Leonard Wood, conservator of Americanism

Front matter

LEONARD woo

CONSERVATOR OF AMERICANISM

Class ^_i:SJ

Preface

The idea of writing a biography of Leonard Wood first took shape in my mind as early as 1914.

At that time I was in the American diplomatic service in Europe, where the war, and military matters in general, became the one and only subject of interest. *One of the all-absorbing topics was the question of America's probable attitude towards the war.

This led to much discussion of American affairs and American men among the civilians and officials with whom I came into contact in France and England, in Germany and Austria.

I then gained a new conception of Leonard Wood, and discovered that his reputation was far higher in Europe than at home. In America we thought of him merely as a competent soldier, but I found that the official classes of the Allies and of the Central Powers rated him not only a great soldier, but as one of the world's greatest administrators; and that they considered Theodore Roosevelt and Leonard Wood the two most notable living Americans.

Since 19 14 his own countrymen have seen

PREFACE

Leonard Wood in a new light, for his work at Plattsburg, his pleas for preparedness, and his dignified reticence under injustice have elevated him in public opinion at home nearer to the European estimate.

Before commencing the compilation of this biography, I had expected to find, already in print, a great mass of material upon which to base my work, and confidently anticipated being able to study numerous books, either written by Leonard Wood or about him. My search for such readymade material was, however, fruitless. Little or nothing was to be discovered.

I found that he had, for popular consumption, published only one small volume on preparedness, and that that contained no information about himself. It was, in fact, so impersonal that, even inferentially, one could gain little impression of the writer beyond his burning spirit of patriotism.

It was also surprising to find how little he had ever talked about himself, and how seldom he had given others a chance to talk about him or his work.

He has preeminently been ''not the speaker but the doer of the word." No living man of equally great achievements has so effectively escaped publicity.

During my past acquaintance with him, as well as in numerous recent interviews, it seemed impossible to obtain from him any material of a

PREFACE

strictly personal character. He has been most generous in furnishing subject-matter, relating to historical events in which he had participated, but his part in these events was passed over lightly or was allowed to drop out of sight altogether.

It therefore became necessary to fall back upon a painstaking research into his official reports — of which there are nearly a hundred volumes, upon my own knowledge of his personality, and upon information gained by me during several years from his associates, past and present.

Among those to whom I am especially indebted for valuable information and strong impressions are the late Theodore Roosevelt, the late Robert Bacon, Lieutenant-Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, and Colonel Henry L. Stimson, who was Secretary of War when General Wood was Chief of Staff; also to Mr. Edward Barlow, one of Wood's boyhood playmates; to Captain Patch, who served with him in the Indian campaigns of the Southwest; to General Edwin F. Glenn and General Charles Kilbourne, each of whom has served as his Chief of Staff; to Halstead Dorey, Gordon Johnston, S. M. Williams, Wilbur Smith, Thomas Gowenlock and Landon Thomas, who have at various times served him as aides-decamp or staff officers; and to his sons, Leonard, Jr , and Osborne.

I am also indebted to my mother, Frances

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PREFACE

Fisher Wood, not only for valuable aid in preparing this book for publication, but also for careful genealogical research in Leonard Wood's ancestral lines, resulting in the discovery of the names and records of some four hundred of his American ancestors.

E. R W.

December, ipip.

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Ancestry and Boyhood 19

II Personal Characteristics 42

Chapter I

Leonard Wood's parents were Charles Jewett Wood, born at Leicester, Massachusetts, and Caroline Hager, born at Weston, Massachusetts ; they were married in 1859, when the former was thirty years old and the latter twenty-three. The father, Charles Wood, was a physician. Leonard, their first child, was born on October 9th, i860, at Winchester, New Hampshire.

The next spring the Civil War, long smoldering, burst into flames. Ever since December, 1620, when two of Charles Wood's forbears, Stephen Hopkins and Richard Warren, had landed from the Mayflower under command of Captain Myles Standish as members of a reconnoitering party and had fought the famous "First Encounter" with the Indians two weeks before the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, there had never been any warfare in America in which the ancestors of Charles Wood had not bravely taken their full part.

