President McKinley

by Robert W. Merry

  The Front Porch strategy was a tremendous success. Between mid-June and Election Day, McKinley welcomed some 750,000 Americans in hundreds of delegations from thirty states. In the process, he unleashed a steady stream of carefully calibrated campaign oratory that was covered every day by newspapers throughout the country. And he never had to leave Ida or drag her along on any campaign hurly-burly.

  McKinley used these sessions to draw a stark contrast between Bryan’s inflationist agenda and what he hailed as his own, more responsible sound-currency commitment. He attacked the “new experiment” proposed by Democrats that would “debase our currency and further weaken, if not wholly destroy, public confidence.” Warming to the attack, he ventured in late July to actually utter the word gold, though he always returned quickly to his cherished tariff issue: “That which we call money, my fellow-citizens, and with which values are measured and settlements made must be as true as the bushel which measures the grain of the farmer and as honest as the hours of labor which the man who toils is required to give. [Loud applause] . . . Our currency to-day is good—all of it, as good as gold—and it is the unfaltering determination of the Republican Party to so keep and maintain it forever. [Cheers].”

  Even The Nation was impressed, although it expressed its satisfaction with a wry qualification. The candidate inserted gold into his rhetoric, said the magazine, “in a somewhat furtive way . . . hastening to take a good pull at the tariff to steady his nerves.”

  What The Nation missed was that McKinley was weaving together three separate threads—currency, protection, and patriotism—into a seamless political vision. The connection may have been artificial, but the result was effective. The Bryan Democrats, he said in August, believed in not only free trade but also free silver, putting the two together as equal evils. “Having diminished our business they now seek to diminish the value of our money. Having cut wages in two, they want to cut the money in which wages are paid in two.” On the money issue, he lauded the Democratic Party’s Grover Cleveland wing, which was “patriotically striving for the public honor, and is opposed to free silver.” The Bryanites, on the other hand, “are devoted to this un-American and destructive policy, and were chiefly instrumental in putting upon the statute books tariff legislation which has destroyed American manufacturing, checked our foreign trade, and reduced the demand for the labor of American workingmen.”

  This was harsh rhetoric, employing terms such as un-American and suggesting that Republicans had a corner on patriotism. But McKinley genuinely despised Bryan’s divisive class-driven politics. “My countrymen,” he asserted to a delegation of black Americans from Cleveland, “the most un-American of all appeals observable in this campaign is the one which seeks to array labor against capital, employer against employee. [Applause] It is most unpatriotic, and is fraught with the greatest peril to all concerned. We are all political equals here—equal in privilege and opportunity, depending upon each other, and the prosperity of the one is the prosperity of the other. [Great cheering].”

  As the campaign progressed, Bryan captured the nomination of the country’s leading alternative party, the People’s Party, known as Populists, which embraced an agenda similar to the Democratic platform and Bryan’s rhetoric. Facing a decision whether to embrace Bryan’s candidacy or go with their own nominee, the Populists chose Bryan at their July convention in St. Louis. But they complicated matters by selecting a different vice presidential nominee, Georgia’s Tom Watson, more attuned to Populist thinking than Bryan’s running mate, the wealthy industrialist Arthur Sewall of Maine. That created an awkward voting situation quickly dubbed the “twin-tailed ticket,” which became even more awkward when Watson sought to get Sewell off the Democratic ballot so he could run with Bryan on both tickets. Although Bryan needed Populist votes to win, he didn’t enjoy the attacks on his Democratic running mate or the ballot-box confusion. He was pleased, however, when he got still another splinter-party nod, that of the National Silver Party, which could pull votes in the Far West.

  Thus Bryan became a triple nominee with bright prospects throughout the South and West. But he was anathema in New England and the Northeast, where he was denounced by major Democratic newspapers in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and other cities. The New York World wrote, “Lunacy having dictated the platform, it was perhaps natural that hysteria should evolve the candidate.”

