The Career of Leonard Wood

by Joseph Hamblen Sears

THE ADMINISTRATOR

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THE ADMINISTRATOR

It has been said that General Wood's work in Havana as Governor-General of Cuba was the continuation of his work at Santiago on a larger scale. This would seem to be erroneous.

The Santiago problem was the cleaning and reorganizing of a city of 60,000 inhabitants. Many stringent measures could properly be put into operation in such a community which were quite impossible in a city of 350,000 inhabitants like Havana, or in a state of two and one-half million people such as the Island of Cuba. It was possible in an epidemic to close up houses temporarily, stop business and commercial intercourse for a period where only 60,000 people were concerned. But to stop the daily commerce of a large city, the capital of a state, was out of the question.

Furthermore the problem in the first instance was one of organizing a community in so {130} deplorable a condition that it was on the verge of anarchy. In the second instance much of the cleaning-up process had been at least begun by other American officers. It was here in Havana a case of administration and statecraft as against organization.

It was the taking of a crown colony of Spain--a kingdom--which had never been anything but a royal colony, and turning it in two years and a half into a republic, self-governed, self-judged, self-administered and self-supporting.

Roughly speaking, there had never been such a case. Even now the proposal of the Philippine Islands would practically be the second case should independence be granted to them by the United States. In all history a colony, once a colony, either has remained so, or has revolted from the mother country and by force of arms established its own independence.

These two problems, then, were quite different in their essential elements and they required different qualities in the man who settled them.

President McKinley's instructions to the new Governor-General were "To prepare Cuba, as {131} rapidly as possible, for the establishment of an independent government, republican in form, and a good school system." And both the President and the Secretary of War left their representative entirely to his own resources to work this out. His work was laid out for him and he was given a free hand.

General Wood, therefore, in December, 1899, after having been received with a magnificent ovation on his return to the United States, made a Major-General and given an LL.D. degree by his own University of Harvard--after having returned to Santiago suddenly upon the outbreak of yellow fever, cleaned the town, covered it with chloride of lime, soaked it with corrosive sublimate, burned out its sewers and cesspools, and checked the epidemic,--finally took up his residence in Havana and began his work.

One can readily imagine the immediate problems all of which needed settlement at once, none of which could be settled without study of the most thorough and vital sort. Wood's method was that of an administrator and statesman of great vision. He immediately proceeded to {132} secure wherever he could find them the best men on each of the problems and set them to work with such assistance, expert and otherwise, as they required to make reports to him within a limited time as to what should be done in their particular branches of the government.

Again, it was so simple that it can be told in words of one syllable. But the great administrator appeared in the selection of the men for the jobs and in the final acceptance, rejection, or modification of the plans proposed. While he was an absolute monarch of the Island he never exerted that authority unless there was no other possible course. In all cases he left decisions in so far as that could be done to native bodies and native representatives and native courts with full authority.

Chief Justice White of the Supreme Court upon being consulted told him that in the main the laws were sound but that the procedure was faulty; that he must look closely to this and make many modifications. This hint from a great authority became his guide.

The most crying needs of the moment were the {133} courts and the prisons. Prisoners were held without cause; trials were a farce; the prisons themselves were filthy places where all ages were herded together; court houses were out of repair and out of use; records hardly existed, and the whole machinery of justice was that of a decayed colony of a decayed kingdom totally without the respect of the public and without self-respect.

General Wood began with characteristic promptness to get to the root of the matter. The principal officer charged with the prosecution of cases was removed and a mixed commission, selected and appointed by himself, substituted. As a result in a short time six hundred prisoners were freed, because there was not sufficient evidence against them to warrant their arrests. Court houses were put into repair. Judges with fixed and sufficient salaries were appointed; officials were set at work upon salaries that were fair and--what is far more to the point--were regularly paid. Prison commissions appointed by Wood examined conditions and the prisons were cleaned, moved to other buildings, or renovated and remodelled according to modern American methods. {134} The result in less than six months was that native officials were conducting this work in a self-respecting, honorable manner, convicting or releasing prisoners in short order and bringing the idea of justice into respect in the public mind. The establishment of order was a natural result. Outbreaks and riots became unknown. The people began to realize as no amount of exhibition of power on the part of the invaders could ever have made them realize that peace, order, fair play, and a chance to live had come upon the land in what seemed some miraculous fashion.

The respect of the individual for the State was born again in the Cuban mind--born, perhaps it is fairer to say, for the first time in the heart of this much abused and ignorant people. Once this really pierced their inner consciousness--the inner consciousness of the whole people, of everybody poor or rich--these people felt safe and secure and knew they could take up their enterprises with safety and with hope of adequate returns which should belong to themselves.

