There is no mistaking the implication of McKinley’s cryptic note. Sometime between the 1888 national convention and his November 1890 defeat, with Hanna’s encouragement, McKinley decided to run for president.
McKinley saw opportunity in his congressional loss. It relieved him from serving in a beleaguered House minority. It bolstered his stature as a political martyr—the Republican protectionist whom Democrats were desperate to defeat. It also freed him to find a better position from which to run for president.
McKinley needed a political post from which to mount a presidential bid, whether that was in 1892 at the end of Harrison’s term or in 1896. A fresh electoral victory would raise his standing even further, and a statewide election would demonstrate his appeal. Fortunately, such a perch was available in 1891—the Ohio governorship, the same post that launched Hayes into the White House fifteen years earlier.
The Major could win it. He and Hanna understood Ohio Republicans had actually done well in 1890, winning all three statewide offices on the ballot by comfortable margins. Though Republicans couldn’t overcome the Democratic gerrymandering, McKinley’s protectionist message helped his fellow Republican House candidates win more votes than Democrats and run ahead of the party’s statewide ticket. Besides, a governor’s race in a competitive state would provide a good testing ground for a presidential bid.1
However, McKinley would need an old foe’s help to win. In March 1891, he visited Foraker at his Cincinnati home to ask the former governor to nominate him at the state convention. This request appealed to Foraker’s vanity, who took it as evidence McKinley felt he was a friend, not “lacking in any quality of manly fidelity.” But McKinley’s visit didn’t demonstrate friendship. It showed McKinley’s political savvy. He knew the untrustworthy Foraker would realize it was in his own interest to agree. Both men wanted party unity: McKinley to guarantee his nomination and Foraker to restart his political career and diminish the hostility of the Major’s supporters.2
This exposed an essential difference between McKinley and Hanna. McKinley knew there are no permanent enemies in politics. The sometimes-hotheaded Hanna, on the other hand, had told a reporter the previous March that Foraker “allowed his ambition to get the best of him,” and had been “a very heavy load for some time.” I “am done with him,” Hanna had said.3
A thousand Republicans met McKinley and paraded him to the Neil House on a blistering June 16 for the state GOP convention in Columbus. The next day Foraker “outdid any of his past performances” and nominated McKinley. The former governor roused the delegates with a stirring recitation of the Major’s record and character and closed saying, “Every Republican in Ohio loves him, every Democrat in Ohio knows him and fears him.”4
Behind the scenes, however, Foraker packed the Resolutions Committee to stop any endorsement of Sherman’s renomination to the Senate as he now wanted to replace him when his term was up in 1892.5
National issues dominated the general election, with the state Democratic platform devoted primarily to a call for free and unlimited coinage of silver and an attack on protection. McKinley responded in his August 22 kickoff in Niles, Ohio. The Major viewed a giant parade from the second-floor balcony of his boyhood home before speaking from a platform on the Union School lawn. Among the marchers were the young women of the Mineral Ridge Ida McKinley Club, dressed in matching red and white dresses and carrying blue umbrellas.6
McKinley quoted Cleveland about the dangers of Free Silver and supported “the double standard” of gold and silver, along with paper notes redeemable in coin. But he also warned that without an international agreement setting the ratio between the metals, silver would depreciate and gold disappear in hoarding. While Campbell, the incumbent governor, said he was willing to take a “chance” on free coinage, McKinley responded he wasn’t.7
He defended the tariff law that bore his name at a Labor Day rally in Cincinnati, saying there was “not a line of that law that is not American, not a page of it that is not patriotic, there is not a paragraph that is not dedicated to the American home.” Campaign badges appeared, featuring a small tin plate inscribed along its rim, “made of Ohio steel and California tin,” with the slogan “McKinley and Protection.” By Election Day, the Major had made more than 140 speeches and covered 84 of the state’s 88 counties, 23 in the last two weeks.8
McKinley closed with mammoth rallies in Cincinnati (where Foraker joined him) and on election eve in Canton, where supporters would yell, “What’s the matter with McKinley?!” to which others responded, “He’s all right!” McKinley was elected governor with a 21,511-vote margin, carrying in a GOP legislature where Republicans outnumbered Democrats more than 2 to 1.9
While understanding it was critical to McKinley’s presidential ambitions to become governor, Hanna had focused on Sherman’s reelection to the Senate, raising money across Ohio and in Chicago and Pittsburgh to flood the state with operatives and funds to help legislative candidates who supported Sherman, not Foraker. He left the management of McKinley’s campaign to William M. Hahn, a Richland businessman whom he and the Major had installed as GOP state chairman.10
In winning, McKinley took a vital step toward the White House, but learned a lesson that would ill serve him in the future. He had handled Democratic calls for Free Silver by using Campbell’s congressional voting record to muddle the picture while offering a nuanced description of his own monetary views: he was against Free Silver unless there was an international agreement. This wouldn’t work in a presidential campaign. McKinley had not yet found language to deal with the currency issue, perhaps because his own record was jumbled.
