Trump Is Right About McKinley

Donald Trump has weighed in on a presidential legacy, albeit not his own. In a wide-ranging July 16, 2024 interview with Bloomberg, Trump proclaimed William McKinley “the most underrated president.” 

Trump is right. McKinley, who guided the ship of state at the dawn of the 20th century, is the most underrated chief executive in our nation’s history. And in many respects his presidency can serve as a model for a United States that is once again undergoing seismic changes.

McKinley is largely forgotten today. Presidential historians often rank him in the middle of the pack. Such rankings are colored by a deep liberal bias—a February 2024 survey put FDR first and Trump dead last—but they do illustrate that McKinley is neither hailed for his greatness nor lamented for his failures. Rather, he’s just overlooked. 

Part of this is due to the man himself; even in his own lifetime McKinley was regarded as somewhat bland. McKinley’s lack of personal papers and, as one biographer noted, his “tendency to listen as much as talk” also contributed to his obscurity. But it is also the result of his premature death. McKinley was murdered by an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, on September 6, 1901, a mere six months into his second term. Some presidential assassinations grant their victims a level of immortality. Lincoln and John F. Kennedy come to mind. But others consign the dead to oblivion. 

Indeed, for more than a century, McKinley has been overshadowed by his larger-than-life successor, Teddy Roosevelt. TR was young, dynamic, and image-conscious. He knew how to court the press and provide good copy for reporters. Roosevelt was 42 when he took office and seemed to embody the youthful nation that he led. He was also famously hyperactive and, at times, erratic. 

The stolid McKinley was Roosevelt’s opposite. He was unknowable. The wife of one of his rivals in Ohio politics, Joseph Foraker, once charged that McKinley was a man of “masks,” his inner thoughts and emotions well concealed. Roosevelt’s own daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, famously said that her father wanted to be the “the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.” By contrast, the unassuming McKinley exuded the air of a man just happy to be invited. 

Roosevelt took the helm right as America became a world power. He was the perfect president for the new media age. TR’s exploits, from hunting exotic creatures to brokering peace between Russia and Japan, served as perfect fodder for press barons like William Randolph Hearst.

But McKinley was popular in his lifetime, and he built the edifice that TR stood on. His death prompted widespread mourning. McKinley was the only president between Ulysses Grant and Woodrow Wilson—a span of nearly forty years—to be elected to two terms. And his electoral victories over his Democratic opponent, the perennial candidate, William Jennings Bryan, were resounding. In fact, they reshaped the American landscape. 

McKinley’s 1896 victory over Bryan is widely regarded as one of a handful of political realignments in U.S. history. Modern Republican strategists like Kevin Phillips, who advised Richard Nixon, to Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s guru, have cited the 1896 realignment as a model—and for good reason. From 1896 until Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1932, Republicans occupied the executive branch for all but eight years. The sole Democratic occupant, Woodrow Wilson, only took office thanks to a split in the Republican party created by TR in 1912.

McKinley, Phillips noted, was the “political architect who ended the two-decade national stalemate” that had existed since 1876, “turning a weakened Civil War coalition to a new full-fledged industrial GOP majority,” thereby making him “the most important nineteenth-century Republican after Lincoln.” McKinley remade the GOP, and “he did so by beating, rather than submitting to, the Eastern machine forces.” And, as Phillips observes, McKinley did so by expanding the GOP to include a broader working-class constituency. “Not since Lincoln, who publicly upheld unions…had a Republican nominee so embraced labor.” 

McKinley famously embraced tariffs, but he also focused on jobs and employment—“the full dinner pail,” as it was called. By fighting for a conservative working-class party, McKinley was doing what Benjamin Disraeli had done three decades before in the United Kingdom. But while Disraeli is regarded as a seminal figure, McKinley is depicted as an unsophisticated Midwestern rube, his triumphs the fruit of the labor of others.

Indeed, historians have often presented McKinley as incidental to the realignment that he helped forge. They portray wealthy industrialists and key advisers like Mark Hanna as being more responsible for McKinley’s electoral accomplishments. The notion that McKinley was weak and the tool of greater men was pushed by his contemporary enemies and has endured for years afterward. McKinley, of course, wasn’t around to dispute the portrayal.