It was so sound to do this wherever possible through the medium of the Cubans themselves and {135} not through army officials! It was so sane and clear-visioned a method to begin with this great beam of the remodeled Cuban house--this building up by the process of individual observation of confidence in those who ruled them!--and the men whom General Wood selected to draw the plans were experts in just such work. He selected them. He passed on their schemes. They did the work. And to this day he gives them credit for the whole thing.

Next came the necessity for inculcating the idea of government of the people by the people. Six months after taking office General Wood had appointed a commission on a general election law, had adopted a plan much after our own electoral laws with the Australian ballot system and a limited suffrage, had prepared in his own office in Havana all the ballots, ballot boxes, circulars describing election rules and had successfully held throughout Cuba the first real election ever known on the island--ever known to the people. Municipal officials and local representatives were chosen everywhere by the people themselves for the first time in their lives.

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Whether such a thing would be successful and prove effective the Governor-General did not know. But he knew that it was the right thing to do if they were ever to govern themselves; he trusted them--and he took the risk.

Next--or rather at the same time with these two basic lines of constructive building--came the school system. When the United States took over the Island the school system was non-existent. There was not one single schoolhouse belonging to the State anywhere on the Island. There were no schools at all except private and church schools and very few of them. Children in the mass did not attend school. There was no foundation to build on. The whole school system had to be created new from the bottom to the top. That schools were another of the main beams of this new house is self-evident. Yet the action taken was much more far-seeing than would have been possible without a single autocrat to decree, and without a man who could see many years ahead.

"I knew," said the Governor-General in one of his reports, "that we were going to establish a {137} government of and by the people in Cuba and that it was going to be transferred to them at the earliest possible moment; and I believed that the success of the future government would depend as much upon the foundation and extension of its public schools as upon any other factor, that such a system must be entirely in the hands of the people of the island."

This was the situation when in the beginning of 1900 within a month after taking office Wood selected a young West Pointer who had been a teacher to draw up a school system and school laws. The result was an adaptation of the Ohio and Massachusetts School Systems; and when in 1902 the Island was turned over to the Cubans three thousand eight hundred schools were in operation in good schoolhouses, with native teachers well paid, with 256,000 pupils, and at an expenditure of $4,000,000 a year out of a total annual state revenue of $17,000,000. In other words nearly one-quarter of the Island's revenue had been spent on the education of children to make them good and self-respecting citizens where nothing whatever had been spent before.

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It was a very bold step. No other country on earth had ever spent so large a portion of its revenue on education. The appropriations in the United States to-day are pitiful in comparison--and yet our country is supposed to be doing pretty well by its future citizens. Again the step taken by the Governor-General was a piece of construction of the main essentials--of the things that make no show, but build, always build.

American teachers were not employed, in order that the Cubans filled with suspicion of what the invaders were going to do might not be led to believe that there was any attempt being made to "Americanize" the Island. But on the other hand in the summer of 1900 one thousand of these new Cuban teachers were invited with all their expenses paid to spend several months at Harvard University in Cambridge and learn something of American pedagogy. The preparations for transporting this large number and handling them during their stay in the United States involved a large amount of work, but the trip was carried through without mishap or accident of any kind, and the thousand teachers returned to {139} their homes in the Island not only with the great benefit resulting from this instruction, but with the immense stimulus of a visit to an organized and comparatively smoothly running civilization. What they saw was of even greater benefit to them in the long run than what they learned in their summer courses.

At this time the city of Havana was a fever-ridden, dangerous city. Yellow fever and other tropical diseases existed always and blazed up into epidemics at certain seasons of the year. Such systems of drainage as existed emptied into the harbor or into the street gutters. A beginning had been made to cleanse the city before Wood took charge, but little had been done in the smaller cities of the Island, all of which were in somewhat the same condition as Santiago in 1898 except for the added scourge in the latter city resulting from its siege.

Nevertheless different methods had to be used in Havana. It is impossible here to go into the mass of detail in the appointing of commissions to carry out the different sanitary works that were required in Havana and all over the Island {140} in cities, towns and country districts. But, familiar as it now is, there will never be an account of this work which has made Cuba one of the healthiest places to live in either in or out of the tropics--there will never be a description so short that it cannot tell of the work of the unselfish, altruistic group of physicians who solved the yellow fever problem for all time. It gives him who writes even now something of a thrill to tell a little of it again and to pay tribute to the man who organized the work and to the men who carried it out under his unfailing support and encouragement. It is the greatest achievement of medicine since the discovery of the smallpox vaccine. It is one of the bright spots in the history of mankind.

Here it is told best by the organizer of it in his official language with all the reserve and reticence that go with all the writing he has ever issued. Between the lines one reads the story of a hundred cases of bravery as great as that required by any fighter in the world, a hundred instances of self-sacrifice and risk willingly given in those fever-stricken places and quarantined hospitals, freely {141} offered that those who came after might be saved from the black cloud which then hung over all tropical and semi-tropical countries.

