Ida McKinley

The Turn-of-the-Century First Lady Through War, Assassination, and Secret Disability

Carl Sferrazza Anthony

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781612776705
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Published in cooperation with The National First Ladies Library

This is the first full-length biography of Ida Saxton McKinley (1847– 1907), the wife of William McKinley, president of the United States from 1897 to his assassination in 1901. Long demeaned by history because she suffered from epilepsy—which the society of her era mistakenly believed to border on mental illness—Ida McKinley was an exceptional woman who exerted a strong influence on her husband's political decisions.

Born in Canton, Ohio, Ida Saxton was the eldest of three children. Throughout her youth, Ida was remarkably independent and energetic. She was interested in art, architecture, and current events, and she was sensitive to the plight of working women. In 1871 she married lawyer and Civil War veteran William McKinley. Following the deaths of their two daughters and her mother, Ida's physical condition deteriorated. During the years her husband served as a U.S. congressman and as Ohio governor, her health fluctuated.

Throughout William's 1896 presidential campaign, delegations came to the McKinley home in Canton to hear the candidate speak from the front porch. Occasionally, Ida was healthy enough to speak with and meet political figures; sometimes she simply sat to hear his speeches; at other times she was entirely absent. Her husband's devotion to her in her state became an attribute of the campaign. Author Carl Sferrazza Anthony shows that despite her frail health, Ida was determined to fulfill as much of her role as First Lady as she could. She made keen and accurate political observations—particularly in assessing the motives of those ambitious for appointments—and her unrelenting lobbying on behalf of Methodist missionary efforts factored into the president's decision to retain the Philippine Islands for the United States.

This fascinating biography is essential reading for anyone interested in the life and times of an extraordinary First Lady.

1

A Daughter Studies

HISTORY WOULD JUDGE HER as the wife of a United States president, but Ida Saxton McKinley defined a sense of purpose to her life by living closely with those she loved.

From her parents to her brother and sister, her father’s father and mother’s mother, nieces and nephews, uncles and aunts, first and second cousins, Ida was bound tightly to her closely knit clan and was blessed that it valued daughters as equally as sons. Although of German, Irish, Scottish, and English ancestry, her identity was Cantonian. She was born in what began as a small village established with help from her grandfathers and would die in what became an industrial center propelled by her father and husband. From Ida’s first breath at its south end to her last gasp farther north, from the scent of its summer red roses to the grime of its winter chimney soot, Canton infused her very being.

John Saxton, her father’s father, was the eldest of eleven, a native Pennsylvanian and War of 1812 veteran. He’d been a Huntingdon Gazette printing apprentice before arriving in 1814 in a small settlement he had read about in Ohio, a state only since 1803. Named after the Chinese city of Canton, wood buildings were being raised on surveyed plots by a diversity of ambitious men: three German brothers from Philadelphia who operated a gristmill, a Frenchman with a medical practice, and an Irishman starting a produce business. “Four farm wagons at one time have just pulled into the [town] Square,” Saxton wrote his father upon arrival. Days later, on July 23, he circulated a prospectus soliciting interest in a newspaper. Determining it was feasible to start a weekly paper based on annual $2 subscriptions, he returned to Pennsylvania to purchase and transport a bulky printing press by ox team to Canton. The first issue of his Ohio Repository was issued on March 30, 1815. Once established, he married his childhood sweetheart Margaret Laird, daughter of Scottish immigrants. Canton was his place of “beautiful eminence.”

Within four years, the newspaper, which focused on national as well as local stories, was successful enough for Saxton to buy a building to house its offices and printing plant. Among those reporters he mentored was Joseph Medill, from the nearby town of Massillon, later the famous Chicago Tribune editor. Content was driven by Saxton’s rabid commitment to abolition of African American slavery and education for women. Through him Ida was introduced to abolitionist and New York Tribune publisher Horace Greeley and once asserted herself to secure a front-row seat to hear him lecture in Canton. The one-time Whig Party presidential candidate often stayed with the Saxtons during his trips to the region, an abolition stronghold.

