GIFT OF 
 
General Wood and His Family 
 
 Taken while his two sons were in uniform during the World War. 
 Left to right, standing: Lieut. Osborn Wood, Miss Louise Wood, 
 Captain Leonard Wood, Jr. Sitting: Mrs. Wood and General Wood. 
 
THE LIFE OF 
 
 LEONARD WOOD 
 
 BY 
 JOHN G. HOLME 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 FROM 
 PHOTOGRAPHS 
 
 GARDEN CITY NEW YORK 
 
 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
 
 1920 
 

 COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 
 
 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
 
 ALL BIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF 
 
 TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, 
 
 INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I . EAKLY BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL DAYS . 3 
 
 II . SOLDIER AND SURGEON 1 
 
 III . WITH CLEVELAND AND McKiNLEY . . 27 
 
 IV . COMMANDER OF THE ROUGH RIDERS . 44 
 V . THE RESCUER OP SANTIAGO .... 55 
 
 VI. GOVERNOR AND BUSINESS MANAGER OF 
 
 CUBA 81 
 
 VII . PACIFIER OF THE PHILIPPINES . . . 135 
 
 VIII . CHIEF-OF-STAFF OF THE U. S. ARMY . 153 
 
 IX . THE AWAKENER OF THE NATION . . 177 
 
 X. THE CHAMPION OF LAW AND ORDER . 07 
 
 412100 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 General Wood and His Fanuly . Frontispiece 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 At a Flower Show in New York .... 20 
 
 As a Rough Rider in Cuba, and as Governor- 
 General 116 
 
 In Camp at Pittsburgh 180 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 NEVER since the Civil War have the Ameri 
 can people been in greater need of strong and in 
 telligent leadership than to-day. The period of 
 reconstruction, about which we began to talk soon 
 after we entered the late war, is now upon us with 
 problems more complex and grave than any with 
 which the nation has had to grapple since the days 
 of the secession. The administration, which in 
 the summer of 1914 commanded us to remain 
 "neutral in thought" and two years later sought 
 endorsement under the slogan that it had "kept 
 us out of war," subsequently informed us that this 
 world would be a different and a better one after it 
 had been made "safe for democracy." 
 
 This is indeed a different world from that of a 
 few years ago, but most of us are convinced that, 
 whatever its faults, we at least live in the best part 
 thereof. Behind that conviction, however, arises 
 an apprehension, born of events during the past 
 year, of impending attacks on the most cherished 
 institutions of our republic. When law and order 
 are defied, when the authority of the central 
 
 vii 
 
viii Introduction 
 
 government is challenged by organized groups 
 whose avowed aim is to establish internationalism 
 by the destruction of nationalism, it becomes easy 
 to understand why the American people at this 
 time are looking anxiously toward their future 
 security and displaying profound interest in that 
 group of national leaders from which most prob 
 ably will be chosen the next President of the 
 United States. The late war, the greatest in 
 history, has left the world a legacy of social and 
 economic problems more grave and troublesome 
 than the problems of any other period in modern 
 times. It will devolve on the next administra 
 tion to solve at least some of these problems and 
 to shape a wise policy which will lead to the solu 
 tion of others. 
 
 Hundreds of millions of men and women in 
 America and in Europe have been released from a 
 titanic struggle which cost countless sacrifices in 
 blood and treasure. These millions are now re 
 covering from the shock of battle. They are 
 trying to find their peace balance. It is difficult 
 work, for the world is still economically upset, 
 and socially in a state of turmoil. Since that 
 memorable day in November a year ago, when 
 Prussian autocracy surrendered, giving up its 
 pretentious for world dominion, literally thousands 
 of remedies have been offered for the war ills of 
 
Introduction ix 
 
 civilization. It seems to the writer that not a 
 single one of these suggested remedies can equal 
 the simple and homely formula spoken before an 
 audience in Passaic, New Jersey, on the evening of 
 January 11, 1920. The speaker wore the khaki 
 uniform of an American army officer. His bron 
 zed, kindly face was deeply lined with furrows and 
 his voice rang with emotion as he said: 
 
 "The watchword of this country to-day should 
 be * Steady and the slogan should be Law and 
 Order. Hold on to the things that made us what 
 we are. Stand for government under the Con 
 stitution. Stand for the homely, plain things 
 which really lie at the foundation of our govern 
 ment. We want to stand with our feet squarely 
 on the earth, our eye on God, our ideals high but 
 steady." 
 
 The speaker was Major-General Leonard Wood, 
 and it seems to me that in the above words he 
 came nearer to giving voice to the thoughts that 
 lie closer to the heart of the American nation 
 to-day than the whole host of political prophets 
 who have addressed us during the past year. 
 
 I believe there is no man in this great land who 
 can point to a career richer in service to his fellow- 
 men than this doctor-soldier-administrator. He 
 has devoted his whole life to his country in a pro 
 fession that is not popular, except in time of war. 
 
x Introduction 
 
 And yet his great deeds, bestowing happiness on 
 alien peoples and undying honour on his own 
 country, have been performed in the capacity of 
 a civil administrator, a business executive. There 
 is no parallel to Wood s Cuban labours. Wood s 
 record in Cuba forms one of the shining chapters 
 in our national chronicles, one of the fair pages 
 in the history of civilization. When in 1903 
 the University of Pennsylvania conferred on 
 General Wood the honorary degree of LL.D., 
 Dr. Horace Howard Furness said: "Can mortal 
 lips pray for a fairer guerdon in this life than 
 to be able to scatter plenty o er a smiling land 
 and on the cheek where malaria spreads disease 
 bid health to plant the rose ? Or by wise 
 statesmanship to lure again to their peaceful paths 
 traffic and commerce, affrighted by turbulence of 
 war? Or to hear the lisping hum of schools 
 beneath the Northern pine reechoed beneath the 
 waving Southern palm?" 
 
 To what extent this saviour of Cuba became the 
 rescuer of the United States during the late war 
 we of the present generation may never be able to 
 determine. What we do know is that he stirred 
 the soul of America by his courage and patriotism 
 when other leaders of our country maintained and 
 enjoined on us a craven silence. How many 
 parents of this land owe the lives of their sons to 
 
Introduction xi 
 
 the wise preparedness labour of General Wood? 
 We can only speculate on the answer, and recall 
 the remark of General "Lighthorse Harry" Lee: 
 "Convinced as I am that the government is the 
 murderer of its citizens which sends them to the 
 field uninformed and untaught I cannot withhold 
 my denunciations of its wickedness and folly." 
 
 "I am not astonished at your ability to recruit 
 and train 4,000,000 troops in nineteen months," 
 said a French officer detailed to one of our Na 
 tional Army camps, "but your ability to train the 
 officers for these troops is miraculous." 
 
 Wood was the precursor of that miracle. His 
 Plattsburgh camps became the model of our 
 officers training camps, and the model was in 
 perfect working order a year before we entered the 
 war. Leonard Wood has achieved a high distinc 
 tion as an army officer, and yet a more unmilita- 
 aristic, more democratic American you cannot 
 find among the hundred million inhabitants of this 
 country. 
 
 The writer of this brief outline of the life and 
 works of Leonard Wood is by profession a news 
 paper man who has had wide experience meeting 
 the prominent men of the United States, and has 
 an unusual ability in analyzing and estimating 
 character. He has sought my advice and assist- 
 
xii Introduction 
 
 ance in the compilation of this book; and being 
 acquainted with both the subject and the author, 
 I have read the manuscript with much interest 
 and believe the book will be of great value to any 
 reader. Of the career of Leonard Wood, the late 
 Theodore Roosevelt said, when writing in The 
 Outlook in 1910, at the time that Wood was pro 
 moted to the post of Chief of the General Staff of 
 the U. S. Army: "His career has been astonishing, 
 and it has been due purely to his own striking 
 qualifications and striking achievements." 
 
 FREDERICK MOORE. 
 New York, February 27, 1920. 
 
THE LIFE OF 
 LEONARD WOOD 
 
THE LIFE OF 
 
 LEONARD WOOD 
 
 i 
 
 EARLY BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL DAYS 
 
 A LITTLE more than twenty years ago the 
 exact date was December 12, 1899 Leonard 
 Wood, a Major-General of volunteers, received 
 the oddest, and at least in some respects the most 
 interesting, order that any government has ever 
 issued to an army officer. 
 
 He was appointed Military Governor of an 
 island which had for four hundred years been a 
 colonial dependency of one of the most reactionary 
 monarchies on the face of the globe, and ordered to 
 train its million and a half inhabitants for demo 
 cratic self-government, and do the job as quickly 
 as he could and then come home. The appoint 
 ment made him absolute ruler over the island and 
 its inhabitants. He became, in fact, if not in 
 name, a monarch. His job was to build and re- 
 
 s 
 
4 /:;.; ;2 r fe Life. of Leonard Wood 
 
 build and repair all the civil institutions of the 
 island, such as the courts, the customs and postal 
 departments, the school system, the electoral 
 system, and to supervise and aid the writing of a 
 constitution. Wood finished the job in two years 
 and a half and came home. 
 
 Two years before receiving this appointment 
 to rehabilitate Cuba and set her on her own in 
 dependent feet, Wood was an obscure army sur 
 geon with the rank of a captain. Long before he 
 had finished with Cuba he was an international 
 figure. Wlien he came home, he was assigned to a 
 somewhat minor post in the Philippines. After 
 that he became Chief -of -Staff in Washington. 
 Then he was shifted from one post to another 
 such as any General might fill. To-day he is 
 commander of the Central Department with head 
 quarters in the half -empty War Department build 
 ing in Chicago, a few blocks north of the Chicago 
 River; and he is more talked about throughout 
 this country than when he was sole master of 
 the island of Cuba. 
 
 If he had followed the ordinary rules, his public 
 demise should have taken place about the time he 
 embarked for the Philippines to take a subordinate 
 post in the islands. However, he did the Philippine 
 job so well that he was made Chief -of -Staff of 
 the United States Army. But thereafter a decent 
 
Early Boyhood and School Days 5 
 
 permanent burial in one of our quiet army bureaus 
 might have been expected under a Democratic 
 regime, especially for a man who had been so 
 closely identified with the preceding Republican 
 administration. Instead of that Wood is to-day 
 the leading candidate for the Republican party s 
 nomination for President of the United States. 
 
 He was not to be permitted to take an active part 
 overseas in the late war. Nevertheless, like all 
 our general officers in charge of troop training 
 camps at home, he had to be sent to Europe for an 
 inspection of the battlefields. A French artillery 
 piece exploded, killing several officers in his party 
 and severely wounding General Wood. At the 
 close of the war, Wood was one of the very few 
 American generals entitled to wear a wound 
 stripe. 
 
 General Wood has never kept quiet in any job 
 he has ever held in the United States Army during 
 his thirty-five years of active service. When there 
 was work to do, he has done it, from chasing bad 
 Indians all over our great Southwest back in the 
 eighties and over a good slice of Mexico s north 
 west, to teaching Cuba how to rule herself. When 
 he had nothing to do but run one of our army 
 departments, which practically run themselves, 
 and draw his army salary, he would pick up odd 
 jobs such as preaching preparedness for the late 
 
6 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 war, and organizing camps for the training of 
 officers. He has been a breeder of action just like 
 his closest friend, the late Theodore Roosevelt. 
 By keeping in such exercise, he has persistently 
 declined to outlive the great reputation he made 
 in Cuba. Otherwise various Republican State 
 organizations would not be endorsing him for 
 presidential candidate at the present time. 
 
 Wood is fifty-nine years old, strong, and in 
 splendid physical condition. He stands about 
 five feet ten or eleven inches, and weighs close to 
 two hundred pounds t He is a powerfully built man 
 with the bulging muscles of one who has done 
 manual work. If he were in civilian clothes, you 
 might take him for a sea captain for he walks with 
 an exaggerated rolling gait rather than a limp, the 
 result of an accident which impaired his left leg 
 some years ago. His voice is deep, with splendid 
 carrying qualities, and yet it is pleasant, even 
 gentle. There is utterly nothing of military fuss or 
 pomp about this man who has been in uniform 
 most of his life. But he carries a distinct air of 
 authority, the natural attribute of a veteran army 
 officer. In speech he is always direct and forceful, 
 sometimes picturesque. His eyes are blue arid his 
 hair is of a neutral light colour and looks as if the 
 sun, rather than age, had faded it. His face is lined 
 with deep furrows, the brand that the sun and wind 
 
Early Boyhood and School Days 7 
 
 of the Southwest, where he spent ten years of his 
 early army life, stamp on the countenances of the 
 farmers and rangers of that region. 
 
 He is a New Englander by birth, and he can 
 trace his genealogy through a line of farmers, 
 merchants, soldiers, sailors, and doctors, back to 
 the earliest New England Colonial days. On his 
 paternal side he is descended from Peregrine 
 White, the first white child born in Plymouth 
 colony, whose parents came over on the May 
 flower. The New England stock from which Gen 
 eral Wood is descended has mixed democracy in 
 politics with its religion for four hundred years, 
 and it has not been accustomed to compromise 
 with its convictions in either politics or religion. 
 
 Recently a New England admirer of General 
 Wood sent him his genealogical table, tracing his 
 ancestry on both his paternal and maternal sides 
 back to the first appearance of his various fore 
 bears on American soil. The document is in 
 teresting in the fact that nearly all the branches 
 of his family seem to have settled in this country 
 before the Revolution; with rare exceptions the 
 names indicate Anglo-Saxon origin. A few names 
 which might be Irish or Welsh appear in the table, 
 and one French name, Jacques, probably French- 
 Canadian. But the most prevalent names are 
 those of Wood, Hagar, Bragg, Boynton, Nixon, 
 
8 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 Reed, Thompson, White, Fiske, Flagg, Pierce, 
 Cutler, and Berry. One of his ancestors on his 
 mother s side, Brigadier-General John Nixon, had 
 a distinguished record in the War of the Revolu 
 tion, commanding a company at Lexington, a 
 regiment at Bunker Hill, and a brigade at Saratoga. 
 
 Names gather their traditions and character 
 and they need not acquire fame or distinction 
 before so doing. These old New England names 
 borne by General Wood s grandsires suggest 
 such decent human careers as built the founda 
 tion of our Republic sailors, farmers, village 
 storekeepers, and merchants the stock from which 
 our country drew its strength in time of trouble, 
 the stock which supplied the pioneers of the West. 
 
 Leonard Wood was born in Winchester, New 
 Hampshire, on October 9, 1860, the son of Dr. 
 Charles Jewett Wood and Caroline Hager Wood. 
 When Leonard was a few months old the family 
 moved to Massachusetts, where the father re 
 sponded to Lincoln s first call for volunteers. He 
 served in the Forty-second Massachusetts regi 
 ment for the greater part of the Civil War, and was 
 invalided home shortly before peace was restored. 
 When the son was eight years old, Dr. Wood 
 settled in Pocasset on Cape Cod, and in this barren 
 but picturesque region Leonard Wood grew to 
 early manhood. There seems to have been noth- 
 
Early Boyhood and School Days 9 
 
 ing especially remarkable about his boyhood or 
 early youth. 
 
 He attended the village school in Pocasset, and 
 a boyhood friend described him as a stocky, well- 
 built lad with blue eyes and hair of the colour of 
 caulking-tow. He was shy, silent, and sensitive. 
 He showed in school a fondness for the languages 
 and history, but he disliked mathematics. He 
 read mostly books on travel, history, and adven 
 ture with an occasional novel. 
 
 Like most Cape Cod boys, he was an excellent 
 sailor and swimmer. He was an out-of-door boy 
 as he has always been an out-of-door man. In 
 cidentally, it may be mentioned that it is the out- 
 of-door boy and man who is physically best fitted 
 to perform the most gruelling indoor work. The 
 days young Wood spent exploring the hills of Cape 
 Cod and sailing on Cape Cod Bay and Buzzards 
 Bay were days well spent for himself and his coun 
 try. These days built up a body which later 
 fought malaria, yellow fever, and typhoid in the 
 pest holes of Cuba, and won out. 
 
 There never was a surplus of wealth in the Wood 
 family, and Leonard Wood had to plan early in 
 life to take care of himself. He attended Middle- 
 boro Academy, where he made more of a reputa 
 tion as an athlete than student, and yet he kept 
 un with his class, never neglecting his studies; 
 
10 Tlie Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 but when it came to cross-country running, foot 
 ball, and other sports, he entered into his work with 
 a zest which set him apart from his fellow students. 
 When he finished at Middleboro, he was famous as 
 a cross-country runner. 
 
 He was now face to face with the problem of 
 choosing a career. He had a deep longing for the 
 navy, but in those days the chances for advance 
 ment in the navy were poor. He got in 
 touch with an Arctic expedition and went so far 
 as to purchase equipment for the northern journey. 
 Then came a council of war between father and 
 son. The father did not seem to think much of 
 the Arctics as a field of endeavour for a young 
 man, especially as there were plenty of openings 
 in the United States for any ambitious youth. He 
 advised his son to take up his own profession, that 
 of medicine, with the result that Leonard Wood 
 entered the Harvard University Medical School 
 in 1880 and graduated in 1884. 
 
 "I had a general notion that I wanted to be of 
 some service to my country," said General Wood 
 when asked about his boyhood ambition. "I also 
 wanted to see something of my country besides the 
 East. When I found that I could not get into the 
 navy, I determined to try the army." 
 
 Wood made his own way through college, partly 
 by the aid of a scholarship, but principally by 
 
Early Boyhood and School Days 11 
 
 tutoring and doing other odd jobs. What with 
 attending to his studies and making his own living, 
 he was too busy to devote much attention to 
 athletics, and most of his football playing was done 
 in later years at army posts. Football has always 
 been his favourite game, and he played it whenever 
 he had a chance until he was nearly forty years 
 old. He would have kept on with it but for the 
 fact that his duties took him to Cuba and the 
 Philippines, and football is not a game for the 
 tropics. 
 
 After his graduation from Harvard he served 
 an internship in the Boston City Hospital, special 
 izing in surgery. One of his old friends described 
 Wood as having been a shy and silent young man 
 about this time, "a regular hog for work," who 
 could always be depended on to attend to his 
 patients with the utmost care. He opened an 
 office in the poorer section of Boston, but as most 
 of his practice was city charity work, it was not 
 especially remunerative. 
 
SOLDIER AND SURGEON 
 
 AFTER a few months of general practice Wood 
 went to New York City and took the examination 
 for a surgeon in the United States Army with fifty- 
 nine other young physicians. He surprised him 
 self by passing second on the list. There was no 
 immediate vacancy in the army Medical Corps. 
 However, there was Indian fighting cropping out 
 in the Southwest, and on June 5, 1885, Wood 
 received his appointment as assistant surgeon. 
 There was some dispute about the matter of his 
 rank and he was asked if he would enter the service 
 as a contract surgeon. 
 
 "Yes, if I can go \Vest and see active service." 
 
 He was assured that he would see all the active 
 service that he wanted, and during the next few 
 years he realized that this was no idle talk. 
 
 He was ordered to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, 
 where General Crook was in command of the opera 
 tions against the Apaches, and assigned to Whipple 
 Barracks under the command of Captain Henry 
 
 12 
 
Soldier and Surgeon 13 
 
 W. Lawton, already a noted Indian fighter. Law- 
 ton later won great fame as commander in Cuba 
 and the Philippines. Leonard Wood reached 
 Whipple Barracks late in the afternoon of a broil 
 ing Fourth of July. There was an old-fashioned 
 Independence Day celebration in full swing at 
 the post. Soldiers, cowpunchers, frontiersmen, 
 and half-breed Indians were observing the day 
 in true Western style with liquor and gunpowder. 
 The young New Englander received a characteris 
 tic greeting from Captain Lawton, who looked him 
 over somewhat critically, and said: 
 
 "What in hell are you doing out here?" 
 "I want to get into the line as soon as possible." 
 This was the sort of an answer that appealed 
 to Lawton, who at once changed his attitude and 
 said: 
 
 "Come along and I ll see what I can do to help 
 you." 
 
 This help consisted in giving the new army doc 
 tor an immediate chance to see early action. There 
 was a detachment about to be sent out on an In 
 dian chase, and Wood was given orders to ac 
 company the troops. The column started off 
 early the next morning, Wood being presented 
 with an unassigned horse. " A very special horse," 
 the sergeant remarked as he handed the reins to 
 the tenderfoot. 
 
14 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 It was indeed something of "a special horse" as 
 its rider soon discovered. It was half -broke and 
 ill-tempered to boot. Even the veteran troopers 
 had dodged it because of its vicious gait. It 
 proved, in fact, to be nothing less than an "out 
 law" and the young Easterner was not an ex 
 perienced horseman. 
 
 There was not a man in the outfit that did not 
 expect Wood to be thrown; at least the troopers 
 were certain he would fall back after an hour or 
 so. But Leonard Wood had already acquired the 
 habit which has stuck to him throughout his life, 
 that of finishing any job he undertook to do. He 
 rode his "outlaw" thirty-five miles the first day, 
 and he was not thrown. During the next five 
 days he averaged eighteen hours a day in the 
 saddle or marching, and this over the roughest 
 country in Arizona and in the blistering heat of 
 midsummer. It was a tough test, even for 
 the veterans. Wood was scorched and blistered, 
 but he never thought of giving up, and his temper 
 was not even spoiled. He smiled and kept up 
 with the old troopers. He never got the oppor 
 tunity to rest and mend, and in the language of 
 the army he "healed in the saddle." Within a 
 few weeks he was able to out-ride and out-march 
 many of Captain Lawton s veterans. 
 
 It had been Leonard Wood s good fortune to 
 
Soldier and Surgeon 15 
 
 join Captain Lawton just at the beginning of what 
 developed into the last long campaign of the war 
 with the Apaches who were under the able leader 
 ship of the notorious Geronimo. There was not 
 much actual fighting. Geronimo was by far too 
 shrewd a commander to be drawn into a pitched 
 battle. He and his "human tigers" waged war 
 by assassination. They would raid white settle 
 ments and Indian reservations alike, kill white 
 and red alike, round up the live stock, and flee 
 to the mountains. Their depredations extended 
 into Mexico, and the warfare into which Wood was 
 plunged took him over wild, rough country on 
 both sides of the line. Three months after he 
 joined Lawton s command he was leading small 
 picked forces whose officers had broken under 
 the strain. He was rapidly establishing a reputa 
 tion among the old troopers for his remarkable 
 physical strength and endurance, qualities which 
 enabled him not only to make good as an Indian 
 fighter, but made it possible for him later in life to 
 stand up under the terribly unhealthful conditions 
 in Cuba and the Philippines. 
 
 The campaign which resulted in Geronimo s 
 capture lasted for more than fourteen months. 
 During most of this time the young army doctor 
 was on the trail. 
 
 The pursuit led over the roughest and wildest 
 
16 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 sections of our Southwest, and into the Mexican 
 states of Sonora and Chihuahua. The course 
 taken by the Indians lay to the west of that fol 
 lowed by General Pershing when he chased Pancho 
 Villa across the border. General Nelson A. Miles 
 had succeeded General Crook, and being one of 
 the greatest Indian fighters the country ever 
 produced, he had definite ideas on conducting a 
 campaign against the red men. His formula was 
 to follow the Indians night and day wherever they 
 went, no matter how rough the country, and never 
 to give them any rest until they were killed or 
 captured. 
 
 There could be but one outcome to the unequal 
 struggle. The tragic doom of the red man was 
 sealed the moment he determined to pit his brute 
 power against the brain power of the white man. 
 However, in the campaign against Geronimo s 
 Apaches, the odds were often in favour of the 
 Indians; and here the story of all our Indian wars, 
 as well as the story of most wars between civilized 
 men and savages, was repeated. The eventual 
 outcome was never in doubt, though the outcome 
 of each individual engagement or skirmish was 
 always doubtful. Our soldiers had to fight the 
 Apaches in their own natural environment, under 
 conditions most favourable to them. The Apaches 
 were masters of the wilderness. They could live 
 
Soldier and Surgeon 17 
 
 off the land wherever they went, subsist on roots, 
 cactus, mice, rabbits, woodchucks, and other 
 rodents when they couldn t steal cattle. They 
 knew all the hiding places in the unsettled regions 
 of the great Southwest. They could travel at 
 remarkable speed on horseback or on foot, being 
 unimpeded by baggage or commissary stores. 
 They would steal horses, ride them to death, then 
 eat them. 
 
 To deal with these savages on anything ap 
 proaching equal terms, the white soldiers had to 
 become masters of the wilderness. They, too, had 
 to toughen their bodies until they were equal in 
 endurance to the red men. They had to accustom 
 themselves to long forays, and dispense with their 
 pack-trains carrying food supplies. They might 
 in time equal the Indians in their knowledge of 
 the country. They could never hope to develop 
 the red man s keen natural sense of sight and smell 
 and hearing, or his animal-like ability to divine the 
 proximity of a foe. 
 
 When Leonard Wood abandoned his civil career 
 and joined the army, our great Western country 
 was in that stage of early development which of 
 fered the most alluring prospects for young men 
 of his professional training and natural ability. 
 Horace Greeley s famous slogan, "Go West, young 
 man, and grow up with the country," was still as 
 
18 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 fresh as the day it was uttered. It was still shap 
 ing the careers of thousands of enterprising young 
 Easterners. Each west-bound train, one might 
 say, carried its Greeley cargo of young men and 
 high hopes. Never was there a movement of 
 immigration destined for greater success than that 
 which moved across the Mississippi in the seventies 
 and eighties. Leonard Wood could have satisfied 
 his desire to see the West by moving into one of the 
 booming Western cities and hanging out his shingle. 
 With the prestige which a diploma from one of 
 the country s foremost educational institutions 
 gave him, his professional success and material 
 prosperity were virtually assured. 
 
 One could readily understand how a reckless 
 youngster, spoiling for the want of action, whose 
 mind was filled with the adventures of the buffalo 
 hunt, the mining field, and the Indian chase, would 
 go into the army or seek the frontiers to satisfy his 
 desires. But Wood was not of that type. He was 
 a thoughtful, quite young man on whom the im 
 press of our Eastern culture had indelibly left its 
 mark. It was unusual in the extreme not only to 
 find a man of his stamp along the frontier, but to 
 find him holding his own in the physical tests which 
 the life of the frontier demanded. And Leonard 
 Wood had entered on this life with a serious pur 
 pose, that of serving his country while satisfying 
 
Soldier and Surgeon 19 
 
 his own youthful craving for adventure and the 
 wide, open spaces. 
 
 Geronimo and his band would no doubt have 
 escaped had they been content to remain in the 
 fastnesses of Sonora and Chihuahua in the fall of 
 1885. But they were on the war path. In the 
 spring of 1886 they returned to the north, in 
 vading the United States and committing in 
 numerable atrocities. Now began the great chase 
 which was to take Captain Lawton and his picked 
 force of troopers and Indian scouts more than two 
 thousand miles. It was in this brief but terrible 
 campaign that Wood won his laurels as an Indian 
 fighter. He had by this time been commissioned 
 first lieutenant. Early in the pursuit he covered 
 a distance of one hundred and thirty -six miles in 
 thirty-six hours on foot and on horseback. On 
 another occasion, after a day s march of twenty- 
 five miles with his troopers and Indian scouts, 
 he rode seventy-four miles during the night, 
 carrying dispatches, and on the following day 
 he marched thirty miles. A good share of the 
 time the chase led over a desert country, and it 
 was not uncommon for the pursuers to be without 
 water for from eighteen to twenty -four hours. 
 The only consolation that the white men had was 
 that the Apaches were suffering no less. They 
 knew from unmistakable signs that the end was 
 
20 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 in sight. The Apaches had ceased to rob and mur 
 der, a sure indication that they were contemplating 
 surrender. 
 
 The troopers were in fact wearing out the In j 
 dians. It was the Fourth Cavalry, Lawton s com 
 mand, that did most of the chasing and fighting. 
 Members of this troop said that before Geronimo 
 was captured, Wood was known as one of the few 
 white men of the Southwest who could ride, run, 
 or walk down an Apache. Wood and his men 
 traversed on foot and on horseback the mountains 
 and deserts of New Mexico and Arizona where 
 no white man had ever been before. They would 
 flush the Apaches, scatter them, drive them away 
 from their food stores and stolen cattle, thus 
 following the Miles formula of never giving the 
 red men rest. 
 
 Finally came the report that Geronimo wished 
 to open communications. Lieutenant Gate wood 
 was sent by Captain Lawton accompanied by two 
 friendly Apaches into the hostile camps to demand 
 capitulation. This Geronimo refused to do saying 
 that he would only talk with "the officer who had 
 followed them all summer," namely, Lawton. 
 Shortly afterward satisfactory arrangements were 
 made for a formal surrender of Geronimo and his 
 hostile tribe to General Miles, Lawton acting as an 
 intermediary. 
 
Paul Thompson 
 
 At a Flower Show in New York 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt, Leonard Wood, and Arthur Woods, formerly 
 Police Commissioner of New York City 
 
Soldier and Surgeon 21 
 
 The preliminary negotiations took place near 
 Fronteraz, a little hamlet south of the border in the 
 State of Sonora. It was agreed that the troops 
 and the Indians should move northward into the 
 United States, and as a mark of good faith, Cap 
 tain Lawton, Lieutenant Wood, and two other 
 officers were to travel with them. The two 
 columns became separated through a mistake in 
 orders and contact was lost between the American 
 troops and the Indians. Captain Lawton had 
 to leave the Apaches in search of his troops. Thus 
 Wood and his two brother officers were practically 
 left as hostages with the Indians. 
 
 Their position at first seemed precarious, to say 
 the least. Only a few weeks before the reds 
 had been murdering every white person who came 
 within then* reach. Writing of this incident, 
 General Wood says: 
 
 Instead of taking advantage of our position, they 
 assured us that while we were in their camp it was our 
 camp, and that as we had never lied to them they were 
 going to keep faith with us. They gave us the best 
 they had to eat and treated us as well as we could wish 
 in every way. Just before giving us these assurances, 
 Geronimo came to me and asked to see my rifle. It 
 was a Hotchkiss and he had never seen its mechanism. 
 When he asked me for the gun and some ammunition, 
 I must confess I felt a little nervous, for I thought it 
 might be a device to get hold of one of our weapons. 
 
22 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 I made no objection, however, but let him have it, 
 showed him how to use it, and he fired at a mark, just 
 missing one of his own men, which he regarded as a 
 great joke, rolling on the ground, laughing heartily and 
 saying, "good gun." 
 
 Late the next afternoon we came up with our com 
 mand, and we then proceeded toward the boundary 
 line. The Indians were very watchful, and when we 
 came near any of our troops we found the Indians were 
 always aware of their presence before we knew of it 
 ourselves. 
 
 After a northward march of eleven days the 
 two columns came to a halt and a formal sur 
 render took place in Skelton Canon. Geronimo 
 spoke no English and the conversation between 
 him and General Miles was carried on through an 
 interpreter. 
 
 "General Miles wishes to assure you that he is 
 your friend," said the interpreter, addressing 
 Geronimo. 
 
 "I ve never seen him, but I have been in need 
 of friends," replied Geronimo, who was gifted with 
 a sense of humour. "If he is my friend, why has 
 he not been with me?" 
 
 Everybody laughed at the Apache leader s joke, 
 and the negotiations proceeded through the 
 mediumship of the interpreter and the eloquent 
 sign language of which General Miles was a mas 
 ter. Contrary to all expectations, the death 
 
Soldier and Surgeon 23 
 
 penalty was not imposed on Geronimo or Natchez 
 or any of the other Apache leaders. In his own 
 dictated story, published many years later, and 
 dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt, then President 
 of the United States, Geronimo tells of the peace 
 negotiations and mentions that Dr. Wood was one 
 of the men who came into his camp to deal with 
 him. 
 
 Although at this time he was only a junior officer 
 with very limited army experience, Leonard Wood 
 immediately drew the attention of General Miles, 
 who says in his published memoirs: 
 
 I also found at Fort Huachuca another splendid type 
 of American manhood, Captain Leonard Wood, As 
 sistant Surgeon, United States Army. He was a young 
 officer, age twenty-four, a native of Massachusetts, a 
 graduate of Harvard, a fair-haired, blue-eyed young 
 man of great intelligence, sterling, manly qualities and 
 resolute spirit. He was also perhaps as fine a specimen 
 of physical strength and endurance as could easily be 
 found. 
 
 . . . His services and observations and example were 
 most commendable and valuable, and added much 
 to the physical success of the enterprise. 
 
 At the time he wrote, Wood had won a captain s 
 commission, but he was only a first lieutenant 
 when General Miles met him at Fort Huachuca. 
 
24 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 Captain Lawton, in his official report of the cam 
 paign, says: 
 
 No officer of infantry having been sent with the de 
 tachment. . . . Assistant Surgeon Wood was, at 
 his own request, given command of the infantry. The 
 work during June having been done by the cavalry, they 
 were too much exhausted to be used again without rest, 
 and they were left in camp at Oposura to recuperate. 
 
 During the short campaign, the suffering was in 
 tense. The country was indescribably rough, and the 
 weather swelteringly hot, with heavy rains for day or 
 night. The endurance of the men was tried to the 
 utmost limit. Disabilities resulting from excessive 
 fatigue reduced the infantry to fourteen men, and as 
 they were worn out and without shoes when the new 
 supplies reached me July 29th, they were returned to 
 the supply camp for rest. . . . Heavy rains having 
 set in, the trail of the hostiles, who were all on foot, was 
 entirely obliterated. 
 
 I desire particularly to invite the attention of the 
 Department Commander to Assistant Surgeon Leonard 
 Wood, the only officer who has been with me through 
 the whole campaign. His courage, energy, and loyal 
 support during the whole time; his encouraging ex 
 ample to the command when work was the hardest and 
 prospects darkest; his thorough confidence and belief 
 in the final success of the expedition, and his untiring 
 efforts to make it so, have placed me under obligations 
 so great that I cannot even express them. 
 
 There have been few men in the United States 
 Army whose standards of soldierly conduct were 
 
Soldier and Surgeon 25 
 
 higher than those of General Lawton, few officers 
 whose commendations were more highly prized. 
 This rough old warrior, like Wood, was a product 
 of Harvard. Between the two there sprang up an 
 intimate friendship which lasted until the death of 
 General Lawton in the Philippines. It was of 
 inestimable value to Wood to be associated with 
 such a man in his early career. Although they 
 differed greatly in temperament, both were born 
 leaders, both soldiers by nature. Wood learned 
 much of military art from him and of the still more 
 complex and difficult art of handling men of all 
 types under trying conditions. 
 
