Part 11
A few days later Wood had returned to Funston and begun preparations for the training of the 10th Division, when by executive action the Governor of Kansas acknowledged on his own behalf and on behalf of the State the General's services to his country by making him a "citizen extraordinary" of the State.
The story of the Tenth Division is short but illuminating. It was composed principally of drafted men. Its first groups began to organize at Funston on the 10th of August--raw men from office, farm and shop. They found there the skeletons of so-called regular regiments--regiments which were regular only in name; that is to {250} say, there were only a very few regular officers of experience and a limited number of men recently recruited under the old system. On the 24th General Wood reviewed the whole division. On November 1st it was ready, trained, equipped and in condition both from the physical and the military point of view to go abroad. And when the armistice was signed on November 11th an advance contingent had already gone to France to prepare for its reception. About the middle of September the British and French Senior Mission--three officers of each army--reported at Funston and remained there for six weeks. And upon their departure on November 1st after a long, rigid and critical examination of the division they stated that in their opinion it was by far the best prepared and trained division that they had seen in this country.
Here again appears the same quality that made McKinley appoint Wood Governor-General of Cuba; that made Roosevelt send him to organize the apparently unorganizable part of the Philippine Islands; that caused the French to award him a very high order of the Legion of Honor; {251} that made the State of Kansas take him into its family as a citizen; that led the generals of Europe to hope he would come and be one of them; and finally that caused many hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen to follow him and support him in his plans to prepare the people of his nation for what eventually came upon them.
With the signing of the armistice and the victorious ending of the war Wood's activities did not cease. With characteristic energy he began the work of looking out for the soldiers who would soon be demobilized from the army and thrown upon their own resources. He saw how changed the outlook of many of these men would be. He saw the troubles in which thousands--actually millions--of them would be involved, not through any fault of their own, not through any fault of the Government or of army life, but because they had undergone certain mental changes incident to training, to active service, and hence could not again return to the point they had reached when their military service began.
He, therefore, instituted in Chicago, where as Commander of the Central Department he had his {252} headquarters, as well as in St. Louis, Kansas City and Cleveland, organizations to look to the finding of employment for returning officers and men. And in addresses and all methods open to him he urged the organization of similar bodies in all cities to accomplish elsewhere the same object. His attitude was that of the father of children--the rearrangement on new lines of the American family; and he again found universal support.
"Appreciation of the work done by our Soldiers, Sailors and Marines in the Great War can best be shown by active measures to return them to suitable civil employment upon their discharge from service. The four million men inducted into the service, less the dead, are being returned to their homes. In seeing that they are returned to suitable civil employment, and by that I mean employment in which they will find contentment, we will find it at times difficult to deal with them. We must remember that many of these men, before going in for the great adventure, had never been far from home, had never seen the big things of life, had never had the opportunity of finding {253} themselves. During their service in the army they found out that all men were equal except as distinguished one from the other by such characteristics as physique, education and character. They discovered that men who are loyal, attentive to duty, always striving to do more than required, stood out among their fellows and were marked for promotion. Naturally many of them now see that their former employment will not give them the opportunities for advancement which they have come to prize, and for that reason they want a change. They want a kind of employment which offers opportunities for promotion. Many such men are fitted for forms of employment which offer this advantage, and they must be given the opportunity to try to make good in the lines of endeavor which they elect to follow. It is not charity to give these men the opportunities for which they strive. It is Justice. Others are not mentally equipped to take advantage of such opportunities if offered, and with these we will find it more difficult to deal. They must be reasoned with and directed, if possible, into the kind of employment best suited to their characteristics. Let us {254} remember that a square deal for our honorably discharged Soldiers, Sailors and Marines will strengthen the morale of the Nation and will help to create a sound national consciousness ready to act promptly in support of Truth, Justice and Right" [Footnote: _Address of Leonard Wood_.]
There is, with the differences patent because of time and place and surrounding circumstances, a flavor to this plea that recalls another address upon a similar subject more than fifty years ago:
"It is for the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth." [Footnote: _Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech_.]
