Feeling that he had accomplished his mission, House took the train back to New York. There he had his cable to Sir Edward Grey coded in the private Foreign Office code and transmitted to England. Writing his memoirs years later Lloyd George insisted that it was Wilson’s insertion of the word “probably” that ruined House’s scheme for mediation.
Villa’s Raid
The President was leaving his project for the re-establishment of peace in Europe in the hands of his confidential colonel. He had other anxieties than the coming election. In Congress and in the newspapers he was beset with criticism by Bryan’s pacifists on the one hand and by Roosevelt’s interventionists on the other. Mexico was a thorn in the flesh.
The Woodrow Wilsons had hardly unpacked their bags at the White House before the Mexican imbroglio, which had seemed laid to rest by the mediation of the A.B.C. powers and the constitutionalist success in destroying Villa’s army near Saltillo the September before, exploded into the headlines. Mexican guerrillas, presumably on Villa’s orders, took sixteen American mining men, who were travelling under a safe conduct from Carranza, off a train near Chihuahua, stripped them and robbed them and shot them dead.
A roar for immediate intervention went up from Republicans and Roosevelt supporters, and even from a good many Democrats. The President kept the State Department busy sending notes of protest to Carranza.
At the same time Wilson was engaged in a speaking tour, talking up cautious preparedness to enthusiastic audiences through the middlewest where the pacifist spirit was strongest. The plain people made him feel that they believed in him. Letters poured into the White House commending his moderation. “You are keeping us out of war, Mr. President. We believe in you.”
He had been trying to convince his Secretary of War, Lindley Garrison, that the Administration could not move faster towards military preparations than the people moved, but Garrison saw things differently. He underlined his stand for immediate universal military service by sending in his resignation. Assistant Secretary Breckenridge resigned with him.
A few days later, Ida Tarbell, who had been writing laudatory articles about the New Freedom in the large circulation magazines, was invited to dinner at the White House. She remarked to the President that it was an anxious time. “No one can tell how anxious it is,” answered the President in a taut voice. “I never go to bed without realizing that I may be called up by news that will mean that we are at war. Before tomorrow morning we may be at war.”
The President’s words proved only too prophetic when, a few days later, the “Red Man” struck close to home. Before dawn on March 9, Villa led several hundred mounted men on a raid on the U. S. Army post, several miles inside the border at Columbus, New Mexico.
Villa had been in a fury against gringos since the Administration allowed carranzista troops he was fighting to cross United States territory by train. After a series of defeats he had to do something to restore his prestige among the revolutionary armies.
His attack was carefully planned. American officers were pinned down in their houses by snipers. While the guard under the officer of the day was fighting off one bunch of Mexicans another detachment attacked from the rear. The obsolete American machineguns jammed. Their gunners were killed. Villa held the town for an hour, looting and burning stores and shooting at anything that moved, before he was driven off and pursued (against strict War Department orders) into Mexico by two troops of the 13th Cavalry.
Eight soldiers and eight civilians were killed in Columbus, and a number wounded. The army reported finding sixty dead Mexicans in the streets of the gutted town.
A Pacifist in the War Department
What to do about Villa’s raid was the first problem that met Wilson’s new Secretary of War when he turned up at his office to be sworn in. Looking about for a loyal Democrat to put in Garrison’s place Wilson picked a man after his own heart. Newton D. Baker was a progressive reformer and a Wilson man from long before Baltimore. He was reputed to be an ardent pacifist.
He came from a prominent West Virginia family. Though most of his people were Union, his father fought for the Confederacy but lived to tell his son he was glad the North had won. Dr. Baker was a popular physician and had a large circle of friends in Martinsburg where the Bakers were first settlers. Hearing one of Huxley’s lectures in the early days of Johns Hopkins he decided that that was where he wanted his boy to go to college. In Baltimore young Newton roomed in the same boarding house with Woodrow Wilson, then an instructor in history and government. He kept a little of the student to professor attitude towards Wilson all his life.
Baker studied law and was settling to a comfortable practice in Martinsburg when he was invited to a job in the Post Office Department in Washington by a friend of his father’s who was Postmaster General under Grover Cleveland.
Caught up in the progressive movement he went to the city of Cleveland as solicitor for Tom Johnson’s reform administration. When Johnson died Baker succeeded him as mayor. Wilson was so pleased with the able support Baker gave him in his presidential campaign in Ohio and at the Baltimore convention, that, in 1913, the Schoolmaster in Politics offered his pupil a cabinet post. Baker preferred to remain as mayor of Cleveland to install the municipal electric plant which had been his promise to the voters.
