Teddy Roosevelt and Leonard Wood: Partners in Command

19. Wood Carries On

163 19 Wood Carries On Word of Roosevelt’s unexpected death flashed across the country instantly. Wood, still at Camp Funston, received the news as he sat down to breakfast that same morning. He was not a demonstrative type, and in public he displayed little emotion, but in his diary he wrote, “Sad, sad business, all of it. I have lost my best friend.”1 He then sent the proper telegrams to the Roosevelt family and prepared for the trip back to Sagamore Hill, where he participated in all the funeral rites. The TR–Wood partnership did not end with Roosevelt’s death, however. As in life, they had worked for the same causes, so Wood resolved to continue the unfinished business of restoring the Republican Party and to defeating Woodrow Wilson’s proposed League of Nations when it came up before the Senate. Wood dedicated himself to carrying on that work. Ever since Newton D. Baker had refused to allow Wood to take the 89th Division overseas, Wood had become less and less disposed to restraining himself in the nonpolitical manner expected of Regular Army officers. And he had come to bask in the enthusiasm with which his many speeches on military preparedness were received. So encouraged, he began to conceive himself as an orator. Aware of the widespread public resentment against Baker for what was viewed as shabby treatment during the war, Wood began to see a future for himself in politics. Up to the time of Roosevelt’s death, the big obstacle to Wood’s political ambitions had been his unflinching loyalty to his friend and mentor Roosevelt. 1. McCallum, Leonard Wood, 278. 164 Teddy Roosevelt and Leonard Wood That inhibition was now gone. He had strong rivals—Lodge, Frank Knox, Hiram Johnson,William Borah—but Roosevelt had dwarfed them. He had lived down his fiasco of 1912, and when he died he was restored to the leadership of the party. According to Wood’s biographer, “Conservatives and progressives alike acclaimed [Roosevelt]; he had no rival for the nomination as the party’s candidate in 1920; even his bitterest enemies had taken the journey to Canossa. It seemed inevitable that he should take up the leadership in the work of construction, which the President had relinquished by default. But on January 6, Roosevelt had died.”2 Talk of Wood’s assuming the mantle of Roosevelt’s leadership began before TR’s funeral ceremonies at Oyster Bay. Between eulogies to their fallen hero, politicians were looking at Wood as the key to the future. Wood later claimed that even some members of the Roosevelt family had mentioned the possibility to him.3 Many people agreed. With the war over, Wood’s military duties were far from strenuous, and he was afforded time to accept speaking engagements all over the country, receiving honorary degrees from at least three universities. He made use of these events to criticize the administration. He had his own style.As described in the Chicago Daily Tribune, his stump speech was twelve minutes of detached granite. He tramped in, he stood up and clasped his hands behind his stocky body. He said about a columnful and then he tramped out, grizzled, ruddy, stalwart, he stood square and he talked square. No flowing periods. No gestures. A whimsical flicker of a smile and a burly half bow. The level voice hammered out grim sentences. Not a flicker of emotion crossed the oak–hewn face. He began; he said something; he finished, “Good day.” He marched out. It was like a rite, this time when the audience rose and stood until he disappeared.4 In the middle of February 1919, Wood left Camp Funston and took over the Army’s Central Command, with headquarters in Chicago. A couple of days later, in Kansas City, he nearly overstepped himself. Before an audience 2. Hagedorn, Leonard Wood, a Biography, 2:326. The term journey to Canossa signifies an act of penance or submission. It is based on a long and dangerous trek made by Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV over the Alps in 1077 to the fortress of Canossa, in Tuscany. When Henry arrived, Pope Gregory VII, after some delay, lifted Henry’s excommunication , which he had levied over a dispute over appointment of church clergy. 3. McCallum, Leonard Wood, 276. 4. Ibid., 275–76. Wood Carries On 165 of twenty thousand people, he parlayed a ceremony honoring the memory of Roosevelt into an attack on Wilson. The audience...