WILLIAM MCKINLEY

25th President, 1897–1901

Historian: Robert W. Merry

Bob Merry is a longtime political journalist and author who most recently was the editor of The American Conservative. He appeared on C-SPAN’s Q & A to discuss his book, President McKinley: Architect of the American Century, on November 1, 2017.

The most important thing going on [between 1897 and 1901] was that the country was burgeoning. It was expanding and poised to move dramatically into the world. America is an expansionist country, always has been.… What William McKinley did was push out—into the Pacific and into the Atlantic, into the Caribbean—in a way that no president had done before. That didn’t just happen; it happened because America was building an industrial base; was building economic growth and economic wherewithal; was building a navy. McKinley had a lot to do with it, but it actually began before him. The country was gaining more and more interest in building a canal across Central America. When we ended up with conflict—serious conflict—in the Caribbean with the Spanish empire, which controlled and owned Cuba, it was inevitable that we would not only go to war with Spain, but that we would basically kick Spain out of the Caribbean. We would pick up significant numbers of their possessions, and we would become an empire.

McKinley was a tough nut for me to crack.… I thought I was pretty good at bringing people to life; McKinley was not easy to bring to life. For one thing, he didn’t keep a diary and, of course, he wrote no memoirs because he was killed in office, but he also hardly wrote any letters. There’s very little written record of what he was thinking, or how he was feeling, or what he thought about this guy or that person. I was really struggling with the book. My friend, David Ignatius of the Washington Post, who was reading my manuscript, touched on it. He said this guy is a mystery because he was a very consequential and a very effective president, and you can’t quite figure out how or why he was able to accomplish what he accomplished because he was indirect. McKinley was an incrementalist. He was a manager. He was not a man of force. It turns out that even without that force, he had amazing capacity to manipulate people into doing the things that he wanted them to do while they thought it was their idea. Once I captured that, then you could see what he was doing,… and I think there was a silent, quiet drama that emerged out of the tale.

[Since] there wasn’t a lot of documentation in terms of what he was thinking, I had to go to people that were around him. He had a wonderful assistant—called a secretary, but it would be almost like a chief of staff—George Cortelyou. He kept a diary, so you got a sense of what McKinley was saying and what he was thinking; other people kept diaries, too. There were some interviews done many years ago with people who were around then—[like Ohio political kingmaker] Mark Hanna who was very close to McKinley—and those interviews yielded up some pretty good anecdotes and stories. Newspaper articles, you had to scour everything there was that he had anything to do with and piece it together. But ultimately, it did come together.

William McKinley grew up in small-town Ohio, first in a little town, Lisbon, Ohio, and then in Poland, Ohio. He went to college in 1860, got sick in his freshman year, and went back to Poland. By the time he recuperated—the illness was mysterious, we never quite knew what it was—he had to go to work because the family was stretched, as families were in the economic downturn. He got jobs as a postal clerk and a schoolteacher, doing both, and he was doing that at age eighteen when the Civil War broke out. His family was always highly, strongly, passionately abolitionist; they hated slavery, and he grew up in that climate. His mother [Nancy Allison McKinley] was very bright and a reader, and they got the weekly New York Tribune, run by Horace Greeley, who was one of the leading abolitionists in America. So, the McKinleys ingested all of that [antislavery] commentary.

He gave himself a couple of days to think it over, but he pretty quickly enlisted in the US Army as a private. He spent four years in the service during the Civil War. He rose up to brevet major, most of his promotions coming as a result of battlefield heroics. He was truly a heroic guy. He didn’t seem to have any sense of what fear might be or how it might be used to keep you out of crazy situations.

One quick anecdote: He was a quartermaster sergeant, and he was at the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American history. He was away from the battle, from the action; he was making sure that everybody got food and other provisions. There was a unit that had found itself isolated and couldn’t get out of this situation it was in. This particular unit had been fighting since early in the morning and had no breakfast, no lunch, had run out of water long since, and this was late afternoon. These people were in extremis, and that unit was not going to be in fighting fitness at all. McKinley got it into his head from three miles away that he was going to load up a wagon, and he was going to get that wagon to these troops. He found a guy to volunteer with him, and he loaded up the wagon and started moving to the woods towards the clearing where the battle was going on. He ran into two officers who told him to get back, he can’t possibly get there, forget it. He ignored them after they left and went through the clearing, got the back of his wagon shot off but managed to get a fair amount of provisions to the troops. Old, wizened veterans said, “God bless the lad.” He became a commissioned officer as a result of that crazy deed and then continued to rise up as a result of similar experiences and similar battlefield actions.