Therefore, it was consistent with the family tradition that in 1861 he should promptly answer the call to arms. Moreover, his brave wife, who was descended from equally stalwart lines, and was a great-granddaughter of General John Nixon of the Revolution, insisted that she should not stand as an obstacle in the way of his patriotic duty. The dominant characteristic of their ancestors who are on record was, generation after generation, without exception, devotion to the high ideals of what we now call Americanism, — and the records of an astonishingly large number of them are known to us.

The forbears of both Charles and Caroline Wood were all born in this country or migrated to it before 1700, nearly all arriving before 1650, and the personal histories of more than four hundred of them have been traced and are set down in public records. Seven of them were passengers on the Mayflower; and more than fifty during the period of the Colonial Wars rendered patriotic service, either by active duty in the field against the French and Indians, or by equally valuable service in the legislative bodies of the Massachusetts Colony. In the later generations, at least seven were soldiers in the Revolution.*

*Sfe Appendix No. 2.

It must be granted that a long line of colonial ancestors is not in itself a conclusive guarantee that a man will be imbued with a spirit of profound patriotism, for some of our American-born Tories, Copperheads and Bolsheviks have conspicuously lacked that virtue, while it is found in a superlative degree in many recently naturalized citizens of foreign birth. But in Wood's pedigree we discover an unprecedented record, for among his hundreds of known ancestors not one is found who cannot pass the severest test of Americanism. From earliest times, his forbears have striven for that ideal condition where love of personal liberty is happily balanced by respect for constitutional law.

It has been said that the Mayflower would need to have been as large as the Leviathan to have brought over as many souls as present-day Americans claim came across in that tiny bark. In point of fact, there were, according to the records of Governor Bradford of Plymouth, exactly 104 passengers on the ship and among them were only twenty-two heads of families to whom those claiming Mayflower ancestry have ever been able to prove descent.

Leonard Wood, by verified records, traces to four of these twenty-two men: — William White, Francis Cooke, Stephen Hopkins and Richard Warren, and to three of the members of their families who accompanied them.

Many of the passengers of the Mayflower were appalled at the inconceivable hardships of the first winter in Cape Cod, and, finding the struggle to realize their ideals of liberty too arduous for their endurance, returned next spring to England; but no one of Wood's ancestors was among these of faint-heart.

Also, many of the less hardy among the little band died in Plymouth during that terrible winter. The twenty-two leaders, who with their families survived the ordeal and braved it out, left long lines of descendants who in physical vigor, indomitable courage and strength of principle have for three centuries been the superlative type of American citizen.

To the early immigrants, Puritans or Pilgrims, and their descendants their new country was first, last, and always of supreme importance. In it they had finally found a refuge, where they could develop for their children and their children's children an atmosphere of religious liberty and constitutional political freedom.

It is, therefore, not surprising that Leonard Wood's character and the ideals by which he has directed his life should correspond closely to the ideals of the men, his ancestors, who signed the immortal Compact in the little cabin of the Mayflower on that bleak twentieth of December, 1620 — a compact that is justly considered to embody the vital germ of our own great Constitution.

In addition to the dominant instinct for patriotic public service, with its natural corollaries of military and legislative activity, we find in Leonard Wood's heredity, recurring in several generations, a leaning toward the medical profession, which claims for its own men who possess the scientific turn of mind, supplemented with intense devotion to public welfare and an unlimited capacity for self-sacrifice.

These hereditary traits — medical, patriotic and executive— are the foundation upon which Leonard Wood, by virtue of his strong will and his ability to conquer his environment, has built up his earnest and efficient character. They rendered possible the great feats of administrative reconstruction which early earned for him his welldeserved international fame, — feats that would have been impossible of accomplishment to any one with military ability alone.

