Acknowledgements
Much of the material for this book began as my doctoral dissertation, ‘ “Slackers”: American War Resisters and Communists in Mexico, 1917–1927’, written for the History Department of the University of Cincinnati and completed in 1998 with the support of Fulbright and Taft Fellowships. Professor Ann Twinam, then one of my advisors at the University of Cincinnati and now at the University of Texas at Austin, worked to help me earn the Fulbright.
I conducted the research for the dissertation while I was associated with the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) and was assigned to work with Daniela Spenser, an authority on the history of the Communist International in Mexico and on the relations between the governments of the United States, Mexico, and the Soviet Union. Daniela and I shared documents with each other: I shared documents from US archives and she shared documents from Russian archives. We became both colleagues and friends. I owe a great debt to professors Twinam and Spenser who were both enormously helpful.
Benedikt Behrens, a historian of the University of Hamburg kindly shared with me documents from the private archive of Francisco Olivares. My thanks also to the late Ben Watanabe, a leader of the General Workers’ Union of Tokyo, Japan, for his help with Katayama’s Japanese autobiography. Two Latin Americanists, the late James D. Cockcroft, a historian, and sociologist Samuel Farber, read and commented on parts of the manuscript. Over the years, I also learned from his book as well as conversations and correspondence with Professor Barry Carr of La Trobe University.
While involved in my research in Mexico and for years afterwards, I also worked closely with Robin Alexander, the International Affairs Director then for the United Electrical Workers Union (UE), for 20 years – 1994–2014 – on the monthly newsletter, Mexican Labor News and Analysis. I have no doubt that my immersion in Mexican political and labour affairs for twenty years helped enrich my understanding of those who decades earlier had been engaged in Mexico in promoting international labour solidarity.
For 25 years after finishing the dissertation, I continued to research and write on the American left’s involvement in the Mexican Revolution. The journal Against the Current published some of my articles on this topic. My thanks to the librarians and archivists of more than a dozen institutions in Mexico and the United States who helped me find the documents I sought.
I also wish to express my gratitude to Sebastian Budgen and Danny Hayward from Historical Materialism for their support and to the anonymous reader they assigned to read my manuscript who made several useful suggestions for editing my draft.
Finally, thanks to my wife Sherry Baron, herself a model of dedication to workers and their health and safety on the job and in their communities, as well as a paragon of patience and a great companion who has supported me many times over the last 25 years and encouraged me to finish this book. Thanks for everything, Sher.