Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 106, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 May 1919 — WOOD BOOM IS NATION WIDE [ARTICLE]

WOOD BOOM IS NATION WIDE

SENTIMENT IN HIS FAVOR FOR PRESIDENCY OVER. _ TIRE NATION. Washington, D. C., May s.—Gen. Leonard Wood has become the leading candidate for the republican nomination for president. Within the last fortnight a veritable wave of Wodd sentiment appears to have swept the republican states from coast to coast. The most significant feature of the manifestations is the fact that the general is being indorsed by conservative as well as progressive republicans. His candidacy is being promoted by no one faction, and the comment most frequently heard is that Gen. Wood is the most available candidate to unite both wings of the party and restore the harmony without which it went down to defeat in 1912 and 1916. Nor does the Wood candidacy appear to be the result of an organized boom. Wood sentiment is not being artificially promoted by any group. There is no Wood committee, no Wood headquarters. The sentiment favoring his nomination seems to be the spontaneous admiration for a strong leader. The republican old guard is not manifesting any enthusiasm, probably because the general is under no obligations to the old guard and becausehis boom is booming along without the assistance and consent of the old guard. “There is more sentiment of the kind that elects presidents surrounding Gen. Leonard Wood than any other who has been mentioned as a possible republican, nominee in 1920.” said Senator George H. Moses of New Hampshire, who has just returned to Washington after a month in. New England. “And the only question is whether this kind of sentiment which elects presidents can be transacted, in Gen. Wood’s case, into the kind that produces delegates and nominates presidents.” The senator said that he has no doubt that this political alchemy will take place in New Hahpshire, where Gen. Wood is a “favorite son,” having been born, the senator says, “in a tenement up over a grocery store in the village of Winchester, where his father was a country doctor.”