In upholding and defending the Constitution of the United States, which his ancestors had helped to make, and in upholding the ancient standards of the Pilgrim Fathers, the man with a long American pedigree has to-day a special mission among us. When the foundations of civilization are shaken, we look to these men of traditional patriotism to steady them; and to effect reforms and correct abuses as our forefathers did, by constructive constitutional means and not by the destructive measures of direct action.

The men who settled New England were of marked type, fanatical perhaps, but fanatical for great principles. Personal comfort they abandoned, class distinctions they abolished, surplus wealth was unknown among them. Even as late as 1720 the estate of the richest man in Massachusetts was inventoried at only $20,000.

In much of New England, these primitive conditions had been modified before Leonard Wood was born. In the larger towns social distinctions had become fixed, considerable fortunes had accumulated, arid the rigid principles of the Pilgrim Fathers had been relaxed. But at Cape Cod, where he passed the first nineteen years of his life, conditions were almost as simple as at Plymouth in the early Colonial days.

Pending her husband's return from the Civil War, Caroline Wood lived with her people at Weston, Massachusetts, and there Leonard grew from babyhood to boyhood. The family was not re-united until 1865, when Charles came back from the army to rejoin his wife. Shortly afterwards they moved to Chiltonville near Plymouth. Doctor Wood's health had been wrecked by pernicious malaria, contracted during the war, and he was advised to live among the pines and sands of the Cape. It was at Chiltonville that his second son, Jacob, was born.

A few months later the Woods moved across the Cape from the Plymouth side, to Monument Beach on the Buzzards Bay side, where their third and last child, Barbara, was born.

In 1867 the family again transferred itself, this time moving a short three miles along the shore in the direction of Martha's Vineyard, to Pocasset, where a more central location for the Doctor's practice could be obtained. There they established their permanent residence; there Leonard's boyhood and youth were passed, and there he lived until he went as a young man to Harvard in 1880.

At that time most of the people of Pocasset were sailors, either owning their own vessels in the coastwise trade, or serving as masters of whalers or other deep-sea ships.

In the desire to visualize the environment and sense the atmosphere of Leonard Wood's boyhood, I paid a visit to Pocasset, which is to-day a local stop between Buzzards Bay Station and Wood's Hole on the Old Colony Line. Its little depot stands quite by itself; in the middle distance are to be seen two or three houses, a church, and a schoolhouse. The people of Pocasset live in farmhouses widely scattered along two miles of the main street, which crosses the railway at right angles.

The train stopped a few reluctant seconds to allow four passengers to alight and then was off again chugging diminuendo towards Cataumet, its next stop two miles down the line. Two of the passengers started cross-lots over the fields while a third approached a waiting farmer's wagon, whose driver was the only sign of life visible about the depot and therefore the only apparent source of information. He showed pained surprise when I asked him if there was any hotel where I might spend the night.

"Reckon you better go up to the post-mistress' place and see if she can let you have a room. Fourth house on the left, up the road and over the hill."

Five minutes' walk brought me to the postmistress' house. She was not at home I was informed by her younger sister, a maiden lady of fifty-odd, a perfectly delightful person whose continued spinsterhood inspired me with astonishment, — until I remembered that the Old Colony constitutes one of the birthplaces of America's pioneers and the cradle of her Empirebuilders. For centuries her enterprising young manhood has generation after generation fared forth to conquer and push back the geographic and industrial frontiers of America, in the process leaving behind their sisters and those of their comrades.

The postmistress' sister said that they *'were not fixed to take boarders," but added with the most generous and unaffected hospitality that they would, nevertheless, find some way to lodge me if other means failed. Other means proved to be Mrs. Jones' boarding house "up the road a piece."

It developed during our conversation that my informant had been a schoolmate of General Wood in the little village school, and I induced her to talk about his parents and his school life for an hour, before I sought Mrs. Jones' establishment.

"I was only ten," she said, ''and was in my first year at school when Leonard left to go to Pierce Academy at Middleboro. I saw him in Washington six or eight years ago and he remembered me perfectly. He said, 'Why you don't look a bit different from what you did when you were the littlest girl in the village school, and I was the biggest boy.'

