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McKinley and the Realignment of 1896

The years from 1893 to 1896 witnessed the first major voting realignment in American politics since the 1850s.… William Jennings Bryan, as a political spokesman for evangelical Protestants, drew a number of Protestant Republican voters into the Democratic Party, while William McKinley established strong new roots among many urban-industrial immigrant and labor voters.

Samuel P. Hays, The American Party Systems

 

Much of McKinley’s success in the presidency came from the rare strength and sophistication he showed in winning it. This is central to any understanding of the man and what he achieved, albeit behind his mask of conventional thinking.

The election of 1896 was a multiple breakthrough. It marked the first time since Lincoln’s day that a nationally well-known and powerful Republican politician won his party’s presidential nomination on the first ballot—and did so by beating, rather than submitting to, the Eastern machine forces. Lincoln himself, in 1860, took until the third ballot to edge past Senator William H. Seward, New York’s choice.

For the first time since Northern occupation forces left the South two decades earlier, the Grand Old Party of 1896 put together a national majority. Indeed, McKinley’s triumph marked the Republicans’ first popular majority in a reassembled, demilitarized nation. Urban, industrial America—the new nation of telephones, turbines, and bustling immigrant sidewalks—now had a political cycle.

But was it his milestone, a McKinley realignment and cycle? The interpretations are almost polar. The prevailing mid-twentieth-century view, seeded by the 1896–98 political attacks of the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers, casts McKinley as a mediocrity, a pleasant, amiable man of no great merit who just happened to be the party choice in the year when scared businessmen and financiers led by Mark Hanna raised the record millions needed to turn back the Bryan challenge. By this argument, they, not McKinley, implanted a new long generation of supremacy for steel mill and railroad car Republicanism.

A second, newer school credits the personal architecture of McKinley, a clever and strong-minded Ohio politician, helped by Mark Hanna, who almost worshiped him. After capturing the nomination against determined machine opposition, he went on to win an 1896 general election victory no other Republican could have brought about. This, more or less, is the view of his late-twentieth-century biographers.

Not that any such achievement is cemented by a single election. McKinley’s judgments and luck consolidated a new GOP era during his five years as president. Republican successes in midterm elections of 1898 and 1902 ended a quarter-century pattern of administrations usually being politically crippled at midpoint. The selection of Theodore Roosevelt as McKinley’s running mate in the triumphant reelection of 1900—decided over Hanna’s objection—worked to extend the GOP consolidation for seven additional years after McKinley’s assassination.

The Hearst-Pulitzer interpretation is mostly calumny grown stale. Not only does McKinley deserve the stature of a realignment president, but the personal-to-his-own-candidacy dimension of the electoral victory underpins the scope of his overall achievement. He was also a hinge president in governmental innovation and in domestic and foreign policy.

THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT, 1876–96

Had some post–Civil War chronicler achieved what Theodore White did with his series The Making of the President 1960, 1964, 1968, and 1972, the postbellum sagas of McKinley’s Ohio-born predecessors would have split into two streams—the machine captive and the less-than-effectives. Two-term winner Grant, nominated and elected as the Northern war hero, was generally controlled in office—sometimes simply manipulated—by the Republican party’s stalwart faction. Lacking political experience, the great general of Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and the siege of Richmond did not have the substantive and tactical wherewithal to assert himself in the corridors of Washington.

The three next Ohio-born chief executives did rise through politics—Hayes (elected in 1876), Garfield (1880), and Harrison (1888). However, all were compromise nominees decided upon in late convention ballots—the seventh for Hayes, thirty-sixth for Garfield, and eighth for Harrison. Each of their nominations was bestowed by power brokers breaking a stalemate. Even after taking office, each man lacked the personal and political stature to be a dominating chief executive. As a different lesson, John Sherman, Ohio’s perennial presidential favorite son, figured in three nomination struggles without ever winning one. A clue lay in his nickname: the Ohio Icicle.

In chronicling McKinley, however, a nineteenth-century Theodore White could have found some quietly impressive drama in the man’s steady climb up five mutually supportive ladders: 1) ever-greater prominence in the Ohio Republican party; 2) emergence as the national GOP’s principal spokesman on tariff issues; 3) ascent to leadership among Republicans in the House of Representatives; 4) mounting power and visibility at Republican presidential nominating conventions; and 5) achievement of unusual popularity among the national Republican rank and file. In consequence, when McKinley won the White House, it was his presidency, even if part of his modus operandi was to disguise that prowess by appearing amenable, collaborative, open to persuasion, and willing to let others take the credit for achieving what was often his own objective all along.

As a newly fledged lawyer, he had spent the eight years of the Grant administration in Canton. But even from afar, McKinley would have perceived Grant’s captivity. Hayes he knew especially well, and Garfield enough; he would have taken note of the weaknesses inherent first in their nominations and then in their standing on Capitol Hill. Harrison, a decade later, was crippled by his own prickliness, as well as by the barely hidden disdain of party power brokers. “A stranger to the art of popularizing himself,” he was said to make enemies with a personal handshake.1 Congress—the Senate, in particular—had gained such ascendancy in Washington that by 1885, Woodrow Wilson, a young political scientist at Johns Hopkins, published a book entitled Congressional Government. Presidents were subordinate, as the rebukes to Grover Cleveland further confirmed. All this McKinley would have duly noted.

His Ohio origins and connections probably put the presidency in his mind soon after he arrived in Washington. That interest must have turned serious by 1885, and once Harrison got nominated and elected in 1888, opportunity beckoned unmistakably. James G. Blaine and Sherman were old—sixty-three and sixty-nine—and falling by the wayside. Some saw McKinley as the potential national legatee of both. In 1892, Ohio’s new favorite son would be forty-nine, in 1896 just fifty-three. It is important to consider his five ladders—in the Ohio GOP, in the U.S. House, in tariff preeminence, in a burgeoning national popularity, and in the high councils of quadrennial Republican presidential nominating—and how they steadily bore him toward higher office. His climb was methodical verging on relentless.

His first two congressional terms (1877–81) thrived on his Ohio connections. Closeness to President Hayes broadened his education, even if it didn’t help much in a House of Representatives controlled by the Democrats. McKinley’s iron and steel background and knowledegability on tariff matters counted more, getting him picked in 1881 for the Ohio GOP seat on the House Ways and Means Committee. Protectionist House leaders of both parties—Democratic Ways and Means Chairman Samuel Randall of Pennsylvania, Republican Speaker Warren Kiefer of Ohio, and GOP Ways and Means Chairman William “Pig Iron” Kelley of Pennsylvania—all aided his early advance.

