None of this was done with any bombast, philosophical musings about managerial principles, or elaborate rationales on why things weren’t what they ought to be. Never did he reveal to his Cabinet or friends any underlying outlook on how best to manage a government or accumulate political power. He simply executed his high office in ways designed to maximize his governmental leverage.
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THE WORKING QUARTERS at the White House in those days provided little in the way of convenience or efficiency. Indeed the building, a relic of the eighteenth century, displayed signs of decay everywhere: peeling paint and wallpaper, discolored closets, sagging floors, threadbare carpets, faded draperies. Though Congress ignored the need for a major restoration, it had bestirred itself to install some modern amenities, including electricity, steam heating, bathtubs, telephones, even an elevator, which, however, was frequently out of service. The mansion was considered a public building, and sightseers were allowed to mill about its corridors and rooms until two o’clock each day. The place teemed also with office seekers, a bane to presidents since the republic’s early days.
At the east side of the mansion’s north entrance was a rickety stairway that led to the second-floor executive offices and a long hallway lined with wooden chairs for waiting petitioners. Two offices at the north end of the executive suite housed presidential clerks and typists—numbering, at the beginning of McKinley’s presidency, just six (one of whom handled Ida’s correspondence). Across the hall was the president’s office, the Cabinet Room, and an office for his secretary, along with an oval-shaped library. The presidential office, though spacious, was so unprotected from throngs of tourists and office seekers that McKinley soon turned it into a waiting area and retreated to the Cabinet chamber, where he established himself at the head of the long conference table. He had the space outfitted with stationery, pens, inkwells, and a blotter and positioned before it a comfortable carved-oak swivel chair that served for years as his station of work and for receiving visitors. The room featured a large brass chandelier directly above the president’s head, a rolltop rosewood desk, and a marble-topped table dating back to Lincoln’s occupancy. A few presidential portraits on the faded walls hinted at the chamber’s rich history.
Proceedings and activities in those offices soon revealed limitations of some staff members and Cabinet officials. One problem was Addison Porter, a kind of presidential staff chief overseeing the clerks and typists, organizing the president’s schedule, and representing him to the public and to White House visitors. He was a Connecticut newspaper editor and Yale graduate whose family wealth outshone his record of achievement. Porter initially wanted to be ambassador to Italy. Somehow the secretarial slot emerged during a Canton conversation with McKinley, who evidently felt—erroneously, as it turned out—that this Eastern Yalie would bring dignity to his presidential offices.
Effete, foppish, puffed up, and erratic, Porter turned out to be the kind of person McKinley had never liked. A leading journalist of the day, John Russell Young, said that, if encountered in a drawing room, “he would impress you as a poet who had in earlier years written upon spring and the falling leaves and had suffered . . . brooding on the mysteries of the universe.” Unfortunately this temperament was ill-suited for maintaining a smooth routine even in McKinley’s small executive setting. Yet McKinley’s kindliness merged with a tendency of avoidance in messy personnel matters, and nothing was done about the problem.
Fortunately in the wings was young George Cortelyou, who had been retained after serving as Cleveland’s stenographer. McKinley made him chief executive clerk, and he soon brought a snap to White House operations. A stern-looking man with a square face featuring penetrating dark eyes and a well-groomed dark mustache, Cortelyou took command of the president’s office needs, drafting letters, taking the president’s dictation in flawless shorthand, ushering important visitors quickly to the Cabinet Room while time-wasters languished upon the hallway chairs. He also dealt with the press, much to the delight of White House reporters. “I want to tell you how much newspaper men with whom I have talked appreciate your courtesy and value the assistance you give them,” one editor wrote. Cortelyou essentially expropriated Porter’s job while the unsuspecting secretary soothed himself with the notion that his worth to the president could never be truly challenged by a mere clerk. But Porter’s significance faded steadily over time.