 It is impossible not to be impressed by the praise 
 bestowed on the young medical officer, who had 
 come into the army totally without military train 
 ing, and who, within a few weeks, had displayed 
 such striking qualities of leadership, and had so 
 quickly mastered the essentials of military science, 
 that he was entrusted with command of troops in a 
 difficult campaign. He had come from the most 
 densely populated and the most cultivated section 
 of the country into a howling wilderness, there to 
 join in a life-and-death struggle waged between 
 American troopers, who were by no means a set of 
 Sunday-school boys, and a band of Apaches, 
 whose name has been perpetuated in our and other 
 languages as an epithet descriptive of savage 
 
26 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 brutality. He won distinction in the conflict 
 which tested not only personal bravery, but the 
 highest qualities of manhood. 
 
 In March, 1898, nearly twelve years after the 
 Geronimo campaign, Leonard Wood was awarded 
 the Congressional Medal of Honour, then, as now, 
 the highest military decoration within the gift of 
 the nation. It was presented "for distinguished 
 conduct in the campaign against the Apache In 
 dians in 1886 while serving as medical and line 
 officer of Captain Lawton s expedition." 
 
Ill 
 
 WITH CLEVELAND AND McKiNLEY 
 
 FOLLOWING the surrender of Geronimo and 
 his band of Apaches, Leonard Wood found time 
 to study the intricate technical side of military 
 science to which he devoted himself with character 
 istic energy. He had already learned how to get 
 the maximum amount of work out of himself by 
 keeping his body in top-notch physical condition. 
 This work knowledge he applied to his perusal of 
 standard works on military technique and military 
 organization and to the practical troop maneuvers 
 in the field. 
 
 During the Indian campaign he had become 
 greatly interested in the heliograph system of 
 signalling which General Miles was developing. 
 To expand his signalling system, General Miles 
 ordered a survey of the State of Arizona; and be 
 cause of the intelligent interest which Wood had 
 displayed in this work, Miles made him one of his 
 chief assistants. The survey consumed several 
 months, and when it was accomplished Wood 
 
 27 
 
28 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 probably had a more thorough knowledge of 
 Arizona than had any other army officer. 
 
 In 1889 Wood was assigned to army head 
 quarters in Los Angeles as one of the staff surgeons. 
 It promised to be an uneventful assignment, but 
 Wood did not find it so. He continued to devote 
 himself to his military studies, and incidentally to 
 engage in his favourite pastime, football. 
 
 Up to this time he had served constantly as an 
 army surgeon. His work as line officer in the 
 Indian campaign and on the surveying expedition 
 as well as his study of military science, was purely 
 voluntary. The fact that he was known as a 
 resourceful surgeon caused General Miles to 
 summon him to his bedside after a serious ac 
 cident. The General s horse had fallen with him, 
 crushing his leg. The most skillful surgeons of 
 Los Angeles attended the distinguished patient 
 and all agreed that an amputation was necessary. 
 
 "The doctors say that they will have to cut off 
 this leg, but they are not going to do it," General 
 Miles said to Wood when he arrived. "I m going 
 to leave it to you. You ll have to save it." 
 
 After a thorough examination of the injured leg 
 Wood announced confidently that there was no 
 necessity for amputation. In a reasonable time 
 General Miles was walking around on two legs, his 
 injury healed. 
 
With Cleveland and McKinlcy 29 
 
 In spite of the severe lessons of the past, scat 
 tered bands of Indians would go out on the war 
 path now and then only to be rounded up by our 
 cavalry after a few weeks. In 1888 another band 
 of Apaches broke out of the reservation. This 
 time the leader was the Apache Kid who endeav 
 oured to duplicate Geronimo s reign of terror in 
 the Southwest. Because of his experience in Indian 
 fighting, Wood was assigned to the Tenth Cavalry 
 which crushed the savages in a campaign lasting 
 only a few months. Wood was then ordered back 
 to California where he served at various posts 
 until 1892, when he was assigned to Fort Mc- 
 Pherson near Atlanta, Georgia. In the year pre 
 vious he had been promoted to the rank of captain. 
 
 It was at Fort McPherson that Leonard Wood 
 won his greatest reputation as a football player. 
 For two years he was captain and coach of the 
 Georgia Institute of Technology team, losing but 
 one game. At that time the rigid inter-scholastic 
 , rules which now govern the sport had not been 
 adopted, and no objection was found against the 
 appearance on the gridiron of the husky, middle- 
 aged army officer who could buck the line or shoot 
 around an end with the impetus and speed of an 
 undergraduate of eighteen. 
 
 There is an incident told by one of his fellow 
 football players which illustrates Wood s Spartan 
 
30 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 courage and recalls the tale of old "Oom" Paul 
 Kruger, the late president of the Transvaal, who 
 is credited with having pulled out one of his own 
 molars which was aching. One day in a football 
 scrimmage Wood received a deep cut over one eye. 
 He dressed the wound hastily himself and con 
 tinued playing. After the game he returned to his 
 office, sterilized the wound, and standing in front 
 of his mirror, took four stitches in it. 
 
 During the time of his service in the West he 
 had met Miss Louise A. Condit Smith, a niece 
 of Chief Justice Field of the Supreme Court. They 
 were married after a brief courtship in 1890. Their 
 union has been a very happy one and has been 
 blessed by three children, two boys and one girl, ( 
 now grown up to manhood and womanhood. Mrs. 
 Wood shared her husband s devotion to outdoor 
 )life and the simplicity of his tastes. Both of the 
 sons served in the late war. As captain of in 
 fantry, Leonard Wood, Jr., was more successful 
 than his father in getting over seas to fight in the 
 war for democracy. On being discharged from the 
 army, he entered the oil business in Texas in which 
 he is still engaged. Osborne C. W r ood, the second 
 son, a member of the class of 1920 of Harvard, 
 left his studies shortly after war was declared 
 and enlisted as a private. He won his commission 
 but was not called upon for overseas duty. At 
 
With Cleveland and McKinley 31 
 
 this writing he is still on active duty. Louise 
 Wood, born in Havana, Cuba, while her father 
 was Governor-General of the island, is attending 
 school in the East. 
 
 As is generally the case with men of ambition 
 and initiative, married life brought co Leonard 
 Wood a sharp sense of family duties and respon 
 sibilities. Life at the army posts in California 
 and Georgia was pleasant. His duties as surgeon 
 were light, and he found ample time to devote 
 himself to his family and to football and other 
 sports. But in the meantime, he was approach 
 ing middle age, the prospects for advancement 
 were meagre, and he felt that he had accomplished 
 little to provide for the future of his family. He 
 was becoming famous in the South as a football 
 player, but when he took stock of himself, as he 
 often did, he could not help realizing that he was 
 marking time just like many of his brother officers. 
 In other words, he was passing through that un 
 pleasant stage which most army and navy officers 
 well know when they are speculating on leaving 
 the service and making a fresh start in some other 
 pursuit offering more activity for their talents and 
 greater financial rewards for their families and 
 themselves. 
 
 "I made up my mind that if nothing happened 
 before I was forty, I would resign," said General 
 
32 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 Wood in discussing this period of his life. "I 
 was still in love with the West, and I was seriously 
 thinking of going in for ranching. I had practi 
 cally decided to become a rancher when the Cuban 
 situation took a turn which made it virtually 
 certain that we would have to interfere sooner or 
 later." 
 
 Even at that, interference in Cuba hung fire so 
 long that Wood, as well as many others who felt 
 deeply that it was our duty to come to the as 
 sistance of the struggling little island, almost gave 
 up the hope that Uncle Sam would don the armour 
 of a knight errant, and challenge the power of 
 Spain. 
 
 When reports from the Klondike, whither thou 
 sands of adventurous young men had flocked 
 to make their fortunes, told of the frightful hard 
 ships which the miners were suffering, Captain 
 Wood felt that he had at last found a job to suit 
 his taste. Here was a chance to combine useful 
 service with all sorts of adventures. He was 
 then stationed in Washington where he had found 
 a man after his own heart, Theodore Roosevelt. 
 On the many long tramps which they took around 
 Washington Wood tried his utmost to induce 
 Roosevelt to join him on a relief expedition to the 
 Klondike to save the miners from disease and 
 starvation. Nothing but Roosevelt s firm belief 
 
With Cleveland and McKinley S3 
 
 that there was a bigger job ahead, where their 
 country would need their services on the battle 
 field, prevented Wood from leaving for the wilder 
 ness of Alaska. 
 
 It was his marriage that led Leonard Wood 
 directly to the great turning point of his career 
 his assignment to Washington in 1895, where he 
 was destined to form the acquaintance and win 
 the close friendship of two of the outstanding 
 figures of American history around the close of 
 the last century President Grover Cleveland 
 and President William McKinley, and of a third 
 man, who was just looming into national prom 
 inence, Theodore Roosevelt. 
 
 Washington, with its social glitter, was most at 
 tractive to a certain type in army and navy offi 
 cialdom. It was an ideal place for officers who 
 were blessed with private fortunes, and whose 
 wives had social aspirations. Captain Wood was 
 inclined to look upon the Capital as a respectable 
 morgue for a man in his position, and Mrs. Wood 
 had no social ambitions, but she had lived much 
 of her life in Washington. Many of her girlhood 
 friends and close relatives resided there. She had 
 always been a great favourite of her distinguished 
 uncle, Mr. Justice Field, and he had often ex 
 pressed the desire that she and her family might 
 be near him in his declining years. 
 
34 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 Captain Wood, who had already begun to think 
 seriously of doffing his uniform for the overalls 
 of a rancher, thought it would make little dif 
 ference whether he spent a year or two in Wash 
 ington before resigning his commission. Life at 
 the national Capital might offer a pleasant diver 
 sion and bring him in contact with interesting 
 figures in public life, and in later years he mighty 
 be able to sketch word pictures of Senator Blank 
 and Congressman Blink for the amusement of his 
 children. 
 
 There was no private fortune on which to draw. 
 Wood had only his captain s salary, and life in 
 the Capital was expensive compared with that 
 at an army post like Fort McPherson. In view of 
 these facts it is doubtful whether he would have 
 accepted the Washington appointment if Mrs. 
 Wood had not been drawn thither by family and 
 friendship ties. His title in Washington was 
 that of Assistant Attending Surgeon. He was 
 the official physician of the Secretary of War 
 and the medical adviser of army officers and their 
 families residing in the Capital. The naval sur 
 geons, attending the President and his family, 
 might call him into consultation if they felt like so 
 doing. 
 
 There was this much to be said for his new post : 
 it gave him as a physician a group of distinguished 
 
With Cleveland and McKinley 35 
 
 clients and brought him into contact with some 
 of the country s leading political figures, even if it 
 gave him no additional emoluments. On the 
 other hand, Wood was thinking of dropping both 
 his professions as soldier and physician. 
 
 It has been said of Cleveland that he picked his 
 friends with great care and dropped them bluntly 
 if they did not measure up to his standards. He 
 was finishing his second term when Wood first 
 met him. Wood at that time was thirty-five 
 years old, hard as nails, physically, his face bronzed 
 by his out-of-door life and exercise. Cleveland 
 received him kindly and it was evident that he 
 liked this stocky, self-reliant army officer, for 
 soon Wood began to receive calls to the White 
 House to attend the Cleveland family. Cleve 
 land found in Wood not only a doctor in whom he 
 had confidence, but a kindred spirit. Here was a 
 man who knew little of politics and less of society, 
 but did know a great deal about shooting and 
 fishing, the President s favourite sports. He liked 
 to chat with Wood about the latter s Western ex 
 periences, and in turn Wood loved to hear the 
 President recall his early career, his political bat 
 tles in New York, and his fishing and hunting 
 adventures. 
 
 Wood was one of a party invited by Cleveland 
 for a cruise off Cape Hatteras shortly after the 
 
36 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 inauguration of President McKinley. It was a 
 delightful vacation. Off duty, Grover Cleveland 
 would drop his official dignity and talk freely of 
 men and politics, and now he was a private citizen 
 once more, and glad to be rid of the burdens of his 
 office. Wood has written the following sketch 
 of Grover Cleveland as he appeared on leaving 
 office: 
 
 I remember very well his words, as he sat down with 
 a sigh of relief, glad that it was all over. He said: "I 
 have had a long talk with President McKinley. He is 
 an honest, sincere, and serious man. I feel that he is 
 going to do his best to give the country a good ad 
 ministration. He impressed me as a man who will have 
 the best interest of the people at heart." 
 
 Then he stopped and said with a sigh: "I envy him 
 to-day only one thing, and that was the presence of 
 his own mother at his inauguration. I would have 
 given anything in the world if my mother could have 
 been at my inauguration," and then, continuing: "I 
 wish him well. He has a hard task," and after a long 
 pause: "But he is a good man and will do his best." 
 
 There was one subject in particular where Cleve 
 land and Wood met on a common ground and 
 that was in their discussion of the region around 
 Buzzards Bay. Here they had both fished and 
 hunted, Wood when he was a boy, and Cleveland, 
 when he was the head of the nation, accompanied 
 
With Cleveland and McKinley 37 
 
 by his old cronies, such as Joe Jefferson, the actor, 
 and others. 
 
 As a rule, military officials are little affected by 
 changes in the national administration, and after 
 McKinley s arrival in the White House Wood 
 found himself occupying relatively the same posi 
 tion that he had held under Cleveland. He be 
 came one of the attending physicians who watched 
 over the invalid wife of President McKinley. As 
 his duties took him daily to the White House, he 
 soon grew to know intimately its new occupants. 
 At the same time, life in Washington began to 
 assume a new and a more tense aspect. The out 
 look in Cuba was growing serious, and Captain 
 Wood was thinking rather less of ranching and 
 more of active service for his country. 
 
 Leonard Wood first met Theodore Roosevelt 
 at a social function given in the Lowndes house in 
 Washington in 1896. Roosevelt was then Assist 
 ant Secretary of the Navy. After a few moments 
 conversation the two discovered that they had 
 just missed each other at Harvard. Roosevelt, 
 two years older than Wood, had graduated in the 
 spring of 1880. Wood had entered in the fall 
 of the same year. Both had succumbed to the 
 Western fever early in their youth, and both had 
 reached middle age with a remarkable similarity 
 of views, retaining a clean, boyish enthusiasm for 
 
38 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 sports, athletic games, and all keen physical 
 exercise, and a boyish admiration for feats of 
 physical strength and prowess. Roosevelt never 
 did outgrow this youthful quality. It was this 
 gift of the gods which all people who knew him 
 loved in him best of all 
 
 They walked home together that night talking 
 of the West, of the clean sports to which both were 
 devoted, and in the course of that evening began 
 a friendship which was to last till the death of 
 Roosevelt. 
 
 "Did you and Roosevelt ever have a scrap?" 
 General Wood was asked at one time by an im 
 pertinent questioner. 
 
 "Never," was the decisive reply. "No, we 
 never had a quarrel. We often disputed. We 
 had our differences, but there never was a break 
 in our relationship. Our friendship was based 
 on our common likes and dislikes. We both 
 loved sports and out-of-door life. Roosevelt had 
 opportunities which I never had for study and 
 travel and exploration. However much I should 
 have liked to have done so, I never could devote 
 myself to the natural sciences as he did. We were 
 in accord in our political views, believing in simple 
 and equal justice to all classes. Both of us felt 
 particularly strongly on the Cuban situation. We 
 felt that it was our duty to free the island from the 
 
With Cleveland and McKinley 39 
 
 outrageous injustice of Spanish rule, and feeling 
 as we did that we should have to intervene sooner 
 or later, both of us did all in our power to urge 
 preparedness for the struggle. 
 
 "There was very little that I could do, but 
 Roosevelt was in a position to do much to prepare 
 the navy for the war and he was not found wanting 
 in his duty." 
 
 The friendship of Roosevelt and Wood has no 
 parallel in the public life of our country. Both 
 were men of great strength of character and con 
 viction, both ardent believers in American de 
 mocracy and institutions, and both possessed that 
 quality of picturesqueness which appealed greatly 
 to the people of this country. They both came 
 from the East, one a New Englander and a de 
 scendant of the people, and the other a New Yorker 
 of the aristocratic Dutch stock on his father s side 
 and of the aristocratic South on his mother s side; 
 and yet they savoured in their speech, their ap 
 pearance, and in their personal and mental habits, 
 of the open Western country. It seems curious 
 that two men who so often proved their qualities 
 of leadership should never clash during the many 
 years of their association. 
 
 The explanation lies in the deep respect each 
 man had for the other. There is an extremely 
 interesting remark of Wood s quoted by members 
 
40 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 of the Harvard Club of New York. Roosevelt 
 and Wood were guests of honour at an informal 
 affair in the club one night after Roosevelt had 
 finished his second term as President. The toast- 
 master introduced Wood as the ex-President s 
 commanding officer in the Spanish-American War. 
 Wood, referring to the days of the Rough Riders, 
 said: 
 
 "President Roosevelt was the most subordinate 
 subordinate I ever had." 
 
 Roosevelt might have said the same of Wood. 
 When he was Commander-in-Chief of the Army 
 and Navy, Wood found no occasion to dispute his 
 authority. 
 
 They took it out on each other with single-sticks, 
 substitutes for broad-swords, with which they 
 fenced; with the boxing gloves, which they often 
 put on; in wrestling matches; football scraps, which 
 they staged with junior army officers and others 
 around the Capital, and in stiff jaunts over the 
 hills and valleys near Washington. The spirit 
 was always one of jest and good humour, but it 
 took a good man to stand up under the blows 
 dealt by Wood s right in a boxing match; and 
 Roosevelt at play was no gentle gamboling lamb. 
 
 They shared vacant lots about Washington with 
 the school youngsters of the city, kicking the foot 
 ball around on autumn afternoons. They made 
 
With Cleveland and McKinley 41 
 
 brave efforts to ski down hills and ravines which 
 barely had enough snow to cover the grass. On 
 many of their rambles about the environs of the 
 city they were accompanied by their sturdy 
 youngsters, for the family ties of both men were 
 very strong. They were so nearly matched hi/ 
 strength that they found an added pleasure hi 
 boxing and wrestling. Later, when Roosevelt: 
 had become President, and Wood famous for his 
 Cuban administration, Washington was inclined 
 to pull long faces over their boxing and wrestling 
 bouts. 
 
 Wood to-day admits that it was largely due to 
 Roosevelt that he remained in Washington. He 
 was bored with the inaction and longed for the 
 West. He stood high in his profession as physi 
 cian and surgeon one of the most honourable of 
 professions, but it so happened that he was not 
 cast in that mould. His nature required more 
 active and strenuous life. Roosevelt was certain 
 that the Cuban situation would soon compel the 
 United States to act, and urged Wood to defer his 
 ranching venture. 
 
 But the President moved cautiously. He had 
 served in the Civil War and knew what war was. 
 The delay was not without its value for Roosevelt 
 and Wood, who had time to mature their plans. 
 Before war was declared by an act of Congress they 
 
42 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 had thought of organizing a volunteer regiment 
 composed of exceptionally hardy and adventurous 
 young men. However, the idea of the Rough 
 Riders did not originate until after the declaration 
 of war, when it was conceived by United States 
 Senator Francis E. Warren of Wyoming. Senator 
 Warren proposed that Congress authorize the 
 [Organization of three volunteer regiments of 
 cavalry to be made up of the wild riders and ad 
 venturers from the Western plains and mount ains. 
 Congress did so, and Wood immediately made ap 
 plication for commission as Colonel of one of these 
 regiments to be known as the First United States 
 Volunteer Cavalry. This was the official name 
 of the regiment which soon after its organization 
 began was dubbed the Rough Riders. Roosevelt 
 was commissioned Lieutenant-Colonel. 
 
 Senator Warren s original idea which made a 
 dramatic appeal to the youth of the country was 
 only modified to the extent that Wood and Roose 
 velt as leaders of the First Cavalry drew a large 
 number of Eastern athletes and sportsmen, college 
 men and social leaders, and members of some of 
 the best-known families of the land. The com 
 position of the regiment, made up as it was of 
 Western cowpunchers, miners, gamblers, Indians, 
 and Eastern aristocrats, each one of whom could 
 fight his own weight in wildcats, made it some- 
 
With Cleveland and McKinley 43 
 
 what resemble the world-famous French Foreign 
 Legion, with the exception that it was thoroughly 
 national, thoroughly American. 
 
 There were a few minor hitches in the way. 
 Secretary of the Navy John D. Long, under whom 
 Roosevelt had served as first assistant, strongly 
 objected to his leaving the department, but Roose 
 velt was not the sort of a man to remain in a 
 subordinate berth when there were prospects for 
 active service in the field. Russell A. Alger, 
 Secretary of War, offered Roosevelt the colonelcy 
 of a regiment, but as the latter knew little or noth 
 ing of military science, he refused. Fortunately, 
 Wood and Roosevelt managed to cut through the 
 departmental red tape which came so near strang 
 ling our war preparations in 1898. As a result 
 the Rough Riders were the first volunteer regi 
 ment to be ready for the front. 
 
IV 
 
 COMMANDER OF THE ROUGH RIDERS 
 
 IN HIS history of the Rough Riders, Roosevelt 
 wrote: "We started with the odds in our favour." 
 
 The difficulties in recruiting were of a minus 
 quantity, consisting of rejecting men. Wood 
 had been in the army long enough to be thoroughly 
 conversant with departmental red tape and how to 
 avoid it. He knew just what he wanted, and 
 knew how to cut corners in obtaining the materials 
 he required if it was possible to do so. 
 
 As the official physician of Secretary of War 
 Alger, Wood had come to know him intimately 
 and win his trust. Alger recognized in him a 
 practical military man who had made an excel 
 lent record in the Apache wars. Observing the 
 hopeless mass of confusion which existed in the 
 War Department, Wood hit upon the plan of go 
 ing to the Secretary of War and requesting a 
 carte blanche to go ahead with organizing and 
 equipping the regiment. Alger was delighted 
 with this arrangement and said : 
 
 44 
 
Commander of the Rough Riders 45 
 
 "Go right ahead and don t let me hear a word 
 from you until your regiment is raised. When 
 your requisition and other papers are ready, bring 
 them to me to sign, and I ll sign them." 
 
 Armed with this authority, Wood, who knew 
 what he needed to equip a cavalry regiment, 
 gained a long lead on all of the other volunteer 
 units. Wood had seen enough of actual fighting 
 to realize how impossible it is to follow to the 
 letter all military rules and regulations in war 
 times. The regulations called for the use of sa 
 bers by cavalry. It takes a long time to train men 
 in the skillful use of sabers and speed was a prime 
 necessity at this time. Moreover, Wood did not 
 think that sabers would make a practical weapon 
 for volunteers mounted on half-wild Western 
 horses. It occurred to him that the machete would 
 be a much better weapon to use in Cuba, and he 
 knew of a New England firm which manufactured 
 these tools for the Cuban sugar fields. So ma 
 chetes were ordered for the Rough Riders. Wood 
 wanted Krag-Jorgensen carbines with smokeless 
 cartridges, for he expected that his cavalrymen 
 might make themselves useful fighting as infantry. 
 But the Krags were scarce. Wood knew where 
 to go for the few that were in stock without wast 
 ing steps. He went to General Flagler, explaining 
 what he had done and telling him that he was in a 
 
46 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 hurry to equip his regiment. General Flagler 
 promptly put through the order for him and the 
 Rough Riders were fully equipped with weapons 
 and ammunition when other organizations had 
 neither. 
 
 The War Department was swamped with orders 
 for uniforms. When Wood called upon the Quar 
 termaster-General for clothes, he received a curt 
 reply, saying that no uniforms were available. 
 The answer did not discourage Wood in the least. 
 
 "Our men can wear the ordinary army brown 
 canvas working clothes," he said. 
 
 Realizing that most of the drilling and all of the 
 fighting would be done in a warm climate, Wood 
 foresaw that the lighter army brown uniforms, 
 not so handsome as the regulation blue, would be 
 far more serviceable. This proved to be a fact. 
 The two innovations introduced by him in equip 
 ping the Rough Riders, the substitution of the 
 machete for the saber and of the light working 
 uniform for the heavier blue, proved successful. 
 The machete was found to be an instrument which 
 could be used for all sorts of things, from killing 
 Spaniards and cutting cane and underbrush to 
 sharpening lead pencils. 
 
 The mustering places of the regiment were in 
 New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma, and the Indian 
 Territory. The response was so heavy that Wood 
 
Commander of the Rough Riders 47 
 
 and Roosevelt could have raised a brigade or 
 division. The number of men allotted to the 
 First Volunteer Cavalry was 780 but was soon 
 raised to 1,000. 
 
 "We drew recruits from Harvard, Yale, Prince 
 ton, and other colleges; from clubs like the Somer 
 set of Boston and Knickerbocker of New York; 
 and from among the men who belonged neither 
 to club nor college, but in whose veins the blood 
 stirred with the same impulse which once sent the 
 Vikings over sea," Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 
 his story of the Rough Riders. 
 
 Among the recruits were star football and tennis 
 players and other college athletes, such as Dudley 
 Dean, Harvard quarterback; Robert Wrenn, 
 another quarter, and at that time the champion 
 tennis player of the country; Hamilton Fish, cap 
 tain of the Columbia crew; and Woodbury Kane, 
 a famous yachtsman and society leader. All of 
 these young men enlisted as troopers, took their 
 turn at kitchen duty and the other disagreeable 
 tasks which devolves on a fighting man. Young 
 Wall Street bankers and brokers, who measured 
 up to the high physical standard set, abandoned 
 their offices and their luxurious homes, just as 
 did their sons and nephews in the late war, and 
 enlisted, neither seeking nor obtaining preferential 
 treatment. 
 
48 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 The mess mates and buddies of these Eastern 
 aristocrats were broncho busters and cowboys 
 from the Southwest, Texas Rangers and Western 
 sheriffs and deputy sheriffs, bear and buffalo 
 hunters from the Rocky Mountain regions, Chero- 
 kees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks from the 
 Indian Territory. Some of the recruits were 
 veterans of Indian wars, and all of them were 
 imbued with that spirit of patriotism and adventure 
 which characterized the leaders of the regiment. 
 All of them were, of course, crack horsemen and 
 crack shots. There was no difficulty in finding 
 competent officers. Most of the captains and 
 lieutenants had served in the regular army and had 
 resigned their commissions to enter civil life. 
 Most of them knew Colonel Wood or Lieutenant- 
 Colonel Roosevelt personally. Two were West 
 Pointers. They were excellent drill masters and 
 had seen enough of the Far West to know just how 
 to handle the rough material before them and 
 develop it into a disciplined unit. To accomplish 
 this without fight and bloodshed required no less 
 tact than military skill. No officer could afford 
 to assume an overbearing attitude toward these 
 free-born Westerners who were unacquainted with 
 army regulations and customs. Roosevelt tells of 
 one rangy recruit from the Southwest who dropped 
 into Colonel Wood s tent one evening and said: 
 
Commander of the Rough Riders 49 
 
 "Well, Colonel, I want to shake hands with you 
 and say we re with you. We didn t know how we 
 would like you fellers at first, but you re all right 
 and you know your business, and you mean busi 
 ness, and you can count on us every time." 
 
 "The faults they committed were those of 
 ignorance merely," Roosevelt writes. "When 
 Holderman, the cook, in announcing dinner for the 
 Colonel and the three Majors, genially remarked, 
 If you fellers don t come soon everything will get 
 cold, he had no thought of other than a kindly and 
 respectful regard for their welfare, and was glad 
 to modify his form of address on being told that it 
 was not what could be described as conventionally 
 military." 
 
 Whatever may be the world record in organizing 
 and drilling a regiment to the point where it 
 could give good account of itself in an engagement 
 with veteran troops, it is safe to say that the record 
 of Wood and Roosevelt in whipping the Rough 
 Riders into shape would stand near the top. The 
 United States declared war on Spain April 26, 
 1898, and on May 29th the Rough Riders left their 
 training camp at San Antonio, Texas, and boarded 
 trains for Tampa, Florida, to be transported to 
 Cuba. 
 
 In thirty -three days the commander of the regi 
 ment and his able and strenuous Lieutenant- 
 
50 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 Colonel recruited, organized, officered, and equip 
 ped 1,000 men and they had given the soldiers 
 enough drilling to enable them to win the greatest 
 fame of any single regiment in the Spanish-Amer 
 ican War. The Rough Riders received only 
 twenty -one days of actual drilling. When we 
 recall what a hopeless muddle the War Depart 
 ment was in at the time, it must be admitted that 
 to find clothing, arms, ammunition, and mounts 
 for a regiment in about a month s time was in it 
 self something of an achievement. The state of 
 affairs in the War Department is best illustrated 
 by the following story which Wood loves to tell: 
 
 "A certain high military officer in Washington 
 whom I met one day was much upset by the sud 
 den war activity, and remarked: Here I had a 
 magnificent system; my office and department 
 were in good working order, and this damned war 
 comes along and breaks it all up. 
 
 The high officer, who made this amusing re 
 mark, was talking to the right man. Wood did 
 as much as anybody to break up the obsolete 
 bureaucratic system of the War Department for 
 the inefficiency of which Secretary of War Alger 
 received perhaps more than his due share of the 
 blame. 
 
 The journey from San Antonio to Tampa took 
 four days. At the latter place, or rather at Port 
 
Commander of the Rough Riders 51 
 
 Tampa, where the troops embarked, Wood showed 
 his usual resourcefulness in securing a transport. 
 This service was in the same mess as everything 
 else. After the Yucatan, lying in midstream, had 
 been allotted to the Rough Riders, Wood and 
 Roosevelt discovered accidentally that this ship 
 had been assigned to two other regiments waiting 
 to embark. Wood immediately seized a launch, 
 boarded the ship and took possession, while Roose 
 velt rounded up the regiment and marched it at 
 double-quick to the quay, just in time to board 
 the vessel ahead of the other two regiments. 
 
 It is not the purpose of this narrative to relate 
 once more the often-told story of the Rough Riders. 
 The regiment landed in Cuba June 22d under the 
 protection of shellfire from American war vessels, 
 and on the day following came the order to ad 
 vance. The Battle of Las Guasimas took place 
 on June 24th, the Rough Riders under Wood s 
 command occupying the left wing of the American 
 forces. 
 
 "When the firing opened some of the men began 
 to curse," Roosevelt writes. " Don t swear 
 shoot! growled Wood, as he strode along the path 
 leading his horse, and everyone laughed and be 
 came cool again. The Spanish outposts were very 
 near our advance guard and some minutes of the 
 hottest kind of firing followed before they were 
 
52 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 driven back and slipped off through the jungle to 
 their main lines in the rear." 
 
 Later, in his description of the action, Roosevelt 
 writes : 
 
 When I came to the front I found the men spread out 
 in a very thin skirmish line, advancing through com 
 paratively open ground, each man taking advantage of 
 what cover he could while Wood strolled about leading 
 his horse. . . . How Wood escaped being hit I 
 do not see and still less how his horse escaped. 
 
 Major-General Joseph Wheeler, in command of 
 the cavalry troops at Las Guasimas, made the fol 
 lowing official report on the Rough Riders : 
 
 Colonel Wood s regiment was on the extreme left 
 of the line and too far distant for me to be a personal 
 witness of the individual conduct of his officers and 
 men; but the magnificent and brave work done by the 
 regiment under the lead of Colonel Wood testifies to 
 his courage and skill. The energy and determination 
 of this officer had been marked from the moment he 
 reported to me at Tampa, Florida, and I have abundant 
 evidence of his brave and good conduct on the field and 
 I recommend him for consideration of the Government. 
 
 On June 25th, Brigadier-General S. B. M. Young, 
 wh had played a distinguished part in the Battle 
 of Las Guasimas, went down with the fever. Gen 
 eral Wlaseler thereupon advanced Wood to fill the 
 
Commander of tJie Rough Riders 53 
 
 vacancy. Henceforth, throughout the siege of San 
 tiago, he was in command of the Second Cavalry 
 Brigade, serving dismounted. This left Roosevelt 
 in command of the Rough Riders. The promo 
 tion of Wood and Roosevelt was confirmed soon 
 afterward. 
 
 In an official report dated June 29th, Brigadier- 
 General Young, whose illness hastened Wood s 
 promotion, wrote: 
 
 I cannot speak too highly of the efficient manner in 
 which Colonel Wood handled his regiment and of his 
 magnificent behaviour on the field. The conduct 
 of Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt, as reported to me 
 by my two aides, deserves my highest commendation. 
 Both Colonel Wood and Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt 
 disdained to take advantage of shelter or cover from the 
 enemy s fire while any of their men remained exposed 
 to it an error of judgment, but happily on the heroic 
 side. 
 
 Methods in warfare have changed. To-day 
 General Wood probably would regretfully repri 
 mand an officer who exposed himself in battle 
 unless it was absolutely necessary. In the Span 
 ish-American War the old tradition prevailed that 
 an officer must at all times show utter disregard 
 for danger and thus set an example of heroism. 
 
 There has been much dispute as to what the 
 Rough Riders under Wood actually accomplished 
 
54 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 in the first engagement at Las Guasimas. Ever 
 since the Spanish-American War we have often 
 heard it said that the great reputation of the regi 
 ment was made by newspaper correspondents and 
 by the prestige which later attached to the name 
 of Theodore Roosevelt. 
 
 As a further testimony of the gallant behaviour 
 of the regiment and of Wood s quality as an officer, 
 the folio wing extract from a heretofore unpublished 
 letter written by the late Richard Harding Davis 
 to his brother, Charles Belmont Davis, two days 
 after the Battle of Las Guasimas and dated, "In 
 Sight of Santiago, June 26, 1898," may be of in 
 terest : 
 
 General Chaffee told me to-day that it was Wood s 
 charge that won the day. Without it the Tenth could 
 not have driven the Spanish back. Wood is a great 
 young man. He has only one idea, or rather all his 
 ideas run in one direction, his regiment. He eats and 
 talks nothing else. He never sleeps more than four 
 hours and all the rest of the time he is moving about 
 among the tents. 
 
THE RESCUER OF SANTIAGO 
 
 IN ALL of history there is no parallel to the 
 service rendered by the United States in Cuba. 
 This is not a boast; it is simply a fact. Nations 
 have come to the aid of sister nations in time of 
 need and have shed their blood to expel foreign 
 foes or crush native tyrants. But the rescuer 
 generally has remained as sovereign or has de 
 manded and received a price in cash or trade con 
 cessions. Sometimes the rescuer has fought be 
 cause his own interests were jeopardized through 
 the invasion of a neighbouring nation s territory. 
 
