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AS 1897 NEARED its end, McKinley certainly understood the implications of his calculated but perilous actions in inserting the United States into Spain’s colonial crisis. In doing so, he may have unleashed a course of events that could end the Cuban war, establish a new status for that troubled island, and cement an ongoing peaceful association between America and the fading Iberian power. But it also could place his country on an inexorable path to war. Woodford, from his vantage in Madrid, suggested the question of war or peace for America hinged now upon “the success or failure of the [Spanish] Cabinet program in Cuba.” McKinley, in his usual reticent way, never responded to that thought. But he commanded little or no control over events in Cuba, and hence the path upon which he had set his country may have been beyond his control as well.
Still, McKinley didn’t succumb to discouragement or alter his usual calibrated incrementalism. He viewed executive decision making as akin to a vast chessboard upon which he would move the pieces slowly and deliberately, after careful rumination on how one move could affect subsequent moves, both his own and his opponent’s. He defended this approach in a conversation with a prominent congressman, who recounted the president’s words to the Chicago Tribune under a grant of anonymity: “I know that the people of this country from one end to the other are getting impatient because we do not move faster, but I am convinced that prosperity is here and that war is the only thing which will prevent its continuance. It would be easy to free Cuba by a war, but to do it without one, to satisfy the people, and keep us in the high road to prosperity, is a thing which cannot be done in a day. That is the problem which confronts us, and we must solve it slowly but surely.”
McKinley held fast to the idea that America under his leadership could effectuate a happy solution to the Cuban carnage without being drawn into a war with Spain. But his actions since summer signaled unmistakably that he was prepared for war if the peaceful approach failed to produce the speedy outcome he had demanded in the name of his country. As Collier’s Weekly summed up the president’s message to Spain, it was “tantamount to saying, Make peace in Cuba yourself, or we shall feel constrained to make it for you.”
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Year-End Assessment
CHALLENGES IN OHIO, THE NATION, AND THE WORLD
On September 2, 1897, thirty-six years after the start of the Civil War, President and Mrs. McKinley traveled to Fremont, Ohio, for a reunion of old soldiers from the Twenty-third Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment. The president joined some eighty-one other veterans of the Twenty-third in celebrating its Civil War exploits. Fremont was, of course, the home town of Rutherford Hayes, and the day’s events included a “touching scene” at the Hayes gravesite, where the “visibly affected” president delivered a few emotional remarks about his beloved commander and mentor, who died in 1893. But the celebrants devoted the day mostly to rousing activities that included two cannon salutes, martial music, an afternoon bonfire, a military review, evening fireworks, and invigorating speeches reflecting the sturdy patriotism of the day. The president, wrote the Washington Post, “is very fond of these boys in blue and takes no pains to conceal it.”
McKinley drew laughter during his brief speech by declaring, “My comrades, the memories of the war are sweeter than service in the war.” He praised his regiment but noted that Ohio produced 200 infantry regiments, “and there were two million men and upward just like you from all of the Northern States and Territories of the Union, who were willing to do and die for the government and for the flag. [Cheers].” The president extolled the national unity he saw in the country some three decades after war’s end. “Today,” he said, drawing more cheers, “instead of having sectional divisions beneath this flag, we have none . . . and the men who fought for this flag and the men who opposed it . . . are now forever united in faith and friendship for its defense.”
The unity idea was a frequent motif of presidential speechmaking, and people clearly enjoyed hearing it, however overblown it might have been. In McKinley’s Annual Message three months later, he returned to the theme, heralding “the growing feeling of fraternal regard and unification of all sections of our country, the incompleteness of which has too long delayed realization of the highest blessings of the Union.” Clearly the president wanted to bury the “bloody shirt” that had enflamed sectional passions for decades. But he knew that unity and social harmony also required good times and a sense that American prosperity was widely shared. He devoted elements of his Annual Message to these themes.
The document, delivered to Congress on December 6 at the start of the new legislative session, touted the president’s success in getting his tariff bill enacted, though he acknowledged the new trade policy hadn’t yet eliminated the government’s budget deficiency, which stood at $42 million. Time would reveal the legislation’s ultimate impact, argued the president, but “the people, satisfied with its operation and results thus far, are in no mind to withhold from it a fair trial.” In the meantime he promised a serious effort to enact comprehensive currency legislation establishing a functional relationship among gold, silver, and paper currency. He said the government had an “obvious duty” to redeem future greenbacks only in gold, though he stopped short of endorsing Treasury secretary Gage’s call to retire greenbacks altogether. This could contract the money supply, he feared, and crush the economic recovery. In truth, though McKinley recognized the ultimate need for a broad currency regimen, he liked the country’s monetary situation at the end of 1897, with new gold discoveries boosting money supply. He wished to avoid any premature solution that could prove harmful.
The president devoted the greatest portion of his message to his efforts to end the war in Cuba. He defended America’s legitimate interest in Cuban affairs extending back to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and said America couldn’t sit by while Spain pursued a war policy that was “not civilized warfare [but] extermination.” He had addressed his “first duty,” which was to American citizens in Cuba, by effecting the release of twenty-two imprisoned Americans and pushing the $50,000 appropriation to aid U.S. citizens caught up in the conflict.
