Notes
1: WILLIAM MCKINLEY, OHIOAN
1. Turner, The United States 1830–1850, p. 280.
2. Ibid., p. 300.
3. Niles Tribune-Chronicle, Dec. 12, 1999.
4. Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, pp. 35, 85, and 87.
5. Morgan, McKinley and His America, p. 63.
6. Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, p. 447.
7. Armstrong, Major McKinley, p. 11.
8. Kane, Facts About the Presidents, p. 227.
9. Auchincloss, Theodore Roosevelt, p. 9.
10. Armstrong, Major McKinley, p. 7.
11. Leech, In the Days of McKinley, p. 12.
12. Ibid., pp. 23–24. Of the several major McKinley biographies, Leech’s devotes the most attention to his early years. These comments are her only egregious errors.
13. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, p. 242.
14. Leech, In the Days of McKinley, pp. 2–3.
15. Ohio Writers’ Project, The Ohio (State) Guide, p. 137.
16. Life of William McKinley and History of McKinley National Birthplace, p. 6.
17. Hay, William McKinley: Memorial, p. 12.
18. Armstrong, Major McKinley, p. 5.
19. Ibid., p. 5.
20. Ibid., pp. 10–11.
21. Williams, Hayes of the Twenty-Third, p. 57.
22. Armstrong, Major McKinley, p. 82.
23. Ibid., pp. 85–86.
24. Ibid., p. 108.
25. Ibid., p. 106.
26. Ibid., pp. 42–43.
27. Leech, In the Days of McKinley, p. 19.
28. Ibid., p. 19.
29. Ohio Writers’ Project, The Ohio (State) Guide, p. 397.
2: SURPRISINGLY MODERN MCKINLEY
1. Early biographers made much of this ancestry in an era when illustrators like N. C. Wyeth painted bold warriors for books like The Scottish Chiefs. Olcott has McKinley descending from a Scots highlander, Fionn-Laidh—pronounced I-on-lay—who carried the Royal Standard of Scotland at the battle of Pinkie in 1547. The sons of Fionn-Laidh became MacIanla, and then MacKinley. Six generations later, one went to Ireland as a guide to the army of King William III at the battle of the Boyne. McKinley’s own ethnic interest does not seem to have run much beyond Robert Burns and similar music.
2. Armstrong, Major McKinley, p. 103.
3. Leech, In the Days of McKinley, p. 36.
4. Olcott, The Life of William McKinley, vol. I, p. 4.
5. Sellers, The Market Revolution, p. 167.
6. Ohio Writers’ Project, The Ohio (State) Guide, p. 26.
7. Ibid., pp. 54–58.
8. Morgan, McKinley and His America, p. 158.
9. Kleppner, The Cross of Culture, p. 244.
10. Olcott, The Life of William McKinley, pp. 280–81.
11. Kleppner, The Cross of Culture, p. 246.
12. Leech, In the Days of McKinley, p. 54.
13. Kleppner, The Cross of Culture, p. 246.
14. Olcott, The Life of William McKinley, pp. 281–82.
15. Linderman, The Mirror of War, p. 27.
16. Morgan, McKinley and His America, p. 528.
17. Linderman, The Mirror of War, p. 184.
18. Armstrong, Major McKinley, p. 130.
19. Ibid., p. 42.
20. Ibid., p. 116.
21. Morgan, McKinley and His America, p. 478.
22. Ibid., p. 61.
23. Olcott, The Life of William McKinley, p. 245; Leech, In the Days of McKinley, pp. 21–22.
24. Olcott, The Life of William McKinley, p. 245.
25. Morgan, McKinley and His America, p. 390.
26. Armstrong, Major McKinley, p. 23.
27. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, pp. 29–30.
28. Leech, In the Days of McKinley, pp. 35–36.
29. Ibid., p. 624.
30. Morgan, McKinley and His America, p. 159.
31. Leech, In the Days of McKinley, p. 53.
32. Morgan, McKinley and His America, p. 160.
33. Barnard, Rutherford B. Hayes and His America, p. 246.
34. Ibid., p. 446.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., p. 513.
37. Ibid., p. 514.
38. Morgan, McKinley and His America, p. 146.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., pp. 73–78.
41. Ibid., p. 130.
42. Ibid., p. 144.
43. Ohio Writers’ Project, The Ohio (State) Guide, p. 182.
44. Morgan, McKinley and His America, pp. 53–57.
45. Beer, Hanna, Crane and the Mauve Decade, pp. 479–80.
46. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire, p. 9.
