Elihu ROOT, Congress, NY (1845-1937)

ROOT, Elihu, a Senator from New York; born in Clinton, Oneida County, N.Y., February 15, 1845; attended the common schools; graduated from Hamilton College, Clinton, N.Y., in 1864; taught in the Rome (N.Y.) Academy in 1865; graduated from the law school of the University of the City of New York in 1867; admitted to the bar in the same year and commenced practice in New York City; United States attorney for the southern district of New York 1883-1885; delegate to the State constitutional convention in 1894; appointed Secretary of War by President William McKinley 1899-1904; appointed Secretary of State by President Theodore Roosevelt 1905-1909; elected as a Republican to the United States Senate and served from March 4, 1909, to March 3, 1915; declined to be a candidate for reelection; chairman, Committee on Expenditures in the Department of State (Sixty-first Congress), Committee on Industrial Expositions (Sixty-second Congress); resumed the practice of law in New York City; author; president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 1910-1925; awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1912; president of The Hague Tribunal of Arbitration between Great Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal, concerning church property, in 1913; president of the New York State constitutional convention in 1915; appointed by President Woodrow Wilson to be Ambassador Extraordinary at the head of a special diplomatic mission from the United States to Russia in 1917; Commissioner Plenipotentiary to the Conference on Limitation of Armament at Washington, D.C., 1921-1922; member of the Committee of International Jurists, which, on invitation of the Council of the League of Nations, reported the plan for a new Permanent Court of International Justice in 1921; died in New York City, February 7, 1937; interment in Hamilton College Cemetery, Clinton, N.Y.

Bibliography

American National Biography; Dictionary of American Biography; The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law; Jessup, Philip. Elihu Root. 1938. Reprint. 2 vols. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1964; Leopold, Richard. Elihu Root and the Conservative Tradition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1954; Zimmerman, Warren. First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their County a World Power. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002.

Source: Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1771-Present