Hanna was amazed by what he saw at the Minneapolis convention. “The demand from the people for McKinley,” he wrote, “was even more outspoken” than four years earlier. It would have hurt McKinley to actively seek the nomination in 1892, but next time, Hanna thought, “[t]he popular demand for his candidacy would override all opposition.”1
Notwithstanding Hanna’s heady thoughts, spontaneous demand is rarely enough in politics. Victory in a race for the presidency generally requires a well-run campaign built on a thoughtful strategy. Fortunately for McKinley and Hanna, they were methodical men. They knew from personal experience how chaotic political conventions could be. Instinctively, both men worked through the challenges of running for president and considered what was necessary to win.
There is no letter from one man to the other, no memo from a consultant or manager, and no record of a single brainstorming session where they hashed it all out. But from what they did, what they said, and how they drew in others in the years that followed the 1892 convention, we can see the contours of McKinley’s strategy to win the nomination.
The first, most essential task was to unify Ohio Republicans. A divided Ohio delegation killed Sherman’s chances in 1888 so a divided home-state delegation would undercut any candidate’s argument that he had the broad appeal necessary to win the presidency. McKinley must have his home state strongly behind him. He and Hanna also knew that in the serpent pit that was the Buckeye State’s GOP politics, there was an ambitious rival. While Foraker spent 1893 and 1894 building his law practice, he still thirsted for higher office and could destroy the Major’s chances.
Both Hanna and McKinley felt that the nomination and general election would be settled over pocketbook issues. Therefore, the campaign should emphasize protection and ignore currency. Old Civil War animosities no longer rallied Northern Republicans as effectively as they once had. Protectionism united Republicans, split Northern Democrats, and attracted the laborer vote, a swing bloc that neither party dominated. McKinley was the party’s undisputed leader on the tariff issue, but protectionism would need to play a bigger role in the GOP’s messaging than it had in the past. By contrast, the currency issue pitted Midwestern and Western silver Republicans against Eastern hard-money Republicans, so it risked dividing the party. McKinley wanted to avoid that.
McKinley knew he would not win the nomination as a regional candidate; he must run a national campaign. He had to start with Ohio, then win as many Southern Republican delegates as possible (Southerners represented a quarter of the convention’s total delegates). He must pick up support in the Midwest, West, and even Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. Illinois, with the fourth-largest delegation, was key since Ohio (third largest) would presumably be for McKinley, while New York (first) and Pennsylvania (second) would be under the control of party bosses and therefore tougher to win.
By ceding no state or region, McKinley was treading in dangerous territory. To run a national campaign, he would have to challenge the machine bosses by recruiting their intraparty state rivals to his cause. Initially, McKinley was reluctant to go after New York and Pennsylvania delegates, but Hanna pressed him. This too was difficult, but extremely lucrative if carried off.2
Favorite-son candidates, on the other hand, did not scare McKinley. He believed GOP activists would see through the charade of candidates who were using home-state friends to get rewards even though they had no chance to win.
McKinley and Hanna understood it would be a mistake to trade promises of patronage, power, or cabinet posts for delegates. Once you start striking political bargains like that, you can’t stop. Machine bosses such as Platt and Quay had been burned by verbal understandings and might insist on written pledges, which if revealed could burn any candidate who made them. McKinley wanted to come to the presidency “unmortgaged,” to have won the nomination because delegates thought he was the right man and had the right platform, not because he’d cut all the right deals.
The Major didn’t set out to be an opponent of “the Combine,” as the Republican leaders of well-organized, disciplined party organizations tied together by patronage, power, and money were called. He understood such arrangements were part of the Gilded Age political landscape. However, over the course of the campaign, McKinley came to understand the bosses opposed him because he wasn’t willing to mortgage his campaign to them. So McKinley eventually decided to convert the bosses’ opposition into an asset by running against them and their methods as a reform Republican.