  Meanwhile a contingent of angry “Gold Democrats” convened a convention at Indianapolis and created yet another party ticket dedicated to siphoning off Democratic votes from Bryan even if that helped McKinley. They gave their presidential nomination to seventy-nine-year-old Illinois senator John M. Palmer, whose qualifications probably didn’t include his age. The vice presidential selection was a more youthful Kentuckian named Simon Bolivar Buckner, only seventy-three. Hanna, always alert to political opportunity, slipped increments of cash to the Palmer campaign in the closely contested states of Delaware, Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky. Palmer reciprocated by declaring toward the end of the campaign, “I promise you, my fellow Democrats, I will not consider it any great fault if you decide next Tuesday to cast your ballots for William McKinley.”

  As the campaign moved into its final weeks, Hanna sent out prominent Republicans to stump for McKinley and whip up a final wave of enthusiasm. One was the ambitious New Yorker Theodore Roosevelt, head of the New York City Police Commission and former U.S. Civil Service commissioner in the Harrison administration. Roosevelt, famous as a reformer in Platt-dominated New York, also was gaining notice for his tendency toward outrageous pronouncements encased in amusing language. In a mid-October speech in Chicago, he “minced no words,” the Washington Post reported, in attacking Bryan, along with Illinois governor John Altgeld, a fiery progressive and tireless warrior in behalf of free silver. Altgeld had won the permanent enmity of the nation’s propertied interests by freeing the last prisoners accused of throwing bombs at the Chicago Haymarket riots of 1886. Roosevelt declared that Bryan deserved “the contemptuous pity always felt for the small man unexpectedly thrust into a big place.” The Nebraskan, he added, didn’t look well in a lion’s skin, but that wasn’t his fault. The blame rested with “those who put the skin on him,” including Altgeld.

  In Altgeld’s case we see all too clearly the jaws and hide of the wolf through the fleecy covering. Mr. Altgeld is a much more dangerous man than Mr. Bryan. He is much slyer, much more intelligent, much less silly, much more free from all the restraints of some public morality. The one is unscrupulous from vanity, the other from calculation. The one plans wholesale repudiation with a light heart and bubbling eloquence, because he lacks intelligence and is intoxicated by hope of power; the other would connive at wholesale murder, and would justify it by elaborate and cunning sophistry for reasons known only to his own tortuous soul.

  Roosevelt’s remarks, reported the Post, “brought cheers from his Republican hearers.” They were the words of a man bent on employing distinctively stark rhetoric and dramatic gestures to gain notice and propel his career upward. Whether they converted anyone to the Republican cause was an open question, but they certainly brought attention to Theodore Roosevelt.

  * * *

  AS ELECTION DAY approached, everyone knew the outcome would be determined in the Midwest, particularly Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, and Ohio. But few felt sure where these states would come down. Predictions and counterpredictions punctuated campaign coverage, and a late-campaign Washington Post review identified fifteen states as “doubtful.”

  But Hanna remained confident. Responding to rumors that anxious party officials in Indiana, Michigan, and Minnesota had pleaded for a quick infusion of resources from national headquarters, he told reporters, “I want people to feel apprehensive. The more frightened Republicans and sound money Democrats become in these States the greater will be the majority for McKinley.”

  Privately he wrote to Harrison, “The outlook is generally encouraging, and I feel there is no doubt of our suc
cess.” He even returned an unneeded campaign contribution at the end of October. Another boon to the campaign—and to America’s wheat growers—arrived when wheat prices unexpectedly spiked due to shortages in India, Russia, and Australia. This seemed to negate Bryan’s persistent argument that low wheat prices reflected a shortage of currency tied to the restrictive gold standard. By October 20 wheat prices in Chicago hit nearly 80 cents a bushel, up more than 30 percent in a matter of months. “What has happened to this ‘law’ under which silver and wheat must go arm in arm?” asked the Chicago Tribune, a Republican paper. “What agency has dared to separate those whom Altgeld and Bryan have joined together in the unholy bonds of rotten money?”