As for the Cabinet, attention quickly turned to Secretary of State Sherman, whose declining energy and faltering memory had sapped his judgment and spawned a growing irascibility. Early in his tenure, Sherman described his government’s Hawaiian policy to the Japanese minister—and not only got it wrong but stirred questions of U.S. good faith when the administration took a far different tack. He sent to his British counterpart an incendiary letter regarding treaty matters between the two countries that stirred outrage at home and abroad. A London newspaper characterized it as “an explosion of bad manners,” while Godkin’s Nation called Sherman’s antics “a mixture of deceit and slang-whanging.” During the summer, Sherman gave a series of interviews while on vacation that proved so diplomatically rancorous that William Day, the assistant secretary installed by McKinley to keep matters at State in hand, had to rush back to Washington from his own vacation to clean up the mess. The Columbus Dispatch reported, “The chaotic condition of affairs in the Department of State, which has for some time been apparent to the general public, has reached such serious proportions as to cause grave apprehensions to the administration.” Some papers inevitably attacked the man who had installed Sherman in the first place. “This is a heavy price to pay for the presence of Mark Hanna in the United States Senate,” declared Hearst’s anti-McKinley New York Journal.
To all outward appearances, McKinley ignored the problem, giving rise to the customary aspersions about his head-in-sand insensibility and habitual inertness. Of course he comprehended the problem fully and viewed himself as dealing with it through his normal decision-making processes of attrition and incrementalism. Whether such glacial approaches could serve his presidency—and the nation—in the face of this kind of crisis remained an open question that soon would be applied to other looming difficulties. But McKinley felt he had filled the void in the meantime with the temperate and astute Assistant Secretary Day. As the Columbus Dispatch explained it, “Judge Day will become Secretary of State, so far as it is possible for him to be so without a specific appointment.” The paper speculated that after the Ohio senatorial election in early 1898, when Hanna would make a bid for a full senatorial term, McKinley may “then perhaps apply a more radical remedy.”
Other Cabinet members also displayed limitations. Despite War Secretary Alger’s impressive background in the military, business, and politics, he proved defensive in his dealings with colleagues and seemed a bit of a poseur. Competent enough in normal circumstances, he turned bewildered and ineffectual when confronted with difficult or complex problems. When Alger was named to the war post the Brooklyn Eagle editorialized, “We tremble to contemplate the outcome of a war conducted under his direction.”
Postmaster General James Gary, sixty-three at McKinley’s inauguration, seemed beset by ill health, which stirred speculation that his tenure would be short. And Navy Secretary John Long, courtly and sound of judgment, also was slowed a bit by infirmities, though his health seemed to improve during the administration’s early months. Still, he needed occasional days off to preserve his stamina and never left his post without fears of what his impulsive assistant secretary, Theodore Roosevelt, would do in his absence. “He is so enthusiastic and loyal,” wrote Long in his diary, “that he is in certain respects invaluable; yet I lack confidence in his good judgment and discretion.” McKinley, though, developed a fondness for the voluble Roosevelt and his often amusing pronunciamentos on matters large and small. Among the president’s frequent guests for his afternoon buggy rides around Washington were Day and Roosevelt.
Another favorite turned out to be Jo
hn Hay, the new ambassador to London, who showered the president with letters notable for three things: a self-effacing tone that seemed tinny from the pen of so accomplished a man; an obsequious quality that could make some men cringe but seemed to strike the president as entirely genuine; and a flow of news, anecdote, gossip, and insight that added up to highly valuable and satisfying information. Complimenting McKinley on his inaugural address, Hay called it “perfect . . . exactly right in what it says and what it does not say . . . a masterpiece from beginning to end.” The previous December he had sent the president-elect a gold ring containing a few hairs from the head of George Washington. He wrote, “It is my confident hope and belief that your administration may be not less glorious and the memory of it as spotless, as that of Washington.” (He neglected to mention he had given a similar ring to Rutherford Hayes twenty years earlier.) Stopping off at New York on his way to London, Hay wrote of his assignment, “I know the place is far beyond my merits”—despite, he noted in passing, “all the approval your appointment of me has received here and in England.” McKinley soon discovered that, along with the letters, he would receive from Hay consistently high-quality work focused intently on the president’s highest priorities.