In the Spring and summer of 1900 a yellow fever epidemic broke out in Havana and in many parts of the Island. All the sanitary methods known to man seemed to have no effect upon it. Nothing seemed to do much good.

At this point General Wood, knowing of the theory of Dr. Findlay that yellow fever was transmitted by the bite of a mosquito and at his wits' end to know what step to take next, received notice that a commission consisting of Drs. Reed, Carroll and Lazaer had been appointed to make a thorough study of the disease at first hand and report to him. "After several preliminary investigations Dr. Lazaer submitted himself as a subject for an experiment for the purpose of demonstrating that the yellow fever could be transmitted in this way. He was inoculated with an infected mosquito, took the fever and died. Dr. Carroll was also bitten and had a serious case of yellow fever, but fortunately recovered.

"The foregoing was the situation when Doctors {142} Reed, Carroll and Kean called at headquarters and stated that they believed the point had been reached where it was necessary to make a number of experiments on human beings and that they wanted money to pay those who were willing to submit themselves to these experiments and they needed authority to make experiments. They were informed that whatever money was required would be made available, and that the military Governor would assume the responsibility for the experiments. They were cautioned to make these experiments only on sound persons, and not until they had been made to distinctly understand the purpose of the same and especially the risk they assumed in submitting themselves as subjects for these experiments, and to always secure the written consent of the subjects who offered themselves for this purpose. It was further stipulated that all subjects should be of full legal age. With this understanding, the work was undertaken in a careful and systematic manner. A large number of experiments were made.

"The Stegomyia mosquito was found to be beyond question the means of transmitting the {143} yellow fever germ. This mosquito, in order to become infected, must bite a person sick with the yellow fever during the first five days of the disease. It then requires approximately ten days for the germs 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-one-half to five days from the time they are bitten. It was further demonstrated that infection from cases so produced could be again transmitted by the above described type of mosquito to another person who would, in turn, become infected with the fever. It was also proved that yellow fever could be transmitted by means of introduction into the circulation of blood serum even after filtering through porcelain filters, which latter experiment indicates that the organism is exceedingly small, so small, in fact, 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, letters, etc., and that, consequently all the old {144} methods of fumigation and disinfection were only useful so far as they served to destroy mosquitoes, their young and their eggs." [Footnote: General Wood's Report on the military government of Cuba.]

That is the story of a work that has made Cuba a healthy land, that has freed the southern part of the United States forever from the dread disease, that has made the building of the Panama Canal a possibility and the Canal Zone healthier in death rate per thousand than New York City, that has finally rid the earth of yellow fever as vaccine rid it of smallpox and typhoid, and as the discoveries during the Great War have made it possible to check tetanus and typhus and bubonic plague.

It was done--the work was done--by the doctors named and their assistants and the many men who took up the burden in other places and carried on. All honor to them! But the man who approved the idea, who took the risk and the responsibility and backed up those who worked-- the man who kept in touch with it day by day and {145} saw that it was carried through--was Leonard Wood.

Simultaneously with these basic administrative activities many other lines of constructive state building were inaugurated, under the same administrative plan--the plan of the appointment of a specialist or a commission of specialists to draw up plans and report to the Governor-General who then decided and started the actual work of reorganization.

A railroad law was written, and General Wood persuaded General Grenville M. Dodge and Sir William Van Horn to help him to build much of the present railway system of Cuba. Hard modern roads took the place of the muddy routes almost impassable at certain seasons of the year which had been the only means of communication throughout the island. Hospitals and charities were grouped under a new organization consisting almost entirely of Cubans which renovated old hospitals, built new ones, put children first into temporary homes and then did away practically with asylums as soon as the destitute children could be put out among the Cuban families who {146} took them under a newly made law. Thus, in so far as was possible, no child from that time forward grew up with the stigma of an orphan asylum resting upon him or her, but had the chance offered to become in time a self-respecting inhabitant of a self-respecting community.

Immense sums were disbursed by the military government in public works, harbor improvements, lighthouses which had almost ceased to exist, post offices and postal systems, telephone and telegraph connections, offices and organizations and an entirely new system of custom houses and quarantine administrations.

The account of these in detail is the same story over and over again--the building of a state from bottom to top; and the administration of this state by those people who throughout their entire lives had known nothing of the sort--much less had any voice in its management.

Two require special notice because of the tact and judgment required in handling them and because of the vital importance their consummation meant in the final settlement of Cuban difficulties.

One was the ending of the long standing war {147} between the Spanish Government and the Roman Catholic Church upon the question of church property appropriated by Spain. No settlement had been made since the concordat of 1861. And when General Wood took command of the Island the Church came to him and said: "What is the United States going to do? Is it war, or peace? Give us our property back, or pay us for the use of it."

