Journal of the Southwest

Armed Progressive: General Leonard Wood by Jack C. LaneReview by: James W. HarperArizona and the West, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Autumn, 1979), pp. 307-309Published by: Journal of the SouthwestStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40168877 .

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REVIEWS 307

fashion. Also, he encountered his share of bootleggers defying the Volstead Act.

By the time he got to San Antonio in 1926, Perkins had major administrative

responsibility. Nevertheless, there were still times of excitement, including acquaintance with the novelties of public administration in Duval County. All the while, though, Perkins was diligently trying to enforce the immigration statutes, and his perceptive narrative of everyday routine gives the book much of its value. Posted to San Ysidro in 1930, Perkins retired there in 1953. He had

enjoyed a long career, marked by an appreciation of the Hispanic manner of life. Clearly respecting his sensitivity, Perkins's official counterparts across the

boundary honored him warmly. While all this makes for useful and lively reading, one might suggest

several misgivings. To reduce Perkins's manuscript to size, Editor Sonnichsen all but omits the California years. Yet they comprised about two decades of Perkins's service. More of the California years - or none of them - might have

quieted a sense of disproportion. As to historical background, Perkins is good but not always good enough. For instance, the Border Patrol was an arm of the Labor Department until 1940, when responsibility shifted to the Justice Depart- ment. The change gets no mention, even though Perkins surely must have found it significant. The reason doubtless lies with Sonnichsen's compression of the California years. An explanatory word in the introduction, however, or in a footnote, would have helped. Then, too, the personal Perkins is a bit elusive. One learns some things about him: his essential decency is manifest. Yet certain

aspects of his life confuse the reader. "Gladys" turns up unannounced. One gathers she was his wife - presumably the first of three Sonnichsen mentions. But

explanation would have helped - again, perhaps, in the introduction or by way of footnoting.

The book has a number of photographs. Many are interesting, despite deficiencies of reproduction. There is an index. Unfortunately, however, it is weak in design.

Still, Border Patrol is worthwhile. It is not only vivid and exciting, but also offers a thoughtful, personal view of Borderlands events and issues. This last is

especially useful, with the undocumented worker now such a concern.

David T. Leary

The reviewer is a Professor of History at Pasadena City College, Pasadena, California.

ARMED PROGRESSIVE: General Leonard Wood. By Jack C. Lane. San Rafael, California: Presidio Press, 1978. 329 pp. $16.95.

Leonard Wood (1 860-1 927) was a key figure in American military and

political history during the early twentieth century. As such it is somewhat sur-

prising that there has not been a biography of him since Herman Hagedorn's adulatory study in 1931. Jack Lane has filled this gap with a readable and

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308 ARIZONA and the WEST

thoughtful volume. Lane traces Wood's career from his earliest Indian service in the Southwest to his "last battle" as Governor General of the Philippines. Appropriately, most of the space is devoted to Wood's activity in Cuba and his work in the Preparedness Movement.

Wood entered the army in an unusual manner as a contract surgeon. His rise to the higher echelons of the regular army was a product of his ability, driving ambition, and astute political connections with leaders such as Theodore Roose- velt. Wood's widely acclaimed service as governor of Cuba, his open championing of military reform and preparedness, and his forceful, vigorous personality com- bined to make him a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 1920. Especially in his later career Wood revealed an authoritarian bent which causes Lane to depict him as a potential man on horseback - an early twentieth-

century Douglas MacArthur. Lane's title suggests a main theme of his work. Namely, that Leonard Wood

personified the military's search for order, efficiency, and modernity; and as such Wood was a progressive in Robert Weibe's sense of the term. While this con-

ceptualization is useful in linking developments in the military to the larger currents in American society, viewing Leonard Wood as a progressive - given his imperialism, militarism, and his penchant for authoritarianism - seems to stretch the term Progressive to the limits of meaningfulness, especially if one is to label with the same name such figures as Jane Addams, Walter Lippmann, and Woodrow Wilson.

