Remembering New Mexico in World War I

The Great War: A fading memory

By Tripp Stelnicki

The New Mexican, April , 2017

The telegram was a series of numbers, a code meant for German and Mexican eyes only.

Once intercepted and deciphered by British intelligence, the message was clear enough: The Germans wanted to promote war between Mexico and the United States.

New Mexico — 17553 67893 — was part of the proposition.

Not long afterward, the German foreign secretary who had sent the fateful telegram publicly acknowledged its veracity. Germany had indeed offered an alliance and encouraged Mexico to take back the southwestern territory it had lost to the United States more than half a century earlier.

This, in early 1917, did not improve Americans’ already dim view of either country — in particular Germany, which had recently announced it would conduct unrestricted submarine warfare. Americans’ widely held noninterventionist convictions, which only months earlier had carried anti-war incumbent President Woodrow Wilson to re-election, were failing.

On April 2, 1917, one hundred years ago, Wilson appeared before Congress and made the case for war against Germany. Four days later, on April 6, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly adopted the war resolution and America plunged into what would become one of the deadliest conflicts in human history, its shadow reaching every corner of the nation, not least the relatively new state of New Mexico.

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