5

Political Success, Domestic Progress, and the McKinley-Roosevelt Continuum

The combination of the “Democratic Depression” of 1893 and severe ethno-cultural hostilities between new immigrant workers and old-stock agrarians created an urban revulsion against the Democrats which lasted into the late 1920s.… The essentially nostalgic and colonial character of the [Bryan] insurgents’ appeal produced a violently sectional reaction throughout the metropole; the Democratic party in that region sank into an impotence which, save for a limited upswing between 1910 and 1916, lasted for a generation.

Walter Dean Burnham, The American Party Systems

 

The implication to be drawn from Professor Burnham, an expert on American political realignment, is that electoral upheaval explains more of William McKinley’s extraordinary domestic policy success than any tabulation of mere legislative enactment. Through shrewd politicking at a critical juncture, McKinley ensured that the economy and society of the early-twentieth-century United States would have a modern industrial and urban bias, supported by an increasingly strong presidency and by a no longer stalemated party system able to marginalize agrarian protest.

Of the six or seven national party realignments in U.S. electoral history, most have intertwined with an important policy watershed, giving their presidential architect a leg up on great or near-great status. Viewed through this lens, McKinley’s interrelated successes—a new period of economic prosperity, including the entrenchment of the protective tariff framework in 1897 and the gold standard in 1900—ended a quarter century of bitter acrimony over currency, money supply, and tariffs with a clear decision in favor of manufacturing, global commerce, and a sound currency with mild inflation.

True, the gold standard and high tariffs, wearing out their welcome, would both need to be replaced at the end of the industrial Republican cycle in 1932, which is another story (and another realignment). But it must be pointed out that McKinley, the currency straddle bug and trade reciprocity advocate, was more flexible on both issues than the business-establishment Republican presidents to follow in the 1920s. His second term, of which he served only six months, would have basked in a brightening ideological sun, encouraging his Lincolnian streak on subjects ranging from tax fairness to attempts to reduce trusts and monopolies, especially those nurtured by special-interest tariff provisions.

Alas, because the Ohioan’s modus operandi was to keep his own counsel, write down very little, and let others think that they were doing much of the steering, he did not leave the sort of paper trail usually required to pique the interest of intellectuals. Unrecorded presidential conversations with admiring reformers and progressives were just that: unrecorded. In historical terms he could not have imagined, the bullets that eliminated his second-term tenure from September 1901 through March 1905 contributed to his great reputational loss and Theodore Roosevelt’s gain. The Progressive era is said to begin with TR, when in fact McKinley put in place the political organization, the antimachine spirit, the critical party realignment, the cadre of skilled GOP statesmen who spanned a quarter of a century, the expert inquiries, the firm commitment to popular and economic democracy, and the leadership needed from 1896 through 1901 when TR was still maturing.

McKinley, fifteen years older than the man he took as vice president in 1900, was a man who achieved much, portions of it far-reaching, by avoiding the limelight and building a reputation, popularity, and gravitas that ultimately allowed him to face down the Senate hierarchs and Eastern machine leaders and win the 1896 Republican presidential nomination virtually unencumbered. TR could never have done that; even in the years 1897–98, when, almost forty years old and assistant secretary of the navy, he appeared to many who dealt with him as headstrong and immature. His later progressivism was still half-submerged in an upper-class derogation of labor unions and routine insistence on a gold currency. Roosevelt did not back McKinley for the nomination in 1896, unlike Robert La Follette, Lincoln Steffens, and others later famous as Progressives. Instead, be supported Reed, the Maine conservative.

What Roosevelt had was independence, intellectual curiosity, and dash. His decision to leave the Navy Department to fight in Cuba as lieutenant colonel of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry—the famous (because he made them so) Rough Riders—bespoke the shrewd political instinct intertwined with his impetuosity. Along with Admiral Dewey, TR became one of the two public heroes of the Spanish-American War, such being a proven national political elevator.1 Upon TR’s return, Thomas Platt, the same boss at odds with McKinley, promptly enlisted the hero of San Juan Hill as the 1898 candidate to hold his machine’s vital but endangered patronage bastion: the New York governorship. Although Roosevelt won only narrowly, a year and a half later he had become the grassroots GOP choice to replace Vice President Garret Hobart, whose death had opened up second place on the 1900 national ticket.

Beyond amplifying the domestic successes interwoven with McKinley’s realignment of party politics, this chapter also reinterprets the respective roles of McKinley and Roosevelt in bringing progressivism and reform to a head in the new century. The two administrations must be taken together, with McKinley being the essential foundation builder and the former Rough Rider the greater attention getter and crusader.

POLITICAL REALIGNMENT AND DOMESTIC POLICY SUCCESS

Political scientists explaining McKinley’s role as a realignment president usually give him domestic laurels. Just in itself, the election of 1896 resolved a long economic debate, empowered Republican policy priorities, and dovetailed with a revival of prosperity. Here is one historian’s explanation:

Party leaders contended over alternative explanations for the depression of 1893 and the ensuing economic crisis, and Bryan and McKinley each sought to persuade voters that he had the correct explanation for the cause of the depression as well as the most effective cure. Each tried to mobilize voters around explanatory ideological positions with which those voters could identify. In the end, McKinley’s explanation in terms of the tariff made sense to discontented urban-industrial workingmen.2

According to a sampling of Democratic and Republican newspapers in the Midwest, the change in the two parties’ credibility between 1892 and 1894 previewed the 1896 outcome. Protection won. Democratic journals that had strongly indicted Republican tariffs in 1892 were massively backtracking two years later. As the Republicans attacked “Democratic hard times” and characterized the tariff as Republican “wage protection,” two-thirds of the Democratic papers said that the tariff issue was now settled, which would restore good times.3

