When they were apart, he showered her with expressions of love. If congressional business kept him on the Hill late at night, he always got a message to her. Once he informed her that he would probably sleep in his office and added, “I hope you will not worry about me, but have a good night’s rest & I will try & breakfast with you in the morning. . . . God bless & keep you. Accept a heart full of love and a thousand kisses.” When he could not monitor her health during times apart, he became anxious. “My darling wife,” he wrote at one point, “I am quite solicitous to know how you are. The telephone is out of order. I hope you are feeling better. Please send me a line saying how you feel. Accept a heart full of love.”
He sent her multiple communications a day when they were apart. When he was traveling by rail she could predict the arrival time of telegrams based on when he was scheduled to reach his destination or change trains. Asked by a friend what the Major could possibly convey to her in these multiple wire messages, she replied tartly, “He can say he loves me.” There was some validity in his feeling that he could ward off her attacks and intermittent infections by keeping her tranquil. On a camping trip near Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, she became distraught over the exuberant yelling of small boys nearby and had to retreat to her tent with a severe headache. On another occasion, when McKinley mentioned in passing an attractive woman he had seen at President Garfield’s funeral, she flew into a fit of jealousy so intense that it led to a serious epileptic seizure.
Some of McKinley’s friends suspected his attentiveness was largely defensive, designed to prevent episodes of unpleasantness. But no one questioned the depth or tenderness of his love. He once told the wife of a political friend that, when he first met Ida, she was “the most beautiful girl you ever saw.” Recognizing that others may not see this fading invalid in the same way, he added, “She is still beautiful to me now.”
In mid-July 1888, while McKinley was attending a House session, an aide approached with a telegram reporting that Ida, in Canton, had contracted a serious infection and was unconscious with fever. He rushed from the floor and caught the next train home. When he got there, he plunged into a carriage waiting to whisk him to Saxton House. Dashing up three flights of winding stairs, he tenderly took her hand and whispered, “Ida, it is I.” He sat up with her all night, receiving intermittent warnings from a doctor that if her fever didn’t break soon she likely would die. The next morning she regained consciousness and managed a wan smile and the words “I knew you would come.” Though the fever had broken, it left her in a weakened state for months.
The distraught husband took a leave of absence from his House duties and refrained from political activities that fall, except for a desultory but successful reelection effort. By year’s end, when Congress convened again, she was able to travel to Washington when he resumed his House routines. But he stayed glued to the Ebbitt House except when duties required his presence on the House floor. Those wishing to confer with him on governmental matters had to travel down Pennsylvania Avenue to see him. When word spread about his solicitous regard for his troubled wife, a reporter came around to interview the couple. The result was a Home Magazine article, reprinted in newspapers across the country, that praised McKinley for “his entire consecration to his invalid wife.” It was the first time Ida was portrayed in print as an invalid, and it gave the nation a glimpse of an intriguing public servant who juggled official duties tirelessly with loving ministrations to a tragic spouse.
Despite his devotion to Ida, McKinley had no intention of abandoning or even slackening his political ambition. When he received an unsolicited offer to become attorney for a big railroad company at an annual salary of $25,000, he turned it down despite knowing that the job would have provided lifetime financial security and bolstered efforts to support Ida’s expansive needs. He told a friend that he was motivated by the thought that he was “serving the country a little.” But of course he didn’t shun such an opportunity merely for the life of a congressman. He harbored a higher ambition.
