McKinley’s reputation in his district centered on his personal qualities far more than on his political views. When the avidly pro-McKinley Alliance Record listed nine reasons why he should get the Republican nomination for Congress in 1876, none focused on issues. Rather, the paper extolled his “spotless record,” his “good service for the party,” and his Civil War exploits—and argued that Stark County deserved the seat because, after all, it hadn’t sent a man to Congress in eighteen years. To the extent that McKinley’s views were considered, he was known as a party loyalist who would never stray from fundamental Republican doctrines, particularly high tariffs to protect U.S. manufacturers from foreign competition.
Further, while hospitable to the interests of business, he also was known as a friend of labor, a reputation buttressed by a celebrated court case early in the campaign year. Coal miners in the Tuscarawas Valley went on strike in March, and when mine owners sought to bring in strikebreaking outside labor, violence erupted near the Stark County town of Massillon. The result was substantial property damage and many injuries. One mine operator was beaten nearly to death. The local sheriff appealed for help to Governor Hayes, who sent in a unit of militia to quell the violence. Twenty-three miners were arrested.
When local public opinion went heavily against the miners and no lawyers in the area would represent them in criminal court, McKinley volunteered for the job. Going against two of the area’s most celebrated barristers, he won acquittals for all the defendants save one. When the miners got up a collection to pay the legal fee, McKinley waived it in recognition of the financial hardship they had sustained during the strike. It was a brilliant political stroke in a district evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. First, the much-publicized trial brought him recognition throughout the Seventeenth District. Second, he managed to assuage antiminer sentiment with the argument that all citizens deserve fair representation at trial while also generating widespread support from miners and the broader contingent of the district’s working classes. That contributed to his victory margin in November of some 3,300 votes.
Hayes also triumphed in the presidential race, but not before the election threw the country into a constitutional crisis of serious proportions. Democrat Samuel J. Tilden captured 51 percent of the popular vote to 48 percent for Hayes. Tilden also outpolled Hayes in the Electoral College, 184 to 165, putting him just one vote shy of the presidency. But Republicans alleged that Democratic officials in three Southern states—Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina—had suppressed the black vote through intimidation. They challenged the Democratic victories in those states (as well as a single electoral vote in Oregon for different reasons). If those challenges could be upheld, Hayes would squeeze out a one-vote Electoral College triumph. This spawned a deadlock that continued for weeks, until congressional leaders created a fifteen-man commission of legislators and Supreme Court justices to settle the matter. It did, in Hayes’s favor. Congress ultimately validated that outcome on the basis of a deal in which Hayes agreed to withdraw remaining federal troops from the South and effectively end Reconstruction in exchange for the votes of Southern Democrats.
The 1876 outcome, viewed by many at the time and later as a stolen election, turned out to be a turning point suffused with irony. Republicans had used antiblack discrimination as a basis for challenging presidential vote totals in the South and then sealed the deal by ending Reconstruction and turning back to the South much greater leeway in managing the region’s race relations. This inevitably meant more widespread antiblack discrimination. For a dozen years, lingering Civil War passions had dominated national politics, reflected in the penchant among Northern politicians to “wave the bloody shirt,” emphasizing what many Northerners considered the South’s profound civic transgressions leading to and during the war. Southern politicians responded with equal asperity, and there didn’t seem to be much hope for any lessening in interregional acrimony.
Then McKinley’s mentor, in a move born of political necessity, sacrificed the protection of Southern blacks in favor of fostering greater prospects for healing the wounds of war among the nation’s whites. As far as is known, McKinley never commented on this fearsome trade-off, either publicly or in private letters or conversation. While he took pride in his lifelong antislavery convictions and his wartime part in saving the Union and emancipating black Americans, he seemed to accept widespread racial prejudice as an inevitable fact of life that would direct the course of national politics long into the future. The result was a kind of patronizing attitude toward African Americans—lamenting their tragic fate and cheering them on as they struggled against it but offering little in the way of political action aimed at ameliorating their condition.
And of course the young congressman-elect was elated to have his friend and mentor entering the White House, however he got there, just as he himself was taking his place in Washington. The friendship of the two men deepened as McKinley stood ready in Congress to assist the president in every way possible. Hayes reciprocated by avidly accepting McKinley’s patronage suggestions and inviting him frequently to the White House for casual dinners and official occasions.
Ida played no serious role in her husband’s congressional campaign, appearing at only one political event. When William settled in at Washington’s Ebbitt House, just two blocks from the White House, Ida was in Philadelphia, under the care of a leading neurologist of the day, Silas Weir Mitchell. During her stay, she proudly revealed to a friend, her husband wrote her three letters a day. By the end of 1877 Ida’s condition had improved sufficiently that she could join her husband in Washington during congressional sessions and take on a modest, but highly guarded, social routine. She loved going to the White House, and Rutherford and Lucy Hayes developed a special fondness for her.
As a congressional back-bencher, McKinley concentrated on consolidating his political standing in his Seventeenth District. His political persona wasn’t much different from the image he had projected as a litigation lawyer. Covering a McKinley appearance shortly after his election, the Warren Chronicle said he was “one of the best political stumpers in the state”: “His manner of presenting the matter in discussion is clear, logical and forcible.”
