ounces, I am red-brown in color, and I have an unimpressive shape. I am the dedicated slave of Joe.” 

     Someone reported that this was “the most successful series ever printed in the history of Reader’s Digest. Over seven million reprints of these articles were sold.”

     When a child in the early to mid-1960’s, I read several of those articles at my grandparent’s house. I found each interesting, but none convinced me to attempt medical school later.

     In recent days, I came across a most unusual book, first published in 1967, and entitled, “You Are Extraordinary,” by Roger J. Williams, professor of biochemistry at the University of Texas from 1940 to 1963. In it, Williams describes the variety of internal organs within a human body.

     Williams starts with a stomach. On page 24, he displays a sketch of a textbook stomach, but then offers a dozen more sketches of stomachs with differing sizes and shapes. He says, “The valve-like inlets and outlets to the stomach vary greatly in size, shape, and placement.

     “They also vary in their operation: some stomachs empty rapidly into the intestine, some slowly. Some people vomit readily when their stomachs are upset; others almost never do. 

     “A Mayo Foundation study of the gastric juices of about five thousand people who had no known stomach ailment showed that the juices varied at least a thousandfold in their pepsin content, the medium that holds a concentration of hydrochloric acid.

     “A percentage of normal people have no acid at all in their gastric juice,” an astonishing fact.

     Then, the stomach’s position varies. Williams identified nine positions, from high up in the chest to far down in the abdomen.

     Williams then turns to the tube that connects mouth to stomach. He says, “People eat with varying speeds due to the size of the esophagus through which food must pass.”

     As for the heart, “it is found that the hearts of some healthy young men pump only three quarts of blood a minute, while others can pump four times this much. Then, a heart’s inner construction does not always follow a single pattern.”

     Williams writes, “I had assumed that the piping system for carrying blood to all parts of the body was about the same in everyone. This is clearly untrue.” 

     For example, the branches that extend from the aorta and deliver blood to the neck and brain vary in number. “Some 65 percent of people have three branches, some 27 percent have two branches, and the remaining people have one, four, five or six branches.”

     On page 36, Williams displays a chart showing twelve normal livers, but in the caption, he writes, “the total weight of these livers varies about fourfold.” Some are huge. Some are small.

     Williams writes, “The endocrine glands—the thyroids, parathyroids, adrenals, pituitaries, and the pancreas—differ widely in normal individuals. For example, thyroid tissue varies in weight in ‘normal’ people from 8 to 50 grams.”

     Each human being is a singular entity, an individual, “distinctive in our makeup.” 

     Williams addresses the reader in his book’s Preface, “You are not precisely like anyone else; you are not approximately like anyone else. You are a remarkable and extraordinary person.”

     Whereas John D. Ratcliff described an internal organ in a general way, Roger J. Williams pointed out an organ’s widespread variations in structure.

 Christopher Columbus’s three ships—the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria—first landed on a beach of a small island within the Bahama Islands, in the Caribbean Sea, on October 12, 1492. The natives called their tiny island, Guanahani, but Columbus re-christened it San Salvador.

     The ninety men aboard the three ships had sailed from Palos, Spain on August 3, 1492. Thus, Columbus had guided the men west across the Atlantic for 71 days, in mainly calm weather. 

     Columbus wanted to believe that he had stumbled upon the east Indies, perhaps Malaysia or Indonesia, so anxious was he to find a shorter trade route that linked India and China to Europe.

     Hence, Columbus called the natives “Indians,” a name that stuck most unfairly, because India lay thousands of miles west of the Bahamas. Although Columbus did not know it, he had bumped into two continents, North and South America, unknown then in Europe.

      What was the native population in 1492, of North America, including central America, Mexico, the United States, and Canada? The numbers are difficult to determine, because the natives kept no records, no books, no statistics.

     One historian named Alan Taylor explained in his 2001 book, “American Colonies: The Settling of North America,” that in early 20th century, certain “low counters” pegged the number at 10 million people in both North and South America. 

     By the late 20th century, the “high counters” doubled that number to 20 million. Some daring “high counters” insisted upon a number as high as 100 million.

     Most scholars today settle for a number near 50 million, which is half the number that the bold “high counters” had insisted upon, but five times the number that the former “low counters” had settled for. 

     As for the numbers north of the Rio Grande, in the future U.S. and Canada, researches argue that there were at least two million Native Americans, but perhaps as many as ten million.

     What happened during the 20th century that prodded scholars to revise their numbers higher?

     First, scholars pointed to evidence for a dramatic depopulation of the Native Americans that occurred throughout the 16th and into the 17th centuries, a cruel result of Columbus’s arrival..

     Second, they found evidence that proved that much of North America was more densely populated than was first believed.