In home-state and national GOP conventions, McKinley was a relative neophyte, but a fast-rising one. In 1880, he was named temporary chair and keynoter of the Ohio state convention. Although not selected as a delegate to that year’s national convention, he was chosen to serve for a while as Ohio’s representative on the Republican National Committee.

Over the next six years, he came of age in both Ohio and Washington. At the off-year Buckeye Republican conventions, where state tickets were negotiated, McKinley usually chaired the resolutions committee. His role in supervising and presenting the platform helped to build his reputation for expertise, conciliation, and highly effective oratory. In 1884, a presidential year, he chaired Ohio’s GOP convention. This time, he was also selected as one of the four at-large delegates to the national convention.

At the national party gathering, too, his skills got him named to chair the high-profile resolutions committee—and enjoy unexpected attention. When the convention chairman could not quiet a noisy, unruly floor of delegates, he turned to McKinley, whose commanding voice quickly silenced the hall. Over several days, the Ohio congressman also led a highly visible floor maneuver that helped clear the way for Blaine’s nomination.

On Capitol Hill, McKinley was second only to Ways and Means Chairman Kelley as the House GOP tariff spokesman. In Ohio, his prestige now made him chair of the 1885 state convention that nominated the fervid Joseph B. “Fire Alarm Joe” Foraker for governor. After Foraker won, he and Senator John Sherman and McKinley were generally recognized as the three prime movers of state GOP politics.

In 1887, at age forty-four, McKinley began the four critical years that would position him for a presidential bid. No documents, no diaries, no confidential letters to Mark Hanna (or anyone else) contain his secret hopes or veiled stratagems. No memoranda set out the predicaments of the previous Ohio-born presidents or revealed how he planned to do better. Still, for whatever reasons and ambitions, “Major” McKinley—the title he still preferred—carefully set in place the career joists, beams, and buttresses that Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Sherman, and Harrison had each lacked. His sophistication in the nominating processes of the Ohio and national Republican parties dovetailed with wide personal popularity, proven oratory, and, not least, shrewd leadership on the issues complex he expected to dominate the late-nineteenth-century economic landscape: the protective tariff system and U.S. industrial growth and high-wage employment.

Democratic President Cleveland, in a late 1887 message to Congress, abandoned his New York–based straddling position on tariffs and threw down the glove. Angry that Capitol Hill Republicans had blocked Democratic tariff reductions, he attacked the high protective tariff as a “vicious, inequitable and illogical source of unnecessary taxation.” The revenue it raised was “needlessly withdrawn from trade and the people’s use.”2 The Democratic platform of 1888 added a further indictment: that high tariffs “permitted and fostered … trusts and combinations.”

Both sides being anxious to join battle, tariffs moved to center stage. As the GOP’s most effective spokesman for industrialization and high wages, McKinley was spotlighted. Not a few party leaders began to rate him a better 1888 presidential prospect than Ohio’s favorite son Sherman, whom McKinley was committed to support.

At the 1888 national convention, McKinley once again chaired the resolutions committee, well placed to build enthusiasm. His potential as a dark horse was open conversation. However, on the fourth ballot—after his support on the third had climbed to eight votes—when a Connecticut delegate vote for McKinley suggested unwelcome momentum, the Ohio congressman interrupted the roll call for a personal insistence:

In the presence of the duty resting on me, I cannot remain silent with honor. I cannot, consistently with the wish of the state whose credentials I bear and which has trusted me; I cannot, consistently with my own views of personal integrity, consent, or seem to consent, to permit my name to be used as a candidate before this convention.… I do not request—I demand, that no delegate who would not cast reflection upon me shall cast a ballot for me.3

If the 1884 convention had given McKinley stature, the events of 1888 burnished it. Home-state Sherman supporters praised his fidelity, and Mark Hanna, then only a state-level power broker, was impressed enough to switch his factional allegiance and fund-raising ability from Governor Foraker to McKinley. A year later, when Foraker lost his bid for a third statehouse term, McKinley became Ohio’s next-in-line presidential favorite son. In declining to gamble for the nomination in 1888, he may well have perceived that in his mid-forties and able to wait, he could and should reject a late-ballot Hayes- or Garfield-type nomination lacking any grassroots underpinning. Harrison, victor on the eighth ballot, found that out over his four years.

Selfless or Machiavellian, McKinley’s new prestige brought numerous benefits. In the House, he was put up for Speaker in 1889 and lost by a single vote to Thomas B. Reed of Maine. His appeal to rank-and-file GOP House members proven, McKinley was named chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and Republican floor leader. And because Harrison’s victory over Cleveland meant GOP trade promises to fulfill, McKinley as Ways and Means chairman would lead this effort during the 1889–90 Congress.

Tariff politics reached its greatest crescendo between 1880, when Garfield turned it into a Republican electoral sword, and 1897, when McKinley resolved the basic debate in the GOP’s favor. As the United States became the leading world industrial power, interest groups locked horns for unprecedented stakes. Cleveland couldn’t get even a Democratic Congress to abandon the principle of protection in 1893, although some rates were selectively reduced. Republican Congresses, for their part, couldn’t put through new tariff schedules while Cleveland was in the White House (1885–89, 1893–97). The two major tariff enactments of this period—the McKinley Tariff of 1890 and the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act of 1894—are both best understood as way stations to the resolution of the tariff question in the 1896 election and its legislative aftermath.

Tariff politics became even more of a minefield in 1889 and 1890 through the admission of six new western states—North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Utah. While giving the Republicans more long-term strength in the Senate, in the short run, these admissions created a new bloc of silver-state GOP solons anxious to renegotiate national economic policy. Western support for protectionism now had two conditions: first, a full range of tariff protection for agricultural and livestock products, as well as manufactures; second, enactment of further legislation to increase silver’s role in the U.S. money supply.

Such were the complications in 1889 and 1890 when for the first time since 1875, a Republican president also had a Republican Congress.4 At the same time, the Gilded Age economy, with its money wars and overleveraged stocks, was slipping toward the great depression of the mid-nineties. The first tremors came in the recession of 1890. Autumn saw the U.S. money markets tremble in the wake of British financial jitters, causing dozens of Eastern bank and brokerage firm failures. These, in turn, inhibited the crop-season flow of money from Eastern banks westward, where grain production was already parched by severe drought and nascent Populism was spreading like a prairie fire. The peak of financial skittishness, overlapping the midterm elections, came in October and early November, when the prominent London firm of Barings suspended payments. Still, this slide was short and U.S. economic recovery came by mid-1891.

