On April 9, 1865, when news of Lee’s surrender reached Winchester, where McKinley and his comrades were bivouacked, two hundred cannons boomed. Recently named divisional chief of staff, Major McKinley ordered the town’s lamps and lanterns lit that night to celebrate the war’s end and the Union’s salvation.1
His regiment was quickly demobilized, leaving McKinley’s future uncertain. He considered making the army a career but declined a commission after his father argued that prospects for advancement in the peacetime military would be poor. He was soon home in Poland, a small town eight miles south of Youngstown, wrestling with what to do with his life.2
McKinley decided on the law. It was a respectable profession, though Hayes wrote from Washington where he had taken his seat in Congress (to which he had been elected while still in combat) to say it was a bad idea. “A man in any of our western towns with half your wit ought to be independent at forty in business. As a lawyer, a man sacrifices independence to ambition which is a bad bargain at best.” McKinley was not swayed. Hayes was a lawyer himself and McKinley had not spent four years away from Ohio to now move farther west.3
The twenty-two-year-old McKinley would train for the law as Lincoln had—by finding an attorney who would let him read law books in his office until he mastered the subject matter and could pass the bar. He was soon offered such an apprenticeship.
Charles E. Glidden had stood on Poland’s tavern steps in 1861 to urge the town’s young men—McKinley among them—to enlist. Now thirty, he had been elected judge in Mahoning County and was in a position to help McKinley. By fall 1865, the Major occupied a desk at Glidden & Wilson, his head buried in law books until late at night. In school, McKinley had a reputation for “studying, studying, studying.” That habit resurfaced, but he still found time to serve as president of the Everett Literary Society, a young men’s self-improvement group that hosted debates and speech competitions. McKinley often won. He was a convincing speaker with a pleasant manner that engendered trust among listeners.4
In September 1866, encouraged by his sister Anna, McKinley entered New York’s Albany Law School. His roommate recalled he “worked very hard, often reading until one or two in the morning.” He ate ice cream for the first time at a reception after the dean’s pretty daughter explained the concept. The Major left Albany in early 1867 after one term and that March was admitted to the Ohio bar. Again prodded by Anna, he moved to Canton, Ohio, where she was a school principal. The town had 5,000 people, was near coal mines and water, sat on three rail lines, and had a promising future as a manufacturing center. It was just the kind of rising place for a twenty-four-year-old lawyer to begin postwar life.5
At first there wasn’t much legal work for the newcomer, but McKinley’s diligence caught the attention of George W. Belden. One evening, the older lawyer came into McKinley’s small quarters, complaining he was ill and unable to handle a case on the next day’s docket. Would the Major step in? Unsettled by having so little time to prepare, McKinley agreed only when Belden said the case would not get heard if McKinley didn’t take it. The Major spent all night prepping for his first appearance. As he opened his argument, saying, “What we contend for in this lawsuit,” McKinley glanced toward the rear of the courtroom. There sat Belden with “a slight smile.” The Major’s well-organized presentation was persuasive and a few days later, Belden dropped by with a $25 fee. McKinley protested it was too much for a day’s work, until Belden replied he had received $100. Not only did McKinley win the case and earn a handsome sum, but he demonstrated his ability to prepare and a talent for presentation. Belden invited him to become his partner. McKinley accepted.6
An ardent Democrat, Belden was an unusual mentor for McKinley, whose strong Republican views were already known. As U.S. Attorney for Northeastern Ohio in 1859, Belden prosecuted the “Rescuers.” These were townspeople, professors, and college students from Oberlin, Ohio, who helped a fugitive slave flee to Canada. But unlike many Ohio Democrats who opposed the war, Belden was dedicated to a Northern victory. It is unlikely that if he had been a Peace Democrat, he would have been attracted to young McKinley or the Major to him.7
Naturally tolerant and easygoing, McKinley joined more than a law firm. He regularly attended the First Methodist Church, teaching in the Sunday school and then becoming its superintendent. McKinley had become a Mason when he and other Northern officers reopened the Winchester Lodge after observing a Union doctor share his cash with Confederate POWs because they were fellow Masons. The Major now joined the Canton Lodge and would remain active in Masonry the rest of his life.8
He became involved in the Knights of Pythias, a fraternity devoted to world peace. He joined the YMCA literary society, which hosted debates. He offered a particularly effective defense of women’s suffrage in one of them. He soon became the Y’s president. Like many comrades, he joined the nation’s largest veterans’ group, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), and the Loyal Legion, a group for Union officers. He regularly attended reunions of the 23rd Ohio.9
McKinley joined these groups because it was a common practice of the times and a way for him to improve his community. It also allowed the Major to develop a wide and eclectic circle of friends, even including Democrats and many Irish and German Catholics. This networking could help him land legal work and be an asset if he decided to run for office.10
IT WAS NOT ALL community service and law for the handsome young twenty-five-year-old. McKinley also took part in Canton’s social scene and in the summer of 1868 found himself at Meyers Lake, west of Canton. The town’s young people frequently gathered there at a lakeside inn.