But keeping the seat proved challenging. Whenever Democrats gained dominance in the state legislature, they sought political advantage by recasting congressional districts to throw Republican incumbents on the defensive. Thus, when McKinley faced the voters again in 1878, three of his district counties had been replaced by other counties more heavily populated by Democrats. He still won, though his victory margin declined to just 1,234 votes. “The Victory in the District, was a very gratifying one to me personally,” he wrote to Hayes, “and besides it was a grand triumph for just principles.”
The old district was restored in time for the next election, but McKinley encountered serious political adversity when he sought a fourth term in 1882. Three problems converged into a daunting challenge. First, Columbiana County argued that Stark County had held the seat long enough, and it was time now for Columbiana to carry the district banner to Washington. Then a local judge named Peter A. Laubie, from Columbiana, alleged that McKinley, in seeking a clear path to the 1880 nomination, had promised that he wouldn’t run in 1882, thus making way for Laubie and Columbiana County. Finally, 1882 turned out to be a big Democratic year. In Ohio, Democratic voters outnumbered Republicans by 19,000 votes in congressional elections. Nationally, the Democratic wave was even more stark; the party gained seventy House seats that year.
The Laubie allegation proved particularly nettlesome, as it undermined McKinley’s reputation for rectitude and bolstered those in the party who wished to get him out of the way to further their own ambitions. An example was an anonymous party man from Mahoning County quoted in the New York Times. “The trouble with McKinley,” he said, “is that he has not grown as we believed he would, and has not made the mark nor won the influence in Congress that was promised in the start. . . . He
has not attempted to go toward the front, but seems to have been overshadowed by younger members and men with less natural promise.” Recognizing the delicacy of the Laubie challenge, McKinley crafted a counterstrategy with carefully timed responses, first from his friends, then from his own pen, and finally an orchestrated riposte from all the district newspapers that favored his reelection.
Through it all, McKinley sought to maintain a statesmanlike pose, avoiding angry expressions or harsh counterattacks. He revealed to his brother Abner that in responding to a letter from Laubie demanding to know if he denied making the promise, “I was disposed to be a little caustic, but my better judgment advised me against it.”
In the end he captured the nomination without difficulty, but the general election proved more troublesome. The initial vote count gave him a victory of just eight votes, and he headed to Washington as an incumbent. But well into his new term, a review panel dominated by Democrats awarded the seat to his opponent. So he returned to Canton a defeated politician. On top of that, the Democratic legislature once again reconstituted his district, giving Democrats an estimated registration advantage of some 900 votes.
McKinley’s natural optimism asserted itself as he reviewed the new district, encompassing counties that he barely knew and where his reputation was only dimly known. “I believe we can carry it,” he wrote to his former law partner and close friend, Allan Carnes. To another friend, John Pollock, he wrote that he didn’t anticipate the kind of difficulty he had encountered in 1882. “There will be nothing in the canvass to revive it, except as my enemies may desire to do it, and if they do, there can be no better time than the present for my friends to show their strength.” He carried the new district by 2,000 votes and obtained a new lease on his congressional seat.
* * *
DURING HIS YEARS as a congressman, McKinley had gained strength as a politician. Elected initially on the basis of his personal qualities and his record as civic leader, he now also possessed abundant skills in the arts of political maneuver and campaign management, reflected in the Laubie episode. Though tough-minded and unsentimental as a political tactician, he managed to keep these traits shrouded behind his image as a man of character who remained above the fray and apart from the petty machinations of politics.
Meanwhile, he faced the challenge of balancing his career with the demands and needs of his wife, whose health and mental equilibrium seemed to be in a state of constant fluctuation. As he wrote to Abner in January 1882, “Ida is growing stronger and better. She was five days without any fainting attacks and they have been less frequent on other days. I am very busy.” He showered her with loving letters whenever they were apart, with salutations such as “My own precious darling,” “My precious love,” and “My precious wife.” In Canton, he worked from an office in their third-floor living quarters at Saxton House, with Ida never far away. His attentiveness never slackened. Now, at the start of his fourth full House term, he could indeed conclude that he had fashioned a balance that could meld his marriage and his political career. The lingering question was where that career would take him.
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The Ohio Republicans
A CLASH OF TEMPERAMENT AND AMBITION
In early 1885 an aspiring Ohio politician and Civil War veteran named Robert Kennedy heard rumors that Congressman McKinley opposed his candidacy for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in favor of rival Joseph Foraker. When Kennedy wrote to McKinley seeking clarification, McKinley responded immediately. But it was a delicate business. While he genuinely intended to remain neutral, he didn’t want to strike a disingenuous pose. “I am neither ‘an active friend of Judge Foraker,’ nor bitterly opposed to you,” wrote McKinley. “I never permit an occasion to pass without speaking well of you and expressing my admiration for your services in war and your zeal and services for the party.” Thus, should Kennedy get the nomination, “you will have no more faithful ally in your campaign and one who will do more proportionate to his ability than I will.”