His higher ambition was the presidency. He never said so, of course, preferring to keep his aspirations shrouded behind the veil of his characteristic taciturnity, just as he kept so much of his thinking concealed from others. But as early as his honeymoon his bride became convinced that he would someday be president. Even allowing for the starry regard nurtured by young love, it seems likely that the magnitude of his ambition was revealed during the couple’s intimate conversations about their future together. Of course, he had watched his great mentor, Rud Hayes, reach the White House just as he was beginning his own career precisely as Hayes had begun his: by capturing a U.S. House seat for Ohio. And Hayes certainly encouraged his protégé’s White House ambitions, as reflected in the older man’s letter to the younger man after McKinley pushed aside the presidential boomlet at the 1888 convention. Then there was Mark Hanna. Everyone knew his big goal was to usher an Ohio Republican into the White House, and it wasn’t difficult to see just which Ohio Republican he had in mind. McKinley’s increasingly intimate association with Hanna left little doubt about his ultimate political objective.
But in early 1889 he directed his ambition to a lesser prize: the House speakership, a constitutional office that could bring wide national attention. “I am doing no soliciting,” he wrote to Hayes. “If I am successful the selection will come in an honorable and self-respecting way.” But by summer he had dropped the coyness, and soon political observers discerned his seriousness in Hanna’s Washington presence. As Theodore Burton, a congressman from Cleveland, put it, “No one except those who were close to him ever knew how anxious Mr. McKinley was for an office when he went after it.”
His principal competitor was Thomas B. Reed of Maine, a mountain of a man with a placid face and high-pitched voice that accentuated a harpoon wit often wielded in behalf of an acidic cynicism. Highly cultivated and intellectually gifted, he became fluent in French after age forty and “read heavily and happily in French.” He maintained his diary in French, “for practice.” Loathing cant and sham, Reed cast a haughty eye upon his Democratic opponents and also some errant Republicans, but he did so with a verve and wry acuity that riveted audiences whenever he merely cleared his throat to speak. Once, after devastating an opponent in House debate, he cast his countenance across the floor and said, “Having embedded that fly in the liquid amber of my remarks, I will proceed.” McKinley once observed with a smile, “Everybody enjoys Reed’s sarcastic comments and keen wit, except the fellow who is the subject of his satire.”
The two men presented two different leadership styles: McKinley, the sweet-tempered adjudicator, always looking for common ground; Reed, the polemical bruiser who employed the force of words to delineate issues and keep opponents on the defensive. Reed considered McKinley “a man of little scope.” But when he outpolled the Ohioan in the Republican conference, the new speaker promptly elevated his erstwhile opponent to the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee. This was a plum assignment. Following the 1888 elections, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress for the first time since 1875 and also had their man, Benjamin Harrison, in the White House. Thus the GOP was positioned to dominate national policy, and the first order of business was an overhaul of the nation’s tariff policy. The man to lead that effort was Chairman McKinley, who crafted a strongly protectionist measure in his committee and sent it to the House floor.
Hovering over the tariff debate of 1890 was the nation’s tariff history going back to its first revenue law, fashioned in 1789 by George Washington’s Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton. From that time forward, the tariff issue drove a wedge through the American body politic. On one side were the Federalists and later the Whigs—Hamilton and Henry Clay prominent among them—who wanted the federal government to build up the nation through public works such as roads, bridges, and canals. High tariffs would pay for these civic programs and, when fashioned to protect specific industries from foreign competitors, could also foster expansive
enterprise in the new nation. On the other side were the anti-Federalists and later Democrats—Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, James Polk—who opposed such levels of government intrusion into the private economy and favored keeping tax levels as low as possible so the people themselves could build up the nation from below. These competing philosophies represented one of the country’s most persistent political fault lines.
Hamilton’s original tariff bill imposed an average taxation level of only about 8.5 percent on imported goods, and Hamilton argued that any protection encompassed in those duties should be discontinued as soon as protected industries established themselves in the American economy. But Northeastern industrialists argued that protection should be substantial and permanent to ensure national prosperity.
