I'm really enjoying these, excellent work Craigo!
Thanks. And thanks to everyone who's commenting with suggestions and quibbles, too.
Arango, Doroteo 1878-1950
Born in Chihuahua to Mexican immigrants who had fled the fighting following the French Army's withdrawal in 1871, Arango, by his own account, had a very rough childhood, and in 1894 had to flee the estate on which his family worked after fighting and badly injuring the son of the patron. He moved to Austin, Texas, and was surprised by the relatively egalitarian atmosphere compared to the quasi-aristocracy of the former Mexican states. Contrasting the two experiences, Arango resolved himself to become and enemy of entrenched privilege everywhere.
He returned to Chihuahua in 1900, and despite threats from the landowners who remembered him as a "bandit," he became an organizer for the Radical Liberal party, and pushed for policies breaking the power of the big estates and protecting small farmers and merchants. He was elected to Congress in 1901, and when he returned in 1903 to campaign for re-election, he survived an assassination attempt in Paso del Norte, killing his attackers in the process. He was catapulted to fame throughout the Confederacy, and after serving a term as Governor of Chihuahua he was returned to Congress, becoming the unofficial leader of the Radical Liberals in that body.
Deeply patriotic, Arango heartily supported the war effort, and in 1915 was nominated to run for the Gray House against Vice-President Gabriel Semmes. Along with the usual Rad Lib egalitarian platform, he attacked the "aristocrats" of the Confederacy (Semmes was the son of a famous navy captain and Alabama Senator) and vowed to prosecute the war more vigoruously. He even suggested that the CSA draft blacks in order to serve as soldiers. However, the black rebellion which broke out in October 1915 sealed his fate. Confederate voters turned violently against the Negro conscription proposal, and Arango lost the election by 20%, taking only the usual Rad Lib strongholds of Sonora, Chihuahua, and Cuba. (He could take some solace in the fact that Semmes had turned to Negro conscription after less than a year in office.)
Arango returned to Chihuahua, and after the war he hoped to make the Radical Liberals the new majority party, displacing the discredited Whigs. The rise of the Freedom Party disrupted his plans, even though it wasn't especially popular among Hispanics in the early 1920s. Arango declined a second run for the Gray House in 1921, and to his dismay, the nomination was won by the Harvard-educated Virginia congressman Ainsworth Layne. A milquetoast, Layne failed to capitalize on the situation and placed third, after Wade Hampton V and Jake Featherston.
Deeply disappointed, Arango, left the Confederate States to volunteer in the Mexican Civil War. He was joined by thousands of other Southerners, but unlike the vast majority he fought for the rebels, rising to the rank of General. Despite his best efforts, Emperor Maximilian III enjoyed the illicit support of the CSA, while the USA gave the rebels only token help. The Republican cause went down to defeat in 1925, and Arango drifted back to the CSA as a pariah.
When the Freedom Party began organizing in Hispanic states in the early 1930s, Arango was initially supportive of their efforts to break the power of the landowners. But he was steadily disillusioned by their methods and views, and by being ostracized for his support of the Mexican Republicans. Arango campaigned for Radical Liberal Cordell Hull in 1933, but to his shock and dismay the ticket was defeated everywhere but in running mate Hury Long's Louisiana. Even Sonora and Chihuahua gave Featherston a plurality.
Arango retired to his ranch, which was attacked twice throughout the 1930s by Freedom-supporting bandits. Arango and his hands repulsed both, though he took a bullet in the arm in the first fight. With the population reduction beginning in the late 1930s, Freedom Party attention moved elsewhere.
In 1943, sensing Freedom Party weakness, he traveled incognito through Mexico to Veracruz and then to Cuba, joining the anti-Freedom rebellion there and rising, as he did in Mexico, to general. By the time of the Confederate collapse in mid-1944, this US-supported, multiracial uprising had liberated Habana and all but taken over the state, as the Confederate government had retreated to Guanatanamo Bay on the island's eastern tip.
Under President Dewey's "Integration" policies, Cuba became the first occupied territory to join the United States on July 4, 1946. Arango was appointed to the United States Senate by Governor Carlos Prio, and took his seat in the legislature of a country he had once vowed to crush. During his three years in office Arango did not join either of the country's three major parties. He died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1949, and was buried near his birthplace in Chihuahua.