Elihu Root

Politician

• Born: February 15, 1845
• Birthplace: Clinton, New York
• Died: February 7, 1937
• Place of death: New York, New York

American bureaucrat and senator (1909-1915)

As secretary of war under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, Root administered territories gained at the end of the Spanish-American War and initiated reforms in U.S. Army administration. He pursued a conservative line as secretary of state under Roosevelt and later as U.S. senator from New York, and argued for the value of international law as a political instrument.

Area of achievement Government and politics

Early Life

Elihu Root was the third of four sons of Oren Root and Nancy Buttrick Root. His father was professor of mathematics at Hamilton College in Clinton, and Elihu was valedictorian of the Hamilton class of 1864. He was graduated from New York University Law School in 1867. Root’s legal career was successful from the start; in time he became one of the leading members of the American bar. Specializing in cases involving large corporations, he was labeled a Wall Street lawyer. Among his corporate clients were the Havemeyer Sugar Refining Company and the traction syndicate controlled by William C. Whitney and Thomas F. Ryan. Root’s success as a lawyer and later as a member of William McKinley’s and Theodore Roosevelt’s cabinets came from his capacity to master detail, the concise and logical qualities of his written arguments, and his ready wit. Reserved and a bit stiff with those he did not know well, Root formed strong friendships with men such as Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Henry Cabot Lodge.

Prior to his appointment as secretary of war in 1899, Root was involved in Republican Party politics on the local and state levels. He served from 1883 to 1885 as United States attorney for the district of southern New York; he was a manager of the New York State constitutional convention of 1894. His association with Roosevelt began around 1882, when Root provided legal advice about an obstacle to Roosevelt’s running for the state legislature. Root ran Roosevelt’s unsuccessful campaign for mayor of New York City in 1886, he provided advice when Roosevelt served as city police commissioner, and in 1898 he resolved a question about Roosevelt’s legal residence that enabled him to run for and be elected governor.

A thin, wiry man of average height, Root had closely clipped hair and a full mustache, both of which turned white in his old age. In 1878, he married Clara Frances Wales. An attentive husband and father to his daughter, Edith, and sons, Elihu and Edward Wales, Root often made decisions about his public career based on his wife’s distaste for life in Washington, D.C.

Life’s Work

While Root declined President McKinley’s offer to serve on the commission concluding a peace treaty with Spain, he accepted appointment as secretary of war in 1899. McKinley said that he wanted a lawyer in the job because of the need to administer the territories acquired during the war. The legal problems posed by the American occupation of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines were complex, and the transition from military to civilian governments required a different solution in each case. In all three territories, however, Root favored improvements in education, health care, and transportation.

The absence of a strong movement for independence in Puerto Rico led Root to conclude that the best solution would be an indefinite period of American control. He proposed a highly centralized governmental structure centered on a governor and legislative council appointed by the president. Root persuaded McKinley that Puerto Rico’s economic well-being depended on an exemption from the Dingley Tariff rates, but the administration accepted a temporary lower rate in the Foraker Act of 1900. Congress also provided for a popularly elected lower house in a bicameral Puerto Rican legislature, and Root accepted the change.

The terms of the peace treaty with Spain called for Cuban independence, and by 1902 Root had established a native government for Cuba and had withdrawn American military forces. He first replaced General John R. Brooke with General Leonard Wood as the military governor, and he instructed Wood to mount a program to repair war damage and to modernize schools, roads, and systems of sanitation. A constitutional convention met in 1901; the delegates were elected by Cubans, but Root had restricted the vote to property owners, former soldiers, and those who were literate. The constitution produced by the convention contained guarantees of American interests originally outlined in the Platt Amendment to the Army Appropriation Act of March 2, 1901. The government of the United States was granted the right to buy or lease bases on Cuban soil, and it was given the right to intervene with troops if Cuban independence or the stability of the Cuban government were threatened.