The industrialists prevailed in the 1820s with passage of two hearty tariff laws. Particularly controversial was an 1828 bill, quickly labeled the “Tariff of Abominations” by Southern opponents, that slapped high duties on iron, molasses, distilled spirits, flax, and various finished goods. A boon to Northern producers, it pinched Southerners in two ways—first, by raising prices on necessities the South didn’t produce, and, second, by crimping the importation of British goods and thus reducing Britain’s ability to purchase Southern cotton. The Tariff of Abominations, enacted during the John Quincy Adams presidency, generated severe sectional tensions that culminated in an ominous constitutional standoff during the subsequent Jackson administration. Jackson threatened to invade South Carolina if it made good its threat to “nullify” the tariff law by declaring that it didn’t apply to that state. South Carolina backed down, and a compromise of sorts was reached, including some modest tariff reductions, but the issue continued to stir political tensions throughout the country. Whereas before the 1820s, average tariff rates fluctuated generally between 16 and 26 percent, afterward the levies typically reached 50 percent, then hovered around 35 percent following the Jackson compromise.
James Polk, running for president in 1844, crafted a new concept designed to assuage Southern planters as well as Northern industrialists. Polk proposed legislation based on two principles: first, tariff rates should not exceed levels needed to run the government on an economically sound basis; second, within that range the government could acceptably impose targeted duties to benefit specific industries in need of protection. Polk’s bill, typically viewed as a “free trade” measure, passed Congress in 1846 and served as the country’s fiscal bedrock through the 1850s, with average tariff rates running generally between 20 and 28 percent.
The protectionist forces were never fully subdued, however, and in 1859 Justin Morrill, a House Whig from Vermont, teamed up with that irrepressible Ohioan, John Sherman, now Ways and Means chairman, to craft legislation designed to get the nation back on a protectionist path. Although it passed the House, it languished in the Senate—until Southern secession took much of the opposition out of the picture. When the war came, necessitating as much revenue as the government could raise, even stern opponents of the Morrill bill changed their tune. The New York Evening Post, which had attacked Morrill’s handiwork as “a booby of a bill” and the “blunder of the age,” now argued that wartime imperatives required free-traders to work with protectionists. “War is an exceptional state,” said the paper, “and demands extraordinary measures.” After the war, promised the Post, it would go back to being a free-trade paper.
But the war generated a huge debt, and the country couldn’t very quickly get back to being a free-trade nation. Besides, the Republicans, as the party of industrial expansion, maintained their dominant position in American politics by nurturing their electoral base—including the industrial states, where protectionist sentiment ran high. During this time tariff rates hovered well over 40 percent. Then a new problem emerged: the tariffs were generating too much revenue, and federal coffers were overflowing with excess funds that government officials didn’t know what to do with. The Democratic answer was simple: reduce tariff levels. Republicans couldn’t go along with that, given their fiscal philosophy and industrial constituency, so they struggled to find other means of addressing the problem.
After New York Democrat Grover Cleveland, a free-trade man, was elected president in 1884, he pushed the Democratic-controlled House to fashion a bill patterned after the Polk legislation of the 1840s. The man who stepped up to the task was Democrat Roger Q. Mills, a rugged-looking Texan with a bushy mustache and deep-set eyes, who served as Ways and Means chairman in the Democratic House. Mills, as ardent a free-trader as could be found in Congress, believed that raw materials should be duty-free and taxes on manufactured items should be reduced substantially. The Mills bill, which cleared the House in July 1888, did both. In the Republican-controlled Senate it encountered a withering attack led by Senator Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, whose devotion to his wool, cotton, and sugar constituents only partly explained his protectionist zeal. The rest could be attributed to sheer ideology.
The Senate summarily discarded the Mills bill in favor of a substitute put forth by a prominent Finance Committee member named William Allison, a Republican loyalist from Iowa. Allison removed many items from Mills’s free list, restored high tariff rates on numerous imports, and sought to address the revenue surplus in part by eliminating or lowering internal excise taxes on whiskey, tobacco, and other domestic products. The bill also reduced import duties on sugar, which couldn’t be produced sufficiently at home to meet domestic demand. Besides, Aldrich offered the novel argument that higher tariffs on other items would reduce revenues further by inducing foreign producers to curtail imports. The Allison bill cleared the Senate and went to the House, where it languished in the Ways and Means Committee without any prospect for reaching the floor.