 Great Britain restored peace and some degree 
 of security and prosperity in Egypt and India 
 when these countries were committing suicide 
 through internal warfare and misrule; but the 
 British flag still flies in Egypt and India. Both 
 countries may have been benefited as a whole 
 through British occupation, but England has lost 
 nothing on the transaction. 
 
 Sweden during the Thirty Years War came to 
 
 65 
 
56 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 the rescue of the Protestant states of Germany; 
 but the Swedes, who entered Germany as cham 
 pions of the Reformation, remained as conquerors 
 on German territory till they were driven out. 
 
 The United States not only freed Cuba from 
 Spain, but saved her from the tropical pestilences 
 and filth diseases which were decimating the 
 population, restored her civil and commercial 
 institutions, founded her public school system, re 
 organized her laws and her courts, then established 
 her as an independent republic. 
 
 And the chief instrument of the United States 
 in this monumental labour the finest service 
 ever rendered by one nation to another was Gen 
 eral Leonard Wood. 
 
 The most remarkable feature of his success in 
 Cuba is the fact that General Wood entered on his 
 duties there utterly untrained in administrative 
 affairs; yet in summarizing his qualifications for 
 his post, Ray Stannard Baker wrote as follows in 
 McClure s Magazine in 1900: 
 
 There are not many men in this or any other country 
 who could have gone into the Santiago of August, 1898, 
 with its thousands of dead and dying, its reeking filth, 
 its starvation, its utter prostration, and made of it in 
 four months time a clean, healthy, and orderly city. 
 Another soldier might have been chosen who could have 
 preserved order as well as did General Wood; a lawyer 
 
The Rescuer of Santiago 57 
 
 might have organized the judicial system, and a physi 
 cian reestablished the hospitals; but it would not have 
 been easy to find another man with the varied material 
 equipment and the requisite physical endurance to 
 serve in a tropical country as a lawmaker, judge, and 
 governor, all in one; to build roads and sewers, to 
 establish hospitals; to organize a school system, and 
 devise a scheme of finance; to deal amicably with a 
 powerful church influence, and yet to appear, in spite of 
 such autocracy, the most popular man in the province. 
 
 Writing in the Harvard Graduates Magazine 
 in 1902, Theodore Roosevelt said: 
 
 Leonard Wood four years ago went down to Cuba, 
 has served there ever since, has rendered services to 
 that country of the kind which if performed three 
 thousand years ago would have made him a hero mixed 
 up with the Sun God in various ways; a man who devoted 
 his whole life through those four years, who thought of 
 nothing else, did nothing else, save to try to bring up 
 the standard of political and social life in that Island, to 
 teach the people after four centuries of misrule that there 
 were such things as governmental righteousness and 
 honesty and fair play for all men on their merits as men. 
 
 Some years later, after Wood had finished his 
 Philippine mission and had become Chief-of-Staff 
 under President Taft, Colonel Roosevelt wrote 
 of him in The Outlook: 
 
 Like almost all of the men mentioned, as well as their 
 colleagues, General Wood of course incurred the violent 
 
58 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 hatred of many dishonest schemers and unscrupulous 
 adventurers, and of a few more or less well-meaning 
 persons who were misled by these schemers and ad 
 venturers; but it is astounding to any one acquainted 
 with the facts to realize, not merely what he accom 
 plished, but how he succeeded in gaining the good will 
 of the enormous majority of the men whose good will 
 could be won only in honourable fashion. Spaniards 
 and Cubans, Christian Filipinos and Moros, Catholic 
 ecclesiastics and Protestant missionaries hi each case 
 the great majority of those whose opinion was best 
 worth having grew to regard General Wood as their 
 special champion and ablest friend, as the man who 
 more than any others understood and sympathized 
 with their peculiar needs and was anxious and able to 
 render them the help they most needed. In Cuba he 
 acted practically as both civil and military head; and 
 after he had been some time in the Philippines, very 
 earnest pressure was brought to bear by many of the 
 best people in the Islands to have a similar position 
 there created for him, so that he could repeat what 
 he had done in Cuba. It was neither necessary nor 
 desirable that this position should be created; but the 
 widely expressed desire that it should be created was 
 significant of the faith in the man. 
 
 His administration was as signally successful in the 
 Moro country as in Cuba. In each case alike it brought 
 in its train peace, an increase in material prosperity, 
 and a rigid adherence to honesty as the only policy 
 tolerated among officials. His opportunity for military 
 service has not been great, either in the Philippines or 
 while he was the Governor of Cuba. Still, on several 
 occasions he was obliged to carry on operations against 
 
TJie Rescuer of Santiago 59> 
 
 hostile tribes of Moros, and in each case he did his work 
 with skill, energy, and efficiency ; and, once he was done r 
 he showed as much humanity in dealing with the van 
 quished as he had shown capacity to vanquish them. 
 In our country there are some kinds of success which 
 receive an altogether disproportionate financial reward; 
 but in no other country is the financial reward so small 
 for the kind of service done by Leonard Wood and by 
 the other men whose names I have given above. Gen 
 eral Wood is an army officer with nothing but an army 
 officer s pay, and we accept it as a matter of course that 
 he should have received practically no pecuniary re 
 ward for those services which he rendered in positions 
 not such as an army officer usually occupies. There 
 is not another big country in the world where he would 
 not have received a substantial reward such as here 
 no one even thinks of his receiving. Yet, after all, 
 the reward for which he most cares is the opportunity 
 to render service, and this opportunity has been given 
 him once and again. He now stands as Chief-of-Staff 
 of the American Army, the army in which he was serv 
 ing in a subordinate position as surgeon thirteen years 
 ago. His rise has been astonishing, and it has been due 
 purely to his own striking qualifications and striking 
 achievements. Again and again he has rendered great 
 service to the American people; and he will continue 
 to render such service in the position he now holds. 
 
 On July 20th, three days after the Americans had 
 entered the city of Santiago, General Wood was 
 summoned by General Shafter in command of 
 the American forces, and ordered to take command 
 
60 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 of the city. This was a turning point in General 
 Wood s career. For twelve years he had served 
 as army surgeon and line officer. For the next 
 ten years he was to combine the duties of a general 
 officer and military governor. He was plunged 
 into the most difficult of positions where he had to 
 serve without any previous training as government 
 executive, bring order out of disorder, and create a 
 government as he went along. 
 
 It is difficult at this time to visualize the handi 
 cap and the trials which beset General Wood 
 when he became Military Governor of Santiago 
 de Cuba. He was just thirty -seven years old. 
 A few months before he had been living the pleas 
 ant and orderly life of any army surgeon in Wash 
 ington with the most distinguished patients in the 
 country. His clients had been President McKin- 
 ley, Mrs. McKinley, and army officers of high 
 rank and their families. But he had no more 
 experience as a statesman than he had as an 
 aviator. Outside of his interest as a good citizen 
 in good government he knew little of govern 
 mental affairs. 
 
 "I had never held any office of any sort," said 
 General Wood. "The army offered no training 
 for the duties which might devolve on a military- 
 governor, but I had read a whole lot of British 
 colonial history, so I was not wholly without 
 
The Rescuer of Santiago 61 
 
 guidance. I met each problem that came up and 
 tried to solve it to the best of my ability." 
 
 General Shafter selected Leonard Wood because 
 he had made good in the Southwest, because 
 President McKinley trusted him, because he had 
 shown great organizing and executive ability in the 
 late campaign, because he had always throughout 
 his career shown a passion for unselfish, patriotic 
 service, and finally, because he was a doctor, and 
 Cuba was mighty sick. 
 
 When General Wood entered on his duties, 
 Santiago was a city of a thousand desperate needs. 
 Here was a community of 50,000 inhabitants, more 
 than 15,000 of whom were sick. It had just gone 
 through a siege, so that most of the population was 
 starving. In addition to the sick among the civil 
 population there were 2,000 Spanish soldiers 
 bedridden within the city, and 5,000 American 
 troops suffering from malarial fevers. 
 
 In an orderly community with its governmental 
 machinery intact and its supply of life necessities 
 normal, an epidemic which prostrated one fourth 
 of the population would result in a panic and wild 
 appeals for outside help. But in addition to being 
 sick, Santiago was starving. Its food supply had 
 disappeared into the cellars of hoarders and ware 
 houses of profiteers. During the siege its sources 
 of supply had been cut off. 
 
62 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 Under Spanish rule the city had been notorious 
 for its uncleanliness. "You could smell it ten 
 miles at sea," said an old sea captain to an Amer 
 ican officer of General Wood s staff, and now it 
 was worse than ever. 
 
 The water supply was polluted, inadequate in 
 volume, a sure breeder of typhoid, from which the 
 city had never been free throughout its history. 
 The swamps in the neighbourhood of Santiago 
 breathed a miasma of malaria from which no 
 foreigner was immune. 
 
 An experienced organizer and executive, invested 
 with dictatorial powers and having under his 
 command a trained staff of medical officers and 
 sanitation experts, an efficient army to maintain 
 order and carry out his instructions, and plenty 
 of food and medical supplies, might have found it 
 a hard but not an impossible task to clean up 
 Santiago, restore the community to health, and 
 establish order. But General Wood had no such 
 equipment. He himself was a raw recruit as a 
 municipal officer. He was short of doctors, and 
 drugs had to be transported from the United 
 States. When it came to the army, his handicap 
 was rendered even more complex. The army was 
 sick. At first General Wood s assignment to 
 Santiago seemed quite hopeless. 
 
 It has been estimated that less than one per 
 
The Rescuer of Santiago 63 
 
 cent, of the American troops stationed in and 
 around Santiago escaped malaria. It was this 
 disease which raised the greatest havoc with our 
 troops. The mortality was not so high, but a 
 soldier subject to malaria might as well be dead 
 as alive, so far as his military usefulness is con 
 cerned, the fever being recurrent. A man would 
 be very sick for a few days, then he would partially 
 recover and be able to go on duty; then he would 
 be struck down again. In the course of these 
 attacks the strength of the strongest and toughest 
 trooper would be sapped so that he had little re 
 serve vitality with which to fight off other ills. 
 
 The pitiable condition of our troops had been 
 rendered worse by a curious incident which to-day, 
 in view of the rigid censorship that was main 
 tained on all military information during the great 
 war, seems almost grotesque. Alarmed at the 
 high percentage of sickness among the troops, 
 the general officers of the army in Cuba addressed 
 a "Round Robin" to Major-General Shafter 
 stating that "the army must be moved at once or 
 it will perish." Accompanying the "Round 
 Robin" was a succinct statement from the chief 
 medical officers attesting to the danger from ma 
 laria and other tropical diseases. 
 
 It has often been said that war correspondents 
 ran the Spanish- American War. In this particular 
 
64 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 case Washington read the details of the "Round 
 Robin" in the newspapers before receiving any 
 official statement from the commanding officer. 
 General Shafter, on receiving a curt letter from 
 Secretary of War Alger criticizing the "Round 
 Robin," explained that it had been given to the 
 newspapermen before he saw it. The effect of the 
 incident was to create what might be called a near 
 panic at home and a bitter unrest among the 
 soldiers in Cuba, adding materially to the labours 
 of every American officer in the island and the 
 ill-temper of the authorities in Washington. 
 
 Secretary Alger in his history of the Spanish- 
 American War denies that the War Department 
 was influenced in the least by the "Round Robin." 
 Nevertheless, the veterans of the Santiago cam 
 paign, with the exception of those infected with the 
 yellow fever or those showing symptoms of infec 
 tion, were removed late in August, 1899, to rest 
 billets at Montauk Point, Long Island. They were 
 replaced by green troops who arrived at the height 
 of the unhealthful season, causing fresh anxiety to 
 all the commanding officers. 
 
 At least some of the older troops had become 
 acclimated and used to conditions in the island, 
 and no doubt General Wood s task of saving Santi 
 ago from starvation and disease would have been 
 lightened if these veterans had been retained. The 
 
The Rescuer of Santiago 65 
 
 Fifth Army Corps was suffering principally from 
 the effects of the Santiago campaign. The men 
 had been wallowing in mud and water in the yel 
 low fever country for weeks, and had, of course, 
 been thoroughly infected with malaria. It was 
 thought that the new troops, recruited mostly 
 from the Southern states and supposed to be 
 immune from malaria, would fare better with im 
 proved tentage and general living conditions. But 
 as General Wood later testified before the War 
 Investigation Committee, the identical troubles 
 suffered by the troops during the campaign ap 
 peared among the new and supposedly immune 
 army living in tents with floors, drinking boiled 
 water, and rigidly maintaining all the sanitary 
 precautions prescribed by the army doctors. 
 
 General Wood began his labours in Santiago with 
 sick troops, veterans of a few weeks on the island, 
 and he continued his work with sick green troops. 
 As he told the War Investigation Committee, 
 "All the immune regiments serving in my de 
 partment since the war have been at one time or 
 another unfit for service. I have had all the 
 officers of my staff repeatedly too sick for duty." 
 
 In spite of these handicaps, the young New 
 England army doctor stuck to his job. Although 
 in perfect physical condition when he landed in 
 Cuba, hardened and toughened by a decade of 
 
66 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 Indian fighting and life in the open, General Wood 
 did not escape malaria or yellow fever. In the 
 midst of his work in Santiago he was taken ill 
 with the latter disease, which had in those days a 
 record of killing four out of five victims, but Gen 
 eral Wood was the fifth. Later, when he was 
 Governor of the island, he contracted typhoid 
 fever while inspecting the hospitals of Havana, but 
 again his iron constitution saved him. 
 
 Another obstacle in the way of the new military 
 governor was his limited knowledge of the Spanish 
 race and language. There were available only a 
 few Americans who could speak Spanish well and 
 a still fewer number of Cubans who could speak 
 English. "I had picked up a smattering of 
 Spanish while serving down on the Mexican bor 
 der," he said, "but I required the services of an 
 interpreter on all official business." 
 
 Perhaps the worst barrier of all was the profound 
 distrust on the part of the Cuban people of all 
 foreigners, a distrust instilled for generations into 
 their minds by Spain s representatives in the 
 island. The laws of the land, fundamentally 
 sound, had been so administered as to deprive the 
 average Cuban of all respect for law and authority. 
 He knew nothing of honest government or honest 
 administration. In consequence, his civic training 
 had consisted of learning how to evade the law and 
 
The Rescuer of Santiago 67 
 
 cheat officials. Neither his property nor that of 
 any of his ancestors, so far as he knew, had ever 
 been safe from seizure. He and his ancestors 
 had always lived in fear of arrest and persecution 
 by officials whose authority was absolute, and most 
 of whom seemed to be swayed by the old Spanish 
 caste prejudice against the colonial born-and-bred 
 subjects of Spain. 
 
 General Wood could hardly expect much civic 
 cooperation from such people. Along with all 
 the rest of the work piled on him he had to win 
 the confidence of the natives, demonstrate to them 
 that although he was an official, he was an honest 
 man from whom they did not have to hide what 
 little property they owned, and that he looked 
 upon them as free men and women, endowed with 
 personal rights which he and all good Americans 
 held sacred. 
 
 When he rode into Santiago, Wood encountered 
 dead bodies of men and of animals lying in the 
 streets. Every thoroughfare was piled with dirt 
 and broken furniture and other household uten 
 sils. The city had no sewer system, and here 
 and there the open drains had been blocked by the 
 corpse of a human being or an animal. Over the 
 city hovered a multitude of vultures, and it was 
 no uncommon sight to see one of these carrion 
 birds sweep down to feed on carcasses. Scores 
 
68 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 of houses were deserted except for the dead bodies 
 they contained. For days there had been no 
 attempt made by the people to bury their dead. 
 The living were too sick, too demoralized by 
 the long and savage struggle of the revolution 
 culminating in the siege, to attend to such ele 
 mental duties. Over this dead and dying city 
 there hung the paralyzing fear that at any moment 
 its suffering might be intensified by the recurrent 
 epidemics of yellow fever, small-pox, or the bu 
 bonic plague. Never did Hercules himself essay 
 a worse cleaning job than that which lay before 
 the American soldier-doctor. 
 
 The first tasks before General Wood were to feed 
 the population and bury the dead. During the 
 siege thousands of women, children, and other 
 non-combatants had been permitted to leave the 
 city and pass through the American lines to El 
 Caney where they were given assistance by the 
 American troops and the Red Cross in securing 
 food and shelter. Now these refugees were strag 
 gling back into the city, having utterly no means 
 of subsistence. 
 
 There were so many dead that it was found 
 impracticable to bury them. The bodies were col 
 lected in lots of fifty to a hundred, soaked in 
 petroleum, and burned outside the city limits. 
 It was horrible work, and men had to be forced to 
 
The Rescuer of Santiago 69 
 
 perform it. But there were many idle and desti 
 tute men in Santiago, and all of them possessed 
 the natural desire to fill their hungry stomachs 
 and earn a little money, if they were not too sick 
 to eat and work. These were drafted to clean up 
 the city under the direction of American troops. 
 Sometimes they had to be driven by threats into 
 houses to collect the bodies. 
 
 Wood s men worked night and day in the streets 
 collecting the dead animals, cleaning away the 
 filth that had accumulated there for months, and 
 carting everything out beyond the city limits to 
 be soaked in oil and burned. General Wood and 
 his army had more or less literally come into 
 the city armed with shovels, scrub brushes, and 
 disinfectants. Houses and streets and vaults were 
 cleansed by native labour directed by short- 
 tempered American soldiers who were full of 
 quinine and uncomplimentary remarks about 
 army life in Cuba. 
 
 We may recall in this connection that architec 
 turally most Latin-American cities are unlike our 
 cities. Our yards surround our houses. In San 
 tiago the houses surrounded the yards. What each 
 courtyard contained was the private affair of the 
 owner, and its state of sanitation depended en 
 tirely on his standard of cleanliness. The Amer 
 icans found these private courtyards depositories 
 
70 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 of garbage; and into many of these premises the 
 Americans had to force their way. 
 
 There was this consoling aspect to the whole 
 discouraging business: the people were to a cer 
 tain extent inured to their misery. They were 
 used to dirt, used to hunger, used to disease. The 
 natives were a race of tough survivors. 
 
 The cleansing process was followed by liberal 
 applications of corrosive sublimate solution. Even 
 the streets were sprinkled with disinfectants. In 
 side of four months Santiago was probably the 
 cleanest city in tropical America. It smelled to 
 heaven of disinfectants, but it was clean. 
 
 The problem of supplying food for the popula 
 tion appeared at first impossible of solution. There 
 was little or no food in sight in Santiago when the 
 Americans entered on July 17th. Within a few 
 days the Americans had disclosed hoards of provi 
 sions here and there. Moreover, the Spanish army, 
 which had now surrendered, had stocked up large 
 quantities for rations. This food was available 
 for distribution among the civilian population 
 while the regular channels of trade communication 
 were being opened. The people of Santiago suf 
 fered little from hunger after the Americans took 
 charge. 
 
 Henry Harrison Lewis, in an article published 
 in McClure s Magazine when General Wood was in 
 
The Rescuer of Santiago 71 
 
 command at Santiago, tells an incident which in 
 these days of high prices is timely and which dur 
 ing the palmiest days of the food profiteers who 
 flourished in this country throughout the great 
 war, in spite of Federal regulations, would have 
 been timelier still. General Wood knew food 
 profiteers in Santiago twenty-one years ago, and 
 in spite of his inexperience in dealing with such 
 persons, immediately hit upon an effective plan 
 to regulate prices. His officers reported to him 
 that merchants in Santiago had considerable 
 quantities of meat and other food, but that the 
 prices were so high that the food was beyond the 
 reach of but few persons. He sent at once for the 
 principal butchers of the city. 
 
 "How much do you charge for meat?" Wood 
 asked the butchers. 
 
 "Ninety cents a pound, Seiior." 
 
 "What does it cost you?" 
 
 There was hesitation and shuffling of feet; then 
 one of the men said in a whining voice: 
 
 "Meat is very dear, your Excellency." 
 
 "How much a pound?" 
 
 "Fifteen cents, your Excellency; but we have 
 lost much money during the war and " 
 
 "So have your customers. Now meat will 
 be sold at twenty-five cents a pound, and not one 
 cent more. Do you understand?" 
 
72 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 Wood then turned to the Cuban Aldermen who 
 were present and charged them with looking after 
 the enforcement of the order on pain of being 
 expelled from office. Thereafter meat was sold 
 in the markets at twenty-five cents. The same 
 simple plan was evolved for all other kinds of sup 
 plies. It took Leonard Wood only a few minutes 
 to solve the high cost of living problem in San 
 tiago. He used no more arbitrary methods than 
 were proposed and attempted by the allied coun 
 tries during the late war. But he enforced his 
 decree to the letter despite the opposition which 
 some of his acts aroused. There was plenty of 
 criticism, for Wood had unmuzzled the press of 
 Santiago for the first time in Cuban history. Wood 
 has never been a believer in censorship. 
 
 To one who has read the official records of the 
 occupation of Cuba it seems that Wood started 
 a hundred different projects during his first few 
 weeks as Military Governor. It is remarkable 
 that he was able to carry through within the short 
 period allotted more than a few of these ventures. 
 But all his plans for the betterment of the city and 
 province seemed to develop in a rapid yet orderly 
 fashion. It is true that he was given a free hand. 
 Nevertheless, no one but a man of great executive 
 and organizing ability could have guided the re 
 habilitation work and pushed it to a completion. 
 
The Rescuer of Santiago 73 
 
 He launched an engineering project for draining 
 the malarial swamps in the neighbourhood of the 
 city; increased the city s water supply; paved 
 streets and built roads; established municipal 
 governments throughout the province; organized 
 pack-train service into the interior; recruited and 
 trained Cuban rural guards to suppress brigandage 
 and maintain order; reestablished the courts, ap 
 pointing native judges and prosecutors; founded 
 public schools; and by opening the customs houses, 
 collecting duty, and improvising means for local 
 taxation, paid for all these improvements. He 
 was already teaching a part of Cuba to stand on 
 its own feet. 
 
 This reconstruction programme was begun by 
 Wood as soon as the emergency work of cleaning 
 the city, disposing of the bodies of the dead, and 
 providing for the food supplies had been ac 
 complished. In a general way he followed the 
 plan of submitting his various schemes for the 
 civic betterment to the native officials and winning 
 their consent and cooperation in whatever he 
 undertook. 
 
 There were no municipal officials to consult. 
 When he took office Wood found himself a ruler 
 over the ruins of a civilization. The civilization 
 which grand old Spain had planted in the island 
 had been crumbling for generations under the 
 
74 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 regime of the Spanish bureaucrats and Military 
 Governors who, by their incompetence and cor 
 ruption, had played the roles of traitors to their 
 native land which had honoured them with posi 
 tions of trust and dignity. 
 
 The American occupation of Cuba began with 
 the occupation of Santiago province. Prior to the 
 transfer of the island to the United States on 
 January 1, 1899, the territory occupied by the 
 United States military forces was limited to this 
 province and some adjacent territory. Leonard 
 Wood s jurisdiction, which at first covered only 
 the city of Santiago, was soon extended to 
 include all of this territory occupied by the 
 Americans up to the time of the Peace Conference 
 of Paris. 
 
 All the municipalities in Santiago province 
 were practically in the same mess as the city of 
 Santiago; all the towns and cities had to be cleaned 
 out, and strict sanitary regulations imposed. 
 There was no government worthy of the name 
 functioning in any of these communities. 
 
 One of General Wood s first tasks, therefore, 
 was to build up a semblance of civil government 
 in the various communities. There was no gen 
 eral election law, as we understand it, on the Cuban 
 statute books; so Wood improvised a scheme for 
 filling the necessary public offices, whereby the 
 
The Rescuer of Santiago 75 
 
 Cubans themselves would have the principal voice 
 in choosing their leaders. 
 
 He would summon fifty or sixty leading men of 
 a community, representing all classes, and ask 
 them to submit a list of men whom they considered 
 competent and honest enough to serve as munici 
 pal officers. From this list he would make his 
 appointments. He would then lay down his in 
 structions to the new officials, charge them with 
 maintaining law and order and enforcing the 
 sanitary regulations promulgated by the Amer 
 icans. He would tell them that they had the 
 backing of the American army in discharging their 
 duties, and he never failed to make it plain that 
 they would have to attend to business and serve 
 their constituents to the best of their ability, or 
 they would find themselves without jobs. 
 
 General Wood established courts throughout the 
 province, appointing judges and prosecutors. He 
 was gradually building up a civilized state on the 
 ruins of the old Spanish crown colony. The 
 hospitals had to be renovated, and the jails cleaned 
 out, and human regulations substituted for the ir 
 regular prison rule which prevailed. 
 
 Santiago s prisons were indescribable. They 
 were filled with political prisoners and other of 
 fenders whose condition was pitiable in the ex 
 treme. Investigation of charges against prisoners 
 
76 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 revealed that many of them had been thrown into 
 jail by the Spanish authorities without any valid 
 reason. For instance, General Wood found one 
 man in a Santiago prison who had been held there 
 for ten years. There was no charge against him 
 and the prison officials explained that he was 
 simply being held "at the will of the Governor 
 General." Further inquiry revealed that a former 
 Spanish Governor General had ordered the man 
 arrested for some trivial offence, the exact nature 
 of which was never discovered. He had never 
 been tried, and the official who had ordered his 
 arrest had left for Spain many years ago. Scores 
 of illegally held prisoners were released and Gen 
 eral Wood issued strict orders that every person 
 arrested must be given trial within twenty-four 
 hours. 
 
 Many years before the Americans came to free 
 Cuba a Spanish municipal architect had con 
 ceived a plan for a beautiful boulevard along the 
 water front in Santiago. The work had been 
 practically finished except for the laying of a 
 permanent pavement. The boulevard was now 
 rutted and in an ill state of repair, as were most 
 of the thoroughfares in the city. General W T ood 
 submitted to the civil authorities of Santiago the 
 necessity for paved streets, and with their consent 
 started an ambitious programme of street im- 
 
The Rescuer of Santiago 77 
 
 provements for which native labour was employed. 
 The marine boulevard was transformed into an 
 avenue of beauty of which any city might have 
 been proud. Being a military man with a most 
 wholesome respect for good roads, and realizing, 
 moreover, the vital necessity for them in a country 
 depending entirely on agriculture, General Wood 
 projected a system of rural highway building. The 
 Spanish had made some efforts at road building 
 in the vicinity of Santiago. What astonished 
 the Cubans most of all was that under the Amer 
 ican Military Governor roads could be built superior 
 to those built by the Spanish and for about half 
 the price. 
 
 Many an executive placed in Wood s position 
 might have sent his own troops into the rural 
 districts to wipe out or capture the brigands who 
 flourished there, making it virtually impossible 
 for people to resume their peaceful pursuits of 
 agriculture. Now some of these outlaws had at 
 some time fought for Cuba, and to send American 
 soldiers to fight them might have precipitated 
 serious trouble. Besides, American soldiers were 
 not fit for such duty. They would have suc 
 cumbed to the tropical fevers from which the 
 Cuban bandits were immune. General Wood 
 recognized these facts and organized the rural 
 guards of Cubans, drilled and armed them, and 
 
78 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 sent them forth to fight their own outlaws. "Let 
 the Cubans kill their own rats," said the General. 
 This proved both efficacious and satisfactory. 
 
 There was no public school system in Cuba, 
 instruction being left to private institutions. 
 Wood devoutly believed then, as he still does, that 
 public education is the cornerstone of every free 
 state. After the cities had been cleaned up, the 
 epidemics checked, and the Spanish troops, pris 
 oners of war, had been sent home, he turned his 
 attention to the schools. When he took command 
 of all of Cuba, Wood had opened nearly two hun 
 dred schools in Santiago province in charge of 
 Cuban teachers, the expenses being paid from 
 public revenue. 
 
 The methods used in effecting this rehabilita 
 tion did not savour much of the military dictator 
 as the following example shows. Throughout 
 its history Santiago had never had an adequate 
 water supply and now it was about one fourth 
 of what the city daily required. The water came 
 from a dam up in the hills which was always break 
 ing. The water was none too good in quality, and 
 Santiago was suffering from typhoid. Wood, 
 being invested with the powers of a dictator, could 
 have ordered another dam built at the expense of 
 the city. Instead of so doing, he called a meeting 
 of the civil officials, explained to them the vital 
 
Tfie Rescuer of Santiago 79 
 
 need for an increased and purer water supply, 
 showed them blueprints of a new dam prepared 
 by American engineers, and asked their approval 
 for raising $100,000 by a bond issue to pay for the 
 work. The city fathers, by a vote, authorized the 
 bond issue and the dam was built. 
 
 It was in the matter of issuing and enforcing 
 health decrees that Wood exercised all the power 
 of his office. He decreed that all cases of sick 
 ness and death must be immediately reported to 
 the Military Government. Violation of this 
 edict meant jail and fine. As a result the death 
 rate in Santiago fell in four months from two hun 
 dred per day to ten per day. 
 
 Having made a fair start toward restoring an 
 orderly government, General Wood promulgated 
 a Bill of Rights giving the residents of Santiago 
 the right to carry arms, hold public meetings, and 
 do virtually all things permitted to people under a 
 free and democratic government. 
 
 The captain of an army transport during the 
 Spanish-American War gave the following account 
 of General Wood s progress in cleaning up San 
 tiago: 
 
 "When we first sailed into Santiago Harbour, 
 late in July or early in August, 98, there were 
 thousands and thousands of buzzards hovering 
 over the city and the water. It seemed to me that 
 
80 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 the sky was full of them. In the summer of 1899 
 there was quite a number of them soaring over the 
 town. Old yellow jack had broken out again, and 
 things looked rather discouraging for General 
 Wood and his men. 
 
 "But in the following summer of 1900 we sailed 
 into the harbour one afternoon, and I recall that 
 one of my officers remarked: Well, sir, there is 
 only one of them left, and I saw where he pointed 
 his finger a lone buzzard floating high overhead. 
 He certainly looked like a very lonesome creature 
 up there." 
 
 It took General Wood only a few weeks to de 
 stroy the buzzards business, but it took two years 
 of continuous bad business to drive them off. 
 
 Late in 1899, General W T ood made a brief visit 
 to the United States, receiving magnificent ova 
 tions wherever he went. In recognition of his 
 services in Santiago, Harvard University, his 
 Alma Mater, bestowed on him an LL.D. degree. 
 
 "Leonard Wood, Harvard Doctor of Medicine, 
 army surgeon, single-minded soldier, lifesaver, 
 restorer of a province," was President Charles W r . 
 Eliot s eloquent and brief eulogy as he conferred 
 the academic honour on General Wood. 
 
 Wood s reward from his government was a 
 promotion to the rank of Major-General of Volun 
 teers. 
 
VI 
 
 GOVERNOR AND BUSINESS MANAGER OF CUBA 
 
 GUIZOT in his history of France tells an in 
 teresting incident in the course of the visit of Peter 
 the Great to Paris. The young monarch, who was 
 at that time opening Russia s "windows" toward 
 Europe, demanded shortly after his arrival in 
 Paris to be shown the statue of Richelieu. 
 
 "One of his first visits," Guizot writes, "was 
 to the church of the Sorbonne; when he caught 
 sight of Richelieu s monument, he ran up to it, 
 embraced the statue, and Ah, great man, said 
 he, if thou wert still alive, I would give thee one 
 half of my kingdom to teach me to govern the 
 other. " 
 
 It was a safe offer. The cardinal statesman 
 was dead. No such liberal offers are made to 
 living statesmen whose abilities and accomplish 
 ments are measured on the uncertain and varying 
 scales of contemporary judgment. The head of a 
 great business corporation may offer a princely 
 reward for the services of a little commercial Riche- 
 
 81 
 
82 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 lieu, but rulers and nations like to govern or 
 misgovern themselves. 
 
 No matter how miserable its state, no nation 
 would appeal to a foreign government expert to 
 come in and govern it and teach it how to live. 
 
 However, just such an opportunity came to 
 Leonard Wood when, on December 12, 1899, he 
 was appointed Governor-General of Cuba. He 
 had made good as Military Governor of Santiago 
 city and the province of the same name. His 
 reward was the governorship of the whole island. 
 
 Of course Cuba did not invite him to come and 
 rule and teach it how to rule itself. If the people 
 of Cuba had been allowed to have their own way 
 after the Spaniards had been driven out, they 
 would no doubt have escorted the Americans 
 politely to their ships, thanked them for their 
 services, and then the various factions of the 
 island would have continued the war among them 
 selves. 
 
 In spite of the conflict which raged in Washing 
 ton at the close of the Spanish-American War, it 
 was clear to all political parties that we owed a 
 duty to Cuba beyond that of freeing the island from 
 Spanish rule. Cuba had to be put on her feet and 
 given a fair start as an independent nation. Gen 
 eral Wood received his appointment as Governor- 
 General from Elihu Root, who had succeeded 
 
Governor of Cuba 83 
 
 Alger as Secretary of War. If, on confirming the 
 appointment, President McKinley had been re 
 minded of Peter s remark before the statue of 
 Richelieu, he would probably have said that he 
 expected Leonard Wood to do a great deal better 
 job than Richelieu ever could have done and that 
 for the modest salary of an American army of 
 ficer. 
 
 A few weeks before, Wood had been advanced 
 to the rank of Major-General of Volunteers pay 
 ing at that time a salary of $7,500 a year for the 
 first five years. This was the maximum pay he 
 drew from his government while acting as its chief 
 agent hi resuscitating Cuba. However, the em 
 bryo Cuban government showed its appreciation 
 of his service by paying him a like sum, making 
 his yearly income $15,000. That is the highest 
 salary he has ever received in his life. Like all 
 army pfficers without private fortunes, Wood is 
 ay a poor man. 
 
 During his Cuban administration, Wood s ad 
 ministrative genius being recognized, he was 
 offered a business position by an American firm 
 at a salary of $40,000 a year. The hours were 
 short, the work easy and pleasant, his future 
 material prosperity and that of his family as 
 sured, but he declined it. One of his earliest 
 ambitions had been to be of service to his country. 
 
84 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 He has never lost that incentive. On his Cuban 
 job, Wood laboured from twelve to twenty-four 
 hours a day and the labour was hard. 
 
