LEONARD WOOD

NATIONAL PREPAREDNESS

General Wood was born in Winchester, N. H., in 1860, and graduated M. D. at Harvard in 1884. He became Asst. Surgeon U. S. A. in 1886, commanding Colonel of the Rough Riders in the Spanish War, Major General of Volunteers, in 1899, Military Governor of Cuba from 1899 to 1902, Major General U. S. A. 1903. He was chief of staff U. S. A. 1910-1914, and as commander Dept. of the East, 1914-1917, was active in urging preparedness for war, and in organizing the Plattsburg Camp. In 1920 he was a prominent candidate for the Republican nomination for President. Since 1921 he has been Governor General of the Philippine Islands. The following speech was delivered before the New York Chamber of Commerce on March 22, 1916.

MR. CHAIRMAN, MR. CHOATE AND GENTLEMEN:-Mr. Choate has told you to give this question of preparedness your most serious thought. If I were going to suggest a change in anything which Mr. Choate has said (and I should make such suggestion with great reluctance) it would be in the line of a slight change in his suggestion and to urge upon you that the time has come not only for serious thought but for action; the time has come to do something.

Of course, you understand my position here-there are a great many things that I cannot talk to you about at all. I came to this meeting to say what I can say with propriety, and nothing more. It is understood, I am sure, by all men of your kind, type and education, that it is a great deal better to get ready for war and not have war, that it is to have war and not be ready for it. This is the proposition that stands out before the American people to-day. You are all men of business and you know a great deal better than I do that it is impossible to do certain things without time for preparation. Willingness

and money, while they are great forces for accomplishment, are not of themselves sufficient without the element of time. Preparation for war requires a great deal of time and it requires a tremendous amount of organization-that you all understand. Remember for a moment that the proposition which is put up to us soldiers is on a line with one which would be put up to you if you were asked to go out into the street and fill up your business houses, your factories, or whatever business you are engaged in with men who had no instruction whatever, no familiarity concerning them. You would hesitate at the proposition; it would mean ruin and disaster and all that sort of thing, but it means nothing more in your business than it means with the military affairs of the nation. We cannot take a million or two of men, despite the splendid promise of a former great statesman, and make them soldiers between daylight and dark; to attempt that sort of thing is simply murder. It would mean the destruction of tens of thousands of men and certainly ruin to the nation that depended upon that kind of preparation. We must take up this whole question from the foundation. It is a question of organization, organization thorough, far-reaching and complete. Of course we must do immediately the things we can do: the increase of the regular army, the absolute and complete federalization of the militia, its conversion into a federal force, into a United States force, and its complete severance from the state as a state force, except perhaps under certain conditions of sudden and grave emergency, such as would render the use of the United States troops proper and necessary; the immediate provision of reserves of men and material. Those things must be done and done quickly; but there is a much deeper foundation which must be laid-you must build up in this country a general sense of citizenship obligation. You cannot maintain a free democracy or representative government on any basis in which a mercenary military establishment plays the vital part in national defense. You must have a paid army for the everyday needs of the nation; but you must adopt some system which rests upon the basic principle on which this and every other democracy stands, has stood and always will stand if it is to resist any severe strain or go through any great crisis; and that

is the basic principle that manhood suffrage means manhood obligation for service. [Applause.] It may not be service in the line with a rifle in hand; it may be service as a minister of finance; it may be service as a surgeon back of the line; it may be as an aviator, or a pilot of transports, or a maker of munitions-it may be one of a thousand different things; but somewhere everyone has a place, if of the right age and physically fit, and he must know where that place is and the government must know what his qualifications are. All these little makeshifts of a few regiments here and a few guns there amount to almost nothing except as a stopgap. They are all right for the demands of peace but they mean very little as preparation for the strain of a great war.

You will remember during the Civil War, when the population was only one-third of what it is at present, we had over four million men in the armies, in the North and South, and we had 127,000 officers in the Northern Army and about 65,000 in the Southern Army, nearly 200,000; in other words, trained officers. Officers must be trained in times of peace, a very large proportion of them, and that is why we are asking for a corps of 50,000 reserve officers. It sounds like a lot, but it is very little when you think of the call to be made upon them.