As municipality president, township trustee, county treasurer, and public school founder, Saxton’s civic duty also included charitable work as a First Presbyterian church elder. Few in Canton were ill, indigent, or struggled in any way for long before Saxton discreetly called, providing a food parcel, envelope of cash, or simply companionship. This left a deep impression on Ida, who developed a lifelong commitment to aid those who were suffering, even strangers, wherever she lived. She even continued her grandfather’s work after he became frail and deaf. If, during periods of disability, she was unable to make visits, Ida drew up lists of food, flowers, or cash for delivery by messengers to those she knew needed attention or support.¹

John and Margaret Saxton raised six sons and one daughter in a brick house they built on the south end of Canton’s main thoroughfare, Market Avenue. Their first child, born May 1, 1816, was Ida’s father, James Ashbaugh. Privately tutored, he had his father’s sense of balance, was shrewd yet honest, gentle yet disciplined. Among her uncles, Ida was closest to her Uncle Joe and, later, to his son Sam, who, at twenty-three years her junior, became like a son. She also developed a lifelong friendship with her cousin Mary, daughter of her Aunt Hannah. Ida was the fifth of twenty-one Saxton cousins.

Thirteen years before Ida was born, eighteen-year-old James Saxton began a hardware business, and by the time she was nine, he had sold it to Uncle Joe. Among the generations of her father and grandfather, members of the Saxton clan often pursued businesses together and sold interests among themselves. John and two brothers had helped their father establish a nail factory. When one of them pursued scientific engineering to eventually develop the nation’s first measuring weight system and camera, his brothers invested in his endeavor. Another brother, Joshua, first worked as Repository printer, and then became copublisher. In later years, John sold the paper to his nephew Thomas.²

Her mother’s family was small but also entrepreneurial. Five years before James Saxton had even arrived in Canton, the Spread Eagle Tavern, built and owned by Ida’s maternal great-grandparents Philip and Eva Dewalt, was thriving. There they hosted Lutheran services on Sunday and served the home-brewed beer of their native Germany the rest of the week. In 1829 their son George, one of five adult children, bought the tavern with his wife, Christiana Harter, also from a German immigrant family. Ida’s mother Catharine (always called “Kate”) was born on August 18, 1827, the third child of George and Christiana; Kate had a brother John and a sister Harriet. After attending Emmetsburg Female Seminary in Maryland, Kate was sent to a second boarding school, Linden Hall Seminary in Lilitz, Pennsylvania. Her father asked the school principal that his daughter’s course of study be “kept economical” with a “regular English Education” and music. George Dewalt believed that Kate’s education should result in “usefulness,” rather than the “mere show” of the fine arts usually emphasized for girls.³

The same year Kate began at Linden Hall, her parents and siblings moved into a large Federal-style house on the southwest corner of what was then 8th Street and Market Avenue South. It is likely that a reception was held there following the August 20, 1846, First Presbyterian Church wedding of Kate Dewalt to James Saxton, who moved into the Dewalt House with her and her parents, sister, and brother. Within a month, Kate was pregnant with her first child.

Kate Saxton’s baby was delivered in the Dewalt House on June 8, 1847, by Canton’s most prominent physician, Lorenzo Whiting. Why the girl was called Ida is unknown, but the choice bucked a family tradition of using the same names in succeeding generations. Family letters disprove later claims that Ida Saxton was a sickly child. The only story to endure from what was her otherwise conventional development from infant to toddler was Ida’s unusually intense attachment to her “affectionate, kind, sympathetic mother.” Even into adulthood, Ida was with Kate so frequently that people assumed she was a “younger sister rather than a daughter.”