 When he appointed Wood Governor of Cuba, 
 Root knew him only through his official record. 
 The two had met only once. This was at a dinner 
 in Washington when Wood was Military Governor 
 of Santiago. At the time the Senate Military 
 Affairs Committee was sifting the charges against 
 Wood in 1903, Root testified, "He (Wood) was 
 made Governor-General of Cuba on my recom 
 mendation. President McKinley did not suggest 
 it." 
 
 President McKinley s instructions to the new 
 Governor-General were brief but comprehensive. 
 He merely told General Wood "to prepare Cuba as 
 rapidly as possible for the establishment of an 
 independent government, republican in form, and 
 a good school system." It was a big order, an 
 assignment which any statesman of the time might 
 have been proud to take. No time limit could 
 be set, but as the whole world at that time was 
 watching with jealous eyes the growing power and 
 prestige of the United States; as the statesmen and 
 diplomats of Europe, knowing what a rich prize 
 Cuba was, distrusted our professions, firmly be 
 lieving that we would annex the island, the ad 
 ministration was keenly desirous of proving as 
 
Governor of Cuba 85 
 
 early as possible its good faith and unselfishness. 
 Hence General Wood s time for performing his 
 great task was limited. He was his own pace 
 maker, but he was required to set himself a brisk 
 Yankee pace. 
 
 Whenever an American commonwealth finds 
 its financial condition unfavourably disturbed 
 through extravagance of public officials, ill-ad 
 vised legislation, or through necessarily heavy 
 expenditure of funds for public improvements, 
 the cry goes out for a business governor. Many 
 a time in our history have the various states of the 
 Union called for experienced business men to cor 
 rect the errors of bungling politicians and to pull 
 through executive measures which were primarily 
 business ventures on a large scale. 
 
 When one looks back upon Cuba at the end of 
 the last century with her ruined finances, her 
 imperative need for big public improvements, 
 her equally imperative need for the up-building 
 of her agricultural, industrial, and commercial life, 
 one cannot escape the conclusion that what Cuba 
 required was a business administration. 
 
 Cuba in 1899 was first of all a business job. 
 
 And Leonard Wood, the Governor of the island, 
 had no business experience. 
 
 How he measured up as business administrator 
 may be gathered from the following translation 
 
86 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 of an article written by a Cuban which recently 
 appeared in a Cuban publication: 
 
 Only those residing in Cuba since the Spanish regime 
 can appreciate to its full extent the marvellous progress 
 of the island in the score of years elapsed, due to a great 
 extent to the wisdom of General Wood s administra 
 tion. When he took possession of the government, the 
 Public Treasury was in a very lamentable condition, 
 as was also all public service. In the first fiscal year 
 (of the American occupation) only $16,151,908.12 was 
 collected in customs revenues. The improvements 
 introduced in the postal service brought $235,854.26 
 into the treasury. The secretary of the new govern 
 ment collected in the same fiscal year $899,256.54 and 
 by various other means $977,774.65 was taken in, mak 
 ing the total $18,264,793.57. The island was thus be 
 coming normal and the task of the administration some 
 what easier. Great sums were invested in public works 
 and sanitation in the cities. The people began to feel 
 satisfaction, using their energies in consolidating peace 
 and reestablishing normal conditions in the various 
 departments of the national government. 
 
 In the fiscal year 1900-01 the collections for the Pub 
 lic Treasury amounted to $18,463,941.47, and from the 
 end of that fiscal year to May 20, 1902, when General 
 Wood and the Government of Intervention withdrew, 
 the collections amounted to $17,071,477.98, that is to 
 say, a total of $58,795,223.40 was collected during 
 Wood s administration. His administration spent a 
 total of $58,160,053.11. When he left Cuba, Wood 
 handed $635,170.29 to the Cuban authorities. 
 
 When General Leonard Wood took charge of the 
 
Governor of Cuba 87 
 
 government, there were only 193 postoffices in condition 
 of rendering service. When he left, there were 366 
 postoffices giving good service. 
 
 The telegraph service was very poor and limited. 
 With the help of the army, Wood repaired the existing 
 lines and established new ones leaving the island with 
 77 stations and 3,518 miles of lines. 
 
 It is not possible to enumerate the great many im 
 provements done for the island during his short ad 
 ministration, and it is very difficult to appreciate to-day 
 the hard work done under difficult conditions by Gen 
 eral Wood and his men for the benefit of the Cuban peo 
 ple in general. One word should be said here in praise 
 of the Cuban people, and it is that they unanimously 
 gave the best cooperation and help to the Military Gov 
 ernor, realizing the altruistic and patriotic work he 
 was doing for the island. Their efforts and patriotic 
 conduct will bring to them, as it will to the name of 
 General Leonard Wood and his intelligent assistants, 
 the admiration and respect of future generations. The 
 Cubans will forever remember W T ood s labours with 
 love and praise. 
 
 Just as the history of Santiago under his mili 
 tary governorship was the story of Leonard Wood 
 during that period, so it maybe said that the history 
 of Cuba from December 12, 1899, when he was ap 
 pointed Governor-General of the island, till May 20, 
 1902, when the Cuban government was turned over 
 to the Cuban people, is the story of Wood. Cuba 
 was his work, his whole life throughout this time. 
 
88 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 What he accomplished in creating order out of 
 disorder, building up the commerce of the country, 
 rewriting its laws, establishing its public educa 
 tional system, fighting its epidemics, founding 
 the courts, remodeling the institutions of cor 
 rections and charities, developing public works 
 and settling innumerable public questions which 
 involved exercise of statesmanship, even diplo 
 macy, constitutes Wood s biography during this 
 time. 
 
 Wood was less than forty when he became Gov 
 ernor-General of Cuba. He was one of the rulers 
 of the world with a bigger job on his hands than 
 most rulers ever encounter. The chief executives 
 of nations are usually kept busy enough wrestling 
 with current problems, even though they inherit 
 from their predecessors a well-ordered government. 
 But in addition to taking care of the new issues 
 which naturally arise in any country, Wood had to 
 tear down much of the old house that Spain had 
 erected, and build up a new structure. Cuba s 
 government from the constitution down had to be 
 created. As he worked to reconstruct, Wood had 
 to forge the tools with which he laboured. 
 
 It is futile to say that the problem before Wood 
 was but the problem of Santiago on a larger scale. 
 He was, of course, much better fitted to assume 
 control of the whole island because of his executive 
 
Governor of Cuba 89 
 
 experience in Santiago, but the whole Cuban prob 
 lem, because it was on so much larger scale, de 
 manded different methods. 
 
 For instance, in case of an epidemic, Wood could 
 stock Santiago city, a town of 50,000 people, 
 with provisions, then put it under lock and key, 
 utterly isolating it temporarily from the outside 
 world. He could suspend practically all business 
 and impose the most drastic sanitary regulations. 
 That is virtually what he did when the yellow- 
 fever epidemic broke forth in the city in the sum 
 mer of 1899. 
 
 But nothing of that sort could be attempted in 
 Havana, the capital of the island, with a popula 
 tion of more than 250,000. Measures wholly 
 different from those used in Santiago province had 
 to be applied to correct the many evils inherit 
 ances of Spanish rule. In addition Wood now had 
 to undertake an immense amount of constructive 
 labour for the whole country. We can only out 
 line the notably important events of his adminis 
 tration. 
 
 He consulted Chief Justice White of the United 
 States Supreme Court, who pronounced the Cuban 
 laws sound but the judicial procedure faulty, re 
 quiring many changes and modifications. This 
 pronouncement from such a distinguished author 
 ity became Wood s guide. He removed judicial 
 
90 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 and prosecuting officers who were found to be 
 blameworthy for the miscarriage of justice, and 
 appointed a commission to inquire into the chief 
 faults in legal procedure. The iniquitous fee 
 system for judges and prosecuting officers was 
 abolished, and these court officials were placed on 
 fixed and sufficient salaries determined by the com 
 mission. For the first time in Cuban history 
 salaries to public officials were paid regularly. The 
 incentive to graft was removed so far as it could be 
 removed. 
 
 Wood found the court as well as other public 
 records of the island in a confused state. He 
 applied a characteristically American method to 
 make them clear and orderly. He established in 
 Havana a free commercial school and furnished 
 trained stenographers, typists, and clericals to the 
 courts and other governmental departments. 
 Within a few months young Cuban men and 
 women were being distributed from this school to 
 the courts and government offices of the island to 
 exercise their skill in making Spanish "pothooks," 
 transcribe their notes on typewriters, and file and 
 index records in true American fashion. It was 
 a simple, common-sense solution of a vexatious 
 problem. 
 
 General Wood named a prison commission which 
 went over all the prisons in Cuba and released 
 
Governor of Cuba 91 
 
 scores of prisoners against whom no evidence 
 of wrong doing could be found. The whole prison 
 system was overhauled and remodeled on the pat 
 tern of the most modern penal institutions in this 
 country. Under the Spanish regime, youths and 
 first offenders had been thrown into cells with old 
 criminals. They came out infected with crime 
 and vice. He organized a new department of 
 Charities and Corrections under a capable Amer 
 ican superintendent, Major E. St. John Greble. 
 A reform school for girls was built at Aldecoa and 
 another for boys at Guanajay where young of 
 fenders were taught useful trades while paying 
 their social debts to their country. 
 
 One of the great faults of the Spanish adminis 
 tration of Cuba was its fearful extravagance. It 
 was extravagant not only in that it seemed planned 
 with the express view of providing lucrative posi 
 tions for Spanish bureaucrats, but in that the 
 system itself was wasteful. For instance, there 
 were many local units of government, towns and 
 villages, and rural communities, each of which had 
 only a few inhabitants and none of which was able 
 to pay the expenses of a local government. Wood 
 abolished these small governmental units and 
 merged them with larger communities thus effect 
 ing an important economic reform. 
 
 Shortly after taking office Wood appointed a 
 
92 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 commission to draft a general election law modelled 
 after our own. The Australian ballot system was 
 adopted. Circulars describing the election system, 
 ballot and ballot boxes were sent out to every 
 election district in Cuba, and within six months 
 after he became Governor-General Wood gave the 
 country its first lesson in self-government at the 
 voting booths. For the first time in the history 
 of Cuba the people chose their own local repre 
 sentatives and municipal officials. 
 
 One of Wood s hardest battles in Cuba was 
 directed against the railroad companies. Busi 
 ness, big and small, had been pretty thoroughly 
 demoralized during the intermittent revolutions. 
 Nothing much remained of the railroad except an 
 impudent presumption on the part of the railroad 
 officials that they could fix their own rates at any 
 figure they pleased without any regard whatso 
 ever for the public. They would charge as high 
 as eighty cents for carrying a sugar bag weighing 
 three hundred and twenty pounds from plantation 
 to seacoast, while the haul from the coast to the 
 refineries of New York City, a distance twelve 
 times as long, cost but from eighteen to twenty 
 cents. Wood enlisted the services of Mr. E. R. 
 Olcott, an attorney of New York City, who was 
 familiar with the railroad laws of the Spanish- 
 American countries, to rewrite the Cuban railroad 
 
Governor of Cuba 93 
 
 laws in conjunction with General Grenville M. 
 Dodge and Sir William Van Horn. An equitable 
 rate system was enforced, and under the supervi 
 sion of General Dodge and Sir William the railroads 
 were extended and put in excellent repair. 
 
 Under the Spanish regime the railroads had been 
 overtaxed, which in part accounted for the ex 
 orbitant rates. They had been forced to pay 
 ten per cent, on their gross passenger service 
 revenue, three per cent, on freight revenue, and 
 four and one half per cent, on their dividends. 
 Wood abolished the gross income taxes and raised 
 to six per cent, the net income tax. 
 
 Wood s business ability as an administrator was 
 put to a sudden and unexpected test by the Bacon 
 resolution in Congress in 1900. Up to that time 
 the United States had spent $42,000,000 of its 
 money in Cuba of which $26,000,000 had been 
 expended under Wood. The resolution called for 
 a full and immediate accounting of General Wood s 
 stewardship. 
 
 The first ship to leave Cuba for the United 
 States, after Wood received his order, carried a 
 complete statement of expenditures accounting 
 for every dollar and accompanied by vouchers 
 and the original order for all the money spent. 
 
 When the Americans entered Cuba in 1898, 
 there were no public schools or public school 
 
94 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 buildings on the island. All the educational in 
 stitutions were private and for the benefit of the 
 favoured few of the upper and wealthier classes. 
 The Spanish government had never distinguished 
 itself either at home or in its colonies by encourag 
 ing public instruction. During the latter half of 
 the eighteenth century Cuban youths had begun 
 to flock to British colonies of this country to 
 attend colleges. They returned with progressive 
 ideas which did not suit the Spanish masters of the 
 island, and in 1799 a royal edict was issued warn 
 ing Cuban parents against sending their sons to 
 the colleges of this country which had just won its 
 independence. 
 
 In his instructions to General Wood, President 
 McKinley had ordered him to establish a good 
 school system. When he received the order, 
 General Wood had already founded a public school 
 system in Cuba. While he was Military Governor 
 of Santiago city and province from July 20, 1898, to 
 December 12, 1899, he had established nearly two 
 hundred schools within the territory under his 
 jurisdiction. 
 
 Wood now began to create a national system 
 of education. He found two young men among 
 his officers well trained for undertaking this labour. 
 They were Lieut. Alexis Everett Frye, a Harvard 
 man who, before volunteering as a soldier in the 
 
Governor of Cuba 95 
 
 Spanish-American War, had achieved distinction as 
 an educator, and Lieut. Matthew E. Hanna, a 
 West Pointer, who had been a school teacher be 
 fore entering the Military Academy. 
 
 Under Wood s instructions Lieutenants Frye 
 and Hanna drafted a school law modelled largely 
 after the Massachusetts and Ohio systems. The 
 school system was made independent of politics 
 and provided for the election of officials by the 
 people. Due credit in the building of the Cuban 
 schools must be given to Dr. Enrique Jose Varona, 
 Secretary of Public Instruction, a Cuban. 
 
 In every town or community of five hundred 
 people two schools were built, one for each sex. 
 Most of the instructors had little or no teaching 
 experience, but they entered on their duties with 
 a splendid enthusiasm for service, and thousands 
 of little children, black and white, whose parents 
 had never dared hope that their offspring would 
 receive the benefits of education, flocked to the 
 schoolrooms. With the advent of the schools there 
 was a new hope born for the young manhood and 
 womanhood of the island. The school districts 
 were divided into three classes: municipal dis 
 tricts of the first class for cities of 30,000 or 
 more inhabitants; municipal districts of the sec 
 ond class for cities of 10,000 inhabitants and 
 less than 30,000; and municipal districts of the 
 
96 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 third class for communities of less than 10,000. 
 These districts were sub-divided into school units 
 having at least sixty resident pupils. Wood and 
 his able assistants took infinite care in choosing 
 textbooks and other school equipment. The 
 schoolrooms were up-to-date in every way. Com 
 plete records were kept of attendance and of 
 progress made by the young pupils. Examining 
 boards were appointed. Summer normal schools 
 were established so that the inexperienced teachers 
 could profit by instruction in pedagogy. 
 
 Within a year after Wood entered office as Gov- 
 enor-General more than 3,000 public schools had 
 been opened. In 1902 Cuba could boast of public 
 school enrollment of 256,000 pupils, surely not a 
 bad beginning in a country having a population 
 of only a little more than a million and a half. 
 The cost was $4,000,000. Under Spanish rule the 
 island had been bled for $7,000,000 per year for 
 the maintenance of the Spanish troops and navy 
 in and around Cuba for the express purpose of 
 keeping the natives enslaved. Out of the 
 $34,000,000 collected annually in Cuba, $182,000 
 had been spent for educational purposes by the 
 Spanish authorities. 
 
 When General Wood was organizing the school 
 system, a friend advised him to import American 
 teachers. 
 
Governor of Cuba 97 
 
 "I ll do nothing of the sort," he replied. "If 
 we did, the Cubans would misunderstand us and 
 think we were seeking to Americanize the chil 
 dren." 
 
 So native teachers of the best families of Cuba 
 were found to instruct the youth. It was Wood s 
 policy to appoint Cubans wherever possible to 
 official positions. During the reconstruction many 
 of the high executive posts were occupied by Amer 
 icans who held military rank. The Americans 
 were displaced as soon as Cubans fitted for these 
 high offices could be found. It was an important 
 part of Wood s job to train native public servants 
 so that Cuba might as soon as possible stand on 
 her own feet. To do this he had to conduct in 
 fact a school of democratic government for Cuban 
 people, and to materialize therein all the cardinal 
 principles of American democracy. 
 
 W T hile building up the free school system, Wood 
 encouraged the private schools. Technical schools 
 for boys and girls were established in various cities 
 and soon commanded large attendance. 
 
 Wood found the University of Havana, the only 
 institution in Cuba conferring degrees, in a cur 
 ious state of demoralization. The faculty of the 
 University consisted of ninety-six professors, all 
 w r ell paid; but there were only four hundred and 
 six students. Most of the professors had very 
 
98 Tfie Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 little to do, many of them did nothing at all, 
 having no classes, no pupils. The laboratory 
 equipment was utterly worthless, the buildings 
 were dilapidated, and all the furnishings run down. 
 Wood ordered a complete reorganization of the 
 University. He compelled all candidates for the 
 faculty to submit to competitive examinations. 
 He sent purchasing agents to Europe and the 
 United States to buy the most modern equipment, 
 scientific instruments and other necessary appara 
 tus. The University was poorly located. Wood 
 scrapped the old buildings and installed the 
 University in a far superior structure, built by the 
 Spaniards as an arsenal and munition factory and 
 situated on a hill overlooking the city. The 
 University still remains on this site, one of the 
 most picturesque in Havana, commanding, as it^ 
 does, a view of the whole city. j 
 
 While he objected to importing American 
 teachers on the ground that the Cubans would 
 justly fear an attempt was being made to "Amer 
 icanize" the island, Wood endeavoured in every 
 way to give the Cuban teachers the best benefits 
 of our experience in education. In the spring of 
 1900, Harvard University invited the teachers 
 of the island to spend their vacation at its summer 
 school to learn something of American pedagogy. 
 Wood enthusiastically championed this venture. 
 
Governor of Cuba 99 
 
 He sent 1,280 teachers to Cambridge, Massa 
 chusetts, all expenses being paid by the Military 
 Government. 
 
 He was under no delusion as to the actual 
 amount of studying they could accomplish on this 
 junket. But what he was anxious for was to have 
 the teachers see something of America and of our 
 best educational institutions, to put them in touch 
 with our leading educators, and to create the 
 friendliest feeling between these guides of Cuba s 
 future citizens and the people of this country. The 
 trip was an entire success and the teachers re 
 turned to their schools with fresh inspiration 
 gathered in the course of the delightful journey 
 and their brief period of association with some of 
 the most cultured men and women of our country. 
 
 One of the sad problems of the Military Gov 
 ernment and one of the most difficult to solve 
 was that of the Cuban war orphans. During the 
 rebellion, which led up to our interference, thou 
 sands of families had become disrupted, and 
 thousands of little waifs, who had lost trace of 
 their parents, were begging in the cities. The 
 problem was most similar to that which various 
 American organizations are now seeking to solve 
 in Serbia, Roumania, Poland, and other countries 
 which were over-run by hostile armies in the late 
 war. Wood established five commodious asylums 
 
100 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 for the parentless children. Here they were given 
 the best of instructions and the best of care that 
 the country could afford. At that time the ques 
 tion of organized charity had not received the 
 careful study it now has. Twenty years ago we 
 had not heard much of the dangers of institution 
 alizing and pauperizing individuals dependent on 
 public aid. However, Wood immediately foresaw 
 the possible dangers to which the war orphans 
 might be subjected in these asylums. He there 
 fore gave strict instructions to his subordinates to 
 find suitable, permanent homes for them as soon 
 as possible. This policy was followed in the case 
 of young war victims, so far as it was possible. 
 
 The great number of war orphans and the 
 abnormal percentage of common -law unions gave 
 a sinister indication of the decline of Cuba s social 
 state, due entirely to the demoralization of the 
 revolutionary wars. The family unit, the very 
 foundation of every civilized state, was in the 
 process of disintegration. One who delves into 
 the voluminous official reports of the American 
 occupation of Cuba, and reads therein the dry 
 accounts of the conditions which existed at the 
 close of the Spanish-American War, is forced 
 to the conclusion that Cuba needed a Moses, a 
 prophet, whom the people would follow blindly, 
 trust with religious devotion, and for whom they 
 
Governor of Cuba- 
 
 101 
 
 would sacrifice all their selfish interests and pre 
 judices. That a doctor and soldier of an alien 
 race, speaking but haltingly their language, could 
 so completely immerse himself in their national 
 life, so intelligently understand their requirements, 
 and so wisely solve their complex problems seems 
 almost miraculous. 
 
 And Leonard Wood had come to Cuba to fight ! 
 
 He did fight, but he remained to rule. And for 
 the brilliant success of his administration there is 
 but one explanation his sound common sense. 
 After all, genius is but common sense developed 
 to the nth degree. 
 
 Wood knew little or nothing of the so-called arts 
 of statesmanship and diplomacy, and yet he was 
 constantly called upon for the exercise of both in 
 adjusting public questions, which demanded great 
 tact and a sagacious appraisal of social and relig 
 ious conditions on the island. In settling the 
 questions of the marriage laws and the claims of 
 the Holy See against the United States as suc 
 cessor to the Spanish Government in Cuba he had 
 to play the role of a statesman and a diplomat. 
 
 There had recently been instituted laws which 
 recognized as legal only those marriages which 
 were performed by judges. Marriages by the 
 clergy were invalid. One can imagine how such 
 a condition of affairs would shock a deeply re- 
 
102 The Life* of Leonard Wood 
 
 Kgious Catholic community. Thousands of couples 
 had ignored the law. They had been married 
 by the priests of their faith without any civil 
 ceremony. Naturally these good people were 
 outraged by the fact that in the eyes of the law 
 their unions were merely those of common law, and 
 the legitimacy of their offspring was a disputed and 
 unsettled matter. Others had dispensed with all 
 or any ceremony. 
 
 Wood immediately recognized the grave injus 
 tice and the potential danger of this condition. 
 Although a Protestant in religion, he consulted 
 with the Catholic clergy in drafting a new mar 
 riage code which would remove the causes of com 
 plaint. The new law gave the same rights to the 
 duly -ordained clergymen of all denominations as 
 to civil marriage officials. The clergy were in 
 vested with the right to act as agents of the state 
 in filling out the forms required by the new mar 
 riage statute. The children born of common -law 
 marriages were legitimatized. 
 
 In the years from 1837 to 1841 Spain had 
 secularized all church property in her colonial 
 possession. Complicated disputes had arisen be 
 tween the state and the Holy See, finally resulting 
 in an agreement entered into in 1861, whereby 
 Spain promised to return to the church all property 
 not disposed of, and to pay for forty years an 
 
Governor of Cuba 103 
 
 annual rental of more than $500,000 on all other 
 church properties held by the state for various 
 purposes. As a legal successor to Spain in Cuba, 
 the Military Government was presented with a 
 handsome bill by the church authorities. Wood 
 instituted an extensive and thorough inquiry into 
 the church claims. Instead of approaching this 
 matter as though it were strictly a legal case in 
 which the Catholic church was the complainant 
 and the Military Government the defendant, Wood 
 assumed that both sides involved desired only a 
 fair settlement. Investigation showed that the 
 claims of the church were eminently fair, and a full 
 settlement was made to the satisfaction of all 
 parties concerned. 
 
 It is practically certain that the legal advisers 
 of the Military Government could have picked 
 plenty of flaws in the church claims, and that, had 
 he so desired, Wood could have evaded full settle 
 ment. He went through the unwieldy mass of 
 documents covering the case, but instead of look 
 ing for handy pegs on which to hang a legal de 
 fence, Wood, guided by sound common sense, 
 recognized the fundamental principles of justice 
 involved and inside of a few days he had settled 
 forever a dispute half a century old. Without 
 amicable relationship with the church Wood s 
 reconstruction work in Cuba would have been 
 
104 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 rendered most difficult. His enemies might have 
 charged that he was shrewdly currying favour 
 with the powerful clerical interest. But we shall 
 see, before we reach the end of his Cuban ad 
 ministration, that Wood was unafraid to antago 
 nize even more powerful individuals than Bishop 
 Donatus of Havana, when to do otherwise would 
 have meant breach of trust and confidence. 
 
 During his Santiago administration Bishop 
 Bernaba was elevated from the priesthood. An 
 ardent Cuban patriot, he showed great affectiom 
 for the liberators of his country and extended an 
 invitation to Wood to walk with him in the cere 
 monial procession from his little parish church 
 where he had served to the Cathedral. The pro 
 cession was an intensely dramatic and solemn 
 spectacle dominated as it was by the tragedies 
 of the past and the joy of liberation from the Span 
 ish yoke. Thousands of Cubans lined the streets 
 and crowded forward to receive their first blessing 
 from a Cuban bishop. When the people saw the 
 American Military Governor walking by the side 
 of the new Bishop and under his canopy they cried : 
 "Thank God the General is a Catholic." The 
 Bishop was an old man and he was so overcome 
 by his emotions that General Wood had to steady 
 him with his strong arm. Sometimes, as the 
 Bishop leaned forward to bless the people, who one 
 
Governor of Cuba 105 
 
 after another grasped his hand to kiss it, his mitre 
 would slip to one side, but there was a cool and 
 dignified young American General by his side who 
 would straighten the mitre without any em 
 barrassment, and this simple service was received 
 in the spirit in which it was rendered. "Thank God 
 you re here," the Bishop said. "I m so old that I 
 could not have made this long journey if you had 
 not been here to help me." When Wood told him 
 that he was not a Catholic, Bishop Bernaba 
 said, "You re a good Catholic, only you do not 
 know it." 
 
 When, in 1899, Wood left Santiago for a visit 
 to the United States the people of the city pre 
 sented him with an illuminated scroll in Spanish, 
 reading in part: 
 
 "The greatest of your successes is to have won 
 the confidence and esteem of a people in trouble." 
 
 After straightening out the Cuban marriage 
 law Wood received the following letter from the 
 Bishop of Havana dated August 10, 1900: 
 
 I saw published in the official Gazette yesterday the 
 decree whereby you give civil effect and validity to 
 religious marriages. This act of your Excellency 
 corresponds perfectly with the elevated ideals of justice, 
 fairness, and true liberty to which aspired the institu 
 tions and government of the United States, which you so 
 worthily represent in this Island. 
 
106 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 I gladly take this opportunity of declaring that in all 
 my dealings with your Excellency I have found you 
 ever disposed to listen to all reasonable petitions and to 
 guard the sacred rights of justice which is the firmest 
 foundation of every honoured and noble nation. 
 
 I am moved, therefore, to speak the thanks not only 
 of the Catholics but likewise of all others who truly 
 love the moral, religious, and political well-being of the 
 people, and to express to your Excellency the sincere 
 feelings and satisfaction and gratitude for this decree, 
 which is worthy of a wise leader and an able statesman. 
 This, too, gives me confidence that all your decrees and 
 orders will continue to be dictated by the same high- 
 minded and liberal spirit of justice that while it respects 
 the religious sentiment, also guarantees and defends 
 the rights and liberties of all honest institutions. 
 Very respectfully yours, 
 
 X. DONATUS, Bishop of Havana. 
 
 On leaving Havana in November, 1901, to be 
 come Bishop of Ephesus, Bishop Donatus wrote 
 Wood as follows: 
 
 Called by the confidence of the Holy Father to a 
 larger and more difficult field of action, I feel the duty 
 before leaving Cuba to express to your Excellency my 
 sentiment of friendship and gratitude, not only for the 
 kindness shown to me, but for the fair treatment of the 
 questions with the Government of the Island, especially 
 the Marriage and Church Property questions. The 
 equity and justice which inspired your decision will 
 devolve before all fair-minded people to the honour, not 
 
Governor of Cuba 107 
 
 only of you personally, but also to the Government you 
 so worthily represent. I am gratified to tell you that 
 I have already expressed the same sentiment to the 
 Holy Father in writing and I will tell him orally on my 
 visit to Rome. 
 
 Yours very respectfully, 
 X. DONATUS, Bishop of Havana. 
 
 When he was about to leave for the Philippines 
 after finishing his work in Cuba, General Wood 
 was the recipient of a most remarkable expression 
 of confidence from the Catholic church of this 
 country. A delegation of church authorities 
 headed by the Reverend William Ambrose Jones, 
 later Bishop of Porto Rico, called on Wood to re 
 quest him to represent the Catholic church in the 
 Philippines. If this were agreeable to him, the 
 delegates said, they would approach the President 
 to suggest that he be invested with the proper 
 authority, whereupon the church would give him 
 full power to represent it in all cases dealing with 
 the Philippine colonial government. 
 
 No review of Leonard Wood s career would be 
 complete without an account of the successful 
 campaign fought during his Cuban administration 
 against the plagues of the island, especially yellow 
 fever. 
 
 General Wood did not personally slay this mon 
 ster, which annually took a toll of thousands of 
 
108 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 lives and millions of dollars, but with his knowledge 
 of medical science and his physician s appreciation 
 of the importance of conquering the plague, he 
 left nothing undone to smooth the way for the 
 scientists working under his jurisdiction in stamp 
 ing it out. 
 
 There is glory enough for all who shared in the 
 labours of Major Walter Reed, the American 
 conqueror of yellow fever. The hard and difficult 
 campaign which he waged would certainly have 
 been rendered more hard and difficult and costly 
 in life had he not received the intelligent and 
 devoted cooperation of the central Cuban Mili 
 tary Government. 
 
 It has never been disputed that it was the con 
 quest of yellow fever which made possible the 
 construction of the Panama Canal at the time 
 it was built. The United States could never have 
 accomplished this monumental feat of engineering 
 with yellow fever infesting the American tropics. 
 The cost in lives would have been prohibitive. 
 
 General Wood was one of the first converts of 
 the medical fraternity to the theory that yellow 
 fever was a germ, not a filth disease. He had 
 employed in Santiago city the most modern 
 methods of sanitation and he had strictly enforced 
 his health decrees. But in their effect on yellow 
 fever all these precautions were practically worth- 
 
Governor of Cuba 109 
 
 less. Better sanitation was effected, but even 
 perfect sanitation failed to check the progress of 
 yellow fever. 
 
 In 1899, when Wood had made Santiago the 
 cleanest city in tropical America, if not in the 
 Western Hemisphere, a virulent yellow-fever 
 epidemic broke out in the city. The Military 
 Government met the crisis by quarantining the 
 port. Non-immunes were removed, infected houses 
 were closed, and Wood s sanitation squads scoured 
 the community with disinfectants. Even the 
 streets were sprinkled with solutions of corrosive 
 sublimate. Two American physicians, Drs. Car 
 roll and Lazaer, heroically presented themselves for 
 inoculation. Dr. Lazaer died while Dr. Carroll 
 recovered. 
 
 In an article on the Military Government in 
 Cuba, published in the Annals of the American 
 Academy of Political and Social Science in 1903, 
 General Wood tells the story of Dr. Reed s dis 
 covery. He states that Drs. Reed, Carroll, and 
 Kean called at the headquarters of the Military 
 Government in Havana one day and informed him 
 that they had reached a point in their scientific 
 research where it was necessary to make extensive 
 experiments on human beings. They asked the 
 Governor-General for money to pay those who 
 submitted themselves for inoculation and for au- 
 
110 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 thority to go ahead with their dangerous investi 
 gation. 
 
 General Wood told the physicians that they had 
 the backing of the Cuban Military Government, 
 financial and otherwise. He cautioned them to 
 experiment only on sound persons who understood 
 distinctly the risk assumed. The written consent 
 of the subject must be secured before inoculation. 
 He further stipulated that the subject must be 
 of legal age. General Wood, in a report of the 
 achievement, wrote: 
 
 The stegomyia mosquito was found to be, beyond 
 question, the means of transmitting the yellow fever 
 germ. This mosquito, in order to become infected, 
 must bite a person sick with yellow fever during the first 
 five days of the disease. It then requires apparently 
 ten days for the germ so to develop that the mosquito 
 can transmit the disease, and all non-immunes who are 
 bitten by a mosquito of the class mentioned, infected as 
 described, invariably develop a pronounced case of 
 yellow fever in from three and a half to five days from 
 the time they are bitten. It was further demonstrated 
 that infection from cases so produced could again be 
 transmitted by the above-described type of mosquito 
 to another person who could in turn become infected 
 with the fever. It was also proven that yellow fever 
 could be transmitted by means of introduction into 
 the circulation of blood serum even after filtering 
 through porcelain filters, which later experiment in 
 dicates that the organism is exceedingly small, in fact, 
 
Governor of Cuba 111 
 
 that it is probably beyond the power of any microscope 
 at present in use. It was positively demonstrated that 
 yellow fever could not be transmitted by clothing, let 
 ters, etc., and that consequently all the old methods of 
 fumigation and disinfection were only useful in so far as 
 they served to destroy mosquitoes, their young and 
 their eggs. 
 
 With the establishment of these facts was inaugu 
 rated an entirely new method of dealing with yellow 
 fever, a method very similar to that adopted in the 
 treatment of malarial fever cases, only carried out 
 much more thoroughly. 
 
 A yellow fever case, as soon as discovered, was care 
 fully isolated in premises inclosed with fine wire screens, 
 and further precautions taken to prevent the mosquito 
 from coming to them. The houses in which cases had 
 occurred were sealed up and filled with formaldehyde 
 or other gases, for the purpose of killing all mosquitoes. 
 The same was done with neighbouring houses. The 
 effect of this method of dealing with the disease was at 
 once apparent. The fever was checked and brought 
 to an end at a time of the year when it is usually on 
 the increase. This was accomplished in spite of the 
 fact that a large number of non-immunes arrived in 
 Havana and other ports of the island. The disagree 
 able and costly process of disinfection formerly in use 
 had been practically done away with. The means at 
 present employed is much less destructive to property 
 and much less annoying to the people. 
 
 Cuba is now free from yellow fever, and has been so 
 for a considerable period. There has not been a case 
 originating in the east end of the island for three years, 
 and none in Havana for more than a year. No epidemic 
 
The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 of yellow fever has appeared in the Southern states in all 
 that time. 
 
 Thus the long and tragic history of this danger 
 ous disease which had held back the development 
 of the tropics was brought to a close. In 1901 
 twenty-nine persons per thousand were admitted 
 to hospitals in Cuba as yellow-fever patients. In 
 1902 there was one case of yellow fever in the 
 island. 
 