For both Hanna and McKinley, being extremely well organized was probably encoded into their DNA. They did not establish the haphazard operation typical of most primary campaigns. Instead they worked to create a highly disciplined organization, which led them to deploy agents around the country to do the preliminary work of identifying McKinley supporters in the states. Most were Ohio associates—including Charles W. F. Dick, an Akron lawyer and former GOP state chairman; William M. Hahn; and Joseph P. Smith, the state librarian. William McKinley Osborne was another agent, as was John Hay. Hay, who had been Abraham Lincoln’s personal secretary and number two at the State Department under Garfield, had married a Cleveland girl and taken over the family’s company when her father committed suicide. Enormously wealthy, he now lived on Washington’s Lafayette Square and was wired into the capital’s gossip. These men and others helped recruit leaders in each state to work to elect McKinley men as delegates to local, congressional district, and state GOP conventions, then to the national convention. This was the Gilded Age equivalent of the presidential primary season, not elections open to party members or voters, but a multistage series of local, district, and state conventions.3
It would be impossible to run every state and territorial effort from Canton, so the men in the states were put in charge and were responsible for devising a plan that met with McKinley and Hanna’s approval and then carrying it out, adjusting as necessary.
McKinley and Hanna began organizing early. There was no incumbent Republican president. The field was wide-open. Candidates and the bosses usually waited until the election year itself to throw together an effort, but from McKinley’s perspective, waiting that long left too much to chance and unnecessarily ceded territory to those party bosses who already had their machines in place.
McKinley represented a generational change within the party. He was the last of the Civil War generation to be president, so he put special emphasis on appealing to a younger generation and empowering its leaders to rise in the GOP.
The Major was also a different kind of Republican who felt the GOP must broaden its base. It was losing strength because the North was becoming less Anglo-Saxon Protestant and Southern Democrats were extinguishing the voting rights of Republican blacks. The GOP would win national elections only if it gained support from new ethnic immigrant laborers in the North—often Catholic—while finding a way to defend free and fair elections below the Mason-Dixon Line and attract more votes there by emphasizing protection.
In politics, it pays to be lucky. But to win, Hanna and McKinley could leave nothing to chance. They would insist on instruction for national delegates. This meant using their grassroots majorities at district and state conventions to vote to direct their national delegates to support McKinley as long as he was in the race. This would keep rogue delegates from deserting when offered patronage or other enticements. Instructions from the grassroots were a powerful way to keep delegates in line since they did not want to return home from the national convention and explain why they had broken faith with their state’s GOP rank and file.
If a front-runner lacked a majority of delegate support before the convention, he often fell prey to a deadlocked convention or the combined animosity of his competitors. The McKinley men would go for an absolute majority of delegates. It was also necessary to have a majority among the members of the Republican National Committee. Control of the RNC would protect any delegate majority.
To gain support, McKinley would also make good use of his many relationships. He made friends while serving in Congress for almost fourteen years, attending three national conventions, and campaigning around the country. These friends could now help deliver delegates at the national convention and their states in the general election, especially because many of these relationships were so deep with McKinley.
He made strong, close friends more easily than most politicians. While self-interest is often the basis of political associations, true friendship is a more powerful bond. Rather than deals and boodle, the Major and Hanna would draw on these friendships to foster grassroots support and build a sense of inevitability for McKinley’s candidacy.
Finally, McKinley needed to demonstrate that his campaign was about something larger than himself. Every person who runs for president is necessarily ambitious, but the overly ambitious (Foraker) reeked of self-interest. Grassroots Republicans found it attractive that in public and private, McKinley came across as selflessly committed to the country’s greater good through the protective system.
McKinley began executing this plan in the fall of 1892 by spending nearly three months campaigning for Harrison and the GOP ticket. This would strengthen his dominance on the tariff issue, create goodwill among party leaders, and deepen his support among the grassroots.
