Eliot Vestner - Ragtime in the White House: War, Race, and the Presidency in the Time of William McKinley

In the first year of the twentieth century William McKinley, twenty-fifth president of the United States, stood at the beginning of his second term, having decisively defeated his Democratic opponent, William Jennings Bryan. He dominated American politics as no other president since Abraham Lincoln. Nine months later he was dead, shot down in cold blood by an assassin, succeeded by his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt.

History played a trick on McKinley. He has been consigned to the shadows between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, vilified or ignored by historians from Charles Beard, the pre-eminent American historian of the early twentieth century and a Marxist, to younger historians raised on the activist presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Roosevelt. It is a richly undeserved fate.

A strong and important president, McKinley accomplished a lot in his first term. He won a war and forced the last European power from the Western Hemisphere; brought the nation out of one of our worst depressions; secured legislation protecting the gold standard, which anchored American monetary policy until the Nixon years; wrenched America from its international isolation; extended the reach of American power and influence across the Atlantic and Pacific; took the first steps toward building the Panama Canal; and put in place army reforms that prepared the nation to fight a world war in Europe. Under McKinley, the nation became a world power with global interests, respected and feared. The challenges he faced are still alive and unresolved. Presidents who committed our soldiers to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan might have learned about the problems of taking on determined adversaries in faraway countries by studying McKinleys war in the Philippines.

When McKinley was first inaugurated in March 1897 few predicted a successful presidency for him. There were many, friends and foes alike, who questioned what, if anything, lay below the surface of his kindly and charming personality. Did he have the backbone to be president in dangerous times? After his re-election in 1900, many of the doubters and nay-sayers changed their tune. So stands William McKinley at the threshold of his second administration, said the editor of the Chicago Tribune, who admitted to having been one of the doubters, every pledge redeemed, every awkward situation bravely met and wisely resolved, cool, well-poised, masterful, a man who yields only to have his every way in the end. Henry Macfarland, another doubter, similarly admitted in a long Atlantic Monthly article that McKinley had proved an outstanding, even great, president.

Critical to McKinleys success was his mastery of Congress. Senators, accustomed to running things, had assumed that the good-natured McKinley would do as he was told. Having served in Congress, he had a healthy respect for the role of that body as a co-equal branch of government and knew that congressional politics was personal. He made time to see members of both parties, treated everyone with charm and courtesy, and listened to what they had to say. Confronted with opposition, he didnt bully or browbeat, but relied on gentle persuasion. Illinois Senator Shelby Cullom said of him, We have never had a president who had more influence with Congress. Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts, a friend and sometime opponent, said of McKinley, With his great wisdom and tact... he succeeded in establishing an influence over the... Senate not, I think, equaled from the beginning of the Government except possibly by Andrew Jackson.

Some contemporaries and historians looking back at McKinley and his times conceded his winning personality but claimed he was weak and lacking in courage. That he was neither loud nor boastful, moved cautiously, and held his cards close suggested to many that he was not a strong leader. Charles Olcott, writing the first major McKinley biography in 1916, interviewed Elihu Root, the leading member of both the McKinley and Roosevelt cabinets. He asked Root, Why do people say that McKinley was a charming man but not a strong character? Root replied with emphasis:

That is a great mistake! He had a way of handling men so that they thought his ideas were their own. I have talked with him again and again before a cabinet meeting and found that his ideas were fixed and his mind firmly made up. He would then present the subject to the cabinet in such a way as not to express his own decision, but yet bring about an agreement exactly along the lines of his original ideas, while the members often thought the ideas were theirs. He was a man of great power because he was absolutely indifferent to credit. His great desire was to get it done. He cared nothing about the credit, but McKinley