Root faced a more difficult task in dealing with the situation in the Philippines. Forces led by Emilio Aguinaldo were in revolt against the American military government, and Root, as secretary of war, had both to bring home the twenty-one thousand troops in the islands whose enlistments were running out and to replace them with an effectively trained force that eventually numbered seventy-four thousand. It took two years to end the guerrilla war, and in the interval the report of a commission headed by President Jacob Schurman of Cornell led Root to conclude that the Philippines were not ready for independence or for a great degree of self-government. In 1900, McKinley and Root sent Judge William Howard Taft to Manila at the head of a second commission charged with replacing the military government. Taft became governor-general, and a bicameral legislature was created. Root’s instructions to the Taft commission, adopted by Congress in the Organic Act of 1902, became the formula for government of the Philippines pursued by the Roosevelt administration.

Partly as a result of his activities as a colonial administrator, Root saw the need for reforming the army bureaucracy. He instituted a general staff system headed by a chief of staff directly responsible to the secretary of war, and he ended the practice of making permanent army staff appointments in Washington. There was a regular rotation of officers from the staff to the line. Root called for legislation that established the Army War College and that made the National Guard the country’s militia. He took steps to see that the guard received the same training and equipment as the regular army.

Root resigned as secretary of war on February 1, 1904, despite the objections of President Roosevelt, but he returned to the cabinet as secretary of state on July 7, 1905. He played no part in Roosevelt’s arbitration of an end to the Russo-Japanese War by means of the Treaty of Portsmouth; nor did he have anything to do with securing for the United States the right to build a canal through the Isthmus of Panama. Root’s chief actions as secretary of state were designed to bolster the fabric of international agreements ensuring world peace. He placed emphasis on friendly relationships with the nations of South America, and in 1906 he undertook a lengthy personal tour of that continent that led to Latin American participation in the Second Hague Peace Conference in 1907.

In the area of Canadian-American relations, Root resolved the North Atlantic coastal fisheries dispute. With the help of Lord Bryce, the British ambassador in Washington, he found a solution to the Alaska boundary issue. Root negotiated a voluntary immigration restriction agreement with Japan after the unrest in California over Japanese labor precipitated exclusion laws. By means of the Root-Takahira Agreement and an arbitration treaty concluded in 1908, he established mechanisms for consultation between the governments of the United States and Japan. Root was committed to voluntary arbitration of international disputes, and during his tenure as secretary of state, he negotiated bilateral arbitration agreements with twenty-four foreign governments. In 1912, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for these efforts to resolve international disagreements within a judicial framework.

In the instructions that were given to the American delegates to the 1907 Hague Peace Conference, Root outlined plans for a permanent court of arbitral justice and committed the American government to its establishment. The nations represented at the conference, however, could not agree on a procedure for selecting judges. The idea was put aside until 1920, when Root, invited by the League of Nations, served on the committee that drafted the statute establishing the World Court. Root worked with President Warren G. Harding and Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes to gain approval for American membership in the court, but congressional opposition led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge frustrated the effort. In 1929, Root returned to Geneva to serve on the committee revising the 1920 statute, and he devised a compromise on advisory opinions, usually termed the “Root formula,” meeting United States objections to certain classes of cases coming before the World Court. Delays in submitting these changes to Congress and the changing political situation led to the treaty’s eventual defeat in 1935.

By that time, Root was ninety years old, and his public career was behind him. He had resigned as secretary of state on March 5, 1909, before assuming the office of U.S. senator, to which he had been elected by the New York State legislature. Root’s career as a senator was less significant than his previous career as a member of the McKinley and Roosevelt cabinets. Root lacked sympathy with the Progressive legislation supported by William Howard Taft, Roosevelt’s successor, and he grew disenchanted with Woodrow Wilson’s policy of neutrality toward the conflict in Europe that developed into World War 1.