The Major received an estimated 1,500 invitations. Hanna and RNC chairman and former Montana congressman Thomas H. Carter, one of Harrison’s “Twelve Apostles,” planned an exhaustive whistle-stop tour to put McKinley before hundreds of thousands of voters. For example, he barnstormed Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan in late October, traveling 2,000 miles and delivering twenty-six speeches in just five days. His message was well received by Republicans and Democrats alike, especially laborers. Recalling the McKinley Tariff’s wool provisions, a Missouri Democrat stockman yelled at one rally, “Three cheers for the man who saved our sheep!” At another stop in Peru, Indiana, 30,000 turned out, many brandishing tin cups from new local factories. In Detroit, young women working at the Standard Pearl Button Company insisted on showing their gratitude for high tariffs. It was unladylike to cheer, so they waved handkerchiefs.4
He spoke in every kind of venue, from New York’s Carnegie Hall to a Beatrice, Nebraska, Chautauqua. There McKinley delivered a two-hour defense of high tariffs, pummeling Democrats for stripping passages from their platform that mildly defended protectionism. He was as popular in the tent as he was in the hall. McKinley did not neglect his home turf, appearing with Foraker and Whitelaw Reid, the party’s vice presidential candidate and New-York Tribune publisher, to formally kick off the Ohio campaign at a monster rally in Dayton.5
He spent the election’s final week in New York before making five stops in Pennsylvania on his way home. His proclamation that “[p]rotection cheapens everything but men” brought applause and gifts everywhere, including a red, white, and blue weaving shuttle from textile workers and a tin ingot from foundry men. A group of laborers appeared on his Philadelphia stage with a tinplate banner painted with the state seal. The crowd went wild when McKinley quipped, “There is another trophy of protection.” He rarely mentioned currency, even though many silver Democrats made it their principal issue.6
While McKinley helped other Republicans by drawing crowds and praising protection, his 1892 campaign also allowed him to road-test his words, hone his speaking skills, and, most important, make new personal and political friends. Harrison lost to Cleveland (who made history as the only president elected to two nonconsecutive terms), but the Major’s future appeared brighter than ever. “He is bound to be the nominee,” his secretary wrote.7
THAT SOUNDED PLAUSIBLE UNTIL a few months after McKinley’s impressive 1892 canvass. Like a sudden clap of thunder, the Major received news that had the potential to destroy his political aspirations, drive him from the governor’s office, and leave him penniless.
On February 17, McKinley was on a train to New York to speak to the Ohio Society and then to pick up Ida. She had been undergoing treatment for epilepsy from Joseph N. Bishop, a Manhattan specialist in “nervous diseases and troubles of women.” There was a telegram waiting when McKinley reached Dunkirk, near Buffalo. Robert L. Walker of Youngstown, Ohio, was bankrupt.
