United States Senator
In January 1909, Root was elected a U.S. Senator from New York, and served from March 4, 1909, to March 4, 1915. He was an active member of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. He chose not to seek re-election in 1914. During and after his Senate service, Root served as President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1910 to 1925.
In a 1910 letter published by the New York Times, Root supported the proposed income tax amendment, which became the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution:
It is said that a very large part of any income tax under the amendment would be paid by citizens of New York....
The reason why the citizens of New York will pay so large a part of the tax is New York City is the chief financial and commercial centre of a great country with vast resources and industrial activity. For many years Americans engaged in developing the wealth of all parts of the country have been going to New York to secure capital and market their securities and to buy their supplies. Thousands of men who have amassed fortunes in all sorts of enterprises in other states have gone to New York to live because they like the life of the city or because their distant enterprises require representation at the financial centre. The incomes of New York are in a great measure derived from the country at large. A continual stream of wealth sets toward the great city from the mines and manufactories and railroads outside of New York.
Read more about this topic: Elihu Root
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states and/or senator:
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“Prior to the meeting, there was a prayer. In general, in the United States there was always praying.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides States and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I am a Senator against my wishes and feelings, which I regret more than any other of my life.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)