Teddy Roosevelt and Leonard Wood: Partners in Command

17. On the Shelf

145 17 On the Shelf In March 1916, Theodore Roosevelt met with a group of friends, all Republicans , in New York City. The purpose was to discuss the presidential campaign of 1916. Among the group were Elihu Root, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Leonard Wood. A secondary purpose of the meeting was to mend fences between former comrades, especially between Roosevelt and Root who, as a member of the Taft administration, had felt obligated to help deny his former chief the Republican nomination in 1912. That reconciliation was easily accomplished. The one man who was out of place in this group of politicians was Wood, who was still on duty as a professional Army officer. His presence, however, was not a mere oversight. It indicated Wood’s growing impatience with trying to push his preparedness campaign through proper channels. Further, Wood was apparently succumbing to the presidential bug himself. Little resulted from the meeting, but the next day Roosevelt, meeting with a reporter from the Chicago Tribune, was quoted as being willing to support a man “who has indomitable courage, who believes fervently in the ideals of Americanism, who interprets America in forms of nationalism, and who believes that in a democracy every citizen owes his first duty to the state, and that it is necessary in the best interests and greatest happiness of the whole people that individual liberty shall at times be subservient to the greater cause of national liberty.”1 This piece of political bombast was standard stuff. It was interesting not for its contents, but for its reception. Roosevelt was apparently describing himself, but both the reporter and Wood presumed that he was talking about Wood. 1. McCallum, Leonard Wood, 266. 146 Teddy Roosevelt and Leonard Wood Further evidence of political proclivities on Wood’s part appeared a few weeks later. He attended a great parade in New York designed to support preparedness. It was led by Edith Roosevelt herself, and it involved 125,000 participants. Despite the implied criticism of Wilson’s cautious foreign policy , Wood viewed the ceremony in a prominent position, standing next to Mayor John Purroy Mitchel, a Plattsburg graduate who was a leader in the movement. Based on these developments, President Wilson now concluded that Wood had to be removed from the political catbird’s seat that New York provided. He instructed the new secretary of war, Newton D. Baker, to break the Army’s Eastern Department into three parts, the Department of the Northeast (Boston ), the Department of the East (New York), and the Department of the South (Charleston). Wood was offered the command of the Department of the South, but none other (except for the Army command in either Hawaii or the Philippines). He chose Charleston, especially as he had a feeling that Wilson would have preferred to get him out of the country. He was not going to comply.2 Wood’s transfer to the command at Charleston nearly coincided with the American declaration of war against Germany on April 6, 1917. He did not, therefore, expect to remain long at this new post; the country was now in a state of flux, and officers were being moved between positions on a daily basis. Besides, Charleston was a desirable spot. —————————————————— At about the time of the Roosevelt meeting in New York, an event was transpiring in far–off New Mexico that was destined to have a dramatic effect on Roosevelt and Wood. In the early–morning hours of March 9, 1916, Francisco (Pancho) Villa, the onetime Mexican general who was now reduced to the status of a bandit, crossed the border from Sonora into New Mexico and burned part of the small town of Columbus, at the edge of which stood Camp Furlong, the home of the 13th Cavalry. In Villa’s raid, seventeen Americans were killed. Villa’s raiding party suffered far heavier casualties, but that fact did nothing to placate an aroused American populace. Public opinion demanded retribution, and a reluctant President Wilson, for political purposes unwilling to appear“weak,”ordered Brigadier General John J. Pershing, at El Paso, to organize an expedition to pursue Villa into the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Pershing’s force crossed southward in two columns, one from Culberson’s Ranch and the other from Columbus itself. It eventually grew to comprise ten thousand men. 2. Ibid., 267. On the Shelf 147 The selection of Pershing to command the Punitive Expedition, as it was officially called, was far from automatic. Because the force...