In January Hanna’s work for Sherman paid off as Republican legislators renominated him by 53 to 38. The senator wrote Hanna, “Without you I would have been beaten.” Foraker would have to look elsewhere to advance his ambitions.11
AS 1892 BEGAN, MCKINLEY was no longer a political apprentice, but a national leader who wanted to be president and whom others wanted to be president. He and Hanna had to decide if he should try for the party’s nomination that summer. President Benjamin Harrison was personally unpopular with many Republicans angry about his personal treatment of them, especially over patronage. Even McKinley, rarely ruffled, had left the White House after discussing a judicial vacancy, upset with the president’s haughty attitude and refusal to listen. The Major never returned while Harrison sat in the White House.12
Though he had undertaken suicide missions in the Civil War, McKinley would not do so as a politician. He decided not to challenge the president at the party’s national convention in Minneapolis, but would be ready if Harrison did not run. If the president did seek a second term, the convention would be an opportunity to raise the Major’s profile, make new friends, and meet potential supporters.
The Major used the spring to prepare. He made several high-profile speeches, among them one to the American College Republican League at the University of Michigan. Responding to a toast “to American Protection,” the Major drew the evening banquet’s longest and most enthusiastic demonstration and lambasted House Democrats “as weak and vacillating.”13
Other Republicans began the New Year firmly opposed to the president’s renomination and created a “Grievance Committee” to attract other malcontents. Their leaders were ironically the powerful New York and Pennsylvania Republican bosses who had made Harrison the nominee in 1888, Platt and Quay.14
Platt seethed at Harrison’s failure to make him Treasury secretary. He was called the Easy Boss, but behind his unflappable exterior was a man who settled scores. His ally, Quay, had brilliantly managed the president’s 1888 race, running a disciplined and well-funded effort beyond the abilities of Harrison’s circle, but had then been ignored on patronage. He had retreated to his library, considered one of the country’s finest, to read and bide his time.15
The two bosses were being helped to dethrone Harrison by James S. “Ret” Clarkson, the publisher of the Iowa State Register and Republican national chairman. Clarkson’s nickname came from his habit of writing “Ret[urn] Clarkson” on articles going to the typographers so he could proofread their work to ensure they had correctly deciphered his atrocious handwriting. Although Harrison had named him Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman, Clarkson felt the president would lose the election and hoped Blaine would run.
