McKinley ran the first modern presidential primary campaign. Before him, candidates left themselves in the “hands of friends” and maintained a low-profile, hands-off posture. They rarely spoke except as an officeholder or party leader and avoided appearing to seek the office. The office sought the man, or at least was led to him by string-pullers and bigwigs who began working for the candidate shortly before state conventions were held in spring of the election year itself.
The field was typically flooded with favorite-son candidates, generally governors or senators. Most had little chance to win and drew modest support outside their state. Some were encouraged to run by supporters at home. Others were prompted by party bosses to run to freeze their state’s delegation until it could be traded at the convention for rewards of cabinet posts, prestigious appointments, or control of Treasury or post office patronage jobs.
Since 1872, no one in an open race for the presidency (when an incumbent was not running for reelection) had had a delegate majority when the convention began. A majority was obtained by deals made generally at or near the convention itself. It was almost more important to be the most popular second choice, in a position to collect delegates as other candidates fell. This made sense, considering that in the five GOP national conventions after 1872, only 1892 went a single ballot, and that year featured an incumbent running for reelection. There were 7 ballots in 1876, 36 in 1880, 3 in 1884, and 8 in 1888.1
Much time and energy was spent on the composition of the state delegation, with factions driven by local issues or personalities jockeying to be delegates. Before McKinley, state conventions often focused more on who would go to the national convention than on whom they would support when they got there.
Delegates in the South—the GOP’s “rotten borough,” a region that produced no Republican electoral votes but had a quarter of the seats at the national convention—were generally obtained by money and political promises in deals arranged with state leaders who were generally (but not always) white. Black Republican voters who made up the vast bulk of the GOP’s Southern base were handled through their leaders and always at a distance. No Republican stumped for the nomination by appearing before a black GOP audience. That would have cost him support among white leaders of Southern party organizations.
McKinley would also have to deal with the Combine, who played an inordinate role in Republican conventions. The Combine was led by Thomas Collier Platt of New York and Matthew S. Quay of Pennsylvania. The two men’s large delegations to the national conventions gave them inordinate power, especially since they influenced nearby states, like Connecticut and New Jersey. The Combine leaders were pragmatic, interested more in winning than in any particular issue, as long as the outcome included things that would cement their position and power.
There were also bosses who stood atop urban machines, as in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Chicago’s Cook County. There were even Southern bosses, such as Powell Clayton, whose “Minstrel” faction ran Arkansas, though it was never easy in the region, especially after a Democrat won the White House in 1885 and took away the postmaster, revenue collector, port collector, and other patronage jobs on which Southern Republicans depended.
This was the age-old system McKinley faced. No one had successfully challenged it before him, but McKinley would systematically upend it, changing the nature of how future Republican candidates would run. He began with an early, in-depth organization, structured, deliberate, and intense, run by men who were loyal to him, and built around the idea that McKinley would restore prosperity by returning the country to a policy of protective tariffs.
The candidate was an active presence in that organization, regularly consulting with and guiding its leadership. He actually campaigned for the presidency, first behind the scenes and then in public—not nonstop like modern candidates do, but in a more sustained way than any Republican candidate before him.
With the audacity he had demonstrated on the battlefield, the thoroughness in preparation he had shown in every endeavor in life, and the charm and integrity displayed in his public and private character, McKinley would try winning the nomination in a different way than any candidate before him. He would aim for early success by taking a vacation.
THE LAST TIME A GOP presidential candidate won electoral votes in the South was 1876. But the region’s 222 national convention delegates were nearly half of what was needed to nominate. The Southern bloc was so large that if it united behind one man, he would probably win. McKinley wanted those votes. If Southern delegates split among several candidates, it would take multiple ballots to nominate someone.
Cultivating Southern Republican leaders could be tricky and expensive. Most were political outcasts at home, with little chance of winning local or state elections because of the Democrats’ overwhelming strength in the region, especially as it extinguished black voting rights. Many Southern Republicans were also poor; a substantial number were black and poor. It was customary for campaigns angling for delegates to offer cash, convention expense accounts, and promises of jobs from a new GOP administration. Additionally, Southern Republicans were notorious for switching allegiances when promised larger envelopes of cash, bigger expense accounts, or more patronage.