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THE RESULT
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X
THE RESULT
In these days, therefore, immediately following the Great War it is well to keep in our own minds and try to put into the minds of others the great elemental truths of life; and to try at the same time to keep out of our and their minds in so far as possible the unessential and changing superficialities which never last long and which never move forward the civilization of the human race.
This very simple biographical sketch is not an attempt to settle the problems of the hour. Such an attempt might excite the amusement and interest of students of that mental disease known as paranoia--students who are far too busy at the moment as it is without this addition to the unusually large supply of patients--but it could not add anything either to the pleasure or entertainment of any one else. That the simple biographical sketch can even approach the latter {258} accomplishment may be held to be a matter for reasonable doubt.
Nor, furthermore, is the sketch an attempt at the soap box or other variety of philosophy which one individual attempts to thrust down the mental throats of his fellow beings. There exists a hazy suspicion that the fellow beings are quite competent to decide what they will swallow mentally and what they will, vulgarly speaking, expectorate forthwith.
The simple biographical sketch is a frank attempt to express, as at least one person sees it, the character, the accomplishments and the service rendered by one man to his country throughout a life which seems to have been singularly sturdy, honest, normal and consistent, and which, therefore, is an example to his countrymen that may in these somewhat hectic times well be considered and perhaps even emulated.
At the risk, however, of entering the paranoiac's clinic it would seem almost necessary if not even desirable to apply the record discussed to the situation which confronts us in these days, since biography has no special significance unless it {259} brings to others some more or less effective stimulus to better and greater endeavor on their own part.
If, therefore, the life and record of a man like Leonard Wood is to be of value to others it must to some extent at least be considered in relation to the events of his day and time. These events have been sufficiently startling in the light of all previous history to make it perhaps permissible to glance over them.
Roughly speaking, since Wood was born transportation has become so perfected that, in the light of our navy's recent accomplishments with the seaplane, it is now possible for a human being to go from New York to London in the same period of time that it took then to go from New York to New London. It is fair to assume then that the distance of New York from London so far as human travel goes is or will shortly be the same as the distance of New York from New London when Wood was born.
Roughly speaking since Wood was born intercourse between persons by means of conversation has become so perfected that it is now possible for {260} two people, one in New York and the other in San Francisco, to converse over the telephone--wireless or otherwise--as easily as could two persons when Wood was born talk from one room to another through an open doorway. So that for practical purposes the three or four thousand mile breadth of this continent is reduced to what then was a matter of ten feet.
One might continue indefinitely, but these two examples are sufficient. If San Francisco is no further away than the next room and if London can be reached as quickly as New London, and if myriads of other physical changes of this sort have occurred in sixty years, then it is fair to assume that there has been an equal amount of resulting psychological change. These changes in the relation of man to his surroundings and the consequent changes in his relations to himself and his fellow beings have probably done more to rearrange the world on a different basis than all the developments of the half-dozen centuries that preceded the nineteenth.
The elimination of distance, the making of human relation as easy for continents as for {261} adjoining communities lessens the size of the world and standardizes the rules that govern life. All intellectual, political, commercial and military procedures have changed therefore in the last half century to a greater extent than in hundreds of years prior thereto. One race in the fifth or sixth grade of civilization begins to discover what the other race in the first grade is doing. One commercial country of a lower order finds what it is losing because of another country of a higher order of commercialism. The laborers of Barcelona discover what the laborers of New York are receiving in compensation for the same work. The people of Russia discover the different political conditions existing amongst themselves and the people of England and France. The government of the German Empire sees what a united nation backed by the biggest army on earth might do in Europe. The men of Austria who have no vote learn what the men of the United States procure from universal suffrage.
With the belief on every human being's part that the other fellow is better off than he, with the education which goes on through the medium {262} of emigration and immigration, with the immense number of detail short cuts, with the prodigious increase in reading and the resulting acquirement of the ideas of others, with the myriad of other matters patent to any one who thinks--with all this and because of it the methods and procedure of daily life have changed entirely throughout most of the civilized world since a man who is now nearly sixty was born.