 American physicians had achieved one of the 
 greatest scientific triumphs of modern times, mak 
 ing tropical America safe for the whole white race. 
 That is civilization. 
 
 The deliverance of the American tropics from 
 the subjugation of the horrible yellow-fever night 
 mare came with a dramatic suddenness which 
 startled the whole world of medical science. It 
 was the outstanding master-stroke of the American 
 occupation of Cuba as it conferred on humanity 
 a world-wide blessing. Leonard Wood s labour 
 of making Cuba a safer place through the ap 
 plication of the principles of modern sanitation 
 and health measures in general was of slower 
 development. He began fighting his battle for 
 sanitation in the island when he became Military 
 Governor of Santiago and kept up the fight until 
 he left Cuba. He found the island suffering from 
 
Governor of Cuba 113 
 
 tuberculosis, typhoid, glanders, small-pox, and 
 leprosy. He wiped out the filth diseases, launched 
 an educational campaign throughout the country 
 to check typhoid and tuberculosis. He ordered 
 the population vaccinated to prevent small-pox, 
 and isolated the lepers. 
 
 The progress of his sanitation labours may be 
 judged by the fact that in 1898 there was prob 
 ably not one single American soldier in Cuba 
 who was not at some time disabled by disease, the 
 mortality rate from disease among our troops 
 being very high, while during the ten and two 
 thirds months ending May 30, 1902, the death rate 
 among American troops in Cuba was 1.67 per 
 thousand from disease; in the United States, 4.83, 
 and in the Pacific islands, 20.26. In other words, 
 the chances of a soldier dying in the United States 
 were almost three times greater than in Cuba which 
 four years before had been unfit for a foreign-born 
 person. 
 
 There were no trained nurses in the island when 
 the Americans came. General Wood established 
 training schools for nurses, and the graduates of 
 these institutions became his most valuable health 
 and sanitation missionaries in Cuba. Nor was 
 all the work which he had begun for the health of 
 the community to be allowed to lapse when the 
 Americans withdrew. 
 
114 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 When the Cuban Constitutional Convention 
 which sat in Havana from November 5, 1900, to 
 February 21, 1901, had finished its work, and the 
 new Constitution, modelled largely on our own, had 
 been ratified by the representatives of the Cuban 
 people, the United States Government insisted on 
 inserting in this document several paragraphs for 
 the protection of the new republic. These clauses, 
 known as the Platt Amendment, were made a part 
 of the Cuban Constitution on June 12, 1901. One 
 of these clauses pledges the Cuban government to 
 continue the public sanitation measures begun by 
 General Wood and his assistants in the island. The 
 American Government, in other words, thought 
 so well of Wood s work for a healthier Cuba that 
 it insisted on perpetuating it in the Constitution 
 on which rests the Cuban Republic. 
 
 Wood built school houses in practically every 
 community throughout Cuba, and modern hos 
 pitals in all the larger towns. Harbours were 
 dredged and otherwise improved for shipping, and 
 lighthouses were constructed; Wood s railway 
 experts built a good share of the present railway 
 system of Cuba, and it was due to his championing 
 of good roads that highways were constructed 
 throughout the rich agricultural districts connect 
 ing the sugar fields with ports or with inland towns 
 having railroad communications. Telegraph and 
 
Governor of Cuba 115 
 
 telephone lines were extended to every town of 
 size, and by the time the island was transferred to 
 the Cuban government, three hundred post- 
 offices had been established. The customs service 
 was reorganized and a modern system of ac 
 counting and auditing established and maintained. 
 Wood expended about $15,000,000 of the Military 
 Government s money for these public works. i 
 
 What astonished the Cubans quite as much as 
 the actual amount of improvements accomplished 
 was the fact that the cost of everything done was 
 so small. One instance will show the difference in 
 prices paid for public works under Spanish and 
 American rule. Shortly before the United States 
 interfered, the Spanish Military Governor of 
 Santiago had built a quarter of a mile of macadam 
 pavement along the Santiago waterfront. The 
 cost was $180,000. A few months later Wood s 
 engineers laid down five miles of asphalt pavement 
 in Santiago at a total cost of $175,000. 
 
 Wood succeeded in performing his enormous 
 task of rehabilitating the island with practically 
 no friction, all the educated and enlightened 
 Cubans and the vast majority of the Cuban people 
 cooperating heartily with him. An explanation 
 of his success may be had from the following 
 episode illustrating his method of dealing with the 
 people. We quote from an article published in 
 
116 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 McClure s Magazine when Wood was Military 
 Governor of Santiago, written by Ray Stannard 
 Baker, the man whom President Wilson appointed 
 as head of the American Press Bureau at the late 
 Peace Conference in Paris: 
 
 I shall never forget a visit I made with General Wood 
 and his Staff to Guantanamo. The Governor of San 
 tiago has a passion for appearing unexpectedly in out- 
 of-the way places in order to see the machinery of his 
 government in its every-day work. If there happens 
 to be a particularly heavy rain storm, with impassable 
 roads, the Governor may confidently be expected. It 
 was raining torrents when we visited Guantanamo 
 and it was Sunday morning. A little group of Cubans 
 stood on the wharf at Caimanera and watched the 
 Americans coming up from the launch. When a Span 
 ish governor arrived there were always flags and music 
 and crowds; but the American Governor what a 
 wonder he was! He was clad exactly like the other 
 men of the party, in a brown khaki suit. He wore a 
 peaked cavalry hat and buff leather riding leggings and 
 spurs. His only distinguished mark was the star on 
 his shoulder, the insignia of a Brigadier-General, and 
 that was too high up for any of the little Cubans to see. 
 
 Guantanamo is a typical east Cuban town of some 
 10,000 inhabitants. On this Sunday morning it was 
 swimming in clay mud, and wore an indescribable air 
 of apathy and disheartenment. The faces at the doors 
 were tired and lustreless, and even the clinking of the 
 spurred heels of the Americans on the narrow flag walks 
 failed to arouse any marked interest. Perhaps they 
 
Governor of Cuba 117 
 
 didn t know that it was the Governor who passed. In 
 a big, bare, dilapidated room with barred windows 
 a conference was held with the mayor and city council. 
 The mayor was a small, dry, brown old man, very 
 smugly clad in a black suit. In his curl-brim straw hat 
 he wore the coloured cockade of a Cuban general the 
 only bit of colour about him he carried a curious tor 
 toise-shell cane, on which he leaned with both hands. 
 He sat next to the American Governor, and, oddly 
 enough, exactly beneath a picture of Admiral Dewey, 
 and solemnly watched each speaker. The city coun 
 cil was made up very much like an American village 
 board, of the apothecary, the wheelwright, the doctor, 
 and so on; but the members varied in colour from the 
 pure olive of the Spaniard to the shiny black of the 
 full-blooded Negro. 
 
 The Governor rose and greeted each man as he came 
 in with serious politeness, for politeness is the bread of 
 existence to the Cubans. After they were all seated 
 and the conference had begun, in walked that typical 
 Cuban institution, the agitating editor. He came with 
 an indescribable bustle of importance and opposition, 
 a dramatic effect unattainable by any Anglo-Saxon. 
 His notebook and pencil were clearly in evidence, and 
 he spurned the chair which was offered him. The 
 dry old mayor looked at him with a solemn lack of 
 interest; the American Governor saw him not at all. 
 The chief of the rural guard was also there, a big, hand 
 some fellow, as straight and lithe as a bamboo-pole. 
 A pistol tipped up the skirts of his coat. He wore 
 black patent-leather leggings, silver spurs, and a white 
 linen uniform with black stripings, which set him off 
 with jaunty consequence. 
 
118 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 At first the talk (through an interpreter) was of 
 money. They had not yet received their allowance 
 from the customs fund, and General Wood explained 
 why it was delayed. The apothecary then reported 
 that they had decided to build a fine yellow fever hos 
 pital of stone; but General Wood advised a wooden 
 structure, with a wide veranda, and he explained with 
 the ready knowledge of a skilled physician how difficult 
 it was to disinfect a stone building. The grave old 
 mayor nodded his head ; the American Governor was wise. 
 "Tell them," said General Wood, "that they should get 
 together and build a good schoolhouse. They would 
 have the honour of constructing the first one in Cuba." 
 
 But the mayor and council were silent schoolhouses 
 did not interest them. They discussed the new water 
 works system on which the Americans were spending 
 $100,000; and they wanted a stable for the horses 
 of the rural guard, a subject which the Governor referred 
 to the local American commandant for investigation. 
 
 "Tell them," said General Wood, "that I haven t 
 heard any complaints from here," at which compliment 
 the council nodded in deep appreciation, and the mayor 
 even smiled. 
 
 "They wish to thank you," said the interpreter, 
 "for the interest which you take in the town," and 
 then it was the Governor s turn to bow graciously. 
 The immediate business being now completed, the 
 Governor shook hands all around, addressing those 
 about him readily in Spanish. And with this the 
 conference ended. 
 
 That the American occupation was so singu 
 larly devoid of disorder was principally due to 
 
Governor of Cuba 119 
 
 Wood s ability to gauge the temper and character 
 of the Cuban people. During the first months 
 of the American occupation the Cubans were 
 especially bitter in their hatred toward the Span 
 ish, and prisoners of war had to be closely guarded 
 from a certain element among the native soldiers. 
 After the evacuation of the Spanish troops, several 
 clashes occurred between Cuban and Spanish 
 civilians, none of them serious. 
 
 The following story illustrates Wood s method 
 of dealing with outbreaks of this sort. 
 
 The General was writing at his desk in the 
 Palace in Santiago one night. At the entrance 
 stood a lone American sentry armed with a rifle. 
 The soldier observed a gathering of men in the 
 Plaza across from the San Carlos Club, the mem 
 bership of which was almost exclusively Spanish. 
 As the people seemed quiet and there were no 
 restrictions placed on public meetings, the sentry 
 paid no special attention to the crowd until sud 
 denly it surged toward the club. In an instant 
 the crowd had become a yelling mob which now 
 began throwing stones, bricks, and other missiles 
 against the club windows and doors. 
 
 General Wood was working calmly at his desk 
 when the sentry entered to report the disturb 
 ance. 
 
 "I know it," said General Wood without looking 
 
120 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 up from his papers. "I have heard the row. 
 We ll go right over and stop it." 
 
 Then, without any haste or excitement, he picked 
 up his riding crop the only weapon, by the way, 
 that he ever carried and accompanied by the 
 one American soldier, he walked across the street. 
 They pushed their way through the mob until 
 they came to the club s main entrance where 
 several men were trying to force the door. 
 
 "Now shove them back, sentry," said Wood, 
 calmly. 
 
 The soldier swung his rifle around, bruising a 
 few obstreperous Cubans, and in less than a minute 
 a space was cleared in front of the club. 
 
 "Now shoot the first man who places his foot 
 upon that step," said the General in Spanish, rais 
 ing his voice so that the mob could hear his order. 
 
 Then Wood turned and walked back to the 
 Palace, and inside of a few minutes the crowd had 
 melted away. An American General, armed 
 with a riding whip, and one soldier, carrying a rule, 
 had quelled what had promised to develop into a 
 bloody riot, and not a shot had been fired. 
 
 Another man placed in Wood s position might 
 have called for troops, and the attack on the club 
 might have turned into a real battle between 
 American soldiers and Cuban civilians. Wood 
 knew the people he was dealing with. 
 
Governor of Cuba 121 
 
 At another time, after lie had sent three invita 
 tions to a Cuban official of Spanish blood and train 
 ing and the latter had failed to appear, Wood 
 despatched a squad of soldiers to bring his man, 
 "and I want you to bring him right away," he said. 
 A few minutes later the soldiers carried into Gen 
 eral Wood s office the official clad only in his 
 pajamas. Thereafter he always appeared promptly 
 when asked to come to the General s office. 
 
 While he was in Santiago, General Wood suf 
 fered greatly from malarial fever. One night, 
 when he had gone to his residence in the outskirts 
 of the city, he received a telephone message saying 
 that a riot had occurred at San Luis, a village 
 about twenty miles out on the Santiago railway. 
 Wood had a temperature of 105, and he was so 
 sick and dizzy that he staggered when he walked. 
 Nevertheless, he drove back to the city, summoned 
 his chief signal officer, Captain J. E. Brady, and 
 rushed over to the headquarters of the Signal 
 Corps, where Captain Brady sat down at the 
 telegraph instrument while the General issued his 
 orders summoning members of the Cuban Rural 
 Guard and the officers of the American troops 
 stationed at San Luis. He spent three hours 
 issuing orders, questioning and investigating the 
 cause of the riot. He was so ill that his officers 
 begged him to go home, but Wood stuck till he had 
 
The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 finished his preliminary investigation. The fol 
 lowing day, still racked with fever, he went to San 
 Luis to complete his inquiry. 
 
 We have touched on the bitterness displayed 
 by the Cubans for the Spanish residents of the 
 island, a bitterness somewhat akin to that which 
 raged in the hearts of our own revolutionists 
 against the British loyalists of the United States 
 at the close of our War of Independence. We 
 know how long it has taken for this nation to for 
 get the scars of its wounds received in wars with 
 Britain, and we therefore can better understand 
 the feelings of the native Cubans. In many cases 
 civil wars and wars between people of kindred 
 blood ties are the cruelest and engender the worst 
 after effects. 
 
 Cuba had a large population of Spanish birth, 
 and it became one of Wood s many duties to act 
 as conciliator between the native and Spanish 
 elements. This work he undertook the more 
 willingly as the bravery and gallantry of the ( 
 Spanish army arid navy, fighting against over 
 whelming odds, had aroused the admiration of our 
 people. Here Wood displayed the talents of a real 
 diplomat. 
 
 It so happened that the inauguration ball given 
 in honour of President Palma, the first president 
 of the Cuban Republic, and the members of the 
 
Governor of Cuba 123 
 
 new Cuban Congress, took place the night of King 
 Alfonso s birthday, so there were two celebrations 
 in Havana. At the Spanish Club which reeked with 
 memories of cruel and incompetent military dicta 
 tors, Spanish loyalists were drinking the health of 
 their young monarch about the time that President 
 and Senora Palma were leading the grand march 
 in the state palace. 
 
 General Wood took a bold course. He gathered 
 the principal members of the new Congress and 
 took them over to the Spanish Club, where Cuban 
 officials, Spaniards and American officers toasted 
 King Alfonso and fraternized with true Latin 
 enthusiasm. The President of the Club and the 
 leading members of the Spanish community then 
 joined Wood and his party and went to the in 
 augural ball, where they drank the health of the 
 Cuban Republic. It is difficult to overestimate 
 the significance of this little incident in creating 
 better feeling between Cuba and the Spanish na 
 tion. 
 
 Wood s success in Cuba was largely due to his 
 genius for selecting able men to assist him, and 
 letting them go unhindered about their work as 
 long as they did it satisfactorily. He did not try 
 to do everything himself. No man could have 
 succeeded in Wood s novel and gigantic task who 
 was not able and willing to trust other men. He 
 
124 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 gave Dr. Alexis Everett Frye and Lieutenant 
 Matthew E. Hanna a free rein in building up 
 Cuba s system of education. He drew on the 
 ability and experience of E. R. Olcott, General 
 Grenville M. Dodge and Sir William Van Horn 
 to assist him in rewriting Cuba s railway laws and 
 building much of the present railway system of the 
 island. He backed Major Walter Reed when the 
 latter came to him for money and authority to 
 make his final experiments which resulted in the 
 conquest of yellow fever. He selected or helped 
 select scores of Cubans, many of them men of 
 exceptional ability, to head the various depart 
 ments of the government. 
 
 Acting in behalf of the United States Govern 
 ment, the Governor-General officially turned over 
 the island of Cuba to the Cuban Republic on 
 May 20, 1902. The occasion was marked by 
 impressive ceremony. Shortly before noon, Wood 
 read the document of transfer in the Government 
 Palace, Havana. President Palma responded. 
 At twelve o clock, noon, a detachment of the 
 Seventh United States Cavalry lowered the Ameri 
 can flag amid the thunder of saluting guns, and 
 the Cuban banner was raised where the Stars and 
 Stripes had been flying throughout the occupation. 
 About one hundred and fifty thousand people 
 witnessed the birth of the Cuban Republic. Im- 
 
Governor of Cuba 125 
 
 mediately following the transfer Wood went 
 aboard a ship which carried him to the United 
 States. His work in Cuba was finished. Gover 
 nor General Wood stepped out of an office which 
 commanded world-wide attention and became 
 Brigadier General Leonard Wood, U. S. A., unas- 
 signed. 
 
 Some time after Wood had departed from Cuba, 
 Lord Cromer who was retiring as Consul General 
 of Egypt, was discussing with some Englishmen 
 the choice of his successor. "Unfortunately the 
 best man for the post is not available," said Lord 
 Cromer. "He is an American, General Leonard 
 Wood." 
 
 Wood s Cuban administration was marred by 
 only one unpleasant incident, the so-called Rath- 
 bone affair. Major Estes G. Rathbone, formerly 
 Assistant Postmaster General, was Director-Gen 
 eral of Posts in Cuba. He was charged with 
 wastefulness of public funds, and unwarranted ex 
 penditure of public money for personal use, and 
 together with some of his associates, was brought to 
 trial, convicted, and sent to jail. 
 
 The whole case should have ended there, but 
 Rathbone had powerful friends, and one friend 
 in particular of the two-fisted, fighting sort. This 
 was Senator Marcus A. Hanna of Ohio, then in 
 the height of his political power as Republican 
 
126 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 leader of the Upper House. Rathbone was ar 
 rested in Havana on July 28, 1900, about seven 
 months after Wood had taken office as Governor 
 General. Wood had hardly had time to establish 
 himself firmly in his position. He owed his ap 
 pointment to a Republican administration of 
 which Hanna was reputed to be the actual, if not 
 the titular leader. Rathbone had been Hanna s 
 political supporter and friend; and whatever his 
 faults (and his enemies were never timid about 
 enumerating them) Hanna s foes could never 
 accuse him of ingratitude. He was a man of 
 generous impulses, just the sort of a man who 
 would fight for an old friend whether the latter 
 were riding on the crest of fortune or on his way to 
 prison. 
 
 After Secretary of War Root had appointed him 
 Governor of Cuba, General Wood had gone to 
 Washington to confer with Mr. Root. He had 
 called on President McKinley who greeted him by 
 saying: 
 
 "What can I do for you, General Wood?" 
 
 "Only this, give me your full support as long as 
 you can trust me, and when you cannot do this, 
 get rid of me." 
 
 If President McKinley had not trusted Wood, 
 this was the time to remove him from office, for 
 not only Hanna but also other influential politi- 
 
Governor of Cuba 127 
 
 cians from the President s own state were fighting 
 the Governor of Cuba. They claimed that Rath- 
 bone had been unjustly accused and "railroaded" 
 in the courts through the direct agency of Gov 
 ernor-General Wood, while the latter was himself 
 guilty of extravagance in office and of accepting 
 presents from a gambling house in Havana. He 
 was accused of interfering improperly with the 
 Cuban judiciary in the Rathbone case. 
 
 Wood saw President McKinley and asked to be 
 relieved in case the President was dissatisfied. 
 
 "I wouldn t want you to persecute Rathbone," 
 said the President, "but if you prosecute him I ll 
 support you." 
 
 The Rathbone case dragged on through the 
 courts accumulating fresh complications at every 
 turn and it was not until March 24, 1902, that he 
 was sentenced. A few months later he was par 
 doned by a general amnesty of the Cuban gov 
 ernment. 
 
 The fight on Wood resulting from the Rathbone 
 prosecution continued until long after the former 
 Director -General of Posts of Cuba had been 
 pardoned. This fight eventually crystallized into 
 formal charges filed with the Senate Military 
 Affairs Committee. Wood had been recommended 
 for promotion to the rank of Major-General in the 
 regular army, and Rathbone s friends endeavored 
 
128 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 to block the confirmation. But the Senate 
 Committee on Military Affairs confirmed the pro 
 motion of Wood as Major-General. In its report 
 the Committee disposed of the talk that other 
 Spanish-American War officers had been slighted 
 while Wood had received more than his due share 
 by saying: "Not one of them has a better claim, 
 by reason of his past record and experience as a 
 commander, than has General Wood; and in the 
 opinion of the Committee no one has, in view of 
 his present rank, equal claim to his [Wood s] on 
 the ground of merit measured by the considera 
 tions suggested." 
 
 It was true that at one time he was only a regi 
 mental doctor, but this fact did not mar his 
 military record, which spoke for itself. He had 
 won the Congressional Medal of Honour for 
 courage and devotion to duty in the campaign 
 against the Apaches. General Miles and General 
 Lawton had cited him for his conduct in the 
 campaign. Wood had no pull with either of these 
 officers at the time he joined the army as a con 
 tract surgeon, nor with Cleveland or McKinley 
 until he proved his character and ability to these 
 presidents from opposing parties. 
 
 Generals Wheeler, Shafter, Young, and other 
 high army officers of the Spanish-American War 
 did not agree with Wood s accusers that he had 
 
Governor of Cuba 129 
 
 "performed no military service of distinctive or 
 special merit in the Cuban campaign." Wheeler 
 had cited him for his courage and skill in the 
 Battle of Las Guasimas. Shafter had recom 
 mended him for promotion as Brigadier-General, 
 and had later appointed him Military Governor of 
 Santiago. Young had commended his "magni 
 ficent behaviour in the field." The Secretary of 
 War, Elihu Root, testified before the Committee 
 that he had appointed Wood Governor-General 
 solely on his official record and without consulting 
 President McKinley. 
 
 While in Cuba, Wood became an enthusiastic 
 player of the Spanish game known as " Jai Alai," 
 resembling racquets, and affording excellent physi 
 cal exercise. When he was about to leave the 
 island, Wood was presented with a beautiful silver 
 service by prominent Cubans known to him as 
 "Jai Alai," players and fans. Secretary Root 
 told the Senate Committee that "to have refused 
 this and other gifts made at the same time would 
 have been discourteous, injurious, and unjusti 
 fiable." The fact that some Cubans placed bets 
 on "Jai Alai," just as Americans have been known 
 to hazard money on such purely amateur sports as 
 football games, gave Wood s enemies a peg on which 
 to hang the false charge that he was the patron and 
 friend of a gambling institution. Secretary Root 
 
130 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 further testified that President McKinley had 
 first picked out Wood for promotion to the rank of 
 Major-General and that President Roosevelt on 
 succeeding to the office of Chief Executive would 
 have been compelled "to put him out of that rank 
 and dissent from the judgment of President Mc- 
 Kinley if he had failed to nominate him." 
 
 The Rathbone case is dead and buried these 
 many years, but to-day Daniel R. Hanna, the son 
 of the late Senator Hanna, is supporting the 
 candidacy of General Wood for nomination for the 
 Presidency by the Republican party. 
 
 Leonard Wood s Cuban administration is unique 
 in the annals of colonial history. The simple and 
 incontrovertible fact is that nothing like it has 
 ever been accomplished. Cuba was one of the most 
 tragic spectacles among the nations of the world 
 when the Americans came to her rescue. Years of 
 revolutionary struggles, crushed by brute force 
 only to break forth again, had bankrupted the 
 island, exiled its leaders and exhausted the energy 
 of the people. Cuba in her struggle for freedom 
 was so far spent that even the family structure was 
 beginning to crumble. Such was the Cuba that 
 Leonard Wood, a self-taught statesman, a self- 
 trained executive, a self-made business man, built 
 into a prosperous state in two years and a half. 
 
 Modern history offers instances of great service 
 
Governor of Cuba 131 
 
 performed by statesmen and private individuals 
 for nations, but in each case the nation in question 
 has been "a going concern" with something on 
 which to build. Cuba was not "a going concern." 
 There was no governmental machinery on which to 
 build, and Wood was alone. He had to build his 
 machinery and select his staff. Cuba was bank 
 rupt. In two years and a half he raised and spent 
 more than $58,000,000. He left Cuba with more 
 than half a million in the treasury. 
 
 General Wood received no great material reward 
 for his Cuban labours, but he reaped the richest 
 harvest which a man of his type could desire, the 
 gratitude of the Cuban people and the high respect 
 of all thoughtful and liberal-minded men who had 
 followed his painstaking labours. When the 
 island of Cuba was transferred to the newly es 
 tablished Republic, President Palma in his formal 
 address to General W ood said: 
 
 "I understand that, as far as possible, all 
 pecuniary responsibilities contracted by the Mili 
 tary Government up to this date have been paid; 
 that $100,000 or such portion thereof as may be 
 necessary, has been set aside to cover the expenses 
 that may be occasioned by the liquidation and 
 finishing up the obligations contracted by said 
 government; and that there has been transferred 
 to the Government of the Republic the sum of 
 
132 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 $689,191.02, which constitutes the cash balance 
 existing to-day in favour of the State. 
 
 "I take this solemn occasion, which marks the 
 fulfillment of the honoured promise of the Govern 
 ment and people of the United States in regard to 
 the island of Cuba, and in which our country is 
 made a ruling nation, to express to you, the worthy 
 representative of that grand people, the immense 
 gratitude which the people of Cuba feel toward the 
 American nation, toward its illustrious President, 
 Theodore Roosevelt, and toward you for the efforts 
 you have put forth for the successful accomplish 
 ments of such a precious ideal." 
 
 Wood was showered with congratulatory mes 
 sages from the most prominent men of the nation 
 on the success of his work, the most remarkable of 
 which may be found in the official archives of the 
 War Department. General Orders No. 38, dated 
 March 25, 1903, issued by Secretary of War Root, 
 relieving General Wood "from further duty in con 
 nection with the affairs of the Military Government 
 of Cuba," reads in part as follows: 
 
 Out of an utterly prostrate colony a free republic 
 was built up, the work being done with such signal 
 ability, integrity, and success that the new nation started 
 under more favourable conditions than has ever 
 before been the case in any single instance among her 
 fellow Spanish-American republics. This record stands 
 
Governor of Cuba 133 
 
 alone in history, and the benefit conferred thereby on 
 the people of Cuba was no greater than the honour 
 conferred upon the people of the United States. 
 
 Richard Olney, Cleveland s Secretary of State, 
 sent him this message: 
 
 I congratulate you personally on the most successful 
 and deservedly successful career, whether as soldier or 
 public man of any sort, that the Spanish War and its 
 consequences have brought to the front. 
 
 John Hay, Secretary of State during Roosevelt s 
 administration, wrote Wood a note "with sincere 
 congratulations on the approaching fruition of all 
 your splendid work for the regeneration of Cuba," 
 and Senator Platt, of Connecticut, wrote of his 
 "admiration for your administration under diffi 
 culties greater, I think, than have ever had to be en 
 countered by any one man in reconstruction work." 
 
 " Could any other nation have done what we did 
 for Cuba?" General Wood was once asked. 
 
 "Yes, Great Britain," he answered, "but 
 Britain s cost in lives and money would have been 
 greater." Then, after a pause, he added with a 
 smile, "And Britain might have stayed longer." 
 
 After he left Cuba, Wood was made a member of 
 a military commission which was sent to Europe to 
 
134 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 attend the German maneuvers. The American 
 Commission included Generals H. C. Corbin and 
 S. B. M. Young. Having shortly before finished 
 his administration in Cuba, which had given him 
 world-wide recognition, Wood naturally received 
 a great deal of attention among the high military 
 officials of all the nations who gathered to ob 
 serve the German war game. The American 
 officers met the British mission headed by Lord 
 Roberts and including General John French, who 
 was later to become famous in the World War. 
 Kaiser Wilhelm, then riding toward the height 
 of his glory, was especially attentive to the Ameri 
 can representatives. 
 
VII 
 
 PACIFIER OF THE PHILIPPINES 
 
 IT IS said that when Henry Morton Stanley 
 returned to the office of the New York Herald after 
 winning world-wide fame by finding Livingston 
 in the wilds of Africa, he was assigned to report 
 a police court case of minor importance. It was an 
 assignment of the sort that "Cub" reporters are 
 given to sharpen their journalistic teeth. Stan 
 ley, a veteran journalist and one of the world s 
 foremost explorers, was deeply offended. 
 
 When Leonard Wood had finished his Cuban 
 administration, he was, like Stanley, a man of 
 international reputation without an assignment. 
 His rank was that of Brigadier-General of the 
 regular army. But what job was there for a 
 Brigadier-General to perform commensurate in 
 importance and dignity with that of establishing 
 a whole country like Cuba in business? He wrote 
 the final report of his administration; he went to 
 Europe as formerly mentioned to witness the 
 German maneuvers, and when he came back he was 
 still without an assignment. 
 
 135 
 
136 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 One day President Roosevelt was telling Wood 
 of his troubles in the Philippines where a civil 
 government had been established, but where 
 the natives in some sections, notably in the Moro 
 provinces of the island of Mindanao, were not 
 inclined to be very civil. William Howard Taft 
 was Governor-General and was making a great 
 success of his administration except for the fact 
 that the Moros were "cutting up" as usual. The 
 President remarked that he would have to send 
 someone on the difficult and dangerous errand of 
 pacifying the Moros, who were mostly Mohamme 
 dans and who had never in their history, so far as 
 anybody knew, behaved themselves properly. 
 
 "Well, why don t you send me?" asked Wood. 
 
 It was worse, if anything, than Stanley s re 
 ported police court assignment. It was a highly 
 dangerous and mean job with little glory at 
 tached and all the discomforts of the tropical 
 jungle assured. It was another Apache job with 
 scores of thousands of fanatical Moros and other 
 Filipinos substituted for the desperadoes of Ge- 
 ronimo s band. And yet Wood asked for it. 
 Having boiled the Cuban fever out of his bones, 
 be had become accustomed, presumably, to a few 
 creature comforts. He had won great honours 
 as administrator, and yet he was willing to under 
 take the humble task of policing the most unruly 
 
Pacifier of the Philippines 137 
 
 section of the Philippines. The work called for 
 subjugating and taming the little brown men of the 
 Moro country and the waters adjacent, for they 
 were amphibious in their lawlessness. They were 
 raiders by land and pirates by sea. They gloried 
 in their defiance of Uncle Sam s law and order. 
 They were head hunters, slave traders. They 
 practised polygamy, and despised all persons 
 whose skin was white. Why not send some young 
 colonel or captain down there to bake under the 
 equatorial sun, to round up the Moros, spank the 
 naughtiness out of them, and sharpen his own 
 military fangs? 
 
 But Roosevelt regarded the work to be done ia 
 the Moro country as far more important than a 
 mere police job. He wanted the seeds of civiliza 
 tion planted in the minds of these people. He 
 wanted the job well done so that it would not have 
 to be done over again. So he sent Wood over to the 
 War Department to see Secretary of War Root 
 with the result that the former Cuban ruler be 
 came military commander and civil governor of 
 the Moro country. 
 
 His jurisdiction covered the island of Mindanao, 
 the second largest in the Philippine group, more than 
 36,000 square miles in area, and also the Sulu group 
 and other islands in the southern part of the archi 
 pelago. There were about twenty different tribes 
 
138 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 in this territory, speaking different dialects. 
 Most of them kept up intermittent fighting against 
 each other, and all were ready to join forces against 
 any foreigner. The population consisted of about 
 50,000 Christian Filipinos, 250,000 Mohammedan 
 Moros, and some 300,000 other natives of different 
 religious professions ranging from Confucianism to 
 plain paganism. 
 
 General Wood took the eastern route to the 
 Philippines. During his term of office in Cuba, 
 he had kept closely in touch with the developments 
 of Dutch and British colonial administrative work, 
 ,and he wanted to visit some of the colonies of these 
 Powers. He stopped in Egypt where he was the 
 guest of Lord Cromer, the Consul-General, who had 
 often expressed his admiration for Wood s work in 
 Cuba, saying that his administration was the 
 finest in modern colonial history. After a brief 
 tour of Egypt, Wood proceeded to India, Ceylon, 
 and the Straits Settlements to make further in 
 vestigations into the subject of colonial adminis 
 tration. He accepted an invitation of the Dutch 
 Government to visit Java, whose native popula 
 tion resembles closely the people of the Philippines. 
 In the course of this journey Wood talked not only 
 with the most enlightened and successful colonial 
 administrators but went out among the natives 
 and questioned them about their problems. In an 
 
Pacifier of ike Philippines 139 
 
 article published in the World s Work, Robert 
 Hammond Murray states that Wood collected 
 case after case of books and statistics during this 
 trip. After he had settled in Manila, Wood 
 received a visit from a friend whom he took into 
 his library. The walls were covered with reports 
 on colonial government. 
 
 "I have gathered these since I came out here," 
 remarked the General. 
 
 "It s a fine collection. When do you expect to 
 find time to read them?" 
 
 " Read them ! " replied Wood. " I have already 
 read every line in every one of them. They have 
 helped me a lot." 
 
 Wood arrived in the Philippines in July, 1903, 
 under a cloud of suspicion and hostility. During 
 his first few weeks in the islands there was no 
 American army officer in the Far East more un 
 popular. 
 
 He was still under charges pending before the 
 Senate Military Affairs Committee, referred to in 
 the preceding chapter. That was bad enough. 
 But after all, many able army officers have to face 
 charges of some sort in their careers. The army 
 officers in the Philippines cared not so much for 
 the official charges against Wood. He had neither 
 been tried nor convicted. What they did care 
 about was the charges behind the charges. Wood 
 
140 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 had not been tried by the Senate Committee, but 
 he had been tried by the newspapers and accused 
 of being an administration pet, and these press 
 reports had reached the Philippines. Evidently 
 some of the papers accusing Wood of being Roose 
 velt s favourite pro-consul had forgotten that this 
 man in the summer of 1900, while still in the pro 
 bationary stage of his Cuban administration, had 
 locked horns with Mark Hanna, the most powerful 
 man in the McKinley administration. 
 
 And there was another reason for the hostility 
 against Wood. He was not a West Pointer, not 
 of the inner circle. There was a distinct tendency 
 among the young and old graduates of the Military 
 Academy to look askance upon a man who had 
 entered the army as a surgeon and had gained such 
 rapid promotion. 
 
 Wood spent a week in Manila where Taft gave 
 him every opportunity to become acquainted with 
 conditions in the islands. Then he left for 
 Mindanao. 
 
