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.
{136}
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.
{138}
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 _regime_--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:
{153}
"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_.]
{156}
{157}
THE STATESMAN
{158}
{159}
VII
THE STATESMAN
Meantime, while Wood was carrying on his work in Cuba, events of
importance to him and to his country were taking place in the United
States. The popularity of his war record had made Roosevelt Governor
of New York, and when the time came for him to run for a second term
the Republican organization of the state forced him to take the
nomination for Vice-President of the United States in order to keep
him out of the gubernatorial field. He objected strongly and tried to
remain in the state fight, but at the convention in Philadelphia upon
a certain momentous occasion Thomas Platt, then head, of the state and
national Republican organization, is said to have remarked to him:
"Mr. Roosevelt, if you do not desire the vice-presidential nomination,
there is always the alternative of retirement to private life."
In other words party machinery was too strong {160} for him and
much against his will he was forced to run as second on the
McKinley-Roosevelt presidential ticket.
The Republicans were successful and Roosevelt, knowing that there was
little for him to do in Washington, was planning an extended trip
through the Southern states to make an exhaustive study of the negro
question. He had indeed begun to accumulate material on this subject
when on September 6, 1901, McKinley was shot at Buffalo. A few days
later he died; and Theodore Roosevelt became President of the United
States.