When, eventually convinced he must serve the Administration, he turned up at the Secretary’s office in the old War State and Navy Building to take his oath, he was still, at fortyseven, a neat trim boyish little man. He disarmed craggy old General Hugh Scott, the Chief of Staff who was acting Secretary, by telling him, “I am an innocent. I don’t know anything about this job. You must treat me as a father would his son.”
Planning an expedition against Mexican bandits was indeed a far cry from reforming the administration of a middlewestern city. In spite of his reputation as a humanitarian of the somewhat mollycoddle type, Baker had no qualms about convincing the President that Villa must be punished. The first decision to be made was the choice of a commander. The ranking general officer, Major General Funston, would remain in command of the entire border. The old military heads around the War Department with one accord told the new Secretary that Brigadier General Pershing was the man.
Black Jack
John Joseph Pershing was raised in a hard school. He was born the year before the Civil War began in a railroad boarding house near LaClede, Missouri. His father was section foreman at the time on the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad. During the war the elder Pershing did well for himself as regimental sutler with the 18th Missouri Infantry. With the proceeds he started a general store which he lost in the panic of 1873. After that he travelled as a salesman for a readymade clothing concern and engaged in all sorts of not too successful speculations. He was a man of some standing in his community, nonetheless; was president of the school board and a charter member of the LaClede Methodist Church. He believed the children should work for their education.
Jack Pershing’s first ambition was the law. At seventeen he started earning a little money teaching a Negro grade school, to pay his way through the state teachers college. All his life he had a way with Negroes. A silent hardworking dour sort of lad he planned to earn his living by teaching until he could save up enough to study law.
When the local congressman, who, as a greenbacker and a Baptist, believed in equality of opportunity, announced he would give his West Point appointment to the boy who passed the best examination, Jack Pershing jumped at the chance of a free education. He studied hard. When he came out on top over eighteen competitors he still felt he was unprepared to enter the academy and eked out his scanty funds to study for a year at a military school at Highland Falls on the Hudson. He was almost twentytwo before he entered West Point as a plebe.
Though far from brilliant in his studies, Jack Pershing was known for his good riding, his inflexible deportment and his erect stance. His final year he was senior captain of the cadet corps. After graduation he served against the Apaches a
nd the Sioux.
When the plains Indians were quieted the army took advantage of Lieutenant Pershing’s training as a teacher by sending him to instruct in military science at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where his family had finally settled and where, as usual, his father was prominent in the affairs of the Methodist Church and of the Y.M.C.A. Pershing fulfilled his old ambition by completing his law course there.
Later he taught tactics at West Point. During the Spanish War he served in Cuba with the Negro 10th Cavalry and was breveted a captain for gallantry at Santiago. He came back from Cuba with the nickname of “Black Jack.”
During the first Roosevelt administration Pershing, now a major, helped put down the Moro insurrection on Mindanao. He was one of the few American officers who learned the Moro language. T.R. was so delighted by the crisp style of his reports he recalled him to work on the General Staff.
Pershing’s army career had been all hard sledding. He’d had no time for women. During his stay in Washington at the age of fortyfive he wooed and married the daughter of Senator Warren. This marriage to the daughter of an influential congressman who had been governor of Wyoming in territorial days and was now chairman of the Senate committee on military affairs, did Major Pershing’s career no harm. Soon after he was sent as attaché to observe the strategy of the Russo-Japanese War. President Roosevelt jumped him over eight hundred odd names to make him a brigadier general.
Returned to the Philippines as governor of Moro Province, he was recalled, when the Mexican troubles began, to take command on the border. Since service there was expected to be of short duration Mrs. Pershing and the children remained in the residence that had been allotted them in the Presidio at San Francisco. On August 27, 1915, the general was called to the telephone in El Paso to be told that his wife and three small daughters had burned to death in the fire that swept the military post. His baby son, Warren, was saved by a maid.
Pershing had always been a silent grimfaced man. After that he was more silent and grimmer. His hair from grizzled became gray.
For an ambitious meticulous soldier there was little solace to be got from the Mexican campaign. Of all the assignments an American general ever had the pursuit of Villa was the most heartbreaking.
The population was sullenly hostile. There was the problem of transport. The expedition penetrated two hundred and fifty miles into the desert state of Chihuahua without being allowed the use of the railroad. The old army muletrains were too slow. Trucks had to be hired and bought. Their maintenance had to be improvised.
There was the problem of intelligence. As the expedition penetrated deeper into the country, villistas and carranzistas joined to excoriate the gringo. Although the constitutionalists were glad to see Villa’s forces scattered they wouldn’t lift a finger to help the Americans.
Wherever they went the Americans were met with treachery and deceit. It had been thought that airplane reconnaissance would be useful in tracking down armed bands. The few airplanes the army had proved incapable of anything more arduous than exhibition flights at a county fair.