"I can't tell you a great deal about his boyhood, because of his being six years older than I, and because he was a regular boy and didn't care much for girls. But his sister, Barbara, was my best friend until she died in 1880 when she was fourteen, and I used to be over to their house often, and knew her father and mother, and I can tell you about them.

"They were most awfully fond of each other. I don't think they minded the hard work of being a country doctor's family, or anything else for that matter, as long as they could be together. They were everything to each other.

"Doctor Charles Wood was .the leading citizen of Pocasset in his day, being head of the schoolboard and having a great deal of influence in the community. He was universally well liked, had a great sense of humor, excellent judgment, and was most kind-hearted. Every one respected him for his unselfishness, of which the most striking evidence was the vast number of uncollected bills which he left at his death.

"Leonard's mother was a mighty fine woman with lots of character. She was most ambitious for her boys and deserves a lot more credit for their success than most people remember to give her. Doctor Wood died in 1880, when Leonard was nineteen, but Mrs. Wood outlived him more than thirty years and always exerted a great deal of influence over her two sons, so that in addition to Leonard's success, his younger brother, Jacob, has become a very progressive and prosperous business man.

"All of us children used to go to the district school, for it was the only one in or near Pocasset. It was a mixed school of about thirty girls and boys. There were the three Gibbs boys ; and Carrie and Lizzie Adams; and the two Dimock boys, and Georgiana Dimock; and Fred and Ed Barlow; and Sadie Beckerman who is to-day Mrs. Fred Barlow, and Lizzie Wright, who is now Mrs. Ed Barlow; and Andrew and Preston Wright; and Leonard Wood and Louis Raymond; and Herbert, Everett, Jeanette, Walter, Eleanor and Abner Avery ; and Lucy, Mary and Annie Wing who are all dead now, and Chester and Byron Wing, and Henry Hammond, and several more whose names I have forgotten.

"The school was equivalent to the grammar school of to-day, but was not divided into grades. In the autumn each scholar told the teacher where he left off the spring before and began his work at that point ; and each one took his own gait independently of the rest. ' "The boys and girls in the school did not use standard books, but each studied from a different set, left over from the school days of their older brothers and sisters, and some were even inherited from parents.

"No books were provided by the Town, as the Cape Codders were doubtful whether expensive new editions would be any better than the ones on hand, although most of those in use were actually very much out of date."

It developed that the most exciting incident of their schooldays was a successful house-to-house campaign undertaken by a new school-mistress named Miss Haskell in the hope of persuading the parents of Pocasset to buy a few up-to-date text-books with which advantageously to begin a new school year.

The attendance was inclined to be irregular. Most of the boys went to work when they were "knee-high to a grasshopper," and only came to school during their spare time in the winter.

"Even that didn't last many years," said my informant, "for if they were Shore-Peeps they went to sea for good before they were sixteen, or into the foundry if they were Up-Roaders."

I requested an explanation of the terms "Shore-Peeps" and "Up-Roaders," and learned that the town had once been divided into two social sets. The main road of Pocasset runs inland two miles from the shore until it joins the turnpike from Buzzards Bay Station to Wood's Hole. Midway between the water and the turnpike, it crosses the Old Colony railroad at right angles. Beyond the railroad and near the turnpike there used to be a foundry where pots and kettles for cooking on iron cranes in open fireplaces were made, and also giant cauldrons for the sugar plantation of Jamaica and Louisiana. This foundry, however, went out of existence twenty-five years ago.

When Leonard Wood was a boy, those who lived between the railroad and the coast were followers of the sea; they were called the Shore- Peeps. Those who lived between the railroad and turn-pike were molders and casters working in the foundry, and were nicknamed the Up- Roaders. The Shore-Peeps and Up-Roaders did not harmonize very well.

The distinction ran everywhere through all the lives of the inhabitants, not merely with the children at school or at play, but with their elders in church or at work. Thus was Pocasset society riven in twain.

