from
Walter Lippmann, Early Writings
With Introduction and Annotations by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Liveright, New York, 1970  pp. 157-169
Scanned and web-posted July 21, 2007.

This essay was published in The New Republic, March 17, 1920.

LEONARD WOOD

General Leonard Wood, who had been commissioned in the Army Medical Corps in 1886, was a close friend of Theodore Roosevelt's and had worked with him in organizing the Rough Riders in the Spanish- American War. Later he served as a colonial administrator in Cuba and in the Philippines. From 1910 to 1914, he was Chief of Staff of the Army. His truculent nationalism made many look on him as TR's heir, but he was far to the right of Roosevelt on domestic issues. After 1920 he served as Governor General of the Philippines until his death in 1927. [A.S., jr.]

There were no end of Caesars after Julius as there are Roosevelts after TR is dead. The name is a magnet of affection and of votes, and whoever can carry the name can carry some of the affection and some of the votes. There is consequently a tussle for the name. The leading contender is Leonard Wood, and there are strong arguments to support him. If the Roosevelt of 1914 to 1918 is considered by himself, if the many previous Roosevelts are put out of mind, Leonard Wood may justly claim the bulk of the estate. He has some of the mannerisms, and at least one of the impulses of Roosevelt.

His managers have naturally made the most of the friendship and the resemblance. They have tried to ride Wood to power behind the fiction that whatever you found in Roosevelt you would find again in Wood. But the closer you examine the real Wood behind the pseudo-Roosevelt the more the fie tion fades. For while Roosevelt was the voice of a multitude Leonard Wood is the unmistakable voice of a faction. A• you unwrap the campaign coverings you find a Robert Lin coin to an Abraham; a president of a sleeping car company, to the great emancipator.

The first wrapper that comes off is the exuberant praise, given Wood by Roosevelt himself. That cannot stand in evidence, for Roosevelt praised other men just as highly at on:• time or another. Of Hiram Johnson he said, for example, in 1912, that he was fit at the moment to be President of the United States. Then, too, Roosevelt was no Warwick. Among all his titles to fame one title will always be conspicuously absent. He will never go down in history as a successful chooser of good Presidents. The case of Mr. Taft settled that The nomination of Henry Cabot Lodge in 1916 confirmed it. In fact, it was a fairly good rule of thumb always to vote for Roosevelt when you could, and never to vote for his candidate when you could avoid it.

Leonard Wood's grievance also has to be discarded. The treatment Mr. Lansing received did not make him a great Secretary of State, nor does Leonard Wood's treatment indicate qualifications for President of the United States. He has a grievance. He was not used during the war up to the limits of his abilities, and lesser men were given greater responsibilities. The grievance resulted from the fact that Leonard Wood could not be the first under Wilson, and neither he nor any one else knew how he could be used as a second. He was a prima donna capable only of singing soprano in a piece when there were no more prima donna parts left. It was unfortunate. It was even tragic. It will not make him a good President. And however answerable Mr. Wilson may be for the decision to keep General Wood out of France, the General's inability to disentangle his zeal for military preparedness from his feud with the Commander-in-Chief remains a part of the record.

Into the same discard with the Roosevelt inheritance and the grievance must go the advertisements of his publicity men. They are energetic if not objective, and they spare no adjectives. Finally you come to the official biographies, to The Career of Leonard Wood, by Joseph Hamblen Sears and to Leonard Wood, Conservator of Americanism, by Eric Fisher Wood. There we must pause and ponder. For these volumes are not likely to err unfavorably to the General. They are genuine documents by fervent admirers and they are written to supply the reasons why he should be the next President. I do not propose to go behind the facts as stated in these two books, except where they are supplemented by the Encyclopedia Britannica and by the writings and speeches of the General himself.