McKinley wanted to do it differently, without a battle over boodle. He and Hanna believed a better way to recruit Southern GOP leaders was to have them spend time with the candidate. Yes, there would be necessary expenses to organize and get delegates to the state and national conventions. But there would be no endless money tap. If Southern men came to have a personal relationship with the Major, agree with him, and believe that he was likely to win the nomination and the presidency, then they were more likely to stay loyal. And while he consciously did not set out to do this, McKinley would do the heretofore unthinkable. The “very radical views” on race he imbibed from his abolitionist parents would lead him to openly appear before black audiences to solicit their support.
McKinley could conveniently make inroads in many states at one time by inviting the region’s GOP leadership to southern Georgia, where Hanna had a winter home. Thomasville, Georgia, was the Palm Beach of its time. The fashionable winter resort was a picturesque small town in gently rolling pine hills near the state’s southern border. From October to March, wealthy Northeasterners and Midwesterners escaped the cold back home by taking cottages or houses for several pleasant months of dances, horse races, bird shooting, tennis, and carriage rides.
For McKinley’s purposes, it helped that Thomasville was located on north-south and east-west rail lines that provided easy connections throughout the South. Several weeks in mid-March were blocked off, inquiries made, and invitations sent to Republican leaders, some with offers of help with transportation for those who could not afford to get there without it. When his travel was announced, McKinley said it was “for a little rest and outing.” This fooled no one. His trip was obviously about politics.2
McKinley was familiar with the region. He had campaigned there in four elections and served with forty-three Southern Republicans in the House, many with whom he kept in touch.3
The Major’s wartime experience had taught him that the most powerful bonds among men came from shared beliefs and camaraderie. So he wooed Southern GOP power brokers. He invited some to travel with him, starting with H. Clay Evans, a former Chattanooga, Tennessee, mayor who had served in Congress with McKinley. His nickname was the “Southern Cyclone.” Evans had been elected Tennessee’s governor in 1894 by a razor-thin 748 votes but was denied office by the Democratic-controlled legislature, which invalidated 20,000 GOP ballots. Clay Evans rode with McKinley to Atlanta, giving the two men plenty of time to talk, especially when a train wreck blocked the tracks, delaying them several hours. When a reporter asked if their trip together “carried any political sensation,” they laughed.4
McKinley also accepted invitations to visit the homes of GOP leaders. For example, Georgia Republican chairman Alfred E. Buck was a Maine man who moved south after fighting there in the Civil War, serving in Congress from Alabama and as U.S. marshal for north Georgia. He hosted McKinley at his Atlanta home with GOP bigwigs from Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina before the Major spent the next day meeting with them one-on-one and in small groups.5
McKinley included his political visitors in social events held during his stay in Thomasville. Hanna hosted a gathering at his home for out-of-town Republicans, along with influential “winter Georgians” whose presence would impress the Southern party leaders. About a dozen GOP grandees also participated in a fancy party held a few days later by town fathers at the Mitchell House, Thomasville’s finest hotel, and then went to a private meeting upstairs.6
But mostly, McKinley sat in a sunlit parlor in Hanna’s rented Renaissance Revival mansion in Thomasville with a guest or two or a small group, talking about the future and hoping to convince his visitors they were friends with the man who ought to be the next president. We do not know the names of all the men who sat in those comfortable chairs, their cigar smoke curling upward. Given McKinley’s and Hanna’s meticulous nature, the list was likely extensive, but only some names show up in the local paper, hotel registers, and subsequent letters.7
This personal approach paid political dividends almost immediately. North Carolina’s newly elected U.S. senator, Jeter C. Pritchard, the only Southern Republican in the upper chamber, left Thomasville a committed supporter. By April, former U.S. senator Powell Clayton—a tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed, one-armed veteran and boss of the Arkansas GOP—led a parade of “Toothpick State” Republicans in endorsing the Major. P. D. Barker of Mobile, Alabama, and a group of Yellowhammer Republicans he had brought to Georgia signed up. Barker was aligned with William Youngblood, the state’s GOP national committeeman, who had been thought to be a friend of the New York boss Platt.8
Dozens of other Republican leaders were converted into McKinley men during the Southern swing. Among them were Florida GOP chairman Dennis Eagan and an ally, John G. Long, and even perhaps Robert Smalls, a former slave who served with McKinley in the House after winning fame in the Civil War by loading a coastal steamer, The Planter, with other slaves and sailing it under the guns of Confederate batteries protecting Charleston, South Carolina, to safety with the blockading Union fleet. By fall 1895, “the Captain of The Planter” was canvassing the South, making speeches to black Republicans on McKinley’s behalf.9
THREE OF THE MORE interesting men recruited in Thomasville were R. R. Wright, S. B. Morse, and John H. Deveaux, black Republican activists from Savannah. Wright was president of Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth and Professor Morse taught there. Deveaux was editor of the Savannah Tribune, a black Republican newspaper. Seen on the streets in Thomasville, he told reporters “no conference had been held on the subject of delivering votes to McKinley in the convention.” That was a lie.10
From what happened next, it’s likely the men impressed upon McKinley the role of black voters in the Southern Republican cause and the challenges they faced from the Democrats’ relentless efforts to deny them access to the ballot box and a fair count.
