Elihu Root might have been so much publicly and has been so little
that a moral must hang somewhere upon his public career.
He might have been many things. He might have been President of the
United States if his party ever could have been persuaded to
nominate him. He might have been one of the great Chief Justices of
the Supreme Court if a President could have been persuaded to
appoint him. He might have given to the United States Senate that
weight and influence which have disappeared from it, if he had had
a passion for public service. He might have been Secretary of State
in the most momentous period of American foreign relations if a
certain homely instinct in Mr. Harding had not led him to prefer
the less brilliant Mr. Hughes. He might have made history. But he
has not. Out of his eight years in the Cabinet and six years in the
Senate nothing constructive came that will give his name a larger
place in history than that of Rufus Choate, another remarkable
advocate who was once Attorney General.
Distrust has always barred his way, distrust of a mind and
character to which problems appear as exercises in ingenuity rather
than questions of right and justice. His greatest opportunity for
constructive statesmanship was offered in the making of the New
York State constitution. But when it became known that Mr. Root had
dominated the Constitutional Convention, that the proposed
constitution was Mr. Root's constitution, that was enough; the
voters rejected it in the referendum.
Distrust spoiled the mission to Russia during the war. The Russians
distrusted him while he was with them. President Wilson distrusted
his report when he returned. And Mr. Wilson's successor equally
distrusted him when he chose a man to finish the work which Mr.
Wilson had badly done or to correct the work that Mr. Wilson had
left undone at Paris.
Light on President Harding's attitude toward Mr. Root is thrown by
an incident at Marion during the campaign. The Republican candidate
had made his speech of August 28th in which he indicated his views
upon the League of Nations. Two days later a newspaper arrived in
Marion containing a dispatch from abroad where Mr. Root then was,
at work upon the international court.
The correspondent represented Mr. Root as "amazed" at the position
Mr. Harding had taken.
The candidate came to the headquarters early that morning. One of
the headquarters attaches handed him a copy of the paper. Mr.
Harding read the dispatch and was angry.
"That man Root," he exclaimed, "has done more harm to the
Republican party than any other man in it! He is always pursuing
some end of his own or of some outside interest." He started away;
then turned back, still angry, and added: "You remember the Panama
Canal tolls incident. That was an example of the kind of trouble he
has always been making for the party."
Many reasons have been given why the President passed over the
obvious man for Secretary of State. Mr. Root himself, who would
have taken the place gladly as an opportunity for his extremely
keen intelligence, but who did not seek it, thinks that the Senate,
flushed with its recent victory over Mr. Wilson and desiring itself
to dominate foreign relations, conspired to prevent his choice. The
Senators did oppose Mr. Root, but their lack of influence with the
President has been sufficiently exposed by events.
The real obstacle to Mr. Root's appointment was Mr. Harding's
distrust of him, the instinctive feeling of a simple direct nature
against a mind too quick, too clever, too adroit, too invisible in
many of its operations. Mr. Harding, being commonplace himself,
likes a more commonplace kind of greatness than Mr. Root's. Those
who were close to him said the President feared that Mr. Root would
"put something over on him." A certain moral quality in Mr. Hughes
outweighed Mr. Root's special experience and wider reputation.
Mr. Roosevelt used to tell a story boastfully of his own
practicality which throws much light on Mr. Root and upon the
reason for Mr. Root's comparative failure as a public man.
"When I took Panama," he would say, "I found all the members of my
Cabinet helpful except one. Mr. Root readily found numerous
precedents. Mr. Taft was sympathetic and gave every assistance
possible. Mr. Knox alone was silent. At last I turned to him in the
Cabinet meeting and I said, 'I should like to hear from the
Attorney General on the legality of what we are doing.' Mr. Knox
looked up and said, 'Mr. President, if I were you I should not have
the slightest taint of legality about the whole affair.'"
Such was Mr. Root. Public questions always were likely to occur to
him first as exercises in mental adroitness rather than as moral
problems. His extremely agile mind finds its chief pleasure in its
own agility. Then he was always the advocate, always instinctively
devoting himself to bolstering up another man's cause for him.
"He is a first class second," said Senator Penrose, objecting to
him as a candidate for President at the Republican Convention of
1916, "but he is not his own man."
He is always someone else's mouthpiece and publicly he is chiefly
remembered as Mr. Roosevelt's mouthpiece. When he came to New York
and made the speech that elected Hughes Governor and made possible
Hughes as Secretary of State he said, "I speak for the President."