Hay faced a big challenge in patching up U.S.-British relations following a tense standoff between the two countries during the Cleveland years. In 1895, with a navy that writer Rudyard Kipling considered “as unprotected as a jellyfish,” the United States audaciously thrust a sword of belligerence at Great Britain, then involved in a dispute with Venezuela over the jungle border between that country and British Guiana. Cleveland intervened on the side of Venezuela, generating serious friction between the two Anglo-Saxon nations. Although the crisis passed without conflict, the episode left the relationship strained.
The president named young Charles Dawes to the high-profile job of comptroller of the currency. Dawes, whose devotion and loyalty to McKinley were boundless, retained his high station in the president’s esteem and affection, while his elegant wife, Caro, stirred in Ida a loving regard reserved for a very few. The McKinleys emphasized to Charles and Caro Dawes that they were welcome at the White House at any time and included them in nearly all formal social events. The president avidly sought Dawes’s counsel on matters of state and delighted in their rambling discussions on political developments and the people involved in them.
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MCKINLEY ASSUMED THE presidency with a clear sense of his premier priority: establishing a Republican-style tariff policy that could meet the country’s revenue needs and boost economic growth. Other immediate goals included a push for an international agreement establishing bimetallism in the industrial world (as promised in the GOP’s St. Louis platform), annexation of Hawaii, negotiations with Britain and Canada over a number of border and environmental issues, legislation to solidify the country’s currency and banking laws, and ending the war in Cuba while somehow avoiding hostilities with Spain.
McKinley initiated his tariff campaign just two days after his inauguration, when he called Congress into an “extra session” to begin March 15. On that date he issued a message to Congress laying out the need to attack the deficit financing of the Cleveland years and end “the remarkable spectacle” of the country’s growing public debt “to meet the ordinary outlays incident upon even an economical and prudent administration of the government.” The country hadn’t seen a budget surplus since the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 1892, said the president, and the previous three fiscal years had produced a combined deficit of nearly $138 million. “Ample revenues must be supplied,” said McKinley, not only to halt deficits, pay for legitimate federal activities, and liquidate the national debt but also for all the protectionist purposes he had extolled throughout his career: “to preserve the home market . . . ; to revive and increase manufactures; to relieve and encourage agriculture; . . . and to render to labor in every field of useful occupation the liberal wages and adequate rewards to which skill and industry are justly entitled.”
But McKinley’s trade philosophy had evolved since he had slumped in his chair at campaign headquarters that November night in 1890 and insisted that his tariff bill from earlier in the year hadn’t caused that day’s GOP shellacking. There didn’t seem to be much limit back then on his desire for ever greater protection for American manufacturers supplying goods to American consumers. But now he could see that America’s burgeoning industrialism was outstripping American consumer demand, and prosperity in the postdepression era that would define his presidency would require an active American pursuit of foreign markets. Excessive trade barriers would thwart that development and curtail the country’s growth potential. That’s why, in his inaugural address, he had touted the “reciprocity principle” in his 1890 bill aimed at “the opening up of new markets for the products of our country, by granting concessions to the products of other lands.” It was never clear how these new sensibilities on trade evolved in McKinley’s thinking or precisely what spawned them. But the president clearly saw a dawning era with America playing a big role in global trade, nurtured and protected by a powerful navy fueled from U.S. coaling stations around the world. Though not a man of vision, he was a man of perception who saw clearly the major developments of his time.
And that’s why McKinley looked with favor upon the bill that emerged in the House Ways and Means Committee under Chairman Nelson Dingley, who also believed that a more moderate approach would serve the country better in the new industrial era of global markets. Throughout the previous winter, his committee, with roughly the same membership, had carved out a measure notable for setting tariff rates that were closer to those of the Democrats’ 1894 Wilson-Gorman bill than those of the McKinley measure. As Dingley wrote to a political ally, George Tichenor, “We expect to cut really all our duties considerably below those of the act of 1890.” Dingley took his bill to the House floor just four days after Congress convened its special session and pressed successfully for a floor debate lasting only nine legislative days.
