President McKinley

by Robert W. Merry

  Following the impromptu session with citizens, Mr. and Mrs. McKinley embarked upon a whirlwind of tightly orchestrated events and tours, including a review of U.S. troops at the Exposition stadium, a tour of horticultural exhibits, and visits to various national buildings representing such countries as Honduras, Mexico, Ecuador—and Puerto Rico, which McKinley had made a U.S. possession. The afternoon included a luncheon at the New York Pavilion, a brief rest opportunity, and then a reception at the Government Building, where the president shook hands for twenty minutes. The evening schedule included a fireworks display that occupied the president’s attention until around nine. The next day’s events included a boat tour below Niagara Falls and then the Temple of Music reception that Cortelyou had warned against.

  Lurking in the shadows throughout the presidential visit and planning to join the receiving line at the Temple of Music was an obscure anarchist named Leon Czolgosz. While McKinley had made history through a lifetime of conscientious political toil, Czolgosz planned to make history through a single destructive act.

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  Ohio Roots

  THE STAMP OF A BURGEONING STATE

  The prominent Massachusetts minister and physician Manasseh Cutler captured the optimism of Americans at the dawn of their republic when he described the territory between Lake Erie and the Ohio River as “the garden of the world, the seat of wealth, and the centre of a great Empire.” In these lands, he mused, “the arts and sciences [will] be planted; the seeds of virtue, happiness, and glory be firmly rooted and grow up to full maturity.” It’s worth noting that, when he wasn’t ministering to his New England flock or tending to his patients, Cutler speculated in Western lands and dreamed of wealth, and no doubt there was some marketing hyperbole in his lyrical description of territory so far from American civilization. Indeed, that expanse struck most Easterners at the time as hopelessly inaccessible—on the far side of the merciless Appalachian Mountains, bordered on the north by British Canada and the south by Spanish Louisiana, peopled by hostile natives bent on protecting their homeland through whatever savage methods they could devise.

  But Cutler understood the new republic’s expansionist impulse. When he died in Massachusetts in 1823, those lands of his vision, now roughly the state of Ohio, boasted the country’s fifth-largest population, with 581,434 residents. These were young and hearty folk—64 percent of them under the age of twenty-five—and by 1830 they had subdued nearly all the state’s land suitable for cultivation. By midcentury Ohio led the nation in the production of corn, much of it transformed into whiskey and hogs for easy transport, and a decade later the state’s population of 2,339,502 trailed only those of New York and Pennsylvania. As a later historian put it, “Ohio recapitulated the history of colonial encounter, conquest, and postcolonial development with breathtaking speed.”

  Ohio also developed its own political culture. One of the first imperatives of the new nation was to surmount that Appalachian barrier, push the Indians westward, and expand the country’s territorial birthright to include those lands that had so beguiled the Reverend Mr. Cutler. Thus did Ohio’s rise coincide with the rise of the nation. Unencumbered by entrenched interests and protected folkways, the pioneers of Ohio could shape their own brand of democracy. As the country entered the political struggle between Andrew Jackson’s populist Democrats, committed to low taxes and limited government, and the governmental dynamism of Henry Clay’s Whigs, Ohioans embraced elements of both.

  Like the Jacksonians, they placed enormous faith in the collective wisdom of the people—“fully competent to govern themselves,” as a prominent lawyer named Michael Baldwin put it in 1802, a year before statehood. He declared that the citizens constituted “the only proper judges of their own interest and their own concerns.” Also like the Jacksonians, Ohioans insisted upon an equality of esteem for all citizens of whatever social or economic station. An early Methodist minister named John Sale expressed his appreciation for living “in a Country where there is so much of an Equallity & a Man is not thought to be great here because he possesses a little more of this Worlds rubbish than his Neighbor.” But Ohioans also embraced elements of Clay’s “American System” of public works and civic projects. A powerful commitment to commercial success took root, along with a devotion to both public and private endeavors designed to foster progress—canals, roads, bridges, schools, libraries, universities, newspapers.

  Further, Ohio’s central location and topography ensured that it became a magnet for various distinct population groups. Americans moved west generally in geographical bands that preserved the mores, folkways, and speech patterns of those in each migration. But in Ohio, Southerners flooded into the river valleys of the state’s southern reaches, while New England Yankees settled the northeast corner and the lower Muskingum Valley. Settlers from Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, mostly Scottish and Scotch Irish, clustered in the eastern and central portions of the state and the Miami Valley. Each group brought its own characteristics—dialect, outlook, politics, even barn architecture. Soon these cultural elements melded into a complex pastiche of politics reflecting multiple sensibilities of the broader country, contributing to Ohio as microcosm state.

  It is noteworthy that, as the slavery issue gripped the nation, Ohio produced one of the country’s most fervent warriors against human bondage in Joshua Giddings, and in Clement Vallandigham, one of its most fearless opponents of the North’s eventual aggression against the wayward South. The state emerged as an outpost of antislavery sentiment and a pathway for runaway slaves seeking freedom via the famous Underground Railroad; but it also proved inhospitable to freed blacks desiring to settle there. When war broke out, however, Ohio’s abhorrence of slavery and devotion to union won out. It sent more recruits per capita into the Northern army than any other state, placing 320,000 men into blue uniforms for the struggle.