47. McKinley, Speeches, p. 205.
48. Crichton, 1900, p. 80.
49. Morgan, McKinley and His America, p. 76.
50. Shannon, American Farmers’ Movements, p. 50.
51. Olcott, The Life of William McKinley, p. 203.
52. Glad, McKinley, Bryan and the People, p. 77.
53. Friedman and Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States.
3: MCKINLEY AND THE REALIGNMENT OF 1896
1. Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley, p. 288.
2. Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest, p. 19.
3. Olcott, The Life of William McKinley, pp. 262–63.
4. In 1881, the GOP controlled the presidency and the House, but the Senate elected in 1880 was tied.
5. Olcott, The Life of William McKinley, pp. 266–67.
6. Morgan, McKinley and His America, p. 165.
7. Ibid., p. 161.
8. Some doubts have existed. The muckraker Ida Tarbell, in her autobiography published in 1939, included an allegation—based on what she claimed to have heard during several years of living in Canton in the 1890s—that McKinley actually knew the size of the loans being taken out with his supporting signature. But none of McKinley’s biographers have credited the Tarbell argument.
9. Leech, In the Days of McKinley, p. 60.
10. Morgan, McKinley and His America, p. 167.
11. Leech, In the Days of McKinley, p. 70.
12. Dawes, A Journal of the McKinley Years, p. 74.
13. Ibid., p. 67.
14. Schlesinger, The Coming to Power, p. 38.
15. Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley, p. 492.
16. Leech, In the Days of McKinley, p. 75.
17. Ibid., p. 67.
18. Koenig, Bryan, p. 199.
19. Dawes, A Journal of the McKinley Years, pp. 88–89.
20. Glad, McKinley, Bryan and the People, p. 137.
21. Ibid., p. 198.
22. Not surprisingly, given this relative closeness, some biographies of Bryan devote several pages to charges of vote fraud leveled against the Republicans, especially by Democratic Governor John Altgeld in Illinois. McKinley biographers dismiss these arguments, while conceding that some employers coerced their workers by telling them not to come back to work if Bryan won. McKinley’s 1896 margin in Illinois was abnormally swollen and shrank four years later, but even there, actual Election Day fraud does not seem to have been the pivot. The combined effect of lopsided Republican dominance in money, press support, and company pressure on employees, however, is impossible to measure.
23. Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest, pp. 155–56.
24. Ibid., pp. 275–79.
25. Kleppner, The Cross of Culture, p. 350.
26. Ibid., p. 99.
27. Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest, p. 295.
28. Kleppner, The Cross of Culture, p. 126.
29. Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest, pp. 292–93.
30. Ibid., p. 278.
31. Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, pp. 878–79.
32. Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest, pp. 290–91.
4: MCKINLEY AND AMERICA’S EMERGENCE AS A WORLD POWER
1. Gould, The Spanish-American War and President McKinley, p. 9.
2. Ibid., p. 10.
3. Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest, p. 57; Thompson, Empires on the Pacific, p. 45.
4. The possibility of attack was not absurd. One naval historian has postulated three meaningful Spanish options: 1) to concentrate their fleet in the Canary Islands as a threat to the U.S. East Coast; 2) to seek out and destroy off Brazil the U.S. battleship Oregon steaming around Cape Horn to the Caribbean; and 3) to wait until the major Spanish warships were fitted and then raid the Atlantic coast somewhere north of Boston. By late May, “this force could have steamed at an economical speed three thousand miles from the Cape Verdes to Boston or Portland, Maine, lobbed a few shells, and escaped from there to Halifax [Nova Scotia]. Once there, under the international laws of neutrality, they could have demanded enough coal to get them back to Spain.” (Musicant, Empire by Default, pp. 288–90).
