Elihu Root (; February 15, 1845 – February 7, 1937) was an American lawyer, Republican politician, and statesman who served as the 41st United States Secretary of War under presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt and the 38th United States Secretary of State, also under Roosevelt. In both positions as well as a long legal career, he pioneered the American practice of international law. Root is sometimes considered the prototype of the 20th-century political "wise man", advising presidents on a range of foreign and domestic issues. He also served as a United States Senator from New York and received the 1912 Nobel Peace Prize.
Root was a leading New York City lawyer who moved frequently between high-level appointed government positions in Washington, D.C., and private-sector legal practice in New York. He headed organizations such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the American Society of International Law.
As Secretary of War from 1899 to 1904, Root administered colonial possessions won in the Spanish–American War. Root favored a paternalistic approach to colonial administration, emphasizing technology, engineering, and disinterested public service. He helped craft the Foraker Act of 1900, the Platt Amendment of 1901, and the Philippine Organic Act (1902). Root also modernized the Army into a professional military apparatus with a general staff, restructured the National Guard, and established the U.S. Army War College.
Root returned to the Roosevelt administration as Secretary of State from 1905 to 1909. He modernized the consular service by minimizing patronage, maintained the Open Door Policy in China, promoted friendly relations with Latin America, and resolved frictions with Japan over the immigration and treatment of Japanese citizens to the West Coast of the United States. He negotiated 24 bilateral international arbitration treaties, which led to the creation of the Permanent Court of International Justice.
As a United States senator from New York, Root was a conservative supporter of President William Howard Taft, playing a central role in Taft's nomination to a second term at the 1912 Republican National Convention. By 1916, he was a leading proponent of military preparedness with the expectation that the United States would enter World War I. President Woodrow Wilson sent him to Russia in 1917 in an unsuccessful effort to establish an alliance with the new revolutionary government that had replaced the Czar. Root supported Wilson's vision of the League of Nations but with reservations along the lines proposed by Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge.
Elihu Root was born on February 15, 1845, in Clinton, Oneida County, New York, to Oren Root and Nancy Whitney Buttrick, both of English descent. His father was a professor of mathematics at Hamilton College.
Elihu studied at local schools, including the Clinton Grammar School and the Williston Seminary, where he was a classmate of G. Stanley Hall, before enrolling at Hamilton. He joined the Sigma Phi Society and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa society. After graduation, Root was an instructor of physical education for two years at Williston Seminary and taught for one year at the Rome Free Academy.
Despite his parents' encouragement to become a Presbyterian minister, Root moved to New York City in 1865 with his brother Wally and sought a career in the law. He enrolled at New York University School of Law and earned money teaching American history at elite girls' schools. At the time, most law students in the United States applied for admission to the bar after one year of study, but Root stayed on for a second year, essentially a private tutelage under Professor John Norton Pomeroy. He graduated in 1867 with a Bachelor of Laws and was admitted to the bar on June 18, 1867.
Upon his admission to the bar, Root completed a year of unpaid apprenticeship at the leading New York City firm Mann and Parsons. In 1868, he and several other young lawyers founded the firm of Strahan & Root with offices on Pine Street. He had various partners through 1897, when a disagreement led to the dissolution of his firm and the formation of Root, Howard, Winthrop & Stimson, a predecessor of the modern firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman.
His early work was assorted and menial, but expanded rapidly after he met John J. Donaldson, the president of the Bank of North America, through their pastor. Donaldson hired Root as a Latin tutor and was impressed with his ability as a lawyer, eventually sending him personal matters and small cases for the Bank. In March 1869, Root was hired to reorganize the bank to acquire a state charter. Soon after, Alexander Compton was elevated to the partnership, and the firm was renamed Compton & Root. Root's public profile and professional reputation were enhanced by his defense of Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, and Compton & Root grew throughout the 1870s into a varied practice with a primary focus on banks, railroads, wills and estates, and municipal government.
Root was admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1881. In 1883, President Chester A. Arthur appointed him U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the chief government attorney in New York City. As U.S. Attorney, Root headed the prosecutions for the Ward and Grant fraud which precipitated the Panic of 1884.
Through 1899, Root took on many other prominent and wealthy clients, including Jay Gould, Chester A. Arthur, Charles Anderson Dana, William C. Whitney, Thomas Fortune Ryan, the Havemeyer family, Charlie Delmonico, and E. H. Harriman. In 1889, Root advised Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Thomas Brackett Reed on his controversial efforts to revise the House rules.
On January 19, 1898, Root was elected a member of the executive committee of the newly formed North American Trust Company.
After moving to Washington in 1899, Root never again became partner in a firm. His public career lasted through 1915, when Root returned to practice in an of counsel role at his son's firm of Root, Clark, Buckner & Howland. Around that time, Root was elected the 38th president of the American Bar Association.
In December 1871, Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed was indicted on charges of deceit and fraud in connection to his real estate dealings and political corruption. Tweed retained eminent defense counsel led by David Dudley Field; Root joined the case on behalf of Tweed's co-defendant James Ingersoll, a furniture manufacturer who stood accused of fraudulently billing the city government for millions of dollars. Root's law partner, Alexander Compton, was Ingersoll's cousin by marriage, and Compton turned the case over to Root due to his courtroom experience. Despite his family's dismay, he accepted the case and joined Tweed's defense in addition to Ingersoll's.
The Tweed case stretched on for years, with the first trial commencing more than fifteen months after the indictment and ending in a hung jury. Four more indictments were brought in November 1873 after the defense's failed attempt to get judge Noah Davis to recuse himself. Root took a minor role in the proceedings, examining jurors and occasionally cross-examining the prosecution witnesses. The jury returned a guilty verdict on two hundred and four counts; Davis imposed a sentence of twelve years and a $12,750 fine, later reduced on appeal. Three of Tweed's attorneys were fined for contempt of court; Root was not among them. Instead, Davis addressed the junior attorneys:
"I know how young lawyers are apt to follow their seniors. ... [Elihu Root and Willard Bartlett] displayed great ability during the trial. I shall impose no penalty, except what they may find in these few words of advice: I ask you young gentlemen, to remember that good faith to a client never can justify or require bad faith to your own consciences, and that however good a thing it may be to be known as successful and great lawyers, it is even a better thing to be known as honest men."