  One of those was William McKinley Jr., then barely eighteen, who worked as a schoolteacher and summertime postal clerk in Poland, a compact hamlet in Ohio’s iron-manufacturing northeast. He was a winsome lad, short of stature but broad of shoulder, with a ready affability mixed with an earnest bearing. He traced his New World roots to David McKinley, “David the Weaver,” who arrived in America early in the eighteenth century and settled in York, Pennsylvania, to ply his trade and seek his fortune. David McKinley’s heritage extended back to a Scottish chieftain named Fionn laoch, translated as “fair-haired chief” and pronounced Fin-lay. With the “Mac” later added to denote “son of Fin-lay,” the family name became McKinlay, subsequently changed to McKinley. Descendants of this early Fionn laoch migrated from Scotland to Ulster, Ireland, most likely in the seventeenth century, and became tenant farmers. From there they ventured across the Atlantic to America.

  The American McKinleys eventually intermarried with folks of English ancestry and set out to exploit New World opportunities as best they could, subject to the vicissitudes of fate. David the Weaver purchased 316 acres of farmland along Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River, and one of his sons built upon his robust inheritance through extensive business activity. A second David McKinley, grandson of David the Weaver, fought in the American Revolution as a militia private and participated in a number of skirmishes. His son James, lacking even a meager education, gravitated to the foundry business and managed blast furnaces in the steel regions around New Lisbon (later Lisbon), Ohio. His son, William, born in 1807, carried on the trade at various Ohio locations.

  This first William McKinley personified Ohio’s devotion to hard toil, civic pride, and family fecundity. He was a broad-faced man with a square jaw, stern lips, and a taciturn demeanor. Though lacking even a modest formal education, he read when he could and kept three books constantly within reach: the Bible, Shakespeare, and Dante. But reading time was scarce. Foundry work required a strong back, multiple skills, and constant attention. To produce pig iron, he mined the ore, chopped and stacked the wood for the charcoal furnaces, burned the charcoal, man
ned the hot forges, and procured the finished product. Around 1830, with a partner, he rented a furnace at Niles and later joined a brother-in-law in leasing and purchasing furnaces at various times at Fairfield, New Wilmington, New Lisbon, and Niles, all Ohio towns.

  In 1829 William McKinley married Nancy Allison, a solemn but caring woman who personified Ohio’s commitment to simple verities and the Christian values of thrift, optimism, modesty, and hard work. She possessed abundant energy, organizational acumen, and a strong disposition to serve her community, particularly her Methodist church. The product of Scottish immigrants who settled initially in Pennsylvania, she was “a born gentlewoman,” as a later biographer described her. This was reflected in a widely told story about her in later life, when she traveled to Columbus, Ohio, by train to visit her son, the governor of Ohio. A woman next to her struck up a conversation.

  “Are you going to Columbus?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have family there?”

  “I have a son there.”

  She pushed her children to academic diligence and plenished the little family library with such volumes as Hume’s History of England, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, and various Dickens novels. She subscribed to Horace Greeley’s influential Weekly Tribune, which reinforced the family’s aversion to slavery and embrace of Northern sentiments.

  According to a report of the day, Niles contained “3 churches, 3 stores, 1 blast furnace, rolling mill and nail factory, 1 forge and grist mill and about 300 inhabitants.” As William Sr. later recalled, “There wasn’t much of a town there then. . . . No railroads, no canals, and terribly poor, wild country roads.” William’s income barely covered the necessities of the large family that soon emerged. The couple produced nine children, eight of whom survived into adulthood, and brought them up in a spacious but simple frame house on the town’s main street, with part of the first floor set aside as a grocery store.

  William Jr., born January 29, 1843, was the seventh child. He grew up in small-town isolation, the only regular outside communication coming via the stagecoach that traversed the dusty, rutted road to and from Pittsburgh. But young William’s parents insisted that he and his siblings take full advantage of the local school, run by a teacher named Alva Sanford. The children were spiffed up each week for services and Sunday school at the local Methodist Episcopal church, where circuit-riding preachers cast their rugged eloquence and stern piety over the congregants. Along with religious instruction, they imparted a strong sense of duty, patriotism, and rectitude in human endeavors. Young William McKinley embraced all of it. Even as a small boy he accepted the challenging task of driving the family cows to and from pasture, a duty that in winter left his feet miserably cold. Decades later he remembered warding off the cold by pressing his feet into the soil where the cows had lain and enjoying the “pure luxury” of their leftover warmth.

