Woodrow Wilson was a man of contradictory impulses. He enacted progressive economic and labor reforms while racially segregating the Federal government. He spoke stirringly about spreading democracy abroad while suppressing civil liberties and arresting dissidents at home. He advocated national self-determination while authorizing military adventures in multiple hemispheres. Perhaps Wilson's most troublesome foreign crisis concerned Mexico, which spent the 1910s wracked with revolution and civil war.In 1910 an alliance of urban liberals and rural bandits overthrew Mexico's ancient, reactionary dictator Porfirio Diaz. His successor, ...