By Monday, March 28, McKinley left for Jacksonville, Florida, where Eagan and Long had arranged a reception at the St. James Hotel. The Major was well received, but some local Republicans threatened to send a competing whites-only delegation to the national convention if McKinley “should tie to the black end of the party.”11
This conundrum confronted every Republican candidate seeking Southern delegates. The party’s White House hopefuls rarely ventured south and none had campaigned among black Republicans. In some states, two GOP organizations vied for national recognition: the regular Republicans, which included both races, and the “Lily Whites,” whose name explained it all. There were many white Southern Republicans like those in Jacksonville who took offense if black Republicans received too much attention. In an age of widespread bigotry, and in a region where a black might be lynched on a whim, no presidential hopeful had ever addressed a public gathering of black Republicans during the primaries. Black support was typically arranged by aides and done so at a distance.
By morning, the grumbling about “the black end of the party” had produced a counterreaction. Jacksonville’s black Republicans, who provided the bulk of the local party’s votes, wanted to meet McKinley. Osborne was dispatched with Eagan and Long to visit Rev. Joseph E. Lee, a black Republican and the state party secretary. The four men “decided it would be bad politics to turn the colored man down in Florida,” and told McKinley. He agreed. So after the Major met privately with Lee, twenty black Republicans, led by a timber company manager, trooped into the St. James for an hour-long private session. McKinley was impressed with the business and professional men and everyone left charmed.
Eagan and Long had encouraged McKinley’s outreach, telling reporters that they supported allowing blacks “to participate in the public courtesies extended to Gov. McKinley.” That was also McKinley’s instinct. Weeks earlier, he had written Hanna, “We can never give our consent to a practice that disenfranchises any of our fellow citizens. I believe the time is coming when that injustice will be corrected, largely by the people of the South themselves, but in the meantime, we cannot abate our insistence upon the exercise of constitutional rights.” As citizens, black Americans deserved the vote and black Republicans deserved McKinley’s respect. The Jacksonville reception was a first for a presidential hopeful of either major party.12
Three days later, in Savannah, McKinley again did something no candidate for either major party’s nomination had done. He campaigned before black voters, speaking in a church at a public meeting arranged by Deveaux and President Wright. According to one organizer, McKinley was “gladly received by our people.”13
The following day, McKinley left for Washington and then home in Canton. Knowing the Southern swing was only just a step, McKinley, Hanna, and their agents, such as Osborne and Joseph Smith, kept in touch with the new supporters. They began building an in-depth organization south of the Mason-Dixon Line aimed at winning delegates instructed for McKinley.
Amazingly, the opposition had not yet stirred and would not do so for months. The Major had stolen the march on them. Platt would later write, “He had the South practically solid before some of us awakened.”14
BUT MCKINLEY WAS NOT on the move just in the South. While in Florida, the Major bumped into Hamilton Disston, a prominent Philadelphia businessman, land speculator, and Matthew S. Quay’s friend. McKinley quizzed Disston about Quay’s views on the contest. Disston said Quay spoke “very highly” of the Major but was uncommitted. McKinley shared that he was confident of Minnesota (its former governor William R. Merriam had been with him in Georgia), as well as Nebraska, Wisconsin, Missouri, Indiana (if Harrison did not run), Ohio, and West Virginia, and was reasonably confident of California and Oregon. Disston dutifully reported all of it to Quay. McKinley’s behavior may have shown he had forgotten the lesson of Manderson stealing his speech in 1867. More likely it was a sign of McKinley’s confidence: he wanted Quay to know his developing strength.15
Yet McKinley’s strategy of competing everywhere meant little unless he actually did so, so the Major and his lieutenants looked northeast to find more opportunities. They knew that as the front-runner, Tom Reed could ill afford defections in New England and that the Speaker’s acerbic personality and the region’s strong protectionist bent might provide openings for the McKinley campaign.