He equally spoke for the President when he delivered that other
remembered address, warning the States that unless they mended
their ways the Federal Government would absorb their vitality.
The law is a parasitic profession and Mr. Root's public career is
parasitic. He lacks originality, he lacks passion--there is no
place for passion in that clear mind--he lacks force. He elucidates
other men's ideas, works out or puts into effect their policies,
presents their case, is, by temperament, by reason of gifts
amounting almost to genius, of defects that go with those gifts
always and everywhere, the lawyer. His public career has been
controlled by this circumstance.
I doubt if he ever had a real love of public life. He turned to it
late, after he had made his success in the profession of his
choice, and he carried over into it the habits of the law. He
always seemed to be taking cases for the public. He took a case for
Mr. McKinley as Secretary of War because the War Department needed
reorganization and the case promised to be interesting. He took a
case for Mr. Roosevelt as Secretary of State because Mr. Roosevelt
was the most interesting client in the world. He took a case for
New York State, to remodel its constitution, a case that ended
disastrously. He took a case for Mr. Wilson in Russia and another,
the League of Nations, to form its international court for it. He
was willing to take a case for Mr. Harding to make a going concern
of the world for him following the smash-up of the war, something
like the task of counsel of a receivership, the most interesting
receivership of all time.
For a few years Mr. Roosevelt made public life interesting to Mr.
Root who, it looked then, might devote the rest of his career to
national affairs.
It was a sparkling period for America. We have never had an "age"
in the history of this country like the age of Elizabeth or the age
of Louis XIV, or the age of Lorenzo, the Magnificent; time is too
short and democracy too rigid for such splendors; but the nearest
equivalent to one was the "age," let us call it that, of Theodore
Roosevelt. There was the central figure--an age must have a central
figure--a buoyant personality with a Renaissance zest for life, and
a Renaissance curiosity about all things known, and unknown, and a
boundless capacity for vitalizing everyone and everything with
which he came in contact.
Dull moments were unknown. Knighthood was once more in flower,
wearing frock coats and high hats and reading all about itself in
the daily press. Lances were tilted at malefactors of great wealth,
in jousts where few were unhorsed and no blood spilled. Fair
maidens of popular rights were rescued; great deeds of valor done.
Legends were created, the legend of Leonard Wood, somewhat damaged
in the last campaign, the legend of the Tennis Cabinet, with its
Garfields and its Pinchots, now to be read about only in the black
letter books of the early twentieth century, and the legend of
Elihu Root, still supported in a measure by the evidences of his
highly acute intelligence, but still like everything else of those
bright days, largely a legend.
Roosevelt, the Magnificent, made men great with a word, and his
words were many. His great were many likewise, great statesmen,
great public servants, great writers, great magazine editors, great
cowboys from the West, great saints and great sinners, great
combinations of wealth and great laws to curb them; everything in
scale and that a great scale. Mr. Root acquired his taste for
public life in that "age" just as Mr. Hoover, Mr. Baruch and a
dozen others did theirs in the moving period of the Great War. It
is easy to understand how.
Like all remarkable ages this age was preceded by discoveries. The
United States had just fought a war which had ended in a great
victory, over Spain. The American people were elated by their
achievement, aware of their greatness, talked much and surely of
"destiny," the period in Washington being but a reflection of their
own mood. Their mental horizon had been immensely widened by the
possession, gained in the war, of some islands in the Pacific whose
existence we had never heard of before.
Until that time there had been for us only two nations in the
world, the United States and England, the country with which we had
fought two wars, and innumerable national campaigns. Historically
there had of course been another country as friendly as England had
sometimes been inimical, France, but France had ceased to be a
nation and became a succession of revolutions.
Manila Bay had been a series of revelations, besides teaching us
that Philippines is spelled with two "ps" and only one "l." We had
there discovered Germany, a country whose admirals had bad sea
manners. We knew at once that our next war would be with Germany,
although the day before Dewey said, "You may fire when you are
ready, Gridley," we would as soon have thought that our next war
would be with Patagonia.
There too we had an interesting and surprising experience with
England, hitherto known chiefly for her constant designs on the
national dinner pail. She behaved in striking and pleasing contrast
with Germany. Blood, on that bright day, May 1, 1898, began to be
thicker than water. Learning once more had come out of the East.
From Manila Bay flowed such a tide of new ideas, such a
reassessment of old conceptions as had not visited the world since
the discovery of Greek and Latin letters put an end to the Middle
Ages.