The two men had been childhood friends. Walker loaned him money for law school and for each of his early congressional campaigns, which the Major promptly repaid. McKinley had returned the favor in recent years by cosigning notes for Walker’s tin stamping business. The Major thought the notes totaled $10,000. Walker’s business was now insolvent and the notes had been called. McKinley would have to pay. It would take most of his life’s savings. Distressed, he canceled his speech, arranged for his brother Abner to escort Ida home, and caught the first train to Youngstown.8
By the time McKinley reached Youngstown, the magnitude of the disaster had grown. Walker had the Major sign blank notes because, he said, he did not know if his bank would renew part or all of a single loan. In reality, Walker was using McKinley’s blank notes to borrow additional money from banks all over northeast Ohio. Friday morning, the notes were thought to total $20,000. By day’s end, the figure was $70,000, three times McKinley’s net worth. When the Major saw Walker, bedridden and crying in anguish, McKinley comforted him, saying, “Have courage, Robert, have courage! Everything will come out all right.” He then issued a statement: “I will pay every note of Mr. Walker’s on which I am an indorser, and not one shall lose a dollar through me.” McKinley was facing not only his political career’s end. He could be bankrupt, too.9
McKinley traveled to Cleveland the next day and met with Myron T. Herrick, a banker serving on his gubernatorial staff. To pay off a note, a local industrialist had already given Herrick a $5,000 gift. Another friend, Herman H. Kohlsaat, learned of the mess from the morning papers in New York. “Have just read of your misfortune,” he wired, “My purse is open to you” and offered to come to Ohio.10
The Major and Herrick met Kohlsaat when he arrived in Cleveland Sunday morning. “McKinley was pale and wan, with black rings under his eye,” the Chicago publisher recalled, and “could not speak for his emotion. Tears rolled down his cheeks.” The men met with other friends to discuss what to do. They estimated McKinley owed $90,000. “I wish Mark were here,” McKinley said in a rare display of dependency. Hanna was out of town dealing with business difficulties of his own.11
When Ida arrived from New York, she insisted on using her inheritance to pay her husband’s debts. The men who were gathered in Herrick’s study discouraged her: that $75,000 would be her only support if McKinley was impoverished or died. “My husband has done everything for me all my life,” Mrs. McKinley replied. “Do you mean to deny me the privilege of doing as I please with my own property to help him now?” John Tod, the wealthy and irascible son of Ohio’s wartime governor, snapped, “Because McKinley has made a fool of himself, why should Mrs. McKinley be a pauper?” Kohlsaat explained if McKinley was to stay in politics, his wife’s assets must be pledged or else critics would say the Major was hiding assets by putting them in her name.12
By late Tuesday, the total debt was now estimated at $110,000, more than William and Ida’s combined net worth. Their friends settled on creating a trust that would buy the Walker notes, using the McKinleys’ assets as collateral, thus keeping their property from being liquidated at auction. Herrick, Kohlsaat, and Judge William R. Day would be the trustees. Kohlsaat unhelpfully told the press McKinley’s “affairs are a complete wreck” and that he would resign and resume his law practice. The governor immediately denied he was resigning. McKinley’s impulsive friend had done him a disservice. It would not be the last time.13
McKinley executed a “deed of assignment,” turning all he and Ida had over to the trustees. Over the next few weeks, $40,000 was raised in Chicago. Hanna and Herrick dragged their money sack through Cleveland. Many others stepped in to help the Major. From Cincinnati, Representative Bellamy Storer sent $5,000 and Charles Taft $1,000. Hanna solicited funds in Pittsburgh with the help of Philander C. Knox, now a wealthy attorney but once the Mount Union student who was McKinley’s star witness in his prosecution of saloon owners. John Hay sent $3,000. McKinley later asked for the list of donors, but the trustees refused. Strangers sent money, including coins from children. “I admire you as an honest man. I admire your integrity and manliness,” wrote a Zanesville, Ohio, railroad engineer. “Draw on me at sight for $500.” McKinley thought such donations made him appear a beggar, so he returned them with his thanks, but many were anonymous.14
Hanna and the trustees raised over $130,000. Herrick negotiated a 10 percent reduction in the Walker notes held by banks, and by June, they had all been paid. McKinley thanked Hanna, Cincinnati lawyer and friend Thomas McDougal, and the trustees for their “noble generosity,” but insisted he would pay the trust back. He sent Herrick regular payments, but rather than pass them on to the fund’s contributors, the Cleveland banker invested the money, leaving McKinley’s estate $200,000 at his death.15
Ironically, the Walker notes actually enhanced McKinley’s White House prospects. Since his first impulse (and that of his wife) was to do anything necessary to pay the debts, the incident strengthened his reputation for integrity. Republican papers praised him, with one saying, “Everybody must feel profound sympathy for a [sic] honest and honorable man who gets into trouble through doing a kindness to a friend.” Even Democratic papers generously applauded his conduct, saying the affair “will raise him in the public estimation as a man.” The Plain Dealer, normally vituperative, editorialized, “The entire country will sympathize with Governor McKinley . . . and it is hoped matters can be arranged without loss to him.”16
THE MAJOR WAS RENOMINATED for a second term in June. With his own financial difficulties on his mind, the Major alluded in his acceptance speech to the country’s economic distress. The economy was sputtering, he told the delegates. Businesses were collapsing, factories closing, blast furnaces going cold, and men losing their jobs. Cleveland had said that for the economy’s health the Treasury’s gold reserves must not fall below $100 million, yet they had. Cleveland blamed it on the Silver Purchase Act and called for its repeal, but the economy had been good under Harrison when the silver law was in operation.
