The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters

Rove, Karl

ISBN 10: 1442396407 ISBN 13: 9781442396401

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2015

Synopsis

From New York Times bestselling author and political mastermind Karl Rove comes a fresh look at President William McKinley who found a message that healed his nation, pried his party away from its bosses, and extended its reach to forge a governing majority that lasted thirty years.

Many of the changes that the country experienced in 1896 match those of today: A rising immigrant population made traditional white Protestants a shrinking share of the electorate, an economic upheaval led to rising inequality, and there was little common ground between the two parties. McKinley’s campaign found answers to many of these challenges, which is why it is so relevant to what ails our politics now.

A talented politician and reserved Ohioan, McKinley (called “The Major”) changed the arc of American history by running the first truly modern presidential campaign. Knowing he didn’t stand a chance with the GOP’s traditional base of supporters, he did the unthinkable and reached out to diverse ethnic groups, including openly seeking the endorsement of Catholic Church leaders. Running on the slogan “The Man Against the Bosses,” McKinley also took on the moneymen who controlled the party by doling out favors. He even deployed what we would consider modern tactics, including micro-targeting voters with the use of the latest technology. Above all, he offered bold and controversial answers to the nation’s most pressing challenge: how to make a new, more global economy work for everyone. And although he alienated factions within his party and longtime allies, he won the White House.

The 1896 election is a compelling drama in its own right, but McKinley’s brilliant strategies offer important and powerful lessons for both political parties today.

About this title

About the Author

Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. He now writes a weekly op-ed for The Wall Street Journal and is a Fox News contributor. Before he became known as “The Architect” of President Bush’s 2000 and 2004 campaigns, Rove was president of Karl Rove + Company, an Austin-based public affairs firm that was involved in over seventy-five campaigns for Republican candidates for president, governor and senator, as well as handling non-partisan causes and non-profit groups.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Triumph of William McKinley CHAPTER 1

Sense of Duty

On July 24, 1864, a twenty-one-year-old Union first lieutenant was sent on a suicide mission near Kernstown, Virginia. An officer in General George Crook’s Army of the Kanawha, he was ordered to ride across an exposed battlefield swept by Rebel musket and artillery fire and tell the men of the 13th West Virginia to withdraw before they were overrun and cut to pieces by Confederates under General Jubal Early, who were close to splitting the Union left.

If the Rebels succeeded in driving Union forces out of the Shenandoah Valley, they might threaten Washington, D.C., further erode Northern support for the war, undercut Lincoln’s reelection, and strengthen the South’s chances of ending the conflict through a negotiated settlement with a politically divided North.

The lieutenant probably wasn’t concerned about these details as he mounted his horse. He was focused on staying alive. Comrades saw him charge “through the open fields, over fences, over ditches” as cannon fire and bullets sprayed the battleground. His tent mate thought he had been hit by an exploding shell, but a “wiry little brown horse” emerged from the smoke with its rider erect and unhurt. He reached the West Virginians and ordered them to withdraw.1

The lieutenant, William McKinley Jr., was to become the twenty-fifth president of the United States. Upon returning from his ride, his commanding officer—Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes, himself a future president from Ohio—said, “I never expected to see you in life again.”2

SOME HISTORIANS WRONGLY CREDIT McKinley’s winning the White House in 1896 to Marcus Alonzo “Mark” Hanna, a wealthy iron and coal magnate turned political power broker. Others are content to overlook McKinley, instead spotlighting his second vice president and successor, Theodore Roosevelt.

Yet in 1896 McKinley outmaneuvered the political bosses within his own party to win the Republican nomination and then defeated the Democrats’ young, charismatic spokesman for the rising Populist movement—William Jennings Bryan—for the presidency. In the process, McKinley modernized the Republican Party by attracting to it workers, new immigrants, and the growing middle class, allowing the GOP and its policies to dominate politics for the next thirty-six years.

McKinley was the first president in more than two decades to win with a significant popular majority. He took office during a severe, prolonged depression that was quickly replaced by strong growth and prosperity on his watch. He annexed Hawaii and waged a short, successful war with Spain that freed Cuba and gave America control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. He instituted policies that ensured America would be recognized as a global economic and military power. Enormously popular, he was easily reelected, only to die at an assassin’s hands six months into his second term.3

For much of the nineteenth century, the United States had been a nation divided. The period after the Civil War saw growing discord between the agrarian South and West and the industrialized North and East. There was friction between debtors worried about their mortgages and loans and the merchants, bankers, investors, and depositors who had lent them the money. There was increasing antagonism between labor and management, and profound disagreements over how the economy should be organized and its benefits distributed. All this was reflected in brutal political battles over esoteric issues like tariffs and currency that nonetheless deeply affected the lives of ordinary people.

