William McKinley and His America

Second Edition

H. Wayne Morgan

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781612773582
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Biographies politiques

When George W. Bush won the White House, he was the first incumbent Republican governor elected president since William McKinley in 1896.

William McKinley was the last of the Civil War veterans to reach the White House. Known widely as the Major, in honor of his military rank, he rose through Congress to head the crucial Ways and Means Committee where, in the early 1890s, he passed a strong and popular tariff bill.

That success caught the eye of Marcus Hanna, a Cleveland industrialist with a passion for politics and an ambition to help make and elect a president. Democrats complained that McKinley was a mere puppet of the wealth Hanna, but historians generally believe they were a well-matched team of two strong-willed men. With Hanna's help, McKinley was elected governor of Ohio in 1892.

In 1896 McKinley swept away all rivals to win the presidential nomination on the first ballot. Faced in the general election by the well-respected and highly touted orator William Jennings Bryan, Republicans adopted their "Front Porch Campaign." Thousands of citizens from across the country were brought to McKinley's home in Canton for a handshake and a few words. Hanna arranged for this $3.5 million campaign to be paid for by big business, with oil baron John D. Rockefeller writing the largest check. McKinley's factors in his campaign. He became the first presidential candidate in a generation to win a majority of the popular vote.

McKinley was a popular president. Pushed reluctantly into the Spanish-American War, McKinley was instrumental in starting America on the path to becoming a global power. He was reelected by a landslide in 1901, after delivering a speech at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, he was assassinated by anarchist Leon Czolgosz, McKinley's vice president, Theodore Roosevelt became the nation's 26 th president.

H. Wayne Morgan's extensively revised and expanded edition of McKinley and His America will prove to be a welcome resource to historians and scholars.

CHAPTER 1

Origins and Ancestors

The Ohio River crosses the land in a great fertile valley, giving wealth and beauty to six states. Throughout much of the nation’s history it was a cultural as well as geographic boundary. To its south gentle hills and valleys fell away to a land that slavery marked and to an old agricultural way of life. To its north lay a land rich in earth, mineral wealth, and with a heterogeneous population. In the autumn and summer the Ohio’s waters move easily past the beauty on its banks. In spring and winter its languor becomes power, and ice and mud often swirl upon man’s works as though the river still prized its independence. The beautiful Ohio is still a boundary between old and new, North and South, though in its waters and along its banks all of these meet and mingle.

The great river carries water to the Mississippi. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it also carried people from East to West. Of those who came to its valley in the eighteenth century none were more diverse, numerous, or influential than the Scotch-Irish. Their first homes were in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and the entrepôts of the East Coast. From there they moved to Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, all the western frontier.

Few national groups have given more to the American heritage than the Scotch-Irish. They turned much of their strength to the basic crafts that sustain life. Their physical stamina carried with it a fierce independence, coupled with respect for the law and individual rights, that placed them on the side of the Revolution in America. Not averse to good living and high spirits, they combined sport with work. Most important, they brought with them to a new land the customs of an old civilization, and respect and demand for education and learning that made them carriers of culture on the frontier.

William McKinley’s ancestors came from the Scottish highlands, where they were famous for their independence.¹ The Caledonian mountains bred a people as hardy as their habitat. Few wars passed them by. Few hesitated to fight for their beliefs; and unless they faced an unusual opponent, they won their fight. Legend records that in the Battle of Pinkie in 1547 a stalwart highlander named “Findla Morh,” or the Great Findla, was killed. In Gaelic his name read Fionn-Laidh, and was pronounced “I-on-lay.” His four sons took the name MacIanla, meaning “sons of I-on-lay.” Their descendants shortened and simplified the name to MacKinlay.

The MacKinlays, restless as well as hardy, eventually settled near Calender, in Perthshire. In 1690, James MacKinlay, “James the Trooper,” joined the army of William III, en route to Ireland, as a guide, and stayed after the Battle of the Boyne, July 1, 1690, to found the Irish branch of the family tree.

The story of their ultimate migration to the New World is clouded in history. Why they came, who was involved, where they first settled, and the path of their westward movement is all uncertain. That they came to better themselves was undoubtedly true. They may also have come, like the ancestors of William McKinley’s mother, for religious freedom. The earliest MacKinlay immigrant to the New World was David McKinley, who at the age of twelve settled in York County, Pennsylvania, early in the eighteenth century. “David the Weaver,” as he was called, adopted the “McKinley” spelling.

