William McKinley and His America
It is the last Sunday of the month which means it is time for the next president, making this week’s book of the week William McKinley and His America by H. Wayne Morgan.
William McKinley was born January 29, 1843, in Niles, OH to William McKinley Sr and Nancy McKinley. He was the 7th of 9 children and his mother had hopes he would become a minister, although William himself never had church aspirations. He was a good student but not particularly diligent and didn’t really have college aspirations when the Civil War broke out. He immediately enlisted in the Ohio Volunteer Regiment with his cousin.
He handled soldiering quite well, earning commendations for bravery and promoting through the ranks, eventually ending as a brevet major, and for the rest of his life he was called Major by everyone who knew him. When asked later in life how he should be addressed, as soldier, congressman, governor, or president, he answered, “Call me Major. I earned that. I am not so sure of the rest.” While serving in the army, he came under the guidance and mentorship of Rutherford B Hayes, who mentored McKinley until his own death in 1893.
Following the Civil War he entered law as a profession, studying for one year at Albany Law School in New York before passing the bar in Ohio, and setting up shop in Canton, OH with lawyer and former judge George Belden, who approached McKinley to work as partner’s. On January 25, 1871, he married heiress Ida Saxton, and they had two children, both of whom died in childhood, leaving Ida ill for the rest of her life as she never quite recovered from the tragedy and was prone to nervous fainting and hysterical spells. There is also some indication that she may have had seizures, although it’s not clear if she had those prior to her children passing or if she developed them later in life. Regardless, McKinley loved his wife and was deeply devoted to her well-being and happiness, always taking time out of his day to check on her and ensure she was doing ok and would wave at her when he walked past the house.
So, he practiced law for about 6 years in Ohio before being elected to Congress, where he would serve from 1877 to 1891. He was well known as a conscientious and peaceful man, he rarely got into altercations with anyone and seemed to get on well with everyone he met. While serving in congress he earned a reputation as a protectionist, arguing adeptly for high tariff bills that would protect the financial interests of American industries.
He also straddled the line between those who backed the gold standard and those who wanted to promote a silver standard by pushing for bimetallism, which is where both gold and silver are used as currency at a fixed ratio to each other, kind of like four quarters make one dollar. And during this time, he also built up his reputation as a solid republican, a trustworthy man who would not stab those who trusted him in the back. He repeatedly rejected offers to put himself on the ticket in favor of those to whom he had pledged his support, when he backed his guy, his loyalty was unswerving, and in turn that earned him party loyalty.
Eventually, he lost his Congressional seat as a result of gerrymandering, but his opponents had to REALLY work for it...they had tried to gerrymander his district out from under him several times while he was in Congress but he was such a likeable guy and so good at his job, that even the democrats in his new districts kept voting for him. When he DID lose his seat, he took a few months off before jumping into the local political arena as governor of Ohio, which position he held until 1895, when he stepped down as governor to accept the Republican nomination for president.
While he was governor, he was ALMOST hit with a scandal, which was mor indicative of his own big heart than any wrongdoing and served him well in the end. In 1893, during one of the financial panics that consistently rocked that decade, one of his friends lost everything. Unfortunately, McKinley had co-signed several banknotes for this friend. And when the friend kept presenting him with notes to sign, saying they were renewals, McKinley kept signing them. They were not renewals. They were all new bank notes, ultimately leaving McKinley on the hook for upwards of $100,000 in 1890’s money, which would be in excess of $3million today. McKinley was shaken and pretty sure he was ruined. Except that he was so good at making friends that when word of his plight got out, donations to clear his debt flooded in. His friend Mark Hanna, who would eventually become his campaign manager, coordinated with several local business owners and wealthy friends to buy up the banknotes and see them cleared. And rather than hurting his political aspirations, this made him more approachable to the average American who was also suffering during the panics.
McKinley was such an adept politician, that he stumped hard for every candidate from 1880 through 1894, national and local, which got his name out there locally, AND nationally. So that during his own 1896 campaign, he didn’t have to leave his house. He gave multiple speeches from his front porch and people traveled from all over to hear him speak, while his own campaign machine, headed by his longtime friend Mark Hanna, did the in-person campaigning.
And he won quite handily, despite some push back from the silverite’s who wanted free silver coinage, and ran such a clean campaign that his opponent, William Jennings Bryan, congratulated him in person and offered no hard feelings, which I don’t think had been done since Andrew Jackson shook John Quincy Adams hand at the White House. At least, it was not reported in any of the books I read as happening.
And his good will towards man continued once he was in the White House, so much so that at least one journalist compared his presidency to James Monroe and the Era of Good Feeling. He welcomed everyone to visit, democrat or republican, treating everyone with equal courtesy. The only people who might receive a slightly chilly reception were favor seekers, but if you just wanted to shake his hand and have a quick word, you were welcomed and treated graciously.
He quickly had his cabinet in place and did what most presidents have a hard time doing...delegated the work thoroughly. And even better, he never second guessed his cabinet members’ decisions. So, the key issues of his presidency were the currency, and Cuba. The currency issue was ultimately settled by OTHER governments, namely the European countries that had been flirting with the bimetallism that McKinley favored, decided to go fully with the gold standard. This in turn forced the American congress to put forth a gold standard bill that was promptly signed by McKinley.