After the Civil War, McKinley got back and immediately decided he wanted to become a lawyer, and I think he pretty much knew he wanted to become a congressman. His great mentor was his commanding officer [and future president] Rutherford B. Hayes, who became an Ohio congressman even before the Civil War ended. Hayes loved young William McKinley. He thought he was one of the greatest young men he’d ever met.

Hayes was also from Ohio, and so McKinley wanted to follow in his footsteps. Hayes told him no. Hayes said, “I think you can make a lot more money; you’d be very rich by age thirty or forty if you went into industrial activity.” There was, of course, going to be an industrial explosion, and Hayes knew it. [He advised McKinley to] go into the railroad business, or something, but that was not what he wanted. McKinley carefully preserved the letter but discarded the advice. So, he became a lawyer and moved to Canton, Ohio, which becomes his hometown and where his sister had been teaching school, and immediately emerges as a civic leader.

He joined everything. He was in veterans’ organizations. He joined the Methodist Church. Everything that he seemed to join, he rose up into leadership positions. Chamber of commerce, well, he became the president of the chamber of commerce. The church, well, he became the superintendent of the Sunday school, and on and on. So, it wasn’t surprising that he was well-known in his community, and when a vacancy emerged in the House of Representatives [in 1876], he went for it and won it.

William met [his wife, Ida Saxton,] before he went into politics. In fact, he even offered not to go into politics [for her]. This is a poignant story; in fact, it’s a very defining story about McKinley. He was maybe one of the finest human beings who’s ever made it to the White House. He was a genuinely fine guy, although he was more calculating than he let on. He met Ida Saxton, who was the belle of Canton. Her father was very well-to-do. Her grandfather had brought a printing press from Pennsylvania and started a newspaper that was very successful in Canton. Her father built on that business and got into banking, mining, development, and other things. They had multiple servants in their house, Saxton House it was called, on the main street of Canton.

Ida was a scintillating young woman. She was smart. She was petite and attractive. She was effective. She was clever. Everyone wanted to woo her, of appropriate age. She picked McKinley. She liked his stolidity and his good manners and his ambition and his ability to bring people to his side. They were married; it was a storybook thing. There were one thousand people at their wedding according to the Canton newspaper—which was owned by her father, so I don’t know if that was true. McKinley was gravitating towards running for Congress at that time. They had a daughter within a year of their marriage, Katie. Then a year later she was pregnant again. Then, things began to go awry in a rush, in a crunch that almost makes it seem like there was a terrible fate that was befalling this young woman and her husband.

During her second pregnancy, she learned that her mother was dying; she was very close to her mother, and she took it very hard. That may have contributed to a troublesome pregnancy.… The baby was born, another daughter, named after her, Ida. The baby was not particularly healthy and died five months later. Ida was inconsolable as a result of that and went into a deep depression. It wasn’t clear that she was going to come out of it until her sister said, “Well, William just decided she had to come out of it.” And he just wooed her out of it. Then she had some kind of carriage accident during this period.… I suspect she might have had some spinal injury of some significance. Her mobility was affected, and she had a hard time walking throughout the rest of her life. It was intermittently different, at times it was sometimes worse and sometimes better. Even in the White House, she can get down the stairs easy enough; going up the stairs, they had an elevator, which was a new thing. It didn’t work often, so he would have to carry her up the stairs.…

Then another thing happened—the development of epilepsy. Ida would have these epileptic fits, which in those days was considered a kind of mental disease; people ended up in institutions. William never wavered in his devotion to her, even as she became a totally different person.… She became sedentary. Her thinking became inward. She became somewhat peevish. He just accepted all that and never wavered. So, it’s quite a poignant story, and it became a pretty famous story across America. McKinley gained a lot of political points for being as devoted as he was to this woman who sometimes struggled through life.

There was [press coverage] in terms of her being an “invalid.” She was always in a wheelchair, and she didn’t seem self-conscious about that. But the epilepsy was kept very much under wraps. They didn’t want that to get out, and it never did. The press, the newspapers, didn’t go into great detail, and no one really knew what was going on. But she was under a lot of medication, and that might have also affected some of her behavioral traits.

[Politically, McKinley’s time in Congress] was a very precarious situation. Ohio was on an ice edge of politics. There was a great parity between Republicans and Democrats. We talk about redistricting today and gerrymandering and all the problems attending that.… In those days it was just axiomatic that if the Democrats controlled the legislature, they were going to mess with your district, and that happened. In one instance after his… second term, he lost, but he only lost after a recount that took… almost a year because it was so close.… So, he lost the seat, then went back and regained it, and continued to have it. [Altogether] he was in the House for fourteen years.