     In 1890, the United States census recorded a total Native American population of 237,196, a number that stuns. It fell from between two and ten million down to a quarter of a million. 

     One environmental historian of the twentieth century, Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., said in his 1972 book, “The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492,” that this population collapse was “surely the greatest tragedy in the history of the human species.”

     What caused the collapse? Alan Taylor explains, “The breath, blood, sweat, and lice of the colonizers, and of their livestock and rats conveyed deadly pathogens that consumed Indians who lacked the immunological resistance of past experience. 

     “The greatest killers were eruptive fevers, smallpox, measles, and typhus, but Indians also suffered from respiratory infections, including whooping cough and pneumonia. Chickenpox killed Indians of all ages. One disease might weaken a victim, but another disease would kill.”

     Alfred W. Crosby labeled these Columbian exchanges of diseases, “virgin soil epidemics, those in which the populations at risk have had no previous contact with the diseases that strike them and are therefore almost defenseless.” A fact, these exchanges were one-sided.

     Native Americans suffered and died in far greater numbers than did the Europeans.   

     On Monday, October 13, the nation celebrates Columbus Day. Four states, including Nebraska, co-celebrate Columbus Day and Indigenous People’s Day, a day to reflect upon what happened 533 years ago. 

Years ago, in these pages, I confessed that I have read Daniel Defoe’s 1719 fictional tale, “The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,” multiple times, as well as listened to the audio version.

     Crusoe’s ability to build a life alone on a deserted island in the Caribbean that lasted for over two decades I find fascinating. Scholars label the book “the father of the English novel.” 

     With a little digging and research, I learned that Daniel Defoe’s own life was as fascinating. 

     The man was in and out of legal trouble, often for writing libelous political comments about others. He was in and out of financial trouble, for insuring ships that failed to return to England with the goods, or for running a business into the ground, out of cash, out of profits.  

     Bankruptcy courts, arrest warrants, harsh judges, the pillory, and time spent in a debtors’ prison was part of Daniel Defoe’s resume. Misfortune hounded him. Of himself, he wrote, “No man has tasted differing fortunes more, and thirteen times I have been rich and poor.”

     He may have died when hiding out of sight from his creditors. 

     His marriage to Mary Tuffley though was stable, eight children and 47 years together.

     In 1692, at the age of 32, Defoe declared himself bankrupt because of a debt of 17,000 English pounds. For ten years he struggled to pull himself out of this predicament.

     Yet, Defoe was a prolific writer, 545 titles across a multitude of subjects over different genre: politics, religion, drama, pamphlets, tracts, travel, history, advice, satire, poetry, domesticity, science, technology, propaganda, war, and a host of others.

     Indeed, “The Oxford Handbook on Daniel DeFoe” lists 36 chapters, each written by a different modern scholar on some aspect of Defoe’s works. The first is entitled, “Defoe’s Life and Times,” and the last is “Defoe on Screen.”

     From 1704 until 1713, Defoe wrote and published a periodical, “A Review of the Affairs of France,” three times a week, reporting upon events during the War of the Spanish Succession. That meant he faced a deadline every couple of days, an unimaginable amount of stress.

     In 1702, Defoe published a 29-page pamphlet, “The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters; or Proposals for the Establishment of the Church” and fell into deep trouble.

     In it, Defoe argued that the English monarch and Anglican church officials must exterminate the Dissenters, those Protestants who refused to conform to the Church of England.

     He wrote, “If ever you will establish the best Christian Church in the world. If ever you will suppress the spirit of enthusiasm. If ever you will free the nation from this viperous brood. If you will leave your posterity free from faction and rebellion, this is the time.

     “This is the time to pull up this heretical weed of sedition, that has so long disturbed the peace of our church, and poisoned the good corn.”

     People read his words and felt outraged. Although no author’s name appeared in its pages, his enemies quickly identified Defoe and pressed charges against him for seditious libel. 

     He was arrested in May of 1703, and a judge found him guilty. Defoe was ordered to pay a stiff fine, to stand in the pillory three times, and to serve a lengthy jail sentence.

     Most literary scholars are convinced that Defoe wrote this pamphlet as tongue-in-cheek, not to be taken literally, but as a hoax to show how absurd political and religious leaders can act and think. However, “the irony blew up in Defoe’s face.”

     According to Daniel Defoe, September 30 was the day that Robinson Crusoe swam to shore from a sinking ship, once it stuck fast to a sand bar. The other ten men drowned. Each year on September 30, on a post, Robinson notched another mark, and thus kept a tentative calendar.

     For me, the final days of September marks another birthday, another anniversary. I married for the first and only time two days after my birthday, a convenient way to remind me.