  When the lad was nine, his parents moved the family to Poland, in Mahoning County to the south. The father’s business remained at Niles, some twenty miles away, which necessitated extended absences from his wife and children and long weekend commutes on horseback. But the new town offered greater educational opportunities, and young William enrolled in the Poland Seminary, founded in 1849 by an Allegheny College graduate named B. F. Lee. Through relentless fundraising, largely among civic-minded local Methodists, Lee managed to erect a three-story brick school and assemble a small staff of teachers and administrators. For William, the most important of these was an instructor named Miss E. M. Blakelee, who offered abundant encouragement to those willing to submit to her rigid authoritarianism.

  At school and on nearby playgrounds, young William emerged as a popular lad, friendly in manner, who delighted in the various games and sports that occupied the town’s boys. Neighborhood friends recalled that he excelled in competitive activities, and one noted, “Will is good at anything he goes at.” But he insisted on fulfilling his studies before play on the theory that leisure time was more enjoyable without school obligations hanging over him. He maintained a neat appearance and always displayed gentlemanly manners, though he didn’t look down on the rougher set. While he never indulged in swear words, he showed no disdain for those who did.

  Within his family, he responded avidly to his strong-minded mother’s moral entreaties and religious sensibilities. He demonstrated his piety at one of the stirring religious revivals that occasionally materialized on the outskirts of town, under huge tents erected for the occasion. People arrived in great numbers from surrounding environs to take in the “torrents of eloquence” flowing from the lips of the revival orators. At one camp meeting, a minister urged those wishing to “profess conversion” to step forward to the “mourner’s bench” and unite with the church. Young William McKinley, just ten at the time and unprompted by family members, marched up to accept his savior. Nancy McKinley immediately concluded that the ministry would be an ideal calling for her son.

  At school he thrived owing to a dutiful commitment to his studies and a natural intelligence. “It was seldom that his head was not in a book,” one childhood acquaintance recalled. But there was a simplicity to his sturdy intellect. He could quickly get to the heart of a matter and distill it for ready comprehension, but seldom did he manifest flourishes of thought or flights of imagination. His was a literal and linear cast of mind. This served him well in the school discipline he most enjoyed: elocution. When it came time for “speaking pieces,” as oratory was called, he stood ramrod straight and delivered his speeches with efficiency and pride.

  He helped create a student group called the Everett Literary and Debating Society, a collection of young scholars who enjoyed public speaking and maintained a room at the academy set aside for the activity. The group raised money to buy a fancy carpet, a collection of classic literature and history books, and a large picture of Massachusetts senator Edward Everett, widely considered one of the greatest orators of the day. To protect the carpet, the boys left their muddy boots at the door and wore slippers purchased with society funds and kept on site for the purpose. Will McKinley was elected the society’s first president.

  As the slavery issue captured the national consciousness, generating intense political passions, there never was any doubt where the McKinley family stood. Mrs. McKinley told a biographer, “the McKinleys were very strong abolitionists, and William early imbibed very radical views regarding the enslavement of the colored race.” The young man liked to linger and discuss politics with the rough-hewn men, many of them Democrats, who worked at the local tannery, and often the subject would be slavery. Though disagreements often were stark, young McKinley developed a style of argumentation that avoided animosity.

  At seventeen, he completed his Poland Academy studies and entered Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, about seventy-five miles to the northeast, to continue the education his parents considered vital to his future. His mother and sister Sarah loaned him money from their savings to pay for tuition and living expenses. At college he combined his characteristic bookishness with a zest for campus social life and also displayed his growing political agitation at Southern belligerency on the slavery issue. When a fellow student raised a glass to Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, an emerging leader of the Southern cause, McKinley replied that Davis was venturing toward treason, and he would gladly fight treason upon Southern soil if necessary. But he expressed himself in measured tones that minimized personal friction. Increasingly, his peers respected him for his social grace even in hearty debate.

  About a year into his college experience, McKinley contracted an illness, never fully identified, that sent him back to Poland for recuperation. Even with his health restored, though, a return to college proved impractical. An economic recession had curtailed his father’s business and necessitated an income flow from all family members. McKinley settled into the town, pursued old friendships, and rekindled his close association with his devoted cousin, William McKinley Osborne, then working in a rolling mill. He lan
ded jobs as postal clerk and teacher in the nearby Kerr school district. The school was some three miles from the McKinley home, and most days, when he wasn’t “boarding around” (living temporarily with various families near the school), the young teacher walked the distance each morning and evening, scrambling over fences and scampering through neighbors’ fields to save time. Years later he conceded, “Six miles would be a long walk for me now, I suppose, but it did not seem like much then.” His teacher’s salary was $25 a month.

  Although this simple Poland life hardly matched the young man’s ambitions, it seemed the only responsible course at the time. But it wasn’t clear where his life was leading. Then fate intervened. With Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860, the nation entered an ominous period of political agitation as Southern secession raised war tensions to a fevered pitch. One day at William Osborne’s rolling mill, an elderly man rushed in and yelled, “They’ve fired on her! They’ve fired on her!” Upon hearing news of the Southern assault on the U.S. Army’s Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor, Osborne and his cousin knew instantly that the war speculation was over; actual war had arrived.