THE UNTOLD PROGRESSIVISM of ELIHU ROOT by ROB LITTLE
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UNFADING HALO: THE UNTOLD PROGRESSIVISM OF ELIHU ROOT by ROB LITTLE Bachelor of Arts, 2004 Midwestern State University Wichita Falls, Texas Master of Arts, 2006 Midwestern State University Wichita Falls, Texas Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of AddRan College of Liberal Arts Texas Christian University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December, 2015 Copyright by Robert L. Little 2015 ii For Puja and Asha with all my love. For Mom and Dad, thanks for believing in me. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In such a herculean effort, much of the credit rests with the supporters that made the task bearable and possible. First, I would like to thank my family. My parents, Mike and Diane gave their unyielding support through this and every endeavor in my life. For that, I am eternally grateful. Next, I would like my to thank my wife Puja, for her enduring love and patience. At various moments, when I doubted my ability to complete this process, she always kept me focused and driven to finish. I would like to thank my wife’s parents Ramesh and Usha for their persistence and confidence. Lastly, I would like to thank my daughter Asha. Once I found out that she was going to be born, she served as my inspiration to complete. I wanted set an example for her to finish what you start. Though she doesn’t know it yet, she played a major role in this project. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to those within the Department of History at TCU. First, I want to thank Dr. Todd Kerstetter, my dissertation advisor. Though I encountered a number of setbacks during my journey, he stepped up and accepted the role as my advisor even though I was already in the middle of my dissertation project. Without hesitation, he jumped right in and provided much needed encouragement and suggestions essential to my success. I would also like to thank the late Dr. Mark Gilderhus for his guidance, wisdom, and humor. He will be greatly missed, but served as a critical element of my academic experience and will not be forgotten. I am thankful for my department colleagues Jose Carlos de la Puente, Will Kelly, Jahue Anderson, Robert Butts, Blake Williams, Chris Draper, Ronald “Bird” Burris for enduring me, challenging me, and befriending me. I am eternally grateful to the History Department for taking a chance on me and helping mold me into the historian and person I have become. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION . 1 I. ROOTING LAW IN ORDER . 26 Lettering in the Law . 37 Legal Reform for the Poor . 42 Civic-Minded Public Service . 47 Uprooting Political Corruption . 51 Man Against the Machine . 60 Root and Judicial Reform . 67 Curbing Corporate Influence in Elections . 76 Two of a Kind: Roosevelt and Root . 81 Policing Corruption: Law Enforcement Reform . 84 II. MILITARY PROGRESSIVISM: THE ROOT REFORMS . 92 Called to Service . 94 Addressing Alger’s Incompetence . .100 The Merit of Men . 104 Managing Military Administration . 106 The Long Game of Military Reform . 116 Weighing the Canteen Ban . 121 Root’s Reorganization . 123 The Military’s Other Branches . 133 III. GETTING AT THE ROOT OF HIS FOREIGN POLICY: THE CUBA EXPERIMENT . 142 Realizing “Cuba Libre” after the War of 1898 . 148 Revising Regulations: Legal Reforms in Cuba . 157 Education in Translation: Cuban Educational Reform . 170 The Root of Power: Government Reforms in Cuba . 185 Making Their Mark: Cuban Elections . 195 Root’s Role in the Monroe Doctrine and Platt Amendment . 198 IV. LABORATORY OF PROGRESS & EXPERIMENT IN EMPIRE: PROGRESSIVE IDEAS IN THE PHILIPPINES, 1899-1904 . 215 Rumble in the Jungle: Backdrop to the Philippine-American War . 219 The Schurman Commission . 221 Uprooting Resistance: Root’s Military Campaign . 231 The Taft Commission and the Transition to Civil Government . 237 Home Rule at Home . 244 Home Rule for the Taft Commission . 255 Home Rule for Filipinos . 258 Progressive Political Education for the Filipinos . 264 Civil Service Reform on the Islands . 276 v V. ROOTING OUT CORRUPTION: REORGANIZING THE US CONSULAR SERVICE . 294 Inheriting the “Spoils System”. 298 Root’s View from the Inside . 305 Efficiency and Consular Reform . 311 The Lodge Act and Congressional Resistance . 324 Reorganization by Executive Order . 335 VI. ORDER, PEACE, AND GOODWILL: ROOT’S PROGRESSIVE DIPLOMACY, 1905-1909 . 342 Root’s Exit and Re-entry into National Politics . 347 Fallout from the Russo-Japanese War . 351 Barriers to Friendship: The “Yellow Peril” in San Francisco, 1906 . 353 Building Consensus: The Gentleman’s and Root-Takahira Agreements . 368 The Original Good Neighbor: The Root Doctrine in Latin America . 373 The Venerable Gospel: Root’s Progressive Vision of Roosevelt’s Corollary . 379 Mending Fences: Root’s South American Tour . 385 VII. THE ARCHITECT OF ARBITRATION: FROM SECRETARY OF WAR TO THE HARBINGER OF PEACE . 426 The Evolution of Arbitration: The American Peace Movement . 430 Modernizing International Arbitration: The Hague Conferences (1899 and 1907) . 436 Debt Collection and the Drago Doctrine . 443 Putting Order in the Court . 445 Organizing Labor Arbitration . 