|
|
Thus were established lucrative and long-standing connections with the titans then interesting themselves in railroads and in the development of Minnesota's fabulous iron-ore deposits; these connections underlay the personal fortune which enabled Kellogg in his later years to devote himself to public service. In the early years of the twentieth century, however, three spectacular departures from the practice of corporation law aligned him with Theodore Roosevelt in the latter's trust-busting activities. In the first he acted as prosecutor in the federal government's successful attack on the General Paper Company, a monopolistic combination of newsprint manufacturers (1905-06). Beginning in 1906, too, he served as counsel to the Interstate Commerce Commission in its investigation of the activities of Edward H. Harriman [q.v.] in railroad finance and in the judicial proceedings which followed upon Harriman's refusal to answer the Commission's questions. Finally, and running concurrently, he carried the burden of the government attack on the Standard Oil Trust. Though this giant combination had survived repeated onslaughts under the antitrust laws, Kellogg pursued the case with vigor and persistence, first gaining a favorable verdict in the United States Circuit Court (1909), then participating in the appeal to the Supreme Court that resulted in a final decision ordering the dismemberment of the trust (1911).
These private and public activities brought Kellogg such prominence that he was chosen president of the American Bar Association for 1912-13. Meanwhile his growing interest in public questions and his fairly close contacts with Roosevelt and William Howard Taft had led him into national politics. He supported Roosevelt in 1912--his only aberration from Republican regularity. Returning to the fold, he played some part in reuniting the party and found his reward in election to the United States Senate in 1916.
Here he attained modest note as a debater of constitutional issues during the first World War. In December 1918 he announced his belief that a league of nations should be formed after the war to preserve the peace. As the Wilsonian pattern took shape, however, he began to have doubts, and when the lines were drawn on the Versailles Treaty he went into opposition. Nevertheless, his position was more moderate than that of Henry Cabot Lodge [q.v.], Republican leader in the Senate. He proposed a less drastic set of reservations to the treaty than Lodge's and joined the bipartisan group which in January 1920 forced discussion of a compromise solution, though without success.
President Harding afforded Kellogg his first diplomatic experience through an appointment as delegate to the Fifth International Conference of American States at Santiago, Chile (1923). Meantime he had lost his race for re-election to the Senate to Henrik Shipstead, representative of a middle-western upsurge of agrarian discontent. After a brief return to the law Kellogg was sent by President Coolidge as ambassador to Great Britain. In this post he participated in the London and Paris conferences where the Dawes Plan for payment of German reparations took shape, playing a personal role of some importance in bringing French and German leaders together at a critical juncture when the question of occupation of the Ruhr threatened to prevent agreement. Coolidge recalled him from what he remembered as one of his most interesting experiences to succeed Charles Evans Hughes as Secretary of State in March 1925.
Suffering at first from invidious comparisons between himself and his august predecessor, he soon faced thorny problems. Two factors contributed toward making his service fall somewhat short of its full potentialities. The first was an organizational upheaval within the State Department produced by the Rogers Act of 1924. This act consolidated the previously independent diplomatic and consular services into a single Foreign Service, in which officers were presumably to serve interchangeably. The consuls outnumbered the diplomats by over three to one, but those who handled promotions under the act awarded them in larger proportion to the diplomats. This caused severe tensions which trespassed upon the time of high-ranking men in the Department and caused Kellogg himself considerable concern. Again, he was served in turn by three under-secretaries, Joseph C. Grew, Robert E. Olds [q.v.], and J. Reuben Clark. The first was excessively involved in the personnel matter already mentioned, and the others were lawyers whose preoccupation with legal questions and with the current difficulties with Mexico prevented them from rendering Kellogg the over-all assistance to which he was entitled and exposed him to administrative details from which he should have been shielded. Also operating to reduce departmental efficiency were defects of Kellogg's own health and temperament which had earned him during his Senate days the nickname of "Nervous Nellie." His vacillation and his occasional outbursts of temper made working with him at times a trying experience.