Sitting outside with his sister Anna on a bright day, McKinley was taken with a slim young woman who was sitting at a picnic table. She had chestnut hair piled high and twisted in the Victorian fashion, large blue eyes, and a confident, athletic manner. Rather than daintily picking at her food as women of the time were expected to do, Ida Saxton was tucking into her creamed chicken and waffle with gusto. McKinley later said he fell in love right then. Anna knew Ida and introduced the Major to her. Later, Ida could recall only his title, not his name.11
Nothing could come of their meeting. She was involved with another major, Joseph W. Wright, recently of the Confederate army. A Marylander without slaves, he had fought for the South as a matter of principle. After the war, he worked on an Arkansas newspaper before earning a law degree and moving to Canton, where he was a salesman for a farm implement manufacturer. Wright’s moonlighting as a lawyer brought him into contact with James A. Saxton, Ida’s father.12
The Saxtons were one of Canton’s oldest, most prominent families. This close-knit clan’s patriarch, John Saxton, Ida’s Scotch-Irish grandfather, arrived in Canton in 1814, shortly after the town’s founding. He wanted to be a publisher. After determining Canton could support a newspaper, he procured a press from his native Pennsylvania and printed the Repository’s first issue on March 30, 1815. When the enterprise proved profitable, Saxton married his childhood sweetheart, Margaret Laird, daughter of Scottish immigrants, and brought her to the thriving village, where they raised six sons and a daughter in a brick home on South Market Street.13
Their oldest was James A. Saxton. He and his siblings were raised in comfortable prosperity. John’s success as a publisher enabled him to build offices and a printing plant, and he and his brothers—James’s uncles—created a string of moneymaking businesses, starting with a nail factory. Their commercial spirit was passed on. James opened a hardware store in 1834 at age eighteen and followed with a dry goods business before marrying into another entrepreneurial family, the Dewalts. They were part of the original German Dunkers, an Anabaptist sect who had settled Canton. Since 1809 they had owned the town’s Spread Eagle Tavern and brewed beer. George and Christiana Dewalt were contemporaries of John and Margaret Saxton. Their daughter Kate married James Saxton on August 20, 1846, in Canton’s First Presbyterian Church. The couple then moved into her parents’ family home at Eighth and South Market. Kate was pregnant within two months and on June 8, 1847, gave birth to a daughter, named Ida.14
The bright, happy girl spent her first three years in her grandparents’ home, growing so close to both her mother and her grandmother Christiana that it was difficult when she and her parents moved out of the Dewalt house into their own home next door. A few years later, James Saxton sold his hardware and dry goods businesses and started the Stark County Bank.15
Ida also idolized her grandfather, John Saxton. He was an ardent abolitionist, committed Republican, and, even more unusual for the time, a staunch believer in women’s education, beliefs shared by his son James. A committed Christian and an elder of First Presbyterian, John helped found Canton’s public schools, served in local government, and tended to the city’s poor, unemployed, and sick. His readiness to offer food, money, or a kind word was a powerful example for his children and grandchildren, especially Ida.16
She entered the Canton Union School in September 1853. For the next eight years, Ida studied English, math, science, drawing, and vocal music, the last complemented by piano lessons at home. The school’s principal was Betsy Cowles, a gifted educator and, like James Saxton, an abolitionist and women’s education advocate. The two organized the Canton Anti-Slavery Society before Cowles left town in 1857.17
Ida finished middle school in spring 1861, but because of the war, took a gap year to help the Union effort, making bandages while her mother served as the Soldiers Relief treasurer. In the fall of 1862, Ida entered the Delhi Academy, in Delaware County, New York, 160 miles northwest of Manhattan. The academy’s principal was a familiar face, the formidable Miss Cowles. While Ida was pleased to be reunited with her mentor, both women found the area too Democratic and hostile to Republicans and abolitionists. Miss Cowles left after the 1863 spring term; Ida returned home, too, and enrolled at Cleveland Female Seminary. She graduated in June 1865 after finishing the school’s rigorous curriculum of advanced math, geography, grammar, history, and penmanship, as well as electives including French literature, music, singing, drawing, painting, sculpture, and piano. Ida excelled in languages, picking up French, Italian, and Greek.18
