Pancho Villa: Mexican Robin Hood?

It is the birthday of Mexican hero Pancho Villa (1878), who led revolutionaries in northern Mexico for a decade beginning in 1910. The result of the conflict was the Mexican Constitution of 1917, which established social rights for the country’s citizens. Villa, whose real name was José Doroto Arango Arámbula, robbed trains and raided haciendas to support the cause. He virtually ran the state of Chihuahua, which provided him with resources to conduct his war.

When he crossed the border and raided Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916, that got the attention of the United States government. General John J. Pershing chased him for nine months but never captured him. Then the United States got into World War I and Gen. Pershing was needed elsewhere. Villa retired in 1920 and received a large estate, which he set up as a colony for his former soldiers. Three years later, Villa got involved with politics again and was assassinated.

Here is a fascinating program, The Hunt for Pancho Villa, from The American Experience with vintage film footage. Pancho Villa is depicted is either a Mexican Robin Hood or a common criminal.

Halliday created Michael Shayne series

It is the birthday of mystery writer Brett Halliday (1904), who is best remembered for his Michael Shayne detective series. Halliday was the pseudonym of Davis Dresser, a prolific Chicago-born, West Texas-raised lad who lost an eye in an accident with barbed wire, at 14 rode with American troops in pursuit of Pancho Villa, worked in the oil fields of Texas and on board an oil tanker, and finally started writing fiction in 1927. Brett Halliday was his most used pen name but he also wrote under the names Asa Baker, Matthew Blood, Kathryn Culver, Don Davis, Hal Debrett, Peter Field, Anthony Scott, and Anderson Wayne. Michael Shayne was a tall red-headed Irishman based in Miami. He usually named the killer when he gathered all the suspects together at the end. The first Michael Shayne novel was Dividend on Death (1939). The franchise continued with radio, television and the movies on into the 1960s.

Happy birthday, Ambrose Bierce

It is the birthday of writer Ambrose Bierce (1842), who is best remembered for his short story, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1891), a riveting tale about a Southern planter who is executed for conspiring to destroy a railroad bridge during the Civil War. The story's structure is unusual because a long period of time from the protagonist's point of view passes in an instant. It has been adapted numerous times for radio, television, and the movies. Bierce was a columnist for Hearst's San Francisco Examiner and is credited with foiling an attempt by the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads to get a bill through Congress excusing their $130 million loan from the federal government to build the First Transcontinental Railroad. Bierce is said to have mysteriously disappeared while he was with Pancho Villa's army during the Mexican Revolution.

Hervey Allen wrote Anthony Adverse

Hervey Allen

It is the birthday of writer Hervey Allen (1889), who wrote the sweeping Napoleonic-era novel Anthony Adverse (1933), a bestseller in its time and the basis of a blockbuster movie of the same name (1936). Allen also encouraged Marjory Stoneman Douglas to write The Everglades: River of Grass (1947).

Allen, who grew up in Pittsburgh, entered the Naval Academy but was injured and returned home. He finished his education at the University of Pennsylvania, and later joined the Pennsylvania National Guard in the signal corps. His unit saw duty near El Paso, Texas, where Mexican bandit Pancho Villa was raiding American settlements. Finally his unit was sent to France during World War I.

During his time in the military, Allen wrote poetry, at first creating verse inspired by Rudyard Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads. When he returned from the war, Allen became something of a poet vagabond, traveling up and down the East Coast. He settled in Charleston, South Carolina, and collaborated with poet DuBose Heyward, whose novel and play Porgy inspired the opera Porgy and Bess. Allen and Heyward wrote Carolina Chansons (1922).

Beginning in 1924, Allen taught English at Columbia University and Vassar College for two years. There he met Ann Hyde Andrews, one of his students. They created a minor scandal when they married after her graduation. He wrote a biography, Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe (1926). With proceeds from the book, he bought a plantation in Bermuda, and lived there five years. The couple's three children were born there.

Allen's 1,224-page novel, Anthony Adverse (1933), became an instant success, rivaled only by Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind that was published the same year. It was the sweeping saga of an illegitimate child of a French noblewoman and an Irish soldier who grows up to face a difficult life. With exotic settings in Cuba, Africa, Paris, the Italian Alps, New Orleans, and the American West, as well as colorful characters and, for its time, risque sex scenes, the book became a bestseller. A 1936 epic film starring Frederic March and Olivia de Havilland was based on the book.

Allen went to Miami in the early 1940s to visit his aunt. By then he was editor of the Rivers of America series published by Rinehart and Company. He asked Marjory Stoneman Douglas to write a book about the Miami River. "You can't write about the Miami River," she replied. "It's only about an Inch long." She suggested, instead, that she write about the Everglades, and include in it the story  of the Miami River. Allen encouraged her to do so, and the idea consumed her for the rest of her life.

Allen later moved to an estate he called The Glades in Coconut Grove, then a small town near Miami, and became good friends with Douglas and with poet Robert Frost, who lived there, too.