The Career of Leonard Wood Part 6

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VI

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 a.s.sistance, 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 princ.i.p.al officer charged with the prosecution of cases was removed and a mixed commission, selected and appointed by himself, subst.i.tuted. 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 pa.s.sed 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. Munic.i.p.al 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 ma.s.s 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 ma.s.s 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 a.s.sume 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 a.s.sumed 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 cla.s.s mentioned, infected as described, invariably develop a p.r.o.nounced 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 Ca.n.a.l a possibility and the Ca.n.a.l 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 teta.n.u.s and typhus and bubonic plague.

It was done--the work was done--by the doctors named and their a.s.sistants 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 impa.s.sable 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 dest.i.tute 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.