If neither explanation of the downturn—too little silver in monetary use versus a business contraction triggered by manufacturers’ fears of tariff reduction—seems sufficient, most voters had broader reasons for their 1896 decisions. Through McKinley’s candidacy, tariff protection enlarged its appeal to urban and industrial voters with sound money, proven commitment to labor, and ethnic and religious ecumenicalism rather than evangelism. The long-term GOP empowerment in 1896, according to Burnham, came from the economic and cultural shifts in the two parties’ national coalitions and agendas:

Essentially, the reorganization of the Democratic Party during the Bryan era made it to a very large degree the vehicle of colonial, periphery-oriented dissent against the industrial metropole-center. It was also the vehicle through which the myriad [largely rural] island communities surviving from the nineteenth century sought on occasion to ward off absorption into the larger society being brought into existence under the auspices of industrial capitalism.4

Another historian, Paul Kleppner, saw in “the party of McKinley” a new Republican majority “quite different socially from that which the party had mobilized in the 1850s. This was not the party of evangelical Protestantism, not the ‘party of piety,’ but the ‘party of prosperity.’”5 McKinley even carried Southern and border-state cities where Republican support had been inconsequential to nonexistent in Lincoln’s day.

A Republican pamphleteer, out to condense McKinley’s four-year record into a 1900 reelection slogan, might have chosen “Prosperity, Protection, and Progress.” The economy turned up in 1897 and pretty much kept rising through 1902, save for a very mild contraction between late 1899 and late 1900. Prosperity had a new base in place. According to economist Milton Friedman, during this 1897 to 1902 rebound, the U.S. money supply rose some 80 percent, largely brought about by booming new gold production in Australia, South Africa, and the Yukon. Per capita output, in turn, rose by an average 4½ percent a year.6

To most industrial workers, McKinley’s “full dinner pail” promise became a reality. Barns in Kansas and Nebraska, a visitor reported, had a new coat of paint. Stock market indexes, celebratory verging on euphoric, showed a rise of some 70 percent between August 1896 and August 1899.7 It was, in short, the seeming Republican boom after the seeming Democratic bust (the reverse would end the industrial Republican era when the GOP crash of 1929 to 1933 led into the Democratic boom and realignment of the 1930s).

With hard times fading as an election issue, the “party of prosperity” enjoyed the fruits—McKinley’s national victory margin rose from 596,000 in 1896 to 860,000 in 1900, and the Republicans also held the House and Senate in both midterm elections, 1898 and 1902. The break with the quarter century of stalemate from 1874 to 1896 was complete.

As a domestic political and economic success story, this one was not far behind Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal comeback from depression. Hallmarks included the two great issues effectively resolved. On the currency front, McKinley had begun a major attempt in early 1897, with the economy still weak, to secure an international agreement for a bimetallic system using both gold and silver in a new value ratio. The French were favorable, provided Germany and especially Britain also agreed. At first, the latter had mild interest, according to McKinley biographer Lewis Gould, because of the possible benefit of renewed silver coinage to British India. Also, some in the British government liked how renewed bimetallism might guarantee defeat for the anti-British Bryan in any second presidential race.8

Through the summer, accord seemed possible. The Bank of England announced that upon agreement being reached, it would hold one-fifth of its note value in silver. This, not surprisingly, aroused gold standard forces in the United States, and when the government of India also protested to London about the silver plan’s risk, the scheme died.

Politically, McKinley had kept the promise in his inaugural address of “constant endeavor to secure it [bimetallism] by cooperation with the other great commercial powers of the world.”9 Practically, however, the rising production of gold and the mushrooming of the U.S. money supply made it obvious by 1899 that further monetization of silver was unnecessary. Plentiful gold had achieved what mild inflationists wanted from silver. In 1900 the White House proposed and Congress enacted the Gold Standard Act, declaring the gold dollar to be the standard unit of value and providing that greenbacks and Treasury notes alike “shall be redeemed in gold coin.”10 Such was the ebb of the currency debate that Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, and Washington switched to McKinley in the 1900 election, leaving Bryan, in his second race, only four faithful Western states: Colorado, Montana, Idaho, and Nevada, the hard core of silver production and sentiment.

On the tariff front, the Dingley Act of 1897, like the McKinley Tariff seven years earlier, was flawed by the hundreds of rate increases and special provisions tacked on by the time of the House-Senate conference. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Nelson Dingley, a McKinley friend and ally, had planned to drop many rates below 1890 levels, but the lobbies prevailed.11 Even so, because the tariff mismanagement collapsed that issue for Democrats in 1894, the Dingley Act had little effect in the 1898 or 1900 elections. The rates controversy was not over, but according to one analysis, “for McKinley, the specific rates in the Dingley Act were less important than the possibility for negotiating reductions in the future, which the reciprocity clauses offered.”12

As chapter 2 has discussed, between 1881 and 1890, McKinley supported a series of reforms including the use of a federal tariff commission to adjust rates on a more scientific basis, an overhaul of customs collection, and the earliest provision for tariff reciprocity. Within six months of becoming president, he was again immersed, recruiting Iowan John A. Kasson to head a newly established reciprocity bureau in the State Department. Part of the imperative came from the huge growth in U.S. trade, especially exports, during the late 1890s. U.S. industry had ballooned, passing Britain in manufacturing capacity. Now the need was to keep expanding exports. Failure to do so, McKinley thought, would mean industrial overproduction, insufficient demand, and an economic downturn.

