Ralph Roeder

[4][5] On December 3, 1929, he married Russian Empire born Fania Esiah Mindell of New York, a theater set and costume designer, artist, and feminist who, together with Margaret Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrne, had been a co-defendant in the Brownsville Clinic Trials of 1917.

He had sided with Pancho Villa as a volunteer, and at one point was captured "by Mexican counter-revolutionaries and was stood against a wall to be shot.

"[9] During the 1930s Roeder researched and wrote three books on Italian history, but by the late 1940s he again turned his interest to Mexico.

In Hispanic American Historical Review historian Walter V. Scholes praises Roeder's book for bringing a major biography of Juárez to an English-language readership, but faults it for its complete lack of scholarly citations, the hallmark of verifiability of information.

"It is almost inconceivable that a full-length treatment, posing as a dependable history of a controversial figure and period, would have completely ignored so fundamental a requirement.