Ida’s father, a practical man, wanted Ida to receive the best possible education. So Ida went off that fall to Brooke Hall Female Seminary in Media, Pennsylvania, a forerunner of a modern women’s college. Brooke emphasized not only academics but also physical fitness. Ida became an enthusiastic walker, leading hikes through nearby woods and hills. The girls also played cards and games weeknights, went to Friday night dances, regularly attended church, and visited nearby Philadelphia for weekend shopping, concerts, opera, and plays. Amid the daughters of some of the East Coast’s great families, Ida flourished, growing into a pert, smart, opinionated, and confident young woman who made friends easily and seemed to be particularly empathetic. Ida graduated in June 1867 and returned to Canton.19
Unlike most other affluent young women then, Ida went to work. For two years, she played an increasingly vital role in her father’s bank, calculating interest payments and dividends and handling loan applications, mortgages, and complicated financial matters. Her father enjoyed her company, trusted her judgment, and respected her abilities, but he also wanted her to be independent. “I have seen enough girls left stranded by sudden losses of means,” he said. For her part, Ida later said she “never ceased to be grateful” for the opportunity to become a “practical woman of experience.”20
Her life was not all banking and business, though. The attractive twenty-year-old was a bright presence at parties, church socials, and concerts. “Every man in town promised to be a brother to me,” she later said. “And oh! I did have such a good time.” While James Saxton had taught his daughters that the decisions of if, whom, and when to marry were theirs, he could not help being worried about unworthy suitors. It’s not clear what he thought of Wright, but he did make it clear he had had enough of young lawyers swarming around Ida.21
Still, sometime in 1868, Ida and Major Wright became an item. She arrived at the Schaefer’s Opera House Halloween ball on his arm, costumed as the “Queen of Hearts.” Friends considered this as tantamount to an engagement.22
Knowing marriage would profoundly change her life, Ida decided to have one last great adventure as a single woman. She and her sister Mary—nicknamed Pina—would take a six-month grand tour of Europe, beginning in June 1869. They would visit England, Scotland, and Ireland, then jump across the English Channel to the Continent before returning to the States. Wright moved temporarily to Louisville for his employer. The two sweethearts pledged to write each other frequently, with Ida promising to buy him a special gift on her travels.23
James Saxton engaged Miss Jeanette Alexander to serve as guide and chaperone for his daughters. Alexander found Ida headstrong, confident, and impossible to manage. In turn, Ida didn’t trust Alexander. They clashed over Alexander’s plan to bring her brother along to manage the group’s money. Ida thought it an attempt to rip off her generous father and felt herself fully capable of keeping meticulous track of her own two-thousand-dollar budget.24
The trip was more than galleries and museums, cathedrals and monuments, natural wonders and mountains. It was also a liberating experience for the sisters. Ida pierced her ears, drank wine for the first time, walked ten to twenty miles a day, hiked the Alps, and, scandalously in Miss Alexander’s eyes, allowed gentlemen friends to take Pina and her to the theater in Paris. In London, she was introduced to Rutherford B. Hayes’s brother-in-law. Ida was not impressed with the unattached young doctor, who mentioned an old army comrade now living in Canton, Major McKinley.25
Ida and Wright corresponded frequently, their letters warm and hopeful. She would find his missives waiting at the banks from which her father had arranged for her to draw cash. In August, Wright explained he was in Canton recuperating after becoming ill on a business trip. Ida wrote her mother, saying, “Mr. Wright is not so sick I think, but I want you to show him very marked attention and do all you can to make his stay in Canton pleasant.”26
