presented by the people of the city with a
magnificent hand-work scroll which said in Spanish:

{126}

"The people of the City of Santiago de Cuba to General Leonard Wood
... the greatest of all your successes is to have won the confidence
and esteem of a people in trouble."

Small wonder that in December, 1899, less than a year after the United
States took over the island, he was appointed by President McKinley
Governor General of Cuba and made a Major General of United States
Volunteers!

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THE ADMINISTRATOR

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{129}

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