Foraker was another ally of Platt and Quay. He later claimed Harrison “was entitled” to renomination, but was urging Blaine to run. At the Ohio convention, he got himself and Asa Bushnell elected national convention delegates as Blaine men and forced McKinley’s managers to agree that they would not bind the delegation for Harrison with what were called “instructions.” While Foraker liked the state platform that did not endorse Harrison’s reelection, he was unhappy with its lengthy praise of Governor McKinley’s record and his namesake tariff bill.16
Would the secretary of state run this time? Platt, Quay, and their allies may have known the pressure being put on Blaine by his wife, Harriet. She hated Harrison. The president had refused to name Blaine’s son assistant secretary of state, appointing him to a lesser post. That April, Mrs. Blaine had personally asked the president to jump her son-in-law, an army colonel, over seventy more senior officers and make him a brigadier. Harrison refused and Mrs. Blaine stormed out, saying, “You had a chance to please us once.”17
Harrison was now a reluctant candidate, disliking his job and hating Congress. He did not commit to run until the spring and then mostly out of pique with his secretary of state. While he and Blaine agreed on most foreign issues, they didn’t like each other and Blaine’s thirst for the presidency was palpable. Old and in bad health, Blaine wanted one last run and finally made his move with a terse resignation on June 4, just three days before the Republican convention. Within hours, the president replied with a similarly curt acceptance. Telling reporters he merely wanted “personal freedom and peace,” Blaine blamed Harrison for viewing him “with suspicion and distrust” and the president’s friends for considering him “guilty of duplicity,” which of course he was.18
Blaine’s resignation quickened the pulses of anti-Harrison men in Minneapolis. Foraker said he “should not be surprised” if Blaine won on the first ballot. Hotel lobbies, bars, and hallways were full of rumors about defections from Harrison.19
Blaine’s entry did not affect McKinley’s plans. He would not wage an overt campaign, but remain loyal to the president, while Hanna gently scouted out support for the Major as a fallback candidate. If Harrison faltered, the Major would hold himself aloof while friends organized a draft. Neither McKinley nor Hanna hoped one was necessary. Harrison had made it hard for any Republican to win that fall. The two Ohioans were laying groundwork for the future, not reaching for the prize in 1892.20
That is why the day before Blaine’s announcement, Hanna reached out to Foraker and personally asked for his help in unifying the Ohio delegation. Foraker was touched that Hanna came to him hat in hand. “This feeling made it easy,” Foraker later wrote, “for me to forget Mr. Hanna’s past unfriendliness.” While still helping Blaine, Foraker promised to support the Major on the first ballot, “notwithstanding a number of McKinley’s appointees, and other friends from Ohio,” he told Hanna, talking in “a very offensive way” about him. McKinley was better than Harrison, Foraker thought, and a chaotic convention might break for Blaine or even Foraker himself.21
Harrison’s fortunes stabilized by Monday. Alger withdrew in favor of Blaine, but the anti-Harrison forces splintered with talk about Sherman, Allison, and, increasingly, McKinley. Harrison’s managers—called the “Twelve Apostles”—remained focused on Blaine, dispatching Frederick Douglass, the former slave and now reform advocate, to remind black delegates that Blaine had opposed the Force Bill protecting Southern voting rights. At a Saturday strategy session that lasted until Sunday morning, the Apostles had decided on a convention-eve “secret meeting” with every Harrison delegate. Their object was to lock in the Harrison men, and if a majority of the delegates attended, Harrison’s victory would be certain. The meeting had the desired effect.22
On Monday, June 6, McKinley was picked unanimously as permanent chairman. The anti-Harrison forces wanted to keep him visible in the event of a stampede. Harrison’s managers had met with McKinley that morning and were reassured he remained “firm and loyal to the President.” Both sides knew from the last convention that McKinley would keep order. Reed arrived and immediately met with Clarkson. Reed hated Harrison for appointing an archenemy as the port collector in Portland, Maine, then pardoning the man’s brother. Though he had long disliked Blaine, he was better than the president. Reed, of course, was available if Blaine wasn’t.23
The buzz about McKinley continued growing as his cousin William McKinley Osborne, now a Boston police commissioner, worked over the Massachusetts delegation. Talk in Pennsylvania and elsewhere led reporters to call the Major “a very dangerous candidate,” which was a way of saying he could win if he ran. Despite his pledge to support the Major on the first ballot, Foraker told reporters Ohioans would support Blaine.24
Tuesday morning, Clarkson gaveled the meeting to order. The Convention Hall was a giant pine box built inside the Industrial Exposition Building. Delegates and guests entered through the exposition’s brick façade under an eagle with a red, white, and blue shield in its claws with stars on a dark blue background above, surrounded by bunting. The building’s newly planed pine timbers smelled good but the sweltering heat caused resin to drip from the ceiling. There were many No Smoking signs.
