William McKinley: The American Presidents Series: The 25th President, 1897-1901

by Kevin Phillips, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (Editor)

Overview

A bestselling historian and political commentator reconsiders McKinley's overshadowed legacy

By any serious measurement, bestselling historian Kevin Phillips argues, William McKinley was a major American president. It was during his administration that the United States made its diplomatic and military debut as a world power. McKinley was one of eight presidents who, either in the White House or on the battlefield, stood as principals in successful wars, and he was among the six or seven to take office in what became recognized as a major realignment of the U.S. party system.

Phillips, author of Wealth and Democracy and The Cousins' War, has long been fascinated with McKinley in the context of how the GOP began each of its cycles of power. He argues that McKinley's lackluster ratings have been sustained not by unjust biographers but by years of criticism about his personality, indirect methodologies, middle-class demeanor, and tactical inability to inspire the American public. In this powerful and persuasive biography, Phillips musters convincing evidence that McKinley's desire to heal, renew prosperity, and reunite the country qualify him for promotion into the ranks of the best chief executives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466866430
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/18/2014
Series:	American Presidents Series
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	463,604
File size:	365 KB

About the Author

Kevin Phillips, author of Wealth and Democracy, The Cousins' War, and Arrogant Capital, is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Magazine, and The Washington Post and is a commentator for CBS and National Public Radio. He also edits his own newsletter, American Political Report. He lives in Connecticut.

Kevin Phillips, author of Wealth and Democracy, The Cousins' War, and Arrogant Capital , is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Magazine, and The Washington Post and is a commentator for CBS and National Public Radio. He also edits his own newsletter, American Political Report. He lives in Connecticut.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., (1917-2007) was the preeminent political historian of our time. For more than half a century, he was a cornerstone figure in the intellectual life of the nation and a fixture on the political scene. He won two Pulitzer prizes for The Age of Jackson (1946) and A Thousand Days (1966), and in 1988 received the National Humanities Medal. He published the first volume of his autobiography, A Life in the Twentieth Century, in 2000.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

William McKinley, Ohioan

It is generally believed by strangers that the most interesting and significant part of Ohio's history lies in the part the state has played in national politics — as a "barometer" state and as the home of political leaders. Ohio has produced many men of political importance, and has sent seven native sons to the presidency — Grant, Garfield, Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, McKinley, Taft and Harding. However, Ohio's industrial life overshadows its politics. ... Ohio's major importance — and major interest — lies in a large and varied industrialism.

The Ohio Guide (WPA)

William McKinley was born in Ohio in 1843, mostly educated there, fought the Civil War in a Buckeye regiment, represented an Ohio district in Congress, and sat in the governor's chair in Columbus. He loved the state. His God, loved even more, was the benign God of an Ohio Methodist Sunday School. His career is only understandable as the career of a proud and well-connected middle-class Ohioan. Factory whistles were his Mozart wind concertos, tariff schedules his Plato's Republic, and Civil War recollections his Herodotus.

Nineteenth-century Ohio, however, was not just a place but a phenomenon. No retrospective on America's twenty-fifth president can begin without a comprehension of the state's spectacular emergence as a center of U.S. political and economic gravity during the fifty-eight years between McKinley's birth and death. Like Virginia earlier, Ohio became a "Mother of Presidents." It was also the first crucible of the Old Northwest. In the year McKinley was born, four other future GOP presidents called Ohio home — Ulysses Grant, just out of West Point, Rutherford Hayes, a year past his Kenyon College graduation, the twelve-year-old James Garfield, working to support his widowed mother, and Benjamin Harrison, a schoolboy in North Bend.

None, obviously, had any youthful inkling of the Ohio regime to come, of how from 1868 to 1900, no Republican would be elected president who was not born in the Buckeye State. Those of other origins tried in vain: New Yorkers, Hoosiers, state of Maine men, anyone. Even the three leading Northern generals in the Civil War were Ohio-born: Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Philip Sheridan. Ohio itself was the sole Northern state central enough to be a bridge from the war's eastern theater of operations in next-door Virginia to its western theater spanning the Ohio-Mississippi river system. The late nineteenth century was Ohio's great period, the Buckeye hour in history.

