The Glowing Dream: A history of Socialist America
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The Election of 1896
San Francisco
October, 1895
“Yes, I’m goddamned sure. Quit asking. You wanna turn yellow, that’s fine with me. But I won’t.”
Jack clutched the little rifle tighter to his chest. It was an old, rusting wartime Winchester that had certainly seen better days. But it still functioned, and as far as the fired-up lad was concerned, that would be enough. Zeal would do the rest. And zeal he had in spades.
He crept up the groaning stairs, Jimmy following close behind. Jimmy Slade liked to say he didn’t exist—he’d been born in the foulest Oakland slum but there was no birth certificate to affirm that was true. This was in part why Jack had brought him along. While he didn’t say as much to his more skittish comrade, he expected their deaths as the likely outcome of this endeavor. It would be worth it, of course, but if some men had to die, who better than the man who didn’t exist and the man who didn’t much care one way or the other if he did?
They reached the third floor, with a fine view of the rolling cobblestone street below, and beyond that the sparkling bay, revealed beneath a sheet of fog curling back on the Pacific.
Jimmy drew his pistol. Perhaps it wasn’t fair that Jack got a rifle and Jimmy only a pistol, but they’d sorted that out the fairest way young men could—drawing straws. And Jack got the rifle.
“Alright, now,” Jack went on. He went over to the window. The building had been abandoned since the risings, when some dockworkers had holed up here and had it out with the federal troops for a good five hours before the boys in blue finally broke in and killed damn near everyone inside. Jack had watched it all crouched in an alley across the way. It still made the bile rise in his throat. That was part of the reason he’d picked this derelict old tenement, beside the excellent vantage point it provided.
Here the workers had drowned in their own blood, and now it was from here the workers would be avenged.
“Now,” Jack started over, realizing he’d drifted off in a reverie. “Keep watching me across the street. I’m gonna wave the rifle when I see him coming. Then you get ready. I’m gonna shoot first. You don’t need to shoot unless I don’t get him. If I don’t get him—”
“How am I gonna know if you got him?” Jimmy asked.
“Because if I get him, I’m damn sure the cab will stop.”
Jimmy licked his lips.
“Right.” His eyes darted about nervously. “Then what? Then we take off running, meet at the wharf?”
Jack was silent for a second. “Right. Yeah. Just that.” He clapped his friend on the shoulder. “Good luck.” Then he stuffed his rifle under his heavy coat and jogged back downstairs, leaving his friend at his post. He got back out onto the street and rapidly crossed it, keeping his head down, brim of his hat pulled down over his eyes.
His own post was across the road and a little further north, so that from his window he’d have a view around the corner and would be able to see their target coming before Jimmy did. This too was a building left abandoned in the wake of the risings. This one had been an old cannery and was half-burned out during the fighting.
Walking awkwardly to disguise the rifle stuffed beneath his coat, Jack hurried through the early morning crowds of rough-edged laborers on their way to work and gentlemen and ladies in their broad hats and fine dresses. The later made him want to spit. He refrained.
He got around the old cannery, slipped in through a long-ago shattered window, and ascended the stairs to the second story. From here he could see south and to the old tenement where he’d left his friend. Jack squinted and caught sight of Jimmy in the window, so far away. He waved. No response. He waved again. This time Jimmy saw and waved back. Good.
Jack checked his rifle once more. It was loaded. It was ready. Now they just had to wait.
He could hardly believe it’d been a year and a half already since the risings.
Jack had never liked bosses. Never liked fat men in pretty clothes who held more gold than most folks would ever see in their lives, without having worked for any of it. He’d never liked the forces of order, uniforms or guns. He was a street rat by nature, made his living in odd jobs and the occasional snatched coin. The world as it was didn’t agree with him, so he didn’t agree with it.
That summer of ’94 he’d just gotten back into town from a stretch on a steamer out east (or west, as it was). It was a few months after his eighteenth birthday, and he’d not had a lot to do. He’d spent some time with a girl down near the wharf and was just about parting ways with her when he picked up a discarded paper and learned about what was happening out on the Great Lakes.
All he had to know was that workingmen were on strike to know he was on their side.
