On Saturday, March 4, 1916, the Wilsons headed for the Navy Yard to board the Mayflower for a cruise of Chesapeake Bay. Edith considered these outings “red-letter days,” and Woodrow savored the respite they gave him from the constant interruptions of life in the White House. On the Mayflower, he could think in peace for hours on end. Their luggage was always taken down in advance, the suitcases were unpacked, and the president’s seagoing office, complete with his typewriter, was ready when he boarded. Even in cold weather they liked to begin their voyage on deck, watching the city of Washington shrink into nothingness. Nearing Mount Vernon, they stood as the crew paid the navy’s traditional tribute to the first president with a dipping of the colors, taps, and a tolling of the ship’s bell. Afterward Edith and Woodrow usually went to the chart room in hopes of finding a new port to visit.
Among the items in need of the president’s attention on that weekend was the appointment of a successor to Secretary Garrison of the War Department. Wilson decided on Newton D. Baker, whom he had known since 1892, when Baker enrolled in the political economy class that Wilson taught at Johns Hopkins to augment his Princeton salary. Baker had gone on to a career in law and city government, and in 1911, at the age of thirty-nine, was elected mayor of Cleveland. At the Democrats’ national convention in Baltimore, he had upended the Ohio delegation’s plan to support a favorite son by giving an eloquent speech in favor of Wilson. Wilson took note and offered him the post of secretary of the interior. Baker declined, feeling obligated to finish his second term as mayor. He left office at the beginning of 1916 and returned to the practice of law.
On Sunday, from somewhere on Chesapeake Bay, the Mayflower radioed the Navy Department and directed it to send Baker a telegram from the president: “Would you accept Secretaryship of War. Earnestly hope that you can see your way to do so. It would greatly strengthen my hand.” Baker decided to go to the White House and explain in person why he was the wrong man for the job. He was a pacifist. He had no interest in war. And the army had no interest in him: he had tried to enlist during the Spanish-American War but was turned down because of poor eyesight.
Wilson saw Baker at ten o’clock on Thursday morning, March 9. Only one sentence of their conversation has survived, but in all likelihood Baker rattled off his defects and Wilson pooh-poohed them. The hand he was trying to strengthen was not the War Department but Ohio, which had twenty-four electoral votes. “Are you ready to be sworn in?” he asked.
Baker surrendered, promising himself that he would leave at the end of Wilson’s first term, which was only a year away. Secretary Daniels marched the prisoner next door to the War Department, where a clerk was waiting with five versions of the oath of office. Asked to choose one, Baker, who topped five feet by only four inches, joked that he would take the shortest, “since Nature has rather adapted me to short things.”
After the ceremony, the new secretary was welcomed by the army officers based in Washington, and at some point in the morning’s proceedings, a reporter delivered a bulletin from New Mexico: Pancho Villa and a band of hundreds had stormed the border town of Columbus at four o’clock in the morning, looting stores, setting fires, and killing seventeen Americans. Baker stayed at the office for the rest of the day and was soon buried in dispatches from Fort Bliss in San Antonio, headquarters of the army’s Southern Department. Acutely aware of his ignorance, he sought out the army’s chief of staff, Major General Hugh L. Scott, who had been a soldier since Baker’s infancy. “[Y]ou know all about this,” Baker said. “I know nothing. You must treat me as a father would his son.”
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The Mexican Revolution had faded from American newspapers after Wilson granted de facto recognition to the government of Venustiano Carranza, first chief of the Constitutionalist Party, in October 1915. The first chief was no George Washington, but his civics were on a higher moral plane than General Huerta’s, and Wilson and Lansing hoped that Carranza’s gratitude for American recognition would reduce Mexico’s temptation to align itself with Germany, which was trying to provoke a Mexican-American war in order to disrupt American exports to the Allies.
After consulting the cabinet, Wilson authorized a punitive expedition, a tightly circumscribed military incursion to deal with a security threat that another government either could not or would not eliminate. The mission: capture Pancho Villa and put his rebel faction out of business. On March 15 nearly five thousand U.S. soldiers headed into Mexico under the command of Brigadier General John J. Pershing. Within two weeks the expedition had marched deep into Mexico and killed thirty Villistas in an old-fashioned cavalry charge. But Villa himself was still at large.
While Americans cheered, Carranza was deeply unhappy. A few days after Pershing and his men set out, the Mexican government had professed its surprise—a euphemism for irritation—that American troops were on Mexican soil. If the Americans did not capture Villa soon, they would be asked to withdraw, Carranza said. The expedition got little help from the Mexican army, and on April 12, the two armies actually came to blows, near the city of Parral. When the shooting ended, three Americans were dead or dying, one had disappeared, and several were wounded. Pershing called a temporary halt to his operations and retreated far to the north. Villa was still on the loose.
Some of Wilson’s cabinet members questioned the wisdom of continuing the pursuit. The Villistas had been chased so deep into the interior that they no longer menaced the border, and Baker and Lansing feared more American casualties. Wilson argued that Pershing’s exit would merely encourage the Villistas to regroup for a new spate of assaults. He also feared that Germany would see the withdrawal as a sign of American weakness, and he was facing yet another German challenge that demanded a projection of strength and resolve. Germany had ordered U-boat commanders in British waters to treat all Allied cargo vessels as warships, making them subject to attack without warning.
On March 24, a torpedo sliced open the bow of the Sussex, an unarmed British ferry crossing the English Channel. There were fifty fatalities, and four Americans among the wounded. Germany offered a succession of excuses: The Sussex must have hit a mine. The Sussex had been attacked by a British submarine firing a German torpedo. The U-boat commander had mistaken the steamer for a minelayer.
