Mad cowmen, foreign investors and the Mexican Revolution

Abstract

‘Today in Merrie England,’ reported the Mexican Herald on 7 October 1909, gracing ‘the ends of traditional English boards is roasted beef from the plains of Mexico’. The man who sent that first steamship of Mexican meat to England, John Wesley de Kay, president of the Mexican National Packing Company, hoped that his refrigerated beef exports would soon rival those of Argentina and the United States.1 Washington National Record Center (hereafter WNRC), U.S/Mexican Claims Commission, RG 76, entry 125, agency 4850, John W. de Kay Memorial, 3 June 1927, see especially pp. 13-25. This document must be read with caution. Having introduced to Mexico the modern meat packing methods pioneered in Chicago, he exemplified the progress and profits that seemed possible through foreign investment during the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz (1876–1911). But de Kay's dream of becoming the next Gustavus Swift or Philip Armour perished with the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when mad cowmen—both disgruntled livestock merchants and militant packing plant workers—toppled his nascent meat trust. By 1914, he found himself in England, acting as an agent of the Mexican government, in a desperate attempt to salvage the virtually bankrupt company. The rise and fall of de Kay's meat packing empire offers both an intriguing case study in the history of Mexican industrial development and valuable lessons for modern investors seeking to profit from the North American Free Trade Agreement.2 On Porfirian industrialisation, see Stephen H. Haber, Industry and Underdevelopment: The Industrialization of Mexico, 1890-1940, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1989. For the magnitude of United States investment, see John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987. The Porfirian culture of progress is described by William H. Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club and Other Essays on Porfirian Mexico, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1987, and Tony Morgan, ‘Proletarians, Politicos, and Patriarchs: The Use and Abuse of Cultural Customs in the Early Industrialization of Mexico City, 1880-1910’, in William H. Beezley, Cheryl English Martin, and William E. French (eds), Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico, Wilmington, SR Books, 1994, pp. 151-71.