Instead McKinley blamed the faltering economy on the lack of business and consumer confidence caused by Democratic threats to undo the protective system. The Democratic platform’s demand for a tariff-for-revenue only pushed business and financial leaders to hunker down, he argued, rather than expand their enterprises.17
The country descended rapidly into a deep depression that would last almost four years and was more severe than the Panic of 1873. There were many causes for the latest economic calamity. Some were international. London’s Barings Bank failed in 1890 because of bad foreign investments, prompting a global financial crisis. Capital was withdrawn from the developing world, including America. The European grain crop failed in 1891, giving U.S. farmers a lucrative year in 1892, but that disappeared the next year when Europe enjoyed a bumper crop. Some causes were secular. Disruptive new technologies led to bankruptcies and closings of companies that could not adjust to them. Then there was the railroad boom’s end, as there were few places left without tracks.
Even then, the United States might have avoided the worst of the panic had it not been for two laws McKinley voted for and, in one instance, wrote. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act had eroded confidence in the dollar as it caused European financiers to worry the United States would abandon the gold standard and adopt an inflationary silver currency. They withdrew gold, reducing both the Treasury’s reserves and much-needed foreign investment in the United States. Then there was the McKinley Tariff, which by reducing imports also reduced the flow into the Treasury of gold to pay for duties. Sugar’s addition to the free list was also responsible for shrinking gold payments for import duties. This, coupled with big increases in spending under Harrison on veteran pensions and on harbor and river improvements, erased the surplus and threatened to plunge the government into deficits, further eroding confidence in the dollar domestically and abroad.18
Walker’s bankruptcy was an omen. The Reading Railroad went under that same month, unnerving investors. By April 22, the Treasury’s gold reserves fell below $100 million for the first time since the Panic of 1873 as people frantically exchanged paper money for gold and hoarded it. In early May, the stock market abruptly declined sharply, led by railroad and industrial stocks. By May’s end, between loans being called, dropping sales, and plummeting stock prices, two dozen companies were failing a day.19
India ended its use of the silver standard June 26, dropping white metal prices from 81¢ an ounce to 62¢ in less than a week. Western mines were shuttered and the Union Pacific and other railroads that transported silver were slammed. Within a month, out-of-work miners were threatening to loot Denver banks. The militia was called out, federal troops were put on alert, and business owners slept in their shops with guns in their hands. Tent camps were set up to house thousands of unemployed men until they could be shipped out of town.20
This continued through the summer, with the Erie & Western Railroad going under in July. Hundreds of banks failed, wiping out their depositors’ savings. New York Stock Exchange officials considered closing, at least temporarily. At the Missouri state line, police met trains from the West, declared the unemployed paupers, and turned them away. Some miners headed to the farm region for work while many went to Chicago.21
By August, 25,000 men were out of work in Cleveland. Chicago’s mayor warned that his city’s 200,000 destitute men needed help or “we will have riots that will shake the country.” In October, the Northern Pacific was put into receivership. As winter arrived, there were reports of starvation in mining and lumber camps. Chicago City Hall, police stations, and churches were opened to give the unemployed a warm place to sleep.22
Against this developing backdrop, McKinley opened the GOP’s fall campaign in Akron, nationalizing his reelection campaign by blaming the poor economy on Cleveland’s effort to reduce tariffs and open the country to a flood of foreign goods. The Democratic platform denounced protection as an “unconstitutional fraud” and promised to rapidly end protection, hurting Ohio factory workers and farmers. West Virginia congressman William L. Wilson, the new Ways and Means chairman, and his committee were already working on a tariff reform measure.
