"...anxiety.
It was lost on nobody that Root had never himself run on a general election ticket for any office, and though he was - for a lifelong bureaucrat, at least - a fairly talented orator who had spoken at every Liberal convention since 1888, a great deal of pressure was made to keep him "above the fray" of a general election campaign, both due to his rust as a campaigner and to create a sense of inevitability around his candidacy and lean into the public perception of him as a talented administrator hard at work in Philadelphia to bring the war to a conclusion.
Root did not mind this, and his contribution to the campaign was remaining cloistered in the capital meeting with diplomats and dignitaries while promising "the grand plan for peace" that would follow the conclusion of the presidential campaign and the war, meeting well-wishers at his fairly modest townhouse on Chestnut Street and giving interviews to any journalist, domestic or foreign, who needed a quote, all while a legion of surrogates fanned out across New York and the competitive Midwest where the election would be won or lost to make his case. Hughes was highly reluctant, due to his concerns for decorum while the war was still ongoing, to make many campaign stops, as was Vice President Hadley; instead, Root relied upon figures as diverse as Pennsylvania Senator Boies Penrose and American Bar Association chairman George Wickersham to rally conservatives put off by the Hughes Presidency's statism to the Hiram Johnsons, Bainbridge Colbys and Richard Yateses of the world to speak plainly to progressives about the need to keep the momentum of the Hughes years headed forward and "keep the fingers of Tammany off of the articles of peace."
The campaign of 1916 did not occur in a vacuum, of course, and was subsumed by events in the South but also, increasingly, at home. August and September of 1916 are remembered for Pershing's March to the Sea, and October for the final liberation of Texas and the mass surrenders in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida that placed American landships in spitting distance of New Orleans, and popular history acts in many ways as if nothing of import occurred other than the rapid collapse of the Confederacy in the final four months of the war starting in Atlanta and Richmond. But the first signs of economic trouble revealed itself as early as the late summer of 1916; shipyards in Seattle and Oakland had long since begun shuttering their production lines or converting tonnage to civilian vessels after two years of trying to produce as many naval hulls as they could, and unemployment in both cities more than doubled over the course of late 1916, presaging issues as munitions factories, textile mills producing uniforms, and other industrial production for wartime began gradually slowing down their output in anticipation that the needs of December 1916 would be well below those of September 1916. Stimson did his best at trying to manage this slowdown, using Root's deputies to secure contracts to sell munitions brokered through Drexel & Morgan, but hours being cut was already a discussion being had in local newspapers as the campaign advanced.
The economic minds behind the American war machine were fairly divided on what, if anything, to do about this issue. Much of the labor that swelled American industry in 1913-16 was foreign-born, and many politicians within the Liberal Party ambivalent about immigration suggested that a labor surplus could perhaps persuade unemployed Italians, Poles and Serbs who had made great sums in the war years to return home to start families and live comfortably in Europe. Other figures, such as New York's powerful financier George Baker or the soon-to-be-infamous Andrew Mellon, [1] viewed the coming labor glut and wind down of industrial wartime production as an opportunity to perhaps undo some of the "statist" rationing and economically nationalist policies Hughes had put in place that they believed, incorrectly, would be illusory and temporary.
While the consortium of bankers and investors who had helped finance the war, led by J.P. "Jack" Morgan, Jr. were not the shadowy cabal of puppeteers in the Root era that they were often perceived as or even particularly allied to the administration - Morgan was heavily exposed to massive amounts of French loans and assets and spent little time concerned with domestic American politics after the end of the war, while Baker never forgave Root his full-throated support of a peacetime income tax and made it a point not to associate - the men who had collectively financed the behemoth that crushed the Bloc Sud were in sharp disagreement on what the postwar period would look like, only that a sharp break from the economic trajectory of the Hearst and Hughes years was needed..." [2][3][4]
- The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President
[1] Foreshadowing...
[2] Suffice to say this is not going to end well, for Root or anybody else.
[3] As a further addendum to this, the US finds itself in a very different situation here having Morgan, Baker et al not be the financiers for Britain and France, and thus emerging as a net creditor, but rather having them finance an American war, which means that the balance sheet facing the US in terms of its red ledger is primarily domestic. This is a big part of what makes the USA's economic foundations in the dire 1917-21 period so shaky; it has ballooning debt after the war and will have a deflationary, fiscally tight-fisted government in place during that time right as demobilization occurs and they have to start servicing that debt
[4] The idea for this update, for whatever it is worth, is based on the 1918-19 and 1945 recessions, which began even before the war ended but when it was obvious that peace was at hand and wartime production started to rapidly wind down in anticipation.