The bond with her daughter reflected Kate’s closeness to her own mother Christiana, and both women became strong role models for Ida, establishing in her a belief that such generational links not only entrench family commitment but were central to the value of a woman’s life, a view that would dramatically impact her life. As Kate prepared for the birth of her second child Mary in December 1848 and then cared for the infant, Ida had the full attention of her grandmother, which intensified all the more her affection for Christiana, as if she were a second mother. When the young family moved in 1850 from the Dewalt House to one next door, separation from her grandmother was apparently difficult for three-year-old Ida. Kate, pregnant with her third child at the time of the move, nevertheless felt it was important for a young family to establish its own household. James Saxton was also financially stable enough to do this; an 1850 census showed they had three servants by then, likely a nurse for the baby, a cook, and a maid.

Kate Saxton gave birth to her third child just two days after the shock of her father’s sudden death on October 29, 1850. She named the baby boy George in his honor. By then, Kate’s brother John had moved to Indiana and within two years, her twenty-year-old sister Harriet died, thus leaving Christiana to live alone in the Dewalt House. For both emotional and practical reasons, James and Kate Saxton and their three children returned to live with her there. Saxton’s business success also allowed him to share the cost of maintaining the large house.⁴

By the time he sold his hardware business and then a “fancy goods” store, Saxton was already in banking, announcing in the June 21, 1854, Repository that, as founder and president of the new Stark County Bank, he would begin accepting deposits up to $500. Drawn into aspects of civic development, he became a trustee of the new Canton Union School, which had been approved by local vote in 1848 to offer public education. Little is known of Ida’s early life in the house. Her childhood piano, which survives, attests to a later claim that she was an “enthusiastic musician.” The object she most cherished and kept within her sight in any home she lived in for the rest of her life was a small rocking chair, given to her as a Christmas gift when she was a child.

In September 1853, six-year-old Ida began her formal education at the two-story brick Union School, among the first generation of Canton children to do so. By 1855, she was one of five hundred students taught mathematics, English, elementary science, vocal music, and drawing over the course of eight years of primary and grammar school. More than any subject, however, what most endured from her education was the influence of a principal whose reputation had preceded her.

By the time Betsy Mix Cowles was working at the Union School, she had earned a national reputation as founder of the Ohio Women’s Rights Association and the Women’s Anti-Slavery Society. One of Oberlin College’s first graduates and founder of a girls’ academy “for intellectual improvement,” Cowles was highly respected by school trustees James Saxton and Lorenzo Whiting. In 1850, the trio organized the Stark County Common School Association. Saxton even influenced her to join the Presbyterian church and attend services with his family. Ida Saxton’s attachment to Cowles was stronger than that of other students. Her motivation to excel in math in particular, for example, can be attributed to the fact that Cowles believed it important for girls to learn. Cowles also shared the Saxton values. James, a strong abolitionist like his father, joined the Canton Anti-Slavery Society, founded by Whiting with Cowles’s aid, and the local Republican Party, becoming a supporter of Abraham Lincoln for president in 1860.⁵

Two months after the Civil War began, Ida Saxton completed middle school. Because of uncertainty about how the war might affect the family’s finances, her further education was delayed until 1862, and instead Ida began work in support of the Union Army. Accounts of her as a “schoolgirl in the civil war” detailed that Ida spent “many an hour outside of study . . . devoted to the preparing of lint and bandages for the wounded soldiers at the front.” In being what one source called “a leader among the patriotic girls of Canton in every work for the comfort and relief of sick and wounded soldiers,” she directly emulated her mother, who was now working as the Canton Soldiers Relief Association treasurer and hosting meetings in the Dewalt House.

Even though Cowles had left Canton in 1857, Ida’s memory of her mentor remained strong enough to motivate her to leave the haven of home to resume studying under Cowles at Delhi Academy in Clinton County, New York. Contemporaries asserted that Ida was “gifted as a scholar” and “an apt learner,” enough so that James Saxton believed her “advancement speedily warranted the superior advantages” of private boarding school. Already with more formal education than most of her peers, Ida’s training included math, which was intended to prepare her for professional work. James Saxton’s bank thrived not only through honesty and caution but also through his ongoing “study of monetary questions” and familiarity with “every phase of finance, theoretical and practical. . . .” He was confident Ida could also do so, writing Cowles on March 14, 1862: “I commit Ida to your care. I trust you will take the same charge of her that you would if she was your own. I want her education to be more practical than ornamental & particularly want her to pay attention to bookkeeping & branches connected with it.”