It did not help Ohio Democrats, some of whom harbored mildly protectionist sentiments, that McKinley’s Democratic opponent, Lawrence T. Neal, played a critical role at the Democrats’ 1892 convention in scrubbing from the Resolutions report any positive references to protection.23
While McKinley devoted most of his speeches to tariffs, he also exploited a growing division between Cleveland administration gold men and Free Silver Democrats. He reminded voters the state GOP platform favored “honest money, composed of gold, silver and paper, maintained at equal value,” suggesting McKinley was more open to silver than Neal, a hard-money man, was.24
But McKinley unexpectedly created a problem inside his own party when he picked a fight with the country’s largest, most politically powerful interest group, the American Protective Association. Despite its name, it had nothing to do with tariffs. It was a virulently anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic pressure group. Founded in 1887, the APA represented a strain of extreme Protestantism that wanted to keep “the institutions of our Government” from “the direction and heavy hand of a foreign ecclesiastical potentate,” by which they meant the pope. This group of nativists and religious bigots was a reaction to the Catholic Church’s promotion of parochial schools and to growing Catholic immigration.25
Fed by fear of popish power and drawing on paranoia about bloc Catholic voting, the APA grew quickly and while nominally nonpartisan, it tilted toward the heavily Protestant, Anglo-Saxon Republican Party. It used secret rituals and titles for its leaders loosely based on Masonry, opposed Catholics holding public office, and wanted to restrict immigration. The group became a significant force as its endorsement—or opposition—could make the difference in close elections, especially in the volatile Midwest, where APA membership was large. In 1893, the group was at the height of its power.26
So it was worrisome when that fall, Ohio APA leaders telephoned McKinley to demand he fire two Catholic prison guards. They warned, “This is a test case.” McKinley knew crossing the organization could hurt. He had won in 1891 by 21,000 votes, a margin equal to one-third the APA’s Ohio membership. Still, he told the APA the Constitution protected religious liberty and the Catholic prison guards would keep their jobs. He also pointedly did not answer an APA questionnaire, leading the Ohio chapter to omit the gubernatorial race from the voter guide it circulated to its members.
After hearing what McKinley had done, Hanna arranged for a priest to tour parishes telling Catholics of the governor’s actions. Within days, the Catholic bishops of Cincinnati and Cleveland praised McKinley for wise leadership, which was tantamount to an endorsement. A few weeks later, McKinley won reelection by nearly 81,000 votes, with 54.5 percent. For Ohio, that was a big victory.27
Part of the reason for it was McKinley’s success in attracting the labor vote again by touting his record on their issues. At his urging, Ohio now had arbitration for labor disputes and penalties for keeping workers from joining unions. The Major had also proposed safety protections for factory, construction, streetcar, and railroad workers.28
But McKinley won mainly because voters blamed Cleveland for the deepening depression and because of the sharp divisions between the Major and Neal over protective tariffs. Once thought to be the depression’s cause, the McKinley Tariff was increasingly viewed as the means to salvation. As men were laid off and despair grew in homes across the country, tariff reform was thought a mistake.