  As the free-silver frenzy visibly waned in October, McKinley happily turned his attention to the broader economic themes that had always animated him: protective tariffs, prosperity, factory orders, the confluence of interests between working men and their bosses. Around the country vast rallies of political enthusiasm unfolded. Late on November 2, as the campaign reached its culmination, a vast Canton congregation erupted into wild cheers, sprightly band music, fireworks, and waving American flags. McKinley, seeing the flags, said, “Glorious old banner it is. So long as we carry it in our hands and have what typifies it in our hearts the Republic and our splendid free institutions will be forever secure.” The next morning he rose early to vote at a country store four blocks from his home and then receive a morning visit from Hanna. He appeared serene throughout the day. “I never saw him look better,” said a visiting friend from Akron. At nightfall he sat down in an easy chair in his study, puffed his cigars, and marked returns on a sheet of paper as they came in from across the country via telephone and telegraph. It soon became clear that his victory was secure. “The feeling here beggars description,” Hanna wired from Cleveland, where he had returned to vote and monitor the election results. “You are elected to the highest office of the land by a people who always loved and respected you.”

  The victory was sweeping. McKinley captured 271 electoral votes to Bryan’s 176. The Ohioan dominated all of the Northeast and New England, as expected, but also swept the battleground states of the upper Midwest: Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. He captured a plurality of 464,000 votes in eighty-five crucial Midwestern cities, the same cities that had given Cleveland a 162,000-vote advantage just four years earlier. McKinley’s Illinois victory margin was 141,537 votes, 69,913 of them coming from Cook County (including Chicago). His 7,107,822 popular votes exceeded Bryan’s total by nearly 600,000.

  When Herman Kohlsaat rang the McKinley home from Chicago just after midnight to congratulate his friend, the call was answered by McKinley’s nephew, James McKinley, who had difficulty locating his uncle. He finally returned to the phone to report that he had found the president-elect in a bedroom, kneeling in prayer with his wife and mother. All he could hear was the eighty-seven-year-old Nancy McKinley saying of her son, “Oh, God, keep him humble.”

  * * *

  MCKINL EY’S 1896 VICTORY, and the manner of his obtaining it, altered American politics for a generation. The transformation came not only through Hanna’s new educational style of campaigning and the expansive fundraising techniques devised to finance it. The systematic approach to blanketing the nation with campaign literature, broken down for targeted demographic groups, had never before been executed on such a scale. One Hanna biographer later described it as an “attempt . . . gradually to wind up public opinion until it was charged with energy and confidence.” This required a series of communication efforts coordinated and timed for maximum cumulative effect by Election Day.

  Beyond that, the clash of ideas unleashed by the campaign also set the nation upon a new course. The Republican Party, having prevailed as the country’s governing institution by winning the Civil War, ending slavery, stitching the country back together, and setting in motion the industrial expansion of the latter half of the nineteenth century, was losing much of its political force by century’s end. New civic angers, sensibilities, impulses, and concerns were coming to the fore, more focused on class consciousness, economic disparities, and perceived industrial abuses. Bryan had mustered these sentiments into a great political wave that threatened for a time to wash over the nation.

  But McKinley, the stolid-minded politician focused on old verities and the adhesive power of representative democracy, had diverted that wave and taken leadership of the country under a banner of unity, focused on the intertwined interests of farmers, laborers, miners, industrialists, urbanites, rural folk, blacks, whites. In projecting his political vision, he sometimes seemed naïve, even simple-minded. But nobody doubted his sincerity, and that lent appeal and vigor to his leadership. He managed to pull disparate voters to his side through his preoccupation with prosperity born of economic growth. It was the right message when the national economy had been reeling for years under Democratic leadership. The Republican Party that McKinley shaped in 1896 would cohere as a political entity and survive as the country’s dominant political force for most of the next three and a half decades.

  — 10 —

  Building a Cabinet

  “and THERE ARE IDIOTS WHO THINK MARK HANNA WILL RUN HIM”

  On November 12, 1896, President-elect McKinley sat down at his desk to craft a letter to the man whose selfless devotion over many years had guided his path to the presidency. His aim in writing to Hanna was twofold: first, to express deep appreciation; second, to lure his Cleveland friend into the McKinley Cabinet. In pursuing the first aim, the governor found his emotions welling up. “Your unfaltering and increasing friendship through more than twenty years,” he wrote, “has been to me an encouragement and a source of strength which I am sure you have never realized, but which I have constantly felt and for which I thank you from the bottom of my heart.” Recollecting all those years of loyalty and friendship “fill me with emotions too deep for pen to portray.”