In many ways, these clashes weren’t about economics—they were about competing visions for America. Through the nineteenth century, the United States filled the frontier with settlers and established firm control over the continent. Yet these pioneers were rocked by periodic financial panics and lived on loans from merchants and bankers until their crops came in, leading some to blame Eastern financiers for fleecing them as they carved out lives far from the Eastern seaboard’s money centers. Some Americans resented those who appeared to dominate the nation’s political institutions, and as the century drew to a close, these critics became increasingly vocal. While an agrarian protest movement was sweeping the South, the Plains, and parts of the Midwest, labor was also organizing across the country, a result of increased industrialization.4

In 1896, McKinley emerged as a political leader uniquely suited for the moment. He understood and championed blue-collar voters while drawing support from captains of industry. He was from a small town in rural Ohio, but as president presided over a rapidly modernizing urban industrial power. His economic concerns appeared parochial, but he viewed them through a national lens. The last of the Civil War generation to occupy the White House, he helped unite the country after decades of division.

A SHADOW HAS BEEN cast on McKinley’s reputation by a remark he made that he learned more from people than from books. Though he was well read and well educated, biographers still assumed the throwaway line justified a narrative that William McKinley was not particularly thoughtful or intellectually curious. Yet his election is widely seen as one of the most consequential in American history, leading to a dramatic political realignment.5

So was McKinley a fortunate man who rose through luck and the guidance of others, as popular commentary suggests? Or was he a leader, very much in control of his own destiny, content to steer quietly but deliberately, focused on reaching goals more than on claiming credit?

In fact, McKinley was a principled man with strong convictions. He was ambitious—most who attain the White House are—but for him, his ambition seems to have been chiefly driven by principles.

Understanding McKinley starts with knowing his forebears, who sprang from Scotland, moved to Ireland, and then came to America, taking up residence in Pennsylvania and, finally, Niles, Ohio, where the future president was born January 29, 1843, the seventh of nine children.6

The Scotch-Irish made an impact on America that far outweighs their numbers. Settling on the frontier, many Scotch-Irish families cut farms out of dense forests while suffering hunger and deprivation and repelling Indian attacks. The story of McKinley’s ancestors follows this narrative. He had men on both sides of his family who fought in the American Revolution, after which his forebears moved west to Ohio, when the state was still a fertile wilderness. His grandfather and father were ironmongers, digging ore out of hillsides, chopping wood, tending fires, and smelting metal in small furnaces.7

Hanna—who had a more mangled yet somewhat similar lineage—once said McKinley received all the Scottish reticence of their shared heritage, while he got all the Irishman’s gregariousness. There was something to the remark. Hanna enjoyed politics’ jocular side, while McKinley remained personally reserved from childhood to the White House.

Reserved shouldn’t imply disengaged. The wife of McKinley’s principal Ohio political rival once said he was a man who wore many “masks,” making it hard to read his emotions or intentions. McKinley’s reserved nature wasn’t just artifice. It was the deliberate approach of a disciplined man who went about his business in a systematic way. He didn’t let his emotions cloud sound decision making or affect his relations with others.8

McKinley’s parents were Methodists and held a deep faith common on the frontier. His father was especially religious, writing his then-forty-one-year-old son in 1884 upon hearing of a family medical crisis to ask, “Is your faith strong[?]” Reserved like his son, Father McKinley was a frugal hard worker with a reputation for integrity. While not well educated, the elder McKinley nonetheless read widely and was fond of reciting favorite lines from a prized volume of Shakespeare.9

Young William was close to both his parents—especially his mother, as his father was often away on business. Nancy Allison McKinley descended from Puritans who fled Old World religious persecution and helped William Penn found Pennsylvania. In the New World, her ancestors maintained their faith’s quiet intensity. Nancy had charge of the Niles Methodist church, keeping it clean and well maintained as if it were her home. A neighbor remembered she “ran the church, all but the preaching.” Mother McKinley (as she became known) tended to ailing friends and boarded traveling ministers and teachers in the family’s home. She also served as the small town’s peacemaker, resolving quarrels and neighborhood disputes.10

In Niles, where the family lived until William Jr. was nine years old, the McKinleys occupied a long, narrow wood-framed home with a general store on one side—close quarters where a mother could keep her children constantly engaged in constructive activity. All her children had chores and were expected to rise early and turn in early. As a boy and young man, William would return home from school to help his mother with her work around the house.11

The McKinley home was not without education or culture. The family had a Bible and, unusual for the time, a small library that included David Hume’s History of England, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Charles Dickens’s early works. Family members regularly read many of the nation’s leading periodicals, including Atlantic Monthly (reportedly favored by William) and Horace Greeley’s antislavery Weekly Tribune.