But when the storm came to San Francisco—
Jack had been at the jail that night, when Sutro was shot and the soldiers fired into the crowd. He’d seen men and women, almost none armed with so much as a club or a stone, scythed down by stone-faced, bluecoated riflemen that reminded him of factory machines. That’s what he saw, wind-up clockwork soldiers slaughtering flesh and blood. He watched that blood ooze on the stones and heard lead split bone.
By the time the bleeding was done he was convinced it all had to go. The bosses, the army, the presidents, the cartels. All of it.
He was hardly the only one in the Oakland slums with similar ideas. Everyone knew someone who’d been gunned down or burned to death during the course of the risings. A German seaman taught him a lick of Marx, and Jack suddenly saw the future opened up before him. He spread the gospel far as he could, and Jimmy was one of the converts he’d made in the back alleys and wharves.
But they had to do something, and Jack had agonized for nearly over a year over what was to be done.
It was now that they’d shot Debs that he’d finally gotten the kick in the ass he needed. Debs’ death had to be repaid. The workers couldn’t take it lying down, not anymore. The bosses might think they were sitting pretty after all the blood they’d spilled in Red ’94, but they were goddamned wrong, and Jack intended to show them just that.
When Huntington made his way back to San Francisco to personally oversee the construction of some new tram line, after the old was seriously damaged in the riots, Jack knew what he must do.
Huntington was bastard of bastards. The sort of man who bought politicians and was proud to have done it. The sort of man who—knowing the wages of San Francisco's workers were dependent on the tram cars and rail lines he owned—jacked prices high as he could raise them without starving to death the very wretches whose scanty earnings he coveted. After the smashing of the risings, he’d gladly donated hundreds of thousands to the city in the interest of ‘rebuilding’—everyone knew the money went instead to the surly ‘deputies’ that now prowled San Francisco hunting for whiffs of unionization and answering vagabonds and jobless men with clubs, determined to prevent so much as the shadow of another Red Summer.
He had to die.
Jack had traced Huntington’s routes for two weeks now. He almost always took this one in the mornings, headed to the dock to oversee construction of the terminal point of the new tram line. Or where the terminal point would be, anyways.
He traveled in a personal little cab. No security, thankfully. They nearly always took this turn.
So, Jack’s plan was to fire over the head of the driver when they came into view. With luck, the man would stop. He would leap out of his seat and drop his reins. Huntington would spill out after him. Jack would draw a bead on the old man and splash his brains over the street. If he failed to stop the cab, it would come down to Jimmy.
Jack doubted his friend’s ability to kill a man from the distance they were at with a pistol. But it was only a backup plan, and God willing they would not need it.
Jack settled in against the window, rifle tight against his chest, and waited.
The crowds continued to float by below. Jack watched them with a sort of sorrow. He wished he could just wake them up. Rouse them. What could be accomplished if the masses of people only knew what kind of power was in their hands? Injustice, poverty, despotism—it could all be swept away in a fortnight if only the slumbering titan would awaken.
Well—perhaps this would serve as an alarm.
He watched intently and then—finally. Around the corner, just up the way, he saw the black cab trundling towards him, the horse pulling along steadily, hooves clicking on stone. Jack turned and frantically waved the barrel of his rifle at Jimmy across the road. Jimmy waved back, indicating he’d gotten the message.
Jack nodded and repositioned himself in the window. Aiming at an angle, not wanting to lean out over the sidewalk and get himself seen, he tried to level the Winchester’s sights with the cab. He didn’t need a direct shot.
The cab turned the corner, Jack tracking its movement all the way. He jerked the weapon up, only an inch or so it seemed above the coachman’s head.
He fired. The Winchester popped. There was a ripple in the crowd. A few people stopped and turned. Some looked in his general direction. But the old rifle was smooth enough no one yet seemed to realize what was happening. He worked the lever and fired again.
Now they knew.
The cab ground to a halt. As he’d expected, the coachman leapt down from his seat. The crowd scattered, screaming. Jack fired one more time, desperate to sow as much chaos as possible. In the welter, shooting down Huntington should not be so difficult.
The coachman leaned into the cab and spoke to the passenger. Yes. Good.
The cab door swung open. A figure wrapped in an old black suit and the tall hat of a consummate bourgeois hobbled out. Even from his vantage point, Jack could make out the man’s elderly, weakening gate. He smiled.
We’ve got you, now.
He leveled the rifle at Huntington’s back, as he moved around the side of the cab. Fired.
The shot went wide.