Root supported Wilson’s efforts to mobilize once the United States entered World War 1, and in 1917 he went to Russia as head of a mission to the Provisional Revolutionary Government. Wilson did not appoint Root as an American representative to the peace conference at Versailles, but the former secretary of state gave public support to Wilson’s plan to join the League of Nations. He had reservations about Article X of the League Covenant and wanted modifications in the terms of the treaty, but he encouraged Senator Lodge to support American membership. Lodge, however, came out in opposition to both the Treaty of Versailles and membership in the League of Nations.

Elihu Root died in New York City on February 7, 1937. He was buried in the cemetery on the Hamilton College campus in Clinton, New York, his birthplace and family home.

Significance

The achievements of Elihu Root’s long period of public service fall into two categories. The first is a set of pragmatic solutions to specific problems. His differing approaches to the governing of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines, like the reforms he initiated in the structure and training of the army, testify to his skills as a lawyer. Root’s work as secretary of war demonstrates the ability of the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century to take on the responsibilities of a global power. The second category of achievement is Root’s consistent efforts to forge a judicial system to interpret a growing body of international law. His work as secretary of state on a series of bilateral arbitration treaties, his support of Wilson’s call for a League of Nations, and his efforts to establish the World Court testify to his commitment. Root declined an appointment to the World Court itself. Given the fact that the United States was not a party to the treaty establishing the court, he believed that it was inappropriate for him to sit as a judge.

Root’s skills were best suited to administration and negotiation. In addition to his work on behalf of the League of Nations and the World Court, he was one of four American delegates to the Conference on the Limitation of Armaments held in Washington, D.C., between November 12, 1921, and February 6, 1922. He served as president or chair of a number of the organizations founded by Andrew Carnegie, including the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and he advised every administration through that of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the area of foreign affairs.

Bibliography

Coletta, Paolo E. The Presidency of William Howard Taft. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1973. Clear account of the Roosevelt-Taft split. Notes Root’s ties to both men; examines the 1912 election campaign.

Cooper, John Milton, Jr. Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. A history of the League of Nations focusing on President Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to create the organization and his failure to win Senate ratification for America’s participation in the league. Describes the role of Root in the fight over ratification.

Gould, Lewis L. The Presidency of William McKinley. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1981. Gould argues that McKinley shaped military and foreign policy more aggressively than previous scholars have believed.

Jessup, Philip C. Elihu Root. 2 vols. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1938. The most complete account of Root’s public career and his political views, this book was begun during Root’s lifetime and benefited from the use of his papers.

Leopold, Richard W. Elihu Root and the Conservative Tradition. Boston: Little, Brown, 1954. Leopold traces Root’s political conservatism but also shows his pragmatic interest in international law.

Millett, Allan Reed. The Politics of Intervention: The Military Occupation of Cuba, 1906-1909. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968. This study stresses the role of the U.S. Army in the policy-making process that determined the nature of the American occupation of Cuba.

Morris, Edmund. Theodore Rex. New York: Random House, 2001. This account of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency includes information about Root.

Mowry, George E. The Era of Theodore Roosevelt: 1900-1912. New York: Harper & Row, 1958. Granting Root’s service to Roosevelt, Mowry notes that the president’s growing progressivism was matched by Root’s increasing conservatism.

Pratt, Julius W. America’s Colonial Experiment: How the United States Gained, Governed, and in Part Gave Away a Colonial Empire. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1951. Pratt’s study pulls together the story of America’s involvement in Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Central America.

Zimmerman, Warren. First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Describes how Root, Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, John Hay, and Alfred T. Mahan articulated American imperialism and made the United States a world power during the early years of the twentieth century.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1901-1940: 1902: Philippines Ends Its Uprising Against the United States; May 12-October 23, 1902: Anthracite Coal Strike; May 22, 1903: Platt Amendment; October 25, 1906: Japan Protests Segregation of Japanese in California Schools; March 14, 1907: Gentlemen’s Agreement; November 25, 1910: Carnegie Establishes the Endowment for International Peace; November 12, 1921-February 6, 1922: Washington Disarmament Conference.