5. Gould, The Spanish-American War and President McKinley, p. 18.
6. Morgan, America’s Road to Empire, p. 25.
7. Ibid., p. 9.
8. Leech, In the Days of McKinley, p. 150.
9. Wall Street Journal, March 19, 1898.
10. Coletta, Threshold to American Internationalism, p. 57.
11. Linderman, The Mirror of War, p. 34.
12. Musicant, Empire by Default, p. 178.
13. Ibid., p. 145.
14. Morgan, America’s Road to Empire, pp. 58–59; Gould, The Spanish-American War and President McKinley, pp. 45–47.
15. Musicant, Empire by Default, pp. 177–78.
16. Gould, The Spanish-American War and President McKinley, p. 85.
17. Linderman, The Mirror of War, p. 85.
18. Morgan, America’s Road to Empire, p. 60.
19. Musicant, Empire by Default, p. 233.
20. Coletta, Threshold to American Internationalism, pp. 94–97.
21. Ibid., p. 100.
22. Linderman, The Mirror of War, p. 206.
23. Bradford, Crucible of Empire, p. 236.
24. Gould, The Spanish-American War and President McKinley, pp. 108–9.
25. As a further brief for McKinley’s personal tilt toward expansion, albeit not the Machiavellian interpretation, it is useful to recall his close connection to Hawaii through his brother David (sometime U.S. consul there), his ties to Methodist missions, his longtime links to the probattleship steel industry, his campaign for Asian markets, and his early backstage involvement (by 1899 a tilt toward crossing Panama rather than Nicaragua) in the Isthmian canal debate.
26. Gould, The Spanish-American War and President McKinley, p. 105.
27. Allen, Great Britain and the United States, p. 550.
28. Ibid., p. 561.
29. Musicant, Empire by Default, pp. 556–64.
30. Gould, The Spanish-American War and President McKinley, p. 32.
31. Ibid., pp. 128–29.
32. Musicant, Empire by Default, p. 667.
33. Gould, The Spanish-American War and President McKinley, pp. 12–13.
34. Musicant, Empire by Default, p. 600.
35. Gould, The Spanish-American War and President McKinley, p. 114.
36. Allen, Great Britain and the United States, p. 559.
37. Ibid., p. 560.
38. Ibid.
39. Wilson, Congressional Government, 15th ed., preface.
40. Hay, William McKinley: Memorial.
5: POLITICAL SUCCESS, DOMESTIC PROGRESS, AND THE MCKINLEY-ROOSEVELT CONTINUUM
1. Wartime generals—TR left the army as a brigadier—who by this point had reached the White House included Washington, Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, Pierce, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, and Harrison.
2. Chambers and Burnham, The American Party Systems, p. 162.
3. Kleppner, The Cross of Culture, p. 262.
4. Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics, p. 53.
5. Kleppner, The Cross of Culture, p. 369.
6. Friedman and Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, pp. 138–39.
7. Ibid., p. 142.
8. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, pp. 44–47.
9. Ibid., pp. 25–26.
10. Rhodes, The McKinley and Roosevelt Administrations, p. 119.
11. Ibid., p. 37.
12. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, p. 44.
13. Crichton, 1900, p. 30.
14. Timmons, Portrait of an American, p. 100.
15. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, p. 247.
16. Morgan, McKinley and His America, p. 182.
17. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, p. 249.
18. Ibid., p. 249.
19. Armstrong, Major McKinley, p. 132.
20. Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System, p. 141.
21. Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility, p. 124, and Crichton, 1900, p. 108.
22. Leech, In the Days of McKinley, p. 142.
23. Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility, p. 122.
24. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, p. 217.
25. Dawes, A Journal of the McKinley Years, p. 233.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., p. 234.
28. Ibid., p. 235.
29. Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility, p. 142.
30. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, p. 225.
31. Leech, In the Days of McKinley, p. 557.
32. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, p. 249.
33. Ibid., p. 250.
34. Olcott, The Life of William McKinley, pp. 299–300. Olcott has not been taken very seriously by later historians. Said Olcott of McKinley and the trust issue: “It weighed on him, and he spoke of the condition plainly and very often, to his nearest friends. His resolution to take up this great question as one of the most important duties of his second Administration is all the more significant in view of President Roosevelt’s relentless vigor in attacking the trusts, thus redeeming, in his own way, this part of his promise to ‘continue absolutely unbroken the policy of President McKinley.’”