“Shit!” he hissed.
Huntington picked up the pace. Jack’s next shot missed, too. He saw it whiz into the flagstones on the street, produce a quick flash of sparks, and then sail off uselessly into the bright morning.
“Goddammit!”
And then Huntington had gotten around to the other side of the cab, and Jack no longer had a line of sight. He swore.
Suddenly there was another pop. He whirled around. The hiss of a pistol. Jimmy was shooting.
He wanted to roar, “not yet!” and cuff his friend, but of course could hardly do that from across the road.
Jack reloaded the rifle and sprinted back down to the street. He burst out of the abandoned cannery, scanning for the stopped cab. He found it, and pushed through the stampeding crowd, not bothering this time to conceal his weapon. No one troubled him for it. He rushed for the cab, dodging horses and men and food carts.
He reached it, triumphant, expecting to find Huntington cowering there beside his coachman, where he could be finished off with ease.
He found nothing. They’d fled.
Jack turned in a slow circle. He scanned the street. He scanned the floor-level windows of buildings. Nothing. His target was gone. He’d missed. He’d failed.
“Fuck!”
He turned to run. He ran back towards the tenements, hoping to collect Jimmy and then flee. If they could make good their escape, they might better prepare for the next time. He ran, head into the wind, along with the rest of the crowd that he’d stampeded with his own rifle shots. The firearm bobbed in his right hand, barrel down towards the ground.
Then he heard it: “hey! Hey! He’s got a gun! He’s got a—he’s the one shooting!”
“Shit!”
He picked up the pace, put more power into his legs. But it was no good. Suddenly a mob of men had formed up behind him and was chasing him. He cleared the block. Leapt from the curb. He looked up. He could see the window where he’d left Jimmy.
Then someone knocked into him. Jack went sprawling to the ground. He kicked and punched and swore. He felt the weight of another body atop him. The rifle was pried from his fingers. He twisted his head around. Someone socked him in the jaw.
“Who you tryin’ to kill, boy?” demanded one of the vigilantes who’d brought him down, a large man in a waistcoat.
“Go to hell,” he spit, over a bloodied lip.
They held him there, face to the curb, until shortly the police at last arrived on the scene to collect him. He did not resist as they crammed him into the back of a black Maria, snapped the horse’s reins, and trundled him off to jail.
After some time in his cell, Jack realized he’d heard nothing of Jimmy, and figured he’d made good his escape.
Well, good for him. Once he got out of here, Jack figured he’d find him easily enough, they’d coordinate, and the next time it would work. After all, since he hadn’t killed Huntington, they couldn’t rightly hang him for murder. He would get out; it was only a matter of some time.
But then—with the way the country was going now, maybe they would just shoot him, leave him in a ditch somewhere, all off the books. He knew it was happening, now. He’d read in the Populist papers of union men shot down in coal country and in the south.
When the police demanded his story, he gave it freely.
“I meant to kill Collis P. Huntington because he’s a greedy bastard, a capitalist dog, and an enemy of the working class of the whole country. I meant to kill him to avenge the death of Eugene Debs, who was a hero to the workers. That’s it, and I’m hardly ashamed, except that it didn’t work out.”
“You know that’s a hanging offense, son,” said one of the officers.
“I suppose it is,” Jack shrugged.
“Who helped you?”
“Just me all alone. I didn’t need help, and I didn’t want any.”
“What’s your name, boy?” they demanded next. “I know you got one.”
Well, he did. He was no Jimmy Slade; there would be a record of his birth somewhere, and he imagined the police would find it eventually if they insisted on digging enough. But there was no reason he had to make it easy on them.
So, he said: “Jack London.”
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
1896 was without a doubt the most tumultuous election year since 1860. Indeed, many a contemporary noted a number of disturbing parallels between the state of affairs, then and now.
Just like in 1860, the election of 1896 would unfold in the shadow of incredible domestic violence—Bleeding Kansas and John Brown’s raid then, Red ’94, now. Just like in 1860, the customary two candidates would give way to a confusing welter of would-be presidents.
1895 had existed as a mere coda to that horrible summer, and so too, it seemed, would 1896. The violence had died down, but not been extinguished. In the fall of '95, a bipartisan motion had passed congress outlawing the AFL as an ‘insurrectionary organization’ for its part in the violence.
