A Conservative Worthy
Elihu Root and the Conservative Tradition.
by Richard W. Leopold.
Little, Brown. 222 pp. $3.00.
In the course of his long and busy career, Elihu Root was thrown by events into three crucial encounters that may be taken as symbolic of his place in history. As champion of Republican orthodoxy, he confronted Theodore Roosevelt and his clamorous “progressivism.” As elder statesman and mentor of responsible Republican opinion on foreign policy, he confronted Woodrow Wilson and his new internationalism. As representative of American democracy, he confronted the Russian Revolution, still in its first (March) phase but already big with Bolshevism. In each of these encounters Root won some sort of short-range victory; in each, subsequent opinion quickly reversed the verdict and dismissed him as a futile, backward-looking man. Yet curiously enough, there are signs that this reversal of opinion is now itself being reversed; many today are (beginning to discover in Root’s thinking a wisdom and a virtue by no means apparent to an earlier generation. The new interest in such men as Root, Hughes, and Stimson is part of the new interest in the conservative aspect of our national tradition.
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It is very much in this light that Richard W. Leopold deals with Elihu Root in this latest volume in the Library of American Biography (edited by Oscar Handlin). In less than two hundred pages of text, Mr. Leopold presents us with a lucid, succinct, and on the whole well-balanced account of “the significance of Root’s public service and its meaning for today.”
Root was already over fifty (he was born in 1845) when in 1899 President McKinley summoned him to Washington to become Secretary of War. His efforts hitherto had been largely devoted to his lucrative law practice, although he was active in New York State politics and had held two public offices. As Secretary of War immediately following the Spanish-American conflict, he faced tasks of the first order: the inauguration of a new colonial system in Puerto Rico, the redemption of the pledge of Cuban independence, the settlement of the status of the Philippines, and, above all, the reorganization of the army. Mr. Leopold shows how well he accomplished these tasks; there can be no doubt that Elihu Root will go down in American history as one of its very great secretaries of war. In 1905, after some months of retirement, he returned to Washington to take over the State Department in Roosevelt’s cabinet. Here too his service was distinguished: he injected a new spirit of hemispheric solidarity and “good neighborliness” into his dealings with Latin America and he substantially improved his country’s position in the Western Hemisphere, Europe, and the Far East.
In March 1909 he began the third phase of his career, as United States Senator from New York. It was the least distinguished part of his public service. For one thing, he was, as Mr. Leopold points out, “out of tune with the times: an ingrained conservative in an age of progressivism.” For another, he was caught up in the furious factional struggle that disrupted the Republican party and deprived it of the Presidency. Root supported Taft against Theodore Roosevelt: yet having assured Taft’s nomination, he took almost no part in the campaign that year. Wilson’s election only added to Root’s frustration, and his last two years of service in the Senate, as he approached seventy, were marked by embittered resistance to the Wilsonian New Freedom.
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Yet his career was by no means over. Upon the outbreak of the First World War, Root joined those who were championing the Allied cause and, after some delay, also the movement for American intervention. His criticism of Wilson’s foreign policy was so impressive that it won the praises even of the New Republic. After the United States entered the war, he urged full support of the administration and accepted Wilson’s appointment, in May 1917, to head a mission to Russia. The mission was a dismal failure; it is hard to avoid the feeling that Elihu Root was the very last person who should have been sent on it. There is something undeniably grotesque in the picture of this elderly corporation lawyer and conservative statesman confronting and attempting to master the volcanic forces of Russian Bolshevism.
After the war, Root returned to his congenial role of constructive critic. He opposed Wilson’s League of Nations internationalism as too unrealistic and impractical and as involving too great a rupture with the continuities of American public policy. Yet he was even more opposed to the Republican irreconcilables (the “isolationists” of those days), who were for scuttling the entire work and withdrawing from the world. He never budged from his position and was largely responsible for keeping alive a moderate internationalism in Republican ranks between the wars.
The last sixteen years of his life Root passed as elder statesman under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, and, in opposition, under Roosevelt. He kept on pressing for America’s participation in world affairs in the interests of maintaining peace and stability; he took a leading part in the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments in 1921; and he fought hard to get the United States into the World Court. He was, of course, altogether opposed to the New Deal. He died in 1937, at the age of ninety-two.
