This place, Cape Cod, where the formative years of Leonard Wood's life were passed, is a sand bank left by some melting glacier sticking out into the Atlantic in the shape of 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. Those who call it their native place have acquired {16} something of its spirit. They have ever been ready to oppose any aggression from the eastward or any other direction, and they have ever been ready to stand firmly upon the conviction that the integrity of the family and of the state must be maintained. And young Wood from them and from his Mayflower Pilgrim ancestors absorbed and was born with a common sense and a directness of vision that have appeared throughout his life under whatever conditions he found himself.
There seems to have been nothing remarkable about him either in his boyhood or in his youth. He achieved nothing out of the ordinary through that whole period. But there has always been in him somewhere, the solid basis of sense and reason which kept him to whatever purpose he set himself to achieve along the lines of the great elemental truths of life and far away from visionary hallucinations of any sort. If it was Indian fighting, he worked away at the basis of the question and got ready and then carried out. If it was war, the same. If it was administration, he {17} studied the essentials, prepared for them, and then carried them out.
Like all great achievements, it is simplicity itself and can be told in words of one syllable. In all lines of his extraordinarily varied career extending over all the corners of the globe he respected and built up authority of government and protected and encouraged the development of the family unit. One might say "Why not? Of course." The answer is "Who in this country in the last thirty years has done it to anything like the same extent?"
Many minds during this time have advanced new ideas; many men have invented amazing things; many able people have opened up new avenues of thought and vision to the imagination of the world, sometimes to good and lasting purpose, sometimes otherwise. But who has taken whatever problem was presented to him and invariably, no matter what quality was required, brought that problem to a successful conclusion without upheaval, or chaos, or even much excitement for any one outside the immediately interested group?
It is not genius; it is organization. It is not {18} the flare of inventive ability; it is the high vision of one whose code rested always on elemental, sound and enduring principles and who has not swerved from these to admire the plaster and the paper on the wall. It is finally the great quality that makes a man keep his feet on the ground and his heart amongst the bright stars.
Of such stuff are the men of this world made whom people lean on, whom people naturally look to in emergency, who guide instinctively and unerringly, carrying always the faith of those about them because they deal with sound things, elemental truths and sane methods--because they give mankind what Leonard Wood's greatest friend called "a square deal."
It is difficult to treat much of his youth because he is still living and the family life of any man is his own and not the public's business. But there is a certain interest attaching to his life-work for his country in knowing that his great-great-grandfather commanded a regiment in the Revolutionary army at Bunker Hill and that his father was a doctor who served in the Union army during the Civil War. Out of such heredity has {19} come a doctor who is a Major General in the United States Army.
At the same time his own life on Cape Cod outside of school at the Middleboro Academy was marked by what might distinguish any youngster of that day and place--a strong liking for small boating, for games out of doors, for riding, shooting and fishing. These came from a fine healthy body which to this day at his present age is amazing in its capacity to carry him through physical work. He can to-day ride a hundred miles at a stretch and walk thirty miles in any twenty-four hours.
Later in life this was one of the many points of common interest that drew him and Theodore Roosevelt so closely together. It has no particular significance other than to make it possible for him in many lands at many different limes to do that one great thing which makes men leaders--to show his men the way, to do himself whatever he asked others to do, never to give an order whether to a military, sanitary, medical or administrative force that he could not and did not do himself in so far as one man could do it.
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