The October of 1895, half a year after Debs’ execution, a ragged twenty-year-old San Franciscan named John Chaney attempted and failed to assassinate aging railroad tycoon Collis Huntington. He cited ‘the cause of the wretched poor’ and a desire to avenge Debs as motivation.
This incident did little to assuage the fears of those who saw red assassins in every shadow and were convinced ’94 was merely the prelude to some future revolutionary convulsion that would engulf the nation entire. The New York Journal worried that, ‘the embers of rebellion are still smoking’, and its editors were far from alone in that fear.
The Republicans nominated dark-horse candidate William McKinley, the well-liked governor of Ohio, against the wishes of the party elite. He would campaign on ‘sound money’ and tariffs for the protection of industry and labor, with the assurance that the Democratic Party’s pitiful and ever-declining state all but secured him the presidency.
The Democratic Party of President Cleveland, for its part, was thoroughly upset in the aftermath of the risings and the disastrous elections the following fall. The confidence of the party bosses was deeply shaken. Cleveland was uninspiring, dithering, and now, after Red ’94, considered an execrable murderer by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Americans. Not a Democrat seemed to believe he would win reelection. It was always rare, through the whole history of the American republic, that the party of a sitting president repudiated him. But the Democratic Party found itself in a uniquely miserable state that year.
Some in the party pinned their hopes on William Jennings Bryan. ‘The Boy Orator of Platte’ was, like Lincoln, a young, vigorous Illinois lawyer with an electrifying effect upon crowds and a staunch attachment to free silver and the common son of toil. He maintained many friends in the ranks of the Populists, and it was hoped that if he was nominated, the Democrats might manage to claw back at least a few of the voters they’d lost in ’94.
Indeed, to many he seemed the Party’s only hope.
But Bryan would have no more to do with the Democrats. Besides fearing for his own political future should he hitch his star to the decaying corpse of Cleveland’s party, he was personally disgusted by the slaughter of the Red Summer.
Bryan resigned his membership in the Democratic Party, and, uncontested, easily took the Populist nomination, with the dynamic Georgian senator Thomas Watson as his running mate.
He was not the only one. Many free silver Democrats were friendly to the Populists, whose supporters were desperately needed if the party was to play to the increasingly anti-gold sentiments of much of its base, either left the party in the wake of the risings or at least refused to be considered as a presidential candidate, including the favored Richard P. Bland.
The nomination had become a poisoned chalice.
Despondent, the Democrats held their noses and re-nominated Cleveland, who seemed little more enthused than anyone else, and just as listlessly drew John G. Carlisle into his doomed campaign as vice president hopeful.
Persistent legend has it that Cleveland’s secretary acerbically relayed the news to him; “Mr. President, I regret to inform you that you have won the Democratic nomination.”
Perhaps the most enthusiastic party going into the elections was the Socialist Labor Party. They maintained no hope of victory, of course, but the ’94 midterms had so boosted them in the public eye, even the prospect of nominating a presidential candidate as any more than a token gesture was stirring.
The candidate ultimately lighted upon was Charles H. Matchett, with Emil Seidel, a little known German-American socialist from Pennsylvania as his vice presidential pick. Others were considered, such as Clarence Darrow, the man who’d unsuccessfully defended the life of Eugene Debs in federal court and become something of a hero himself for it in left-wing circles, and Edward Bellamy, who had some years before written a wildly popular book imagining a future America organized along utopian socialist lines. Daniel DeLeon, the party’s irascible grand old man, would surely have run himself except that he was not American born. Darrow declined and Bellamy was ultimately found wanting. So, Matchett it was.
The campaign was a tumultuous one.
McKinley focused his campaigning on ‘sound money’, firing constant broadsides at Bryan’s championship of silver and denunciations of eastern financiers. The Populist platform was a ‘recipe for economic ruin’ as the Republicans put it. Bryan was tarred as a dangerous radical, the speeches he’d made expressing sympathy for the rebel workers of ’94 were ceaselessly hauled out, chopped apart, and sifted through for suitably out of context quotes that might paint him as some bomb-hurling anarchist.