Then John Addison Porter, a wealthy young philanthropist and president of the Hartford McKinley Club, invited the Ohio governor to appear before the group’s impressive membership at an April 9 dinner. It was a busy day, with McKinley first visiting the Connecticut State Capitol where he was welcomed by Governor Owen V. Coffin and presented to the legislature by Speaker Samuel Fessenden, a Reed man. Afterward, the Major spoke before five hundred guests at the Foot Guard Armory, an imposing gray stone fortress, joined by Coffin, Fessenden, and Connecticut’s two U.S. senators, Joseph R. Hawley and Oliver H. Platt, at the head table. The Major demonstrated his proficiency in the tariff by spending two hours explaining how Cleveland’s reform had reduced revenue and created debt, and why protection would restore prosperity and bring higher wages.16
News reports said the event proved two things—“(1) that the McKinley presidential boom has a distinct stature in New England, and (2) that the field is to be diligently cultivated. The Buckeye favorite was hailed at the banquet table as the next President.”17
MCKINLEY EVEN LOOKED TO Illinois, where the odds were stacked against him. The state already had a favorite son who coveted the presidency and was backed by two ruthless men who controlled the state’s GOP machinery. McKinley would need a strong leader for his Illinois campaign if he hoped to win. He strangely picked a man who had lived in the state a matter of weeks.
In January, Charles G. Dawes, his wife, and their two children had left Lincoln and moved to Illinois. The intense young lawyer who had spent time with McKinley that fall in Nebraska had decided to become an entrepreneur and make bustling Chicago his home.
Dawes took his profits from real estate, banking, and meatpacking investments to buy gas utilities. The twenty-nine-year-old had started down this path the previous July when he investigated buying a Peoria, Illinois, gas company on behalf of an investor group. He was unimpressed with the Peoria deal, so he bought a more promising prospect in La Crosse, Wisconsin. His investors may have been surprised when the brainy entrepreneur showed up with the deed to a different gas company, but the venture was very profitable.18
Now Dawes stalked the Northwestern Gas Light & Coke Company in Evanston, Illinois. In a coup, he bought it in a competition with Chicago National Bank’s John R. Walsh. Dawes then audaciously presented Walsh with a business plan so solid that the bank president loaned the younger man money to modernize and expand the company.19
Dawes had continued helping McKinley’s nascent presidential bid after they had seen each other in October, reaching out to the North Dakota GOP chairman, W. H. Robinson, and Wyoming congressman F. W. Mondell, among others, on the Major’s behalf. He was also active in shaping up McKinley’s Nebraska organization, recruiting friends and his brother Beman Gates Dawes (nicknamed “BG”). Impressed, McKinley had Hanna meet with Charles Dawes in January to take his measure.20
McKinley had bigger things in mind for young Mr. Dawes than mining his address book. With his keen eye for talent, the Major had decided Dawes would command his campaign in what was already thought to be an important—if not the most critical—contest of the GOP presidential primaries. So before the Southern swing in March, Hanna asked Dawes “to look after matters in Illinois.”21
It was a stunning choice. Dawes had never managed a campaign. He was a newcomer to Illinois. He was very young. And he would face two of the most formidable foes of McKinley’s aspirations for the GOP nomination.
