ELIHU

ROOT (1845– )  , American lawyer and political leader, was born at Clinton, New York, on the 15th of February 1845, the son of Oren Root (d . 1885), professor of mathematics at Hamilton College from 1849-81 . He graduated at Hamilton College in 1864, taught at the Rome (N.Y.) Academy in 1865, and graduated at the University Law School, New York City, in 1867 . As a corporation lawyer he soon attained high rank and was counsel in many famous cases . Politically, he became identified with the reform element of the Republican party . He was United States attorney for the Southern District of New York (1883-85), and a delegate to the State Constitutional Convention of 1894, acting as chairman of its judiciary committee . From August 1899 until February 1904 he was secretary of war in the cabinets of Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, and in this position reorganized the army and created a general staff, and in general administered his department with great ability during a period marked by the Boxer uprising in China, whither troops were sent under General A . R . Chaffee, the insurrection of the Filipinos, the withdrawal of the United States troops from Cuba, and the establishment of a government for the Philippines under a Philippine Commission, for which he drew up the " instructions," in reality comprising a constitution, a judicial code and a system of laws . In 1903 he was a member of the Alaskan Boundary Tribunal . In July 1905 he re-entered President Roosevelt's cabinet as secretary of state . In the summer of 1906, during a visit to the Pan-American Conference at Rio de Janeiro, he was elected its honorary president, and during a tour through the Latin-American republics, brought about a better understanding between the United States and these republics .

In general he did much to further the cause of

international peace, and he concluded treaties of arbitration with Japan, Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Austria-Hungary, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland and other countries . Upon his resignation from the cabinet he was elected, in January 1909, as United States senator from New York . In 1910 he was chief counsel for the United States before the Hague tribunal for the arbitration of the long-standing dispute concerning fisheries between his country and Great Britain (see NEWFOUNDLAND) . He received the degree of LL.D. from Hamilton, 1896; Yale, 1900; Columbia, 1904; New York University, 1904; Williams, 1905; Princeton, 1906; University of Buenos Aires, 1906; University of San Marcos, of Lima, 1906; and Harvard, 1907 .