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Senate Years of Service: 1909-1915 Party: Republican
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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.
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