This unique molding and mentoring helped to sculpt McKinley's political rise and influence. The state's economic vigor and innovation, besides underpinning its national importance, also gave McKinley his principal career theme: first, the blessings of a protective tariff system, and then the reforms it would need to meet the twentieth century. Lacking the patina that other Ohio GOP presidents got at Williams College (Garfield), Yale (Taft), or Harvard Law School (Hayes), little about McKinley did not reflect his middle-class, midcountry origins.

DRUMS TO DYNAMOS ALONG THE OHIO

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Ohio was the doorstep of the New West, the open, rich land closest to Virginia and the original Northern states. Steamboats were common on the Ohio River by the 1820s. By 1830 and 1840, the center of national population was speeding westward across Virginia. In 1850 it hovered near Parkersburg, West Virginia, on the south bank of the Ohio River. Then, like Eliza, the fugitive slave in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, it leaped across the river, coming to rest in 1860 about fifteen miles from Chillicothe.

Ohio had gone from territory to state in 1803, just as Thomas Jefferson was arranging the Louisiana Purchase. The early settlers, disproportionately from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky, concentrated near the river that had taken most of them west. Cincinnati, its "Queen City," became the state's major urban and commercial center, although its streets were often clogged by noisy, dirty hogs on their way to the slaughterhouses.

Then in the 1830s, courtesy of New York's Erie Canal, a new population movement began to fill up the northern and central parts of the state with Yankees, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and German, British, and Irish immigrants. At midcentury, Cincinnati still had a huge edge over Yankee Cleveland on Lake Erie — a population of some 115,000 versus just 17,000. But growth in northern Ohio was accelerating like one of the new Philadelphia-built locomotives on the Mad River and Lake Erie Railway.

Ohio was a new type of state, a composition board of converging migrations from all three major U.S. eighteenth-century coastal regions — New England, the Middle Atlantic (mostly Pennsylvanians and New Yorkers), and the South (principally Virginians, Carolinians, and migrants from Tennessee and Kentucky). Ohio's northeast, the former Western Reserve of Connecticut, had welcomed a small first wave of Yankee settlers in the 1780s and 1790s at the same time as larger numbers of Appalachian Scots-Irish crossed the Pennsylvania and Virginia borders.

As settlement swelled, Ohio's population jumped from 230,000 in 1810 — Shawnee and Wyandot war parties still prowled the state's northwest — to some 900,000 in 1830. A further flood more than doubled the population to nearly 2 million in 1850. Ohio became to the canal, steamboat, and Conestoga wagon era what California would be to the automobile and airplane in the decades after World War II: not just a beacon but a national symbol of westward migration.

"The immigration to the North Central section," concluded historian Frederick Jackson Turner, "had a special significance. In the Atlantic states, from the colonial days, the rule of the older stock was well-established, and institutions, manners and customs — the cultural life of the sections — had been largely fixed by tradition. But in the New West, society was plastic and democratic. All elements were suddenly coming in, together, to form the section. It would be a mistake to think that social classes and distinctions were obliterated, but in general, no such stratification existed as was to be found, especially, in New England."

Buckeye agriculture complemented Jacksonian democracy, being small-holder based and a far cry from plantations of the Cotton South or the quasi-feudal land holdings of New York's Hudson Valley. Farmers were lured by the fifty to sixty bushels an acre corn yields of the fertile Muskingum, Scioto, and Miami valleys, two or three times what they could grow on hillside or tidewater plots back east. By the 1840s, two extensive state-built waterways connected Ohio farmlands to Lake Erie and the Erie Canal, opening up the Eastern U.S. and European corn and wheat markets. Higher crop prices followed.

Additional help came from the reaper and other new farm machinery. In 1840, Ohio was the leading wheat-producing state ranked by yield. This slipped to second in 1850 and fourth in 1860 as the grain belt moved west. In corn, however, Ohio had been fourth in 1840, but rose to first place in 1850. Corn was marketed largely on the hoof — cattle and hogs fed on it, then were slaughtered, packed, and sent east or abroad.

Not surprisingly, Ohio led the nation in livestock in 1850. Meatpacking Cincinnati had already won the nickname "Porkopolis," and Ohio's sheep-raising eastern counties likewise made it the number one wool-raising state. A century later, one would err taking Ohio as the heart of the Farm Belt, but not in the years of McKinley's boyhood.