The explosive growth of U.S. trade had already trampled earlier free-trade warnings about protection building fatal economic walls. Between 1865 and 1900, U.S. merchandise exports had quintupled from $261 million to $1.53 billion, with the fastest growth coming in manufactures (now 35 percent of total)—mostly metals, machinery, and transport equipment. In all of these, U.S. companies were becoming world leaders. During the low tariff era between 1846 and 1861, imports and exports had been roughly equal in value. However, by 1897 and 1898, as prosperity returned under high tariff protection, merchandise exports surged far beyond imports. In 1897, the surplus was $286 million, in 1898 a staggering $616 million. By 1899, the United States was exporting almost twice as much merchandise as came in, utterly unprecedented.

On one hand, this was a triumph—Republicans reasonably boasted about tariffs’ effectiveness in nurturing such successful industries. Yet it was also a caution: selling so much abroad would be hard to sustain without taking more foreign goods in return, thus the need to shift from pure protection to an emphasis on reciprocity and bargaining.

The chief of the federal Bureau of Foreign Commerce, in a magazine article, found it “almost incredible that we should be sending cutlery to Sheffield, pig iron to Birmingham, silks to France, watch cases to Switzerland … or building sixty locomotives for British railroads.”13 True enough, but the extraordinary progress in science, invention, and industry in the United States from the Civil War to 1900 was on a scale with what Britain had achieved from 1760 to 1830 during the gathering of the Industrial Revolution. The great technological exhibitions of early Victorian Britain had stunned the world, and so did the displays in the technology-filled American Pavilion of the Paris Exposition in 1900 and the U.S. Pan-American Exposition in 1901.

Since 1890, McKinley had been urging trade reciprocity as a corollary of protection. In 1901, his intention to frame it as a coequal principle was already raising warning flags among staunch protectionists. The president planned his major address for the Pan-American Exposition in September—he told Dawes that “it will be the most important one of my life”—because much of the negotiated reciprocity involved Latin America.14 His great emphasis would also send a message to the new Congress convening in December.

In McKinley’s view, tariffs were enough of an engine of the U.S. economy to serve, when reconnected to pistons of reciprocity rather than simple protection, as drivers of wide-ranging change. In negotiations with the French over possible bimetallism, he had held out a carrot of tariff concessions under the new reciprocity provisions. In 1901, after the giant U.S. Steel combination was formed, one GOP congressman from Wisconsin introduced a bill to reduce tariff rates on steel products that competed with those of the new Goliath.15 It was a tactic that the president himself had pursued. The McKinley Tariff of 1890 had slapped at the Democratic-linked sugar (refining) trust by putting imported sugar on the free list.16 As trusts and combinations proliferated like rabbits in the late 1890s, high-priced products of monopolies became logical possibilities for tariff concessions under reciprocity. With respect to wealth and income distribution, reciprocal tariff reductions could also be used to redistribute economic burdens assuming lost tariff dollars could be replaced from a new income or inheritance tax.

Despite momentum for international reciprocity in 1898 and 1899, Senate inaction blocked the multiple agreements the president submitted. His lopsided reelection, however, suggested a new balance of power in Washington. During the summer of 1901, according to White House Secretary Cortelyou, McKinley prepared “for a series of speeches in which he proposed to develop progressively his ideas on the extension of our foreign trade through the means of reciprocity treaties.” He also asked for “the collection of data on the subject of trusts.” Cortelyou later recalled, “I never saw him more determined on anything than on this.”17 Senator Henry Cabot Lodge told Rhode Island’s Nelson Aldrich that not only would reciprocity be pressed in the upcoming Congress, but that proreciprocity majorities were likely to emerge in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee unless protectionist senators rallied their colleagues to oppose the White House.18

At home, McKinley was also anxious to reunite a nation still divided, North and South, by Civil War memory—and, East and West, by a quarter century of gold versus silver conflict. His international negotiations for bimetallism made strides in winning back the silverite West. This started in the 1898 midterms, when the GOP gained congressional seats in California, Kansas, South Dakota, Washington, and Wyoming. Then, in the 1900 election, vice presidential nominee Roosevelt successfully stumped the sagebrush states where he had ranched and hunted in the 1880s and recruited his volunteer cavalry in 1898.

Ecumenicalism, arbitration, and outreach, in turn, were almost extensions of McKinley’s personality. He had applied them to labor, Catholics, and Democrats in Ohio, and as president, he reached out to the South as well as the silver states. Democrat Grover Cleveland, who had hired a substitute rather than fight in the Civil War, later stirred a furor in 1887 by ordering the return to the South of captured battle flags. As a Northern veteran, McKinley could extend the olive branch with near impunity.

When the Spanish-American War started, McKinley recommissioned two former Confederate brigadiers, Fitzhugh Lee and “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, as “a symbol that the old days are gone.” For months, Dixie leaders had been saying that Southerners would flock to the colors in numbers that would submerge and replace memories of the 1861–65 strife, and McKinley’s actions were warmly applauded below the Mason-Dixon Line. By one account, “these appointments and the enlistments of many other Southerners brought a unity the country had not seen since the end of the Civil War. Now, instead of singing ‘Dixie’ or ‘Marching Through Georgia,’ the country was singing ‘He Laid Away a Suit of Gray to Wear the Union Blue.’”19

Mawkish middle-class sentiment, to be sure. But taken together, these successes—in politics, prosperity, finance, technological progress, and national reunification—helped to make McKinley the most popular president since Lincoln.