A November 18 Cleveland Leader cartoon illustrated this changing view. Uncle Sam stood on a hill with factories, smelters, and smokestacks behind him. He was gesturing toward a rising sun labeled “McKinley 1896,” while a band of tiny men labeled “Dem. Ways and Means Committee” tugged on a rope tied around Uncle Sam. “You can’t pull me down now, boys,” he said. “Don’t you see that prosperity is dawning?”29
MCKINLEY WAS OVERWHELMED WITH Republican invitations to stump in their states and districts for the 1894 election. McKinley campaigned even more than he had in 1892, with the longest and most extensive barnstorming trip in the history of American politics. In two months, the Major traveled more than 13,000 miles by rail, visited 19 states and more than 300 communities, delivered roughly 375 speeches, and was heard by an estimated 2 million people. McKinley’s message was that protectionism would restore prosperity and Democrats could not govern. It was time for a change.30
McKinley opened with a New England tour before the early September elections there, then picked it up again in late September with ten speeches in Indiana before moving west to Missouri and the Plains, then striking northeast to Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. He spent most of mid-October canvassing Ohio before heading south to New Orleans.31
The New Orleans trip was largely self-interest. Yes, Republicans hoped to pick up Southern congressional seats, but the GOP’s realistic targets were not in Louisiana, where Democrats had violently suppressed black voting. Instead, McKinley wanted to project a message throughout the Southland that its growing manufacturing sector would benefit from protection, remind Louisiana planters he was the author of the bounty provision that rewarded them for tolerating cheap sugar on the free list, and, perhaps most important, gratify the Louisiana Republican Party leaders who had begged him to come. They would send sixteen delegates to the national convention. He spoke at the Auditorium Athletic Club to an enthusiastic 12,000 people, the largest political meeting ever held in the city. McKinley made his way north, mobbed in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and Illinois before returning to Ohio.32
The exhaustive schedule was possible because the Major had a private railroad car and, sometimes, his own engine. Party officials knew that was the only way he could cover the necessary ground. Having his own train also made it practical for reporters to accompany him, guaranteeing national coverage. Reporters were amazed at the speed of his entourage, sometimes running all day at more than 60 miles an hour.33
There were always enthusiastic, capacity-only crowds at McKinley’s stops. Reporters were taken aback with the mobs that strained to get into halls already jammed to the rafters. It was often difficult for McKinley to leave events, and police were frequently called to clear a path to his carriage. While large crowds in big cities were understandable, it was harder to explain why 30,000—mostly farmers—camped out for up to two days in bad weather near Olney in southern Illinois to hear the Major speak at eight thirty on a wet Monday morning. Or how 30,000 people arrived in Hutchison, Kansas, some on trains from Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Texas. McKinley obliged the huge throng there by speaking twice.34
As he did in 1892, his 1894 speeches hit on simple but tough points. The choice was between two great economic theories. One was that America would be prosperous if we “give a part of our market to foreigners at the expense of our own production and labor” through free trade. The other theory held people would prosper with protection of “the home product represented by home labor.” Protection would create jobs, raise farm prices, and restart the nation’s mines, smelters, and factories. He admitted that while “the people thought they had too much tariff under the Republican administration they are now thinking they have too little under the Democratic administration.” In keeping with his strategy, McKinley rarely spoke of currency and when he did, it was to call it “a dead issue.”35
At times, the Major traveled with Civil War veterans who rallied their former Union comrades. President Grant’s son, Fred, campaigned with McKinley across Iowa and was mobbed by crying veterans saying, “I was with your father.” Entire communities were decorated with patriotic bunting, flags, posters, and lithographs of the Major. The men of Baker & Shattuck’s packinghouse in Springfield, Illinois, concocted a display out of tin cans and flags. There were even casualties: in late October, a cannon used to announce McKinley’s arrival at Arcola, Illinois, exploded, blinding one man and blowing off another’s hand.36
He attacked the president at every stop—“Cleveland has been president nineteen months, and they’re the longest nineteen months since the war.” In Wisconsin, he responded to Democratic claims that the country was prosperous in Cleveland’s first term by saying it was because Cleveland was “operating and administrating laws which were passed by Republicans.”37
