III.

Early Career

A.

Civil War Soldier

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, McKinley enlisted in the 23rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry. His superior officer was Major Rutherford B. Hayes, a successful lawyer and future Republican president of the United States (1877-1881). The regiment was sent to western Virginia, where it spent a year fighting small Confederate units. McKinley’s bravery under fire impressed Hayes, and he was promoted to commissary sergeant. In September 1862 at the Battle of Antietam, McKinley drove a mule team loaded with meat and coffee through heavy enemy fire to supply troops at the front. For this heroic action he was promoted to second lieutenant and made an aide on Hayes’s staff. In 1865 he left the army with the rank of major.

B.

Lawyer

Returning to Ohio, Major McKinley, as he now preferred to be called, studied law in the office of county judge Charles E. Glidden of Youngstown. In 1866 he attended law school in Albany, New York, and the next year was admitted to the practice of law in Canton, Ohio. He had only moderate success as a lawyer, but he was active in civic affairs and soon became one of Canton’s most popular citizens.

In 1869 McKinley met Ida Saxton, daughter of a wealthy Canton businessman and banker. Two years later they were married, and they had two daughters. One child died after five months, and Mrs. McKinley suffered a mental breakdown. The shock of the second daughter’s death from typhoid fever in 1873 was more than she could bear. For the rest of her life she suffered epileptic seizures and bouts of mental depression.

B.1.

Entrance into Politics

In 1869 McKinley was elected prosecuting attorney of Stark County. He also became active in the Republican Party. In 1876, the year of Hayes’s election to the presidency, McKinley was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

C.

United States Congressman

McKinley served in the Congress of the United States from 1877 to 1891 with the exception of one term. In 1882 the boundaries of his congressional district were changed to prevent him from being reelected, but he won reelection two years later (see Gerrymander). As a congressman he was known as a powerful speaker and a hardworking but very conservative legislator.

C.1.

McKinley Tariff

In Congress, McKinley became the foremost supporter of a high tax on imports, called the tariff. Tariffs on imports were intended to raise money for the government and to protect U.S. businesses from foreign competition by increasing the cost of importing those goods. Industries in Northern urban areas and banking interests tended to favor high tariffs because they helped domestic businesses; agricultural areas in the West and the South tended to oppose them because they made it harder for people to buy cheap foreign goods such as clothing. McKinley said his belief in a laissez-faire economic system, in which government did not interfere with business, did not deter him from demanding high tariffs to protect American industry from foreign competition. In 1890 he wrote the tariff act that bears his name. The McKinley Tariff imposed the highest tariffs that the United States had ever placed on imports.

C.2.

Bimetallism

McKinley took a more moderate stand on the other pressing issue of the day, the demand by Western factions for the unlimited coinage of silver, a position called bimetallism. Western farmers wanted the government to issue more silver dollars, which would raise the prices for their crops; a larger money supply would also decrease the value of a dollar and enable farmers to repay their debts with less valuable money. Large banks and industries, located mostly in the East, wanted to maintain the gold standard, a monetary system in which paper money may be converted, on demand, into gold at a rate fixed by law. This would limit the supply of money, protect creditors, increase the value of their loans, and keep prices high.

The Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, which pledged the government to issue more silver coins, was a compromise between silver advocates and supporters of the gold standard. McKinley voted for it in exchange for support for his tariff bill. His vote angered Eastern bankers and industrialists but helped lessen Western opposition to his stand on the tariff.

D.

Governor of Ohio

Because he was a champion of protective tariffs, as well as an extremely popular politician, McKinley attracted the attention of a Cleveland industrialist, Marcus Alonzo Hanna. Hanna was eager to be the maker of a president and to be the man who exercised power behind the scenes. In 1890, as a result of popular reaction against his tariff and of another Democratic redistricting, McKinley lost his congressional seat. With Hanna’s help, McKinley was elected governor of Ohio in 1891 and reelected in 1893.