At the same time the family remains the same; the marriage law is unchanged; the right of private property is what it was in the days of ancient Rome. The Constitution of the United States is what it was a hundred and thirty years ago. Justice is the same as it was in the time of Alexander. The Golden Rule has not been altered since the time of Christ. Love, hate, fear and courage stand as they were originally some time prior to the stone age.
To revert, then, to the simile of the construction of the house, it seems true that while the plaster and the wall paper--the decorations of its interior and exterior--change from time to nevertheless on the whole, as a rule, in the main {263} the passage of the great ages has not materially changed the supports of the structure--and never will.
In the matter of interior and exterior decoration periods come and go during which those who build houses decorate according to schools of art. It is the only belief that any sane and hopeful human being can have that these schools of decoration for the old house of civilization in the main steadily improve. If it is not so, then we have nothing to live for, nothing to which we may look forward. Also, however, there are fashions and fads running along by the side of these great schools which are suggestive, amusing or ludicrous, as the case may be. The cubists and the followers of the old masters paint at the same time. One, however, dies shortly and the other lives on--often to be sure affected in some slight way by the grotesque but honest fad, but never giving way to it.
In the month of November, 1918, greater changes of this nature took place in the political world than in all the years which preceded that month since the beginning of the Christian era. {264} In that month some scores of crowned heads stepped down from their thrones and made haste to reach shelter as do the rats in a kitchen when the cook turns on the electric light. At that time something like three hundred millions of people gave up their particular forms of government and to a certain extent have been living on since without any substitute.
Some of these crowned heads have sat on their thrones from five to ten centuries. Some of the governments have lived as long.
It looks like a general tumble of the house of civilization. And yet most of these millions of people go on getting up in the morning, going to bed at night and, impossible as it may seem, conducting commercial enterprises. The kings have gone; the governments have gone; yet the people remain and their daily life goes on--not as usual --but in the main the same.
At such a time amidst such stupendous changes it is natural that an infinite number of plans for reconstruction come forward. All the century-old panaceas crop up. All the moss-grown plans for a perfect world are thrust forward in a new {265} dress and naturally gain credence. And with the increased ease of intercommunication of individuals and ideas the opportunity not only for many more but for widely divergent theories to make themselves heard is immeasurably increased. Thus it becomes possible for a Lenine and a Trotzky to leave their tenement flats in the slums of New York and proceed to the palaces of the Czar to show the hundred and twenty millions of Russians what can be done--and, what is far more to the point, get a hearing. Thus it becomes possible for the International Workers of the World in Russia, France, England and America to get together in conference in Switzerland or elsewhere and discuss how best to destroy not only governments, but private property, law, order, the family and all the beams of the great house at one time. Thus it becomes possible for a host of less radical but none the less pernicious plans for the good or evil of the world to fly about amongst unstable but well-meaning minds.
Our country, so remote in miles from the scenes of these upheavals, is by the development of {266} modern times so near that it is to a certain extent affected by them.
In a population of one hundred millions in the United States there are probably one hundred million different views entertained upon each of the questions of this disturbed period. But a fair classification of them could be safely made into radicals, moderates and conservatives--Bolsheviki and theorists, slow-moving and hard-thinking citizens and stiff-necked reactionaries--all honest and earnest in the mean. If the Bolsheviki and theorists outnumber the others we shall have a situation in the United States similar to that in Russia, Austria and Germany. If the stiff-necked reactionaries outnumber the others, we shall smother the flame for a time only to have it burst forth shortly in an infinitely more terrible explosion. If the slow-moving, hard-thinking citizens outnumber the others, we shall maintain the main structure of our house so laboriously built throughout the ages while we change to some extent the nature of the wall paper and the plaster to adapt it to modern conditions.
Some of us want to achieve the first, some the {267} second and some the third status; and it would be safe to say that up to the present in this country the people of the great middle class--the not rich, the not poor, the steady business man, the ordinary mother of a family--are in the majority and are trying to adapt themselves to the new conditions even if only in a slow and somewhat halting manner.
It will help them and therefore help the country to maintain themselves and itself on an even keel until the storm subsides if they can have some concrete standard to work by. And as standards in this sense usually become established by example, by what each of us thinks the man he looks up to is doing, thinking and planning, it seems fair to say that the example of a few leading men of the strong sanity which characterizes General Wood is having now or will have in the future a great influence for good.