Bryan banged on his populist drum, railing against the ‘dictatorship of capital’ that McKinley represented. Though he could not lay the blame directly at the feet of his opponent for the carnage of two years before, since after all, that was the burden of Cleveland and the Democrats, he did his best to obliquely suggest a relationship, mentioning often ‘the ruins of Chicago’ or ‘the bloodshed in New Orleans’. Campaigning in his strongholds of the west and Midwest, he asked poor farmers and urban laborers if they would like to ‘face down the bayonets of the soldiers your own taxes have armed’, as did ‘the men of Chicago’.
Everyone seemed to have forgotten that the Democratic Party, and Grover Cleveland, still existed.
It was quite an ignominious tumble; some Democrats openly wished for more excoriating attacks from McKinley and his partisans, just to feel they were worth the consideration.
Cleveland hardly campaigned at all, occasionally huffing from crowd to crowd in the Midwest or the south, delivering a rambling speech in which he neither promised nor denied much of anything, and then disappearing again to scattered applause.
One Democrat that heard him speak in Charleston lamented that he’d heard ‘a fitting eulogy for our party’.
It was not quite clear what Cleveland’s platform was, or if he even really had one to speak of. The platform drafted upon his nomination stood by ‘sound money’, just as did McKinley’s, though there were also some vague, noncommittal concessions to ‘other, legitimate interests’. It pointedly ignored what was on everyone’s mind: the risings of ’94 and their handling.
The Socialist Labor Party chugged along in fourth place, issuing blistering attacks on all sides (save on Bryan, who endured criticism from his left, but generally mild criticism). And it was the campaign of the socialists that resulted in the most excitement.
As a sort of stunt, Matchett led a procession to lay wreaths at Haymarket Square, now the twice connected with labor martyrs. As expected, the crowd was brusquely dispersed by the Chicago police. Later, at a Union hall elsewhere in the city, Emil Seidel blasted their treatment, reminding his audience that unless they remained vigilant, ‘we shall see another‘94’. And yet, some noted, that proclamation occasionally sounded less like a warning than a triumphant promise.
“’We shall see another ’94,’ thunders the wild Dutchman to his assembly of bobbing heads and red flags,” grumbled the Chicago Tribune. “And wordlessly appended to that promise is another; ‘and this time we shall win!’”
After a fiery speech by renowned economist Henry George (who was not quite a socialist, but was sympathetic, and supporting the party in the coming election), in St. Louis, with its large, often radical immigrant communities, two Hungarian workmen murdered a third man, who they recalled as a ‘scab’ in ’94. George was summarily ‘escorted’ out of St. Louis by police, and further mass gatherings of socialists proscribed.
The Republicans, though primarily focused on the insurgent threat of Bryan, occasionally saved a wary look over their shoulders for the Socialists. “Creeping anarchy,” McKinley warned in one address to a packed New York music hall.
The nation finally went to the polls in November. As almost all had expected, McKinley scored a handy victory.
He scooped up 45.2% of the popular vote, though he received an overwhelming majority of 273 electoral votes.
Bryan came in second place, with 27% of the popular vote, and 98 electoral votes.
Cleveland crashed to a pitiful 16.7%, and took 76 electoral votes, by managing to just barely hold together most of the old south under the Democrats, with the notable exception of Georgia, which gave its 13 electoral votes to Bryan.
The socialists managed to net an impressive (and to many, frightening) 7.3% of the popular vote, primarily concentrated in the northern industrial belt, certain western mining areas, and a few southern cities.
McKinley ascended to the presidency, the Democrats retreated to mourn their collapse, while the socialists and populists rubbed their hands and anticipated the next four years—failing to reach the presidency hardly felt like a defeat for such spectacular up and comers.
In his inaugural address, McKinley promised peace both abroad and at home.
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You're welcome. Thanks again for writing this! I am finding it interesting so far.
fasquardon
And likely get neither. Wonder if there'll be a Spanish-American war, and if it'll be bloodier. Perhaps a worse Philippine-American war.
I wonder how Teddy is doing I could see him joining the populists and will he be a rough ridding?
How does everyone stand on race issues at this point? Since unions are getting banned right and left, there's no real point in them selling out and self segregating in exchange for recognition, so the labour movement could easily be more radical on the question.
That would be another way to boost the socialists, who tended to have an uncompromising anti war stance.
That would be another way to boost the socialists, who tended to have an uncompromising anti war stance.
Teddy will indeed put in an appearance, and have a rather important role a little ways down the line, though it'll be a rather different role from the one he often takes on in ATLs.