This is not unnecessary economic embroidery. Part of the institutional weakness of the presidency between 1872 and 1896 reflected the devastation wrought by recessions on the chief executive’s party in Congress. The midterm elections of 1874, 1878, and 1882 were painful enough. Those of 1890 and 1894, however, would hand the party in the White House even worse—a blistering 78 House seats lost by the Republicans in 1890, an almost unbelievable 117 torn from the Democrats in 1894.

The newly enacted McKinley Tariff of 1890 was one of the reasons for that year’s heavy GOP losses. Even though its rate schedules had taken effect only on October 6, some merchants were quick to prematurely raise prices on items in stock, and clever Democrats took this mercantile proclivity and magnified it. In McKinley’s own district, tin peddlers were hired to go into rural districts offering coffeepots and tin cups at ridiculous prices, blaming the McKinley Tariff. Elsewhere, the exaggeration was more routine.

The spending excesses of the “Billion Dollar” Republican Congress—overfattened veterans’ pensions, in particular—were another drag. Even so, the GOP’s biggest problem was economic and financial—the middling panic in the East and the combination of drought, third-party Populism, and hard times in the Midwest and West. Dry and angry Kansas, which had given the Republicans all seven of its House seats in 1888, dumped five for Populists in 1890. Other large losses came in big states like Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Illinois.

In Ohio, though, the Republican ebb was notably intensified by the Democratic legislature’s gerrymander. They created a half dozen lopsidedly GOP districts (out of twenty-one) in order to improve another half dozen from marginally Republican to marginally Democratic. As we have seen, most notable artistry was in McKinley’s district, redrawn to yield a normal Democratic margin of 3,000 votes, which his popularity and effort kept down to a 302-vote Democratic edge.

Few Ohio observers singled out the tariff. Friendly commentators bemoaned partisan manipulation. The statistically minded weighed McKinley’s strength in clearly Democratic territory and named him a probable winner against Democratic Governor James E. Campbell in the next gubernatorial election twelve months away. In Ohio, the Cleveland Leader opined that “the result makes Major McKinley the next governor of Ohio,” and the Columbus Dispatch agreed. Similar points were made by the New York Tribune, the Pittsburgh Gazette, the Philadelphia Record, and the Chicago Inter-Ocean.5

In the spring of 1891, a delegation of Ohioans sent to Washington succeeded in convincing McKinley, still in town for the lame-duck session of Congress, to make the statehouse run. Because a loss to Campbell could end his career, he had thought about waiting until 1892 and gaining reelection to Congress. However, the economy showed new life and the recession’s lifting in midsummer cleared away that voter grudge. An enthusiastic 1891 GOP state convention nominated McKinley by acclamation. Then his gubernatorial margin of 21,000 votes, roughly what experts foresaw from his House showing, was substantial for that era of close division. It was better, for example, than Rutherford Hayes had ever managed in his three Ohio gubernatorial victories.

Returning to the House in the next election might well have narrowed McKinley, trapping him in a legislative mind-set, as it did his once and future rival, Speaker Thomas Reed. Instead, William McKinley, Jr., as he still appeared on Ohio ballots, took up a position that, despite its limited administrative clout, sidestepped Washington tariff backbiting and promised a Republican, who was already well known nationally, new executive credentials and a further push toward the presidency.

THE GOVERNOR, ANTIMACHINE POLITICS, AND THE 1896 NOMINATION

McKinley’s powerful capture of the 1896 Republican presidential nomination followed a relative nonchalance—activity that scarcely rose above intra-GOP image building—with respect to the 1892 nomination. President Harrison sought renomination for a second term. Most party leaders, however, doubted his chances. They also doubted, should Harrison be pushed aside, that any other Republican could win in what looked to be a poor year. By the spring of 1892, with the economy seemingly renewed, large portions of the Eastern financial community were already lining up behind a second term for conservative Democrat Grover Cleveland, whom Harrison had unseated four years earlier. Few expected any Republican nominee to carry Eastern swing states like New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

It was not, in short, a nomination worth fighting for. Mark Hanna, free to boost McKinley now that Sherman was out, went to the GOP national convention in Minneapolis. Supposedly, he wanted to block Harrison’s renomination on the first ballot so that a divided convention might turn to McKinley. McKinley’s arrival added to the boomlet; biographers agree that his mere appearance in many places brought applause.6

But the governor was merely showing his flag. Push was not intended to come to shove. In his official role as 1892 convention chairman, McKinley performed impartially and lavishly praised Harrison. When Ohio cast all but one of its delegate votes for favorite son McKinley, the one was McKinley’s own proxy, conspicuously cast for Harrison. When the incumbent was renominated on the first ballot, it was McKinley who asked that the choice be made unanimous.

Because dissenters blocked agreement, the first ballot total remained divided: Harrison 535, Blaine 182½, and McKinley 182. This indifference to unity was not the only poor augury. New York boss Thomas Platt joked about his delegates wrapping themselves in furs to ward off the chill of Harrison’s renomination and returning home to await defeat (a good forecast, inasmuch as Cleveland’s 45,000-vote statewide majority in New York would be the largest to date for a Democratic presidential nominee). The two dissenting blocs left on the tally sheet were the party’s fond wave to the past—to its “plumed knight,” James G. Blaine—and its nod to better prospects under McKinley.

Watching McKinley’s skilled 1884–96 ascent of Mount Nomination is impressive, a bit like seeing a first-rate climber move across a particularly challenging rock face. No other nineteenth-century Republican ever advanced so methodically, but careful preparation was a McKinley talent dating back to his wartime staff work.

Cleveland unseated Harrison in 1892 by enough—carrying Wisconsin and even coming close in New Hampshire—that by his inauguration, some Democrats believed the twenty-year logjam of national politics had broken in their favor. In May and June, however, with the unlucky Cleveland only some ten weeks in office, they were humbled by the decade’s main economic earthquake, for which the shudders of 1890 had been only a mild precursor.

The great depression of 1893 to 1897, a political prop first to McKinley’s rise to the presidency and then, through its timely finish, to his success in office, was one of the two or three deepest in U.S. history. Overextended railroads, weighed down by watered stocks and bonds, led the crash. Banks and farm prices followed. Farm destitution and general unemployment swelled enough that in 1893, the Populist governor of Kansas, Lorenzo Lewelling, issued his famous Tramp Circular, likening the jobless men on the roads to the social unrest of Tudor England and prerevolutionary France.

McKinley himself was fortunate to be in Ohio. The defeat that had taken him from Washington’s economic and tariff cockpit led to a major statehouse platform on which to display his reformist and labor credentials. As one biographer noted, “He permitted the tariff issue to slumber until hard times after 1893 made him the prophet of prosperity.”7 His record, together with the popular economic reaction against Cleveland and the Democrats, reelected him in 1893 with the highest share of the total vote given any Ohio governor since the Unionist coalition of the Civil War.