Now Cuba ultimately led to the Spanish American War, due largely to reports that Spain was treating the citizens of Cuba abysmally. Not just propagandistic reports, Spain had implemented concentration camps and the women and children of Cuba were starving. Spain promised to lighten the penalties for rebels; however, they never did, and in return, the rebels started rioting. McKinley sent the USS Maine as basically a peace keeping force and the Maine had barely sunk anchor when it was sunk itself on February 15, 1898.
Now, Spain offered to conduct a joint investigation with the United States; however, McKinley declined the offer and conducted its own investigation. Shockingly...Spain determined the explosion that sunk the Maine was an accident. The United States determined it was sabotage. And war was declared. Now...the Spanish American war was supposed to just be over Cuba; however, McKinley took the long-standing Monroe Doctrine seriously, or at least his secretary of War Russell Alger did, and there was fighting in Cuba AND the Philippines. Now, those two locations are NO WHERE NEAR EACH OTHER. They aren’t even in the same ocean! But somehow, we ended up kicking ass in both the Philippines and Cuba, bringing Spain to the table for negotiations. Now Spain was loathe to give up her colonies in the Western hemisphere, but McKinley, in addition to being a capable politician in his own right, had the knack of a good leader in putting the right person in the right job...with two notable exceptions: 1. His first secretary of State John Sherman, and 2. his secretary of War, Russell Alger.
Now, his treaty team did NOT include Sherman, but did include assistant secretary of state, who would go on to become Sherman’s replacement, William R Day. Sherman was a capable secretary of treasury under Rutherford B Hayes and during his time as Senator had authored the Sherman Silver Act, but by the time he was made secretary of State, he was ready to retire, and was kind of cantankerous. William Day, however, was a solid choice of replacement, and served as McKinley’s Secretary of State until McKinley’s assassination.
Anyway, the end result of the Treaty of Paris of 1899 was that the United States became a recognized imperial power, purchasing Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain for $20 million, or approximately $731 million in modern currency. Now, the troubles were not over yet. Cuba wanted independence but was happy for US Assistance on the road to independence. The Philippines categorically declined to become a US colony and switched their hostilities from Spain to the United States in short order. Like, once it became clear the US intended to colonize and Christianize the already Catholic Island nation, the Philippines rebelled, necessitating more troops being sent to quell the incipient rebellion.
Ultimately, Alger, who was deemed incompetent but not corrupt, was asked to resign from the cabinet, and McKinley replaced him with Elihu Root. Root was a lawyer, which is what McKinley determined was needed, and with his gift for picking the right man functioning, Root was able to quickly establish a working colonial government for the Philippines, which consisted of Judge William Howard Taft. This, incidentally, was Taft’s introduction to the stage of politics. He had been a happy lawyer and judge before being called to federal service to act as the governor of the Philippines.
And those were the two overwhelming issues of his day. He had to work on trade with China, he annexed Hawaii, and directed his ambassador in England to work on a treaty with Britain to build a canal across the isthmus in South America, but overall, his administration was basically free of scandal and major issue. His renomination in 1900 was a foregone conclusion, with the only difference being that his Vice President for term two was Theodore Roosevelt, his first term VP, Garret Hobart, having passed away on November 21, 1899.
After his reelection and second swearing in, McKinley took the summer off to tour the United States before returning to his home with his wife in Ohio, where they spent the balance of the summer months before McKinley traveled to Buffalo, NY for an exposition celebrating inventors in America. And on September 6, 1901, McKinley was shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. McKinley’s chief of staff George Cortelyou had been worried about security and McKinley had kind of waved him off, pointing out that he hadn’t any enemies. And he truly didn’t. Czolgosz assassinated him purely based on Czolgosz own anarchistic beliefs.... he was an anarchist, McKinley was president, thus the figurehead of the government. And as an anarchist, governments were bad, so McKinley had to go. And anarchists had been assassinating world leaders all over.
Not mentioned in the book, but I read it in Michael Malice’s The White Pill, the writings of Emma Goldman inspired Czolgosz’s attack on McKinley. I didn’t mention that during my review of Malice’s book because I knew I was reading THIS book and didn’t know if that would be discussed at all. It was not. Goldman was investigated briefly and definitely made persona non grata in social circles, but ultimately, Czolgosz was executed by electrocution for the assassination on October 29, 1901. They did not fuck around back then; execution was a speedy affair.
So, McKinley was shot on September 6, and died of a gangrenous infection as a result of the bullet wound on September 14, 1901. He was buried in Canton, OH, with Ida joining him in 1907.
I think that McKinley was as good a president as the 19th century could have produced. He was, by all reports a genuinely nice man and likeable. He was someone that people enjoyed being around. And the whole nation truly mourned him when he was murdered. Like there’s a definite reason Emma Goldman lost popularity following his death.
This was a good book, it outlined his life thoroughly and laid the groundwork for how tragic his murder was, at the absolute pinnacle of his life. I do think McKinley was a man of his times, and his foreign policy laid the groundwork America’s interventionist policies in the 20th century. Like, if he hadn’t included expansion in the Pacific with the Spanish-American war, it might have been harder for Wilson to ultimately justify America’s entrance into WWI. But that’s a future book. I think I rank him middle of the pack for my personal pick of president. His ability to get along with everyone, regardless of party affiliation, is something that modern presidents are sorely lacking, and America could desperately use today, but his blind spot when it came to Philippines independence is a little too ironic for me.
This book was originally reviewed on YouTube on May 28, 2023, but is now available on Rumble and PodBean.
