New York EXPLAINED
Get the brief

On this day in New York · February 15, 1845

Elihu Root Is Born in Oneida County

A country lawyer from a Hamilton College professor's house grew up to run the War Department and the State Department, then won a Nobel Prize for trying to get nations to sue each other instead of shoot.

Elihu Root Is Born in Oneida County
Wikimedia Commons / Elihu Root

The facts

Born
February 15, 1845, in Clinton, Oneida County, New York
Cabinet posts
Secretary of War (1899-1904) and Secretary of State (1905-1909)
U.S. Senate
Represented New York, 1909-1915
Nobel Peace Prize
Won in 1912 after negotiating 24 bilateral arbitration treaties

Elihu Root was born on February 15, 1845, in Clinton, a village in Oneida County where his father taught mathematics at Hamilton College. He trained as a lawyer in New York City and built one of the city's top corporate practices before Presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt pulled him into Washington, first as Secretary of War, then as Secretary of State. New York sent him to the U.S. Senate in 1909. In between and after those jobs, Root spent years negotiating treaties that pushed countries to settle their fights through arbitration instead of armies, work that won him the 1912 Nobel Peace Prize.

In their words

The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.

  1. The chief force which makes for peace and order in the community of individuals is not the police officer, with his club, but it is the praise and blame, the honor and shame, which follow observance or violation of the community's standards of right conduct.

    Elihu Root, Nobel Peace Prize acceptance lecture, 1912

    Source: Brooklyn College, CUNY (Nobel lecture text)

Why it still matters

Root's argument that nations could be shamed and bound into good behavior by law rather than armies helped build the case for international courts and the institutions, right down to the UN complex on the East Side, that still run out of New York.

Sources

Get the day it happened, the day it happens.

Every morning brief ends with this day in New York history, and every day adds a page to this almanac. Free, in your inbox.

Free to start. The unsubscribe link actually works.