35. Leech, In the Days of McKinley, p. 575.
36. Faulkner, Politics, Reform and Expansion, p. 266.
37. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, p. 162.
38. Dawes, A Journal of the McKinley Years, p. 192.
39. Leech, In the Days of McKinley, p. 106.
40. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, p. 15.
41. Ibid., p. 164.
42. Binkley, American Political Parties, p. 326.
43. Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest, p. 307.
44. Nor did Truman with FDR’s cabinet; Lyndon Johnson, however, would retain most of Kennedy’s.
45. Morris, Who Was Who in American Politics, p. 312.
46. McKinley and Knox had a long and close relationship. As Stark County prosecutor in 1870, McKinley had sought to close down a saloon selling to local collegians and Knox was the student who provided the key testimony. In 1893, Knox contributed to retire McKinley’s debt on the notes the governor had signed for his bankrupt old friend, and in 1896, Knox handled Pittsburgh fund-raising for McKinley’s efforts in the all-important Illinois caucuses. (Leech, In the Days of McKinley, pp. 13, 59, 75.) In early 1901, McKinley had wanted his outgoing attorney general, John Griggs, to pardon a bank defalcator who was allowed to enlist in the army and became a hero in the Philippines, but despite an army petition, the righteous Griggs said the Department of Justice was not the Department of Mercy. Because of his and McKinley’s three-decade friendship, that pardon became the first act of Philander C. Knox as attorney general. (Timmons, Portrait of an American, p. 86.)
47. Beer, Hanna, Crane and the Mauve Decade, p. 246.
48. Morgan, McKinley and His America, p. 504.
49. Croly, Marcus Alonzo Hanna, p. 338.
50. Beer, Hanna, Crane and the Mauve Decade, p. 215.
51. Gould, The Spanish-American War and President McKinley, pp. 60–61.
52. Musicant, Empire by Default, p. 183.
53. Coletta, Threshold to American Internationalism, p. 113.
54. Ibid., p. 24.
55. Allen, Great Britain and the United States, p. 610.
56. Timmons, Portrait of an American, p. 87.
57. Ibid., p. 96.
6: MCKINLEY RECONSIDERED
1. Morgan, America’s Road to Empire, p. xi.
2. Rhodes, The McKinley and Roosevelt Administrations, p. 172.
3. Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley, p. 486.
4. Coletta, Threshold to American Internationalism, p. 15.
5. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, p. 8.
6. Morgan, McKinley and His America, p. 34.
7. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, p. 8.
8. Morgan, McKinley and His America, p. 35.
9. Ibid.
10. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, p. 9.
11. Linderman, The Mirror of War, pp. 22–23.
12. Ibid., p. 183.
13. Two who knew him well and belittled him were also political enemies whom he defeated—New York machine leader Platt and House Speaker Thomas Reed. A onetime close friend, Herman Kohlsaat, became hostile after a mutual breach. Secretary of State John Sherman, initially grateful for his departmental appointment in 1897, later badmouthed McKinley after mounting senility forced him into what became a highly embarrassing retirement in April 1898.
14. Olcott, The Life of William McKinley, vol. 2, pp. 374–75.
15. Armstrong, Major McKinley, p. xiii.
16. Linderman, The Mirror of War, p. 180.
17. Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley, p. 485.
18. Montgomery, Beyond Equality, p. 372.
19. Ibid., p. 372.
20. Dawes, A Journal of the McKinley Years, p. 133.
21. Olcott, The Life of William McKinley, vol. 1, p. 343.
22. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, p. 215.
23. Leech, In the Days of McKinley, p. 330.
24. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, p. 137.
25. Ibid., p. 241.
26. Ibid., p. 7.
27. Ibid., p. 38.
28. Morgan, McKinley and His America, p. 64.
29. Linderman, The Mirror of War, p. 9.
30. McKinley, Speeches, p. 299.
31. Coletta, Threshold to American Internationalism, p. 328.
32. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, p. 159.
33. Ibid., p. 249.
34. Morgan, America’s Road to Empire, p. 107; Fry, Dixie Looks Abroad, p. 129.
35. Binkley, American Political Parties, p. 329.
36. Ibid., p. 323.
37. Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest, p. 308.