The schoolhouse, the church, the depot and the post-ofiice were all situated near the railway half way between shore and foundry and served both factions alike. The families of the schoolteacher, the preacher and the postmistress were neutral and were known as the *Tn-Betweeners."

Leonard Wood was a Shore-Peep, not only because his father lived between the railroad and the tides, but because his own inclination led him constantly towards the sea. He and his younger brother, Jacob, were always on the water, cruising or fishing off Patuisset and Exmouth and Magansett and Onset and Monument Beach, or even venturing as far South as Martha's Vineyard, No-Man's Land and Gay Head. As a boy it was Leonard's ambition and intention to "go to sea" when he arrived at the mature age of sixteen, following the example of all good Shore- Peeps.

"You ought to go visit old Captain Will Barlow," advised the postmistress' sister. "He ran a sloop in the coast trade, carrying cargoes between ports when Leonard was a boy, and took him on several voyages; and you ought to talk to his younger brother Ed, who is about Leonard's age. He won't be home daytimes because his wife is sick in the hospital at New Bedford, and Captain Ed goes to see her every blessed day and hasn't missed a day for two months, though it's a forty-mile trip. But he is at home every evening, and if he isn't, you'll find him next door at Mr. Roland Finney's, the grocer who married his daughter.

"You ought also to see Captain Irving Gibbs of Cataument, who lives a couple of miles south of here ; he and Leonard have always been great friends ever since they were six or seven years old."

Accordingly, that evening I sought out Captain Edward Barlow, and found a business-like old sailor, who had been master of ships for thirty years. He had commanded an American trans-Atlantic steamer throughout the recent hostilities, and even before America came into the war was fired at eight times by a submarine. As had been predicted, he willingly added to my information about Doctor Charles Wood and his family.

*1 can't tell you so much about Leonard as I can about his father, because there aren't so many things to remember about a boy as about his father, who worked with us so many years, and saved so many of our lives.

''Doctor Charles Wood was a wonderful doctor. We think he was the best there ever was on Cape Cod. He was very original and a great reader of Human nature. I reckon that was an important part of his success in his profession."

Captain Barlow told me how his own father, Captain Jesse Barlow, "had had nervous dyspepsia and finally was unable to work daytimes, or to sleep at night. For many years he was master of a small vessel in the coasting trade and worked grinding hard. He ate when and where he could, and usually in a hurry; often he bolted his food. Finally he broke down his digestion and developed his nervous dyspepsia.

THE HOUSE WHICH LEONARD'S FATHER BLULT ABOUT 1875

WHERE THE SHOREPEEPS LIVED 32]

POCASSET BOYS OF TODAY

Grandsons of Leonard Wood's boyhood playmates.

THE SCHOOLHOUSE IN I'ot ASSET Where, as a boy, he studied tor six years.

"Then he went to see Doctor Wood and asked him for some pills. Doctor Wood knew father well, and what ailed him, and why. He looked at him for a time, and then said : 'You better go see an osteopath.'

" 'What will he do to me?'

" *I don't know, but he is sure to do something.'

"So father went away, meaning to visit an osteopath, but the next day he came back again, and said he had decided against it, and wanted Doctor Wood to take charge of his case.

" *I don't believe I can do any good,' said the Doctor.

" 'If you can't, nobody can,' replied father, and he stuck to it.

"Finally the Doctor said, 'Since you are so obstinate about it, I will take care of you on one condition, and that is that you will do exactly what I tell you, no matter how hard the treatment seems.' As soon as father promised, he continued : —

" 'AH right then, my first orders are that until I come and tell you to stop, you will eat only one meal a day, and that to consist exclusively of rye meal pudding, without sugar, or milk, or salt, or any other fixings.'

"For several weeks father did exactly as he was ordered. He said he felt as though he was starving to death, but he stuck it out. Pretty soon he began to sleep at night, — although he dreamed constantly of being hungry, and of sitting down to sumptuous dinners, and of having them snatched away just as he was beginning to eat.