MCKINLEY, ROOSEVELT, AND REFORM, 1896 TO 1904

Theodore Roosevelt, on becoming president, knew the depth of public affection for his slain predecessor. Nevertheless, his statement in September 1901 that “in this hour of deep and terrible bereavement … it shall be my aim to continue absolutely unbroken the policy of President McKinley” had a downside, given the dead president’s unique leadership style. TR bound himself to extend the sort of policy making that McKinley’s 1897 to 1901 record appeared to represent, which is to say a mostly conventional conservatism.

TR charging off in pursuit of his own political initiatives would have gone down poorly, of course. Even so, the result was to hamstring Roosevelt in pursuing the ideological changes that McKinley had up his carefully guarded sleeve but which, for tactical reasons, he had not put on the proverbial table. Tariff reciprocity, reasonably publicized, was an exception; TR just didn’t have the expertise or Capitol Hill support to lead that battle. Perversely, the constraint of Roosevelt’s first thirty-eight months in turn reflected back on McKinley, appearing to confirm that it was his dullness that a restive TR was obliged to extend.

Some chronology will indicate otherwise. In 1896, TR had been much more of a conservative Republican than McKinley. He supported the machine favorite for the presidential nomination, House Speaker Reed. He was a gold currency man with no Midwestern ifs, ands, or buts. He disliked labor unions and Grangers. Where McKinley shared some of Bryan’s suspicions of the East and was careful in derogating his Democratic rival, TR voiced the sort of arrogance heard in Manhattan or Boston clubs, worrying about “a red government of lawlessness and dishonesty as phantastic and vicious as the Paris Commune itself.”20 His reformism was mostly of the mugwump sort, emphasizing the civil service and municipal corruption.

The views of the two men converged somewhat after Roosevelt won the New York governorship in 1898. Silver-gold divisions were falling by the wayside; TR’s tariff positions moved farther from the free-trade theology he had heard at Harvard and closer to standard Republican thinking. Governing in New York also required him to confront two subjects that McKinley had earlier faced in Ohio: labor reform and tax fairness.

Roosevelt devoted fully one-fifth of his first annual message to issues affecting workingmen, a sign that he was broadening his base. During his two years in Albany, he proposed and the legislature passed measures to add factory inspectors, enforce the eight-hour day for state workers, increase protection for women and children in factories, inspect tenements used for manufacturing, and limit drug clerks’ hours. However, Platt and the legislators rejected his most advanced labor proposal, an employers’ liability bill.

As for tax fairness, Roosevelt got drawn into the legislature’s attempt to redefine taxable real estate to include the franchised use of city streets by utility and transportation companies. Even when compromise legislation stalled in the courts, the ruckus spotlighted a key issue: relative tax burdens. TR also proposed a novel approach to curbing the trusts: the use of government to publicize information on companies’ assets, debts, and profits. Mild state legislation in this vein was enacted in 1899. In December 1901, Roosevelt as president made a similar proposal for federal-level publicity (this while judicial implementation of the Sherman Antitrust Act remained uncertain).

McKinley’s influence had quietly secured much farther reaching labor and tax legislation in Ohio. However, the two men’s methods represented different eras and psychologies. McKinley avoided rhetoric in favor of strategic enlistment and backstairs orchestration; Roosevelt anticipated the Progressive era climate by jousting with epithets and accusations as much as legislation. He infuriated the state GOP machine and its business allies with blunt comments—desiring, for example, to crack down on corporations “organized in a spirit of mere greed, for improper speculative purposes” and holding that “the man who by swindling or wrongdoing acquires great wealth for himself at the expense of his fellow, stands as low morally as any predatory medieval nobleman.”21

In 1900, TR decided not to reappoint state insurance Commissioner Louis F. Payn, an organization stalwart who had taken an improper half-million-dollar loan from an insurance-connected bank. Despite his compromise with the machine on a replacement, the sum of Roosevelt’s provocations had become unacceptable. Platt announced in April that the governor “will not be renominated for his present office.”

Vice President Hobart’s death, however, had opened up a new avenue: obtaining Roosevelt’s selection as McKinley’s new running mate. There were two problems. First, Roosevelt said he didn’t want to run for vice president but again for governor, and most of the time he seemed to mean it. As a gentleman historian, TR knew that aside from the vice presidents who succeeded Lincoln and Garfield, from 1860 to 1896, the office was a ticket to nowhere. Hannibal Hamlin, Schuyler Colfax, Henry Wilson, William Wheeler, Thomas Hendricks, Levi Morton, and Adlai Stevenson each served their four years without creating any demand for their advancement. Friends’ advice about a changing vice presidential role rang hollow.

Problem number two was that the president didn’t care for Tom Platt and hadn’t for a long time. In 1888, deal-seeking emissaries from Platt had provoked McKinley to rare “violent profanity.”22 Why would a president who had refused to deal with Platt in 1888 or as a nomination seeker in 1896 now be willing to let the New Yorker appear to impose a vice presidential nominee on his triumphant reelection? Small wonder that TR was ambiguous about what he wanted (or want he wanted to say he wanted).

Hobart, who had become the president’s friend, sometimes served as his eyes and ears in the Senate. McKinley’s first choice to replace him was Iowa Senator William B. Allison, a smooth operator who could have helped as a backstairs White House liaison with the ever-troublesome upper house. But Allison had no interest. Other possibilities included Congressman Jonathan Dolliver of Iowa and Navy Secretary John Long. Mark Hanna, with whom McKinley was not so close as before, vehemently opposed taking the volatile Roosevelt. Because Hanna had some thoughts of succeeding McKinley himself in 1904, he might not have been entirely disinterested.