Ironically, he had to survive his own brief brush with the economic downturn. He had endorsed notes for an old friend and schoolmate, Robert Walker, in the amount—or so McKinley thought—of some $17,000.8 Already successful, Walker was starting a tin-plate business. When he went bankrupt in 1893, supposedly with a liability of $25,000 or so, McKinley cut short a trip and returned to Ohio. His plan, he told assembled friends like Mark Hanna, William R. Day, Herman Kohlsaat, and banker Myron Herrick (himself later governor), was to resign the governorship and resume the practice of law. Within a day or two, as banks were contacted by his friends, McKinley’s obligation turned out to rise to $60,000 and finally $130,000.

*   *   *

Mrs. McKinley’s $70,000 estate from her father was in her name and not reachable, but she insisted on pledging it to help. Hanna, making the arrangements, allowed her to deed it to him in escrow “to be used if needed.” The governor also insisted on turning over his properties to trustees. Convinced not to resign, for the moment, he rejected the suggestion of raising funds through a public subscription. He accepted the services of his friends as trustees in consolidating the debt, but told them that he expected to pay it himself. Instead, they raised the money from private contributors, mostly in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, and paid off the cosigned notes so that McKinley—by now, the probable next president—did not need to go back to practicing law.

Hanna, Herrick, and the others involved appear to have been careful. McKinley was kept from knowing the names of most of the contributors, aside from the close friends who were trustees. None appear to have sought favors or accepted offices. Few Democratic politicians directly challenged the propriety, usually confining themselves to noting that the governor was not a good businessman or that he couldn’t take care of his own affairs.

In 1893, this did not do the damage it might have in another year. The public was sympathetic. Voluntary public offerings received at the governor’s office alone exceeded the $130,000 needed, although they were all returned. During that autumn’s gubernatorial campaign, the miners McKinley had defended without charge in 1876 came to see him; they wanted to help by paying the money he had earlier refused. Here is biographer Leech’s conclusion:

His trouble had awakened strong sympathy, not only for a kindly man whose trust had been betrayed, but for an honest politician who had not used public office for personal gain. The whole circumstance of McKinley’s bankruptcy and the liberality of his friends became, as the Democratic Brooklyn Eagle later commented, “a matter of hearthstone pleasure around the land.”9

Despite easy reelection as governor, McKinley still had to leap a few hurdles and reconfirm his popular appeal at key points in the 1896 nominating process. Even so, Mark Hanna seems to have been fundamentally correct in his earlier assessment of the 1892 convention: “The demonstration at Minneapolis convinced me that, although it was an impolitic thing for his interests to nominate him there, in the next national convention the popular demand for his candidacy would override all opposition.”10

In the economic depths of 1894, McKinley took to the national hustings, flailing Cleveland and the Democrats for unsettling business in 1892 with their free-trade promises. These fears, he said, had been removed only in 1894 when the Democratic Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act kept protective policies in place after all. As an economic explanation of the downturn, the tariff uncertainty was probably peripheral. However, given the Democrats’ exaggerations in their own 1890 tariff rhetoric, McKinley’s barnstorming was fair retribution. He gave 371 speeches in three hundred cities before some two million people during the 1894 campaign, visiting many of the districts where Republicans gained House seats. The outcome strengthened his hand for the 1896 nomination.

What suspense remained came from uncertainties in the all-important Midwest. Forgoing reelection as governor to be free to politick in 1896, a careless McKinley lost control of the June 1895 Ohio GOP convention to the rival faction headed by ex-governor Foraker. The McKinley and Foraker factions thereupon made a loose compact: McKinley would back the faction’s candidate, Asa Bushnell, for governor in 1895 and Foraker for U.S. senator in 1896, and those two, in office, would keep the Ohio party solidly behind McKinley’s presidential ambitions.

In consequence, McKinley spent little of 1895 on the national stage and more at home supporting Bushnell and the local GOP contenders whose victories would ensure a pro-Foraker legislature. His broader task, in a nutshell, was to display enough hold on the Ohio electorate to bind Foraker and Bushnell to him during 1896. Huge crowds duly came forth, including miners and factory workers. Bushnell’s healthy 51 percent of the gubernatorial vote was not far below McKinley’s own 52.6 percent in 1893, and the deal was set. Foraker, elected to the Senate by a solidly Republican legislature in early 1896, would work for McKinley’s nomination.

Ohio aside, McKinley and Hanna were able to reject deals. In late 1895, as the party chieftains saw the Ohioan heading toward nomination, the two most important Eastern leaders, Senator Matthew Quay of Pennsylvania and ex-Senator Thomas Platt of New York (soon to be senator again), met with Hanna. Their price for convention support was at least one cabinet seat; Platt was set on becoming secretary of the Treasury and demanded the commitment in writing.

Hearing these terms from Hanna, McKinley is said to have replied: “There are some things in this world that come too high. If I cannot be president without promising to make Tom Platt Secretary of the Treasury, I will never be president.”11 Parenthetically, Hayes, Garfield, and Harrison had all drawn the line at giving the Treasury to an Easterner. McKinley would have looked like a chump to agree.

But no deal was necessary. Quay, Platt, and their allies had no strong rival to field. Their favorite, the preferred nominee of the East, was House Speaker Thomas Reed of Maine, a three-hundred-pound procorporate conservative with little following west of the Appalachians. To brake McKinley’s advance, they decided to deploy a group of favorite-son candidates: Reed in New England, Governor Levi P. Morton in New York, Quay himself in Pennsylvania, ex-President Benjamin Harrison (possibly) in Indiana, Senator Shelby Cullom in Illinois, and Senator William B. Allison in Iowa. Together, they might keep a McKinley nomination from jelling.

The first link in this weak chain broke in February when Harrison told Indiana’s top McKinley backer, future senator Charles Fairbanks, that he would not be a candidate in 1896. That left Indiana open to Fairbanks and his McKinley activists. March saw the Ohio convention plump for McKinley, with Senator Foraker agreeing to head the delegation. Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, and South Dakota followed suit. Hanna and McKinley had already lined up most of the Southern delegates, and inroads in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut broke Reed’s hold on New England.

The decisive arena, however, was the Illinois state GOP convention in late April. Its endorsement had to be nailed down for McKinley. Unlike Allison, Quay, and Morton, Cullom’s White House potential did not have to be humored. Victory for McKinley in Illinois would comfortably increase his delegate lead, impress the uncommitted, and rebuke the favorite-son plotters. Achieving it fell to a thirty-year-old reformer new to McKinley’s campaign staff, Charles G. Dawes. Thirty years later, Dawes would become vice president of the United States, but in late April, his first moment in the national political sun came from beating Shelby Cullom and the Illinois and Chicago machines.