I take the facts and let rhetoric go. It is not important that Cape Cod, where Leonard Wood lived until he was nineteen, looks to Mr. Joseph Sears like "a doubled-up arm with a clenched fist as if it were ready at any moment to strike out and defend New England against any attack that might come from the Eastward"; nor that Mr. Eric Fisher Wood has discovered that four out of the twenty-two heads of families on the Mayflower were ancestors of the General; nor that he finds in the General "hereditary traits--medical, patriotic and executive" upon which he "has built up his earnest and efficient character"; nor that a Cape Cod sea captain said that when Leonard "did get into a fight, his face sort of lit up"; nor that he is "five feet, eleven inches tall, weighs 195 pounds and has a 44-inch chest"; nor that, so far as Mr. Eric Fisher Wood knows, the only thing that Leonard Wood did at the Georgia Institute of Technology was to organize and coach "the first football team the Institute ever had ... His team in the first season defeated the champions of the South, and lost only one game during the two years he was its captain ... Starting with that impetus and proud of his initial reputation the Georgia Tech has always since then maintained a fine football record." These things have to be endured in a biographer as gallantly as Assistant-Surgeon Leonard Wood endured the thirst and the fatigue of the desert in his pursue of the Apache Chieftain Geronimo.

In the pursuit of a President you traverse the sands of ii relevance right up to the close of the Spanish-American war There is nothing in the biographies before that time to indicate the education of a statesman. A limited schooling, the Harvard Medical School in the early eighties, a brief period of practice as a surgeon in Boston, several years of Indian fighting in the southwest, time at army posts, service as the Doctor Grayson to President McKinley, and then Colonel on the Rough Riders: it is not until Santiago de Cuba fell that Leonard Wood arrived on the scene as a man with a bent for administration. He was made the Military Governor of Santiago and then promoted to the Governorship of Cuba. H, held that post till 1902 when the first intervention ended. The first concrete evidence of Leonard Wood's statesmanship is to be found, if anywhere, in Cuba from 1899 to 1902.

It happens to be the only concrete evidence. It is true that he was later appointed Governor of the Moro Province in the Philippines, and that he pacified the native tribes. But Presidents of great nations are not made nor even revealed by policing savages in the tropics. It is true also that General Wood was Chief of Staff from 1910 to 1914, but no one claimed then or has claimed since that Presidential qualities were conspicuous. It is to the Cuban governorship that the biographers turn, and rightly. The task of reorganizing that island was one of the moderately big undertakings of recent colonial experience, and Leonard Wood has his place among the empire builders.

How high a place it is difficult fairly to estimate. In the opinion of his biographers only the sky is the limit of their praise. They naturally dwell upon the sanitary improvements, the road building and the public works, the improvement in the administration of justice, and the modernizing of jails. asylums, hospitals and schools. That Cuba became a vastly better place to live in under the American occupation is certain, and the credit is Leonard Wood's. But we are looking for evidence of his statesmanship, of his constructive ability in the moulding of institutions. It is not enough to show that his instinct for order and for cleanliness caused him to pacify and cleanse the island when he had behind him the unlimited authority of the intervention. His biographers know that this work in itself is not enough to mark a Presidential figure. They are not content to claim that Leonard Wood "cleaned up" Cuba. They insist that "Leonard Wood knows how to build for permanency. It [Cuba] is the only Latin-American republican government which has ever endured for more than three or four years." Thus Mr. Eric Fisher Wood. It is rather interesting that the biographer picked three or four years as a measure of permanency. For the Cubans took over the government on May 20, 1902. Revolution broke out on the 28th of July, 1906, a little over two months margin of permanency. Neither of the biographers seems able to remember this second intervention which occurred a little over four years after Leonard Wood left Havana. Says Mr. Sears: The Cubans "received their country at the hands of the Americans with new laws, with a republican form of government, with their own kind for rulers elected by their own people, and began an existence that has now been running long enough to prove that the work was so well performed for them as to make the impossible possible—the rotten kingdom, a clean republic; the decayed colony, an independent proud democracy. It is a piece of work unparalleled in the annals of history." Mr. Eric Fisher Wood seems equally incapable of remembering that there was a second intervention. "Today, fifteen years later," [sic] he writes, "the Republic of Cuba still continues to function efficiently, a proof that Leonard Wood knows how to build for permanency." The record is that the second intervention began on September 29, 1906, and that the last American troops were not withdrawn until April 1, 1909. Leonard Wood did not participate in the second intervention.