On the surface, the House discourse unfolded along the lines of all previous tariff debates. “Free-trade tariffs have always brought calamity to our country,” declared Tennessee’s Republican representative Henry R. Gibson. Whenever the experiment has been tried, “hard times have been the invariable result.” Retorted Democrat Joseph W. Bailey of Texas, “I warn you now that if this bill fails . . . to bring the prosperity which the Republicans have promised, you will not live long enough to obtain a patient audience with the American people upon the absurd proposition that you can make them prosperous by increasing their taxes.”
But behind this familiar rhetoric was a subtly shifting debate. Ida Tarbell, a contemporary journalist who studied the tariff issue closely and despised the traditional Republican protectionism, wrote later that the Dingley bill, which cleared the House pretty much as Dingley had crafted it, “was a fairly good protectionist measure, certainly a real improvement on the McKinley Bill. There were fewer prohibitive rates [designed to halt entirely any importation of particular goods], less contradiction, and less quackery.” Dingley and McKinley weren’t alone among Republicans now favoring greater moderation on rates. They were joined by Rhode Island’s Nelson Aldrich, the imperious chairman of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee. “Industrial conditions in this country,” declared Aldrich, “. . . do not demand a return to the rates imposed by the act of 1890.” That sentiment guided his committee’s actions on the bill, which generally imposed a downward pressure on rates, particularly for chemicals, earthenware, glass, metals, and certain wool products.
But Aldrich, as commanding a figure as he was, lost control of the measure on the Senate floor. Free-silver Republicans, as Godkin’s Nation had warned, held the balance of power in the chamber and felt no particular loyalty to the party establishment. These senators, whose constituents included Western wool growers and also some Eastern wool manufacturers, set an inflated price for their support on the bill. Taking their cu
e from the defiant National Association of Wool Manufacturers, they demanded high enough tariff rates to kill all wool imports. More moderate senators argued that such trade barriers would stir ongoing political opposition, and thus tariff policy on woolens would continue to fluctuate, generating policy uncertainty and economic havoc. But the radicals ignored such entreaties and pushed rates on clothing and combing wool to 1890 levels, while rates on carpet wool, which had no foreign competition, reached unprecedented levels.
The Senate version cleared the chamber on July 7 with some 872 amendments pushing up rates favored by a host of interests, which couldn’t be ignored so long as the wool lobbies received the full measure of their demands. A subsequent conference committee continued the splurge, boosting rates even further. Traditional free-traders were outraged when Congress approved a conference report that embraced the highest trade duties ever seen in the country. Tarbell, who hated the McKinley bill as a sop to trusts and industrial elites, considered the final Dingley product “more oppressive” than the discredited 1890 legislation.
But the political response across the land turned out to be surprisingly mild. Given the four-year depression that had gripped the nation under a Democratic administration, the voters were ready for an antidote, even one that had been discredited in previous times. Besides, the issue had lost some of its sting in the face of the emotion-laden free-silver cause. Perhaps most significant, the new president enjoyed enough trust and popularity across the country to generate a feeling that he ought to be given a chance to prove what he could do for the country.
Just before four on the afternoon of July 24, McKinley received Nelson Dingley in the Cabinet Room, along with Representative Alva Hager of Iowa, chairman of the House Enrolled Bills Committee, who clasped the formal Dingley document in his hand. Seated with several Cabinet members, the president rose and greeted his visitors, then reclaimed his oak chair to sign the measure, which Porter had placed before him. Though the president had a number of pens at hand, Dingley pulled out a dainty stylus and asked that it be used for the occasion. McKinley readily complied, though he jocularly commented on its small size. Then, dipping it deeply into the inkwell, he appended his signature, inquired as to the date, and then affixed that upon the parchment as well.
President McKinley Page 22