452 Prelude to the Coal Strike . 459 Reacting and Resolving the Great Coal Strike of 1902 . 462 VIII. THE ROOTS OF PROGRESSIVISM: PROFESSIONALIZATION, STANDARDIZATION, AND CODIFICATION . 475 Professionalization: The Rise of Legalism and Legal Organization . 478 Reforming the Bar: Root as President of the ABA . 481 Creating Accord from Discord: The Nationalization of State Laws . 496 Thinking Globally and Acting Locally: The Codification of International Law . 503 Courting Consensus: Codification and the World Court . 515 CONCLUSION . 526 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 538 vi INTRODUCTION: REVISING ROOT “True love of country is not mere blind partisanship. It is regard for the people of one’s country and all of them; it is a feeling of fellowship and brotherhood for all of them; it is a desire for the prosperity and happiness of all of them; it is kindly and considerate judgment towards all of them . The essential condition of true progress is that it shall be based up grounds of reason, and not of prejudice.” Elihu Root Throughout his long and distinguished career as a lawyer, statesman, and senator, Elihu Root modernized, reformed, and advanced progressive institutions at home and abroad. Like many reformers of his day, Root grew increasingly troubled by the growing inequality that developed out of the social, economic, and politic chaos of the Gilded Age. In one of the earliest works on the subject, Harold Faulkner established that during the Progressive Era, thoughtful men of the progressive strain worried that America “in making her fortune was in peril of losing her soul.”1 Root recognized the growing need for reform, accountability, and efficiency of public institutions, while also promoting an individual responsibility need for education, morality, and self-restraint. Accordingly, he deemed it of the utmost importance reformers to remain “alive to the defects in our 1 Harold Underwood Faulkner, The Quest for Social Justice, 1898-1914 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1931), 81. 1 system of laws and solicitous to find means to cure them.”2 Elite lawyers such as Root formed a significant majority of progressive reformers who sought restore the public trust in civil government, depoliticize civil service appointments, and destroy political machines.3 Beyond these measures, Root, the supposed “archconservative,” sympathized with or worked toward many progressive efforts, including legal access for the poor, campaign finance reform, merit-based political appointments, civil service reform, corporate and inheritance taxes, trust busting, the regulation of corporations, direct primaries, and voting rights for African Americans. Though he championed a number of progressive ideas, Root failed to support all of the vast and varied progressive agenda, though he opposed only a specific few issues: women’s suffrage, direct election of senators, prohibition, and judicial recall. His stance on these principles made Root no less a progressive than his reformist counterparts who embraced only specific reforms and rejected others with a cafeteria-style approach. Regardless of their policy differences, Root and his progressive colleagues agreed the best type of government served the will and needs of its people. As a result, he embraced a progressive outlook toward enhancing and expanding the institutions of government, both local and state, to meet with the needs of a modern society often plagued with legal inequity, class divisions, and personal suffering. 2 Elihu Root, Judicial Decisions and Public Feelings: Address by Hon. Elihu Root as President of the New York Bar Association, at the annual meeting, in New York City, on January 19, 1912 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912), 6. 3 Robert Gordon, “Are Lawyers Friends of Democracy?,” in The Paradox of Professionalism: Lawyers and the Possibility of Justice, Scott L. Cummings, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 42. 2 Despite all of Root’s progressive-minded endeavors, newspaper articles and subsequent historical works branded him as an unapologetic “corporatist,” a shill for big businesses, or a conservative reactionary rather than showing the progressive undercurrents that composed his policies and personality. To increase sales, newspaper editors trumpeted the longstanding negative stereotypes of lawyers and combined them with the sensationalist journalism of the period. The earliest and most influential in this regard was the newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. Hearst, who failed to be elected for the governorship of New York in 1906, blamed the political clout wielded by Root as a primary reason for his loss. As a result, Hearst then launched a vitriolic public campaign against Root, wrongly labeling him as a tool of major corporations and a henchman for political bosses. He constantly paraded and exaggerated Root’s limited, but highly visible role on William “Marcy” Tweed’s defense team years before. These accusations, unchecked yet reprinted, made their way across papers through the Hearst newspaper empire, while small town papers, many already hostile toward urban life, merely reprinted and repackaged these falsehoods.