About 1743 David McKinley purchased a tract of land in York County, on the Susquehanna River, where his descendants farmed many years after his death.² The family was not prominent in politics, but accepted their share of the burdens of local government, serving on juries, occasionally holding law enforcement offices, attending to tax affairs, and in general fulfilling their ideals of social and personal responsibility.³

Those ideals rested on a strong sense of individualism and independence. When the American Revolution came, the McKinley men joined the colonial frontier ranks. David McKinley, born in 1755, great-grandfather of the president, enlisted as a recruit from Pennsylvania and saw a total of twenty-one months service between 1776 and 1778. He participated in skirmishes against the British and their Indian allies. After the war he lived in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, for fifteen years, and then moved to New Lisbon, Columbiana County, Ohio.⁴

Ancestors on both sides of President McKinley’s family were iron workers and tinkers. His maternal great-grandfather, Andrew Rose Jr. left the Continental army in order to cast lead bullets and cannon, an occupation more crucial to the ragged patriot armies than wielding a gun.⁵ The small forge that he and other McKinley ancestors worked impressed many things on their descendants. Work with the hands, creativity, independence—all were reflected in their occupation.

David McKinley, the Revolutionary War veteran, fathered ten children, one of whom was James Stevenson McKinley, the president’s grandfather, born in 1783. He married Mary Rose, whose ancestors had emigrated with William Penn to the New World. James and Mary McKinley settled in Mercer County, Pennsylvania, where he worked in the iron-foundry business. A son, christened William, was born to them on November 15, 1807, in New Lisbon, Ohio, where the family had moved seeking better prospects.⁶

This man who was to father a president was not extraordinary except in the force of his character. Strong of physique, he was true to his heritage in his taciturnity. Like his father and grandfather, he knew many trades. The life to which he was born required ready adaptability to hardship. He could forge iron, mend fence, paint, plow, tend animals, build houses, work wood, and occasionally invent things. At sixteen he worked full days, rising early and retiring early. His later pictures showed a strong jaw, large nose, and keen eyes, which reflected the determination and ability of the inner man. His education was limited to grammar school, scattered reading, and a small talent at figuring. He read Dante, the Bible, and Shakespeare. His neighbors later recalled that he wore the pages thin on all his books.

William McKinley Sr., as he was called when his own son rose to national prominence, traveled a great deal during his youth in Ohio, tending to his furnace business.⁷ But his travels did not prevent him from desiring and acquiring a family. Nancy Allison, whom he married in 1829, was a perfect companion for the pious, industrious, and independent McKinley. Old Mr. McKinley in after years fondly remembered that his wedding present to his new wife was a trip to a nearby spring where in mid-January the newlyweds took a mutual drink of icy water from a gourd dipper.⁸

The hardihood that chilly journey symbolized was evident in everything Nancy Allison McKinley undertook. Like her husband, she was descended from early immigrants, both English and Scotch-Irish. Her ancestors had fled England to live in Holland, where they could better practice their Puritanism. Her family originally came with William Penn to Pennsylvania and one of her forebears owned a sizable tract of land in that colonial bread-basket.⁹

Nancy Allison McKinley profoundly influenced all her children, and especially William Jr. Her husband was often absent on business, and the duties of raising their large family fell mainly upon her. She accepted the burden without comment. If she thought her lot hard she never said so. The family formed the center of her life, and she was a devoted, if often stern, mother. Her fondness never became weakness, nor did love for the children prevent her from raising them with the strict discipline that turned love into the deeper sense of responsibility that motivated her family.

Like her husband, Mother McKinley, as she was affectionately called, lived to see her son successful. Her lifetime of good works and solid if prosaic living gave her the perspective of common sense. “Mother McKinley was the leader in Niles of much that was good,” a childhood friend of her son remembered.¹⁰ “I recall her quiet dignity of manner,” another noted. “She was just the same in the midst of common-place duties as in a palace if she had been reigning there.”¹¹

Rural isolation and the need for self-help sharpened Mrs. McKinley’s sense of responsibility to her family and neighbors. She tended sick friends, bore her share of the community’s problems, and acted as peacemaker, for she detested strife. She boarded visiting ministers and teachers. She and her sister had charge of the Methodist church in Niles, and swept, scrubbed, painted, and tended it with the same efficient thoroughness they applied to their own hearths and homes. According to one recollection, they “ran the church, all but the preaching.”