Boarding at Delhi Academy, however, left both student and teacher on edge. They both quickly discovered that their abolitionist Republicanism was an unpopular view in the solidly Democratic town. The one highlight Cowles recalled of their time there was news of the Emancipation Proclamation. A final indication of Ida’s solidarity with her teacher is that when Cowles left Delhi after the 1863 spring term, so did Ida, having completed three semesters there.

Ida resumed her education that fall at the Cleveland Female Seminary, renamed the Sanford School during her first semester when it was purchased by the new principal, Solomon N. Sanford. He taught students natural and moral sciences, and his wife and vice principal, Louise, instructed students on hygiene and “domestic economy.” A bonus to this school was that, just outside its gates, the sixteen-year-old could catch the Kinsman Street omnibus to the Cleveland depot and take the railroad to Canton on weekends.

Ida apparently carried a rigorous course load. She took advanced mathematics, grammar, geography, penmanship, and history. She also had the choice of electives in French literature, instrumental music, singing, drawing, painting, and sculpture. Almost certainly she continued her piano instruction in twice-daily classes. Marking her first sustained exposure to foreign languages, Ida excelled in French, Latin, and Greek. The incident that eclipsed all others during her two years at Sanford School took place in her last term. She heard a chilling eyewitness account from classmate and native Indianan Harriet Sherman. In Washington over Easter break, Sherman was thrilled to discover, as she took her seat to watch a comedic play, that the president was also in Ford’s Theater to see Our American Cousin. She recounted being startled to hear gunfire, then was bewildered when the famous actor John Wilkes Booth jumped on stage and ran off. More disturbing was Harriet Sherman’s description of the next moments as she stood near the doors and watched the bloodied and unconscious Abraham Lincoln being carried out, the first president to be assassinated.⁶

Ida graduated from Sanford School two months later and began her last three years of education that fall at Brooke Hall Female Seminary in Media, Pennsylvania. It was a commanding three-story building with a covered piazza running the full length along one side. Its founder and principal Maria Lee Eastman ruled the finishing school with propriety. The school, which opened in 1856 with students drawn from elite mid-Atlantic families, placed a decidedly untraditional emphasis on developing physical strength and athleticism in the girls.

Led by the friendliest of teachers, Harriet “Hettie” Gault, the students began each day with a vigorous walk into town and around the courthouse square. James McKnitt, the school’s young groundskeeper, recalled how Miss Saxton took to the new exercise immediately. Yet even when it wasn’t part of a formal regimen, Ida felt compelled to walk. She was known for leading friends on hikes through the nearby woods, across a footbridge, to the rail station, and back. Other times she challenged herself by running slowly down a steep incline, then vigorously climbing back up again. Even when it rained, she maintained her rigorous exercise with laps of fast-walking, up and down the full length of Brooke Hall’s enclosed front porch.

McKnitt also remembered Ida attending Friday night dances in the school’s large hall and Sunday morning services in the town’s United Church of Christ. She often spent Saturdays in nearby Philadelphia, shopping and then attending the opera, theater, or concerts. On weeknights, she played piano and learned card and parlor games, her favorite being euchre.

During the school day, one source noted, “quickness kept her at the head of her classes, while she spent less time in study than any of the others.” Although Miss Eastman confessed to being “more severe with her than any other,” she later claimed it was to disguise her favoritism for Ida whose intelligence made her stand out. It may have also been to keep her influence and antics in check. “She led the other girls in their enterprises, sometimes mischievous ones,” a later vague account ran. Ida’s empathic individuality, combined with her overtly generous warmth, made her a role model for more insecure...