That was the state of play through the 1888 presidential election: two very different bills representing two different fiscal philosophies represented by the two parties. When Republicans emerged triumphant in the election they quickly invoked the sanctity of voter sentiment. “The people have spoken,” said McKinley on the House floor as he began the fight for his Ways and Means bill, patterned after the earlier Allison measure. “If any one thing was settled by the election of 1888 it was that the [Republican] protective policy . . . should be secured.”
The McKinley bill sought to address about $10 million of the country’s annual $60 million surplus by eliminating domestic excise taxes on tobacco and alcohol. But the chairman sought to maintain or raise tariff rates on other items sufficiently to preclude any importation of these goods, including woolens, higher grade cottons, cotton knits, linens, stockings, earthen and china ware, and all iron, steel, and metal products. McKinley dismissed the opposition view that these duties would expand the nettlesome surplus. Echoing Aldrich, he argued that when tariffs are placed high enough, “you diminish importations and to that extent diminish the revenue.” This was particularly true, he argued, in the case of tin plate, used in the burgeoning canning industry but not manufactured to any appreciable degree in the United States. McKinley’s aim was to raise the rates on tin plate high enough to throttle the import flow and create from scratch a domestic industry.
McKinley’s bill also placed duties for the first time on wheat and other agricultural items to address a robust global increase in agricultural production, much of it with cheap labor. Thus the U.S. farmer, said the chairman, must direct his “care and concern” to preserving “his home market, for he must of necessity be driven from the foreign one.” Canada, for example, exported about $25 million in agricultural products to the United States. By erecting trade barriers, the country could ensure that that $25 million would come from domestic sources instead. Who could say, asked McKinley, “that $25,000,000 of additional demand for American agricultural products will not inure to the benefit of the American farmer . . . and give to the farmer confidence and increased ability to lift the mortgages from his lands?” (Applause.)
But the McKinley bill took a different tack on sugar—an article, McKi
nley said, “of universal family use,” around which a powerful trust had emerged through the protection of the sugar tariff. To help consumers and thwart the trust (and pick up House votes), McKinley proposed the elimination of all sugar duties, accompanied by a “bounty” of two cents a pound for domestic producers who otherwise would be harmed by reduced prices wrought by the tariff elimination. Since seven-eighths of the sugar consumed by Americans was imported, eliminating the tariff would take a big chunk out of the budget surplus—nearly $56 million, according to official estimates, offset by the bounty cost of $8 million. Not surprisingly, the bounty idea stirred an instant backlash. The Ways and Means minority report said it proved “that the whole [tariff] system is a system of discrimination between the various productive industries of the country, a system which imposes charges upon some for the support of others and disregards every principle of justice and equality in distributing the burdens of taxation.” But the bounty idea prevailed.
McKinley dismissed opposition warnings that high tariffs would curtail U.S. exports as other countries put up retaliatory barriers. “We place no tax or burden or restraint upon American products going out of the country,” insisted the chairman, citing statistics showing that U.S. exports increased under protectionist policies and declined during free-trade periods. “This bill is an American bill. It is made for the American people and American interests.” (Applause.)
But that crusty Texan Roger Mills dismissed the view that market constrictions could generate prosperity. America’s ingenuity of enterprise was creating surpluses “in all branches of our industries,” he noted, including agriculture, mining, forestry, and more. The Democrats wanted to foster international trade so these surplus products could be sold in world markets in exchange for other nations’ excess products or raw materials. But Republican barriers to imports, argued Mills, inevitably induced other nations to impose their own barriers against American goods. “There are people all over the world who need our meat and bread,” said Mills, “and the only reason for depression is because governments have thrown obstructions in the way between the producer and consumer.”
President McKinley Page 9