Biblical land of Goshen as the state might seem, abundant crops did not always lead to prosperity. That had been proved in the late 1830s and 1840s when banks failed and low meat and grain prices barely exceeded production costs. Prosperity returned in the 1850s, but by the late sixties and early seventies, Washington's acquiescence in a post–Civil War contraction of the currency was provoking crop and livestock districts alike.

As president, McKinley would fondly reminisce about how, as a barefoot nine-year-old, he took his family's cows to and from pasture. Yet from the start, his part of Ohio was also industrial. At the time of McKinley's birth, the Niles Tribune-Chronicle later recalled, the town had included "3 churches, 3 stores, 1 blast furnace, rolling mill, nail factory forge and about 300 inhabitants." Even in 1820, only Pennsylvania and New York surpassed Ohio in the value of manufactured goods, and this kind of interspersed small-scale industry characterized the Ohio countryside until the Civil War.

McKinley's grandfather James, and his father, William, were iron makers by trade. In the early nineteenth century, they came to Ohio from Pennsylvania, where Scots-Irish iron masters, aroused by prohibitions in the British Iron Act of 1750 against colonials making pig iron into ironware and machinery, had been a mainstay of the American Revolution. In 1804, Daniel Heaton built Ohio's first smelting furnace on Yellow Creek, near the present site of Youngstown. This was the forerunner of the Mahoning Valley steel industry, at its twentieth-century peak second only to that of nearby Pittsburgh.

Iron quickly became Ohio's leading manufacturing industry, with the 1850 census ranking state pig-iron output second only to Pennsylvania's. Coal and iron production both concentrated in the eastern counties where the McKinleys always had a small furnace or two.

Turnpikes, canals, and railroads crisscrossed the area where McKinley grew up. By the 1850s, the railroad concentrations of northeastern Ohio rivaled those centered on Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. At the Civil War's outbreak, Ohio led the nation in railroad mileage, and when Buckeye soldiers got leave, all they had to do was reach the Baltimore & Ohio line in the east or the Louisville & Cincinnati in the west. Home would be only hours away.

Like Ohio's centrality in late-nineteenth-century politics, its significance to U.S. manufacturing is hard to exaggerate. Between young Will McKinley's birth and his election to the presidency in 1896, the state's industrial innovation was the stuff of record books — literally.

Cleveland had John D. Rockefeller at work in the Ohio oilfields and refinery district, as well as Charles Brush, whose invention of the arc light illuminated America's cities. Young Thomas A. Edison spent some of his boyhood puttering in the town of Milan. Charles Martin Hall, based in Oberlin, in 1886 discovered the electrolytic process for making aluminum. Toledo to the northwest claimed Edward Libbey and Michael Owens, whose inventions and local company, Libby-Owens-Ford, revolutionized the glass and bottle business.

Dayton boasted the Wright brothers, who tinkered with the forerunners of flying machines in their local bicycle shop, as well as the Patterson brothers who started National Cash Register in 1884. The inventions of Charles Kettering, who started Delco, ranged from electric starters for automobiles to the iron lung. Fifty miles to the south, candle molder William Procter and soap maker James Gamble were already building the company that eventually made Cincinnati a household-product word.

In McKinley's own backyard, B. F. Goodrich and Harvey Firestone made Akron the rubber capital of the world in the 1870s and 1880s. The National Inventor's Hall of Fame, located there, has been described by the Wall Street Journal as "a Cooperstown for gadgeteers and tinkerers." The Studebaker brothers grew up in Wooster before building their cars. J. Ward Packard produced electrical equipment in Warren before putting his name on a luxury automobile.

Few remember Joshua Gibbs, whose newfangled iron plows turned Canton, Ohio, into the nation's leading pre–Civil War producer of farm machinery. Without that base, the city might not have lured youthful lawyer McKinley in 1869. William H. Hoover developed the vacuum cleaner, and his company remains a Canton institution.

Small wonder that innovation became part of McKinley's argument for the protective system. "It encourages the development of skill and inventive genius as part of the great productive forces," he said as a young man awed by what he saw around him. He identified the tariff with national development and patriotism, and, in the words of biographer H. Wayne Morgan, "through the dull tax [tariff] schedules that bored other men, he found the romance of history in the unfolding development of the nation's wealth."