Cullom tried to bargain, but Dawes recalled many years later in his book A Journal of the McKinley Years that he heard the soon-to-be president tell Cullom “that he proposed to take the place, if it came to him, unmortgaged.”12 Dawes had his own goal: “to make the machine sick before we get through with them.”13 He succeeded, and the Illinois endorsement of McKinley was widely regarded as sewing up the nomination. The national convention in St. Louis was by then just seven weeks away.

A week before it opened, Joseph Manley, the Maine GOP boss and strategist for Speaker Reed, threw in the towel: McKinley, he acknowledged, would be nominated on the first ballot. The Ohio governor ultimately received 661½ ballots to 84½ for Reed, 61½ for Quay, 58 for Morton, and 35½ for Allison. Not only had the several machines failed to stop McKinley, they had become his foils, his targets of opportunity. Early in 1896, the New York Herald Tribune had surmised that should McKinley win, he might “owe his success to the underlying and deep-seated hostility of the mass Republican voters to the dictation and domination of a boss oligarchy.”14

Senator Francis Warren of Wyoming advised a friend that “McKinley is in it with the masses in nearly every state in the Union.… The politicians are making a hard fight against him, but if the masses could speak, McKinley is the choice of at least 75% of the entire Republican voters in the Union, and I am not considered much of a McKinley man, either.”15 McKinley, for his part, felt strongly about his popular support, citing it principally as a moral obligation. Mark Hanna, practical and a promoter by nature, turned his friend’s discussion of stopping the bosses into a pointed campaign slogan: the campaign of “The People Against the Bosses.” Its truth, as we will pursue in chapter 5, picked up further strength from the reform credentials of the state McKinley lieutenants: Dawes and several old Lincolnians in Illinois, Fairbanks (who would be Theodore Roosevelt’s vice president) in Indiana, Robert La Follette in Wisconsin, future governor Albert B. Cummins in Iowa, and many others. Kinships like these would bolster McKinley against Bryan’s regional appeal to the old Grangers, reformers, and antimachine dissidents.

Before turning to the election and realignment of 1896, it is essential to spell out the relationship between McKinley and Hanna. Its distortion became the principal club with which the pro-Bryan Hearst newspapers, led by the New York Journal, sought to bludgeon the Republican ticket. Hearst correspondent Alfred Henry Lewis, seizing on Hanna’s role in rescuing McKinley from his 1893 financial problems, used the episode to portray Hanna as the chief of a millionaire syndicate, gambling for the White House, who would “shuffle him [McKinley] and deal him like a pack of cards.”16 More influential still were Homer Davenport’s cartoons of Hanna and McKinley, depicting the former as an obese plutocrat, covered with money bags and dollar signs, with McKinley as a smaller puppet, dancing on strings pulled by Hanna. Davenport’s caricature, more than Lewis’s poison pen, lingered with a vengeance.

Biographers Leech, Morgan, and Gould concur that McKinley, not Hanna, made the important decisions. They employ similar arguments and citations, but Margaret Leech has set out a particularly intriguing psychological explanation:

He [Hanna] had been magnetized by a polar attraction. Cynical in his acceptance of contemporary political practices, Hanna was drawn to McKinley’s idealistic standards like a hardened man of the world who becomes infatuated with virgin innocence. That his influence ruled McKinley was the invention of the political opposition, of young Mr. Hearst’s newspapers, in particular. Hanna, on the contrary, treated McKinley with conspicuous deference.… McKinley gave the orders, Charles G. Dawes noted in his close association with both men, and Hanna obeyed them without question. [Herman] Kohlsaat wrote that Hanna’s attitude towards McKinley “was always that of a big, bashful boy toward the girl he loves.” Hanna told the story himself. He said that somehow he felt for McKinley an affection that could not be explained, but he explained it very well.17

In June 1896, when Hanna followed up the St. Louis convention by visiting McKinley, who had remained in Canton and kept in touch by telephone, both men considered autumn’s general election well in hand. True, parts of the Middle West had reacted against the gold plank in the Republican platform. But the Cleveland administration was receiving most of the blame for the economic depression. The Democrats’ huge 1894 losses were proof enough. That badly divided party, Republicans assumed, had no strong candidate or issues to rally around. Two weeks later, July’s Democratic convention proved them wrong and set the stage for one of America’s great electoral battles.

MCKINLEY AND THE REALIGNMENT OF 1896

Historians disagree over how many observers anticipated the 1896 Democratic convention’s nomination of thirty-six-year-old William Jennings Bryan, a former congressman from Nebraska. Apparently not many. Missouri Representative Richard “Silver Dick” Bland had been the spring front-runner. The gold forces allied to the unpopular Cleveland administration had no agreed-upon candidate. In the early months of 1896, Bryan, a long shot, had confided his seemingly implausible hopes only to friends. But in May and June, as the expected convention dominance by silver delegates grew, so did the Nebraskan’s quiet campaign.

By the time Bryan arrived in Chicago for early July’s convention, he was taken seriously, although not expected to win. However, as a member of the resolutions committee, the Nebraskan staged a coup, arranging a convention debate on the currency issue, with himself as the concluding speaker for silver. The rhetoric, including his famous “cross of gold” allegory, had already been well tested on church, farm, and congressional audiences.18 This would be his great chance.

Charles Dawes, the young McKinley aide, was an old friend of Bryan’s from Nebraska, familiar with his oratory and ambition alike. In his journal for July 7, he set down a prediction to Mark Hanna: if Bryan got a chance to make a speech, he would be nominated. Dawes attended the Democratic convention on the ninth to hear his friend’s oratory, which he called “magnificent,” despite “pitifully weak” logic.19 To many Democratic attendees, however, Bryan’s words were messianic—a call to arms, not just to oppose the gold standard, but to save democracy and stand again, as Andrew Jackson had stood, against the encroachments of organized wealth. Excitement rippled out of the convention hall and across the nation.

Years later, the Kansas journalist William Allen White would recall that “It was the first time in my life and in the life of a generation in which any man large enough to lead a national party had boldly and unashamedly made his cause that of the poor and oppressed.”20 Not only did Bryan’s speech secure him the nomination, but its Jacksonian themes also unnerved Midwestern Republicans, mindful of their own distrust of the East, and threw a weighty stone into the quiet pool of June GOP electoral assumptions.

Mark Hanna canceled a planned European vacation. July’s wave of popular pro-Bryan reaction moved the perceived electoral combat zone from the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas—parched, Populist, and by GOP political calculations expendable—hundreds of miles east to the pivotal population concentrations of the Great Lakes: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. These essential six counted 97 of the 224 electoral votes needed to elect a president.