All along the trail, there was talk of a future presidential bid. In Springfield, Illinois, as McKinley prepared to take the podium after an enthusiastic welcome, someone yelled, “Three cheers for McKinley, our next president,” setting off another demonstration. In St. Paul, as McKinley started to speak, a man shouted, “Our next president!,” causing three cheers and more applause. The University of Michigan Republicans met him at the Ann Arbor depot shouting, “McKinley in ’96!” The mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, introduced him by saying, “If the signs are propitious two years from now, the slogan will be, ‘He comes from Ohio and his name is William McKinley.’ ”38
Everywhere he went, party leaders traveled with him, gossiping in between stops and catching up with their old friend or getting to know this rising national leader. Men later recalled their time with McKinley in 1894 as the moment they committed themselves to his cause, even if they didn’t realize it then. Still, some people were unhappy. Missouri APA leaders were miffed over being seated in the back of the hall in Kansas City and whined about it. But still, McKinley had made many new friends and impressed many party sachems.39
The most important acquaintance McKinley made that year was present at his stop in Lincoln, Nebraska, in early October. Just twenty-nine years old, Charles G. Dawes was tall and slender with a red droopy mustache, hair parted in the middle, and big ears. He had visited McKinley in Columbus earlier in the year and joined him when he came to Nebraska. After Hanna later met him, he said, “He doesn’t look much.”40
Born in Ohio, Dawes had worked as a railroad surveyor at seventeen, graduated from Marietta College at nineteen, and went to Cincinnati Law School before heading west in 1887. His law office was in the same building as another young lawyer, five years his senior, named William Jennings Bryan. The two were members of a book and debate club, the “Round Table.” After Bryan bested him in a debate over Free Silver, Dawes researched and wrote a volume on the banking system. Some days, Dawes and Bryan ate at Cameron’s fifteen-cent diner with the University of Nebraska ROTC instructor, Lieutenant John J. Pershing.41
Dawes had made a name taking on the railroads over exorbitant freight rates and monopoly actions, and made some money with shrewd investments in real estate, banking, and a packinghouse. He was also intensely interested in politics and an avid reform-minded Republican. Neither McKinley nor Dawes understood how big a role he was to play in the Major’s future, but by year’s end, the energetic, gawky young man was feeling out GOP leaders in Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Wyoming on the Major’s behalf.42
McKinley closed the 1894 campaign with an election-eve rally at Canton’s Tabernacle. When he appeared, the audience “was on its feet as one man. Hats were tossed, handkerchiefs were waved and the tumultuous applause drowned out all efforts to speak.” The Major was moved. It’s unlikely he foresaw this reception as he signed over his life’s assets and Ida’s to pay the Walker notes the previous year. He told his neighbors that the next day was the twenty-fifth anniversary of his election as county prosecutor, his first office. Pushing back his emotions, he returned to his stump speech on protection and prosperity. He spent the night at his mother’s, cast his ballot the next morning, and headed back to Columbus to await the returns.43
It was a Republican triumph. Ending the Democrats’ two years of controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress since 1858, the GOP spectacularly picked up 130 seats in the House, with a lopsided 254-to-103 majority, and narrowly took the Senate. Politicians being politicians, party leaders immediately turned their eyes to 1896.
THOUGH MCKINLEY HAD WEATHERED a near-catastrophic personal crisis, won reelection amid the Panic of 1893, and seen his efforts benefit Republicans in the 1894 election, the GOP presidential nomination remained a distant goal.
Realistically, he was not the front-runner. That title belonged to New England’s Thomas B. Reed, the Combine’s preferred candidate. Reed would be elected Speaker again in 1895, and with so many Republican congressmen dependent on his goodwill, he had a ready-made national organization.
And while McKinley’s role as the “Apostle of Protection” won him support among laborers that was unusual for a Republican, many party leaders still blamed him and his namesake tariff bill for the party’s 1890 defeat and worried he would lose and drag the party down with him. Then there was his refusal to placate the APA and the distrust of the bosses. McKinley had a rough path ahead. To overcome such powerful opposition, he needed some early success.