Frank D. Root

Frank D. Root was one of the active editors of the New York Times so long ago that the news which he handled professionally appears nowadays to belong to an almost forgotten era of American history. Perspective changes curiously in such reminiscence; to the present generation the Cleveland campaign seems as far away as the Lincoln administration, and the period between them even more remote. Root was the Times’s Washington correspondent when Garfield was assassinated; he forced the investigation into the “Star Route mail frauds,” which excited the popular mind in those simpler days as much and as little as Teapot Dome has stirred it up nearly half a century later. His older fellow-Centurions will perhaps recall Root more clearly in his station on the fringe, so to speak, of the old-time convivial group at the northwest corner of the dining-table. He shared only casually in the exchange of epigram; the hilarities of the others caused nothing more than an occasional grave smile from behind his long gray beard; but he was none the less a part of the picture.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1929 Century Association Yearbook