In July, Bryan also picked up the endorsement of the Populist party, albeit in a relatively complicated set of circumstances unimportant to this book’s examination. In short, the fusion was as much minus as plus. The critical nuance was that although the Midwest had been the cockpit of the Grangers and Greenbackers a decade or two earlier, by 1892, the fires had banked enough that five of the six pivots had given only weak support—from 1.8 percent in Ohio to 4.3 percent in Michigan—to the third-party Populist presidential contender. Only in Minnesota had nominee James Weaver gotten 11.3 percent. By and large, Great Lakes area farmers were more sophisticated and diversified in their crops than the Plains wheat growers. This would turn out to be a vital distinction.

Between mid-July and early September, when Republican leaders began to breathe more easily, large sums were raised for education, mailings, and canvasses—a mobilization doubly designed to rebut Democratic free silver arguments and ensure Republican turnout. Late July had seen Democrats optimistic about a regional sweep. August sampling had Bryan still ahead in Iowa. By early September, Hanna, Dawes, and company found Ohio and Michigan looking better, although pro-silver Iowa remained close. The Middle West, still a battleground, now leaned slightly to the Republicans.

Uncertainty about the East ended in September when the early voting states of Vermont and Maine turned in huge Republican margins reminiscent of the party’s Civil War heyday. Such evidence of gold Democrats sulking and GOP voters rallying forecast Bryan’s solid defeat in the three Northeastern states that had backed Cleveland in 1892—New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. Pennsylvania and the rest of New England were safely Republican.

Out West, the three Pacific states of California, Washington, and Oregon teetered. However, the silver bloc—Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado—was even more solidly for Bryan than was the South. October’s duel would be in the Middle West. Both sides knew it and concentrated their efforts.

Of Bryan’s 250 last campaign stops, some 160 were in eight Middle Western states. McKinley, politicking from his own Ohio front porch by receiving all kinds of visiting delegations, wound up with the same regional emphasis. In the end, however, the Middle West voted decisively for McKinley—Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa all backed him. The electoral college outcome pivoted accordingly.

Which brings us back to this chapter’s initial query: Was the election and realignment of 1896 personal to McKinley or something that another Republican could have managed? The answer lies in the voting data: personal to McKinley.

The Ohioan beat Democrat Bryan in the popular count by 7,108,480 votes to 6,511,495 and in the electoral college by 271 to 176. Yet his margin of 596,985 covered up what was in some ways a closer race. Bryan himself calculated that a change of roughly 20,000 votes in California, Oregon, Kentucky, Indiana, North Dakota, and West Virginia would have given him a total of 224 electoral votes and the election. “This calculation,” he added, “is made to show how narrow was the defeat of bimetallism and what is possible for the future.”21 Fraud, while it existed in Illinois and elsewhere, was not decisive.22

In all likelihood, no other Republican could have done as well as McKinley. Certainly not porcine House Speaker Reed, whose Yankee drawl, acerbic wit, and longtime support for gold would have fit into an Eastern stereotype to voters west of the Appalachians. Simply subtract from McKinley’s total the reasonably close states of California, Oregon, Indiana, Ohio, and North Dakota—all political cultures where Reed’s Eastern orientation would have played into Bryan’s hands—and the House Speaker would have been defeated. Probably he would not have done that well.

New York Governor Levi Morton, a stiff seventy-two-year-old banker who had been Benjamin Harrison’s little-noticed vice president, would have been even weaker. Among those favored by the machine chiefs, the most plausible winner was Iowa Senator William B. Allison. Respected in the Senate, he had coauthored major silver legislation in 1878 with Missouri Democratic Congressman “Silver Dick” Bland. Despite his age (sixty-seven) and lackluster public persona, he might have been able to hold most of the Midwest. If so, Quay, Platt, and the other Eastern leaders presumably could have carried their own bailiwicks for Allison against a Bryan caricatured as a lineal descendant of Marat and Robespierre.

Probing within the Middle West, however, identifies a whole range of McKinley singularities and personal credentials that buoyed him with urban voters, labor, Catholics, Germans, Union veterans, and his native region’s currency bimetallists. If Bryan sought to reclaim an agricultural, rural America—his revivalist speech to the Democratic convention contended that “the great cities rest on our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country”—McKinley appealed to a very different industrialized, urbanized America.

His vista of prosperity conjoined protective tariffs, sound money, and skilled immigrants from Europe flocking to factory jobs that paid wages twice those of Düsseldorf, Bradford, or Milan. He could discuss those wage relationships like no other leading political figure, and in the last weeks of the campaign, he increasingly focused on job and tariff issues and public praise for labor.

From Boston to San Francisco, virtually every major Northern city backed McKinley, often reversing normal Democratic majorities. In states like Maryland, Illinois, and California, his statewide victory margins came on tidal waves from Baltimore, Chicago, and San Francisco. In his own Ohio, the six largest counties, including Cuyahoga (Cleveland) and Hamilton (Cincinnati), carried for Democrat Grover Cleveland by a slim margin of 1,800 votes in 1892, produced a 31,000-vote margin for McKinley. This was almost half of his statewide lead. In New York, unprecedented Republican vote totals were paced by huge urban gains, including a GOP sweep of New York City’s crowded ethnic sidewalks—a telling tabulation of what drove the New York Journal to its character distortions.

Not since Lincoln, who publicly upheld unions and the right to strike during the Civil War, had a Republican nominee so embraced labor. As chapter 2 has profiled, McKinley’s career commitment ranged from his early unpaid legal help for arrested miners and his mid-1880s advocacy in Congress of a national system of labor arbitration to later success as governor in enacting Ohio legislation to impose fines and jail sentences on employers who refused to permit employees to join unions.

Jobs were the commitment to which McKinley could always rise. In pledging “the full dinner pail,” he could add detailed information about how the tariffs on tinplate or steel rails had moved thousands of jobs from Britain to America and make the data come alive to his audience. During the 1891 gubernatorial race, when incumbent Democrat James Campbell, unschooled on trade issues, charged that a Findlay, Ohio, glassworks benefiting from tariff protection hired mostly Belgians, who were unnaturalized aliens, McKinley was in Findlay the next day to refute the charges. Wages in Ohio, he demonstrated, were three to six times higher than Belgian pay for the same skills, and of the 10 percent of the local glassworkers who were Belgians, nearly all had become citizens.23

Religious and cultural ecumenicalism added to his urban, labor, and immigrant appeal. In Ohio, he had aligned with the Hayes, Garfield, and Sherman wing of the party, which usually sidestepped controversial religious, moral, and social issues to emphasize tariffs, jobs, wages, and economic development. In McKinley’s case, it helped that Stark County was a Democratic-leaning urban center heterogeneous in religion and home to large Irish and German populations. Tolerance was necessary politics when your home district included sizable blocs of Catholics, Methodists, Lutherans, Quakers, and Mennonites.

