Rensselaer Journal, Volume 11, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 April 1902 — A West Point Critic. [ARTICLE]

A West Point Critic.

Major Charles E. Woodruff of the medical department of the army, on duty at Fort Riley, Kansas, says that it ought to be reasonable to expect that a large proportion of West Pointers would become famous, or that at least some of them would become noted or successful in. life. “The fact is the very reverse occurs,” he says, “for it seems as though the best way to extinguish a man is to send him to West Point.” In the course of a paper which he has written on the subject he makes some interesting and original observations, among others that absolute discipline kills aggressive initiative; that scholarship is too often mistaken for ability; that the most successful military leaders have been noted for their ignorance of general topics and hatred of books, and that these Bame great military leaders are, as a rule, undisciplined and insubordinate in the lower grades. He says his object in presenting these facts is to show that the young man who graduates from West Point is a nervous wreck, and that, he goes to his duties as a commissioned second lieutenant in a state of collapse, worn out by hard work, ceaseless drills and pestered by the exactions of his military instructors, too often stunted into a uniformed mimic bearing a military title.—Leslie’s Weekly.