One was John R. Tanner. He enlisted in the Civil War, fought under Sherman, and lost his father and two of three brothers in combat and POW prisons. As a downstate state legislator, he threw his support behind Governor Shelby Cullom’s 1883 bid for U.S. senator. Cullom rewarded him by having President Arthur appoint him U.S. marshal for Illinois’s Southern District. Tanner thereafter became the senator’s trusted advisor. He angled for Cullom to run for president in 1888 and then tried making him the state’s favorite son for the 1892 convention. Tanner was state Republican chairman during the GOP’s tremendous 1894 sweep before engineering Cullom’s reelection in 1895. In the process, Tanner cemented an alliance with the Cook County Republican machine that he hoped would make him the GOP candidate for governor in 1896.22
McKinley’s other foe was William Lorimer, a thirty-four-year-old freshman congressman and head of the Cook County Republican machine. He was called the “Blond Boss” because of his light hair and complexion. Born in England to a Scotch Presbyterian minister, his family immigrated to America when he was five and moved to Chicago in 1870 when he was nine. His father died three years later, leaving his family penniless. To support them, Lorimer sold papers, shined shoes, hauled coal, collected laundry, painted signs, drove a wagon in the stockyards, and became a streetcar conductor and union organizer.23
At age twenty-two, he first voted in the 1884 presidential election. Parties—not election officials—then printed ballots. When Lorimer arrived at the polls, there were no Republican “ticket peddlers” distributing ballots. So he walked to a nearby polling place, scrounged up ballots, and returned to his precinct to vote and give out the rest to other Blaine men.24
Lorimer’s disgust with the party’s poor organization led him to organize a Republican club in his ward, turning it from a Democratic stronghold into a GOP one. He was rewarded for that with a seat on the Cook County Republican Central Committee. Two years later, he was given a county water department job. At the age of twenty-eight, he was appointed the department’s chief, overseeing 1,300 patronage workers. Within two years he had used that army to make himself the boss of the Cook County GOP and was elected to Congress in 1894. He had a real talent for organizing men. The quiet Blond Boss was no orator, yet people paid attention when he spoke. He once said, “I think there is a time and a place to talk; that has been my policy all my life.”25
Tanner and Lorimer were allies for mutual convenience. Cook County could provide Tanner half the convention votes for his gubernatorial nomination. The Blond Boss wanted the additional patronage that a friendly governor could provide and an advocate who could swing downstate Republicans behind a Chicago man for the U.S. Senate—namely him—if an opportunity arose.
Neither was inclined to support McKinley. Both men sensed it was in their interest to stick to the usual course, keeping Illinois up for grabs by running a favorite son and then cutting the best deal possible with the Combine at the national convention, delivering the fourth-largest delegation for a candidate who would offer them certain useful considerations. Tanner and Lorimer also probably wondered about McKinley’s smarts in having a Nebraska hick run his Illinois campaign, a man with no connections to the state’s political structure. They routinely made mincemeat of well-meaning novices like Dawes.
They did not yet understand that despite his youth and ignorance of Illinois politics and players, Dawes was meticulous, well organized, and energetic. He was a natural leader who quickly commanded the respect of his colleagues. Dawes began systematically ferreting out the best McKinley men to thoroughly organize their county, congressional district, and state conventions.
The campaign’s pace quickly grew so intense that Dawes split the state into three areas and brought on allies to head the campaign in each of them. General John C. McNulta worked the Chicago area, General C. W. Pavey handled the state’s southern counties, and William G. Edens covered the northern ones.26
Nearly thirty years Dawes’s senior, McNulta was a Bloomington lawyer and cigar manufacturer who had been active in Illinois GOP politics since returning from the Civil War. He had been involved in virtually every GOP presidential contest since then, was elected in 1872 to a term in Congress, and failed in a bid for the GOP gubernatorial nomination. He knew everyone and everyone knew him.
Pavey, like Tanner, was from the state’s far southern region, known as “Little Egypt.” He, too, was nearly thirty years older than Dawes, and a longtime Republican operative who had been appointed internal revenue collector by Garfield.
Edens was only thirty-one, a railroad conductor, and an official in the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen. Like Dawes, the trim young man parted his hair in the middle and had a talent for organization. Edens was also active in the National League of Republican Clubs that had an extensive national network of young friends.27
Dawes started a card file of supporters in each of the state’s 102 counties. Over the next year, this would become an elaborate system that tracked which county, congressional district, and state delegates were for McKinley and which were not and which local conventions had instructed and which had not. Dawes updated his tally regularly and used it to help McNulta, Pavey, and Edens target where they needed to cultivate more support for McKinley.