McKinley developed a lifelong fondness for the poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Lord Byron, reflecting a romantic streak. The sentiments of these writers shaped his character. Whittier was a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Longfellow was an active abolitionist and used his poetry to draw attention to the cruelty of treating people as property.12

Because the senior McKinley was not well educated, he wanted his children to be. So the family left Niles and resettled in Poland, Ohio, which had a better school. McKinley was a serious scholar who spent considerable time on his studies. Yet while working part-time at the post office or at other odd jobs, he still found time to help organize his school’s “Debating and Literary Society,” where he excelled at speaking and arguing. At seventeen, he graduated from the high school and, because of his grades and maturity, was accepted as a junior at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Sadly, he fell ill his first semester in 1860 and left after a few weeks.13

William’s mother long desired for him to enter the ministry and insisted the family regularly attend church, Sunday school, tent revivals, and camp meetings. Young McKinley needed little encouragement. Enrolling in Sunday school even before starting regular school, he was always dedicated and sincere in his faith. “God is the being above all to be loved, and served,” he once said. He studied the Bible with the “especial thoroughness” that would characterize his future work in law and politics. He picked up some Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and was “eternally asking questions” in Sunday school, going “to the bottom of the subject,” as one acquaintance later recalled.14

At fifteen, McKinley felt strong enough in his faith to be baptized into the Niles Methodist Church at a camp meeting in 1858. For the rest of his life, through the Civil War’s brutal combat, his wife’s long illness, and in trying political battles that (on occasion) resulted in his defeat, McKinley’s faith informed his character and his relationships with others. It gave him optimism that God’s plan was working in his life and in the world. The Christian acceptance of life’s tribulations in “Nearer My God to Thee” made it his favorite hymn.15

The Weekly Tribune’s presence in the McKinley home hints at another force that shaped McKinley’s character—an intense opposition to slavery. Ohio was a northern state, but McKinley grew up a short distance from the Ohio River—and on the other bank was a slave state, Virginia, later home to the capital of the Confederacy. The Underground Railroad ran through northeast Ohio near where McKinley lived. Slavery’s existence in a neighboring state gave people in Northern border states an intimate personal experience with the cruelty of human bondage that some came to deplore. Northerners like McKinley were incensed when the new federal Fugitive Slave Act required them to capture and return any escaped bondsmen. The senior McKinley was a staunch Free Soil man; he and his wife were passionately against slavery.16

As a consequence, so was young McKinley. Mother McKinley later described the family as “very strong abolitionists” and said her son “early imbibed very radical views regarding the enslavement of the colored race.” He even argued with pro-slavery Democrats who worked at a local tannery. It is unlikely that the teenager won them over, but he had formed a core principle that would govern his life. Slavery was wrong and must be resisted. Every person—regardless of color—ought to be free.17

Slavery wasn’t the only social force to shape McKinley’s views and character. He came of age as the world around him began to take off. Like in other states in the emerging Midwest, Ohio’s population and industries boomed, especially as the opening of canal systems gave its farms, mines, and nascent factories access to global markets in the 1820s and ’30s. When made a state in 1803, Ohio had 45,000 citizens. By 1850, there were 1,980,000.18

These Ohioans came from Ireland, England, Germany, and elsewhere in America, all drawn by fertile land, opportunity, and the promise of prosperity. Ohio became more politically critical, with an ever-rising number of congressmen as its population grew, and a new reputation as a battleground in which presidential elections were settled. Competition between the parties was fierce in this politically divided state. From the Civil War to the century’s end, the five Republicans elected president were born in Ohio.19

Agriculture initially drove Ohio’s economy. In the 1840s, Ohio was a leading producer of wheat, corn, and, because corn grows animals, livestock and wool as well. But by the Civil War, coal and iron had also become pillars of its economy and Ohio had more miles of railroad track than any other state. This was key to the state’s prosperity. With railroads and waterways, farmers and manufacturers could reach and profit from global markets, and in war, the rails could deliver men and matériel to the front quickly.20

Ohio continued its rapid expansion after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox and, like other Midwest states, became a center of agricultural and industrial innovation as Ohioans developed “reapers, seed drills, steel plows, cultivators, binders, and steam threshing machines” and created a slew of innovative companies that became household names while transforming commerce, among them Procter & Gamble, founded in Cincinnati when William Procter (a candlemaker) and James Gamble (a soap maker’s apprentice) joined forces in 1837; National Cash Register, founded in Dayton in 1884; and Standard Oil Company (which John D. Rockefeller took to national prominence), founded in Cleveland in 1870.21

In short, the Ohio into which McKinley was born and to which he returned after combat reflected America’s changing condition. As in many rapidly expanding economies, the influx of people and uneven growth creat...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1442396407
• ISBN 13: 9781442396401
• Binding: Audio CD
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 16