McKinley would have noted something else. In 1896, he had prided himself on being the candidate of “The People Against the Bosses.” By the time the 1900 convention started, the New York governor was just as obviously the people’s choice. His bent even resembled McKinley’s. The New York Times observed that TR had “torn down the curtain that shut in the Governor and taken the public into his confidence … beyond what was ever known before.”23 In some conversations with Henry Cabot Lodge and others, McKinley showed interest in taking TR on the ticket.24 What could not be accepted was any appearance of dictation by Platt and his usual ally, Pennsylvania machine leader Quay.

Indeed, that year the McKinley administration had been quietly at work helping to weaken or replace old-line state machines and leaders, most notably in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin in the Midwest, but also in New Jersey. Roosevelt running again in New York, beating and even terminating the Platt organization, would have been their first choice. Charles Dawes was the presidential adviser who tended party upheavals in the Midwest—defeating a machine resurgence in Illinois and supporting the takeovers of Progressives (and 1896 McKinley lieutenants) Robert La Follette in Wisconsin and Albert B. Cummins in Iowa. Officially, he was the federal comptroller of the currency; unofficially, he was close to McKinley in the same son-figure way that McKinley had been to Rutherford Hayes.

While Hanna was readying a last-minute convention attempt to stop Roosevelt’s nomination and complaining that the White House wouldn’t act, Dawes set up a telephone call to McKinley’s chief secretary George Cortelyou, with the president listening in on another telephone. Dawes described to them how an enraged Hanna wanted to block a Quay-orchestrated stampede to Roosevelt with a White House–backed countermove for Secretary Long. Dawes told Cortelyou and the president that any such Hanna effort would boomerang.25 As Dawes later described the event in his journal, he then took dictation of a “hands-off” presidential message to Hanna:

The President’s close friend must not undertake to commit the Administration to any candidate. It has no candidate. The Convention must make the nomination. The Administration would not if it could.… The Administration wants the choice of the Convention and the President’s friend must not dictate to the Convention.26

Hanna acquiesced, and Dawes conveyed word back to the president. The next day, Dawes went back to Washington and spent four hours talking politics with McKinley.27 A week later, Dawes had dinner with TR. The latter had heard some details about the Dawes maneuver from George Perkins, a future Progressive party brain truster and a quietly emerging McKinley-Dawes confidant (who had been in the White House meeting with McKinley at the time Dawes called). This made TR want to know more. However, Dawes recorded in his journal only Roosevelt’s comment that “If he could have had four years more as Governor of New York, he could have demolished Platt in New York as we think we have demolished Tanner in Illinois.”28 The Machiavellian mind, however, must wonder: Did a late-hour reformist counterplot help secure the Roosevelt nomination?

Alas, the notes in Dawes’s journal are maddeningly brief. A year later, the Chicagoan spent a day at the Oyster Bay home of Roosevelt, now vice president, and they discussed the 1904 presidential nomination. TR expressed concern that the machine would try to control the New York delegation against him. Dawes said that he would back Roosevelt in 1904 and thought Illinois would as well, but that TR could gain from fighting the New York machine just as McKinley had profited from beating the Illinois machine in 1896.

Two months later, McKinley was dead and Roosevelt had become president. The veiled reform potential of a second McKinley administration—never quite definable—was lost. No succeeding vice president, however dedicated, lacking his own mandate and pledged to a static continuity could do what the twice-elected, powerful McKinley might have worked with his prestige and understanding of Capitol Hill power and public opinion. Tariff reciprocity, as noted, withered on the vine. Trade statistics didn’t come alive for Roosevelt as they did for the Ohio ironmaster’s son. He had little chance of imposing reciprocity on Congress—and he didn’t try.

The trust issue itself may have been muted by McKinley’s death. McKinley’s biographers agree that action had been gestating in late 1899 and 1900, albeit no one expected Congress to undertake serious attention in the regular preelection session that began in December 1899 or the lame-duck one in December 1900. Fact-finding by the federal United States Industrial Commission appointed in 1898 was stirring interest, but although McKinley cited its unfinished work in speeches, serious legislative attention to trusts would await the full session of the new Congress convening in December 1901.

The jockeying began in 1900, with TR allowed to make campaign speeches recommending publicity of capitalization and profits, taxation of corporations, and “the unsparing excision of all unhealthy, destructive and anti-social elements.”29 Over a September lunch, the president reminded Senator Hanna, who had been defending the trusts, that McKinley’s summer letter accepting renomination termed the trusts “dangerous conspiracies … obnoxious to the common law and the public welfare” and requiring legislation. Hanna, unenthusiastic, agreed to modify his speeches.30 Biographer Leech perceived particular importance in Roosevelt’s public stance: “His forthright censure of the trusts did much to counterbalance the deference to business which paralyzed Republican leadership on economic questions, and to attract the enthusiastic support of younger and more progressive elements of the party.”31

Trusts were certainly on McKinley’s mind in 1901 as he collected data, discussed the law with his new attorney general (but old friend) Philander Knox, took note of popular apprehension over the new steel and railroad consolidations, and pondered on what premise and how far to proceed. That summer, as Cortelyou recalled, the president said, “This trust question has got to be taken up in earnest, and soon.”32 In August, under the prodding of Progressive Albert Cummins, Iowa Republicans put a plank in their state platform urging “any modification of the tariff schedules that may be required to prevent their affording a shelter to monopoly.”33

Charles Olcott, an early-twentieth-century McKinley chronicler assisted by Cortelyou, contends that McKinley planned to give trusts equal billing with tariff reciprocity and that this realization underpinned Roosevelt’s own attacks in 1902 and thereafter.34 Leech, also drawing on Dawes and Cortelyou, concluded that the president’s 1901 tour, unlike his other trips to the West, was not intended to affect elections: “The President was going to talk to the country about two subjects which had previously been overshadowed by the postwar issues: the control of trusts and the extension of commercial reciprocity. His choice of these subjects implied that, in the political freedom of his second term, McKinley was going to pit the power of the Executive against the power of the Senate.”35 Had McKinley succeeded with an antitrust campaign tied to tariff reciprocity, he might have waved a bigger stick from 1901 to 1904 than TR did.