Why was a second intervention required, in spite of the fact that Leonard Wood had left Cuba an independent proud democracy four years previously? I quote the Encyclopedia Britannica's article on Cuba written by Mr. Francis Samuel Philbrick, "formerly Scholar and Resident Fellow of Harvard University, and member of the American Historical Association":

In material prosperity the progress of the island from 1902 to 1906 was very great; but in its politics, various social and economic elements, and political habits and examples of Spanish provenience that ill-befit a democracy, led once more to revolution. Congress neglected to pass certain laws which were required by the constitution, and which, as regards municipal autonomy, independence of the judiciary, and congressional representation of minority parties, were intended to make impossible the abuses of centralized government that had characterized Spanish administration.

In other words Leonard Wood left Cuba with a "constitution" but without a political code and without an institutional life. The second intervention corrected this fatal defect, and only since then can it be said that there is an approach to "permanency." The regime set up by Leonard Wood's intervention lasted four years and two months; the regime of the second intervention has lasted eleven years. This does not destroy the credit that belongs to Wood for what he really did accomplish, but it does make rather thin the claim of his biographers that his work is "unparalleled in the annals of history," especially when that claim is put forward with careful silence about the revolution which followed this unparalleled performance.

Leonard Wood cleansed the island of Cuba. He did not build a structure that endured. By his own standard of "deeds not words" the record contradicts the claim that he is a statesman who has built institutions. That does not mean that he does not stand fairly high among military administrators. The qualification "military" is necessary. For Leonard Wood has never governed a free people. In all his life he has never done a big piece of work where he had to rely upon the consent of free men. Whatever efficiency he has exhibited has always been based ultimately upon military force, and has been displayed among men who could not disobey. "His administration in Cuba," says Mr. Eric Fisher Wood, "has been likened to a curious mixture of old town-meeting republicanism and absolute autocracy: he never used his authority for the sake of using it as the Spanish Governors had so often done, but when it was the last resort he set his jaw and used it to the limit."

That happens to be the doctrine of the benevolent despot, and it is in terms of that doctrine that the whole campaign for Leonard Wood is made. Consequently no one can prove that the General is qualified to administer the affairs of a self-governing people because his whole experience is in the administration of dependent peoples. How well he has ruled subject peoples is, as we have seen, open to dispute. It is not open to dispute that Leonard Wood has held no single office under democratic conditions. He is trained to administer when he can command; he is, if you like, a successful colonial governor; he is, if you insist upon it, a Cromer or a Kitchener or a Roberts. Has any one seriously proposed a Cromer or a Kitchener or a Roberts for prime minister of England?

It may be that Leonard Wood has in him unsuspected abilities as a statesman in a republic. They have never been exhibited in action. The whole of Leonard Wood's claim to be President among the American people rests not on deeds but on words. Words about his relation to Roosevelt, speeches about preparedness, magazine articles about Americanism, talks to audiences in various parts of the country. There are no facts available about his deeds as an American statesman. He has not governed a California as Johnson has, or an Illinois as Lowden has; he has not been a cabinet officer like McAdoo, or an administrator by voluntary cooperation like Hoover. He proposes to jump from the government of dependent peoples and subordinate soldiers straight to the most difficult political office in the whole world. He cannot make the jump on a record of deeds. He is in fact trying to make the jump on a record of words.

The record of his words about preparedness. He was, after Roosevelt, the foremost propagandist for military foresight at a time when such a propaganda was needed. It was no fault of his that the political setting made him the agitator instead of the executive of preparedness. But unless you choose to regard the Plattsburg camps as conclusive and outstanding evidence of Presidential qualities, the fact remains that more than any other candidate conspicuously mentioned, the man who pretends most to despise words, has little but words to recommend him for the office he is seeking.

