Arts and Letters

If Pericles delivered the truly great speeches which Thucydides ascribes to him, he was the first in the Western World to achieve greatest eminence both as statesman and as man of letters. This has not often happened in the history of statesmanship and of literature. Caesar was a nation-builder and a man of letters, while Cicero was a man of letters and a publicist of highest authority. When our own nation was in the making, there was an extraordinary revelation of the possibility of combining political insight and public service with literary skill and fine literary form. The writings of George Washington, of the two Adamses, of Jefferson, and of Hamilton demonstrate this beyond peradventure. Burke had already made his mark in both fields of endeavor, and Thiers, Disraeli, and Gladstone were shortly to do the same. Bismarck, although the fact is little recognized, would have been a distinguished contributor to the literature of his people had his literary skill and productivity not been overshadowed by his stupendous achievement in the field of practical statesmanship.

Elihu Root was another statesman of similar type. The farsighted vision, the human understanding, and the power of interpretation which marked his state papers and his public acts, were all revealed in a literary form which has made these a permanent contribution to the literature of our language and which brought him the distinction of membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Literature and literary power are not and need not be something apart from other personal characteristics and attributes, but unhappily they are too often looked upon as such to the disadvantage both of literature itself and to that of achievement in other fields of endeavor.

Elihu Root was one of those fine and rich personalities who would not and could not detach his private pursuits from the public welfare. Before he was a teacher or a lawyer or a statesman, he was a good citizen. He measured his public and professional activities in terms of the highest standard of American citizenship. His attachment to the college which bore the name of his hero, Hamilton, on the campus of which he was born and near the campus of which he lies buried, grew with the years and nothing affected him more directly or more deeply than its welfare and its repute. His reading was of the now unhappily old-fashioned type which included the best that had been written in any language. The ancient classics were familiar to him, as were the outstanding contributions to English, to French, and to Italian literature. He reflected this knowledge not only in his frequent quotations, but in his own direct and persuasive literary style. There were few topics upon which he did not touch in the course of his long and active life. Some of these called for charming and tender sentiment, and he furnished it. Some of them called for learning and precise knowledge, and he furnished it. Some of them called for courage and vision and outstanding leadership, and he furnished it.

History will confirm the judgment of Lord Bryce that Root was the greatest Secretary of State in the history of the American nation, among all the long list of names which begins with that of Thomas Jefferson. Of our Secretaries of War, he was easily the most distinguished and his five Reports, made while incumbent of that post, are, as Lord Haldane described them, the last word on the organization and administration of an army in a democracy. That he had no peer as a diplomat was the judgment of Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, which judgment is fully confirmed by his long record of outstanding achievement. In his adjustment of the difficulties between the United States and Japan, in his work for the pacification of Cuba and the Philippines and their good government, in his emphatic insistence upon upholding our treaty obligations against discrimination in the Panama Canal tolls, in his work at the Washington Conference for the Limitation of Armaments, and in his plan for the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague that brought into existence the tribunal which, one of these days, will be looked upon as a ruling influence in the peaceful guidance and development of the world's organization, he made permanent contribution to the history of modern civilization. His letter of instructions to the representatives of the United States at the Second Peace Conference at The Hague in 1907 is a classic document and marks an epoch in the building of the institutional life of an organized family of peaceful and cooperating nations. When the history of the world's difficult and painful struggle to put international war behind it and to establish a peaceful and wisely organized world comes to be written, the name of Elihu Root will lead all the rest.

One must go back across well nigh a century and a half to find in Alexander Hamilton that American to whom Elihu Root's mind and life and type of public service are most analogous. The truly great oration in which the Reverend Dr. John Mitchell Mason, Pastor of the First Associate Reformed Church in the City of New York and later Provost of Columbia College, paid tribute to the memory of Alexander Hamilton when speaking before the Society of the Cincinnati at Federal Hall in New York City on July 31, 1804, may be in large part repeated at this hour in memory of Elihu Root:

One of his (Hamilton's) primary objects, (said Dr. Mason) was to consolidate the efforts of good men in retarding a calamity which, after all, they may be unable to avert; but which no partial nor temporary policy should induce them to accelerate. To these sentiments must be traced his hatred of continental factions; his anxiety for the federal constitution, although, in his judgment, too slight for the pressure which it has to sustain; his horror of every attempt to sap its foundation or loosen its fabric; his zeal to consecrate it in the affections of his fellow citizens, that if it fall at last, they may be pure from the guilt of its overthrow—an overthrow which may be accomplished in an hour, but of which the woes may be entailed upon ages to come.

With such dignified policy he joined the most intense application to his professional duties…. How he resolved the most intricate cases; how he pursued general principles through their various modifications; how he opened the fountains of justice; how he revered the rights of property; how he signalized himself in protecting the defenceless; how judges, and jurors, and counsel, and audience, hung on his accents; let them declare who have entrusted their fortunes to his hand.

With these words of historic judgment called to echo over the greater part of a century and a half, we may leave Elihu Root's well-earned fame to be confided to a grateful people's care.