Really Cool Stuff about William McKinley
1. He was the self-imposed journalist of the Poland Guards during the war. “As the appointed ‘correspondent’ of the Poland Guards company, Private McKinley began writing letters that were published in the Mahoning Register, the newspaper in nearby Youngstown” (p. 21).
2. In one of those odd historical coincidences, it was due to the influence of Rutherford Hayes that McKinley was promoted at all during the war. “When the Twenty-third again suffered heavy casualties, its commander, Colonel Rutherford B Hayes, the future president, recommended McKinley for a vacant lieutenancy, and he received the commission personally from Ohio Governor David Tod in November. In January 1863, Hayes, now commanding a brigade of Ohioans, made Lieutenant McKinley the brigade quartermaster, supervising clerks, a carpenter, a forage master, a wagon master, a harness master, two blacksmiths, and five teamsters” (p. 21-22).
3. McKinley was the last veteran of the Civil War to be president of the United States.
4. He was a proponent of women’s rights throughout his political tenure. “McKinley, alone among nineteenth-century presidents, received an honorary doctorate from two women’s colleges, Smith and Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts” (p. 47).
5. His reelection as governor of Ohio was a major victory for the Republicans. “His record, together with the popular economic reaction against Cleveland and the Democrats, reelected him in 1893 with the highest share of the total vote given any Ohio governor since the Unionist coalition of the Civil War” (p. 67).
6. Yellow Journalism was at its height during this period in history, pitting William Randolph Hearst against Joseph Pulitzer. In fact, many claimed that it was due to the yellow press that the Spanish-American War occurred at all.
7. As mentioned earlier, the Spanish-American War was the shortest war in United States history.
8. I have to admit something here—I was wrong. That’s right, folks. Make a note. I erroneously stated in the Benjamin Harrison blog that he was the president who annexed Hawaii. However, that was incorrect—it was actually McKinley. What confused me was that Harrison really did send the treaty of annexation to Congress but Cleveland, upon taking office, removed it from congressional consideration. McKinley then had to send it back to Congress where it eventually was passed. “Even before the peace protocol with Spain, McKinley used his new popularity and support in Congress to promote his agenda for US expansion. The Senate approved annexation of Hawaii on July 7 [1898]” (p. 99).
9. McKinley, unlike Cleveland, understood the growing power of the press. “Cultivation of the press began in June, a month after the battle of Manila Bay, when efforts were made by the Vanderbilts to bar reporters from a McKinley visit to one of the family mansions. The word came back: no press, then no presidential visit. Six months later, the first official White House reception for the press was schedule shortly after Christmas” (p. 146).
10. Medically, there were still plenty of mistakes when, after being shot, McKinley was treated by the doctors. It seemed like American doctors back then were pathetically afraid of technological advances in their field. With Garfield’s medical staff, they were wary of antisepsis while McKinley’s doctors looked askance at the new-fangled x-ray machine. This relatively new invention was on display at the very Pan-American Exposition that McKinley was attending when he was shot. The technology was right there and possibly could have saved the president’s life (they couldn’t find the bullet, remember?) but the doctors didn’t want to use it because they didn’t know how it would affect the president’s body. Their wariness is highly understandable but if they had taken that risk, especially since the president would die shortly thereafter, could have been a boon to the evolution of medical science. And might have saved McKinley’s life. History is simply filled with what-ifs, right?
I thought Kevin Phillips was a very witty author with a very keen eye into the McKinley era but I was not hot about the layout of this book. Like all the other books in the American Presidents Series I assumed that this would be a biography of McKinley when in reality it was more of an in-depth essay into the character and times of McKinley. Needless to say, this format made it extremely difficult for me to not only gather concrete information about our 25th president but also to get any sort of chronological idea of what was going on. Phillips just schmoozed over McKinley’s early years (you’ll notice that I barely have anything to write) and the next thing I know—we’re at the Civil War. What the…! I have to shamefacedly admit here that I wiki’d McKinley a good deal just so that I could piece together the important events in his life.
But I’m certainly not saying that this is a terribly written book. On the contrary, I though Phillips, like I mentioned earlier, was witty and knowledgeable. Here’s just a sample of what I liked about Phillips’ writing style. “Pennsylvania and Ohio, the American seat of Vulcan, also represented a monetary transition zone where Eastern financial support for the gold standard gave way to Midwestern and Western demand for currency expansion friendly to borrowers and continued fast growth” (p. 49). I liked the allusion to “the American seat of Vulcan.” Here’s another one. “However, Republican national platforms straddled to cater to the Midwest and West—and in 1896, as chapter 5 will pursue, McKinley’s own platform, guided by himself and Mark Hanna, evolved through straddlebug nuances to a final-hour bimetallic-hedged gold commitment that Niccolo Machiavelli himself would have found suitably Florentine in its timing and effect” (p. 52-53).
Phillips also gives quite a good amount of background information on typically archaic political issues such as the gold/silver standard and tariffs. I have to admit that I’ve read about tariffs a good deal in these presidential bios and it wasn’t until this book that I got a decent understanding of what each one does!
I also wondered why McKinley, who is credited as being the first modern president, is ranked in the lower portion of the presidential spectrum. Phillips addresses this issue immediately in the introduction. “The recent consensus of historians has pegged him somewhere in the ho-hum midsection of presidential ratings, and small wonder. Too many dismissive paragraphs, thoughtless sentences, and inaccurate descriptions still nuture the false public impression of a cultural and intellectual mediocrity, however popular, who toadied to business as a puppet of Wall Street” (p. 2). So, according to Phillips, it was due to the bad press surrounding McKinley while he was alive that has since impugned his reputation to this day. It also didn’t help that right as he started his 2nd term—who knows what would have happened—he is assassinated and various questions about McKinley remain unanswered.
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