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An appraisal of the man and his career, something Mr. Leopold attempts in his concluding chapter, presents peculiar difficulties. Elihu Root was, as Mr. Leopold makes abundantly clear, a man of superior intelligence, an “alert, acute, and resourceful mind”; he had a wide knowledge of public affairs and a strong sense of public responsibility; and he was one of the best secretaries of state and of war that the country has known. Yet there was a kind of narrowness and limitation about him that seemed to confine his capacities and restrict the scope of his public services. It was not intelligence that he lacked, but vision and boldness of mind; not a sense of dedication to the public interest, but a breadth of sympathy in comprehending that interest. Shall we say that Root suffered from the defects of his conservative virtues? But British conservatism—think of Burke and Disraeli and Churchill—has not generally been so afflicted, nor was American conservatism in earlier days. If we could manage to understand this difference, we might be able to gain an insight into the factors that tended to vitiate the American conservative tradition and to frustrate Root’s career.
Conservatism in Britain emerged against the background of an old-established and self-confident landed aristocracy, sure of its vocation as the ruling class and animated by a genuine spirit of aristocratic responsibility. Its best representatives wished to conserve the imponderables of British tradition and the British constitution, not merely the bank accounts and vested interests of the rich. They were not wedded to laissez-faire, which was the ideology and program of Manchester liberalism; nor did they measure all values in economic terms. We should not forget that Disraeli sponsored a program of “Tory socialism” and that some of the most substantial steps towards the British “welfare state” were taken under Churchill. Even the powerful “Birmingham” influence has not been able to rob British conservatism of its vision, imagination, and social concern.
Conservatism in the United States emerged and developed against a background markedly different. Whatever this country possessed of a genuinely aristocratic tradition helped mold the early conservatism of Alexander Hamilton and the best of the Virginians. But this earlier aristocracy, through its own inner weakness and through the impact of social and economic change, soon disappeared as an important factor in American public life; after the Civil War, American society became entirely bourgeois, dominated by the businessman, his ideology and interests. As a result, liberalism became almost the official philosophy of American public life, liberalism in the older “Manchester” sense. Even conservatism in America became “liberal” in this sense, thoroughly permeated with the timidities, inhibitions, and illusions that characterize the outlook of the businessman in politics. American conservatism has thus, since the Civil War certainly, been a hybrid product, reflecting an uneasy combination of the conservative noblesse oblige with the importunities of bourgeois self-interest. American conservatism could never discriminate between protecting America’s precious constitutional heritage against the “progressive” drive for “direct democracy,” and resisting the programs of social legislation advocated by the reformers of the time. Workmen’s compensation, LaFollette’s Seaman’s Act, and the income tax were opposed with the same intransigence as were such harebrained schemes as the initiative and referendum, the popular recall of judges, and cross-filing in state primaries. And when the conservatives were forced to give way, they generally gave way with an ill grace, yielding too little too late.
Much of this indictment holds for Elihu Root as it does for his fellow conservatives. It explains why the perennial significance of Root’s authentic conservatism has been so easily obscured by, and confused with, the no longer intelligible positions he took on particular social and economic issues of his day. He did not distinguish them in his own mind, and posterity has been hardly more discriminating.
And yet some discrimination must be made, for there is much of enduring value in Root’s thinking. Root fought what seems to us a pointless fight against the “progressivism” represented by Wilson and the earlier Roosevelt; but is it not true that his vindication of the indirect representative character of our constitutional system still remains an idea of vital significance, while most of the “progressive” contrivances for rendering our democracy more “direct” have revealed themselves to be of doubtful value? The (best opinion of the inter-war decades supported Wilson’s internationalism against even Root’s moderate strictures; but have not the extravagances of the “one worlders” of our own time lent force to Root’s insistence on the necessity for schemes of world peace and international association bearing some relation to the continuities and realities of the world situation? It is easy enough to represent the Root Commission to revolutionary Russia in a ludicrous light; but is not our fight against totalitarianism, on the political level at least, a fight against the absolute “mass” state in the name of the limited-power constitutional state to which Root was so devoted and of which he was so competent an expositor? Root had little understanding of early 20th-century American “progressivism,” and none at all of the revolutionary forces that were tearing Russia apart and beginning to transform the face of the earth. That was his weakness, the weakness of American conservatism. But he had also his strength: a firm grip upon certain truths about political life and political institutions. And it is these truths that we are beginning to rediscover today.
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