Perceiving our widened interest, John Hay, as Secretary of State,
took our foreign relations on a grand Cook's tour of the world. He
showed us Europe and the Orient. In honor of Manila Bay he invented
that brilliant fiction, the "open door" in the East. Turning our
attention to the world we discovered the General Staff. Hitherto
our army had fought mostly with the scattered Indian tribes of the
West and you cannot use a General Staff in conducting six separate
wars at once, each no bigger than a good-sized riot. But as Admiral
Perry had opened the eyes of the Hermit Kingdom of Japan, so
Admiral whatever-his-name-was who consented to be sunk by Dewey,
the unremembered hero of this great enlightenment, had opened the
eyes of this Hermit Republic of the West to the world across the
seas.
We had to have a General Staff. Mr. Root, as Secretary of War, gave
us one, faithfully copied from the best European models. Roosevelt,
the Magnificent, stood by and said "Bully." Everything was of this
order; so it was to a tremendously interesting job that Mr. Root
succeeded when he took the place of John Hay as Secretary of State.
The mood of the hour was expansive and a luminous personality
pervaded the national life.
But public service cannot always be so interesting as it is at its
fullest moments. The luminous personality went out. And Mr. Root's
next experience, in the United States Senate, was disillusioning.
The Senate is a body in which you grow old, ungracefully waiting
for dead men's shoes. The infinite capacity for taking pains which
Senators have is not genius. If the gods have been good to you, as
they were to Henry Cabot Lodge, you enter the upper house young, a
scholar and idealist, with the hope of the Presidency as the reward
of generous service. Where the race is to the slow you lay aside
your winged gifts one by one and your ambition centers finally not
on the Presidency but on some committee chairmanship clung to by a
pertinacious octogenarian.
Hope deferred makes you avaricious of little favors, until when a
British journalist writes of you as one did of Henry Cabot Lodge,
making his speech before the last Republican national convention at
Chicago, that you "looked like an elderly peer addressing a labor
gathering," your cup of happiness, is full to the brim, as Henry
Cabot Lodge's was,--whether because you are compared to a lord or
because other people, lesser than Senators, are put into their
proper inferior place. Mr. Lodge is the perfect flower of the
Senate. It is a flower that does not bloom in a night. It is almost
a century plant.
Into this Senate came Mr. Root, full stature, as he might walk into
the Supreme Court of the United States, preceded by his reputation.
On Olympus one may spring full grown like Minerva from the head of
Jove. But not in the Senate, where strong prejudice exists against
any kind of cerebral generation. A young Senator from Ohio, Mr.
Harding, arrived in the upper House early enough to see the portent
of Mr. Root there. He keeps to this day a sense of its unbecomingness.
From his desk on the floor Mr. Root talked to the country, but the
Senate did not listen. One does not speak in the Senate by the
authority of intellect or of personality. One speaks by the
authority of dead men's shoes.
Not being a big committee chairman, Mr. Root was not of counsel in
the big cases. He tried to associate himself with counsel but the
traditions of the Senate and the jealousy of Senators were against
him. He had not the passion for public service that makes Reed
Smoot and Wesley Jones miraculously patient with the endless
details of legislation. After six years he quit.
"I am tired of it," he said to Senator Fall, "the Senate is doing
such little things in such a little way." It was different from
public life under Roosevelt where one did not notice size of what
they did--one has not yet noticed the size of what they did--for
the grandeur of the way they did it.
I have said that Mr. Root's mind with its advocate's bent always
occupied itself with the justification of other men's views, his
chief's or his party's. There was one notable exception, his break
with the Republicans while he was in the Senate on the question of
discriminating in favor of American shipping through the Panama
Canal. A clever lawyer's argument can be made that when the United
States said "all nations" in its treaty with Great Britain
regarding the Canal it meant all nations except itself. But Mr.
Root declined to make it, holding that plain morality and a greater
respect for the obligations of a treaty than Bethman Hollweg
expressed when he called them scraps of paper required this country
to charge just the same tolls for American ships using the canal as
for British ships or any other ships using it.
The general Republican argument is that thus interpreted, the
Hay-Pauncefote treaty is so foolish and so inconvenient a treaty that
Mr. Hay must not have meant what he said when he wrote it, and
really did mean something that he wholly failed to say. The reasons
for contending that Mr. Hay meant no tolls for the United States
and tolls for England, when he wrote the same tolls for everybody
are highly ingenious and as it was a Democratic President who was
asserting that Mr. Hay used language in its ordinary sense, Mr.
