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The Federal Presence in NM
(This article is excerpted from the original. The opinions expressed are those of the author and not of my office.)
January 6, 1912, marks a watershed for New Mexico. The Territorial period lay in the past; the future promised a new beginning as the forty-seventh state.
Today most of us find it hard to imagine what people in New Mexico, or elsewhere in the United States, thought about themselves or their government in the early twentieth century. But to understand the role that New Mexico's statehood played in national events, we must try to comprehend people's attitudes at the time. The following two sets of quotations illuminate the mindset of that era—first in New Mexico and then at the national level.
1) L. Bradford Prince, a former territorial governor, speaking in 1902:
"A Territory with bad officials is a despotism, and not a republic; it is ruled by men named by an authority 2,000 miles away, who are not responsible to any local instrument of power."
Of Prince's remarks, the eminent Yale University historian Howard R. Lamar once noted: "It was such sentiments, reminiscent of the assertions of local liberty in the thirteen colonies, that led the Arizona and New Mexico citizens to campaign for their own independence between 1900 and 1910."
2) President Theodore Roosevelt in his annual message to Congress, December 5, 1905, on the issue of government control of business:
"I do not believe in the government interfering with private business more than is necessary. I do not believe in the government undertaking any work which can with propriety be left in private hands. But neither do I believe in the government flinching from overseeing any work when it becomes evident that abuses are sure to obtain therein unless there is governmental supervision."
The respective views of L. Bradford Prince and President Theodore Roosevelt may seem unrelated, but they are of a single piece. Both men addressed how society was to be organized and toward what ends government should act. These were the broad questions that people thought about, and talked about, in the decades prior to and following New Mexico's statehood.
© 2007 by David V. Holtby. Used with permission.