The best parallel is to the Britain of 1750 to 1820, with its early Industrial Revolution convergence of communications, foundries, factories, and, most of all, innovations. The most notable were James Hargreaves's spinning jenny (1766), James Watt's steam engine (1768), Henry Cort's patents for puddling and rolling iron (1783–84), and Richard Arkwright's power loom (1787). Like post–Civil War Ohio, early industrial Britain had secured and mobilized itself with tariffs, strict patent laws, government assistance, and military procurement, as well as the Navigation Acts that gave preference to British shipping and parliamentary statutes that sought to prohibit skilled workers and engineers from leaving the country.

Born and bred in such innovative surroundings, McKinley's speeches about enterprise and the fruits of the protective tariff system often sounded trite, like paeans from a chamber of commerce brochure. But they had a base in reality. When he came home from the war, factories belched smoke where only a few sheep had grazed. A decade later, when Rutherford Hayes recommended that the new congressman hook his career to a specialty in tariffs, McKinley's own district was practically a casebook; witness the 1860 to 1900 population explosion in three of its manufacturing cities: Youngstown — 2500 percent, Akron — 1300 percent, Canton — 1200 percent.

However, if Ohio politics and commerce were powerful in molding McKinley, so were two other home-state institutions: the Methodist Church and Abraham Lincoln's boys in blue, the Ohio Volunteers and the Grand Army of the Republic.

OHIO AS THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY MIDDLE AMERICA

The Ohio of McKinley's youth reflected the just-past-the-frontier culture of the burgeoning Midwest: a new unpolished middle class given to teetotaling Methodism, religious camp meetings, and small-town values, typically light-years distant from the sophistication of upper-class Eastern universities, salons, and clubs.

Some biographers have dealt condescendingly with his midwestern manners, his fondness for homilies, his open religiosity, his middle-class taste, his unflagging commitment to "the people," and a liking for popular hymns, sentimental poetry, and patriotic odes. His devotion to his invalid wife, counted entirely genuine even by foes, drew a certain mockery for its Victorian syrup of language and expression, including gestures like his effort as governor always to wave to her window at three o'clock in the afternoon.

These attributes, however, also had a positive effect: they helped to give William McKinley, Jr., the greatest personal popularity of any president since Lincoln. His success on the stump, his ability to draw crowds everywhere, and his obvious personal following would be used to rebuild executive power that a generation of lesser presidents — some able to read Kant or Plutarch in the original — had lost to Congress. In late-nineteenth-century politics, his personality was a pillar of his success, whatever disdain it might evoke among later sophisticates.

Religiosity was part of that drawing power. In eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, the McKinleys had been Scots-Irish Presbyterians committed to kirk and covenant. But not long after arriving in Ohio, they became Methodists, caught up in the revivalism of the early nineteenth century. By 1844, when the Methodist Church divided between north and south, Methodism had become America's most popular creed, with over a million members and almost twelve thousand local and itinerant preachers. This itinerant capacity, together with emphasis on camp meetings — so named for the tents that provided early housing — particularly equipped the Methodists to evangelize a moving frontier.

Ohio was one of their strongholds, and among those recruited to atonement, grace, and the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit was young Will McKinley, who requested baptism after a series of camp meetings in 1859. His mother hoped his commitment would lead him to the ministry, but the Civil War intervened. Still, his regiment — the Twenty-third Ohio Volunteer Infantry, to whom we shall return shortly — was scarcely less religious than his home environs. Nicknamed "the psalmsingers of the Western Reserve," they followed a routine he described to his sister as "religious exercises in the company twice a day, prayer meetings twice a week, and preaching in the regiment once on a sabbath."

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "William McKinley"
by .
Copyright © 2003 Kevin Phillips.
Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Editor's Note,
Introduction,
PART I: OHIO BORN AND MOLDED,
1. William McKinley, Ohioan,
2. Surprisingly Modern McKinley,
PART II: BECOMING AND BEING PRESIDENT,
3. McKinley and the Realignment of 1896,
4. McKinley and America's Emergence as a World Power,
5. Political Success, Domestic Progress, and the McKinley-Roosevelt Continuum,
PART III: PRESIDENT MCKINLEY IN RETROSPECT,
6. McKinley Reconsidered,
Appendix A: McKinley in Memoriam,
Appendix B: The Eminent McKinleyites,
Notes,
Milestones,
Selected Bibliography,
Index,
Also by Kevin Phillips,
The American Presidents Series,
About the Author,
Copyright,