The sisters and their chaperone arrived in Geneva on Saturday, September 25. Mary went to dinner but Ida went to the bank to get Swiss francs and pick up the latest letters from home. Mary returned to the hotel to find Ida weeping on its terrace. Joseph Wright had died of meningitis on September 2. The next morning, Mary told her parents that the news “was a fearful shock.” Ida was understandably deeply depressed, writing, “I know I should not feel so, but I cannot help it.”27
A few days later, she pressed her parents for details, asking, “How long he was sick? If he suffered? Who took care of him?” “Mr. Wright spoke in his last letter he would be either in Canton or New York to meet me,” she wrote. “Only think that now he is dead, and buried. I cannot realize it.” Her life had changed irrevocably with the death of the man she expected to marry. “Things will be very different from what I expected when I get home.”28
Though Ida considered remaining in Paris to study French, the sisters were back in Canton before Christmas. Ida had presents for each child in her Sunday school class and “one ambition” for the New Year, namely to “master the intricacies of finance.” She would bury her grief in work. In a way, that was welcome news to her father, who was content to pass more of the bank’s operations on to his eldest daughter. Her extensive schooling, intelligence, and judgment gave him confidence she could handle its complex affairs. Ida thought her work in the bank “the most valuable course in her whole education.”29
THE WORK ALSO BROUGHT her back into contact with Major McKinley. After James Saxton brushed off suggestions from mutual friends that he consider the young lawyer for the bank’s legal business, Saxton was added in November 1869 as a defendant to a case on which McKinley was already a member of the defense team. To the surprise of some defendants, McKinley won the case. When the Major personally delivered a substantial check for the banker’s share of the award, Saxton was impressed.30
Whatever Ida thought of McKinley’s legal skills, she was more impressed when, as YMCA president, he introduced famed New York newspaperman Horace Greeley at an appearance. The Major was eloquent and captivating. Soon he was a regular guest at the parties in the third-floor ballroom of the Dewalt home, which, though Christiana Dewalt still lived there, was now full of Saxtons and was more often referred to as the Saxton house. Another frequent guest later remembered how the Major’s “affable manner soon gained him admission to the upper crust of Canton society.” McKinley “was the most handsome, dignified and graceful human being.”31
The now-twenty-six-year-old McKinley had gained new stature in 1869 while Ida was abroad when he was elected Stark County prosecutor. It was an electoral upset. Stark County was Democratic and the GOP nomination for local offices was considered of little value. But McKinley’s web of relationships and winning manner did the trick for him. The post was not a difficult responsibility and he could handle unrelated legal business on the side. The only significant public issue McKinley took on during his two-year term was illicit liquor sales, especially in the town of Alliance, among the young men attending Mount Union College. McKinley used the confession of a sixteen-year-old student from Pittsburgh named Philander C. Knox to convict some saloon owners, an action that linked McKinley with the temperance movement and won his mother’s approval.32
His family was also gathering in Canton. First, some siblings relocated there, then his parents, though the senior McKinley was often in Michigan, where he had invested in a pig iron furnace.33
The courtship between Ida and McKinley lasted a year. There were long walks. He became a regular caller, sometimes twice in an evening, once for conversation, a second time to say good night. She often visited McKinley’s law offices above the First National Bank, the rival to her father’s First Canton. They even paid a local boy to carry letters to each other. At a church social where Ida was scooping ice cream, he tried taking away a tray of bowls but succeeded only in dumping the desserts on her. He was horrified, but she laughed.34
