John Passos - Mr. Wilson's 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.

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.

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 and 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.