Indeed, one later historian, noting that events always seemed to go McKinley’s way despite his lack of a heavy hand, referred to the 25th president as a “tantalizing enigma.” McKinley, the former editor of The American Conservative Robert Merry observed, “never moved in a straight line, seldom declared where he wanted to take the country, [but] somehow moved people and events from the shadows. He rarely twisted arms in efforts at political persuasion, never raised his voice in political cajolery [and] didn’t visibly seek revenge.” Nonetheless, “he always seemed to outmaneuver his rivals and get his way.”

McKinley, Merry pointed out, was the “architect of the American century.”

As the historian Lewis Gould has observed, McKinley should be regarded as the first modern president. He significantly expanded, and reorganized, the White House staff, bringing it into the modern era. Dwight Eisenhower, a career military officer, was the first president to formally create the office of Chief of Staff. But the office has its origins in the McKinley administration, when the former Ohio governor chose George Cortelyou to be his private secretary. Prior presidents had secretaries, of course. But Cortelyou’s flair for organization and expansive powers were noteworthy. A man who was working as a post office clerk a mere decade before McKinley elevated him would eventually go on to become the U.S. Secretary of Commerce and Labor, the Secretary of Treasury, and the head of the Republican National Committee.

As Phillips noted in his 2003 biography, McKinley was the first president to extensively use the telephone, develop systematized press operations, to have a news summary, and to make the White House a news center. The Spanish–American War would be the first conflict to be managed from a White House war room connected to military headquarters in Washington and the field by telephone and telegraph. Both in the 1896 campaign and afterward, McKinley used new media’s power in innovative ways. McKinley also traveled broadly. Prior to his assassination, he was planning trips that would have made him the first president to travel abroad—trips that he thought reflected America’s newfound power and status.

McKinley was unique in another respect. He was one of the few occupants of the Oval Office to be a successful wartime president. Despite later portrayals, McKinley wasn’t an avowed imperialist; he had qualms about the annexation of Hawaii and was hardly pushing for U.S. involvement in the conflict with Spain. Yet once he had decided on the use of force, he wanted it to be overwhelming. 

In foreign affairs, McKinley wasn’t a bully, as Bryan and other critics alleged, but he wasn’t a man for half-measures either. As he said in his inaugural address: “We want no wars of conquest; we must avoid the temptation of territorial aggression. War should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed; peace is preferable to war in almost every contingency.” McKinley, the last veteran of the U.S. Civil War to occupy the White House, once told the White House physician: “I have been through one war; I have seen the dead piled up; and I do not want to see another.”

The 25th president not only reshaped American domestic politics, but he also reoriented U.S. foreign policy. As Phillips notes, “he helped to shape and preview America’s early-twentieth-century alliances and hostilities: on one hand, entente with Britain and an off-and-on commitment to the territorial integrity of China, and on the other, mounting Caribbean and Pacific tensions with Germany and Japan.” In shoring up relations with Britain, McKinley helped set the stage for what would become the fabled and long-enduring “special relationship.” McKinley took office when the international system was in flux. Old empires, like Spain, the Qing dynasty in China, and the Ottoman Empire, were on their way out, while new powers, notably Germany and Japan, were rising. He presciently recognized the growing importance of what today is called the Indo-Pacific. McKinley helped reshape American foreign policy for a new era.

Given his deserved reputation as a fierce proponent of tariffs—Trump lauded him as the “tariff king”—it is unsurprising that McKinley viewed foreign affairs through the prism of markets and trade. McKinley pushed for trade reciprocity, prioritizing access for U.S. exports. McKinley was an advocate for both American manufacturing and the working man, viewing both as key to the nation’s health. For McKinley, military power was inseparable from economic power—a truism that American leaders today would do well to remember.

John Hay, a one time secretary to Abraham Lincoln who served as McKinley’s ambassador to Great Britain before becoming his, and then TR’s, secretary of state, had this to say: “In dealing with foreign powers he will rank with the greatest of our diplomatists. It was a world of which he had little special knowledge before coming to the presidency. But his marvelous adaptability was in nothing more remarkable than in the firm grasp he immediately displayed in international relations. In preparing for war and in the restoration of peace he was alike adroit, courteous and far-sighted.” High praise from someone who served, and intimately knew, both Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

Sometimes the man makes the moment, and sometimes the moment makes the man. McKinley can’t fairly be said to have done either. But the man was right for the moment. He changed both America itself, as well as America’s place in the world. And his presidency, with all its enduring successes, should serve as a model for his successors.

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