Hanna initially tried managing the Illinois campaign long-distance by letters and occasional visits, but by May, Dawes was in full command and Hanna began pulling back. However, before doing so he met with Dawes and Herman H. Kohlsaat to discuss Tanner. The next day, Hanna and Dawes spent the afternoon with Tanner and William Penn Nixon, publisher of the Chicago Inter Ocean. Dawes thought he heard Tanner pledge himself to McKinley.28
Hanna and Dawes might have believed Tanner said that, but it was naïve for Dawes or Hanna to think Tanner would back the Major. Unlike Lorimer, there was little they could do to help Tanner win the governorship. This May 11 meeting was not the last time Dawes would take Tanner at his word.
Uncle Shelby Cullom’s favorite-son candidacy had been an object of conversation since January, though the Chicago Tribune called it “a great joke.” But Tanner and Lorimer liked the favorite-son candidacy’s potential. Uncle Shelby was popular downstate and Lorimer’s machine could deliver Chicago, where Cullom was not as respected. Together the combination could help lock up the state. Then the two party bosses could deal with their Eastern counterparts for rewards that might include funds for the Illinois gubernatorial campaign and patronage.29
Meanwhile, Dawes’s card file grew in size and importance as McNulta, Pavey, and Edens covered the state and their young commander tracked their efforts. By the summer, Dawes was trying to gain the support of the new Chicago mayor, George B. Swift, on the theory that the enemy of one’s enemy can be your friend. Swift had been elected in April and almost immediately went to war with Lorimer.
The mayor fired thousands of city employees and replaced them with supporters, but some of those he fired were Lorimer’s men. The Blond Boss retaliated, having the Republican-controlled Cook County Board fire Swift supporters from county jobs and replace them with Lorimer’s men. Swift and Lorimer then fought for control of the county Republican organization. The Blond Boss prevailed, taking over the executive committee and most of the city ward organizations and even electing himself Cook County GOP chairman. Still, Swift’s endorsement would give McKinley a foothold in Cook County and a ready army of supporters.30
There was one problem: Kohlsaat. The publisher was a childhood friend of the mayor and one of his most important supporters. Kohlsaat discouraged Swift from helping McKinley. While Kohlsaat and the Major were close, Kohlsaat didn’t want Swift to endanger his political future by endorsing a presidential candidate. Once again, the publisher had different priorities than McKinley.31
MEANWHILE, SINCE AT LEAST January, McKinley and Hanna had men covering the entire country, organizing everywhere. McKinley believed in aligning authority with responsibility, so agents were told to find the right men to build an organization in each county and congressional district that could deliver a McKinley majority in their local and state conventions, preferably instructed to support the Major. They were to report to Hanna and he was available for advice and reasonable expenses for their work, if need be. McKinley would follow up by letter, meet with important prospective supporters, or otherwise reinforce the men they recruited.
One of Hanna’s agents was John Hay, who reported tidbits he heard from Senators Henry Cabot Lodge and Don Cameron, both close friends and neighbors. Lodge was the brains behind the Reed campaign and Cameron fancied himself the leading silver Republican presidential prospect. Hay’s link to Cameron also gave the McKinley operation a back channel to Senator Quay, Cameron’s Senate colleague and the Pennsylvania GOP boss.
Hanna was impressed with Hay’s gossip from Cameron, Quay, and Lodge. “I think you are as good at the game as either of the Penn[sylvania] Senators,” Hanna wrote Hay, “and I am perfectly willing to leave them in your hands.” Hanna probably didn’t know that Hay had had an affair with Cameron’s wife, Lizzie, whose uncle was Senator John Sherman, and was now pursuing Lodge’s wife, Nannie.32
Men like Hay were critical to McKinley’s early organizational efforts in early 1895. Osborne focused on the Northeast and a few Southern states. Joseph P. Smith handled most of the South, while William Hahn split the Midwest with Charles Dick, another former Ohio GOP state chairman, and covered some Western states. Myron T. Herrick even played a role on his four-month vacation to California, meeting with state party leaders and reporting back.33
McKinley put more agents into the field earlier and in a more systematic and highly structured way than any other candidate or the Combine. And even then, the Combine did not have as many men circulating nor an emphasis on instruction. It was not in their interest to instruct delegates: that made it more difficult to trade them at convention time.