Root as a Republican might have been expected to declare that Mr.
Hay used it in quite the reverse of its ordinary sense. But he did
not. He supported the Democratic President and treated the
Republican position as if it had not the slightest taint of
legality in it, to the lasting shock of Mr. Harding, on whose side
the precedents are, for nations do say "all nations," and are later
found to mean all nations but themselves when their virtuous
promises to make no exceptions in their own favor turn out to be
inconvenient.
When Mr. Root took a high moral stand on the treaty it was said
among Republican Senators that he was thinking more of the
transcontinental railroads which were fighting competition by water
than he was of the sanctity of international engagements. The
probability is that he was probably thinking more of John Hay and
Elihu Root than he was of either. He was in the Cabinet when John
Hay as Secretary of State made the treaty. Senator Lodge, the only
other Senator to agree with Mr. Root and disagree with his party
about the meaning of all nations, was John Hay's closest friend.
Probably both of them, intimately associated with Mr. Hay, had
their part in the making of the treaty. They had perhaps the
sensitiveness of authors about their capacity to say exactly what
they meant. They wanted to recognize their own international piece
when it was put on the stage by the commercially minded producers
of the Senate.
The history of the Hay-Pauncefote treaty is interesting and
unfamiliar. Attaching Pauncefote's name to the treaty was a
delicate act of international courtesy since there is Pauncefote's
word for it, privately spoken, that he had nothing to do with the
writing of it.
Hay draughted the treaty by himself probably with the cognizance of
Root and Lodge, the great lawyer who was his associate in the
Cabinet and his closest personal friend in the Capitol. Hay then
handed it to Pauncefote, the British minister here. Pauncefote
transmitted it to the foreign office in London which received it
with surprise and probably with satisfaction, for the Clayton-Bulwer
treaty which it in a sense revived, had been forgotten for nearly
half a century. Delay is the rule of foreign offices.
Perhaps Mr. Hay's treaty was not so generous as it seemed on first
reading, a suspicion which seems to have been justified by the
interpretation put upon it by the final authority upon international
engagements, the Republican National Convention at Chicago. And if
it was as generous as it seemed let not America think Great Britain
too eager in accepting it, let America pay a little to overcome the
reluctance of Great Britain in setting her approval upon the new
contract.
At last, after much apparent hesitation, the foreign office agreed
to the new treaty in consideration of America's throwing in, with
it an arbitration of the Bering Sea dispute. President Roosevelt
interpreted Mr. Hay's arbitration contract much as the Republican
National Convention interpreted Mr. Hay's treaty, by appointing
American arbitrators who promised beforehand, in giving a fair and
impartial hearing to the Canadian claims, always to vote for the
American position and to resign and be succeeded by others if they
found that they could not do so.
Why, then, the prevailing distrust of Mr. Root? His public morals
regarding the Hay-Pauncefote treaty were better than those of his
party, even if we accept the view that they were dictated by
nothing more than a certain mental integrity, a certain consistency
with himself. He was as virtuous in the taking of the Panama Canal
as the virtuous Mr. Roosevelt. He had the advocate's honesty of
being true to his client, whether his client was the public or the
great corporations. Mentality was uppermost in him, so that he took
primarily a logical rather than a moral view of all questions; but
also so much that he could not pretend, could not act, and thus he
was more honest than the politicians.
His statesmanship was discontinuous, being an interesting avocation
rather than a career. Of it little has been permanent. His General
Staff soon lapsed into incompetence; if it had not, it might have
been the danger to American national life that the German General
Staff was to German national life. Recently it was merged with the
high command. As Secretary of State he was not creative, Mr.
Harding turning back to the solid ground of American international
policy, rested upon John Hay's open door and Knox's dollar
diplomacy. Root in foreign relations merely succeeded with the
Senate where Hay had failed. Always the advocate, he takes other
men's ideas, Hay's or Wilson's and justifies them or makes them
practical. His New York constitution failed, being unjustly
suspected. His world court has little better hope of acceptance,
for Mr. Hughes is not a voluntary sharer of glory.
In spite of it all, some greatness remains, the impression of a
powerful though limited intelligence. His career was to give us a
moral. It is: if you have an adroit and energetic mind you will
find public affairs uninteresting; except in their occasional
phases. If you have such a mind and must enter politics, hide it;
otherwise democracy will distrust you. Whatever you do, be dull.