100 years of history
By Carol Pelosi
For the past couple weeks, I have been recounting some of the history of Wake Forest from 1910 through the early 1920s. At the same time, I have reread Barbara Tuchman’s “The Zimmerman Telegram,” 200 pages outlining how skullduggery, theft, murder, intercepted telegrams and a secret corps of code-breakers turned America from massive indifference and into the bloody trenches of World War I.
In 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson was re-elected on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” people learned the news mostly through newspapers. Most Wake Forest residents probably did not see one from week to week, but the college professors and staff, the local businessmen and large farmers would have subscribed to one of the Raleigh newspapers, which would be delivered to town by train daily.
There was much more interest in events in this hemisphere than in far-off Europe. One of Wilson’s first acts in office had been to clear the last obstruction from the Panama Canal, opening it to international traffic. The country’s disinterest in the war buttressed Wilson’s personal crusade to win a peace agreement, one in which no one would win. Both England and Germany had rejected Wilson’s efforts outright, but Wilson, never one to acknowledge fact when it contradicted his personal opinion, persisted.
The newspaper subscribers in Wake Forest would have learned about the outbreak of war in August of 1914, but their real interest may have been on Mexico, which was convulsed by civil war, bandits and a parade of presidents who either were shot as they left office or shot so they would leave office.
The hotels in Mexican port cities on both coasts were filled with German and Japanese officers, legates and spies, while along the border American spies from every government office literally stumbled over each other. Germany wanted to cut off the supply of Mexican oil to England, assured so far because the oil cartel was British. Japan was nominally part of the Allies, but after grabbing up all the land it could in the Pacific was trying to gain a foothold on the American continent.
Since one of Germany’s war aims was to keep America out of the war, German diplomats were cooking up a scheme by which Mexico, with the help of Japanese troops and German arms, would invade the United States and seize Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, reclaiming her lost territory. Thus busy defending its own borders, America would not join the Allies, which by 1917 had gone through their credit while spending a generation’s lifeblood in the Belgian and French trenches.
Google-eyed Pancho Villa, smoking gun in one hand, brandy bottle in the other, had captured America’s attention, first by the Massacre of Santa Ysabel on Jan. 10, 1916. He and his band stopped a train carrying 17 American mining engineers, lined them up, stripped them and shot them. One remained alive, able to crawl to Chihuahua City and tell the news. Panic and vigilantism gripped the American side of the border.
A month later, Villa was back with 400 horsemen to raid Columbus, N.M., burning, looting and killing 20 residents. Wilson, who found Mexico and its politics his personal quagmire, reluctantly commanded General John Pershing, later “Black Jack” Pershing of the American Expeditionary Force, to cross into Mexico to capture Villa. Tuchman called the raid “bootless,” and it certainly was fruitless.
That summer, while there was food rationing across England and Europe, while the armies struggled to gain a few feet of blood-soaked mud, there were some indications America was ending its isolationism. The Naval Appropriations Act authorized the building of dreadnoughts and light cruisers. Still Wilson, to the despair of Ambassador Walter Hines Page and former President Theodore Roosevelt, refused to discuss anything but peace negotiations among equals. Roosevelt privately called Wilson yellow.
Then on Jan. 17, 1917, a fateful telegraphic intercept rattled into Room 40 of British Naval Intelligence. Cryptographers soon decoded enough to realize it was from German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmerman to Germany’s ambassador to Mexico, setting out the terms he was to offer Mexican President Venustiano Carranza, including an alliance: “Together make war. Together make peace.”
In addition, the telegram said Germany intended to begin unrestricted submarine warfare beginning Feb. 1, with U-boats striking and sinking any non-German shipping. The seas would only be free to icebergs and fish, one newspaper said.
Since the British Naval Intelligence headed by Rear-Admiral William R. Hall understandably wanted to keep Germany from knowing they had cracked their codes, there was a diplomatic pause while spies rummaged in unlikely places and Western Union was forced to cough up one message.
In the end, the telegram was published in its entirety without too much explanation by the Associated Press. It was a bombshell. For the first time, Americans from coast to coast realized Germany was their enemy. On April 6, with the concurrence of Congress, Wilson declared war on Germany.
One of those who went to France with Pershing and the AEF was Laurence Stallings, a Wake Forest College graduate who was wooing Helen Poteat, the daughter of President William and Emma Poteat. Stallings was wounded in battle and lost a leg. He wrote a post card to Helen, saying he could not write more because he knew Miss Annie Crudup, an assistant to Postmaster O.K. Holding, would read the card. Miss Annie was apparently bad for satisfying her curiosity. Much later, Stallings visited the post office and Miss Annie said, “Laurence, why did you write that on your card? You know I don’t read the cards.”
Laurence and Helen were married and in 1927 they restored Forest Home on N.C. 62 near Roxboro. The house had been built in 1835 for Capt. James Poteat, Helen’s grandfather.
The Stallings could afford the restoration. He had gone on to co-author “What Price Glory?” with Maxwell Anderson, a play with a long Broadway run and was later made into two movies. Stallings and Anderson wrote other plays, and Stallings wrote other books including a biography with a North Carolina setting, “Plumes.”
What else was going on in Wake Forest in 2003?
Construction of the first portion of the N.C. 98 bypass was still ahead of schedule even though the rain this summer has added delays.
“It just shows you how much ahead of schedule we were,” Brian Harrington, the supervising engineer with Barnhill Contracting Co. which has the $9.8 million contract to build the section between Jones Dairy Road and South Main Street.
In early June, Harrington had said construction of a detour at South Main would begin in mid-July, a date that has slipped. “The weather has had a lot to do with it,” Harrington said. Instead, the Barnhill crews are still at work on the roadway and on the bridge over the CSX railroad line.
“When we catch up a little more and finish with the bridge completely, we’ll drop back with our crews” to work on the detour, Harrington said.
After the detour is built to the west of South Main, trucks will begin hauling in fill dirt to raise the street by 6 feet and widen it to five lanes at the intersection with the bypass. When it is completed, the intersection of South Main and the bypass will be at grade level and signalized.
This first section is due to be completed in December of 2004 after construction of the second section, from South Main to Capital Boulevard, begins in the spring of next year.
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Much interest in proposed historic district
The proposed National Register of Historic Places designation for a large swath through the heart of Wake Forest would not place restrictions on homeowners.
No, Ann Swallow told the 50 or so potential district residents. “You can turn it around to the backside and paint it purple.”
Swallow, who works in the State Historic Preservation Office and manages the National Register for the National Park Service, and Ruth Little, a consultant who did the district survey for the town and compiled the application, were the speakers at Monday night’s meeting.
Little used slides to give a short overview of the town’s history. The Raleigh & Gaston Railroad on the east side of the campus helped Wake Forest College, the first denominational college in the state, to thrive, Little said. Later, the fact the town remained a college town with Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary replacing Wake Forest College in the central campus helped preserve the many historical buildings.
Swallow explained the nature of a National Register district – “It’s pretty much what you want to make of it. Promotion and recognition of this historic district is pretty much in the hands of you people in the district.” – and explained the process and the tax benefits of the district.
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