RNC members and dignitaries sat on the back of the stage while hundreds of reporters flanked it. Delegates were in front. Behind them were more guests who sat on uncushioned chairs in galleries. People walked onto the stage via a slanting staircase, creating dramatic entrances. The only banner was at the hall’s back, facing the stage, with yellow letters on blue saying, AMERICAN WARES FOR AMERICAN WORKMEN, AMERICAN MARKETS FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, and PROTECTION FOR AMERICAN HOMES.
Delegates unanimously confirmed McKinley as permanent chairman. Dressed in a black Prince Albert coat with high collar, his hair brushed and face pale, he took the stage to cheers and began, “Gentlemen of the convention.” Someone yelled, “Three cheers for McKinley!” and the hall roared them out before he could start again. Speaking without notes for roughly seven minutes, McKinley heralded the GOP’s record in passing every pledge from its early platforms into law—including freedom for the slave and a transcontinental railroad. He defended protection, saying it “stimulates American industries and gives the widest possibilities to American genius and American effort.” Then he slammed new Democratic tariff proposals and closed by insisting on “a free ballot and a fair count” as “the greatest constitutional guaranty.” This provoked delegates to call for Frederick Douglass, who stood to acknowledge their cheers. There was less talk in the hallways, hotel suites, and watering holes about Blaine, more about Reed and McKinley, and plenty about Harrison, who appeared to be winning.25
A credentials fight over Alabama would tell each camp’s strength. When delegates convened Thursday evening, Harrison men had dominated the credentials committee and the anti-administration camp was forced to challenge Alabama’s approved slate. For more than four hours the sides went at each other, while McKinley “blandly conducted the proceedings with a palm-leaf fan” to stay cool. He kept the convention from tying itself into parliamentary knots several times so it could finally have a test vote of the two camps’ strengths. At midnight the roll call stopped when the lights failed. The band played “We Won’t Go Home Till Morning” until they returned. Harrison won the test vote 436 to 4321/2, close but enough to guarantee his renomination.26
The next morning, the Los Angeles Times endorsed the Major, while the New-York Tribune reported, “McKinley is the dark horse.” Both newspapers’ publishers were the Major’s friends. The anti-Harrison men were so desperate for McKinley’s support for Reed, their fallback if Blaine faltered, that they approached Hanna to promise the Major the secretaryship of the Treasury if he would endorse Reed. Hanna refused.
Only Harrison and Blaine were nominated. As he seconded Blaine’s nomination, Stephen W. Downey, who served in Congress with McKinley as Wyoming’s territorial delegate, turned to the Major on the stage and said, “when four years more roll around, we will make you President.”27
When the roll call reached Ohio, McKinley challenged its count, thinking his alternate had voted for him rather than Harrison (he was mistaken). Harrison won a first-ballot victory with 5351/6 to 1821/6 for Blaine and 182 for McKinley (a handful of votes went to other candidates). Without mounting an organized campaign or even being nominated, McKinley captured as many votes as the anti-Harrison bosses won for Blaine. As the meeting ended, delegates yelled at the Major, “Your turn will come in 1896!”28
McKinley was carried into his hotel on the shoulders of admirers before refusing their demands for a speech, saying, “What voice I have left is for Harrison and my heart goes with my voice.” Exhausted by the day’s exertions and blistering heat, he and Herman H. Kohlsaat, a Chicago baker who used his profits to buy newspapers, went to their room, ordered ice water, stripped down to their undershorts, flopped on the bed, and fanned themselves. Hanna arrived. After Kohlsaat draped the sofa with the bed’s top sheet, Hanna stripped to his skivvies, threw himself on the couch, and croaked, “My God, William, that was a damned close squeak!”29
Hanna was right. McKinley had kept his commitment to Harrison and yet could have been nominated by a convention close to stampeding. The Major was grateful it did not. No Republican would have an easy race after Harrison, especially following that convention fight. Instead he and Hanna considered what lessons to take from Minneapolis. They would need a strategy for 1896.