While saying he wanted a peaceful solution “just and honorable alike to Spain and to the Cuban people,” the president emphasized that Spain had no leeway for delaying a settlement. “The supposition of an indefinite prolongation of the war is denied,” he declared. He disavowed any American interest in Cuban annexation. “That, by our code of morality, would be criminal aggression.” But he sought to maintain his own freedom of action by opposing any U.S. recognition of Cuban independence (“impracticable and indefensible”) or of belligerency rights for Cuban insurgents (“unwise, and therefore inadmissible”).
Essentially the president urged patience upon Americans and their congressional representatives as he continued his delicate efforts to nudge events toward an agreeable solution. Enumerating the actions Spain already had taken in response to his pressure tactics—removing Weyler, ending the reconcentrados program, accepting the principle of home rule—he promised his government “will abate none of its efforts to bring about by peaceful agencies a peace which shall be honorable and enduring.” But, he added by way of warning, should America feel a need to “intervene with force,” it would come only when the necessity “will be so clear so to command the support and approval of the civilized world.”
Turning to Hawaii, McKinley noted that the annexation treaty had been ratified unanimously by the Republic of Hawaii “and only awaits the favorable action of the American Senate.” The “logic of events” rendered annexation “the natural result of the strengthening ties that bind us to those Islands.” It was “gratifying” that Japan had retreated from its previous complaints and now evinced “confidence in the uprightness of this Government, and in the sincerity of its purpose to deal with all possible ulterior questions in the broadest spirit of friendliness.” He avoided any flourishes of expression on the islands’ strategic significance or potential role in Amer
ican expansionism.
But he did hail a number of initiatives designed to expand America’s global reach and commerce: a canal across Central America serving as a “great highway of trade between the Atlantic and Pacific”; the push for reciprocal trade agreements; enlargement of the country’s merchant marine to address an inadequacy “humiliating to the national pride”; and the “great increase of the Navy . . . justified by the requirements for national defense.”
The president declared his commitment to the Civil Service legislation enacted in 1883, the so-called Pendleton Act, to chip away at the country’s traditional “spoils system,” which entailed the hiring and firing of federal personnel based on political patronage. Like his predecessors going back to Chester A. Arthur in the 1880s, McKinley found himself caught between reformers such as Carl Schurz, who wanted a professional workforce untainted by political barter, and “spoilsmen” such as presidential allies Mark Hanna and Charles Grosvenor, who wanted to maximize the political leverage of governmental hiring.
In June 1897, McKinley had shown his hand by moving to protect a large number of federal employees from arbitrary removal, thus irritating some of his closest friends but delighting reform factions. The Chicago Tribune declared, “Any doubts which might have existed about President McKinley’s fidelity to civil service reform must vanish now.” Godkin’s Nation, always wary of McKinley’s intentions, gushed, “President McKinley deserves and will receive the heartiest praise of good citizens, without distinction of party.” It was smart politics, expanding his support base among reform elements often uncomfortable with his tendencies toward political realism.
Although McKinley’s Annual Message didn’t highlight growing signs of prosperity, newspapers peppered readers with encouraging reports. According to the Pittsburgh Dispatch, iron merchants were responding to growing demand for their products by encouraging producers to prepare for the fall trade “with a degree of confidence greater than that which marked the outset of any season for several years.” London’s Pall Mall Gazette said the American iron and steel industry was gaining global dominance, and the causes of America’s favorable position were “permanent, and everything points to the United States remaining the cheapest steel-producing country in the world.” Meanwhile textile manufacturers throughout New England and the Mid-Atlantic region started reopening mills, rehiring workers, and restoring prerecession wage levels. Wheat prices, a key index of farm belt prosperity, hit a dollar a bushel in August. U.S. wheat exports through Philadelphia, already the largest on record, “will reach figures in excess of what has been the most sanguine expectation of shippers,” said the Washington Post, which reported also that New York banks were issuing business loans in greater volume than had been seen in years. The country’s “general condition to-day,” announced the Philadelphia Inquirer, “is more satisfactory than it has been for four years and bids fair to grow steadily better.”
Of course, these trends didn’t impress ardently anti-McKinley Democrats. The St. Louis Republic refused to attribute any of the economic good news to McKinley, whom it deemed “one of the weakest characters” ever to reach the White House. But the president knew the economic rebound, coupled with his steady brand of leadership, would enhance his political standing, and that of his party, as the country moved into an election year.
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ON THE MORNING of December 2, 1897, in Canton, Mother McKinley, eighty-eight years old, awoke to find she couldn’t speak. Fearing she had suffered a stroke, she went to the room of her daughter Helen to express her concern in hand signals. She seemed to Helen to be fully in possession of her mental and physical faculties. But in the early afternoon she sank into semiconsciousness. Abner McKinley, visiting from New York, wired the president of their mother’s condition and promised an update at five o’clock. McKinley didn’t wait for the update. “Tell mother I will be there,” he wired back and took the next train to Canton. When McKinley’s father had died five years earlier, it had been a difficult time for the son. But William Sr. had never exercised the kind of impact on the younger William that Nancy had.