But here McKinley felt a need to interject a note of realism about Foraker, who had run for governor two years earlier and acquitted himself well despite an ultimate general election defeat: “I had thought that if Foraker wanted the nomination he would likely get it by reason of his splendid campaign.” True, he lost the election, “but I have never heard it charged to him and there is a good feeling for him in this election, while here you also have many friends.”
McKinley’s carefully calibrated diplomacy reflected his political persona, always intent on avoiding unnecessary animosities and willing to work with anyone on any political matter so long as their interests aligned. But there was a deeper imperative in McKinley’s determination to keep intraparty relations as smooth as possible. Ohio politics resided on a knife’s edge of parity between Republicans and Democrats, with political sentiment so closely divided that neither party could afford to let slip its cohesion or unity of purpose.
This party parity stemmed from intertwined economic and demographic developments. After becoming an agricultural powerhouse in the first half of the nineteenth century, Ohio turned its attention to the industrial challenge. With Great Lakes access to the north, the robust Ohio River east and south, and multiple other rivers and canals, Ohio enjoyed a transportation bonanza. Further, its central location rendered it a natural crossroads for burgeoning railroad lines, both east-west and north-south. All this, coupled with the development of vast seams of coal in thirty-two eastern and southern counties, spurred a manufacturing explosion. By 1872 Ohio produced five million tons of coal annually; within fourteen years production doubled. This led to the development of coal-fired open-hearth furnaces for steel production, and by 1892 Ohio ranked second among all states, behind Pennsylvania, in the manufacture of steel. Inevitably, new manufacturing uses for the steel soon emerged.
In Cincinnati Cyrus McCormick invented the reaper and Obed Hussey developed the farm mower. Cleveland became an industrial behemoth as well as an oil hub. Columbus became the “Buggy Capital of the World,” while the National Cash Register Company turned Dayton into a center of new technology. By century’s end, Ohio had plunged into chemicals, automobile and rubber manufacturing, soap products, and pharmaceuticals.
All this required labor, and laborers poured in from overseas. In the twenty years beginning in 1870, Ohio’s population grew by a million people, to 3,672,329. The greatest influx was from Germany, and by 1870 half of all foreign-born Ohioans were Germans. But the wave included growing numbers of Irish and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—Italians, Slavs, Croats, Poles—who were mostly Catholic and less inclined than the Germans to assimilate smoothly into the prevailing Anglo-Saxon culture. Before long these immigrants represented significant population segments in the industrial cities of Cleveland, Youngstown, Akron, Dayton, and Toledo.
McKinley’s Republican Party largely represented native-born Ohioans, mostly British and German in provenance, Protestant, middle class, residents of small country towns. As the party that had destroyed slavery, the GOP projected a reformist ethos focused on improving the American character through material and moral progress. The greatest vehicle of material progress, in the Republican view, was the protective tariff. Moral betterment was promoted through the temperance movement against alcohol consumption, the promotion of public education, and (to a limited extent, given the political realities of the day) a concern about civil rights for black Americans.
The Ohio Republican Party, in short, was the party of middle-class respectability, crisply represented by Rutherford and Lucy Hayes, from the small Ohio town of Fremont. Lucy’s refusal to serve alcohol in the White House got her the nickname “Lemonade Lucy.” Her zeal for missionary and reform movements got her recruited to the presidency of the influential Woman’s Home Missionary Society. These were quintessential Ohio Republicans. Novelist Brand Whitlock noted that among such people it was “inconceivable that any self-respecting person should be a Democrat.”
Ohio’s political parity rendered it imperative that each party consolidate its base, meaning minority segments with splinter-issue passions had to be accommodated. Republicans needed to assuage the temperance movement so it wouldn’t split off into a one-issue protest party and undermine Republican prospects. But that meant few Democrats could be lured to the GOP in close elections. Democrats had to conciliate populist dissidents demanding soft-money policies to aid debtors and slam elites. That meant, likewise, that few Republicans would rally to the Democrats. The result was a precarious political environment for politicians of both parties. McKinley’s mercurial Seventeenth District was a case in point.
Thus it wasn’t surprising that both parties cherished internal harmony. Yet Ohio Republicans were headed toward a rift that would roil party councils for years. It would be a schism not of ideology but of personal temperament and political ambition involving primarily four large figures: three rising politicians with finely honed political skills and an old salt of a pol who had navigated the shoals of history for more than three decades and who now, in his declining years, held fast to his political station and ultimate ambition.
The old salt was John Sherman, a lanky, rustic-looking man with a closely cropped beard and fiery pale-blue eyes. Though widely known as the brother of Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, he was a man of mark in his own right. Born in 1823, he cast his first presidential vote for that political titan of the misty past, Henry Clay, founder of the Whig Party. From a family of prominent landowners and jurists in Connecticut and Ohio, Sherman grew up in privilege but showed a rebellious streak. As a boy he habitually got into fights and was expelled from school for punching a teacher. Still in his teens, he set out on his own and became a lawyer at twenty-one.
President McKinley Page 6