It was soon clear that Ida was in love again, but Wright’s sudden death left a scar. Once when McKinley was late for a party, Ida became anxious, asking, “Have you seen the Major? Do you imagine the Major is sick? Has the Major been called to the city?”35
Among their rituals was meeting on a corner near First Presbyterian, where Ida taught Sunday school, and First Methodist, where he was Sunday school superintendent. One Sunday, McKinley told her, “I do not like this separation every Sunday, you going one way and I another. Suppose after this we always go the same way.” Ida replied, “I think so too.” Soon after on a carriage ride behind a team of bays and at the top of a hill outside town, McKinley proposed. Ida immediately accepted. “My fate was sealed,” McKinley fondly recalled, and James Saxton told his soon-to-be son-in-law, “You are the only man I have ever known to whom I would entrust my daughter.” The Major wrote Hayes, “It is now settled that Miss Saxton and I will unite our fortunes. I think I am doing the right thing. Miss S. is everything I could hope for.”36
“Fortunes” might have been a poor choice of words. McKinley made $1,000 a year as prosecutor and some from legal work on the side. He owned a modest house, but with his sisters. Ida came from one of Canton’s richest families and her father earned $53,000 in 1869, nearly a million dollars today. Still, McKinley asked his brother David in San Francisco to buy a ring of California gold with small diamonds around a red ruby. A pall was cast over the young couple’s preparations for their wedding by the death in October of Ida’s grandmother, which hit Ida and her mother Kate hard. The widow Dewalt left her home to Kate.37
Ida and William were married January 25, 1871, in the unfinished new building of First Presbyterian, with a thousand guests, three hundred standing around the sanctuary. Ida wore an ivory satin gown with Mary in pink silk and a friend in yellow as maids of honor. McKinley’s brother Abner and his cousin William McKinley Osborne were groomsmen. McKinley’s father was absent, away in Michigan managing his furnace. (The senior McKinley’s finances were precarious: he was supported by gifts from his children, William Jr. and Anna included.)38
The newly married couple caught the late-night train east for a honeymoon in New York and Washington. They posed for photographs in Manhattan. In Washington, McKinley apparently shared a secret with his new bride. He hoped to follow his old commander, Hayes, into politics. Ida was thrilled, soon telling family and friends “her husband would someday be president of the United States.”39
The couple returned home on Valentine’s Day and moved into a residential hotel so they could consider their housing options. Ida was then battered by the third loss of someone close to her in less than two years: John Saxton, her grandfather, role model, and the family patriarch, died April 16 at the age of seventy-nine.40
A few days later, the young couple settled into a house on North Market Street, a gift from James Saxton. There was talk of moving into the Saxton house, but Kate said, “no young woman does as well as under her own roof.” Regardless, Ida was soon under the Saxton roof: pregnant, she spent the late summer and fall under her mother’s watchful eye. A baby girl arrived Christmas Day. They named her Katherine, after Ida’s mother and grandmother, and called her Katie.41
The baby was a Christmas gift that more than compensated for McKinley’s narrow defeat that fall for reelection as county prosecutor. That itself was only a small setback for McKinley. His law practice was on solid ground even before James Saxton had begun steering more of his legal and bank business the Major’s way.42
By late summer 1872, Ida was pregnant again. The good news was paired with bad. Ida’s beloved mother, Kate, was dying, probably of cancer, and in terrible pain. At Christmas, Ida and McKinley gave their daughter Katie the small rocking chair Ida’s parents had given her. It was Kate Saxton’s last Christmas: she died March 14, 1873. Because of the closeness of the relationship with her mother, “the shock was too great” for Ida. “Her nervous system was nearly wrecked.”43
Two weeks later, Ida gave birth to a second daughter and named her Ida. It was a very difficult end to a troubled pregnancy for mother and daughter. The child was sickly from the first, and as her mother struggled to regain her own health, the baby grew weaker and then died of cholera on August 20, 1873. Having already been devastated by the loss in a very short time of Joseph Wright, grandparents to whom she was very close, and her mother, this unexpected and premature death was a heavy blow. For Ida and William, baby Ida’s death marked “the beginning of the great sorrow that was to hover like a cloud over the remainder of their lives.”44