 In Mindanao General Wood proved a distinct 
 surprise to his critics. The American officers 
 found that the W T hite House judgment on this quiet, 
 middle-aged man with the weather-beaten face 
 and the body of a hardened trooper was correct. 
 He fell right into the swing of his Indian fighting 
 habits, and before he had been long hi Mindanao 
 
Pacifier of the Philippines 141 
 
 his officers had discovered his qualities of leader 
 ship. He knew how to lead, issue commands, 
 direct. He demanded no physical comforts which 
 his subordinates could not share. He showed calm 
 judgment in handling the perplexing problems of 
 the native population. 
 
 The taming of the Moros was a slow, tedious 
 business, highly dangerous, requiring infinite 
 patience and tact in dealing with the native 
 rulers and the suspicious Moslem population. 
 The former feared the loss of power and the latter 
 were inflamed against the Americans by their 
 chiefs and other religious leaders who declared that 
 the foreigners desired to destroy their faith. 
 Wood sent native couriers throughout the province 
 proclaiming to the population that the Americans 
 would not interfere with the social or religious 
 habits of any one, but that piracy, brigandage, 
 murder, and slavery must cease at once, and that 
 the armies of the United States would never with 
 draw until such lawlessness came to an end. He 
 received in reply scores of messages from tribal 
 chieftains rajahs, maharajahs, sultans, and datos 
 that the General s word was law; and right on 
 the heels of these conciliatory pledges would come 
 reports of piracy raids along the coast of Borneo, 
 or of the capture of a score of friendly Filipinos 
 by some Mohammedan slave trader. 
 
142 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 It took Wood more than two years to wipe out 
 human slavery and piracy in Mindanao and the 
 Sulu Islands, patch up the age-old feuds between 
 the various tribes, and restore friendly intercourse 
 between factions which had been fighting each 
 other as far back as the tribal traditions went. 
 It took a vast amount of patient work to teach 
 these people the simplest kindergarten principles 
 of government and trade relationship. But Wood 
 managed to convince the people in the uplands 
 that it was not only profitable but safe for them 
 to bring their produce down to the valleys and the 
 coast villages to sell and barter. Hitherto such 
 procedure had been unthinkable. The natives 
 who ventured beyond the limits of their tribal 
 territory had been robbed, enslaved, and perhaps 
 killed. 
 
 There was a good deal of scattered fighting, 
 mostly of the guerrilla type. But all the cam 
 paigns called for more of physical endurance 
 and watchfulness than actual fighting. Wood led 
 in person many of the expeditions against ob 
 streperous slave traders, walking for miles over the 
 floating bogs of the lake country, or climbing 
 mountain ranges. He headed an expedition 
 against about 70,000 hostile Moros in the vicinity 
 of Lake Lanao. In this campaign his reputation 
 for personal bravery was greatly enhanced among 
 
Pacifier of the Philippines 143 
 
 his troops through an incident which came near 
 costing him his life. 
 
 Wood s party was proceeding cautiously along 
 a trail over a jungle-covered floating bog. The 
 interpreter of the party stepped into the tall grass 
 and was immediately surrounded by hostile Moros. 
 Wood was the first man to reach the interpreter 
 who was bravely returning the fire of the enemy. 
 The Moros began to retreat when they saw Wood 
 and the other soldiers, but kept on firing. The 
 General picked up a rifle and fought in the ranks 
 with his men until the hostile party had fled, 
 leaving several dead and wounded. 
 
 The principal engagement was the taking of the 
 stronghold of Dalu Ali, one of the most influential 
 of the Moro chiefs. It did not amount to much 
 as a military contest. However, it took more than 
 two years to run Dalu Ali down, and his power 
 was never broken till he was killed in 1905 in an 
 engagement with the Americans led by Captain 
 Frank R. McCoy, Wood s aide-de-camp. Ali was 
 notorious throughout the southern archipelago as 
 a raider, slave dealer, and despot. He had built 
 himself a fort in the Cottabato Valley. He had 
 about 2,000 Moro warriors, and was well supplied 
 with arms and ammunition. Ali s men terrorized 
 the neighbouring country, raiding friendly and 
 peaceable native settlements. 
 
144 Ttie Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 The job of digging AlTout of his stronghold was 
 exceptionally arduous. The wily chieftain had 
 built his fortress within a network of lakes, rivers, 
 and swamps. Wood s soldiers declare that the 
 General took a hand many a time in dragging 
 fieldpieces over especially difficult spots in the 
 swamps. Dalu Ali s pretentious establishment 
 was easily destroyed after the Americans reached 
 it. His band was annihilated, but the chief, 
 himself, escaped. Wood kept his men on Ali s 
 trail until the latter fell. Ali s death broke the 
 resistance of the Moros. 
 
 The change of sentiment toward Wood among 
 the American officers in the Philippines may be 
 indicated by the following statement of Colonel 
 Duncan, a veteran of the Philippine wars: 
 
 "Before I met General Wood his very name stirred 
 indignation in me. I couldn t help feeling that 
 the promotion of a mere doctor over the heads 
 of so many experienced and deserving officers was 
 an outrage on the service. The bill which made 
 me a Colonel made him a Major-General, yet I 
 was so bitterly opposed to his promotion that I 
 was willing to see the bill defeated and lose my 
 colonelcy. Afterward I served under him in the 
 Philippines and I found him to be one of the big 
 gest men I had ever come in contact with, a mag 
 nificent officer with a remarkably large way of 
 
Pacifier of the Philippines 145 
 
 looking at and dealing with things. He is a great 
 soldier." 
 
 It was Wood s ready, even-handed justice to 
 ward everybody under his command, whether 
 natives, army officers, or privates, which appealed 
 to the men who served under him. Wood believed 
 in basing promotions on merit rather than on the 
 number of years of service. He, himself, had been 
 promoted over the heads of many other officers 
 by McKinley. 
 
 To a young officer whom General Wood had 
 quickly promoted he said : 
 
 "You have been a captain only fifteen or twenty 
 minutes and you re mighty young to be a major; 
 but you have earned your promotion. Try and 
 bear it modestly. There are lots of young men in 
 the army who are as good as you, and better, per 
 haps, but unfortunately for them I do not know 
 them. I do know you. If you hadn t earned it, 
 you wouldn t have got it. 
 
 "As you know, I believe in promotion by selec 
 tion. You are an example. Take a class of one 
 hundred young men who have graduated in law 
 and medicine. Ten of them, perhaps, will be ex 
 traordinarily successful; ten will make a great 
 success; ten others will be fairly successful, and so 
 on down the line until you come to the fellows who 
 are just getting on. Why should young men in 
 
146 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 the army be different? Men are alike, and the 
 young men in the army resemble the rest in their 
 qualities and the degrees of their attainments. 
 Why should the best and the most capable be held 
 down to the level of those who just get on, who 
 merely do enough to hold their commissions by a 
 system of promotion by seniority? It robs the 
 army of incentive. Competition spurs on men, 
 in or out of the army." 
 
 Because of their close friendship, the impression 
 always existed in the public mind that Wood 
 owed to Roosevelt his rapid rise in the army. John 
 J. Leary, Jr., in his reminiscences of Roosevelt, 
 published in McClure s Magazine, gives Roose 
 velt s own words on the subject: 
 
 One thing which annoyed Roosevelt was the public s 
 persistence in believing that it was to him that General 
 Leonard Wood owed his big jump in the army and to 
 its confounding the case of Wood with that of Pershing. 
 
 "The man they are thinking of," he used to say, 
 "is Pershing. It was he I jumped over the heads of 
 several hundred other army officers. I d do it again, 
 by thunder, if the same occasion arose! Wood got his 
 big jump from McKinley, and all I ever gave him were 
 the promotions due him in the usual course of seniority. 
 I ve tried a hundred times to straighten this out in the 
 public mind, but I don t suppose I ll ever succeed. 
 The public seems to want to believe this myth. 
 
 "President McKinley gave Wood his big jump in the 
 
Pacifier of ttie Philippines 147 
 
 regular establishment, after he took him out of the 
 Rough Riders. I gave Pershing his big jump long after 
 I had succeeded Mr. McKinley in the White House. . . . 
 
 "Sims of the navy, another man I was accused of 
 favouring, Mr. Wilson has also chosen for important 
 work, fairly good proof that my judgment of these 
 men when they were juniors was sound." 
 
 "But he has not approved of Wood," I suggested. 
 
 "No, he has not. He has used Wood very badly and 
 very unfairly. I might say he has also been very 
 foolish in the way he has handled Wood. 
 
 "If he wanted to sidetrack him he could have done it 
 by sending him to Hawaii or the Philippines and leaving 
 him there. But he did not have the courage to do this; 
 he adopted half-way measures and as a result Wood 
 has been like a sore thumb to him always in the way 
 and doing things so well that the public won t allow 
 Mr. Wilson to forget him. 
 
 " Wood is a big man who can look on a problem from 
 every angle. He makes few mistakes, but he s big 
 enough, when he makes one, to admit the error, 
 and he always has patience with the other fellow s 
 opinion. 
 
 " I am very fond of Wood, and I know he is of me, but 
 in my years in the presidency Wood never took any 
 advantage of our intimacy or in the slightest degree 
 presumed on our friendship. If anything he leaned 
 backward hi this respect." 
 
 While he was in the Philippine Islands, General 
 Wood met with a painful accident which perma 
 nently impaired his left leg. He has walked with a 
 
148 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 decided limp ever since, but his general health has 
 never been affected by his injury. 
 
 While detachments of his forces were engaged 
 in rounding up the different bands of outlaws which 
 made Mindanao province unsafe, Wood lost no 
 chances to get into personal touch with the native 
 rulers, priests, and other leaders of the people to 
 whom he explained the mission of the United 
 States in the Philippines. He found the majority 
 of the people tired of their incessant civil wars and 
 anxious for peace. Wood acted as judge hi set 
 tling the feuds between the various tribes. He 
 sought out the strongest Moslem chieftains and 
 made them his allies in restoring peace and main 
 taining law and order. The Spaniards had ignored 
 the natural leaders and as a result the ablest men 
 of the islands were always arrayed against Spain. 
 
 Wood took a diametrically opposite course. He 
 squatted cross-legged in the tents or palaces of the 
 rajahs, tried to adjust their disputes with the civil 
 government of Mindanao, and offered them friend 
 ship and posts of authority in their districts if 
 they would maintain order. When the Moslem 
 chiefs quoted their Koran to prove that human 
 slavery was permissible, they were astounded to 
 hear the American General quote another verse of 
 the Koran advocating human freedom and simple 
 justice to all persons. 
 
Pacifier of the Philippines 149 
 
 "The Prophet has said that a man may have 
 many wives," said one turbaned chief with a 
 bejewelled scimitar in his belt. "It is so written 
 in the Koran." 
 
 "That is true," replied the General. "I have 
 studied the Koran." 
 
 This reply pleased the Moro chief greatly. 
 
 "But the Prophet has said it would be better 
 for a man if he had only one wife," added the 
 General. "That was a very wise and true say 
 ing." 
 
 Wood could not destroy the institution of 
 plural marriages practised under the guise of 
 religion, but he made no compromise on the 
 subject of slavery. Here the Moro leaders had 
 to give way completely. Slaves were released 
 from their masters wherever American soldiers 
 found them. Wood s stern commands to the 
 Moros that they must give their women better 
 treatment was also heeded. One of the traditions 
 which Wood had to uproot was the Moros market 
 valuation of human life. The natives from time 
 immemorial had been accustomed to settle for 
 murder by payments of set sums. The life of a 
 freeman was worth fifty-two dollars and fifty 
 cents; that of a freewoman, twenty-six dollars and 
 twenty -five cents, and the price of a slave killed 
 was about twelve dollars. 
 
150 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 Wherever he found it possible, Wood established 
 a school among the Moros, and by the time he 
 left Mindanao, numerous Moro children were be 
 ing taught English in addition to their own dia 
 lects. Wood divided the Moro province into four 
 districts, Davao, Lanao, Cottabato, and Zambo- 
 ango, each under a district governor. These 
 districts were in turn divided into smaller com 
 munities under native chiefs who were commis 
 sioned to represent the government. 
 
 When Wood came to Mindanao in the summer 
 of 1903, the Moro province was the main source 
 of trouble in the Philippines, the sorest spot 
 on our map. Human slavery flourished and the 
 natives were compelled to obey vicious and des 
 potic petty rulers. When Wood left Mindanao 
 in April, 1906, it was a well-governed section of 
 the Philippines. Wood had brought peace and 
 prosperity to our Moslem wards and established 
 confidence in our institutions and respect for the 
 United States in the hearts of the natives. He 
 had to deal with more than a score of tribes 
 speaking almost as many dialects and professing 
 all sorts of religious beliefs. Wood reached them 
 all with his message of civilization. The ridicu 
 lous little fortresses of mud and bamboo over 
 which the little brown men fought were razed 
 and in their places were erected schoolhouses. 
 
Pacifier of the Philippines 151 
 
 Once more Wood had succeeded brilliantly as an 
 administrator largely because of his abundant hu 
 man intuition. 
 
 There was comparatively little of bloodshed, 
 but none of the Moros who fought the United 
 States were inspired by patriotic motives. They 
 were fighting to perpetuate their institution of 
 slavery, their license to rob on the high seas and 
 raid neighbouring Filipino tribes. 
 
 Wood was transferred from Mindanao to take 
 command of all our Philippine military forces 
 numbering about twenty thousand troops. Dur 
 ing the two years he commanded the Philippine 
 Division he transformed the whole defensive 
 system of the island, making it more secure. In 
 performing this work, there was required not only 
 military acumen, but diplomatic tact. Our rela 
 tions with Japan were delicate as usual and any 
 radical changes involving preparedness measures 
 were being closely watched by our Oriental neigh 
 bours, who had looked with anxiety on our ap 
 proach toward their shores. 
 
 In the training of our Philippine army, Wood 
 insisted on extensive bayonet practice. The 
 criticisms he encountered for thus "wasting the 
 time" of his soldiers was never answered until 
 the late war proved that fighting with cold steel 
 at close quarters, while an unpleasant feature 
 
152 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 of warfare, is not obsolete. He instituted military 
 athletic meets to encourage the officers and men to 
 keep physically fit. He divided the year into two 
 parts, the rainy season for garrison and the dry 
 season for field duty. Just before he left Manila 
 in the spring of 1908, he was the guest of honour 
 at a Filipino banquet, tne first military commander 
 in the Philippines to be so honoured. 
 
 In the Far East his name came to be linked with 
 that of Kitchener. One prominent Englishman 
 who had seen a good deal of General Wood re 
 marked that in England he would have gone 
 farther than Kitchener, adding: 
 
 "He has Kitchener s soldierly qualities and 
 genius for administration, but he also has tact and 
 statesmanship." 
 
vni 
 
 CHIEF-OF-STAFF OF THE U. S. ARMY 
 
 LEONARD WOOD S career falls into four 
 distinct periods from the time he joined the army 
 in 1885 to the present time. 
 
 First, the army period from July, 1885, to July, 
 1898. 
 
 Second, the period of administration and states 
 manship from July, 1898, when he became Military 
 Governor of Santiago de Cuba and covering the 
 Cuban and Philippine periods to May, 1908. 
 
 Third, the prepare3nes3~period from May; 1908, 
 to Armistice Day, November 11, 1918. 
 
 Fourth, the reconstruction period, from Armis 
 tice Day to the present time, covering Wood s 
 services in upholding law and order, his fight on the 
 destructive radical groups of the country, and his 
 campaign in behalf of constructive Americanism 
 and justice for Labour. 
 
 During his Cuban administration, Wood had 
 been afforded glimpses of world politics as ex 
 pressed in trade rivalries of European powers in 
 
 153 
 
154 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 the West Indies. As a military man he knew, of 
 course, of the terrific military establishments 
 under which Europe was staggering, and when he 
 witnessed the maneuvers of the German army in 
 1902, he became convinced, like most of our high 
 army officers, that where there was so much war 
 smoke a conflagration was likely to break out 
 at almost any time. He was to receive further 
 confirmation of his belief when in 1908 he left the 
 Philippines. 
 
 He returned by the way of Asia and Europe, 
 and stopped in Ceylon, Singapore, Egypt, Malta, 
 France, Germany, and Switzerland. But this 
 time he was not studying colonial administration 
 so much as military systems. He spent most of 
 the summer in Switzerland. Officially, he was on 
 leave of absence, recuperating from five years in 
 the tropical jungles of Moroland. Unofficially, 
 he was making an intensive study of the Swiss 
 army system. When he established the military 
 training camps for college students in 1913 and 
 later the Plattsburgh camp, he did not improvise 
 his plans on the spur of the moment. He had 
 been planning for years his military preparedness 
 programme to suit the peculiar needs of his own 
 country which he knew to be averse to militarism 
 and which he knew could never become militaris 
 tic. 
 
Chief-of-Staff of the U. S. Army 155 
 
 While he was in Switzerland, Austria-Hungary s 
 time for liquidating the Dual Monarchy s obliga 
 tions with reference to Bosnia-Herzegovina ma 
 tured. Defying Russia and the Serb states, 
 Austria-Hungary annexed the provinces. Russia, 
 the memory of her defeat by Japan only three 
 years old, permitted this transgression of the 
 Treaty of Berlin. While the diplomats were 
 making bold gestures in every capital of Europe, 
 Germany s army staged its maneuvers at Saar- 
 brucken, ready at the War Lord s command to 
 pounce on Europe. The army of France was on 
 the Loire, poised for immediate action. Both of 
 these tremendous forces Wood had the opportunity 
 to study at field practice. Henry White, Ameri 
 can ambassador to France at the time, asked him 
 what he thought of the French Army. 
 
 "Despite the fame of the German military 
 machine," answered Wood, "France in the next 
 war will surprise the world by the fighting effect 
 iveness of her forces." 
 
 This conclusion General Wood based on the 
 relationship between the officers and the men of 
 the French Army. He has always been a pro 
 found believer in the formula, attributed to 
 Socrates, that the first duty of an army officer is 
 "to look after the welfare of his men." 
 
 He found that the French officers were trained 
 
156 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 to treat their men with consideration and to look 
 with human regard after their needs. He disliked 
 profoundly the brutal and arrogant conduct of 
 the German officers toward the common soldiers, 
 who, while being treated like inferior beings, were 
 commanded to fight like heroes. 
 
 Throughout the French maneuvers, General 
 Wood was attached to the headquarters of one 
 of the army corps. When the war game was 
 over, he visited Paris where he was presented to the 
 President of the Republic and other high French 
 officials. In recognition of his record in Cuba and 
 the Philippines, he was made a Grand Officer of 
 the Legion of Honour, a rank which in those days 
 was seldom conferred on foreigners. However, 
 the Government of the United States withheld 
 from Wood permission to accept the decoration, 
 and it was not until years later that American 
 officers were granted the privilege in a general order 
 to wear foreign medals. 
 
 General Wood returned to the United States 
 hi the fall of 1908, his mind filled with plans for a 
 greater and more difficult campaign than he had 
 ever conducted in the field or in administrative 
 office that of arousing this nation to a sense of its 
 insecurity in a world bristling with armaments, 
 and moving the soft American colossus to insure its 
 interests by reasonable military preparedness 
 
Chief-of-Staff of the U. 8. Army 157 
 
 against the war toward which Europe was headed. 
 Science was annihilating distance and Wood 
 realized that America s isolation was a thing of the 
 past. The United States as a world power was 
 bound to be seriously affected by any war dis 
 turbance hi Europe. 
 
 On his arrival in this country, Wood was placed 
 in command of the Department of the East with 
 headquarters on Governor s Island, one of the 
 most important commands of the army in times of 
 peace. He had been a general officer in the 
 United States Army for more than ten years, but 
 never during that time had he held a command at 
 a home post. In fact, he had never held any 
 actual command in this country except for a little 
 more than a month in the spring of 1898 when as 
 colonel of the Rough Riders he was enlisting and 
 training his regiment in Texas. WTien he led 
 detachments of troops on raids after the Indians 
 in the Apache war, he had merely acted as a 
 volunteer line officer while his official status was 
 that of a medical officer. 
 
 When, in the spring of 1910, General Wood was 
 sent as special ambassador to represent the 
 United States at the centenary celebration of the 
 Argentine Republic, he received fresh assurances 
 of the vital need of preparedness in this country. 
 In Buenos Aires he met among the distinguished 
 
158 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 foreign visitors General von der Goltz of the 
 German Army, who was destined to play such an 
 important role in the World War. He talked at 
 length with the German general, a devout disciple 
 of universal military training and of the Prussian 
 army system as a whole. 
 
 Wood knew that the German military scheme 
 with its iron discipline and its official caste was 
 utterly unsuited to this country. He had always 
 been a champion of the common soldier, and to 
 treat enlisted men like cattle was especially re 
 pugnant to his deep-rooted sense of democracy. 
 
 General Wood returned from South America 
 more firmly convinced than ever that our military 
 system ought to be revolutionized. He was more 
 than ever dissatisfied with our system, which 
 provided only for a small and entirely inadequate 
 army of professional soldiers. He felt that it did 
 not even possess the virtue of being democratic in 
 principle. 
 
 He was made Chief-of-Staff of the United 
 States Army on July 6, 1910, and held office until 
 April, 1914. The Boston physician, who had 
 joined the army as contract surgeon, had now 
 scaled his way to the peak of the military structure. 
 Having reached that point, he was in a much more 
 favourable position to proceed with his prepared 
 ness plans. However, his position of prominence 
 
Chief-of-Staff of the U. S. Army 159 
 
 had its disadvantages. As head of our military 
 establishment, he was certain to draw sharp fire 
 from the apostles of pacifism and from eloquent 
 men and women who really knew nothing about 
 European political conditions and the war dangers 
 of the Old World, but were masters of beautiful 
 theories whereby they could prove to most any 
 intelligent but uninformed audience that war on a 
 great scale was an absurdity. In America Mr. 
 Bryan was the high priest of this cult. 
 
 Legions of publicists were shouting from the 
 forums of the whole English-speaking world that 
 war was a thing of the past, that with the present 
 expense of maintaining huge armies and the dead- 
 liness of modern military engines, war meant 
 national bankruptcy, national suicide, and there 
 fore could not take place. 
 
 This was the peculiar situation which faced 
 General Wood when he first began to advocate his 
 scheme of universal military training. He was 
 staking his w r hole record on the success of his 
 campaign, knowing that if he failed he was due for 
 a fall from which it would be difficult to recover. 
 But he is not the man to be deterred from duty 
 because of danger either physical or to his career. 
 
 His universal service plan was based on the 
 Swiss and Australian systems short terms of 
 training for the youth of the land at a time when 
 
160 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 they could best afford to give a few months to 
 their country; intensive short officers training 
 courses for college men and others possessing the 
 necessary educational qualifications; and more 
 extensive maneuvers or military games than this 
 country had as yet undertaken. In this pro 
 gramme Wood never contemplated a large stand 
 ing army. He opposed the essentials of the mili 
 tary programme of the Continental Powers which 
 demanded great sacrifice of time from its male 
 citizens while they were going through their train 
 ing. 
 
 To arouse the country to a sense of its insecurity 
 and to move it to action before it became too late, 
 Wood was not afraid to violate some of the moss- 
 grown traditions which encrusted our military 
 establishment. We had a sort of an unwritten 
 law which in effect provided that army officers, 
 like small boys, should be seen but not heard. 
 General Wood knew that his preparedness pro 
 gramme required an educational campaign of 
 national scope. He became its chief spokesman 
 and wrote and spoke untiringly year after year in 
 an effort to arouse the nation. He was one of the 
 few men in this country who clearly foresaw the 
 danger of the approaching European war, and one 
 of still fewer who had the courage to advocate 
 sound preparedness measures. 
 
Chicf-of-Staff of the U. S. Army 161 
 
 In speeches and magazine articles he called 
 attention to the many defects of our army system 
 and the vital necessity for improving it. He began 
 doing this when nine out of ten persons in this 
 land knew practically nothing about what was 
 happening in Europe and cared less. How could 
 a European war touch the United States? Sup 
 pose we were challenged? "A million Americans 
 would spring to arms over night, " to quote the fa 
 mous political orator of the Middle West. But 
 when the time actually came, it was well for us 
 that the allied armies were in a position to hold the 
 Western front while our millions of volunteer and 
 drafted soldiers were being drilled; and it was well 
 that the Allies were able to transport and equip 
 most of our army, which could not otherwise have 
 taken its place in the trenches in France. 
 
 Wood did not sound any brass gong of alarm. 
 He went ahead slowly and surely, but steadily. 
 He began his preparedness campaign while he was 
 commander of the Philippine Division, by re 
 vamping and extending our system of defence in 
 the islands, moving the military base from Subig 
 Bay to Manila Bay, by subjecting our island forces 
 to more intensive military training in general. 
 While commander of the Eastern Department, 
 he wrote extensively of our need for comprehensive 
 field maneuvers, especially in view of the fact that 
 
162 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 our forces were so small. He called attention to 
 the fact that while our small army units were 
 splendidly trained, there was not a single officer 
 in the United States who had had any experience 
 in handling a large force of men, say a complete 
 division. In fact, never since the Civil War had 
 our general officers been afforded the opportunity 
 to deal with the problems of managing large army 
 units consisting of the three branches of the ser 
 vice, infantry, cavalry, and artillery. 
 
 Coming from a man of deeds rather than one 
 of words, Wood s pleas for preparedness carried 
 all the more weight. Instead of painting lurid 
 pictures of our devastated country over-run by 
 invading armies, he supplied the nation with a 
 physical demonstration of our defencelessness. 
 This he did by organizing in August, 1909, the 
 most extensive maneuvers the United States had 
 yet staged. 
 
 The military problem presupposed that, follow 
 ing the sudden rupture of diplomatic relations 
 with a strong European power, our North Atlantic 
 fleet had been defeated and scattered off the Maine 
 coast, that the enemy had gained command of the 
 North Atlantic and had landed an expeditionary 
 force on the coast of Massachusetts with the object 
 of capturing the city of Boston. The mock 
 campaign occupied a week, and was made as real- 
 
Chief-of-Staff of the U. S. Army 163 
 
 istic as possible. The attack on Boston was by 
 land and sea, army transports being used in place 
 of warships. More than 14,000 National Guards 
 men took part in the hypothetical battle; and while 
 the umpires officially declared the result to be a draw, 
 they did not conceal their belief that the invading 
 "Red" army had the best of the argument with the 
 defending "Blues," and that Boston would have 
 been taken had the battle been real. Wood s war 
 game afforded the whole country a striking proof 
 of the vulnerability of our Atlantic coast cities. 
 
 "But what of our elaborate coast defences on 
 which we have spent so much money?" asked the 
 skeptics, still doubtful that an invasion was pos 
 sible. 
 
 "A coast defence is like a giant in armour," 
 answered Wood. "He is only effective within 
 the reach of his club." Wood had demonstrated 
 that no matter how powerful coast defences might 
 be, they were absolutely useless without a well- 
 trained, mobile army operating behind them. 
 
 Pleading the cause of preparedness, General 
 Wood ventured into a new field. He was unac 
 customed to writing and speaking hi public. He 
 had no literary grace, no cultivated art of oratory, 
 but he had something to say, which was more 
 important. He developed a clear, plain, forceful 
 style, ^illuminated by homely, humorous phrases. 
 
164 Tlie Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 "Our troops are split up into companies of walk- 
 cleaners, battalions of lawn-mowers, and regiments 
 of patrolmen," he said at one time when he was 
 trying to convince the country of the uselessness 
 of the military posts in the interior where there was 
 nothing to do but mow the grass and keep the 
 walks clean. Wood demanded adequate military 
 protection for the Panama Canal, the Philippine 
 Islands, Hawaii, and our great coast cities. At 
 tacking our wastefulness, he pointed out that the 
 United States spent $100,000,000 per year on our 
 few thousand troops, two thirds as much as 
 Prance spent annually for her large army. Ancient 
 posts, established in the interior of the West when 
 the Indians were being pacified, were kept up at 
 huge expense because pork-hunting Senators and 
 Congressmen wanted them, although their useful 
 ness had long since passed. Of course, he was 
 opposed by the politicians in his advocacy of scrap 
 ping the interior posts and grouping our military 
 forces on or near the borders and at the outposts, 
 such as the Philippines and the Panama Canal. 
 
 Future historians will find much valuable and 
 interesting data in the articles written by General 
 Wood on military subjects during this time. In 
 a series of magazine articles he told of the remark 
 able achievements of our soldiers, which most of 
 us had forgotten, if, indeed, we had ever known. 
 
Chief-of-Stqff of the U. S. Army 165 
 
 The army had cleaned up the pest holes of Cuba 
 and Porto Rico. Major Walter Reed, of the 
 United States Army, had removed the peril of 
 yellow fever; and another army doctor, Major 
 Bailey K. Ashford, had discovered the cause of 
 tropical anemia in Porto Rico. From the earliest 
 days in our history, the army had preceded the 
 pioneer settlers, pacifying hostile Indians through 
 out the Middle West, the Far West, and South 
 west, building trading posts, laying telegraph 
 wires, maintaining order and the security of life 
 and property. In late years, the army had per 
 formed similar service in Alaska, connecting by 
 telegraph the remotest outposts of that territory 
 with the wire system of the country, laying cables, 
 equal in length to some trans-Atlantic lines, build 
 ing wireless stations in most inaccessible regions, 
 constructing good roads which will last for decades, 
 if not centuries, to come. 
 
 As Chief-of-Staff in Washington, General Wood 
 was more popular with the officers and men at 
 the military posts throughout the country and the 
 territorial dominions than with the bureaucrats 
 in the Capital. He brought into the department 
 an untiring energy and initiative which made the 
 swivel-chair experts uneasy and uncomfortable. 
 He challenged time-honoured traditions and de 
 stroyed quantities of red tape. For instance, al- 
 
166 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 though originally the various bureaus in Washing 
 ton had been created to function for the benefit 
 and service of the line, the bureau heads, sitting 
 close to the men in power, had managed to twist 
 this arrangement about in such a way that the 
 line had become subservient to the bureaus. In 
 other words, the servants in the Washington 
 War Department dictated to the military forces 
 outside. 
 
 This order was upset without much ceremony 
 by General Wood who understood the causes for 
 the inexcusable delays in the War Department 
 which had hampered him as well as all our other 
 active army officers in the field or at outlying 
 military posts. He decreed that henceforth the 
 Washington bureaus must serve the line and serve 
 it promptly. This meant that bureau chiefs 
 would have to hustle and take short cuts to supply 
 the needs of the army. 
 
 This act was characteristic of Wood. He had 
 always been the champion of the man in the field. 
 If he had any favourites, it was the man on the job. 
 He always had an unbounded faith in the en 
 listed man, and he believed fervently that if the 
 American army was well officered and well sup 
 plied it would inevitably give good account of it 
 self. Once an officer remarked to him that the 
 personnel of a certain regiment was below grade, 
 
Chief-of-Staff of the U. S. Army 167 
 
 and on the whole rather poor, to which Wood re 
 plied: 
 
 "A wise old general once said/there are no poor 
 regiments, but there are plenty of poor colonels. " 
 
 He was a stickler for building up the morale 
 of the enlisted men to the highest point and mak 
 ing each lowly private proud of his uniform and 
 his profession. Wood never held too big a job 
 to address privates, offer them advice or correct 
 them. Once during the late war, when he was in 
 command of one of the National Army Divisions, 
 he was driving in his automobile toward camp. 
 He noticed a private accompanied by a young 
 woman coming along the road. As the machine 
 approached the couple, the soldier stooped over 
 apparently to tie his shoelaces. General Wood 
 ordered the driver to halt. He called the soldier 
 over to the machine. 
 
 "Didn t you see us coming?" asked the General 
 in a kindly manner. 
 
 "Yes, sir," answered the private. 
 
 "Then why didn t you salute?" 
 
 The General was smiling, but the soldier could 
 not find a ready answer even though he knew he 
 was not exactly being called down. 
 
 "Now I know how you felt," continued the 
 General. "You were with this young woman, 
 and you felt a bit embarrassed, so you thought 
 
168 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 you d avoid saluting by busying yourself with 
 your shoelaces. That was a mistake. You should 
 have said to the young lady: There comes the 
 old man himself. Now watch me make him 
 salute. You know that it is your duty to salute 
 me as your superior officer, but it is just as much 
 my duty to return your salute." 
 
 A veteran Rough Rider, J. Pennington Gardner 
 of Boston, tells the following incident from the 
 Spanish-American War: 
 
 "We left San Antonio, Texas, and in due course 
 arrived at Tampa, Florida. A day or so after our 
 arrival I was told that an aunt of mine from Boston 
 was at the Tampa Bay Hotel and wanted to see 
 me. I was astonished, as I had no idea that she 
 was in that part of the world. I secured a pass 
 and reached the hotel at about nine o clock in the 
 evening. 
 
 "It appears that she had read manifold tales in 
 the newspapers that the boys were without shoes 
 and clothing, etc. She had a trunk full of clothing 
 she had brought in the hope that she could fit me 
 out. If this happened to any other outfit, it did 
 not happen to ours, as Colonel Wood and Lieu 
 tenant-Colonel Roosevelt had seen to it that we 
 lacked nothing in the way of equipment and we 
 were extremely well provided for. 
 
 "The first thing I was asked was if I cared to 
 
Chief-of-Staff of the U. S. Army 169 
 
 eat anything. The idea of a meal at a table was 
 quite appealing, and we adjourned to the dining 
 room. My aunt, having already dined, merely 
 sat at the table with me while I had dinner. We 
 had been there only about ten minutes when in 
 walked my commander Colonel Wood, with 
 Brigadier-General Young, who was in charge of the 
 Cavalry Division. 
 
 "In the large dining room there was only one 
 table set and this my aunt and I occupied alone. 
 Dinner had long since been served, and it was then 
 perhaps 9:15 in the evening. The waiter showed 
 the Colonel and General up to the table that we 
 were sitting at. Colonel Wood said to the waiter: 
 "Set that table over there," indicating another 
 table some distance from ours, and then left me. 
 Personally, I thought no more of the incident, as it 
 was only etiquette and proper that my Colonel 
 especially in company with a Brigadier-General 
 of the regular army should not sit at the same 
 table with me, being, as I was, a private in his 
 command. 
 
