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1912 El PASO newspaper with a front page political cartoon showing PEOPLE & BUSINESSES FLEEING CRIME in EL PASO Texas- inv # 5T-304

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SEE PHOTO----- COMPLETE, ORIGINAL NEWSPAPER, the El Paso Morning Times (TX) dated January 13, 1912 with a front page cartoon of CRIME in EL PASO, Texas driving people and business out of the city during the waning days of the WILD WEST in the Southern Texas town.

In 1909, William Howard Taft and Porfirio Díaz planned a summit in El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, an historic first meeting between a U.S. president and a Mexican president and also the first time an American president would cross the border into Mexico But tensions rose on both sides of the border, including threats of assassination, so the Texas Rangers, 4,000 U.S. and Mexican troops, U.S. Secret Service agents, FBI agents and U.S. marshals were all called in to provide security. Frederick Russell Burnham, the celebrated scout, was put in charge of a 250 private security detail hired by John Hays Hammond, who in addition to owning large investments in Mexico was a close friend of Taft from Yale and a U.S. Vice-Presidential candidate in 1908. On October 16, the day of the summit, Burnham and Private C.R. Moore, a Texas Ranger, discovered a man holding a concealed palm pistol standing at the El Paso Chamber of Commerce building along the procession route. Burnham and Moore captured, disarmed, and arrested the assassin within only a few feet of Taft and Díaz.

By 1910, the overwhelming number of people in the city were Americans creating a settled environment. However, this period was short lived as the Mexican Revolution greatly impacted the city, bringing an influx of refugees – and capital – to the bustling boom town. Spanish-language newspapers, theaters, movie houses, and schools were established, many supported by a thriving Mexican refugee middle class. Large numbers of clerics, intellectuals, and businessmen took refuge in the city, particularly between 1913 and 1915.

Ultimately, the violence of the Mexican Revolution followed with the large Mexican diaspora which had fled into El Paso. In 1915 and again in 1916 and 1917 various Mexican revolutionary societies planned, staged, and launched violent attacks against both Texans and their political Mexican opponents in El Paso. This state of affairs eventually led to the vast Plan de San Diego which resulted in the murder of 21 white citizens. The subsequent reprisals by local militia soon caused an escalation of violence, wherein it is estimated that approximately 300 Mexicans and Mexican-Americans lost their lives. These actions affected almost every resident of the entire lower Rio Grande Valley, resulting in millions of dollars of losses; the end result of the Plan of San Diego was long-standing enmity between the two racial groups.

Simultaneously, other Texans and Americans gravitated to the city and by 1920, along with the U.S. Army troops, the population exceeded 100,000 and whites once again were in the clear majority. Nonetheless, the city increased the segregation between Mexicans and Mexican-Americans with Americans. In reply, the Catholic Church attempted to garner the Mexican-American community's allegiance through education and political and civic involvement organizations, including the National Catholic Welfare Fund. In 1916, the Census Bureau reported El Paso's population as 53% Mexican and 44% white.

Mining and other industries gradually developed in the area. The El Paso and Northeastern Railway was chartered in 1897, to help extract the natural resources of surrounding areas, especially in southeastern New Mexico Territory. The 1920s and 1930s saw the emergence of major business development in the city, partially enabled by Prohibition-era bootlegging. However, the military demobilization, an agricultural economic depression which hit places like El Paso first before the larger Great Depression was felt in the big cities, hit the city hard. In turn, as in the rest of the United States, the Depression era overall hit the city hard, and El Paso's population declined through the end of World War II with most of population losses coming from the white community. Nonetheless, whites remained the majority to the 1940s.

During and following the war, military expansion in the area, as well as oil discoveries in the Permian Basin (North America), helped to engender rapid economic expansion in the mid-1900s. Copper smelting, oil refining, and the proliferation of low-wage industries (particularly garment making) led the city's growth. Additionally, the departure of region's rural population, which was mostly white, to cities like El Paso, brought a short term burst of capital and labor. However, this was balanced by additional departures of middle class Americans to other parts of the country which offered new and better paying jobs. In turn, local businesses looked south to the opportunities afforded by cheap Mexican labor. Furthermore, the period from 1942 to 1956 saw the bracero program which brought in cheap Mexican labor into the rural area to replace the losses of the native white population. In turn, seeking better-paying jobs these migrants also moved to El Paso. By 1965, Hispanics once again were a majority. Meanwhile, the post-war expansion slowed again in the 1960s, but the city continued to grow with the annexation of surrounding neighborhoods and in large part because of its significant economic relationship with Mexico.

Fair condition. This listing includes the complete entire original newspaper, NOT just a clipping or a page of it. STEPHEN A. GOLDMAN HISTORICAL NEWSPAPERS stands behind all of the items that we sell with a no questions asked, money back guarantee. Every item we sell is an original newspaper printed on the date indicated at the beginning of its description. U.S. buyers pay priority mail postage which includes waterproof plastic and a heavy cardboard flat to protect your purchase from damage in the mail. International postage is quoted when we are informed as to where the package is to be sent. We do combine postage (to reduce postage costs) for multiple purchases sent in the same package. We list thousands of rare newspapers with dates from 1570 through 2004 on Ebay each week and we ship packages twice a week. This is truly SIX CENTURIES OF HISTORY that YOU CAN OWN!

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