Ida herself was sick, bedridden for nearly six months. It is likely that her immune system and that of her daughter were compromised during the pregnancy, leaving both vulnerable to infection and disease. Ida may have also suffered some kind of fall that led to a concussion or even more traumatic brain injury, while injuring her spine.45
Ida’s father, alarmed by her condition and alone in the Saxton house except for his ne’er-do-well twenty-three-year-old son, George, invited the McKinleys to leave their home and live with him. They accepted. A platoon of maids, servants, and cooks would make Ida’s life easier.46
Overwhelmed, Ida became severely depressed and “hysterically apprehensive” about Katie, holding her in her lap for hours in a darkened room, crying. When Abner McKinley found Katie swinging on the garden gate and invited her for a walk, his niece replied, “No, I mustn’t go out of the yard or God’ll punish Mama some more.”47
In addition to depression, Ida suffered severe headaches and an acute sensitivity to light, rapid motion, and sound. Even the hairpins used to hold her coif in place could bring on agony, so she cropped her hair short. On an August 1877 camping trip, some young boys began banging out music on homemade instruments, causing McKinley to fly out of his tent and ask them to stop: Ida was being tormented by a headache. Yet a few weeks later, she hosted a piano recital at her home with no ill effects.48
She began suffering epileptic fits, probably the result of brain trauma from a fall. Headaches often signaled one was imminent. Her body would stiffen; she would become oblivious to her surroundings, make a hissing sound, and shake uncontrollably. Often she did not know she had had a seizure and would pick up the conversation in midsentence. She sometimes fell out of her chair or, if walking, slumped to the ground. She had facial tics and contortions. It is difficult to diagnose more than a century later, but doctors now believe Ida suffered a central nervous system injury to her left frontal lobe that resulted in epilepsy and partial paralysis or muscle weakness on her right side. The headaches and seizures lasted the rest of her life.49
If a seizure came on in public, her husband would cover her face with a handkerchief until it passed. William Howard Taft was once talking with McKinley with Ida present and as he asked the Major for a pencil, Ida began hissing and suffered a seizure. McKinley reached for his handkerchief with one hand while giving Taft the pencil with his other. It left Taft discombobulated.50
Ida’s persistent weakness on her right side caused her to hide her right hand in photographs and public appearances. In addition, she had phlebitis, which made it painful to walk or stand, likely aggravated by a spinal injury that caused nerve damage that made her mobility issues worse. Still, after being virtually hospitalized in her own house for six months, these maladies did not keep Ida from traveling and entertaining in the years ahead.51
By March 13, 1874, Ida felt well enough to attend her first party. In the meantime, as the McKinleys lived under James Saxton’s roof, little Katie grew into an outgoing, animated young girl and McKinley’s law practice flourished, in part because of his father-in-law’s needs or referrals. Saxton encouraged him and Ida to purchase a large office building across the street from the Saxton home, even lending them the money. McKinley moved his law office there and rented out the remaining space for income.52
But then on June 25, 1875, the McKinleys suffered another misfortune. Ida’s worst fears were realized. Katie died of scarlet fever. It was almost too much to bear. Friends worried about Ida, buried under her grief and praying for her own death. McKinley would not let her go, even though he too felt keenly the loss of his “favorite Christmas present.”53
Ida’s pregnancies, her illnesses, and the rapid deaths of so many people to whom she was so close transformed her from the spirited, self-confident woman McKinley had married two years earlier into a near invalid. McKinley understood what the death of six of the closest people to her in less than six years must have done to his wife.