Wood is a successful agitator with a following. It is a comparatively small but fervent nucleus of people who have responded to his words and his quality. They are people with much money and great zeal, and they are truly convinced that they have a cause and a prophet. The arguments about Cuba are afterthoughts. The directing impulse was born in the period of American neutrality when the country was drifting dangerously without military preparation. Leonard Wood was one of the first to see this. For the ulterior objects of this war he cared nothing in particular, but for war, efficiently and triumphantly conducted, he cared a great deal. Roosevelt and he focussed and organized sentiment chiefly among the upper strata of society in the big cities, in the colleges and among the intellectuals. The mass of the people they did not convert,—that was done by the President with his democratic formulas. But the inner sect of the war party was Wood and Roosevelt, and that sect is Wood today.

At certain stages of the war, this sect may indeed have made a decisive and saving difference. That is a question for the historians. The significant thing now is what that sect has become. It has been deeply affected by an unhappy experience in the war. Its members were not employed actively or long enough to consume their energy, and they have been ever since in a state of balked impulse. Their frayed nerves were easily infected with the fiercest phases of the war psychology, and they have boiled and fretted and fumed. The hatreds and violence, which were jammed up without issue in action against the enemy, turned against all kinds of imaginary enemies—the enemy within, the enemy to the south, the enemy at Moscow, the Negro, the immigrant, the labor union, —against anything that might be treated as a plausible object for unexpended feeling.

This sect has been called conservative. It is not that in any accurate sense of the term. It is far too reckless to be called conservative. The word must be reserved for men like Lord Robert Cecil and Mr. Hughes. The sect has been called reactionary. That also is inaccurate for the last thing this sect has in mind is a return to the easy-going, decentralized, un-regimented America of the nineteenth century. It has been called capitalistic. It is not capitalistic, if that means that it is interested in the administration of capitalism. The sect is radical jingo with the prejudices of the Junker rather than of the great industrialists. It really is incapable of distinguishing between the military government of an occupied country like Cuba and the civil government of the United States. It is a mystical sect of innovators who propose to exalt the federal government into a state of supreme and unquestionable authority. They are not finicky about law or principle. If the biographers of the General are a fair sample, they do not know much about law or principle. They have the mood, if not the courage, of the coup d'état. They have backed every attack on civil liberty. They propose to "save" by a searching of hearts and a use of force. They are the moving spirit in the performance at Albany, and Speaker Sweet has had what amounts to a blessing from the Conservator of Americanism.

The real Wood nucleus is, however, too small to win an election. It is not too small to run a campaign. It has money and conviction. What it lacks is votes, and these it is now seeking earnestly and painfully. The problem for the sectarians is: how to transfer their own zeal to a majority of the electorate? Their own response to the General is electric. I h force and his recklessness and the conqueror in him have attracted about all the people in America whose fears find an answer in his strength or whose recklessness finds expression in his. The rest is hard going. The bulk of the people are other attracted to other men, or they are prosaic and not easily inflammable.

To them the General has addressed his recent speeches au,' articles, with every once in a while a stimulating word to the sect. Thus the General's pronouncements fall into two classes You may call them the original and the derived, the person:: and the expedient—those which express the General's inn pulse, and those which are meant to catch the Republican vote. The two classes of statements are distinct both in subject matter and in rhetorical emphasis. In the first class yon hear the leader of the sect, the real hero of the biographies, the mystical patriot, the conqueror. In the second, and more recent, class of public statements, you hear the mumbling of the amateur Republican trying his level best to remember and repeat the Republican catchwords of 1920.

To illustrate the temporary eclipse of the vivid Wood in the vote-getting Wood take these two utterances on the subject closest to his heart—the subject of war and peace. Thy first was made before he was a serious candidate, April 24 1919. He was speaking to wounded soldiers in a hospital at Detroit. Talk that any covenant, he said, will protect the world from future war„ is "idle twaddle and a dream of mollycoddles." That was from the heart. Compare it with his reply of February 11, 1920, when questioned by Senator Borah:

I believe we should accept the League of Nations as modified and safeguarded by existing Lodge reservations.... I am in favor of and shall continue to be in favor of the well-established foreign policy of this government which conserves and promotes the interest of our own country ... One aim ... has always been the promotion of the peace of the world.

As the Colonel might have remarked, when the elections are at hand the weasels go to work.