He became the greatest protectionist in America. [By 1889,] he was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and he crafted a highly protectionist tariff bill with high tariffs to help various industries. He soon found himself on the outs because we were beginning to move into a recession, and businesses took the occasion to raise prices.… The Democrats went after Republican incumbents. It was a terrible year, 1890.…

McKinley lost his seat in the Congress in 1890 [and the Republican Party lost nearly half their seats in the House], and he refused to believe that this was in any way a reflection on his views on protectionism. He wanted to be president, and so he didn’t know where to go. When you lose a seat, you lose political momentum. He thought about waiting two years and then running for a congressional seat again. But, he decided that maybe the governorship was the best stepping stone, so he ran for governor. There was an incumbent Democrat [James Campbell] who was an effective and a popular politician, so he had to roll over that gentleman, which he did. McKinley served two two-year terms [as Ohio’s governor].

The McKinley Tariff was not popular because of how prices were raised. Everyone said, “Well, this isn’t working.” Grover Cleveland, who [was re-elected president in 1892]… was a free trader, being a Democrat; he brought down the tariffs marginally. And then McKinley [who was elected president four years later in 1896] promptly put them back up; but in the meantime, McKinley had crafted this concept of reciprocity. That was not unlike what we might call “fair trade” today, in the sense that he advocated bilateral agreements with countries in which both countries would reduce their barriers to foster trade across those borders. This was a result of his recognizing that we needed to be able to develop markets overseas in order to ensure the continuation of prosperity.

[Under] the McKinley Tariff of 1890, the percentages were in the neighborhood of 50 percent on a lot of goods, and they were placed on a lot of goods. But the interesting thing about McKinley was that as he became president, he discovered that his views were changing. The reason was because he understood that America was becoming an explosive producer of goods, both agricultural and industrial, and it was clear that the huge market of America was not going to be sufficient to absorb all the goods that this amazing country, going through that amazing transformation, was going to be able to produce. In order for prosperity to continue, it was going to be necessary for America to sell goods overseas, and you can’t sell goods overseas in any significant way if you have major barriers from goods coming in because you don’t have anything to trade.

[The Republican Party selected William McKinley as their presidential candidate at their convention] in 1896. He basically had it; it was a coronation. He didn’t have any significant opposition once the convention began. He ran against Democrat William Jennings Bryan. That year was the big currency issue, the big questions were about the “cross of gold” and whether we were going to have the free coinage of silver to expand the money supply. A lot of farmers and rural people in the West and South felt like they were being beleaguered by the bankers of the Northeast who were constricting the money supply.… McKinley stayed with the gold standard and launched what you might call the first educational presidential campaign in which he realized he was going to have to explain these issues to the American people. And he won by a significant margin.

Cuba was very, very significant [at this point].… The Cubans, like the Mexicans earlier and others, had wanted independence. There was a ten-year insurrection that had occurred about two decades before McKinley was elected that was devastating to the island and to Spain. And now another insurrection was in progress as McKinley was elected.

Spain’s number-one colony, since it had lost throughout the nineteenth century most of its colonies in Latin America, Central America, and South America, was Cuba. Spain also had the Philippines, it had Puerto Rico, it had Guam, and a few other islands in the Pacific. McKinley’s predecessor, Grover Cleveland, didn’t have sympathy for the Cubans. He called them the “rascally Cubans.” He basically was a status quo guy. He thought that the best thing to happen would be for Spain to remain in Cuba, but that was becoming increasingly untenable. McKinley comes in, and he takes a different view. He has much more sympathy for the Cubans. He doesn’t want to go to war with Spain, but he wants Spain to either… negotiate an end of the war, enter into more of an autonomy arrangement, or get out. Spain said, “You can’t tell us that.” McKinley wouldn’t yield. He sent the battleship Maine into Havana harbor… to help Americans who might get caught up in the chaos, and [on February 15, 1898] it exploded at a time when there was a lot of passion in this country as well as in Cuba and in Spain. [Two hundred sixty-six Americans died in that explosion.]

War became inevitable after the explosion and McKinley knew it. So, he sent Admiral George Dewey, who had the fleet near Hong Kong, to the Philippines where we promptly destroyed the Spanish fleet.… And then McKinley sent his Atlantic fleet to intercept the Spanish Atlantic fleet and destroy that fleet. Then, he ordered the army to land in Cuba near Santiago and take Santiago, which they did [on July 2, 1898]. That’s the famous Teddy Roosevelt ride up—people say the San Juan Hill, but it was the San Juan Ridge—and he marched up. TR led his troops up there in a very delicate time, a very difficult time, quite heroic—foolhardy, one could argue—but nevertheless, it succeeded. Roosevelt became a national hero along with George Dewey. That led to Spain suing for peace.