As for the evolution of federal tax policy, nothing much happened under TR between 1901 and 1904. McKinley, the experienced former Ways and Means Committee chairman, had helped shape the temporary tax increase enacted in 1898 to finance the war with Spain. One inclusion was a progressive tax on inheritances over ten thousand dollars (save for those passing from husband to wife) that reached a top rate of 15 percent for bequests over one million dollars. Other provisions included a tax of 1 percent on all receipts over two hundred thousand dollars of corporations refining oil or sugar (a two-pronged jab at the sugar trust and Rockefeller’s Standard Oil), special taxes on banks and brokers, and a stamp tax on checks and drafts, stocks and bonds, insurance policies, and commercial and legal documents, albeit a larger part of the new revenue came from doubled excise taxes on tobacco and alcoholic beverages.36

In 1899, McKinley had asked Justice John Marshall Harlan whether the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected as unconstitutional the income tax enacted in 1893, had ever ruled on Abraham Lincoln’s wartime income tax.37 He also told Dawes that he intended to recommend an income tax.38

TR himself first endorsed a progressive inheritance levy in 1906 and a progressive income tax in 1909. Would McKinley have moved any faster? Probably—especially if success with tariff reciprocity looked likely to reduce government receipts enough to require a new revenue source. Lost tariff revenues had explained the income tax provision in the Democrats’ ill-fated Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act of 1894. McKinley’s own interest as governor in fairer distribution of Ohio’s tax burden—the nonpartisan tax revision commission he appointed in 1892, reaching beyond corporate and franchise taxes, had recommended a general levy on intangible wealth!—could have been extended through a kindred commission on the federal level. It might have included the likes of economist Edwin Seligman, an advocate of a progressive income tax who had advised Roosevelt’s 1899 deliberations in New York.

Labor would have remained a McKinley theme and ally. In 1897, the new president had refused to appoint as postmaster general a Wisconsin party regular, Henry C. Payne, strongly urged on him by Mark Hanna, because of the man’s record as a lobbyist and as an anti-labor employer. Biographer Leech quotes McKinley telling Hanna that “I cannot put a man in my cabinet who is known as a lobbyist.”39 According to another historian, a protracted strike against Payne’s Street Railway Company, joined by a public boycott, had “muted the pro-labor image of the Republican Party,” which was why McKinley took Robert La Follette’s objection over Hanna’s pleading.

In a similar vein, Treasury Secretary Lyman Gage of Illinois, picked in 1897 partly because of Dawes’s recommendation, had bolted the GOP in 1884 and was a persistent foe of the state GOP machine. After the Haymarket Riot of 1886, Gage had favored pardons for the accused participants and become an advocate of “more friendly consultation and less inconsiderate action on the part of labor and capital.”40 Terence V. Powderly, onetime head of the Knights of Labor, was appointed by McKinley as commissioner general of immigration; AFL chief Gompers and railway union leader Frank Sargent were named to the Industrial Commission.41 The 1900 GOP platform endorsed Gompers’s support of an eight-hour day for government workers. Other former labor union officials had federal appointments under McKinley, several as U.S. consuls in Britain and the continent.

In 1903, Roosevelt signed legislation that McKinley had first put forward to establish a new Cabinet Department of Commerce and Labor. Named to head it was the former president’s chief secretary, Cortelyou. Over a full second term, McKinley doubtless would have kept in close touch with the AFL’s Gompers, who later commented on their relationship: “He would frequently ask me to the White House to see him, and I would sometimes ask for the privilege. At no time was I disappointed.”42

Far from being a reactionary overwhelmed by the approach of the twentieth century, McKinley was arguably a politician ahead of his time. The year 1896, however, was not a time in which progressivism could risk the boldness so easy in 1906 or 1909. According to Midwestern historian Richard Jensen, the conservative countercrusade against Bryan was so stigmatizing that the effects “took years … to wear off. Many, if not most, of the [future] Progressive crusaders had battled in the trenches against Bryan, including Robert La Follette, George Norris, Theodore Roosevelt, Jonathan Dolliver, William Allen White, Albert J. Beveridge, Louis Brandeis and Woodrow Wilson. Only when the spectres of Altgeldism and free silver vanished did they feel free to propose reforms again, or to indulge in crusades.”43

We might add the muckraker Lincoln Steffens, who voted for McKinley, or the socialist author Jack London, who said he would have voted for McKinley if that had been necessary to stop Bryan. Arguably, it was only after Bryan’s second defeat in 1900 that the middle class in general and the future leaders of Progressivism would be ready to edge toward controversial reforms—suppression of corporate political contributions, implementation of income and inheritance taxes, direct election of U.S. senators—from the Nebraskan’s 1896 crusade. Under TR, the 1901–04 years became a transition period; how much more or less transformation might have come under McKinley can only be guessed.

In the real world, the realignment president whose ethnic and metropolitan inroads greatly enlarged his party’s constituency for Progressivism did not live to see that trend catch fire. The Senate never faced his planned challenge. The new Fifty-seventh Congress, to which McKinley would have outlined his not-quite-finished requests, did not arrive in Washington for a regular session until December, six weeks after the president’s funeral train had left for Canton.