Clearly the twaddle and mollycoddle vein is authentic. To it belongs the General's statesmanlike contribution to the problem of how best to deal with the revolutionary immigrant. "My motto for the Reds," he said last December to the Colorado Farmers Congress, "is `S.O.S.'—ship or shoot. I believe we should place them all on a ship of stone, with sails of lead and that their first stopping place should be Hell." In the same class belong his more amiable exhortations to women voters about their babies, to the citizens at large about the way to preserve the national stock, about how to create democracy by means of training camps, and just how to assay the percentage of patriotism in your neighbor. Any student of the higher literature of Prussianism in any country will recognize at once the choice of subjects and the emphasis. Power and prestige based on the dogma of the inheritance of acquired characteristics (Leonard Wood has '`hereditary traits —medical, patriotic, executive") as preparedness for war regarded as a permanent and beneficial institution, accompanied by a lack of real interest in social and economic questions, except as they affect the supreme power state. Mutatis mutandis, it is all in Houston Stewart Chamberlain, only for him the magic word is Germanic. "And tortured one poor word ten thousand ways."

I have called this the authentic Wood. It corresponds accurately to the experiences of his life. Where Roosevelt, the American statesman, boasted of the many racial strains that were in him, Wood, the bearer of our White Man's burden, permits and encourages his biographers to boast that his is the pure blood of a chosen people. The essential difference between the two friends is revealed right there, the one exuberantly catholic and national, the other intensely sectarian and factional. Roosevelt at his greatest sought to speak for a church that was at least as universal as America; Wood in his most genuine moments is a member of a quarrelsome tribe.

But an appearance of catholicity he must have to secure the office he seeks. And so in recent months he has taken to himself, besides Mr. Frank Hitchcock, a perfunctory platform of views. They have no personal flavor whatever. They have none of the emphasis and none of the emotional tone that pervades the rest of his thought. They are worn like civilian clothes. But they are all tabulated in eleven articles of faith which prove the perfect Republican orthodoxy of the General.

They are (a) that we must go slow in paying the war debt and we must not tax excess profits; (b) that we must regulate privately owned railroads equitably, properly, "etc."; (c) that in foreign affairs we should be "strong, dignified, and conservative," but must protect American interests and trade; (d) that we should have "a small but excellent army and ever-ready navy"; (e) "a well equipped diplomatic and consular service"; (f) "suitable working conditions" and "an honest day's wage for an honest day's work," just how not stated by the General; (g) a protective tariff; (h) "we" should develop "a suitable merchant marine," the "we" undefined by the General; (i) economy and a budget; (j) respect for law and order; (k) no class legislation, "but" that the government be maintained under the constitution, "each department functioning strictly within its own limits."

It will readily be seen from this that the boldness and plain speaking of the General have temporarily been suppressed in the interests of his campaign for hard-boiled Republican delegates and one hundred per cent Republican business men. The General remains a terrible lion to the voteless, a brave advocate of causes that do not enter into the duties of a President, an evangelist of the spirit, but on the excess profit tax, the tariff, the Lodge reservations and the other articles of Republicanism, he is as regular as Warren G. Harding himself.

I do not wish, however, to leave the impression that Leonard Wood is morally a timid man. He is cautious at the moment, both about his platform and about resigning from the army. He has, it is true, nothing whatever to say that can be called his own on any concrete question of modern statesmanship. Nevertheless, there are energies within him, energies that do not exist in canned goods politicians like Harding. The energies of Leonard Wood are banked down just now to facilitate the scramble for delegates. But they are there. They are energies of ambition and of domination greater, I believe, than any that have appeared in American political life within our generation. They are energies that a military career of a spasmodic kind has whetted but not satisfied or organized. The energies of Leonard Wood are fiercer than his intellectual equipment can employ or control. The intemperateness of his speech and recklessness of his manner are the visible signs of a nervous system overstrained by long frustration and incomplete exercise. The energies of Wood are pent; when they issue they follow the patterns of his experience which are to use force, to ship or shoot, to act as the conqueror does among inferior peoples. There is no composure in the character of Wood. There is instead the titan's and romanticist's uneasiness in an apoplectic soul. This looks superficially like strength, and is easily mistaken for it.

March 17, 1920