  Then to business: “I want you as one of my chief associates in the conduct of the government.” Acknowledging Hanna’s expressed misgivings about joining the Cabinet, he described the call to Washington as an imperative of patriotism. “I want you to take this tender under the most serious consideration and to permit no previous expressed convictions to deter you from the performance of a great public duty.”

  Hanna had no intention of acceding to McKinley’s plea. For one thing, he didn’t like the appearance of it—the perception that he was getting a high-profile job in return for his political devotion. He wanted his dedication to McKinley to be seen strictly as a product of principle. This was particularly important in light of the increasingly vicious attacks from some Democratic newspapers, notably William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, which had endorsed Bryan as a circulation ploy. Hearst cynically suspended his pro-gold convictions so the Journal could become New York’s only major pro-Bryan paper and thus corral that readership. He then shamelessly pushed Bryan’s candidacy in his news columns by portraying McKinley as an empty-headed front man manipulated by the oafish, misanthropic Hanna, ravenous for power and money. Hearst’s cartoonist Homer Davenport, whose savage pen brought him fame and wealth through widespread syndication, devastated Hanna by drawing him as a corpulent human monster with a malevolent grin and dollar signs plastered all over his expensive suits. Hanna sought to dismiss the attacks as a burden he must bear for his political success in a partisan-press era. But friends knew the depth of his pain. Coming across one particularly ghoulish caricature of himself while breakfasting with a companion, he passed it across the table with the words, “That hurts.”

  Beyond that, despite his boundless respect for McKinley, Hanna didn’t want to remain in the man’s shadow. Throughout most of his life, in building his business with his distinctive talents and drive, he had been his own man. Then, in pursuing his dream of getting an Ohioan into the presidential mansion, he had suspended his independence of identity. Now he hankered to become his own man again. That p
robably meant a return to industrial pursuits. It certainly precluded a job as governmental hired hand, however elevated.

  But Hanna harbored a secret ambition for a government position that could satisfy his desire for independence. He revealed it one day in January 1892, four years before McKinley’s election, to his corporate lawyer, James Dempsey. “Jim,” said Hanna, “there is one thing I should like to have but it is the thing I never can get.”

  “What is it?”

  “I would rather be a Senator in Congress than have any other office on earth.”

  When Dempsey suggested the ambition wasn’t unrealistic if Hanna set his mind to it, the Cleveland man replied, “Jim, I could no more be elected to the Senate than I could fly.”

  But now, with his enhanced political standing, Hanna could entertain the idea more hopefully. Ben Foraker was scheduled to become Ohio’s junior senator early in 1897, so that seat wasn’t in play. But John Sherman’s term would expire in two years, and that might be a possibility if Sherman, now seventy-three, decided to retire. Beyond that, Hanna couldn’t help speculating about a possible scenario that could speed things up: What if McKinley offered Sherman a place in his Cabinet as, say, secretary of state, thus inducing him to abandon his Senate seat in March? It was an enticing thought.

  In the meantime, McKinley turned his attention to the Cabinet-making challenge with a full understanding that his recruitment for top governmental jobs could determine his level of success as president. When reporters asked the governor’s cousin and confidant, William Osborne, if the president-elect had commenced building his Cabinet, Osborne replied, “I guess that is about the only thing agitating his mind nowadays.” It was a task replete with myriad political pressures and demands that were sometimes intertwined, often in conflict. The New York challenge became particularly nettlesome when Tom Platt suggested that his machine would accept a pro-tariff merchant named Cornelius Bliss to fill the Cabinet’s New York slot. Bliss, a broad-faced man with fluffy side whiskers, had served for years as treasurer of the national Republican Party and proved himself an effective political fundraiser. He was aligned with New York’s reform elements but always managed to work amicably with all factions. By pronouncing Bliss acceptable, Platt hoped to preserve his influence with McKinley, despite his aggressive opposition during the nomination campaign, by making it easy for the governor to accept his recommendation.