Bryan, by contrast, had a rural Protestant evangelical mind-set. This led him to insist that “a very great economic question is in reality a great moral question,” as well as to liken himself to Old and New Testament figures like David and Saul of Tarsus, while calling for America’s spiritual and financial redemption through free coinage of silver. Hoarse at the end of a day’s campaigning, Bryan would apologize that “a large portion of my voice has been left along the line of travel, where it is still calling sinners to repentance.”24 To late-nineteenth-century Catholics and immigrants, such language evoked the pietist, moralizing, sometimes blue-nosed Protestantism many had come to distrust.

Since the 1850s, the preachy Republican voice in which such morality expressed its usual politics had made Democrats out of the great bulk of Catholics and Lutherans. Their religions, by contrast, were liturgical and ritualistic, and most communicants were uncomfortable with utopias, revivals, redemption, and evangelism. From 1884 to 1892, a wave of Middle West GOP positions against religious schools and for Sunday closings and strict liquor laws had significantly undercut Lutheran and Catholic support for the party, especially among Germans. Thus it was of great importance, in the McKinley versus Bryan race of 1896, that the two parties and presidential nominees had partially reversed their stereotyped roles.

As an Ohio congressman and governor, McKinley had been at odds with the socially combative and somewhat nativist wing of the GOP led by Joseph Foraker. Indeed, the American Protective Association (APA), anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic in tenor, worked against McKinley in 1896 for having appointed too many Catholics to office in Ohio. One social historian summarized as follows:

Numerous local councils of the order in Ohio enacted resolutions declaring their opposition to him. In April, the National Advisory Board announced that it had investigated the charges brought against McKinley by APA leaders, viz., that he had discriminated in his appointments in favor of Romanists and against American Protestants and found them to be accurate. The Board also drew attention to the number of prominent Catholics who had announced their support for McKinley. In early May, both the Executive Committee and the Campaign Committee of the order issued public statements opposing McKinley, and announced their willingness to accept any other potential Republican candidate.25

Meanwhile, the GOP presidential nominee enjoyed the open support of Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul (Minnesota), a blunt critic of Bryan and Populism and arguably the most influential Catholic prelate in the Midwest. After Ireland and McKinley collaborated in the 1896 campaign, including tactics for dealing with the APA, the archbishop subsequently served in an informal diplomatic role for the Vatican, trying to prevent Spain and the United States from going to war in 1898. A leader in the Jansenist or mildly puritan (and prohibitionist) wing of Irish-American Catholicism, he helped candidate McKinley with the St. Paul Irish. He had much less effect with the beer-garden German Catholics in small-town Minnesota whose trends merely matched the Great Lakes norm.

On Election Day, Catholics in the United States, no more than 25–30 percent Republican in the 1892 presidential election, probably cast some 40–45 percent of their vote for McKinley. This is the surmise of scholars like Richard Jensen, Paul Kleppner, and others, although precise data do not exist. Besides swelling the huge Northern urban tides, the GOP Catholic gains also spilled over into rural sections, into upper Midwest locales that were almost European in how their transplanted German, Belgian, Dutch, Bohemian, and Slavic towns clumped around towering church spires visible for miles. Townships like these generally gave McKinley 10–20 percent more of their vote than Harrison had won. Whereas in the East, the broader anti-Bryan shift was so large that New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut would have gone Republican easily even with no change in Catholic loyalties, that was not true in the hard-fought Middle West. There, the 1892–96 Catholic swing, interwoven with a hard-to-separate urban shift, was decisive.

Across the Middle West, Lutherans—German Lutherans, in particular—were scarcely less important. Between 1870 and 1890, the Yankee Protestant share of the region’s vote had declined as immigration increased the Catholic and Lutheran electorates. Wisconsin in 1890 was 35 percent Catholic and 30 percent Lutheran, Ohio 25 percent Catholic and 25 percent Lutheran, and Michigan 20 percent Catholic and 15 percent Lutheran.26 Ignoring these demographic tides in the 1880s had undercut the GOP; in 1896, the miscalculation would be Bryan’s. McKinley had learned from Ohio how important the German vote was, and in 1896, his national campaign had a German division, which wooed both Catholics and Lutherans.

In one tabulation, the fifteen most populous counties in the Midwest, 40 percent of their voters liturgical Germans, gave McKinley 56.6 percent of their vote while the rest of the region gave him only 53 percent. His share of the German vote, Catholic and Lutheran, might have been 50–55 percent, up from Harrison’s 30–40 percent in 1892. The Illinois Staats-Zeitung made this assessment:

The German voters decided the [1896] election in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska and Minnesota.… They have many complaints against the Republican party, which … sought to combat the influence of Germans in every way, and annoyed them continually with Prohibition laws, Sunday closing laws and school laws. The Germans consequently turned their backs on the Republicans, with the result that Cleveland was twice elected, and if the Democrats had not inscribed repudiation, bankruptcy and dishonor on their colors as a result of the union with the Populists, the Germans would have supported them this time also.…27

By 1896, the Hayes-Garfield-Sherman-McKinley wing of the Ohio GOP had learned from experience about balancing German biergartens and parochial schools against Protestant moral crusades. Garfield, a former college professor who spoke German, had held open house, greeting arrivals with “Alles wilkommen.” Sherman reminisced in his memoirs about liking to make a Sunday stop at a German beer garden in Cincinnati “to see the people enjoy themselves, to drink a glass of that good old German beverage, beer, and to listen to the music.”28 No possible Eastern party nominee had a comparable regional feel.

McKinley, too, had eased away from his earlier prohibitionist inclinations, by the 1890s taking the occasional glass of wine (and even the occasional Scotch whisky). However, although he didn’t visit beer gardens, he was well acquainted with other Teutonic traits: how Germans from Minnesota to Ohio had generally stayed aloof from morally fervent Great Plains Populism and equally distrusted the inflationary panaceas of silver. The German government, as many of the immigrants from Prussia or Westphalia well knew, had abandoned silver in the early 1870s.

Within the Democratic party, German-Americans helped keep the 1896 Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan Democratic conventions behind gold, a prelude to Election Day’s shift to McKinley. In heavily German Milwaukee, when a Populist congressional candidate argued that it did not matter whether money was made of “gold, silver, paper, sauerkraut or sausage,” he was laughed off the stage. Several Democratic newspapers, anguished by Bryan’s weakness, fell back on warning that Republicans wanted to outlaw beer. The city’s top German wards gave McKinley 59 percent of their vote.29 The small but significant National (Gold) Democratic third-party presidential ticket got only 133,000 votes across the country, but helped McKinley win not just in the Middle West, but in Kentucky and less directly in West Virginia and Maryland.