Much more useful is Lane's portrayal of Leonard Wood as the officer in conflict with the dominant Uptonian thinking in the army. Where Emory Upton foresaw army reform based on an elite professional army, Wood cham-

pioned a citizen army recruited by universal military service. Wood's view pre- vailed, and its success constituted his greatest contribution to American history. Ironically, as Lane aptly points out, the Uptonian view of an elite (West Point trained) officer corps survived, and in the end dealt Wood a bitter personal blow, depriving him of a coveted combat command in World War I. Lane also adds to our understanding of American imperialism with his portrayal of Wood as the American proconsul in Cuba and the Philippines. Wood's material success and his assistance to American economic interests were achieved at the expense of native opposition, and his activities reveal the complexities and subtle cur- rents of American expansionism.

Lane has based his volume on the rich and extensive Leonard Wood papers and his bibliography indicates wide research in primary and secondary materials. However, Lane omits many key sources and secondary works relating to Wood's career, and these omissions constitute the most serious shortcoming of the book. Missing are any references to the papers of Tasker Bliss, Woodrow Wilson, Hugh Scott (all important contemporaries of Wood) and to the collections of the United States Army Military History Collection at Carlisle Barracks, Penn- sylvania. Also disappointing is the absence of any reference to the studies of preparedness by John Finnegan and William Harbaugh and to biographies of key contemporaries such as Frank Vandiver's Black Jack. These omissions under-

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REVIEWS 309

score the difficulties confronting any biographer of a twentieth-century figure with an impact as great as Wood's.

While the failure to exhaust the sources prevents Lane's study from being labeled definitive, it does not negate the value of the book. Lane writes clearly and uses the evidence in a thoughtful, provocative manner. He has utilized the Wood papers thoroughly. The publishers have produced a professional volume, well indexed and enhanced by useful maps and photographs. In sum this is a serviceable book of interest to the general reader and of great utility to the scholar.

James W. Harper

Professor Harper is a member of the history faculty at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, and a specialist on Mexican Border relations.

BORDER BOOM TOWN: Ciudad ]udrez Since 1848. By Oscar J. Martinez. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978. 231 pp. $12.95.

Always difficult to tell is the story of the dialectic of people and economic events. Discovery or depletion of resources, the absence or initiation of trans-

portation facilities, rises or falls in prices (not to mention drought, disaster, war, and sheer idiocy) exert influences on human life similar to those of ecological changes on animals and have similar interrelated consequences over a spectrum from the individual to the species. To work convincingly along the entire line is exceedingly tricky for the narrator, requiring at once a thorough insight into theoretical issues on several planes, as well as the imaginative capacity actually to feel one's way into the lives of people as they contribute to and are affected

by complex economic forces. What, for example, is likely to be the depth and reverberation of the existential blow in the weaver whose talent, and thereby the precious balance of whose ego, is usurped by the looms of the Industrial Revolution? A few writers currently assay such questions. In consequence of their answers, Herbert Gutman, David Noble, Anthony F. C. Wallace, the late

Harry Braverman, and others - the list is not yet that long - are in process of

converting us to a view of economic events as uniquely human (as opposed to

"impersonal") phenomena that must be talked about as such, just as they are

convincing us, in Christopher Lasch's words, of the "futility of drawing the conventional distinctions between economic, social, and political history."

Given an appreciation of the analytical sweat exacted by such work, one is grateful for a book promising to unravel one tangled example of the reciprocal effects generated in the collision of industrial capitalism with a pretechnological people. On the impact of the stronger of these two forces in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, the author of Border Boom Town is admirably clear. In 1848, when the story begins, Juarez (El Paso del Norte until 1888) is an agricultural village on the banks of the Rio Grande in far northern Mexico. Distance, poor roads, and the Apache isolate the El Paso valley from Mexico's centers of population

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