He arrived at his mother’s bedside at ten o’clock the next morning and remained with her for a day before returning to Washington for presidential duties. Disposing of immediate White House business in twenty-four hours, the president rushed back to Canton with Ida and a retinue of relatives and servants. He found his mother still alive and capable of recognizing family members. But soon she lapsed into a coma-like condition. “The President is almost constantly at the bedside,” reported the New York Times, “refusing to be relieved by others and to take the rest and exercise he needs.” Three days later, she displayed a brief interval of consciousness, but then, just after two o’clock in the morning, she died, with all of her children and many other relatives standing around her bed.
The funeral took place two days later at Canton’s First Methodist Episcopal Church amid a constant rainstorm. The president, sitting in the first pew directly before the pulpit, “gave no outward evidence of his sorrow,” reported the Times. The service began with the chant “Still, Still with Thee” and included the hymns “Jesus, Lover of My Soul” and “Lead, Kindly Light.” The Rev. C. E. Manchester’s eulogy included the statement, “It is not given to many to have such grace of life, such perfection of character as crowned her.”
Following the funeral, a crowd of 3,000 braved the elements in a procession to the gravesite at the West Lawn Cemetery near the center of town. Following remarks that were “very short and simple,” Mother McKinley was lowered into the grave by pallbearers. That evening the president and Ida boarded an overnight train for Washington and the crush of presidential duties. He knew that he would be thrust immediately into a political maelstrom that could undermine his political standing in the country. The old feud within the Ohio Republican Party had reemerged like an abscess, and Mark Hanna’s political fate hung in the balance.
The story began with intrigues precedent to the Republican state convention in Toledo in June. Hanna’s senatorial appointment was set to expire when a new legislature, to be elected in November 1897, would convene in January to fill that senatorial slot for the remainder of John Sherman’s term, scheduled to expire in January 1899, and for the subsequent six-year term. Hanna wanted both terms as a crowning affirmation of his political stature. A defeat would represent not only a crushing termination of his political career but also a symbolic blow to McKinley, whose public image depended significantly upon his ability to dominate Ohio politics. McKinley and Hanna reasoned that a strong party endorsement from Toledo would position Hanna to command the needed legislative votes—so long as Republicans retained their majority status in the November elections.
In the weeks leading to the convention, newspaper reports suggested some Hanna enemies, invariably tied to Senator Foraker, wanted to impede his election. The plan apparently was to urge county Democrats to elect Foraker delegations to the state convention so they could pass a rousing endorsement for Asa Bushnell’s reelection as governor but thwart any endorsement for Hanna. The man behind this plan was said to be Cleveland mayor Robert McKisson, a leading Foraker-Bushnell confidant, who reportedly wanted to become Ohio’s lieutenant governor as part of the plan.
All this was brought into the open by Ohio congressman Clifton Beach, who told reporters in late April that “Mark Hanna is in grave danger of defeat for the Senate” because of political maneuverings in Cuyahoga County, surrounding Cleveland. “If McKisson should declare himself one way or the other Hanna might be more certain of election,” said Beach, “but McKisson is too sly for that. He is going to keep still and do his fighting on the quiet until the time comes to stab Hanna.”
“Does Hanna realize the gravity of the situation?” a reporter asked Beach.
“He certainly does, but he is not talking.”
The tireless Hanna promptly went to work in Cuyahoga County and corralled 65 percent of the delegates. “This means the overthrow of Mayor McKisso
n’s control of the county machine,” asserted the Washington Post. “It goes without saying the Cuyahoga County delegation to Toledo will be unanimously for Hanna.” Hanna publicly dismissed the significance of the Cuyahoga intrigues. “I suppose they need something of that kind to warm up their blood,” he said.
But tensions mounted on the eve of the convention when Hanna’s forces announced plans to give the state GOP campaign chairmanship to Charles Dick, Hanna’s talented campaign chief, over Charles Kurtz, a Foraker stalwart and Hanna nemesis who served as state party chairman. Hanna felt he needed a loyal man running the party campaigns as he pursued his senatorial bid, and he couldn’t trust Kurtz. But Bushnell argued that the party’s gubernatorial candidate had always named campaign chairmen, and he intended to fight for that party courtesy. With battle lines drawn, Foraker openly promoted Kurtz’s candidacy with the full force of his influence, while the McKinley administration was “freely quoted as favoring Dick,” the Post reported.
When the Toledo convention convened on June 22, the cunning Hanna quickly took control of the proceedings. But he sought to ease tensions by suggesting Dick would withdraw his candidacy if Kurtz would do the same, thus paving the way for a compromise campaign chairman. Kurtz promptly rejected the idea. When the balloting commenced, Dick won 2 to 1, and the convention unanimously endorsed Hanna’s senatorial candidacy. For good measure, the Hanna forces replaced Kurtz as state party chairman with a Hanna friend named George Nash. Signifying the desire of many party officials to bridge the chasm between the two warring factions, the convention also endorsed Bushnell’s reelection bid without dissent. But the chasm remained.
President McKinley Page 27