THE MCKINLEY-ROOSEVELT CONTINUUM

The Ohio-born historian James Ford Rhodes, who happened to be Mark Hanna’s brother-in-law, published a volume in 1922 called The McKinley and Roosevelt Administrations, 1897–1909. He saw parts of the McKinley-Roosevelt continuum, but we can identify many more.

The willingness to remain in office by McKinley’s cabinet, which Roosevelt quickly requested, bespoke a rare tribute to the dead president by an especially capable group of men. McKinley had made a few unwise appointments in 1897, especially Russell Alger at the War Department and John Sherman at State. (Woodrow Wilson, too, would make a Sherman-like mistake in 1913 by naming his own party’s longtime unsuccessful presidential contender William Jennings Bryan as secretary of state or “premier.”) However, the cabinet of 1901—John Hay at State, Elihu Root at War, Lyman Gage at Treasury, Philander Knox as attorney general, “Tama Jim” Wilson at Agriculture, Charles E. Smith as postmaster general, John Long at Navy, and Ethan Allen Hitchcock at Interior—was among the best of the Gilded Age. Their lengthy tenures—Hay, Wilson, and Hitchcock stayed through the entire term, Root and Knox until 1904—helped to ensure that most Rooseveltian policies would develop out of McKinley’s. Long and Gage, departing in 1902, were in their late sixties when they left.

Previous vice presidents who became president—Tyler in 1841, Fillmore in 1850, Johnson in 1865, and Arthur in 1881—sought or received no comparable pledges.44 Majorities of the held-over cabinet members exited soon or were replaced. McKinley’s memory and Roosevelt’s leadership qualities constituted a unique political adhesive. This is a central part of my emphasis on a McKinley-Roosevelt continuum.

The major shift under Roosevelt come in conservation and care of natural resources. In forestry and reclamation, both TR preoccupations, his interest and attention greatly exceeded those of McKinley, who was neither sportsman nor outdoorsman. Countless forests and national parks bear witness. Yet the latter’s secretary of the interior, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, was not only kept on, but served through March 1907. His description in Who Was Who in American Politics emphasizes his McKinley antecedents:

Missouri Republican and close friend of President McKinley, who appointed him secretary of the interior (1898–1907), a post in which he quickly and effectively established himself as a conservationist and friend of the Indians. He exposed wide frauds in the handling of public lands, cleaned out the General Land Office, and had more than a thousand people in twenty states indicted, among them many government officials.45

As for the trusts, besides the evidence of McKinley’s larger preparations, the die may have already been cast under his regime for Roosevelt’s most famous move, the Northern Securities antitrust case brought by Attorney General Knox in 1902. Having known Knox since the latter’s Ohio college days three decades earlier, the president doubtless consulted him on the trust issue, especially because the railroads combining under the Northern Securities banner roiled the stock market in the late spring of 1901, just as Knox was taking up his new post. Their personal and political closeness deserves greater attention.46 Mark Hanna had told James J. Hill, whose railroads were involved, of the administration’s earlier concern. After Knox brought suit in February 1902, Hanna said, “I warned Hill that McKinley might have to act against his damn company last year. Mr. Roosevelt’s done it.”47

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Roosevelt’s rhetorical calls to arms between 1901 and 1904 were a clarion he was far better equipped to sound than McKinley—the Ohioan’s disingenuous techniques forged back in the 1870s were becoming dated. The time had come to mobilize popular and congressional reformation of corporate abuses through open leadership, not quiet backstage orchestration. TR brought an aristocratic outspokenness and aplomb much better suited to this challenge than McKinley’s congeniality and middle-class demeanor.

On railroad issues, TR made no splash until his second term, when he led in enacting the Hepburn Act (1906), which gave government the power to set railroad rates. The Elkins Act, passed in 1903, had prohibited rebates to favored shippers. McKinley, who had introduced Granger resolutions as a congressman and pushed railroad regulation as governor of Ohio, would have achieved comparable legislation as the progressive tide rose.

When TR threatened to put coal mines into federal receivership in 1902 after mine-owner recalcitrance in a strike, Hanna was already saying how it would “serve the mine owners right” if the government seized the mines. Private property rights were not sacred to nationalists like McKinley and Hanna. In 1900, as anger grew over the outrageous prices charged by the steel industry for warships’ armor plate, the McKinley Navy Department led by Secretary Long had threatened to build its own armor plate facility.48

As for TR’s growing attention to labor-management relations and arbitration, we must recall that McKinley, two decades earlier, brought about a national arbitration system on the floor of Congress, later enacted a state-level system in Ohio, and quietly, so as not to introduce politics, presided over dozens of arbitrations as governor. Under his prodding, Congress passed the Erdman Act of 1898, which set up wage mediation for interstate railroads. Hanna was cut from surprisingly similar cloth. He boasted, justifiably, that “I was the first employer that I know of in the state of Ohio that ever recognized and treated with organized labor.”49 Rare is the chapter about Hanna that skips his famous rebuke to a Philadelphia banker who called laborers the “lower classes.” “Do you mean working men?” said Hanna. “Or do you mean criminals and that kind of people. Those are the lower classes.”50

In 1901, Hanna became associated with the conciliation and arbitration work of the National Civic Federation, of which Treasury Secretary Gage was honorary president and Samuel Gompers vice chairman. He spent the last two years of his life devoting as much time to coal, steel, and railway labor relations as he did to Senate business. On this issue, Roosevelt and the Square Deal fell in behind the McKinley-Hanna tradition. TR also met with AFL chief Gompers in the White House, but it was McKinley who had opened the door.

