William McKinley

William McKinley: The Quiet Manager of American Empire

At White House state dinners the President of the United States broke protocol to sit beside his wife rather than across from her, so that when Ida's epileptic seizures arrived he could lay a large handkerchief over her face until they passed, then lift it and resume the conversation. The gesture is the man in miniature: a crisis anticipated, absorbed, and handled so smoothly that most of the table never noticed. McKinley governed the same way. For half a century afterwards, historians mistook the smoothness for weakness.

An Iron Founder's Son at Antietam

He was the seventh of eight children, born on 29 January 1843 in Niles, Ohio, to a father who owned an iron foundry and a devoutly religious mother, Nancy Allison McKinley. The family moved to Poland, Ohio when he was ten; he attended a Presbyterian seminary school there and enrolled at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania in 1860, leaving after a single term to illness and money trouble. The Civil War supplied the education that college had not. He joined the Twenty-third Ohio Volunteer Infantry, distinguished himself at Antietam, and was commissioned onto the staff of Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes, a connection that would carry him for thirty years. He ended four years of service as a brevet major. Albany Law School and the Ohio bar followed in 1867, then a Canton practice and, in 1869, the county prosecutor's office.

The Tariff Man

McKinley went to Congress in 1876 and stayed, with one interruption between 1882 and 1884, until 1891, rising to chair the House Ways and Means Committee. There he built the thing his name was attached to for a generation: the McKinley Tariff of 1890, which pushed rates on imported goods sharply upward to shelter American manufacturing. It was a conviction rather than a manoeuvre, and it cost him his seat that November. Ohio sent him back as governor in 1891 and again in 1894, where he built machinery for arbitrating labour disputes and steered a state through a national depression. By 1896 the Ohio industrialist Marcus Hanna had organised and financed his presidential campaign, and McKinley beat the Democrat William Jennings Bryan in what the Miller Center calls the greatest electoral sweep in twenty-five years.

Gold, Tariffs and the Business of Recovery

He called Congress into special session and got the Dingley Tariff of 1897, which raised average rates to 49 percent while letting the President negotiate reductions of up to a fifth. In 1900 he signed the Gold Standard Act, ending two decades of bimetallist warfare by backing all currency with gold at a fixed $20.67 an ounce. He courted organised labour unusually hard for a Republican, making the Knights of Labor veteran Terence V. Powderly immigration commissioner and endorsing the Erdman Act of 1898. On race he was worse than cautious. He denounced lynching in his 1897 inaugural address and appointed some thirty African Americans to diplomatic posts, then took no formal action against the violence in the South. Black Republicans said as much at the time.

An Empire He Did Not Ask For

Spain's reconcentrado camps had confined roughly 300,000 Cubans by the time McKinley took office, and he spent 1897 pressing Madrid for a settlement. In January 1898 an intercepted letter from the Spanish minister described the President as "weak and a bidder for the admirations of the crowd." On 15 February the battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbour, killing 266 men; a naval inquiry blamed an external explosion, presumably a mine. Spain declared war on 23 April, the United States on the 25th, Congress attaching the Teller Amendment pledging Cuban independence after victory. The war lasted three months. Dewey destroyed Spain's ten-ship Pacific squadron at Manila Bay on 1 May without losing a man; Santiago fell and the Atlantic fleet with it; American combat deaths stayed under 400. The Treaty of Paris, ratified by a single vote in February 1899, handed the United States Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines for $20 million. Hawaii was annexed by joint resolution during the fighting. What followed in the Philippines was not brief: Emilio Aguinaldo's insurgency ran to 1902 and cost more than 5,000 American and roughly 200,000 Filipino lives. In China, John Hay issued the Open Door notes; when the Boxer Rebellion besieged the Peking legations in June 1900, McKinley sent 2,500 troops without asking Congress, a precedent with a long future.

The First Modern Presidency

Re-elected over Bryan by a wider margin in 1900, with Theodore Roosevelt on the ticket, McKinley had already rebuilt the office around himself. He invited journalists to regular briefings, the forerunner of the presidential press conference; he enlarged the White House staff; he toured the country speaking; and he ran a war by telephone. His use of the telephone, the press and publicity, the Miller Center notes, "became staples of his successors." Privately he kept small fixed rituals: a cigar out of public view, a whiskey before bed, a pink carnation in the lapel.

Buffalo, 4:07 p.m.

On 6 September 1901, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, McKinley stood receiving the public in the Temple of Music. Leon Czolgosz, a 28-year-old unemployed mill worker who had convinced himself the President was "the enemy of the people, the good working people," fired a concealed .32 revolver into his chest at point-blank range. Collapsing into the arms of his escorts, McKinley told them not to hurt the man, then thought of his wife: "My wife, be careful, Cortelyou, how you tell her, oh, be careful." Doctors expected recovery. Gangrene formed around the wound and he died on 14 September, six months into his second term. Czolgosz went to the electric chair that October, unrepentant. Ida survived until 1907 and was entombed at Canton beside her husband and their two daughters: Katherine, born on Christmas Day 1871 and dead at four, and a second girl who lived from April to August 1873.

Why William Is Called a Genius

Almost nobody called McKinley a genius in his lifetime, and the surviving verdicts run the other way. The Spanish minister thought him weak. Roosevelt thought his caution over Cuba a failure of resolve. Early twentieth-century historians wrote him down as Mark Hanna's marionette. Modern scholarship has reversed that judgement without reaching for the word: the Miller Center's revision describes a president in firm control of his cabinet and his generals, who "tried mightily to avoid war" under enormous public pressure and then "acted decisively when all the diplomatic cards had been played."

If there is genius here it is managerial and temperamental rather than intellectual, and honesty requires naming it as such. McKinley's gift was for absorbing pressure without transmitting it, for letting opponents underestimate him while he assembled a decision, and for building durable institutional machinery almost invisibly. The press briefings, the enlarged staff, the speaking tours, the telephone used as an instrument of command were process inventions, and his successors simply kept them.

The counter-case is substantial. He acquired an archipelago and then presided over a colonial war that killed some 200,000 Filipinos. He committed troops to China without Congress. He denounced lynching and did nothing about it. A politician whose signature legislation lost him his seat, and who came round to reciprocal trade treaties only the day before he died, was no original economic thinker. Calling McKinley a political craftsman of the first order is defensible on the evidence. Calling him a genius is a stretch that evidence does not carry.

Legacy

Four and a half years bought the United States an overseas empire, a gold-backed currency, a doctrine for trading with China, and a presidency organised for publicity and speed. McKinley did not so much enlarge the office as demonstrate, in the Miller Center's phrase, how successfully a president could work "within the prevailing limitations" of it. The demonstration was not lost on the man who took his place. Theodore Roosevelt's noisy expansionism is hard to imagine without the quiet apparatus his predecessor left behind.

Achievements

• President of the United States (1897–1901)
• United States representative (1887–1891)
• Governor of Ohio (1892–1896)
• Governor-General of the Philippines
• Educated at Allegheny College and Albany Law School