Leonard Wood: Rough Rider, Surgeon, Architect of American Imperialism (review)

Leonard Wood—physician, football player, combat commander, adept colonial governor, loving husband and father, Army chief of staff, and vocal advocate for a strong national defense during the later Progressive Era—was an ambitious, aggressive man of bold decision and intrepid action. While many of his decisions and actions were, and continue to be, less than deserving of approbation, his energy, stamina, fortitude, and charisma demand enduring admiration.

Jack McCallum's compact biography of this dynamic and often forgotten American makes enjoyable reading. However, it offers no new insights into, or analysis of, Leonard Wood, and it has the flavor of a book that has been rushed to completion. McCallum seems to care greatly about General Wood and usually has him in the right place at the right time, but I came away with the feeling that he did not really care about the supporting actors and events in Wood's life. Historical missteps—from using inadequate or inaccurate references while more robust source material has been ignored—occur throughout, as evidenced by the following examples: the author says that Wood recommended the burning of Daiquiri, Cuba, to eradicate yellow fever in 1898 (p. 114); William H. Taft returned from the Philippines in 1904 to become secretary of state (p. 222); and "young Lieutenant George S. Patton" served as Wood's aide in Manila in 1921 (p. 293)—although the author's own reference stated that Major and Surgeon Louis LaGarde recommended burning Siboney, and Wood concurred; Taft returned to be Theodore Roosevelt's secretary of war; and Lieutenant Patton occasionally served as Wood's aide at Fort Myer, Virginia, over several months in 1912, but Patton was a major in 1921 and never did a tour of duty in the Philippines.

As in any historical work, it is the events in context that are important. A somewhat cavalier use and interpretation of sources has contributed to error, confusion, and a loss of context. A glaring example of this appears in McCallum's rendition of the experiments of the Yellow Fever Board during Wood's tenure as military governor of Cuba. George Sternberg did not create the Reed Board to "investigate infectious disease on the island" (p. 168): Wood urged him to create it, and Sternberg was glad to have his moral and financial support to continue yellow fever research that had been pursued by Walter Reed and James Carroll since late 1897 and by Aristides Agramonte since late 1898. Yellow fever was the number one priority. Sternberg told Reed in his instructions, "it is evident that the most important question which will occupy your attention is that which relates to the etiology of this [yellow fever] disease."¹ Carlos Juan Finlay's mosquito-transmission theory was not pursued because "they had nothing better to investigate" (p. 169), but rather because it now made more sense than it had previously: Reed's team had eliminated the bacilli of Sanarelli and Sternberg from consideration by late July 1900, were fully aware of Henry Carter's extrinsic incubation theory and the studies of Ronald Ross demonstrating mosquito transmission of malaria, and they had one yellow fever death in a prisoner at Pinar del Rio barracks which led the board to conjecture that "some insect capable of conveying the infection, such as the mosquito, had entered through the cell window, bitten this particular prisoner and then passed out."² The author's statement that Reed knew that Sternberg was "unlikely to support the necessary human experiments" (p. 170) is also far from correct. Sternberg had conducted experiments in 1887 to determine if yellow fever could be transmitted from person to person through blood inoculations, and he now urged Reed, who completely concurred, to do the same. After Reed had demonstrated mosquito transmission of the disease, Sternberg successfully pressured him to conduct human-to-human inoculation experiments in late December...