As governor, McKinley improved Ohio’s roads and public departments and established an arbitration board to settle labor disputes. He showed some sympathy to workers by carefully avoiding the use of force in breaking a labor strike.

McKinley also had the opportunity to speak out on national issues, and at the Republican National Convention of 1892, Hanna made a brief attempt to win the presidential nomination for him. But when the cause became hopeless, Hanna and McKinley threw their support to the moderate Republican president, Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893), who was seeking a second term.

McKinley’s political career was almost ruined in 1893 when a friend, whose bank notes he had endorsed, went bankrupt and left McKinley responsible for his debt of $130,000. McKinley was saved from ruin only when Hanna and his wealthy friends and associates agreed to repay the debt. As a reflection of the esteem in which he was held, McKinley also received many donations from the public, all of which he returned.

E.

Election of 1896

An economic crisis called the panic of 1893, coming as it did with a Democratic president in office, made the Republicans optimistic about winning the presidency in 1896. In the congressional elections of 1894, McKinley made 371 speeches throughout the nation and was widely seen as man who could restore prosperity.

Hanna left his private business to devote full time to McKinley’s candidacy. He did his work well, and on the first ballot (vote) at the Republican National Convention in 1896, McKinley was nominated for the presidency. Garret A. Hobart of New Jersey received the nomination for vice president.

The reaction of the Eastern industrialists and financiers to McKinley’s nomination was not overly enthusiastic. Used to controlling the candidates of both major parties, they were confident that the Democrats would nominate a stronger supporter of the gold standard.

E.1.

Nomination of Bryan

For three decades farmers in the South and West had been dissatisfied with bankers’ and industrialists’ domination of the federal government. The gold standard had forced prices and wages down. Manufactured goods, favored by high tariffs and corporate practices that restricted competition, fell only slightly, but farm commodity prices declined sharply. This meant that farming communities had less money to buy the manufactured goods for which prices had not fallen.

In the early 1890s the farmers’ revolt came to a head. The Populist Party made great strides throughout the West with a platform of extensive social and economic reforms that would, they argued, curb the power of the wealthy and benefit agriculture. The Populists also attempted to forge an alliance with the more radical labor unions and thus threatened to become a potent third force, following the Democrats and the Republicans, in American politics.

The most important demand of the Populists, as well as of Western Democrats and Republicans, was the free and unlimited coinage of silver at the legal ratio of 16 to 1 with gold. In 1896 the silverites gained control of the Democratic convention and, largely on the strength of his famous “cross of gold” speech, William Jennings Bryan, a 36-year-old orator, journalist, and former United States congressman from Nebraska, was nominated for the presidency. Later in the year the Populists also nominated Bryan, who proceeded to tour the country making fiery speeches for free silver and against wealth, privilege, and business control of the government.

E.2.

The Front Porch Campaign

Alarmed by Bryan’s attack on wealth and privilege, and urged on by Hanna, big businesses rallied in support of McKinley, contributing the unprecedented sum of $3.5 million to the Republican campaign. The money was put to good use. The country was flooded with McKinley campaign pamphlets and posters, and Republican speakers toured the nation to argue against bimetallism and to portray Bryan’s crusade for social justice as a rebellion of fanatics who would destroy the government. To reinforce these arguments, factory managers warned their workers that a victory for Bryan would mean depression and loss of their jobs.

Refusing to compete with Bryan’s around-the-country campaign, McKinley stayed at home, receiving delegates from all over the country and issuing such statements as “Good money never made times hard.” The image of the honest, upright Major McKinley contrasted favorably with that of Bryan, who was challenging many of the American businesses’ most sacred beliefs. Sweeping all the large industrial states, McKinley won the election by 271 electoral votes to Bryan’s 176. He also won the popular vote by 602,555 votes out of 13,620,659 votes cast. The election also had an effect far beyond the naming of a president. It set up coalitions of interests and political alliances that lasted for the next 16 years. The Republicans held the presidency until Democrat Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated in 1913.