… McKinley was very, very tough in the negotiations. He wouldn’t even enter into any talks unless it was clear that the Spanish would leave Cuba. He made it very clear from the beginning, and there was some legislation to this effect, that we had no desires on Cuba, but he said we were going to get Puerto Rico and we were going to leave the Philippines in our hands… and that we needed an island in what was called the Madrones at that time, which is the Marianas today, and that would be Guam. The Spanish were devastated. [The Senate approved the final treaty with Spain in February 1898.]

[The annexation of Hawaii…] happens around the same time. And again, it’s a distinction between him and his predecessor, Grover Cleveland. Cleveland didn’t want to annex Hawaii, but McKinley understood, and while he wasn’t a man of vision,… he had a way of seeing events clearly and understanding their implications and therefore what he needed to do. He realized that the Hawaiian Islands were one of the two or three most strategic spots on the whole globe. From those islands you can control a huge amount of territory, and not just oceans, but also land along the waters.… The Polynesian peoples were the indigenous peoples of Hawaii, but because it was such an amazing spot in the middle of the North Pacific, people came there [from all over]. The whaling ships came. Americans came for various reasons, and then the sugar plantations emerged. Sugar was an amazingly high-margin business. You can make huge amounts of money, so Americans flocked in there to run these sugar plantations and got very, very rich. And in getting rich, they felt like they should have more political power, so they wrested the political power from the Polynesians. It was a monarchy. The Americans took over the island and said, we want it to be part of America. We just annexed it [through a joint resolution of Congress, which McKinley signed on July 8, 1898]. The main thing to be recognized here is that if we hadn’t taken those islands, Japan would have. Japan had a very significant claim on those islands because those plantation owners had brought in lots and lots of Japanese workers for the fields and they weren’t being treated very well, Japan felt. They were agitating for better treatment of their indigenous Japanese working in the islands.… Germany also wanted colonies anywhere it could get them in those days because it wanted to be like England. So, if we hadn’t had gotten those islands, probably Japan [or Germany] would have gotten them.

I’m not quite sure when McKinley met Teddy Roosevelt for the first time, but he knew him vaguely when he became president. Many top Republicans were agitating to have Teddy Roosevelt be appointed assistant naval secretary. McKinley wasn’t sure he wanted to give that man that job because he had heard that Roosevelt was always agitating everybody; he was a man out of control much of the time, and McKinley was a control freak in a lot of ways. He didn’t like chaos. He told some of his friends that he wasn’t sure that Roosevelt would behave himself in the office. But Roosevelt had so many admirers and friends, and his friends loved him, and they really went to bat for him. The result was that McKinley finally acceded to their request and allowed Roosevelt to become the assistant navy secretary. [And, in 1900, the Republicans chose Roosevelt as their vice-presidential nominee when McKinley ran for re-election.]

This photo of William McKinley was taken September 6, 1901, just eight days before he was assassinated at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Courtesy E. Benjamin Andrews, History of the United States, Volume V

[McKinley beat William Jennings Bryan once again in 1900, this time…] even bigger. By that time, McKinley’s presidency had been so successful in terms of economic growth and the emergence of prosperity and the ending of the Panic of 1893… that he managed to take the sting away from William Jennings Bryan’s silver advocacy.

[Six months after McKinley was sworn in for his second term], Leon Czolgosz killed McKinley, in September 1901. He went into a receiving line where McKinley was greeting people at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. He had his hand in a kind of sling or a bandage as if it had been injured. McKinley reached to shake his other hand, whereupon he put a pistol to McKinley’s chest and fired. That bullet didn’t penetrate too much, but McKinley stepped back, and the second bullet entered his abdomen and was never able to be removed. Ultimately, McKinley developed an abscess or sepsis infection and died [on September 14, 1901. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, forty-two, was sworn in as president that day in Buffalo].

It’s hard to say, but if you look in our lifetime’s terms, William McKinley would probably be a moderate Republican, maybe not quite a Rockefeller Republican, but maybe a Mark Hatfield Republican, the senator from Oregon. [He’d be] a moderate-to-liberal Republican with strong views about economics, free enterprise, but probably somewhat more liberal views on racial matters and on social issues.

William McKinley was a man of mark. He was a man of force, much more than he gets credit for. And therein lay a very interesting human story: How did this guy—with this easy temperament and this pleasant way about him and this incrementalism of management—how did he do all the things he did?