 "The next day out at the camp I was standing 
 some distance from Colonel Wood, who appar 
 ently recognized me as the man whom he had seen 
 the night before, and whom he had not sat down 
 with to dinner. He came up to me and said, 
 I hope you did not mind my not sitting down 
 
170 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 with you and that lady you were dining with last 
 night, as General Young and I had some private 
 matters that we had to discuss. Most obviously 
 they were planning some details in connection with 
 the Cuban campaign. I was perfectly floored by 
 the thoughtfulness of Colonel Wood in thus ad 
 dressing me. I could only salute and say * Thank 
 you, sir. Evidently he had had in mind that he 
 might have hurt my feelings in not sitting at the 
 same table with me. 
 
 "This story I have quoted many times as in 
 dicating Wood s personality. Able as he is in 
 administrative affairs, and strong as he is in han 
 dling any difficult situation whether it be in his 
 Apache campaign or in Cuba or in the Philippines 
 he is under the skin a man of the most consider 
 ate nature, and his human qualities as shown by 
 this little incident clearly set forth that though a 
 regular army officer with the stiff training of his 
 calling, he is big in small matters and as human 
 as a man can be. 
 
 " Those who knew him personally, or have come 
 in contact with him, as I did through this small 
 incident, cannot have otherwise than the deepest 
 regard for him personally." 
 
 It was this spirit which has always made the 
 officers and men who worked under Wood swear 
 by him. It was the spirit that won the coopera- 
 
Chief-of-Staff of the U. S. Army 171 
 
 tion of his subordinates in Cuba, and dissolved the 
 hostility which he at first encountered in the Philip 
 pines, creating loyalty in its stead. 
 
 Any reader of this narrative, who has had any 
 experience in business affairs of any sort, knows 
 that one cannot step into an established business 
 and propose and enforce important improvements 
 in service without arousing bitter antagonism and 
 hatred on the part of the old hands who always 
 want to run things the way they were run in the 
 past. It makes no difference how bad and ineffi 
 cient the old management may be, it has its loyal 
 adherents who want to be left comfortably alone, 
 muddling along as they have been accustomed to 
 do. 
 
 As Chief-of-Staff, Wood did not leave things 
 alone. He made changes, going even so far as to 
 dismiss one Brigadier-General. The result was 
 that a determined effort was made to oust him from 
 office. A bill was introduced to this effect by 
 Representative James Hay of Virginia, chairman 
 of the House Committee on Military Affairs, and 
 an intimate friend of the dismissed Brigadier. 
 
 General Wood was too much absorbed in his 
 chosen work, that of preparing the country against 
 the conflict which he saw coming, to pay much 
 attention to the small number of men whose 
 enmity he had aroused. His one aim was to labour 
 
172 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 for the safety of the nation. How farseeing he 
 was may be judged from the fact that shortly after 
 he took office as Chief-of-Staff he began to be 
 labour Congress for an appropriation of $5,000,000 
 for the establishment of an aircraft department. 
 
 "There is no limit to the possibilities of the 
 airplanes," said General Wood. "I am heartily 
 in favour of experimenting as much as possible 
 in this new branch of science which has no limit 
 in view of the limitless field the air. 
 1 "It may be one year, it may be more, but sooner 
 or later the airplane will be the greatest factor 
 of the century in the world s affairs. For these 
 reasons I shall use my influence to the utmost to 
 obtain funds from Congress to enable the army 
 to carry on experiments and trials. . . . 
 
 "Just at present a dirigible can carry more men 
 and more supplies, and is, perhaps, more depend 
 able than a flying machine, but this will not pre 
 clude my favouring the airplane for the army." 
 
 These prophetic words were spoken in August, 
 1910. In that happy, peaceful, far-off time, 
 America and England were bestrewn with famous 
 writers and orators who could prove in half an 
 hour that another great war was the creation of a 
 disordered military mind. Lord Roberts, one of 
 England s greatest military men, was sacrificing 
 his honourable reputation by constantly warning 
 
Chief -of -Staff of the U. S. Army 173 
 
 his country against the impending war tragedy. 
 England s leaders of public opinion were making 
 kindly allowances for "Bobs," who was, no doubt, 
 "seeing things" in his old age. England never 
 paid much attention to the wise counsel of Lord 
 Roberts, and the result was that Britain came to 
 the verge of defeat at the hands of the Germans. 
 
 Of course, Congress knew better than to waste 
 the country s money and the energies of our young 
 army officers in aircraft experiments. The air 
 plane was a thing to be proud of as an American 
 invention. It was good enough to enliven a 
 Roman holiday. To-day we can reflect that al 
 though General Wood, as Chief -of -Staff, demanded 
 airplanes for our army nearly ten years ago, 
 predicting its great future possibilities at a time 
 when aviation was still in its early infancy, our 
 government neglected aviation persistently, re 
 fused to help develop it, and permitted England, 
 France, Germany, and Italy to outstrip us in this 
 important branch of scientific endeavour. In 
 1918, our army officers at the front were repeating 
 the same demand that General Wood made in 
 August, 1910, and our valiant aviators fought 
 throughout the late war in flying machines made 
 in France, England, and Italy and most of them 
 old machines. 
 
 W T ith the change of administration in 1913, 
 
174 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 Wood was slated for early retirement as Chief-of- 
 Staff. Newspaper reports at the time pointed 
 out that no man, who had been so closely indenti- 
 fied with three Republican presidents, could ex 
 pect to continue long in office as head of our army. 
 However, he was reappointed by Lindley M. Gar 
 rison, Secretary of War, and remained Chief -of- 
 Staff for more than a year, Secretary Garrison ex 
 plaining that he did not want to disturb the Wash 
 ington War Office until he had become better ac 
 quainted with it. Besides, he and Wood seemed 
 at first to be well matched for effective team work. 
 Garrison caught Wood s infectious enthusiasm for 
 preparedness to the extent that he began to make 
 public demands for a larger standing army. In 
 the summer of 1913, they made an inspection trip 
 of army posts which turned out to be something of 
 a national preparedness speech-making tour. Both 
 spoke plainly on the need of stronger military pro 
 tection, but suddenly the speech-making came 
 to a halt. The explanation given was to the 
 effect that Wood and Garrison had been silenced 
 by a stern rebuke from President Wilson who 
 deplored their activity. But the world was at 
 peace in 1913. Two years later Garrison officially 
 censured Wood for permitting Colonel Roosevelt 
 to express his patriotic views on our military needs 
 in the vicinity of the Plattsburgh camp, and the 
 
Chief-of-Staff of the U. S. Army 175 
 
 United States had then been cruelly challenged 
 by the world s greatest military power, and 
 Europe was in the throes of the most disastrous 
 war in history. 
 
 However, Wood continued his preparedness 
 work with the cooperation of Secretary Garrison 
 in 1913. With the latter s permission he sent out 
 letters to many presidents of colleges and univer 
 sities, proposing the establishment of summer 
 military training camps for students. The re 
 sponses were friendly, but somewhat lacking in 
 enthusiasm. Still, Wood managed to recruit 
 enough students for two camps, one of which he 
 located on the historic battlefield of Gettysburg 
 and the other on the Presidio of Monterey, Cali 
 fornia. The former opened July 7, 1913, and 
 closed August 15th, and the latter ran from July 1st 
 to August 8th. One hundred and fifty-nine students 
 reported for instruction at Gettysburg and sixty- 
 three at Monterey. One year before the war only 
 two hundred and twenty-two young men could 
 be interested in national preparedness to the extent 
 of training for it. At Wood s suggestion an advi 
 sory committee of college presidents was formed 
 consisting of John Grier Hibbenof Princeton, Henry 
 B. Hutchins of Michigan, Benjamin Ide Wheeler 
 of California, Jacob Gould Schurman of Cornell, 
 Henry Sturgis Drinker of Lehigh, and John H. 
 
176 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 Finley, Commissioner of Education of New York 
 State. 
 
 Despite the small attendance, the college camps 
 of 1913 were a great success. The two hundred 
 and twenty-two students became so many mis 
 sionaries of Wood s ideas and they returned to 
 their colleges and universities in the fall telling 
 their friends of the interesting training they had 
 received and the value they had derived from their 
 vacation work. Wood s idea had taken root. 
 In the summer of 1914, four camps had to be 
 established to accommodate the students who 
 volunteered for instruction. Camps were estab 
 lished in Vermont, North Carolina, Michigan, and 
 California. The total attendance was six hundred 
 and sixty -seven. 
 
IX 
 
 THE AWAKENER OF THE NATION 
 
 LEONARD WOOD remained Chief-of-Staff 
 under the Wilson administration until April 22, 
 1914, when he was transferred to the command 
 of the Department of the East. It was his old 
 command which he had held before going to Wash 
 ington in 1910. 
 
 His headquarters on Governor s Island, that 
 little pancake of land in New York Harbour 
 within a stone s throw of the Statue of Liberty, 
 now became a busy centre of patriotic activity. 
 From the office which General Wood now oc 
 cupied in the dingy, weather-beaten old building 
 on the island, Hancock, Meade, McDowell, Miles, 
 and other well-known officers had commanded the 
 eastern military district. It was a place rich in 
 patriotic tradition, and no more fitting spot could 
 have been found from which to disseminate Wood s 
 propaganda for the protection of the United 
 States. 
 
 Thus far he had encountered no opposition to his 
 
 177 
 
178 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 plans, either on the part of the War Department 
 or the Administration. Yet it is safe to say that 
 there was no man in high military office in Europe 
 or America who was waging a more aggressive 
 campaign for military readiness than Wood. At 
 the same time, however, there was no army officer 
 of high rank either in this or any other country 
 who was more unmilitaristic in thought or utter 
 ance. There is no saber-rattling to be found in 
 any of his numerous speeches or articles of this 
 period immediately preceding the outbreak of the 
 European war. He never voiced any creed of 
 imperialism or spread-eagleism. The man who 
 had refused to import American teachers to Cuba 
 for fear it might offend a friendly and dependent 
 alien race expressed no desire to foist American 
 culture or institutions on foreign lands. 
 
 He was spurred on by a zeal for which not even 
 his severest critic can impute any other motive 
 than patriotism of the noblest order. The facts 
 speak for themselves. All our military traditions 
 impose silence on army officers. They should be 
 seen, not heard. They should obey orders and keep 
 their mouths shut. Wood obeyed orders to the 
 letter, and violated all the sacred traditions of 
 silence. He was talking, preaching, writing, 
 night and day, pleading for a larger army, bigger 
 guns, airplanes, maneuvers on a large scale. In 
 
The Awakener of the Nation 179 
 
 short, he was making a show of himself from the 
 point of view of the military man of orthodox 
 traditions. He was making the same sort of show 
 of himself as Lord Roberts " Little Bobs" of 
 Britain. Unless there was actual danger ahead, 
 Wood could achieve nothing by his preparedness 
 fight except loss of prestige in the army. 
 
 And then, with the suddenness of a thunderclap, 
 the European war broke loose. 
 
 From President Wilson came the edict to the 
 country that we must remain "neutral even in 
 thought." Wood s answer to this curious order 
 was to establish the Plattsburgh camp on Lake 
 Champlain. It was an officers training school 
 for business men, teachers, lawyers, preachers, 
 public officials, men of all callings. Academic 
 military men and unreasoning administration 
 partisans may argue even to-day that Wood was 
 insubordinate in spirit, if not in action; but there 
 are certainly times when blind obedience to an 
 erring commander-in-chief ceases to be the highest 
 duty of a military officer. Wood s course was 
 vindicated by the events of the war. It has won 
 him the admiration and active support of men of 
 national prominence of all political parties. In 
 response to a letter sent by the Leonard Wood 
 League last December to men of prominence 
 throughout the country asking support for General 
 
180 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 Wood as candidate for the Republican Presidential 
 nomination, Frederick Coudert, the distinguished 
 international lawyer of New York City, and a 
 Democrat, wrote as follows: 
 
 I have your letter of the 15th in regard to the nomina 
 tion of General Wood and would say in reply that I 
 am most earnestly hopeful that General Wood may be 
 nominated, not as you say, "to insure a Republican 
 victory," but rather to secure a strong, fearless, capable 
 Executive at a time of national and international diffi 
 culties of an extraordinary character. The independent 
 voters of America who, when aroused, are in number 
 sufficient to hold the balance of power, have become 
 utterly weary of the politicians, who seek to use great 
 problems affecting the vital interests of the nation as 
 stepping-stones for personal or party advantage. Never 
 have party ties been more lightly held, yet never has 
 national feeling been more earnestly aroused than during 
 the last two years. The nation now feels the need for a 
 leader who will embody this sentiment in acts rather 
 than in words. 
 
 The country is profoundly chagrined at the failure 
 of the present Administration to do aught but sub 
 stitute platitude for policy, promise for performance: 
 a course which has led to the paralysis of government 
 at a time when the nations of Europe look to America 
 for guidance and cooperation in reconstructing a world 
 shattered by war. 
 
 The lamentable situation created in Mexico by such 
 a lack of elementary foresight and firmness such as to 
 render ultimate intervention seemingly inevitable, and 
 
The Awakener of the Nation 181 
 
 the inability to deal effectively with domestic problems 
 has created an exceptionally serious situation which 
 must compel the choice of an exceptional man. 
 
 At a time when a pusillanimous neutrality, ordered 
 from Washington, benumbed the public mind, General 
 Wood preached the gospel of preparedness at great risk 
 to his own career, and inaugurated the training system 
 which made it possible for the American army to have 
 a corps of officers when war came. His life has been 
 spent in creative public activity, away from political 
 machination and phrase-making. I believe there is 
 to-day no one else who will make such an appeal to our 
 independent voters whose sole concern is that the na 
 tion be respected abroad and united at home, and that 
 pending problems be met with firm grasp and fearless 
 mind. 
 
 When Wood established the first Plattsburgh 
 camp in 1915, his campaign had gone beyond the 
 college youth stage. Every able-bodied man of 
 military age might now be called upon at any time 
 to defend the rights of America in the gigantic 
 contest across the seas. The first Plattsburgh camp 
 was stern business. The men who attended it 
 did so at sacrifice of time and money. They paid 
 their own railroad fares, paid for their living in 
 camp, their uniforms and all equipment, except 
 arms. 
 
 The Plattsburgh camp was more than a camp, 
 more than a training school for officers. It was 
 an idea which caught the imagination of every 
 
182 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 red-blooded American. Ideas leap from one land s 
 end to another and across international boundary 
 lines. There were five training camps established 
 in 1915 with a total attendance of more than 
 3,000. In 1916 there were six camps and the at 
 tendance grew to more than 16,000. 
 
 The alumni of the first college camps in 1913 had 
 formed an organization which they had called the 
 National Reserve Corps, whose coat of arms bore 
 the inscription: "Ready, Organized, Prepared," 
 and whose slogan was: "Striving for Peace, but 
 Ready for War." The men who attended the 
 first Plattsburgh camp formed a society just as. 
 the college men of the Gettysburg and Monterey 
 camps had done, and in 1916 these two organiza 
 tions merged under the name of the Military 
 Training Camps Association of the United States. 
 Being true Americans, no members of this body 
 had any fear that this democracy was in danger 
 of becoming militaristic in spirit. They were 
 merely translating into deeds old Cromwell s wise 
 saying : " Trust in God, but keep your powder dry." 
 
 Having fathered the training camps movement, 
 General Wood became their leader and constant 
 advisor. He inspected them, counselled the in 
 structors, and inspired the students by his patriotic 
 utterances and his clear, practical lectures on mili 
 tary subjects. 
 
The Awakener of the Nation 183 
 
 Officially he occupied a high army position, but 
 unofficially he was far removed from the seat of 
 power. His volunteer activities did not find 
 favour in the eyes of the Administration. It must 
 be recalled that President Wilson, who had com 
 manded the nation in 1914 to remain "neutral 
 in thought," was about to appear for reelection 
 under the slogan, "He kept us out of war." And 
 yet, here was a Major-General of the United States 
 Army going up and down the land preaching readi 
 ness for war and urging the flower of American 
 manhood to enlist in the military training camps 
 and prepare for the worst. 
 
 What gave Wood peculiarly great strength with 
 the masses of the American people, who from the 
 beginning of the war were overwhelmingly pro- 
 Ally, was that he sandwiched his speeches and 
 articles on preparedness with two-fisted action of 
 the sort that Americans like. His words were 
 propped up by deeds. The Boston maneuvers, 
 the student camps, Plattsburgh, were deeds. They 
 stood forth like hard and clear mountain peaks 
 above the beautiful, smooth billows of oratory 
 which flowed from the White House. 
 
 And Wood talked facts, hard, uncompromising 
 facts, which nobody could dispute or argue against. 
 He was indefatigable, working just as he had 
 worked in Cuba, night and day. Most of us had 
 
184 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 studied American history rather uncritically at 
 school, especially the military part thereof. Wood 
 found time to rewrite whole chapters of our mili 
 tary history, turning the spotlight on some ex 
 tremely disagreeable facts. He showed that we 
 had never been adequately prepared for any war 
 in which we had ever engaged, and pointed to the 
 heavy sacrifice in blood and treasure which we had 
 sustained through unpreparedness and defective 
 military organization from the Revolutionary War 
 down to the Spanish-American War. In his book 
 entitled "Our Military History, Its Facts and 
 Fallacies," he gave documentary proofs that some 
 of our campaigns in the Revolutionary War, the 
 War of 1812-14, and the Civil W r ar were not all 
 glorious for American arms. They were, in fact, 
 disastrous. 
 
 His statistics showed that in our wars we had 
 always had superiority of troops, in some cases 
 overwhelming. We had enrolled 400,000 soldiers 
 in the Revolutionary War and yet Washington 
 at no time had an effective force of more than 
 20,000 men in line, the large numbers of militia 
 called from time to time being practically useless. 
 He quoted Washington who said: "To place any 
 dependence upon militia is assuredly resting upon 
 a broken staff." In this volume Wood quoted at 
 length Washington s appealing letters, describing 
 
The Awakener of the Nation 185 
 
 the disheartening trials of the war, due to the 
 militia system, short enlistments, and lack of 
 organization. Wood wrote: 
 
 Briefly, these are the lessons of the (Revolutionary) 
 war. That a confederation of states, without a strong 
 central government under the direction of citizens 
 without experience in military matters and under con 
 ditions which permit each state to raise, arm, and equip 
 troops, is an exceedingly weak form of government for 
 the prosecution of war; that the war resources of a na 
 tion can only be employed to the greatest advantage 
 when used as a national force under national control and 
 direction; that undisciplined and raw levies cannot meet 
 disciplined troops with any hope of success ; that voluntary 
 enlistments based on patriotism and the bounty cannot 
 be relied upon to supply men for the army during a 
 prolonged war, but that men should be enlisted for the 
 period of the war; and, finally, that we should turn to 
 the policy of general military training with a fixed 
 period of obligation for all able-bodied men. 
 
 So much for the militia system. Of the War of 
 1812-14 Wood wrote: 
 
 We had apparently learned very little from the les 
 sons of the Revolution. The war, taken as a whole, 
 was a series of disasters and reverses on land, many of 
 them highly discreditable in character. Our record on 
 the sea was much better, and we gained many notable 
 successes. The men of the fleet and on the individual 
 ships of war were better trained and better disciplined 
 than those of the land forces. 
 
186 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 He emphasized that during our Indian war, 
 following the second war with Britain, this nation 
 with a population of seventeen million people had 
 spent seven years struggling with twelve hundred 
 Indian warriors, finally closing the fight without 
 accomplishing its object, that of forcing the 
 emigration of the Reds. Passing over the Mexi 
 can war, which was on the whole our best-con 
 ducted war, we come to the Civil War. Here 
 Wood again pointed out the failure of the militia 
 feature and of the volunteer system for both the 
 North and the South. Both had to resort to the 
 draft, then continuing: "The Confederacy really 
 conducted the war as a nation; the Union as a 
 confederacy. By so doing, the Confederacy added 
 at least fifty per cent, to its efficiency. New 
 regiments were not created to the extent that they 
 were in the North. Volunteering, as could have 
 been expected, and doubtless was expected by all 
 who had any knowledge of our military history, 
 diminished after the first excitement was over, and 
 the draft was in general application, both in the 
 North and the South." 
 
 In preparation for the coming struggle, Wood 
 was striking heavy blows at the volunteer and 
 militia systems, and wisely preparing the nation 
 by the soundest educational methods for universal 
 service. When we finally entered the war and 
 
The Awakener of the Nation 187 
 
 determined to fight it as a nation, making use of 
 conscription, the country overwhelmingly ap 
 proved this means of distributing the sacrifice. 
 And no man in this great country had done so 
 much to prepare the way for universal service as 
 Major-General Leonard Wood. For this service 
 alone he deserves the undying gratitude of the 
 people of the United States. 
 
 In those tense days before we declared war on 
 Germany, it was naturally impossible for any man 
 to stir around the way that Leonard Wood did 
 without arousing bitter opposition and active 
 enmity of thousands of people. That might have 
 been expected from the first by any one who knows 
 the peculiarities of human nature. That the head 
 of the War Department in Washington and other 
 high officials of the Government would be moved to 
 anger by the volunteer work of the man whose sole 
 object was to prepare the country against danger 
 at the time the world was passing through the 
 greatest war tragedy in history, seems almost un 
 believable, especially in view of the fact that 
 victory for the Central Powers of Europe would 
 menace all our democratic institutions and lead to 
 greater armed conflicts. Yet, everybody knows 
 to-day that from Washington emanated the chief 
 opposition against which Wood had to contend. 
 
 Early in 1915 Wood, then in command of the 
 
188 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 Department of the East, was asked for trifling 
 assistance by the newly organized American 
 Legion (not the organization of the same name 
 formed after the war by the World War veterans) , 
 a patriotic society which proposed to list and 
 classify all Americans of military age who had had 
 some military training. Officers of the Legion 
 asked Wood to lend them the services of one of his 
 aides to explain to them the War Department s 
 standard method of grouping and classifying re 
 serves. The society proposed to present the whole 
 list, containing some 250,000 names, to the War 
 Department without cost. 
 
 Wood was most favourably impressed by the 
 constructive and practical programme of the 
 Legion. He knew that Roosevelt had given it his 
 endorsement, and was much interested in its work. 
 He could do no less than assign his aide to the brief 
 task of showing the Legion s officers how to go 
 about their classification labour so as to conform 
 most closely to the records of the War Depart 
 ment. He reported on the whole matter to 
 Secretary of War Garrison. 
 
 In reply Wood received a letter from Garrison, 
 dated March 11, 1915, virtually rebuking him for 
 having anything to do with the American Legion, 
 and ordering him to shun it in the future. While 
 recognizing that it might be desirable for the War 
 
The Awakener of the Nation 189 
 
 Department to possess such a list as the Legion 
 proposed to draw up, Secretary Garrison held that 
 it was "undesirable" for officers of the army to 
 have any connection with organizations outside 
 the War Department, dealing or contemplating 
 dealing with the same matter. 
 
 But the real storm against Wood did not break 
 until after Colonel Roosevelt delivered his famous 
 talk at Plattsburg on August 25, 1915. He 
 did not mention the Administration at all nor 
 any government officials. He delivered himself of 
 a few caustic sentences about the hyphenates, and 
 paid his compliments to the "pacifists and pol 
 troons" who refused to fight for their rights and 
 apparently desired to "Chinafy" the country. 
 While criticizing the German-Americans of di 
 vided allegiance he emphasized, as he often did, 
 that the bulk of Americans of German descent were 
 one hundred per cent, loyal, saying that one could 
 fill every high government office from the presi 
 dent down with men of purely German blood who 
 had proved to be nothing but Americans. 
 
 The Colonel had prepared an address, but it was 
 not until late in the afternoon that he spoke and 
 the light was too dim for him to read his speech as 
 he had intended. His remarks, therefore, were 
 largely extemporaneous . About five thousand per 
 sons heard the address, student officers and civilians. 
 
190 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 The mischief of his Plattsburg visit was caused 
 by a dictated statement which the Colonel gave 
 to the newspaper men at the Plattsburg railroad 
 station, way outside the camp, while he was wait 
 ing for his train to New York. 
 
 "I wish to make one comment on the statement 
 so frequently made that we must stand by the 
 President," said Colonel Roosevelt. "I heartily 
 subscribe to this on condition, and only on con 
 dition, that it is followed by the statement so 
 long as the President stands by the country. 
 
 " Presidents differ just like other folks. No man 
 could effectively stand by President Lincoln 
 unless he had stood against President Buchanan. 
 If after the firing on Fort Sumter President 
 Lincoln had in a public speech announced that the 
 believers in the Union were too proud to fight; 
 and if, instead of action, there had been three 
 months of admirable elocutionary correspondence 
 with Jefferson Davis, by midsummer the friends 
 :of the Union would have followed Horace Greeley s 
 advice to let the erring sisters go in peace, for 
 peace at any rate was put above righteousness by 
 some mistaken soul, just as it is at the present 
 day." 
 
 The next day Secretary of War Lindley M. 
 Garrison sent the following telegram to General 
 Wood, informing newspaper men in Washington 
 
The Awakener of the Nation 191 
 
 that he had done so without consulting President 
 Wilson: 
 
 I have just seen the reports in the newspapers of the 
 speech made by Ex-President Roosevelt at the Platts- 
 burgh camp. It is difficult to conceive of anything 
 which would have a more detrimental effect upon the 
 real value of this experiment than such an incident. 
 
 This camp, held under government auspices, was 
 successfully demonstrating many things of great mo 
 ment. Its virtue consisted in the fact that it conveyed 
 its own impressive lesson in its practical and successful 
 operations and results. 
 
 No opportunity should have been furnished to any 
 one to present to the men any matter excepting that 
 which was essential to the necessary training they were 
 to receive. Anything else could only have the effect 
 of distracting attention from the real nature of the 
 experiment, directing consideration to issues which 
 excite controversy, antagonism, and ill-feeling, and 
 thereby impairing, if not destroying, what otherwise 
 would have been so effective. 
 
 There must not be any opportunity given at 
 Plattsburgh or any other similar camp for any such 
 unfortunate consequences. 
 
 In reply to this stinging rebuke, General Wood 
 sent Secretary Garrison this message: 
 
 Your telegram received, and the policy laid down 
 will be rigidly adhered to. 
 
192 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 Aside from the fact that Secretary Garrison 
 apparently made no effort to investigate fully the 
 circumstances of Colonel Roosevelt s criticism, 
 and reprimanded General Wood, the ranking 
 officer in point of service in the United States 
 Army, for statements made by another man out 
 side the Plattsburgh camp, it might be recalled that 
 not so very long before this incident, both he, him 
 self, as well as Wood had been criticized by the 
 President for making preparedness speeches, ac 
 cording to popular reports. 
 
 The Garrison rebuke caused a nation-wide up 
 roar. Almost every newspaper of note defended 
 Wood and scored Garrison. Wood, of course, said 
 nothing. 
 
 How the camp at Plattsburgh felt about the whole 
 matter is best shown by the fact that the rookies 
 consisting of business men, college students, men 
 of all political beliefs, united in the protests against 
 Secretary Garrison s reprimand. The day after 
 Garrison s letter was published, General Wood 
 reviewed the student officers. The men marched 
 in perfect order. Then suddenly someone started 
 to applaud the General; it was enough to break 
 military discipline for a few moments. The 
 rookies gave vent to their pent-up feelings in a 
 vigorous applause for Wood. 
 
 A few simple facts from the history of our 
 
The Aivakener of the Nation 193 
 
 participation in the European war tell more 
 effectively than anything else could what General 
 Wood did to get the country ready. Our armies 
 suffered from shortage of airplanes, artillery, and 
 tanks, but so far as the human material was con 
 cerned, there was nothing the matter with our 
 preparation or output. 
 
 In his report of November 21, 1918, a few days 
 after the Armistice was signed, General Pershing 
 stated that the first American force using Ameri 
 can airplanes went into action in August, 1918, 
 sixteen months after war was declared by the 
 United States. We were in the war a little more 
 than nineteen months, during which time not a 
 single American battery employed an American 
 field gun and only one hundred and nine American 
 field guns had arrived in Europe at all. In the 
 summer of 1918, Floyd Gibbons, the war cor 
 respondent who had just returned from France, 
 lecturing in Carnegie Hall, New York City, told 
 his audience: 
 
 "I experienced a great thrill to-day. Passing 
 by the Public Library I beheld on its steps the 
 first American tank that I have ever seen." 
 
 This remark was made all the more bitter as the 
 speaker had lost an eye and had been otherwise 
 seriously wounded while going over the top with 
 American soldiers fighting machine guns. Dur- 
 
194 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 ing the last part of the war our army was the only 
 one in Europe to fight machine guns with flesh and 
 blood. The French and the British either used 
 tanks or else smothered machine-gun nests with 
 artillery fire. Our artillerymen were equipped 
 with French field guns of ancient model. We 
 borrowed our tanks from our Allies. 
 
 But we had trained nearly 4,000,000 soldiers 
 before the Armistice was signed and more than half 
 of that number had gone to France. More than 
 200,000 officers had been trained. 
 
 What astonished the British, French, and Italian 
 officers more than anything else was not our ability 
 to raise such a large army, but the miraculous 
 facility with which we trained such a large number 
 of officers in such a short period. 
 
 It was the result of Wood s work. These 
 200,000 officers were not trained in the camps that 
 he established before we entered the war, but when 
 we did declare war, the United States possessed 
 the mould and model of officers training camps. 
 The Plattsburgh idea was responsible for the seem 
 ingly miraculous results attained by the United 
 States in officering our troops. As a matter of 
 fact, training 200,000 officers in nineteen months 
 was no miracle at all. Wood had been preparing 
 for the job since 1913, the year before the European 
 war began, when as Chief-of-Staff he established 
 
The Awakener of the Nation 195 1 
 
 the first student camps at Gettysburg, Pennsyl 
 vania, and Monterey, California. 
 
 Now we come to the astonishing series of 
 humiliations which the Administration heaped on 
 General Wood, seemingly as punishment for 
 his activities in insuring American victory. 
 Shortly before the United States declared war 
 and at a time when everybody knew it was 
 inevitable, David Starr Jordan, one of the country s 
 chief apostles of pacifism, wrote a letter to 
 Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, who had 
 succeeded Garrison, complaining against General 
 Wood s speeches. 
 
 Immediately after war was declared, Wood 
 wrote and personally delivered two letters, one to 
 the Adjutant-General of the Army and the other 
 to the Chief -of -Staff, asking for service abroad. 
 He was then fifty-six years old, sound in mind 
 and body, and in service the ranking general offi 
 cer of the army. 
 
 He never received any reply, not even an ac 
 knowledgment. What he did receive was notice 
 that the Department of the East which he com 
 manded had been divided into three small 
 departments although several governors of the 
 Atlantic states had vigorously opposed such a! 
 plan. With this notice came an order relieving 
 Wood of his command and offering him the choice 
 
196 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 of three military positions, the Philippines, Hawaii, 
 or the "less important post" at Charleston, South 
 Carolina, headquarters of the newly created South 
 eastern Department. Wood chose the "less im 
 portant post." 
 
 Apparently the War Department paid greater 
 heed to Dr. Jordan s letter protesting against pre 
 paredness when war was at hand, than to General 
 Wood s letter asking for assignment at the 
 front. 
 
 Although the whole country knew that Wood 
 had won the disfavour of the Administration 
 nevertheless his demotion came as a great shock 
 to most people. Again the press took up the cud 
 gel in Wood s defence just as it had done following 
 the Plattsburgh incident. The Department of 
 the East is known as one of the most import 
 ant military commands in the country, and 
 friends of the Administration, as well as its foes, 
 felt that a great mistake was being made not only 
 in removing General Wood from a big command to 
 a comparatively insignificant one, but in the very 
 act of humiliating an officer who had been so 
 conspicuously active in doing everything he 
 could to make the country more ready for the 
 struggle. 
 
 Wood assumed command at Charleston in the 
 early part of May, 1917. During the next few 
 
The Awakener of the Nation 197 
 
 months he managed to find plenty to do selecting 
 and planning eleven large camps for the National 
 Army and three officers training camps, one at 
 Oglethorpe, Georgia, one at Atlanta, and one at 
 Little Rock, Arkansas. 
 
 Reprimands and the shifting of Wood to less 
 important fields of activity did not seem to be 
 having much effect. In favour or out of favour, 
 Wood was following his old habit of keeping busy 
 and doing a lot of useful work. Whether or not 
 this was recognized by the Administration, the fact 
 remains that Wood was transferred again in 
 August, 1917, still farther away from the scenes of 
 most active war preparations. This time he was 
 shifted to Camp Funston, Kansas, to train and 
 command the 89th Division of the National 
 Army. 
 
 This kicking of General Wood from pillar to 
 post was utterly futile. It harmed only the Ad 
 ministration, while enhancing Wood s popularity. 
 Through his unselfish devotion to the country s 
 cause Wood had become a central figure in the 
 war. Apparently the Administration was deter 
 mined to move him from the centre of the stage, 
 but Wood had the peculiar habit of taking the 
 centre of the stage with him. When he was 
 shipped from South Carolina to Kansas, South 
 Carolina regretted the move and Kansas rejoiced. 
 
198 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 Was the transfer intended as a demotion? If 
 it was, Kansas had a ready answer. Kansas 
 made Wood a Citizen Extraordinary through 
 the following proclamation of Governor Arthur 
 Capper: 
 
 STATE OF KANSAS 
 
 GOVERNOR S OFFICE 
 
 KNOW ALL MEN BY THESE PRESENTS: 
 
 INASMUCH as the life of a state, its strength and 
 virtue and moral worth are directly dependent upon 
 the character of the citizens who compose it and 
 
 INASMUCH as it is a solemn obligation imposed 
 upon the Governor of the state to promote and advance 
 the interests and well-being of the commonwealth in 
 every way consistent with due regard for the rights and 
 privileges of sister states, and 
 
 WHEREAS, the soldier, Leonard Wood, Major- 
 General in the United States Army and now command 
 ant at Camp Eunston, has shown by his daily life, by 
 his devotion to duty, by his high ideals and by his love 
 of country, that he is a high-minded man after our own 
 hearts, four-square to all the world, one good to know, 
 
 NOW, THEREFORE, I, Arthur Capper, Governor 
 of the State of Kansas, do hereby declare the said 
 MAJOR-GENERAL LEONARD WOOD 
 to be, in character and in ideals, a true Kansan. And 
 by virtue of the esteem and affection the people of 
 Kansas bear him, I do furthermore declare him to be 
 to all intents and purposes a citizen of this state, and 
 
The Awakener of the Nation 199 
 
 as such to be entitled to speak the Kansas language, to 
 follow Kansas customs and to be known as 
 CITIZEN EXTRAORDINARY 
 IN WITNESS WHEREOF I have here- 
 rQ , unto subscribed my name and caused to 
 ^ J be affixed the Great Seal of the State of 
 Kansas. Done at Topeka, the capitol, this 
 19th day of December, A. D. 1917. 
 