When we are all complaining at the changing conditions, when we see apparently permanent organizations like the government of thousand-year-old empires crumbling in a month, when we hear the new-old theories for a new form of {268} existence, we are somewhat dazed, somewhat influenced by the outward signs and somewhat skeptical about our own small but to ourselves important outlook. At such a moment the voice of one who says in substance: "Do not let superficial changes --no matter how important they seem--make us forget the law of man and nature; do not forget that the fittest survives; do not imagine that wars are over because the most terrible one in history is just finished; do not hesitate to prepare for your own duties and those of your country; do not forget that organization and cooperation produce peace, safety, prosperity and happiness"--when a voice in our land announces this and its owner proves by his whole life the truth of his statements, then it pays to listen and inwardly digest.
In spite of all we are being told to the contrary, there need be no alarm for the future if the country contains enough of such leaders to make themselves heard above the babel of new cries and beliefs, notwithstanding the attractive pictures some of these theorists present. For that reason leaders must always exist where progress is to be {269} made and the great majority must stand behind them to back them up.
The effective spear cannot do its work without its steel point, nor yet without its long handle to force the point home.
This biographical sketch treats of one of these spear points and as such represents to a greater or less degree all great sane leaders, though it speaks of but one.
Leonard Wood's personality is one of mental sanity and physical health. It is non-reactionary and non-visionary. It is military only in the sense that the army happens to have been his business in life. His business might have been that of the law, of banking, or leather, without in the least changing in it. He once said of this:
"The officers of the Army and Navy are the professional servants of the government in matters pertaining to the military establishment. They are like engineers, doctors, lawyers, or any other class of professional men whose services people employ because they are expert in their line of work. They do not initiate wars. Nine-tenths of all wars have their origin directly or indirectly in {270} issues arising out of trade. The people make war; the government declares it; and the officers of the army and navy are charged with the responsibility of terminating it with such means and implements as the people may give them."
His voice raised in behalf of preparedness refers therefore to the military, because as a Major-General in the United States Army he is not empowered to speak of other walks in life. Yet his own wide experience in Cuba and the Philippines in administration, very little of which was military, is a witness of his belief in preparedness in an life.
He founded schools where there were none to prepare citizens for the new Cuban republic. He reorganized and built up customs laws and regulations where there were only attempts at such in order to prepare revenue to build roads and finish public works to make a busy and healthy nation. He reestablished sane marriage laws in order to prepare a solid community resting upon the basis of the clearly defined family. In the Philippines he instituted local government to prepare the islands for self-government.
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None of these acts, nor many others of like nature, had anything to do with the military. They were all based on the law that a sound and successful community, whether that community be a village, town or nation, rests in the final analysis on personal, individual responsibility which in the group makes a responsible government, that personal responsibility comes only from preparation, from execution as a result of preparation and from efficiency which is its synonym.
We study for this or that profession. We cannot practice law unless we prepare and take a degree. We cannot enter the medical profession unless we study and take a degree. Wood's great thesis is that we cannot become sound citizens and, therefore, in the group a sound nation, unless we study and prepare to be such.
It sounds so simple that one wonders why it is written. And yet for the last two years under the guise of war necessity this country has been moving in quite another direction. Instead of personal responsibility we have been substituting more and more government responsibility. Instead of individual effort we have been advancing governmental {272} effort. Instead of natural competition we have been substituting government regulation. Instead of advancing patriotism, nationalism, Americanism, we have been letting all these give way to internationalism. We have not been preparing ourselves as individuals to assume individual responsibly, but in fact we have been giving up that responsibility to government.
It is through the sense of the people quickened by such men as Wood that we shall come back to sounder methods--not to where we were before. That can never be. If it were so, the world would not be moving forward. But we shall come back to the basic principle that individual initiative, energy and the rewards that accrue therefrom are and always must be the basis for collective initiative, energy and the rewards thereof; that no collective organization such as a government can remain virile and effective unless its component parts--the individuals--remain virile and effective.