THEN MCKINLEY WAS DEALT a blow that could have derailed his campaign by making it impossible to unite Ohio. McKinley’s second term as governor was up in November and he would not seek a third one, nor attempt to name his successor at the state Republican convention in Zanesville on May 29. That didn’t keep Hanna from having his own aspirations to be the Ohio kingmaker: he backed former state attorney general George K. Nash to succeed the Major.
What neither anticipated was that Joseph B. Foraker would reappear after a two-year hiatus and attempt to grab control of the Ohio Republican Party. After failing to unseat Senator Sherman in January 1892 or advance himself at that year’s GOP national convention, and still tarnished by his disastrous bid for a third term as governor in 1889, Foraker had gone underground, rebuilding his law practice and waiting for a chance to reemerge on the political stage.
Fire Alarm Joe Foraker said he returned only because Republican “enemies” complained he had chosen to “neglect” the party’s “interests for his own.” And while McKinley might have thought the rocky relationship and earlier disagreements were behind them, Foraker’s perspective was different, writing later with customary flair that “a battle royal was to be fought between two great factions” at the convention because “nothing short of a genuine trial of strength would satisfy either.”34
One man—Foraker—was coming to the state convention looking for a fight while his target—McKinley—was hoping to have everyone happy and unified behind him. Regardless of the outcome, unity was at risk now. This was not going to be pretty.
Fire Alarm Joe coaxed a reluctant Asa S. Bushnell to run. Foraker and his ally George Cox, boss of the Cincinnati Republican machine, kept their forces in reserve, bleeding enough votes to Bushnell on each ballot to keep his total growing. Then, when delegates turned toward Bushnell after midnight on the sixth ballot, Cox’s Hamilton County men moved as a bloc behind him, putting him over the top and forever in their debt.
Foraker then dictated the rest of the ticket, stacked the state central committee, named the state chairman and national committeeman, and won an unprecedented endorsement of himself for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Calvin S. Brice, which was up in January 1896. “The Hanna men were not allowed to surrender,” a contemporary later wrote. “They were captured, and even their side arms were taken.”35
The results were widely seen as a serious defeat for McKinley. “The McKinleyites got nothing, not even civil treatment,” said one paper. They were beaten by “revolutionists, bent on the overthrow of the McKinley power in Ohio.” The Cincinnati Enquirer said, “McKinley Presidential stock has taken a great fall,” while the subhead in the New York Times banner read, “The Governor may not have his state’s solid backing at the national convention.” The Major’s nomination depended on a united Ohio delegation. That appeared to be in jeopardy. Even McKinley’s men admitted “his archenemy was in complete control.”36
The Combine exulted in the Zanesville results, hoping it provided an opportunity to put their Ohio friends to use. Clarkson reached out to Foraker and reported to his superiors that there was a chance to split Ohio and kill McKinley’s chances.37
One bit of good news for McKinley was that the Zanesville platform endorsed him for president and said the state’s Republicans “pledge him the absolute and unswerving support of Ohio at the next national convention.” Platforms could be broken or ignored, but this was a strong endorsement, difficult to disregard, even harder to abandon. Foraker would have killed this plank if he could, but McKinley’s home-state support was too strong. Occasionally a realist, Foraker also came to understand he needed a united effort to elect Bushnell and carry a Republican legislature if he was to go to the Senate. If Foraker broke with the platform’s endorsement of McKinley, the Major’s men could well break with the platform’s endorsement of Foraker.38
Fire Alarm Joe was also canny enough to know June 1895 was not the time to fracture the Ohio GOP. The national convention was a year off. If McKinley displayed weakness, there would be time to undermine him. For now Foraker was content with his return to power and stayed quiet when Hanna claimed, “Ohio will send a solid and loyal McKinley delegation.”39
The Ohio platform contained another problem for McKinley. A plank that McKinley helped write endorsed bimetallism, the use of gold and silver as “standard money” with “parity of values of the two metals.” The impossibility of achieving parity drew abuse from gold advocates such as the Nation, which characterized the Ohio plan as “a throwaway to silverites.” The Ohio GOP’s tilt to the white metal added to suspicions that McKinley preferred silver or a straddle. For now, the Major was content being murky. In perhaps the biggest mistake of his emerging campaign, he still considered the issue inconsequential. He would be proven wrong.40