We have recommended a million and a half of citizen soldiers, that is, men trained to come in behind the regular army and militia in case of trouble. Fifty thousand officers will be needed to officer them. This is one of the reasons why we are asking for a reserve corps of 50,000 officers. We must prepare them in time of peace.

I think Congress is going to give us this number. My personal opinion is we must eventually adopt some system not unlike the Swiss and the Australian, under which all of our youth, all of our men, will receive a basic military training which will make it possible for them to become quickly, reasonably efficient soldiers. This republic can never maintain a standing army big enough to insure its security in time of real war. We never yet have had a war with a first class power prepared for war which we have waged unaided. It is an experience entirely ahead of us.

War to-day is based upon organization, organization of the

resources of a nation. It includes organization of industry and many other things, and it rests upon the organization of public sentiment—that is the big result we must work for, and it is some distance ahead of us.

There is another aspect of this moral organization quite apart from the military side, and that is the value on the citizenship side. We are taking in enormous numbers of alien people. They come in racial groups, they live in racial groups and they go to racial schools and are fed by a dialect press. We nativeborn citizens have very little contact with them and do little to make them good citizens. I think some system of universal training would have a great influence in this direction. If we put ourselves shoulder to shoulder with these newcomers in a common cause, and that cause is preparation to defend the country, it will go a long way toward building up national solidarity and making real citizens of all concerned.

The men who have been at Plattsburg represent all classes from great wealth to the laboring class, and yet no man who has been there will ever look upon any other man there as belonging to a class apart-they have all worn the same clothes and they are all branded with the same brand, and that brand is the brand of the American man who has been trying to do something to help his country, something to fit himself to discharge his obligations as a citizen of a democracy in case his services should be needed in war. The work these men did altogether shoulder to shoulder has had a tremendous influence not only for preparedness but for better citizenship.

If we desire to protect this country effectively we must adopt, and promptly, some form of universal military training under which we can build up an adequate force of citizen soldiers to meet the demands of modern war. These men must be trained under conditions which interfere as little as possible with their educational and economic careers. We can do it and the result will be not only an adequate measure of preparation but it will give us a much better class of citizenship.

There are many things which give all of us who are at all thoughtful occasion for grave anxiety. Many of you gentlemen have been connected directly or indirectly with the great munitions contracts growing out of the present war and you

all know how desperate the struggle has been to turn out arms and munitions; you know how vitally defective our equipment has been in many instances. We have been able up to date to accomplish very little on many lines of effort. You all realize how few rifles have actually been built even after a year and a half of uninterrupted effort. In some instances we are just turning out the first samples. You appreciate the fact that our industrial organization is very imperfect. You realize that we could not make machines for the making of weapons because the amount of high-speed tool steel was lacking. You appreciate some of you that the shortage of high-speed tool steel was in a way dependent upon a shortage of certain kinds of tungsten, antimony and other things. Some of you appreciate the fact that we cannot make the best class of armor plate in large quantities because we have not the necessary tungsten to put into it. Many of you realize that chemistry to-day is one of the great factors in war and yet our chain of chemical resources is broken every few links. Take nitrates, for instance, the very basis of our high explosives. We procure all our nitrate from Chile. We should be out of it in a very, very short period of time if we lost sea control. Here is a case in which we must take steps to provide nitrogen from another source. European countries have been doing it for a long time. We must take up the question of producing nitrogen from the air; in other words, we must develop our chemical

resources.

War is not a matter of getting a certain number of men together in these days and putting arms in their hands and having a band march them out of town. War is opposing the organized might of a nation by the organized strength of your own, and you cannot do this in any happy-go-lucky way.

No amount of money, no amount of willingness, no number of men, unless there is organization, preparation and time for it, amount to much. One of my officers, speaking of the value of undeveloped military resources to some patriotic gentleman who was describing our resources in men, money and material, said that unorganized, undeveloped resources are of no more value in the onrush of a modern war than an undeveloped gold mine in Alaska in a Wall Street crisis. That is just about the