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Newton Baker

To baseball historians, secretary of war Newton D. Baker is best remembered for the impact he had on the 1918 season. It was Baker who dictated the method of drafting the nation’s army and, as part of that, on May 23, 1918—on the same day he appeared before the House Committee on Military Affairs to press for an unlimited army—he had the Provost Marshal, Gen. Enoch Crowder, issue the work-or-fight edict. Because the war department did not specify whether baseball was considered an essential occupation, the work-or-fight edict was a dark cloud that hung over the 1918 baseball season until Baker finally issued a decision in late July.

Baker’s role in history, though, extends well beyond his brief brush with activities on the diamond. He was a reformist democrat who was elected mayor of Cleveland in 1912, serving in that role until January 1, 1916. At that point, he and two other partners put up $500 each to start a law firm in Cleveland called Baker, Hostetler and Sidlo. Baker would be associated with the firm for the rest of his life—now, Newton Baker Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. Baker Hostetler is one of the nation’s top 100 law firms, employing more than 600 lawyers.

But, just three months after starting the law firm, Baker received a telegram from President Woodrow Wilson, for whom Baker had been a strong supporter. The telegram asked Baker to Washington to become secretary of war. Baker, a pacifist, later recalled, “I had never even played with tin soldiers.” He reluctantly took the job, which wasn’t a very pleasant one. There was deep national division over how prepared the U.S. should be for war. Baker figured he could help out Wilson, be the war secretary for a year and return to Cleveland. The entry of the U.S. into war against Germany in April 1917 changed that, though.

Baker had shortcomings as a secretary of war—he admitted that freely—and as a pacifist, he was often the target of right-wing attacks. In reality, though, he was far more pragmatic than liberal. Though the pace of the nation’s preparation for war was halting and unpredictable, Baker did manage to get an entire army of nearly 4 million soldiers trained, clothed, fed, housed and over to Europe in time to ensure German defeat. It was an enormous task, one that that no American federal administrator had ever come close to undertaking.

Baker spent much of the cold, wet spring of 1918 touring the front in Europe. It was an important trip, because it gave Baker a chance to see first-hand what life was like in the trenches. On March 20, the New York Times reported that on a day when he tested out a common soldier’s gas mask and shrapnel helmet in France, a German shell exploded less than 50 yards from his car. “The shell hit a roadside dugout, digging a big crater,” the paper said. “Mr. Baker wished to stop and ascertain whether there were men in the dugout, but the chauffeur, realizing the danger, opened the throttle and made his best speed until the danger zone was passed.”

When Baker returned from that trip, he seemed to better realize the role the U.S. needed play in winning the war. Soon after that, the war department underwent a shakeup in which the sharp-tongued and no-nonsense Gen. Peyton C. March was made the chief of staff. With March in place, the nation was able to begin sending troops and supplies to the front much more efficiently. This was a boon to the war effort, but it also required that the country increase the president’s right to call an unlimited army and pushed Baker to devise the work-or-fight order—if more men were to be drafted in the American army, more men would be needed to build ships and make equipment to support that army.

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