 ARTHUR CAPPER. 
 
 Governor. 
 
 Late in November, after he had his training 
 work well advanced, Wood was ordered to France, 
 as were most of the other officers in command of 
 National Army cantonments, to observe the mili 
 tary operations at the front. He landed in Liver 
 pool on Christmas Day, and while in England 
 conferred with General Robertson, British Chief - 
 of -Staff, and General French. 
 
 On January 27th, while watching artillery practice 
 at Fere-en-Tardenois a mortar shell burst inside 
 the gun exploding the piece. The whole crew was 
 blown to pieces. Four officers standing near 
 General Wood were instantly killed. Colonel 
 Charles E. Kilborne, Wood s Chief-of-Staff, was 
 badly wounded in the face and Major Kenyon A. 
 Joyce, another aide, received a wound in the arm. 
 The General himself received a severe wound in 
 his left arm. He was the only man standing near 
 the gun who was not killed. General Wood was 
 
200 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 removed to a Field First Aid Hospital for an emer 
 gency dressing. The next day he motored about 
 one hundred miles to Paris where he entered the 
 French Officers Hospital in the Hotel Ritz. 
 Thanks to the excellent surgical attention he re 
 ceived and his own splendid physical condition, 
 he recovered rapidly. While mending, he was 
 consulted by Clemenceau, Poindare, and Joffre. 
 About the middle of February he left for the 
 United States. 
 
 No sooner had he reached Washington than 
 seemingly inspired news stories began to appear 
 in the press reflecting doubt that he would be s .it 
 back to France for active duty. It was announced 
 that he would have to pass a physical examination. 
 A few days later Wood was examined by a Medical 
 Board consisting of Major W. J. Mayo of Roches 
 ter, Minnesota, Colonel W. T. Longcope of New 
 York City, and Colonel Frank Billings of Chicago, 
 all medical scientists of international reputation. 
 The board pronounced Wood sound and physically 
 fit to command at the front. 
 
 Like all the general officers who had been sent 
 abroad for inspection, General Wood was sum 
 moned before the Senate Military Affairs Com 
 mittee and questioned as to the conditions at the 
 front and the need of men. He told the Com 
 mittee that America must prepare to raise an army 
 
The Awakener of tlie Nation 201 
 
 of 5,000,000 men. One newspaper commented 
 later that it was not until Wood had given his 
 estimate of the military requirements that Pres 
 ident Wilson began to talk about an army of 
 5,000,000. "No other American general return 
 ing from France had said anything about 5,000,000 
 men," as one Eastern newspaper put it, "only 
 Wood. The fault of Wood is his size." 
 
 After appearing before the Military Affairs 
 Committee, Wood left for Camp Funston to 
 resume his work of training the 89th Division 
 which was completed the latter part of May. The 
 89th was then ordered abroad for service. Ac 
 companying his division to New York, General 
 Wood had no intimation that he would not be 
 sent overseas, but on arriving at Camp Mills, 
 Long Island, on May 25th, he found an order from 
 the War Department relieving him of his com 
 mand and instructing him to go to San Francisco 
 to take charge of the Western Department. Two 
 days later, General Wood went to Washington 
 where he asked President Wilson and Secretary of 
 War Baker to rescind the order and give him per 
 mission to go abroad. He was told that the 
 President would take the matter into considera 
 tion. That was the last he heard from the 
 President. Wood returned to New York City 
 to bid farewell to his division. Reviewing the 
 
202 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 troops for the last time, he addressed his men as 
 follows: 
 
 "I will not say good-bye," and those who heard 
 him said his voice trembled with emotion. "But 
 consider it a temporary separation at least I 
 hope so. I worked hard with you and you have 
 done excellent work. I had hoped very much to 
 take you over to the other side. In fact, I had no 
 intimation, direct or indirect, of any change of 
 orders until we reached here the other night. 
 
 "The orders have been changed and I m to go 
 back to Funston. I leave for there to-morrow 
 morning. I wish you the best of luck, and I ask 
 you to keep the high standard of conduct you have 
 had in the past. There isn t anything to be said. 
 The order stands, and the only thing to do is to do 
 the best we can all of us to win the war. That s 
 what we re here for, that s what we ve been trained 
 for. I shall follow your career with the deepest 
 interest, with just as much interest as though I 
 were with you. Good luck and God bless you." 
 
 Before leaving he shook hands with every man 
 in the entire division. 
 
 So far as we know, General Wood has never 
 made any other comment on the order which de 
 prived him of the command of his division. No 
 one has ever heard him speak one word of criticism 
 against his shabby treatment. There was no need 
 
The Awdkener of the Nation 203 
 
 of it. Everybody else spoke for him. Even the 
 strongest Democratic papers in the country de 
 nounced as mean-spirited and utterly un-American 
 this attempt to humiliate a man with such a long 
 and honourable military and civil record. The 
 storm of indignation proved too strong. The 
 Administration compromised. The order assign 
 ing Wood to San Francisco was revoked and 
 he was sent back to Camp Funston instead, to 
 train a new division, the 10th, which was ready to 
 go abroad on November llth, when the Armistice 
 was signed. 
 
 The Washington correspondents tried to pry 
 from the Administration some intelligent explana 
 tion for keeping Wood at home. But their effort 
 was in vain. 
 
 In spite of the crowding events of great impor 
 tance during the last few months of the war, the 
 Administration found it hard to live down the 
 Wood episode. " Wood has been like a sore thumb 
 to Wilson," remarked Colonel Roosevelt. When 
 members of Congress, newspapermen, and others, 
 who were not afraid to offend the powers in Wash 
 ington, even in time of war, returned from over 
 seas with stories about the shortage of American 
 artillery, airplanes, and tanks, the Administration 
 would be reminded sharply of its treatment of 
 General Wood. This man whom Washington 
 
204 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 sought to bury in Hawaii, or the Philippines, as 
 far from the war as possible, had done more than 
 any other man in the country to get us ready. 
 
 Ex-President Taft in an article under the head 
 line "The Shelving of Wood," in the Philadelphia 
 Ledger of June 1, 1918, wrote: 
 
 The country is seriously disappointed that General 
 Wood has not been permitted to go abroad with the 
 division which he has been training. The New York 
 World (strong Administration supporter) refers to the 
 change of orders in his case as likely to leave a bad taste 
 in the mouths of the friends of the Administration. 
 Those who are not thick and thin followers of the Presi 
 dent are even more disappointed. The previous treat 
 ment of General Wood creates doubt of the explanation 
 that his shelving is due to General Pershing s request. 
 The suspicion that it is but a continuation of the dis 
 ciplining of General Wood, this time for his recent frank 
 attacks before the Senate Military Affairs Committee, 
 will find strong lodgement in the minds of the people. 
 
 One may recall Lincoln s long patience with Mc- 
 Clellan s rude remarks and insulting conduct toward 
 him, and Lincoln s remark that he would hold Mc- 
 Clellan s horse for him if McClellan would only render 
 the service the country needed. With a like spirit, 
 Lincoln called Stanton to the war office in spite of Stan- 
 ton s previous bitter criticism of him and his adminis 
 tration. 
 
 The popular disgust aroused by what now ap 
 peared to be a set programme of hounding General 
 
The Awakener of the Nation 205 
 
 Wood aroused Congress, and on June 11, 1918, 
 Secretary of War Baker was called before the 
 Military Affairs Committee and questioned why 
 Wood had been kept at home. One of the Sena 
 tors gave this report of the meeting: 
 
 "Mr. Baker told us that he did not know what 
 was in the mind of the Commander-in-Chief as to 
 Wood. WTiich translated, I suppose, means that 
 the President has not told Mr. Baker what he pro 
 poses to do with General Wood." 
 
 According to newspaper reports, Senator Hitch 
 cock questioned Baker as to the cause for reliev 
 ing Wood of his command. "Mr. Baker at once 
 assumed his best defensive methods, and all cross- 
 questioning failed of its purpose." On the same 
 day that Baker was being grilled, Roosevelt said 
 in a speech in St. Louis: 
 
 "If this country had followed the advice Gen 
 eral Wood gave us three years ago, if we had 
 utilized the knowledge he had and profited by his 
 vision when we entered this war, we would have 
 had 2,000,000 trained men and the arms to equip 
 them. Russia would never have broken down 
 and peace would have come within ninety days." 
 
 On the next day Senator Johnson of California, 
 now one of Wood s rivals for the Republican pres 
 idential nomination, asked the Administration to 
 explain Wood s recall, and read before the Senate 
 
206 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 many editorials from papers of all political opin 
 ions demanding such an explanation. Among the 
 other members of Congress who volunteered as 
 Wood champions at this time was Representative 
 Richard Olney, a Democrat, of Massachusetts 
 and a member of the House Committee on Military 
 Affairs. Mr. Olney, who had formerly urged the 
 promotion of Major-General Wood to the rank of 
 General, now addressed an appeal to Secretary 
 Baker, but nothing was done. 
 
THE CHAMPION OF LAW AND ORDER 
 
 AFTER the Armistice, Major-General Wood 
 was transferred to the Central Department with 
 headquarters in Chicago where his duties consisted 
 chiefly of superintending demobilization. It was 
 an eminently respectable assignment demanding 
 the services of a man of tried administrative 
 ability. Next to the Eastern Department it was 
 perhaps the most important post in the country. 
 But nothing of any consequence was due to happen 
 there. 
 
 It was deadly dull, routine, swivel-chair work 
 which Wood encountered in Chicago. Fortunately, 
 he had not gotten out of his old habit of picking 
 up odd jobs. 
 
 One evening during the winter of 1918-19, Gen 
 eral Wood was walking to his hotel from the army 
 headquarters in East Ohio Street when he en 
 countered two young men in uniform. Both 
 boys were intoxicated. Each had lost an arm. 
 General Wood stopped them and began to ques- 
 
 207 
 
208 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 tion them. They had been discharged, they told 
 the General, and had stopped off in Chicago on 
 their way to their homes in the West. A well- 
 meaning civilian had offered them a drink. There 
 had been a soldiers celebration in the course of 
 which they had lost all their money and their 
 railroad tickets. General Wood sent the boys to 
 a hotel and paid for their supper and lodgings 
 over night. 
 
 It was an act of kindness such as any American 
 soldier or civilian might have performed. But 
 Wood did not stop with providing food and shelter 
 for the boys for one night. He recognized the 
 misfortune of the soldiers whom he had befriended 
 merely as a sample of thousands of similar cases. 
 
 The war heroes were returning, most of them 
 mere boys who a few years ago had been wearing 
 knickerbockers and had never been away from 
 their homes until they were called to fight for their 
 country. In the army they had been protected 
 by military discipline. Discharged, they were 
 adrift, boys once more, subject to great tempta 
 tions, especially during the first few days after 
 their return when they were lionized by their fellow 
 citizens. 
 
 The day after he met the two wounded veterans. 
 Wood started his reconstruction work in behalf of 
 returned soldiers in Chicago. He turned his great 
 
The Champion of Law and Order 209 
 
 organizing ability to the task of forming a central 
 bureau for aiding the discharged soldiers. The 
 work had already begun, but in a rather slip-shod 
 way. Chicago as well as other cities had several 
 such bureaus, but they lacked organization. They 
 were scattered units without any centralized team 
 work. The Chicago bureau as organized by Wood 
 became the model for the Federal Bureau for find 
 ing employment for returning soldiers. Under the 
 guidance of Major-General Leonard Wood, the man 
 who had unwillingly stayed at home, the Chicago 
 Federal Bureau won the reputation of being the 
 most efficiently run office of its kind in the country. 
 General W ood s plan for assisting the veterans 
 included a central registration office, an efficiently 
 run employment bureau, sleeping quarters for 
 men without funds, and an information bureau 
 to guide soldiers to places where they might secure 
 wholesome food and clean beds at reasonable 
 prices. He secured the cooperation of Chicago s 
 leading business men and representatives of the 
 various societies which had turned their energies 
 to war work, including the Salvation Army, the 
 Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A., the Y. W. C. A., the 
 Knights of Columbus, the Chicago Vocational 
 Training Board, the Jewish Welfare Board, the 
 Farm Labour Administration, the Women s Trade 
 Union League, the Lodging Bureau of Chicago, 
 
210 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 and scores of church organizations and other so 
 cieties. 
 
 In the summer of 1919 there occurred in the se 
 cond largest city in the United States a race riot 
 which in brutality and mob violence surpassed any 
 outburst of lawlessness this country has ever known. 
 By the time the local police and state authorities 
 had crushed the mob spirit and restored order, 
 thirty-five Negroes and twenty white persons were 
 reported to have been slain, while scores of men 
 and women had met with serious physical injury. 
 
 It was indeed an ugly blot on American history, 
 as humiliating to the nation as it was to the city in 
 which it occurred. But fundamentally the riot in 
 Chicago was no more criminal nor disturbing than 
 other demonstrations against law and order which 
 have taken place within the past year, but which 
 have been more promptly quelled, and conse 
 quently have not resulted in such heavy blood 
 shed. 
 
 The country had hardly recovered from the first 
 sharp shock of the Chicago riots when a similar 
 outburst occurred in Omaha, Nebraska. The cir 
 cumstances which led to the Omaha riot differed 
 only in details from the Chicago incident. Both 
 were spontaneous outbreaks of mob passion di 
 rected against the coloured people. 
 
 The mob in Omaha stormed the county jail, 
 
The Champion of Law and Order 
 
 lynched a Negro accused of having assaulted a 
 young white woman, almost succeeded in lynch 
 ing Edward P. Smith, the heroic Mayor of the 
 city, who attempted most courageously to save the 
 coloured prisoner from illegal execution, and 
 burned the courthouse and county jail. 
 
 Governor Samuel R. McKelvie of Nebraska 
 immediately called for Federal troops. When he 
 received word of the riot, General Wood, in whose 
 district (the Central Department) the crime oc 
 curred, was on an inspection tour in South Dakota, 
 far from the scene of disorder. He at once sent 
 his terse orders over the wire, and within a few 
 minutes after Governor McKelvie had appealed 
 for help, trained veterans were rushing to Omaha. 
 Wood commandeered a railroad engine and a ca 
 boose, and rode a night s journey to connect with a 
 train which took him to Omaha. He was in the city 
 the day following the lynching, and sixteen hun 
 dred picked soldiers were patrolling the streets. 
 In less than twenty -four hours law and order were 
 restored and one hundred and fifty of the rioters 
 were in jail. Three days later Wood left Omaha, 
 a quiet and orderly community. 
 
 The main difference between the Chicago and 
 Omaha riots lay in this: that in the Nebraska city 
 the mob which had declared itself an outlaw of 
 civilization was pacified within twenty-four hours 
 
The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 by a handful of troops directed by a strong leader 
 who never allowed himself to become excited. Not 
 a shot was fired in stamping out the condition of 
 anarchy which temporarily prevailed. Had the 
 state of Illinois availed itself of the same leader 
 ship, it is virtually certain that not a single person, 
 black or white, would have met death or injury 
 after the first mad demonstration on the bathing 
 beach of Lake Michigan. 
 
 Though inspired solely by race prejudice, the 
 Omaha riots developed certain disquieting phases 
 which did not escape Wood s observation. There 
 was no industrial battle being waged, but disorder 
 having broken loose, radicals of the city sought to 
 foment a continuation and extension of the trouble. 
 Wood discovered that the Reds were on the spot 
 supplying liquor and appealing to the worst ele 
 ment with inflammatory speeches. The Reds were 
 ready to convert a race riot into a political riot. 
 
 If it bad been the Administration s plan to keep 
 Wood in the background where the people of the 
 country would forget him, that plan was cracking. 
 From coast to coast he had been applauded for his 
 constructive and effective means of aiding the 
 returning soldiers. His success in stamping out 
 the flame of anarchy in Omaha had a bracing 
 effect on the whole country which had already 
 begun to grow nervous under repeated mutinies 
 
The Champion of Law and Order 13 
 
 against law and order. Nor did the leading 
 educational institutions of the country seem to 
 approve the Administration s course, for they be 
 gan to shower General Wood with academic 
 honours. His Alma Mater, Harvard, had con 
 ferred on him an LL. D. degree in 1899. Williams 
 College had bestowed on him a similar honour in 
 1902, and the University of Pennsylvania in 1903. 
 Between 1916 and 1919 honorary LL. D. degrees 
 were given General Wood by Princeton, University 
 of the South, University of Michigan, Union Col 
 lege, Wesleyan and George Washington universi 
 ties, while Norwich University and Pennsylvania 
 Military College bestowed on him the degree of 
 "Doctor of Military Science." 
 
 May we quote the official citation by Princeton 
 University, the great institution formerly presided 
 over by Woodrow Wilson, accompanying the pres 
 entation of the honorary LL. D. degree to Gen 
 eral Wood. 
 
 Doctor of Laws Leonard Wood, awarded the Medal 
 of Honour by Congress for his daring and determination 
 in most difficult and dangerous operations; winning new 
 credit in the Spanish War; Military Governor of Cuba, 
 doing his work with scrupulous fairness and swift de 
 cision until the island was safely transferred to the new 
 Cuban Republic; for five years on arduous duty in the 
 Philippines; Governor of Moro Province; later Chief -of- 
 
214 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 Staff and now commanding the Department of the 
 East; Major-General in the United States Army. In 
 our defenceless state he has sounded the reveille to 
 waken a slumbering nation from its dream of security, 
 bidding us rise and take our place like men to save our 
 freedom and help to save the imperilled freedom of the 
 world. 
 
 Months before the war closed we had begun to 
 talk about the reconstruction and its problems. 
 Some of our inspired sages had predicted that this 
 would be a different and a better world as soon as 
 autocracy had been overthrown and the world 
 made "safe for democracy." They had told 
 us that the blood-bath in Europe would cleanse 
 our hearts of unselfishness, and once Germany was 
 beaten, peace and social justice would reign for 
 evermore. 
 
 On the other hand, the radicals of the country, 
 who were fairly eating out their own hearts with 
 class hatred, threatened the Government with 
 destruction and damnation, applauded every 
 strike, excused every act of violence against law 
 and order, and openly advocated the Russian 1 
 order of things as a panacea for all governmental 
 ills. They shouted themselves hoarse over the 
 general strike in Seattle, gloated over the trag 
 edies of Chicago and Omaha as symptomatic of 
 the Government s inefficiency, and waited im- 
 
The Champion of Law and Order 215 
 
 patiently for the two great industrial battles the 
 steel and the coal strikes, toward which the country 
 was being permitted to drift. The forces of Capi 
 tal and Labour were piling up arms and ammunition 
 for an annihilating war which would cripple in 
 dustry and bring discomfort and suffering to 
 millions. 
 
 On October 6th, Governor Goodrich of Indiana 
 telephoned General Wood asking him to take 
 charge of the strike situation in Gary, Indiana, 
 the chief centre of the steel labour war. Condi 
 tions in the city had become so difficult that the 
 local police and the state militia were unable to 
 assure law and order. In defiance of the local 
 authorities, mass meetings were being held by 
 strikers addressed by men who advocated direct 
 action in all labour disputes. 
 
 Wood received the call for help at his head 
 quarters in East Ohio Street, Chicago. A few 
 minutes later army trucks packed with overseas 
 veterans were speeding from Fort Sheridan, north 
 of Chicago, to the steel city about thirty miles 
 south of Chicago. Colonel Mapes was in im 
 mediate command. Five hours after Governor 
 Goodrich had telephoned, the soldiers were in 
 Gary with Wood in general charge. 
 
 The Gary situation was so loaded with mischief 
 that many friends of the General, who were already 
 
216 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 pushing him to the forefront as Republican 
 presidential candidate, charged that the Admin 
 istration purposely had left him in command of the 
 Central Department in order that he should 
 receive the onus of the blame if there should be any 
 trouble in Gary. There is every reason to believe 
 that no such motive existed. General Wood 
 could easily have evaded going to Gary. He 
 voluntarily assumed charge of patrolling the steel 
 strike and restoring law and order in a town which 
 last October probably had a larger proportion of 
 wild-eyed radicals than any other community in 
 America. 
 
 It was the same old story. Wood walked in, and 
 disorder and anarchy walked out. There was no 
 further excitement to be found in the place. 
 Gary, Indiana, had figured on the first pages of all 
 the daily papers of the country for days until Wood 
 arrived. After most of the agitators had fled and 
 the radical leaders, who stayed, had been arrested, 
 Gary became a city of no news which meant good 
 news. Law and order were restored by the old 
 Wood method, without the firing of a shot. The 
 city has since witnessed a tense labour struggle, 
 but strikers, workers, employers, and other citi 
 zens of Gary have walked the streets in security. 
 Their freedom, guaranteed under the Constitution, 
 was not abridged, and they were relieved from 
 
The Champion of Law and Order 217 
 
 daily association with some of the most undesir 
 able elements of the land. Gary was the nerve 
 centre of the great labour struggle in which more 
 than 200,000 men were involved. With 1,200 
 soldiers, Wood kept the place peaceful. 
 
 General W r ood kept Gary quiet and orderly 
 without arousing either antagonism or criticism 
 from the labour leaders themselves. One of the 
 champions of the strikers, known to sympathize 
 with the radical wing of the American Federation 
 of Labour, said: 
 
 "I doubt whether the Gary job could have 
 been done better. There was military administra 
 tion at Gary that was somehow coolly and shrewdly 
 managed from the top; in similar situations, it has 
 almost always happened that the military per 
 mitted itself to be used, was outmaneuvered or 
 tricked by the instruments and machinations of 
 the anti-labour crowd, while at Gary I found the 
 feeling on both sides that the military was neu 
 tral." 
 
 General Wood and his men were strictly neutral 
 except toward the prosperous little nest of Reds in 
 Gary. Wood cleaned out that nest, arrested the 
 revolutionary fledglings and turned them over to 
 the proper authorities. One morning the news 
 papers published a story stating that censorship 
 had been established. Another press report 
 
218 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 stated that Wood had made a personal applica 
 tion to the War Department that he be assigned 
 to duty in the strike-stricken city. Both tales 
 were without any foundation. The censorship 
 story probably grew out of the fact that news 
 papermen were warned by the military authorities 
 not to publish certain reports until they could be 
 verified. The story of Wood s application to the 
 War Department for duty at Gary is almost too 
 absurd to pay attention to. Gary was within his 
 military jurisdiction. He might have asked to be 
 relieved from duty there. He would no more 
 have asked to be placed in charge there than a 
 captain of a company would ask Washington for 
 permission to take charge of his own company. 
 
 At the request of Governor John J. Cornwell of 
 West Virginia, General Wood sent eight hundred 
 veterans of the First Division to West Virginia the 
 last of October to prevent any disorders in the coal 
 strike. No trouble occurred and the troops were 
 never required to use their weapons. In the coal 
 fields there was probably less radicalism among the 
 workers than in Gary. On the other hand, the 
 coal miners were in a bad temper, ready for a 
 fight at any moment. They were used to hunting 
 in the mountains. They were expert riflemen. 
 Only the prompt arrival of troops, which could 
 assume absolute control, assured peace. 
 
The Champion of Law and Order 219 
 
 No sign of lawlessness of any sort appeared after 
 Wood assumed charge. Neither employer nor 
 employee could charge that troops were taking 
 sides in the labour fight. In Gary, Wood had per 
 mitted the strikers to hold mass meetings in halls 
 as long as there was no seditious talk against the 
 Government. The right of assembly and free 
 discussion was never tampered with. The same 
 rule prevailed in the coal districts. 
 
 In discussing the two strikes, Wood declared 
 that he had found the overwhelming majority of 
 the workers and strikers thoroughly loyal. Dis 
 loyalty, he found, was confined to a very small 
 number, mostly foreigners anarchists and Bol 
 shevists. 
 
 Late in November, after he had ample oppor 
 tunities to study the coal, and the steel strike, 
 General Wood said: 
 
 "While we deprecate and denounce the alien 
 un-American influence that is endeavouring to 
 poison the minds of our labouring men, it is 
 imperative that we should satisfy the demands of 
 the workers for a fighting chance in life for them 
 selves and their families. This applies to every 
 labourer, whether he works with his hands or his 
 brain, whether he digs coal from a mine or plants 
 Greek roots in a college. 
 
 "No industrious man or woman, equipped to 
 
220 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 perform satisfactorily their special tasks, should be 
 forced to worry about the necessaries and comforts 
 of life. Whenever, or wherever, it is discovered 
 that a worker hasn t a fighting chance in life the 
 conditions should be changed at once. 
 
 "That was a sound proposition of our fore 
 fathers that every man is entitled to life, liberty, 
 and the pursuit of happiness. And he is assured 
 of not one of the three unless his labour receives a 
 just reward. 
 
 "It boils down to this, that we must establish 
 keen sympathetic relations between all types of 
 men, between those who employ and those who are 
 employed. Every man should be a property 
 owner, and every man should be given an oppor 
 tunity to become such. This is, of course, a 
 generality, but the problem confronting us can be 
 solved if we stick to our American faith in the 
 efficacy of publicity. What we need are facts and 
 figures. 
 
 "Our laws are made by public opinion and public 
 opinion will go wrong if it hasn t the facts. What 
 we ve got to stand for now are the rights of prop 
 erty, the domination of law, and the maintenance of 
 public order. 
 
 "None of these can be maintained if we submit 
 to either an autocracy of wealth or an autocracy of 
 labour. We must insist upon democracy, govern- 
 
The Champion of Law and Order 
 
 ment by, for, and of all the people. Through 
 democracy, the connecting link between the 
 prosperity of the employer and that of the labourer 
 must be conserved. 
 
 "I don t think that our labour situation is so 
 complicated that it cannot be remedied by an 
 application of the Golden Rule. Why can t our 
 employers realize that their employees are just as 
 essential to their prosperity as for instance their 
 customers. If employers treated their employees 
 with something of the consideration that they treat 
 their customers we d have fewer strikes. 
 
 "There ought to be, it seems to me, a way in 
 which these strikes might be avoided. This can 
 not be done unless the public knows all the facts. 
 The labour papers present only one side of the 
 question and it is almost impossible for the public 
 to arrive impartially at facts. I believe that if 
 a court were organized with the power to hear and 
 investigate the claims made by Labour and the 
 counter charges made by Capital, a great many of 
 these industrial disputes could be avoided. It 
 is my idea that a court could be so constituted that 
 it would have the power to call upon the capital 
 ists to reveal their books and that it could send 
 investigators into the factories, shops, and mills 
 in order to determine if the claims made by the 
 employees were just. This court could then 
 
222 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 throw the pitiless light of public opinion upon the 
 facts and could point out definitely who was in the 
 wrong, so that public opinion could be brought to 
 bear upon the question. Indeed, I believe we 
 could benefit by investigating and adopting some 
 of the practices of Australia and Canada in these 
 matters. An industrial court of investigation 
 might have the power also to make an award and 
 to enforce its decision. We hear a great deal about 
 investigating and forcing arbitration in interna 
 tional disputes in order to avoid war. Why not 
 have such a court duly constituted so as to give 
 the public the facts in labour controversies so as 
 to prevent or shorten the great strikes and to 
 force the party who is in the wrong to settle on an 
 equitable basis giving the "square deal," as 
 Theodore Roosevelt used to say, to both or all 
 sides. 
 
 "If we had been more careful of the foreigners 
 whom we admitted to our shores during the years 
 that have gone by I do not believe that we would 
 have so much industrial strife. 
 
 "I should like to see the great organizations 
 which performed such valiant and patriotic service 
 during the war the Salvation Army, the Y. M. 
 C. A., the Y. W. C. A., the Jewish Welfare Board, 
 the Knights of Columbus, and similar societies 
 turn their energies to the Americanization of the 
 
The Champion of Law and Order 
 
 foreigners. They are splendidly organized, they 
 have the spirit of unselfish service, and they could 
 not find worthier labour at this time than that of 
 instilling into the minds of our immigrants the true 
 principles of our government. 
 
 "But all such work must be done sympathetic 
 ally and intelligently, and while we should protect 
 the immigrant from exploitation as well as supply 
 him with the proper instruction, there must be no 
 attitude of patronage on our part. Personally, 
 I favour the working methods of the Salvation 
 Army whose members meet the people they assist 
 on a common level and labour with them as well 
 as for them." 
 
 The following semi-official statement tells what 
 was done by Wood in the course of the steel strike 
 at Gary. 
 
 In the specific case of restoring law and order in 
 Gary, Indiana, General Wood, upon request of the 
 Governor of Indiana, ordered a detachment of troops 
 to proceed to that city for the purpose of protecting life 
 and property and to bring the place back to its normal 
 life so far as order was concerned. Accompanied by 
 his staff officers, the General made a personal investiga 
 tion of the situation and issued a proclamation defining 
 the reasons why the United States troops occupied the 
 city, setting forth therein rules and regulations for the 
 conduct of all persons in Gary during the time of mili 
 tary occupation. This proclamation also indicated 
 
The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 that the city government, as established, would act as 
 an agent of the military authorities. After this state 
 ment had been put in writing and read to the mayor 
 of Gary, who acquiesced, it was released to the local 
 papers and to the papers of the country for general 
 publication. Immediately thereafter, General Wood 
 sent for prominent citizens of Gary, for strike leaders 
 and organizers, and for certain persons who had been 
 identified as participants in a parade held in defiance 
 of the mayor s orders. When these persons came to 
 gether the proclamation was read to them and then 
 General Wood said that the troops were not in Gary 
 in the interest of the steel corporation or of the strikers, 
 but were there solely for the purpose of maintaining 
 law and order. 
 
 One of the strikers asked General Wood what action 
 he would take against picketing. The General s reply 
 was that picketing with a reasonable number of men 
 would not be interfered with so long as the pickets did 
 not offer violence against any persons; that the function 
 of the pickets, as he saw it, was to speak to people, 
 setting forth the reasons for striking and to try to get 
 others to take the same point of view and join them in 
 their action, but that he would not permit any violence 
 or threats or any means of intimidation to be employed 
 by the pickets, and that they would promptly be ar 
 rested if they disobeyed the regulation. Strike leaders 
 notified General Wood that this arrangement was fair 
 and perfectly satisfactory and that they were glad to 
 have the troops in control, as they thought the strikers 
 would get better treatment from the troops than they 
 had been getting from the local civil authorities. 
 
 After the conference the men who had assembled 
 
The Champion of Law and Order 
 
 were dismissed, and General Wood sent for certain 
 persons who had been reported to him as being of radical 
 tendencies and having attempted to incite the people 
 to riot. This little congregation heard a soldier s 
 sermon. They were told that if they attempted any 
 activities along radical lines, made any attempts to 
 incite people to break the laws, they would be arrested 
 at once and brought to trial. During the occupation 
 of Gary by the military, frequent raids were made 
 on places known as rendezvous for radical agitators. 
 Several arrests followed and many papers and docu 
 ments of various kinds of redly violent nature were 
 confiscated; and with them there were taken a choice 
 collection of firearms, whiskey stills, and other things. 
 All of these raids were made by the civil authorities, 
 backed, however, by the authority of the military. In 
 Gary, every arrest has been made by the municipal 
 police except in cases where men have violated the law 
 or the rules and regulations of the military in the im 
 mediate presence of United States troops. In Gary 
 all the men who want to work are working and without 
 interference. It is not within the province nor the 
 inclination of the military authorities to drive men to 
 work who don t want to work because they have or 
 think they have a grievance against their employers. 
 The main thing is that order has been established in 
 Gary and the rights of every resident of the city under 
 the law have been safeguarded. 
 
 The career of Leonard Wood up to the present 
 moment has been replete with big deeds, quietly, 
 unostentatiously, and efficiently performed. There 
 
226 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 are few living Americans who can point to a busier, 
 more useful and more successful record. There are 
 none who can point to an administrative and 
 business executive record which even approaches 
 in magnitude his Cuban exploit. And Wood was 
 only forty-one when he left Cuba, having then re 
 stored the country from a national wreck to a 
 happy and prosperous sovereign state. 
 
 Wood s is peculiarly an American career. His 
 whole life has been spent in the service of his coun 
 try. America has always been his chief interest. 
 And he has hewn his own career, unaided, from 
 the time he left his parents home to enter college. 
 Ours is still a land of self-made men. Wood 
 entered Harvard University penniless, paying for 
 his own education. He entered the army as a 
 civilian and climbed to the top. He became 
 Governor of Cuba without any previous adminis 
 trative training and made himself a most capable 
 government executive. He was the receiver of 
 bankrupt Cuba, directed the expenditure of 
 scores of millions of dollars, liquidated enormous 
 debts, pushed through to successful completion 
 great public works, and he left Cuba debt-free with 
 money in the treasury. 
 
 With the vision of a true statesman he foresaw 
 Europe s tragedy and our unescapable participa 
 tion in the great war. He refused to remain silent 
 
The Champion of Law and Order 
 
 and inactive when silence and neutrality were 
 commanded and when to act for the safety of the 
 country jeopardized his personal advancement. 
 His profession has been that of a soldier and a 
 government executive, but he has yet to be touched 
 by the blight of militarism. He has been en 
 trusted by his country with many important 
 missions and he has performed them all with 
 distinction. He knows America as few men do. 
 In a recent speech delivered in an Eastern city 
 Wood said: 
 
 "The watchword of this country should be 
 Steady and the slogan should be Law and Order. 
 Hold on to the things that made us what we are. 
 Stand for government under the Constitution. 
 Stand for the homely, plain things which really 
 lie at the foundation of our government. We 
 want to stand with our feet squarely on the earth, 
 our eyes on God, our ideals high, but steady." 
 
 To-day, when the whole world is jumpy and 
 nervous after the superhuman trials of the late war, 
 one would have to ponder long and earnestly 
 before finding a sounder watchword than Wood s 
 "Steady." 
 
 In closing this outline of Wood f life no more 
 fitting words can be found than the tribute of his 
 friend Theodore Roosevelt, who said of him: "He 
 combined in a very high degree the qualities of 
 
228 The Life of Leonard Wood 
 
 entire manliness with entire uprightness and clean 
 liness of character. It was a pleasure to deal 
 with a man of high ideals, who scorned everything 
 mean and base, and who also possessed those 
 robust and hardy qualities of body and mind for 
 the lack of which no merely negative virtue can 
 ever atone." 
 
 THE END 
 
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