In specifically endorsing gold in the Republican platform only at the last minute, even McKinley’s timing was skillful. His career bimetallism had already enabled him to attract the convention delegates from a number of silver-minded Western states, helping to ensure his first-ballot nomination. Acquiescence to the word gold in April or May would have made those inroads impossible. Worse, preconvention gold-silver tensions would have had dangerous weeks to fester among bimetallism-attuned voters in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and even Ohio. But when gold language was accepted under pressure in the final days, only the core silver state delegations were angry enough to walk out, and their departure had been inevitable. The nominee’s record of bimetallism, plus his repeated commitment to an international conference to remonetize silver, kept pragmatic Republican silverites in line. So did Western GOP support for regionally important tariffs on wool, copper, lumber, and other commodities.

On the Democratic side of the ledger, the GOP platform’s commitment to gold came in time to be a summer and autumn beacon to German and other sound-money Democrats repelled by Bryan and free silver coinage at sixteen to one. In the three Midwestern states where local Democratic conventions stuck by gold, German and Catholic Democrats swung to the GOP in much greater numbers than Protestant Republican pietists and evangelicals moved the other way.

If Bryan was strong in the sections of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa disproportionately populated by Southern Baptists, Disciples of Christ, and Cumberland Presbyterians (Bryan’s denomination), most of these counties were normally Democratic. However, he also made inroads in some Republican sections of the Middle West populated by the sort of evangelical Protestants who had flocked to earlier-nineteenth-century enthusiasms ranging from abolition and prohibition to perfectionism and millenarianism.

Insistent moralizers were a problem McKinley had earlier faced in Ohio. His ethnic and religious ecumenicalism, his wine, tobacco, and card playing, the relaxation of his staunch Methodism, and his moderate faction’s control of the Ohio GOP all provoked dissatisfaction. Besides American Protective Association activists, it came from peripheral elements of the rival Foraker faction and antiliquor stalwarts, some of whom moved into the ranks of Ohio’s small but pesky Prohibition party. In 1896, McKinley lost ground in towns and counties where the dissidents collaborated with pro-Bryan groups like the Populists and Farmers Alliance. In the eight Ohio counties where Methodists predominated, McKinley dropped almost a point below Harrison’s support in 1888, whereas in the state as a whole he climbed by 2.3 percent, thanks to urban voters.30 McKinley also slipped in the counties that were the most rural and held the fewest immigrants.

In Ohio and Indiana, the two closest Middle Western states in 1896, the areas where Bryan gained over Cleveland’s 1892 showings tended to be units where 1) third-party Populist support had been greatest in 1892 (it now moved largely to Bryan) or 2) concentrations of evangelical or pietist Republicans embraced another crusade for redemption and morality, this time to be held in a prairie Democratic tent. Even with McKinley’s net increases in both states, 10,000 votes would have changed the outcome in Indiana and 25,000 in Ohio.

The biggest surprise came in Michigan, a more volatile state with a two-decade history of giving 8–15 percent of its vote to Greenback, Populist, and Prohibition splinter parties. Bryan’s redemptionist rhetoric drove large numbers of Catholics and Lutherans toward McKinley. However, it also encouraged the old Yankee core of southern Michigan—abolitionist, food faddist, Seventh Day Adventist, and so on, including the city of Jackson, the GOP’s 1854 birthplace—to chalk up Bryan’s banner Midwest gains. In contrast to Yankee-settled regions farther east, Michigan Yankee counties had been friendly to Greenbackers and Populists and showed the biggest Bryan trends.

Southern Michigan aside, however, McKinley’s Middle West losses of this sort were not large. Despite his softer Methodism, by all but zealots’ standards, he remained a born-again true believer. Sydney Ahlstrom, in his magisterial Religious History of the United States, called the election of 1896 “one of the great revelatory events in American religious history. As in no other election, both candidates virtually personified American Protestantism. Both William Jennings Bryan and William McKinley were reared in pious homes, educated in denominational colleges and guided throughout their lives by the traditions and practices of evangelism.”31 Among plausible Republican nominees, McKinley had the greatest capacity to limit Bryan’s Midwest evangelical inroads.

The Ohioan also had another unique credential. The men who had worn Union blue were beginning to die off in the 1890s, but they remained a large group—usually at least two-to-one Republican—and William McKinley had a rare claim on their affections. While he would be the last American president to have served in the Civil War, he would be the first to have fought part of that war as a private soldier. The election turnout in the Middle West was huge in 1896, and Republicans called upon the Grand Army of the Republic to show that veterans’ patriotism demanded the rejection of Bryan. October 31 was declared “Flag Day,” with marches in every Northern city.32 On November 3, the onetime private of the Twenty-third Ohio Volunteer Infantry was chosen as commander in chief.

Despite what became a twentieth-century stereotype of Bryan’s cranky economics and rustic evangelism, he was not that easily beaten. In the critical Middle West, McKinley’s victory depended enough on his local background, ecumenicalism, and connections that any Eastern nominee would have been weaker. Ironically, the twin dismissals of Bryan and McKinley—the hick and the hack—that became fashionable in the twentieth century may have depended on each other. If Bryan was basically just an agrarian Bible thumper with quack economics, then of course he could have been beaten by a small-town mediocrity who took his marching orders from the Wall Street puppet masters.

The reality is otherwise. In an America where religion was still at the core of national culture, McKinley and Bryan were both in their ways remarkable men—tribunes of the people, not the interests—and their clash shook their home region, in particular. When the dust settled, America’s urban and industrial future was narrowly victorious, but many of the reforms Bryan had held out eventually became law under more sedate auspices, a worthy tribute. American electoral politics, in turn, realigned for a generation around the broad outlines (if not the precise patterns) put down in 1896 and 1900 by William McKinley. In the heartland from which both men hailed—in counties named Miami, Wabash, Sangamon, Muscatine, Blue Earth, Fond du Lac, and Traverse—nobody else on the Republican side could have countered enough of Bryan’s own moral commitment, proud regionalism, and appeal to the ordinary citizen.

However, before we turn from electoral politics to a larger view of McKinley’s success in domestic and economic policy and his place in the annals of both progressivism and the presidency, foreign policy requires attention. It is in this arena that many historians concede that the twenty-fifth president worked a second realignment: the expansion of the U.S. role in international affairs and America’s transition into the twentieth century as a world power with powerful alliances and rivalries.