Ida became his constant focus. She clung to him fiercely and demanded much of his time, which he gave willingly. McKinley did all he could to assure her of his continuing love. He stopped riding horses and cut back on walking because these activities took him away from Ida, preferring instead to take her on carriage rides. He was quick to attend without complaint to her every whim and need. He would excuse himself from meetings or visitors to periodically check on her and sit in the darkened parlor at night, talking with her. When the two were apart because of business or politics, he would write her frequently.54
Ida’s illness kept her from his swearing-in as a congressman. When it took place in March 1877, she was in Philadelphia’s Infirmary for Nervous Diseases under the care of Silas Weir Mitchell. He was a neurologist whose remedies required forced bed rest and a high-caloric, milk-based diet. His patients were isolated in darkened rooms, prohibited from entertainment or reading. His methods were used on Virginia Woolf and thought to do more harm than good. At least Mitchell viewed epilepsy as a physical, not a mental, disease, unlike most doctors of the time. Ida was in Mitchell’s care for perhaps three months and McKinley wrote to her as many as three letters a day.55
McKinley offered to sacrifice his political dreams, telling her, “If you would suffer by the circumstances surrounding me in a competition for public station, I will devote my ambition to success in private life.” But she strongly supported his career, perhaps even saw in it a way to some of the happiness denied her by the death of her children and the onset of ill health. So she responded, “Your ambitions are mine.”56
He gave her the support the grieving mother needed. “Ida would have died years ago,” one friend later remarked, “but William would just not let her go.” The couple would have no more children. For the rest of her life, she kept Katie’s photo on her dressing table and hung a larger version on her bedroom wall, the image hand-tinted with yellow hair, pink cheeks, red lips, and blue eyes. Ida took to displaying Katie’s rocking chair next to her own childhood chair, often draping them with Katie and little Ida’s clothes.57
Ida could be challenging. She was—for a period—intensely jealous. In summer 1881, after Ida and McKinley returned from their tenth-anniversary California vacation, she felt neglected when the Major was out of town and accused him of an affair. It ended in “a frantic scene.” Soon after, McKinley and two of his brothers were walking when they met an attractive neighbor woman. As they neared the Saxton house, McKinley pleaded, “please don’t walk into the yard with me. Ida might see you.” Later that fall, after a memorial service in Cleveland for President Garfield following his assassination, McKinley mentioned seeing “a handsome lady” friend of the family’s. Ida erupted in a jealous outburst ended only by an epileptic seizure.58
Even in calm waters, Ida could be demanding, especially in private around family and friends. Mark Hanna’s precocious Boston nephew, David Rhodes, spent the summer of 1896 at his uncle’s Cleveland home. When the McKinleys stayed a week there participating in the city’s centennial celebration, the teenager reported to his father, Hanna’s brother-in-law, the historian James Ford Rhodes, that “Mrs. McK has been somewhat more flighty than usual during the last few days . . . to the great annoyance of Aunt Gussie and Aunt Mary Phelps whose nerves are on the point of entire collapse from their constant effort to fulfill her outrageous whims.”59
But McKinley accepted Ida’s condition and behavior without complaint or bitterness. It was part of God’s plan and his faith was deepened rather than shaken. “His first consideration was to soften the blow for Ida as far as he could,” a contemporary observed. “His devotion to her grew with her dependence on him.” Ida’s reliance on him, suggests McKinley’s preeminent biographer, “fulfilled his need to be loved, and that mattered most.” The Major reacted stoically to his daughters’ deaths and his wife’s deteriorating health, hardly ever speaking of either and never complaining about the latter. In a rare reflection years later, he wrote a friend about the death of a child, “Only those who have suffered in a similar way can appreciate the keenness of such affliction.” He forever enjoyed the company of children.60