The former Rough Rider’s cultivation of experts and academic advisers was a fact. However, his willingness to use government-appointed commissions to gather data and point legislators in well-planned directions already had been developed into a political art form by his predecessor, as chapter 6 will examine.

McKinley was also far ahead of TR in supporting the franchise for women, black voting in the South, and direct election of U.S. senators (which he backed in the House of Representatives). Several biographers have made much of TR’s controversial invitation to black educator Booker T. Washington to have dinner in the White House. In 1898, McKinley had visited the famous college president in Tuskegee, Alabama, and taken along much of his cabinet. Roosevelt pushed the Vatican to get a cardinal’s hat for Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul, the leading Republican among Catholic prelates. McKinley had built that relationship during a decade when it was much more controversial. And so on.

Nor was TR the real architect of McKinley-era wartime successes and military reforms nor of the decision for the Panama Canal nor the rise of U.S.-British entente. Biographer Gould has rebutted the “fateful telegram” theory that Roosevelt, in a single late February day as acting secretary of the navy, was decisive in readying the U.S. Pacific Squadron for its great victory three months later in Manila Bay:

The actual sequence of events is more complex, and Roosevelt’s message shrinks in importance. Naval planning for an attack on the Philippines dated back to 1895, when the possibility of a Spanish-American conflict over Cuba first arose.… In late October 1897 Commodore Dewey was named commander-in-chief of the Asiatic Squadron, and the Philippine plan, whose general outlines he already knew, was available to him in early 1898, when he took over his new assignment. As the Cuban crisis worsened, the navy relayed orders to Dewey in accordance with the plan. On January 27, he was told to retain men whose enlistments had expired. Roosevelt’s wire of February 25 was part of this preparatory process.51

In a related vein, TR’s gush over war as a national fulfillment was such in 1898 that he could add little to the limited imagination of U.S. diplomacy. A more mature Roosevelt might have been able to, one naval historian has noted, “but no one in his right mind would have trusted TR to conduct sensitive diplomacy in 1898.”52 TR’s arbitration of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize, represented a greater maturity and an exposure to McKinley’s emphasis—chapter 6 will say more—on elevating arbitration internationally.

Sweeping reform that put the army under a new General Staff, announced by Secretary of War Root in 1903, dated back to the Spanish-American War aftermath. McKinley had cannily picked Root in 1899 for his legal and administrative skills, and the president’s de facto wartime chief of staff, Adjutant General Corbin, served as the secretary’s military collaborator. Still, according to one military historian, McKinley “gave Root his most vital support … and used his influence with Congress to push the reform legislation. While the whole program of army reform was not completed until two years after McKinley’s death, his approval and support were essential conditions of its birth.”53

Roosevelt’s brusqueness helped complete British agreement to a new treaty permitting the Panama Canal and its fortification by the United States. However, the substitution of Panama for a Nicaraguan route harked back to 1899 discussions. McKinley had been impressed enough by the case for Panama to arrange a year’s delay while Mark Hanna pulled together more information. Hanna read up, accepted the Panamanian argument, and led the spring 1902 congressional debate that shifted the canal’s location.

TR, however, was less than skilled in arranging for the right of way. One historian at the U.S. Naval Academy, writing of the Roosevelt-seeded Panamanian revolution, observed, “The ‘rape’ of Panama from Colombia by Theodore Roosevelt followed McKinley’s death and lost the United States the friendship McKinley hoped to cement in that area through another Pan-American Conference.”54

Although Roosevelt favored Anglo-America entente, his early diplomacy in 1901 and 1902 verged on bluster—bugle calls over U.S.-British canal negotiations and troop dispositions in the Alaska-Canada border dispute. He may have been too unused to carrying a big stick to speak softly at the same time. In Great Britain and the United States, his chronicle of the two nations’ ties, Oxford historian H. C. Allen concluded, “It was perhaps a good thing for Anglo-American relations that he only came to power when he did, for by 1902, when he had assumed full control, the work of Hay had already been done.…” Things had moved along to calm waters, “where presidential ebullience would not have deeply serious consequences.”55

Even the growth of TR’s beloved navy, which he accelerated, began under McKinley. Following up wartime needs, the McKinley naval expansion program of 1900 authorized two battleships, three cruisers, three protected cruisers, and five newfangled submarines.56 In 1901, McKinley planned to use launching ceremonies for the battleship Ohio in San Francisco to speak on the importance of a two-ocean navy, but his activities in San Francisco turned out to be constrained by his wife’s sudden illness.57

During the four years after the election of 1904, Roosevelt came into his own with a boldness and verve McKinley would have found difficult. The size of TR’s landslide, in turn, was a triumph of Progressive enablement. McKinley had blocked the Democrats from reaching political success along a Populist route in 1896 and 1900. In 1904, Roosevelt’s success under a Progressive banner, defeating business and financial Democrat Alton Parker by the biggest Republican presidential majority on record, proved the conservative Democratic route even rockier than Bryan’s path. Parker carried only one state—Kentucky—outside the old Confederacy, losing the Bryan silver heartland of Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Utah by almost two to one. Even populism was beginning to morph into Republican Progressivism.

Overall, the McKinley-Roosevelt continuum was itself more progressive than conservative, guiding American politics for roughly another decade, finally cresting in the 75 percent of the national presidential vote cast in 1912 for Progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson, TR as a third-party Progressive, and Socialist Eugene Debs. The hapless Republican, William Howard Taft, received only 23 percent. Not only is this Republican presidential sequence from 1896 to 1912 among the nation’s most important, it is one of the least fathomed. In the persons of both McKinley and TR, two different enablers of Progressive politics saddled and rode the nation’s conservative party.