At the War Department, however, Secretary Baker, whose appointment had been greeted with dismay in regular army circles, was showing a capacity for quick decisions. His speed in dictating wore out the army stenographers. The military discovered with relief that he was shaking off his humanitarian inhibitions. Get the job done was his motto. When the Quartermaster Corps claimed that there was no appropriation for motor trucks he said buy them anyway. “Mine is the responsibility.”
Pershing failed to catch Villa, but his embarrassingly futile marches and countermarches proved a valuable training school for the regular army. The problem of supplying ten thousand men in hostile country taught the War Department and Newton D. Baker things they had never dreamed of about procurement and logistics.
The Sussex Correspondence
While American troopers were sweating out their lives trailing false rumors through the scorched deserts of northern Mexico, where every nopal hid a skulking rifleman, the President was knitting his brows over the freshly puzzling behavior of the Germans. Though von Tirpitz’s resignation and von Bernstorff’s protestations to Colonel House seemed to proclaim a new reasonableness, the imperial government’s announcement in early March that it would treat armed merchantmen as ships of war held threatening possibilities.
The Allies were discovering that an agile gun crew could do considerable damage to a submarine that surfaced to give warning. They were trapping the submarines with innocentappearing freighters that turned out to be heavily armed. In America the peace organizations were echoing Bryan’s demand that Americans be prohibited from travelling on armed merchantmen. The argument had reached a hysterical pitch when the newspapers, the morning of March 25 carried news of the Sussex disaster.
The Sussex was a Calais-Dover ferry with women and children on board and was known to be unarmed. An explosion blew the bow off the ship right under the white cliffs of Albion. There were eightyodd casualties. It was taken for granted that Americans were among the dead, though it turned out later that there were none. The State Department was in a rage. Lansing wanted to give von Bernstorff his passport right away.
Though Colonel House was indulging in one of his bouts of illhealth he hurried to Washington with advice. He agreed with the Secretary of State. He found the President preoccupied and evasive. “From the way he looked at me,” he confided to his diary, “I am inclined to believe that he intends making excuses for not acting promptly in the new submarine crisis … He does not seem to realize that one of the main points of criticism against him is that he talks boldly, but acts weakly.”
The argument about what to do about the Sussex went on for weeks. The President listened to Lansing and to Counsellor Polk. He called in Baker and other members of the cabinet, separately and collectively. House’s advice was considered so important that the confidential colonel took up his residence at the White House for a while.
At last the State Department transmitted a note, of which the final version was as usual painfully typed out by the President himself on his own solitary typewriter, curtly warning the German Government that unless their submarines gave up attacking unarmed merchant ships the United States would break off relations.
Largely at von Bernstorff’s insistence the German foreign office replied that their government would “do its utmost to confine the operations of war for the rest of its duration to the fighting forces of the belligerents.” They went on to demand that, in return, the United States bring pressure on Britain to restore freedom to the seas. Wilson accepted the first part and ignored the rest. The Germans were outdebated. They clumsily accepted responsibility for the Sussex attack and offered to pay an indemnity for any American losses. The result, for the American press at least, was another diplomatic victory for the President.
1. T.R.
2. Big Game
3. The Peerless Leader
4. The Genial Mr. Taft
5. The Kaiser and His Generals
6. The Popular Professor
7. Kingmaker from Vermont
8. Congenial Souls
9. The Woodrow Wilsons
10. Mac
11. Leaders of Democracy
12. President Wilson with Joe Tumulty at His White House Desk
13. Kaiser Wilhelm II
14. Papa Joffre
15. The Peacemaker in State
16. Colonel and Mrs. House
17. Page at the Court of St. James
18. The President’s War Cabinet
19. Mr. Ford of Detroit
20. The Beguiling Widow
21. The Faithful Physician
22. Roosevelt and Wood on the Warpath
23. Black Jack Pershing
24. The Republican Candidate
25. Vote for Wilson
26. Newton D. Baker
27. Briand’s Goodbye
28. The Dapper Von Bernstorf
29. Casualty
; 30. The Ingenious Nivelle
31. Dollar a Year Men
Chapter 10
HE KEPT US OUT OF WAR
THE Sussex correspondence brought forth new outbursts from Theodore Roosevelt. In preparation for the conventions of the Bull Moose and Republican parties slated for early June in Chicago, T.R., refreshed by a trip to the West Indies which had improved the chronic bronchitis that his bullet wound had left him with, was on the rampage in the middle-west. Dorcas was willin’. Too astute a politician to have any real hope of the nomination, he couldn’t help being affected by his friends’ plans for Chicago. The inner circle of Bull Moose was hoping to bring about a stalemate in the Republican convention to be followed by a dramatic merging of the two conventions with T.R. acclaimed as the only man who could heal the schism and defeat Woodrow Wilson. It would take a miracle but miracles could happen.
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