Of the diplomatic problems confronting Kellogg in his secretaryship, Latin America presented a generous share. Efforts to compose the troublesome Tacna-Arica boundary dispute between Peru and Chile, inherited from the previous administration, took much time but proved fruitless. Renewed American intervention in Nicaragua subjected the United States to bitter attacks by anti-imperialists and Kellogg himself to particular vilification. In Mexico his own ineptitude at first sharpened an antagonism over oil and land policy only recently and incompletely quieted. The Mexican situation was redeemed, however, by the appointment as ambassador of Dwight W. Morrow [q.v.], whose effective labors softened, if they did not finally remove, recent acerbities. Still, the Sixth International Conference of American States at Havana (1928) was the scene of sharply critical attacks on American interventionism, only partly met by Hughes, who had been induced to head the American delegation.
Chinese problems claimed large attention, and here Kellogg's influence was important in painstaking if unsuccessful efforts to meet wartorn China's demands for recognition of a nationhood she had not yet earned. He took the lead in calling and conducting the conferences promised by the Washington Conference of 1921-22 to consider lifting the burdens of extraterritoriality and tariff restrictions under which China had long labored, though these conferences proved abortive. Later, when Chinese nationalism led to attacks on foreigners at Nanking, Kellogg refused to join the Powers in forcible reprisals. Still later, when a stronger government had emerged under Chiang Kai-shek, the United States under Kellogg's leadership was the first major power to accord China an "equal" tariff treaty.
In Europe, the three-power Geneva Naval Conference (1927) did nothing to advance the cause of disarmament and developed an Anglo-American antagonism which carried over into the following period. The Kellogg-Briand Pact, on the other hand, seemed at the time of its signing (1928) a major success. The French Foreign Minister, Aristide Briand, had suggested an agreement between France and the United States renouncing war as an instrument of national policy. Kellogg, lukewarm toward the idea and fearful of the entanglement implicit in a bilateral arrangement, delayed for months; then, prodded into action by vocal opponents of war, he broadened the base of the treaty to include all nations who would subscribe to the pronouncement. Amid universal rejoicing at the "outlawry of war," sixty-two nations, including all the major powers, signed the treaty. Kellogg considered it the crowning achievement of his incumbency.
Kellogg left office with Coolidge in March 1929. Travel, occasional participation in his law firm's affairs, election to a seat on the Permanent Court of International Justice (1930-35), receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize (in 1930, for the year 1929) for his labors on behalf of the anti-war treaty, the acceptance of various honors, and the celebration in 1936 of fifty years of marriage rounded out his career. He died at St. Paul of pneumonia following a cerebral thrombosis and was buried in the National Cathedral in Washington, D. C.
On the whole, Kellogg was a reasonably capable but undistinguished Secretary of State. He entered office with no well-thought-out policies, met emergencies not too efficiently as they arose, and generally followed previously developed lines under the counsel of his professional advisers, although he was occasionally checked by Coolidge and sometimes exhibited a stubborn insistence of his own against the convictions of his subordinates. He was generally conservative, an irascible but still a friendly colleague and chief, not prone to long flights of fancy or of leadership--a fitting associate of Calvin Coolidge and an apt exponent of American policies of the 1920's.
text by L. Ethan Ellis, Dictionary of American Biography, Supplements 1-2: To 1940. American Council of Learned Societies, 1944-1958.
Sources:
Kellogg's papers are in the Minn. Hist. Soc., which also has the papers of the law firm of Davis, Kellogg, and Severence. The dispatches covering Kellogg's career as Secretary of State are now available in the Nat. Archives (see esp. Record Group 84). The papers of Chandler P. Anderson, Nelson T. Johnson, and William E. Borah, all in the Lib. of Cong., contain valuable material, as do those of Joseph C. Grew, at Harvard Univ.; Henry L. Stimson, at Yale Univ.; and Dwight W. Morrow, at Amherst Coll. The diary of William R. Castle (in private hands), who as an Assistant Secretary of State and Washington neighbor was very close to Kellogg, sheds much light on his personality and working habits. The standard printed work is David Bryn-Jones, Frank B. Kellogg: A Biog. (1937); very useful also is Robert H. Ferrell, Peace in Their Time: The Origins of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1952). Other sources for particular facts include: Timothy Hopkins, The Kelloggs in the Old World and the New, vol. II (1903); N. Y. Times, Dec. 22, 28, 1937; biog. references compiled by Dale M. Bentz, Univ. of Ill. Lib. School.