"...entirely sure what to anticipate from him. Much had been made, as has been discussed earlier, about how Root was by far the most experienced man to enter the office of the President in history, and it was indeed that experience that had appealed to the right-wing party bosses and the technocrats both. The Root Report had laid the groundwork for the Army reforms of the Hearst era that had helped the United States prevent a total collapse in Pennsylvania after the surprise of the Maryland Offensive wore off, and as Secretary of State he had been responsible for the sober steering of American foreign policy through its most trying hour. Of course, his tenures as Attorney General and Treasury Secretary under Hay and Foraker had left much to be desired, and it was in fact that version of Root who it turned out America was going to get.
But that experience, and continuity in war, had perhaps been his exclusive selling point. He entered office with little in the way of proposed agenda other than ending the war, a stance that left him later exposed to the ambitions of his various Cabinet secretaries. His main two goals in the short term were, it turned out, fairly simple and easy programs that would have just as soon passed under McClellan - the ratification of Mount Vernon, and the passage of an amendment to shorten the "lame duck period" between the Presidential election and inauguration.
Such a shortening had been proposed years earlier, but the events of 1913 had supercharged interest by both Houses of Congress in its passage, and it had nearly been sent to the states the year before. The idea that the long four months between November 1912 and March 1913 had helped exacerbate the tensions was one of the few things both Hughes and Hearst agreed on, and Garrison - whose opinion Root took seriously as an outside advisor both as Secretary of State and as President, and whom he full-throatedly encouraged to accept returning to public service when he was asked to return to State in 1921 - concurred with this view. In fact, it was such a high priority for the Root administration that he had even directly urged Congress to pass this proposed 16th Amendment in his inaugural, stating, "may this be the last time an inaugural ceremony is held in the month of March." The only debate was whether to split up the dates for swearing in the President and the Congress; one proposal from George Prouty was to swear in both Houses of Congress on January 3 and the President on January 20th, in order to give each branch "their due." This largely fizzled, however, as the idea of a "day of renewal" of Congress and the Executive taking office together in tandem appealed to too many traditionalists, and the amendment that won the day was one drafted by Congress Charles Hamilton of New York, who settled on a shared date of January 10th, with Congress' first sitting of the term beginning Constitutionally as soon as the swearing-in, thus taking the ability to set a sitting out of the Speaker's hands and formalizing a practice in place for decades. For a constitutional debate, the 16th Amendment carried remarkably little controversy and once the language of the amendment was finalized and simplified, it passed near-unanimously in both Houses and was ratified by the sufficient number of states before the end of 1917. Root, indeed, was the last President to be inaugurated in March, and he would be the first President to leave office on January 10th.
The passage of the Mount Vernon Treaty posed its own difficulties, however. Root was famous, and would soon become infamous, for not having a particularly good relationship with the Senate, unlike his immediate predecessor who despite being a teetotaler learned to socialize with both Liberal and Democratic politicians and was often able to maneuver his priorities carefully through both Houses through dogged negotiation and a nose for compromise. Root was not as rigid as his reputation suggested, but one of his few friends in that body - indeed in Philadelphia - was Lodge, who now had replaced him at State. The Liberal caucus in the Senate was an unwieldy big tent, including in its numbers arch-conservatives like Pennsylvania's Penrose as well as progressives who were often left of the median Democrat such as Walter Lafferty of Oregon or Bob LaFollette, indicators of a time when the parties were not sorted well by ideology but rather by region and class. With Lodge at State, the Foreign Affairs Committee was now entirely the fiefdom of George Turner, the most tenured Senator, who despite no longer formally being Chair of the Committee may as well have been, what with him being succeeded by the non-entity of J. Edward Addicks of Delaware.
Turner, deservedly, was very proud of the Mount Vernon Treaty he had helped craft and as an unofficial leader of the Democratic Caucus as Kern ailed, he worked had to whip the Treaty towards ratification. It was a surprise to him, then, to learn that Lodge was secretly urging his former Liberal colleagues to delay ratification of the Treaty until the Confederacy ratified it. Since its finalization, Lodge had begun to feel he had been insufficiently draconian in its terms, and was unconvinced that the Confederacy would actually concede to its terms peacefully. As such, in the (in his mind) likely outcome that the Confederacy were to reject the treaty, it would be better if they rejected it before the United States ratified it, in his view, to give Philadelphia a better moral high ground to begin burning the Confederacy again, from a more advantageous position with nearly five months of rest.
Turner and Lodge had, despite their sharply different views on domestic politics, always left their rivalries at the door and been good friends and capable partners at Foreign Affairs, but upon discovering that Lodge was now secretly lobbying on a wait-and-see approach that appeared to an outside observer to instead be cheering for Mount Vernon's failure even after negotiating it himself, that friendship was over. Turner's intense lobbying for the Treaty escalated and he began working on Liberal Senators himself, isolating Lodge barely a month into his tenure.
Root, at this point, also had to involve himself, as Senators began debating whether the provisions for abolishing slavery had sufficient teeth. In a speech in Boston to the Organization for Negro Education, flanked by both the heroic General Pershing and the new Chief of Staff of the Army Peyton March, Root appealed in Lodge's hometown to "the greatest act of liberty of this century" in securing the signatures of Confederate leadership to end, in some capacity, chattel slavery. A major boon was found in Massachusetts' two Senators, Fred Gillett and John Weeks, announcing their support of the Treaty. In the end, it was ratified with only six votes against, all Liberals, and the fears of the Treaty being defeated in Philadelphia were not borne out. Nonetheless, the Presidential intervention in the process signaled that Root had less influence with his party's Senators than he thought, and it was not the last time that he would look weaker than expected.
With the 17th Amendment and the Treaty of Mount Vernon passing through Congress by late April, it would seem that Root's great priorities were essentially over the goal line, and he had succeeded in securing two major early victories. But it was not these votes but rather two speeches given that same month that would really define his term - the first in New York, as Andrew Mellon outlined to Wall Street bankers and lawyers the deflationary program the Treasury intended to pursue, and the second in northern Alabama, as Nathan Forrest II called upon all of the Confederacy to resist by force of arms and trigger a mass insurgency against occupying soldiers..."
- The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President