World War I and the Federal Presence in New Mexico
War Preparedness and New Mexico
Delfino Gonzales, José F. Trujillo, and three friends from Tucumcari joined the
Army within days of President Wilson declaring war. They traveled to Albuquerque, enlisted,
and reported to El Paso’s Fort Bliss by Wednesday April 11, 1917.Two-and-a-half months
later they were on their way to France. On July 4, 1917, the young men from Tucumcari
might well have been among the several hundred soldiers, mostly new recruits, who heard
the roar of Parisians as American troops paraded five miles through the city to pay tribute at
several French military memorials. The soldiers’ presence rallied spirits in the capital city and
throughout France—exactly the impact sought by General John J. Pershing, commander of
the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). Just over a month later, on Wednesday August
15, another contingent of American soldiers marched through London and passed
Buckingham Palace, where King George V reviewed them.
For the balance of 1917, the five young men from Tucumcari—together with about
160,000 enlisted Regular Army troops and perhaps as many as five-thousand National
Guardsmen, including soldiers from New Mexico—trained in France. For the first fifteen
months of the war, though, General Pershing largely presided over an army-in-drill. His
plans called for combat-readiness to be developed in two stages: six months’ stateside
general military training followed and another three months in France to acquire proficiency
in defensive tactics and offensive maneuvers.
Combat readiness took time, something well-known to the allies and Germans alike.
France and Germany had large, well-trained standing armies of nearly a million men each in
1914; Great Britain did not—and neither did the United States in 1917. All militaries exist to
defend a country when attacked and to mount a combat offensive when needed. The United
States’ military proved unprepared to do either in 1917. No one should have been surprised
by the American military’s lack of readiness. In 1912, the Secretary of War described the
Army’s degree of combat worthiness as “zero.”
The military’s lack of preparedness roiled national politics in 1915 and 1916, and
New Mexico’s two senators and one congressman found themselves on opposite sides.
Senators Albert B. Fall and Thomas B. Catron, along with most Republicans and some
Democrats, supported accelerating militarization, calling for a doubling in the number of
regular army troops to at least 250,000 (from just over 125,000). New Mexico’s two senators
disagreed only on the ends for such a build-up: Fall, even as late as mid-February 1916,
thought only in terms of Mexico in advocating war preparedness. Senator Catron, in a July
25, 1915 letter to the New York Times advocated a significant increase in the army and navy as
well as having the federal government be more active in creating “a well-disciplined reserve,
with which we could fill up the regiments and companies of the regular army, and in the
shortest possible time.”
To his credit, though, Fall was forward thinking on one key issue. As he told the New
York Times early in 1916, “The Government, too, should establish its own munitions and
guns plants, sufficient to meet all requirements.” Not until late in the war did the federal
government decisively address the critical need for munitions, and then it essentially adopted
Senator Fall’s proposal. Civilians were tapped to supply federal workers for government run
armament factories, and in September 1918, more than 300 New Mexico men from the
counties of Santa Fe, San Miguel, Colfax, Chavez, and Bernalillo departed for Tennessee—at
the government’s expense— to work at a federally run munitions manufacturing plant.
Democratic Representative Harvey B. Fergusson aligned with the Secretary of State,
William Jennings Bryan, as a forceful voice for pacifism within Wilson’s administration afer
leaving congress in March 1915. He immediately became the private secretary to Secretary
Bryan, and during the remaining months of his life he and Bryan worked tirelessly to curb
militarization.
For his part, President Wilson presided over a nation divided three ways in the runup to America’s entry into World War I. Naturally pro-German sentiment abounded in many
immigrants from that country and their first-generation descendents, and these numbered
over ten million. Pro-English sentiment ran high as well. But a sizable number of Americans
genuinely sought neutrality or were pro-peace. Against this divided opinion, President
Wilson campaigned for re-election in 1916 as the candidate who “kept us out of war” in
Europe.
President Wilson carried New Mexico by a margin of 2,375 votes out of 66,787 cast,
or 3.56 percent. Nationwide the president won re-election with a margin of victory of 3.12
percent (578,140 votes out of 18,536,585 ballots cast). In the Electoral College, Wilson
garnered 277 votes and his Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, received 254. Two
minor party candidates, representing the Socialist and Prohibition parties, received no
electoral college support but did draw 811,826 popular votes. Wilson’s re-election in the fall
of 1916 has to be understood as reflecting the public’s narrow preference to avoid fighting
abroad.
New Mexico’s politicians in Washington typified divisions within the nation over
preparedness, and the senators’ attitudes revealed impatience with congressional and
presidential hesitancy. At bottom, as one historian has noted,
In the United States, a traditionally antimilitaristic country, the armed forces
[in 1917] had long been the stepchild of the nation. Unlike all the European countries,
the United States imposed no obligatory military service. The U.S. Congress was
reluctant to appropriate large funds for the military.
General John J. Pershing first encountered problems caused by Congress’s dithering
over preparedness during his duty as commanding general of Fort Bliss at El Paso beginning
in the spring of 1914. But he acutely experienced them from March 1916 through February
1917 with the call up of Nation Guard units following the raid on Columbus, New Mexico.
Still, Pershing forged an effective fighting force in 1916-1917. When he departed Columbus,
Pershing knew and trusted the capabilities of the 5,000 Regular Army soldiers from Fort
Bliss he had led in Mexico. These troops, augmented by recent enlistments such as the
young men from Tucumcari, constituted his “army” sent to France in June 1917.
© 2008 by David V. Holtby
Supplying the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) ran from the mundane (paragraph 1)
to the critical (paragraph 4). The 41st Division, which included New Mexicans, is informed
their draft animals, transported on two ships, departed on December 9, 1917. (paragraph 7
final sentence). NARA II, Record Group 120, American Expeditionary Forces, Division
Records, 41st Division, Box 1.
This order from mid-October 1918 on the proper fitting of shoes is illustrative of how long
it took the army to fully organize and plan for its troops’ needs. NARA I, Record Group
393, Camp Kearny, Box 5.
Redacted and transcribed from the second paragraph of a June 1917 account “Mobilizing
the Forces of America for War,” Current Opinion, June 1917, Vol. LXII, No. 6. p. 1