With infinite wisdom and tact the Governor-General appointed judicial commissions to make an exhaustive study of the situation which resulted in reports showing that the claims of the Church were in the main just and fair, and a settlement was reached by which the State purchased most of the property, and rented for five years the rest, so that time should be given for equitable adjustment. This settled for all time a century-old trouble which alone would have made the setting up of a peaceable and effective government doubtful.

The other sound reorganization of a delicate nature was the action of the Governor-General in revising a law which made marriages only legal if {148} performed by a judge and ignoring the church ceremony altogether. The changed law recognized either church or civil marriage and quieted the most serious of all family troubles in the Island.

Finally a constitutional convention was planned and held, at which a constitution of the republican form based upon that of the United States was framed and adopted; an electoral law for elections in the Cuban republic was also adopted; and the general administrative law of the land was rewritten and adapted so that the government of the Island could be turned over to its inhabitants in workable form even though that form was new to them and they new to self-government in any form.

Look for a moment at the result of this work. In December, 1899, Leonard Wood took command of the Island of Cuba. In May, 1902, he turned over that Island to its own inhabitants. In 1899 except for the military work done by the American Army the Island contained Spaniards who had for years been its autocratic rulers and who had recently been defeated in a war; and Cubans who {149} had for years been governed by a tyrant race. In 1902 these two century-old hostile groups, neither of whom had ever had any real experience in modern representative government, 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. And the closing episodes which occurred in Havana are a witness to the affection and pride in which the people held the man who had accomplished it, the nation which had ordered it and their Island which was the scene of its happening.

One typical episode occurred on the night of President Palma's inauguration ball given to the new President and the new Cuban Congress by General Wood. Wood took a number of the {150} principal representatives of the new Cuban Congress to the Spanish Club--the hotbed of the Spanish régime--where there was a celebration in progress in honor of King Alfonso's birthday. The two nationalities fraternized at once under the influence of the American Governor-General, and all of them, Spaniards and Cubans, drank the health of the King of Spain. The President and the principal members of the Club then joined the party and went to the ball together, where in turn all of them, Spaniards and Cubans alike, drank the health of the new republic. When Wood's family left for Spain the Spanish colony in Havana made a request that they should sail on the Spanish Royal Mail Steamer in order that they might show their appreciation of his work. And this ship when she sailed was the first Spanish boat to salute the brand new Cuban flag which had just been raised at the entrance to the harbor where for 400 years before that day the flag of Spain had waved.

Another witness to the singular skill with which the Governor-General handled the diplomatic relations of the republic, and which is probably {151} unequaled anywhere in history, follows. This witness has to do with his work in laying the foundations of peace between the government of the Island and the Catholic Church. It is only possible here to quote from a few of the documents which Wood received not only as acknowledgment of his wise and sane policy, but as voluntary signs of personal affection and respect which the writers held for him when his difficult task was done. Monsignor Donatus, Bishop of Havana, wrote among other letters three which deserve quoting here. They were all voluntary expressions on his part. The first, dated at Havana on August 10, 1900, says in part:

"To His Excellency, Major-General Leonard Wood, U.S.A., Military Governor of Cuba. Honored Sir:

"I saw published in the official Gazetta yesterday the decree whereby you give civil effects 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 institutions and government of {152} the United States, which you so worthily represent in this Island.

"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 honored 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."

The second from the same place, dated December 11, 1900, says:

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"All lovers of liberty of conscience, all guardians of the sanctity of the home and all who understand and admire good citizenship must recognize in this as in your other order on the same subject, the wisdom of a far-seeing statesman and the courage of a fearless executive.

"Thanking you therefore in my own name and in the name of the Church I represent, I remain with every sentiment of respect and esteem, Very sincerely yours, X. Donatus, Bishop of Havana."

And finally as the Bishop was leaving Havana in November, 1901, to become the Bishop of Ephesus and proceed to Rome, he wrote:

"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 decisions will devolve before all fair-minded people to the honor, not {154} 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."

An interesting result of this work of Wood's in regard to the settlement of the religious questions of the Island came later on when he was starting on his way to take up his work in the Philippines in the form of a delegation of Church authorities headed by Archbishop Jones. This delegation came to General Wood to say that its members proposed to approach the President of the United States and suggest that Wood be given the same authority to represent church matters in the Philippines as he had had in Cuba. They added that if this were done, they would give him full power to represent the Catholic Church as a referee and confer upon him the power not only to recommend action in all matters, but to settle all matters for the Church himself.

It is very doubtful if such authority has many times in history been given to a Protestant by the {155} Church of Rome, and it marks the extraordinary height to which Wood's ability had lifted him in the world at large.

It is hardly to be wondered at that Theodore Roosevelt wrote at the time: "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." [Footnote: Harvard Graduates' Magazine.]

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