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His favorite relaxation is hunting and fishing trips to Alaska and Canada, where Indian guides call him Captain Ogontz (Ojibway for wall-eyed pike). So far, motherly Mrs. Wood has blocked the General's every attempt to smuggle into his study a stuffed trophy of the chase. Other hobbies: riding his Arabian horse Kebar in the early mornings, driving his Ford sedan to his office at breakneck speed, and playing bridge, a game in which he invariably overbids, and into which he invariably plunges with his favorite expression: "Let's charge!"
At first Bob Wood was sympathetic with the New Deal. He voted for Roose velt twice, approved AAA, SEC, Social Security, many another reform. But he began to part company with the New Deal. He gagged at the Third Term. He gagged at Franklin Roosevelt's foreign policy. When America First gave him something political to work for, he threw himself into it with a will.
Out of the Ground. The doctrine of U.S. isolationism has a long and honorable past. To be sure American independence was won with the aid of a European ally (France), and several times the U.S. invaded European waters to maintain the freedom of the seas.
Since the turn of the century, however, all ventures outside the bounds of the U.S. had acquired a bad name. By 1939 the imperialism ("Manifest Destiny") of 1898 had been long regarded as a pain in the bowels and conscience of the U.S. The timid internationalism of World War I was a spinster memory, pressed like a dead flower between the forlorn pages of the League of Nations.
In September 1940, when as an America Firster General Wood first wound his horn against U.S. interference in foreigners' affairs, he had every reason to believe that he was embarking on a popular and respectable crusade.
Friends and associates joined him. They were certain that war would knock business for a loop. Hitler was in another country. Practical-minded Chicagoans felt that under certain arms-length circumstances they might even tolerate Hitler, as they had tolerated Capone. As the General put it, they did not think the U.S. should "interfere in the quarrels of Europe and Asia, old, sick and overpopulated continents with ancient rivalries that cannot be healed."
Their crusade was sincere and dignified, their membership select. Into it came men like Lessing Rosenwald (son of Sears, Roebuck's famed president, Julius), intimate with Wood and associated with him at Sears; wealthy, influential, socially prominent Edward Ryerson Jr. (steel); wealthy, bluff Sterling Morton (salt). Eager to speak for its cause was such an impeccably American woman as Kathleen Norris, eminently successful writer of he-she stories for women's magazines, a sincere and emotional pacifist who hates war. For the most part, members confined themselves chiefly to writing to the President, until last January when the Lend-Lease debate began.