When she visited relatives in other towns, she thought nothing of the necessary horseback ride, or of perching the youngest child on her lap so that he too might see distant cousins and aunts. No amount of worldly fame could offset in her eyes anyone’s failure to use all their talents. She was later proud of William’s political accomplishments, but remained undemonstrative. When he was governor of Ohio, she took the train to see him, and when a fellow passenger asked if she had relatives in Columbus, she replied only: “Yes, I have a son there.”¹² Few who knew her at any stage in her life would have suspected her of producing a president, least of all herself. “After all, I don’t believe I did raise the boy to be President,” she said in her later years. “I tried to bring up the boy to be a good man, and that is the best that any mother can do. The first thing I knew, my son turned around and began to raise me to be the mother of a President.”¹³

In the 1840s, Niles resembled scores of other country hamlets in Ohio. It boasted little more than a tree-shaded, unpaved street, lined with clapboard houses, a country store, a small church, and a bridge across the creek. It was laid out in the 1830s, but as early as the first decade of the century, discoveries of coal and iron ore in the adjacent hills promised it a future as a manufacturing town. By the 1830s, a local foundry was turning out regular consignments of andirons, stove castings, pipe, and household utensils, and the plant boasted a smokestack thirty feet high, a man-made wonder for the area. In this factory the elder William McKinley entered into a brief partnership in the iron business. He made little money as manager and foreman. He owed any success to his diligence and common sense rather than to any innate business acumen. But he was never in debt beyond his ability to pay, and happily for him, his household expenses were few, for the older children helped their thrifty mother with her work.¹⁴

In this tiny hamlet, on January 29, 1843, Nancy McKinley bore a son, christened after his father, William McKinley Jr. He used this signature until his father’s death in 1892. The town whose closest large neighbor was fledgling Youngstown, offered nothing extraordinary. “There wasn’t much of a town there then, hardly anything but the furnace I was managing,” the president’s father later recalled. “Strange times those were, so different from now. No railroads, no canals, and terribly poor, wild country roads.”¹⁵ The house in which this seventh of nine children was born fitted his later success story. It was a long, low, clap-boarded and whitewashed two-storied structure, one part of which was a village grocery store. There was a chimney at one end of a steeply gabled roof, and the windows were carefully draped. Luxurious lengths of beautiful woodbine plant grew from the roof.¹⁶

Though he did not often reminisce about his childhood, President McKinley did remember the general sense of peace and isolation of his childhood in Niles. “I need not tell you that many very cherished memories crowd my mind as I stand in this presence,” he said to well-wishers in Niles in 1899. “The old frame school-house and the church have disappeared, and in their places splendid structures have been built.”¹⁷ Beneath his reserve there was a deep need for affection and a streak of sentimentality in William McKinley, and he expressed much of this in recollections of his youth. Time could not erase the nostalgia he felt not only for the simple town of Niles and its charming surroundings, but also for the uncomplicated life it represented. He remembered Niles and Youngstown as villages, before industrial progress came, sweeping all this away. Men traveled faster when William McKinley was president, but in his memories the old stage still rattled its way between Poland and Massillon and all the other little towns that became cities.¹⁸

William McKinley Sr. wanted his children to rise above his own station through education. Though lacking diplomas and degrees, the elder McKinley was not ignorant. Both he and his wife tried hard to maintain adequate intellectual standards in the midst of the arduous duties of child-raising. Hume’s History of England, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, and the early works of Dickens graced the scant library shelves alongside the Bible in their household. Every member of the family old enough read the better monthly magazines and passed them on to others. Horace Greeley’s Weekly Tribune came into the home to fortify an antislavery bias that reflected the McKinleys’ humble origins and Northern sympathies.¹⁹ Though the family lacked intellectual pretensions, they encouraged study.

The stern but loving mother permitted no straggling in her children. They rose and retired early, and in between they quickly learned the basic responsibilities of life while living normal and happy childhoods. William got his share of attention but his mother did not dote on him. “I had six children [at that time], and I had all my own work to do,” she remembered. “I did the best I could, of course, but I could not devote all my time to him.”²⁰

She did not have to, for he learned to care for himself. Though he had bouts of sickness, William was usually healthy and anxious to join in games with playmates. He early exhibited two traits that he carried through manhood—a reluctance to talk, and acute powers of observation. “He began to take notice of things when very young,” his mother recalled.²¹

Mother McKinley enrolled her children in Sunday school before regular school, for she was a devout church-goer. The strong desire for education and learning appeared early. “My ideas of an education were wholly practical, not theoretical,” she said later, “I put my children in school just as ear...