I certainly mean to explore the race question soon enough. Basically though, as you say, unions are definitely going to be more radical than IOTL, since they're quickly being pushed towards being all but criminal organizations. The conservative wing of the labor movement (still led by Gompers), persists, but they're kind of viewed as traitors or at least sell-outs, and are rapidly fading into irrelevance.
Naturally, the SLP and labor as a whole will be far more radical on the race issue in the north. Since immigrant workers were IOTL and ITTL an important socialist constituency, they'll of course be motivated to speak out loudly and often against ethnic/racial bigotry (not that immigrants and black Americans always got on swimmingly, of course) . In the south, they'll be trying to eat into some old strongholds of Populist support, and so racial egalitarian rhetoric will definitely be downplayed so as to not scare off white workers and farmers. But they'll still be leagues ahead of everyone else in the south just by virtue of not being explicitly in favor of white supremacy, so they won't have too much trouble picking up substantial black support. And since the total disenfranchisement of southern blacks hasn't been completed yet, the black vote will still count for something at this point.
Next chapter will probably be a look at some European reactions to the American troubles
I wonder if the Russian Revolution will still happen ITTL. It might be interesting/ironic if Russia stayed a monarchy, republic, or went fascist!
They could easily end up involved in fighting black disenfranchisement, too, which would net them reliable vote from them.
Frankly being forced to radicalize is the best thing that could happen to the AFL. Attempt at complying with the various waves of anti radical legislations left it mostly neutered OTL.
On the other hand, with the Populists making inroads into the South they might end up moderating their positions to broaden their base of support opening up space for the SLP to carve out a niche among southern radicals and African-Americans. If they start making big enough inroads they might be able to absorb what remains of the Republican base, particularly in the Upper South. Though at the same time you also have De Leon's colourblind class reductionism which could be a problem. Though a more radical Trade Union movement that picks up more black support will help to counteract that, along with the legacy of black workers in the New Orleans uprising.
Eh class reductionism is still going to be pitted against explicit segregation and the like, since any attempt at dividing the working class using race is still harmful to its intent, so it'll probably twist itself into supporting the other radicals.
What I'd expect is that the Populists would be the ones who do the most pandering for the southern vote, as they try to appeal to the poorer democrats left without a functional party, while the republicans appeal to the richer ones. And the SLP would be left with radicals of all stripes, including trying to organize black people to defend their ballot access.
The first idea that popped into my head about Teddy is that he joins the Populists but his imperialist foreign policy (assuming he becomes president) pushes the party's more radical voters toward the SLP.
I actually think that Teddy will end up being the face of the Conservative bulwark against Socialism and Populism. With more radicals being drawn into the Populists and Socialists the Republicans would probably shift right to fill the void and appeal to conservative Democrats, hastening their demise. IOTL he ran against Henry George in New York and saw Bryan and his supporters as dangerous fanatics. ITTL I could see him building a persona as a sensible liberal-conservative reformer who can protect the nation from both the dangerous revolutionists and the corrupt old guard that allowed things to get this bad in the first place.
You know, Teddy was pretty gung ho about getting into WWI. Perhaps he's president when a version of it kicks off and drags the US into it ultimately causing a successful revolution.
That's pretty much how Reds! proceeded; the US gets involved in the war almost immediately leading to a huge number of American soldiers dying and the rest being "radicalised".
the battlefields of WW 1 are a great place to be radicalized.
Taimur500
Banned
the people is still landless and hungry.
and a good part of it live their lives as if the USA doesnt exist.
Could the Spanish-American War become bloody enough to radicalize American troops? I can think of a few ways:
1. Spain gets enough troops to the Philippines to turn it into a meat grinder.
2. The Filipino resistance to the US is strong enough to turn it into a Vietnam situation.
3. Spain refuses to negotiate, so an imperialist US launches an invasion of Spain itself.
1. Spain gets enough troops to the Philippines to turn it into a meat grinder.
2. The Filipino resistance to the US is strong enough to turn it into a Vietnam situation.
3. Spain refuses to negotiate, so an imperialist US launches an invasion of Spain itself.
I think you ignore in mexico is illegal to flow an USA flag outside embassy, a lot of frontier mexica have little love of some people go 'south' their border, that is something always existed and have a voice in the DF, if anything mexico would never be nothing a neighboor to USA anyway