BY NOW, MCKINLEY’S LEGAL apprenticeship was finished. He was one of Canton’s leading lawyers, respected for his preparation and admired for his skills of presentation and persuasion. Because of those talents, he was forced into handling a lawsuit with political ramifications. In March 1876, coal miners in the Tuscarawas Valley struck for higher wages. Management brought in strikebreakers. Violence broke out. A mine operator was severely beaten and several mines burned. By June, twenty-three miners had been arrested and were facing trial. When no one volunteered to defend the miners, McKinley was pressured into the job.61
The opposing counsel was familiar. McKinley had beaten William A. Lynch for county prosecutor in 1869, before Lynch returned the favor two years later. A partner in Canton’s preeminent firm, Lynch represented the mine owners, who were led by a slender thirty-nine-year-old Cleveland businessman with a long, gray patriarchal beard named Mark Hanna.62
Six years older than McKinley, Hanna was born in New Lisbon, Ohio, in 1837 to Scotch-Irish Quaker parents. His father was involved in the family business, started by Hanna’s grandfather. It was the leading wholesaler and distributor in what was then a bustling market town on the Ohio River, on the state’s eastern edge.63
In 1852 the family moved to Cleveland, where the Hanna men started a grocery wholesale business that grew into a distributor for all kinds of commodities. Hanna began working there as a warehouseman in April 1859 after being expelled from Western Reserve College. He had printed up a fake program mocking the school’s junior class talent performance, using “racy” language pillorying it as a burlesque show. As the company began running steamboats on the Great Lakes, hauling sugar, molasses, and foodstuffs and returning with cargoes of pig iron, iron ore, and salt fish, Hanna took on other responsibilities. He was variously a clerk, steamboat pursuer, and traveling salesman. He had a natural talent for business.64
Hanna assumed the company’s leadership in 1862 when his uncle died, his father having withdrawn from the firm for health reasons. At his mother’s urging, Hanna hired a substitute to take his place in the Union Army, though he joined a militia that was called up in 1864 when the Ohio National Guard replaced regular army units in forts around Washington. Before his four months of Guard duty service, Hanna married C. Augusta Rhodes, whose father, Daniel, was a wealthy Cleveland iron and coal merchant and ardent Democrat.65
After the war, Hanna nearly went broke building an oil refinery before selling it to a high school classmate, John D. Rockefeller, in 1867. The domineering Rhodes then pressured his son-in-law to leave his family’s business and devote his talents to a new partnership—Rhodes & Company. Hanna was then just thirty. For the next twenty-seven years he made the partnership a major player in iron and coal, transforming it into a vertically integrated business that owned mines, furnaces, smelters, steamships, and warehouses. Along the way, he purchased the Cleveland Leader, picked up the city’s Opera House at a sheriff’s auction, bought control of Cleveland’s west-side streetcar company, and organized one of the city’s most profitable banks in 1884. He never reentered the oil business.66
Politics slowly interested him. He was elected to the Board of Education in 1869 and though a lifelong Republican given his Quaker forebears’ abolitionist views, bolted the local GOP in 1873 when it fielded an unacceptable mayoral candidate. As the thin, young up-and-comer with the wavy beard thickened over the 1870s into a beefy, clean-shaven middle-aged man with thinning hair, Hanna increased his political activity.
He was an unusual businessman. He had a good relationship with employees, keeping his door open to the lowliest deckhand or miner. He paid them fairly, covered expenses of injured workers, and provided reasonable working conditions. He recognized labor’s right to organize and endorsed collective bargaining and arbitration. He avoided serious labor disputes, often settling them at the outset by meeting with disgruntled workers. About the only serious strike Rhodes & Company had was at the Massillon mines in 1876.67
Despite the high-powered counsel opposing him, McKinley proceeded to get all but one miner off. He then refused the $120 the miners had collected for his fee, adding to his reputation as the workingman’s friend.68
The trial gave Hanna his first glimpse of McKinley, but he later did not recall meeting the Major. The coal baron was distracted by a terrible attack of hives and “smeared with sulfur ointment” to ease the itching and could walk only with a cane. The friendship between the two men would have to wait eight years, until spring 1884. In the meantime, McKinley’s legal apprenticeship was over, but his schooling in a new craft was under way and about to reach a critical test.69