"At the end of two weeks Doctor Wood came to see him again and told him he could now begin to eat three meals a day, but that as long as he lived he must never again eat pies, flapjacks, or heavy pastry, nor drink water with his meals. 'And take time to eat,' said the Doctor. *If you obey these rules, you will never be sick again until you die of old age.' Father did keep them and he lived to be eighty-seven, and worked almost to the last.

'The Woods were a family possessed of perseverance and constitution," continued Captain Ed. "I guess those two words describe them better than anything else. They were always more all-fired persistent than anybody else, and once they started, they always had the endurance to see it through.

"When Leonard and Jacob went gunning they left home early, kept going all day, and didn't get back until after dark. The other boys didn't much like to go with them; it was too much like work.

"And if old Doctor Wood hadn't had that sort of a constitution, he would have taken sick within a year or two, like a young doctor we had here recently. For you want to remember that along from 1865 to 1880 there weren't any automobiles for a country doctor to get around in.

"Doctor Wood had all the practice in and around Pocasset and he used to drive a great many miles each day ; six miles up to North Falmouth, eight miles down to Sagamore, and all in between. His old white mare Treetchy' (Barbara Fritchie) was a regular part of the establishment and was known all over this side of the Cape. The Doctor bought her as a colt when he first came to Pocasset, trained her himself, and drove her all the rest of his life. She survived him by twelve or fifteen years and lived to be a very old horse, for she did not die until she was thirty-three. The two Wood boys continued to drive her long after the Doctor was gone.

"Frank Dimock, who was father of the two Dimock boys and a close friend of the Woods, was quite a poet ; he wrote a poem about the old mare, and she is so much of a tradition that the Cape Codders still know that song, although it's forty years since the Doctor last drove her. The chorus goes: —

Improved with age

From fair to good The neighbors called her

Freetchy Wood.

"The Doctor always took care of Freetchy himself, and she was very faithful and industrious. When he had to go on long drives he put in the feed-bag, so that Freetchy could have her dinner while he was seeing the patient. He would often go without food himself but he always saw to it that Freetchy had her 'snack.'

"Those two went through a great deal of trouble together, particularly driving round during the long cold winters. The Doctor was always short of sleep, and used to catch up by taking naps while driving home. When he had finished with his last patient, he would climb into his buggy, start Freetchy and go sound asleep. She always went straight back to the Wood house here in Pocasset; she had learned the way from every direction.

^'Sometimes on lonely winter days when we were wood-cutting, we would see faithful old Freetchy plodding along the frozen roads towards home ; the Doctor sitting behind her in his single seater, all wrapped up in his buffalo robes and fast asleep. When the buggy stopped in his own front yard he would wake up.

"Those rides were mighty lonely, and when outward bound the Doctor used to tie a bit of rag on a wheel-spoke and count the revolutions and calculate distances and rates from place to place in order to keep himself awake. His little red rag was the first speedometer ever used in this part of the country.

"Doctor Wood was a great hand to joke," said Captain Ed. "He always looked on the funny side of everything. I don't mean he was a practical joker, because he wasn't, but he just always seemed to be able to see the humor even in the most unpleasant situations.

"One day he was at the depot waiting for the train, which was very late. Some one said to him: 'Well, Doctor, how are your patients today?' 'Nearly exhausted,' he replied, 'waiting for this train.'

"Back in 1875, when he had just finished his fine new house, one of the neighbors was joking him about it and said, 'Doctor, what for is that flat place on top with a rail round it?'

" 'Why,' said the Doctor, 'that is where I am going to stick on a mortgage if I ever need one, and the railing is to keep any one from getting at it to foreclose it/

"One day he was sailing across the bay to Onset Beach with Leonard. Leonard was then about eight years old, and was handling the tiller. Another boat came along cutting in on their course. 'Give 'em more room,' said the Doctor. 'But we have the right of way,' said Leonard. 'I know it, but I'd rather forego my rights than spend the night out here with my mouth full of sea-weed,' returned his father.