The Fragile Republic 33proper. It also assumed a Congressional willingness to lower
trade barriers. Wilson's program was politically handicapped,
because he and his most ardent champion, Senator Joseph B.
Foraker of Ohio, were not on intimate terms with the
McKinley administration. With Leonard Wood's succession
to the military governorship, Wilson's views were given short
shrift in Havana and Washington. Nevertheless, the form (the
indirect control of Cuba through economic ties) if not the
substance of the Wilson program became the foundation of
the United States Cuban policy.
General Leonard Wood was Wilson's chief competitor for
Brooke's job and Washington's ear. As military governor of
the city of Santiago in 1898 and then of Cuba's two eastern
most provinces, Wood attacked the problems of reconstruction
with energy and self-assurance.^24 In the course of his admin
istration, a stunning success by humanitarian standards, he
became Brooke's sharpest and most politically powerful critic.
Unlike his superior, Wood firmly believed that drastic and
far-reaching reforms were needed in Cuban society. As he
wrote President McKinley in 1900:
The great mass of public opinion is perfectly inert; especially is this
true among the professional classes. The passive inactivity of one hundred
and fifty years has settled over them and it is hard to get them out of
old ruts and grooves.... We are dealing with a race that has been
going down for a hundred years and into which we have got to infuse
new Me, new principles and new methods of doing things.^25
Particularly frustrating for Wood was that "the better sort,"
the educated and wealthy people, were uninterested in public
affairs. As Wood complained of the membership of the Cuban
Constitutional Convention in 1901:
The Convention represents at any rate the class to whom Cuba
would be turned over in the case we withdraw, for the highly intelligent
Cubans of the land-owning, industrial, and commercial classes are not
in politics. The politicians are in a certain sense doctors without patients,
lawyers without practice and demagogues living on the subscriptions
of the people and their friends.^26