"...poorly remembered in the United States for the disastrous economic conditions of his term and his perceived flippancy towards the struggles of the working class in this period; Root is also not particularly well liked across much of the Americas, either, viewed as one of the architects of yanquismo chauvinism over the next five decades, particularly in the Caribbean Basin and Isthmian republics.
It is ironic, then, that Root's belief in the Panamerican Congress was genuinely held, as evidenced by his contemporary correspondence and public proncouncements. "A grand congress of this hemisphere and her two continents," Root argued in an open letter published in early October 1917 in the New York Times, "well-regulated and cabined in its powers and purviews, comprised of the best men of the Anglo-Saxon and Latin races in harmony, would be the chief guarantor against any such conflagration on Western soil ever repeating." The Panamerican Congress had first begun in 1881 at the behest of James Blaine, and while a failure in accomplishing its more grandiose goals of permanent intra-hemispheric cooperation, it had been generally well-received by its participants; they had continued every four years until the start of the war beginning in 1893, which was held on the sidelines of the Columbian World Exposition in Chicago, arranged by Blaine's political protege John Hay, who had in many ways been a mentor to Root. Root's attachment to the Panamerican Congress was as much personal as ideological, and it would be fair to say that well-intentioned as it may have been, his dogged belief that the Congress could have avoided the GAW had it been convened in 1913 as planned and that it would prevent future conflicts in the Americas was naive utopianism. It was also a position where he found himself unusually isolated, even within his own party.
One of his few American supporters was, perhaps unsurprisingly, his immediate predecessor as Secretary of State, Lindley Garrison, who had served the Democrat William Hearst in that role 1909 to 1913 and would return to the State Department in 1921 for a further seven years in the job. Garrison was the early 20th century's most important Democratic diplomat, an important thinker on how to synthesize the party's domestic worldview into a coherent set of principles for conducting foreign policy that did not reject Blainism but rather enhanced and progressed it rather than simply simmer in glories gone by, as it was thought Liberals were fond of. Garrison was thus of the internationalist wing of his party, opposed to an isolationist wing gaining force in the Midwest and Prairie States that was deeply skeptical of international treaties and involvement "outside the lines," as it was stated once by Senator John Eugene Osborne of Wyoming. He agreed in the value of a Panamerican Congress, having represented the United States in 1909, but even though he regarded Root a peer and friend, he found Root's staunch belief in its almost divine value misguided.
Rather, Garrison - who was himself the first champion of the American-Argentine Treaty and "special relationship" - saw a Panamerican Congress as a way to cement the new, American-led order coming out of the Great American War. Continentalism, arbitration, common international law - all these were things that the United States had always pressed for, and a single forum for disputes rather than bilateralism appealed to him. (In this mode he ironically sounds more like the Liberal Party of present day). Garrison saw the postwar settlements as a smattering of treaties that failed to chart any kind of architecture for what the postwar Americas would actually look like, drawn up to either end a war expediently (Kansas City with the Native chiefs of what would become Sequoyah, Coronado with the Mexicans) or to hash out punishment towards enemies that the United States did not like (Lima with Chile, Mount Vernon with the Confederacy). Garrison viewed a new Panamerican Congress, ideally convened every other year, as a permanent court of hemispheric arbitration and perhaps a venue for settling matters of trade (invariably in yanqui favor), navigation, and free movement of peoples; the contours of modern debates over the Free Travel Area or the proposed Common Market can be seen in this vision. This was not some grand forum for peace - it was a method of explicitly enforcing a new American hegemony that had already been formed through peaceful and commercial means.
Garrison was typically assisted in his internationalist instincts by George Turner, the most tenured Senate Democrat, its longtime chair on the Foreign Relations Committee, one of the drafters of the Treaty of Mount Vernon and the potentate of a small clique of senior Western Democrats known colloquially as the "Synod." Turner, representing the state of Washington and keenly aware of the interests of Seattle's ports, was usually a reliable ally on such measures, but by late 1917 he had begun growing increasingly skeptical of the value of the Panamerican Congress. The Americas had been cowed, in his view, and the future of the United States lay across the Pacific - in enhancing its position in Chusan (an island concession off the eastern coast of China), expanding its ties to Asian ports, and becoming the guarantor of a "belt of democracies" around the Pacific Rim that included not just South American states but also Australia, the Philippines, China, and perhaps Korea, where American business and missionary interests held great sway. Turner was not vehemently opposed to Garrison's ideas of a permanent Congress, but he was not interested enough to advocate for his friend, and without Turner, Garrison - in private life at the time, still - saw little interest across the Democratic Party as a whole for a push. It was also the case that Root's standing with Democrats had collapsed by the time 1917 turned to 1918 - the economy was in tatters, his administration had shown itself hostile to organized labor and outside ideas, and the occupation of the Confederacy was increasingly an incompetent, inept bloodbath. There was no trust that Root's vaunted "wise men" who had proven themselves anything but could deliver such a delicate diplomatic program.
Root was unhelped, too, by his own party - Lodge, his Secretary of State, indeed saw the permanent Rootian Panamerican Congress as insufficiently hegemonic, as a way in which the "conquered can now dispute the conqueror." While this kind of language was unusually extreme, most Liberals were extremely reluctant to extend olive branches, especially to smaller Latin states. Relations with strong and important Mexico were improving, Brazil was held in check by the alliance with Argentina, and wartime allies Peru and Bolivia looked increasingly unreliable, while all others were "minnows," as Lodge put it, or politically dominated by European states, such as Colombia's relationship with France or Venezuela and Costa Rica with Germany. The appetite for actually trying to chart out a postwar "order" was not there - the order already existed de facto to most of Philadelphia, and it was the order of American businesses now unhindered across the hemisphere by protectionist or nationalist governments, supported by American guns whether in the hands of a Marine or the decks of a battlecruiser.
The push of 1917-18 to create a league or permanent congress for the Americas was thus a dismal failure before it even passed an idea charted out in Philadelphia drawing rooms; and, to be sure, it would likely have run aground against strong opposition around the Hemisphere, where sufficient governments still regarded the idea as very clearly a vehicle for further American hegemonic domination of her smaller "sisters and cousins," as the popular parlance at the time was. A Panamerican Congress would be held, poorly attended, in 1921, a far cry from Root's vision; the permanent annual sitting of the Panamerican Congress would not come about until decades later. Root, one of the most famous foreign policy minds of his generation, saw the chief diplomatic endeavor of his Presidency fizzle and die with a whimper; it was, perhaps, emblematic of his unloved Presidency as a whole, and a failure despite best intentions that augured ominously the clientelism that would come to define pan-American relations for the next fifty years..."
- The Firm Hand of Freedom: Soft Imperialism by the United States in Latin America 1917-69