At Minneapolis, McKinley emerged as one of his party’s most formidable leaders, chosen by delegates as the convention’s permanent chairman. Hanna, though not a delegate, showed up and positioned himself to exploit any McKinley boomlet that might arise as delegates struggled with what to do about their incumbent president, Harrison, who clearly was unpopular around the country. But Harrison had the votes for renomination, and the convention unenthusiastically accepted his inevitability. McKinley objected when the Ohio delegation cast all but one of its votes for him, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Ultimately he received 182 first-ballot votes to Harrison’s 535 and 183 for Blaine. The governor was particularly glad to be off the ticket because he suspected that 1892 was going to be just as treacherous for Republicans as 1890 had been.
He was right. Although the party picked up thirty-eight House seats (offsetting the eighty-five-seat loss of 1890), it lost nine Senate seats, and former president Cleveland engineered a White House return with a plurality of 372,639 votes over Harrison. McKinley had been wise to bide his time on the presidential front. He gained added national stature during the 1892 campaign year even as his party floundered.
Then came a development that threatened to destroy his political career. In February 1893, as McKinley was traveling to New York City to pick up Ida from medical treatment and deliver a banquet speech, he received an urgent telegram from his office during a train stop at Dunkirk, New York. The wire reported that McKinley’s old friend, Robert L. Walker, the Youngstown industrialist and McKinley benefactor, was facing bankruptcy. The Major had cosigned various Walker loans amounting to $17,000, largely because Walker had helped finance his law studies at Albany a quarter century before and had contributed $2,000 to each of McKinley’s congressional campaigns. McKinley felt beholden to the man and believed his financial standing to be rock solid.
What he didn’t know was that Walker had got himself hopelessly overextended in his business ventures as a severe economic downturn began gathering momentum in 1892. When the beleaguered entrepreneur had asked McKinley to sign various routine loan extensions, they actually had been notes in blank that Walker had then inflated into massive liabilities, undertaken in a desperate effort to save his businesses and personal fortune. For McKinley, it now appeared, the exposure might be $100,000 or more, far beyond his assets.
Getting the news of Walker’s imminent bankruptcy on a Thursday, the governor promptly canceled his speech and asked Abner McKinley to fetch Ida from New York and escort her back to Ohio, where a crisis-management effort would soon ensue. He then booked train passage to Youngstown, where he intended to issue stern words to Walker and assess the magnitude of his own liability. Reaching Walker’s residence on Friday, amid newspaper accounts of the fiasco, he found the fallen entrepreneur in such a state of anguish that McKinley’s famous compassion prevailed over his anger. Instead of berating Walker as he had intended, he offered words of solace.
“Have courage, Robert, have courage,” said the aggrieved victim to the man whose fraudulent behavior could likely destroy his political career. “Everything will come out all right.”
But with newspapers now furiously following the story, he had little time for compassion. On Friday evening he issued a statement designed to get ahead of the headlines and assure voters that he would never shirk his financial obligations. “I will pay every note of Mr. Walker’s on which I am endorser,” he said. “I must understand the situation before I can rest for my whole future, politically and financially, is involved in this.” Then he rushed to Cleveland to consult with a close friend and political patron named Myron Herrick, a wealthy lawyer and entrepreneur whom Hanna had drawn into Ohio politics and the McKinley circle. While the governor was en route to Cleveland, Herrick summoned Ida by wire to his Cleveland mansion. “Do not worry over the Walker matter,” he added to soothe her concerns. “Your husband has friends who will see that every obligation bearing his name will be paid and no stain will blot his fair name.” The problem, however, was that having his friends pay off his debts could in itself constitute a bit of a stain.
At stake was a political career carefully nurtured over many years to position the Major for a presidential pursuit. The governor, now fifty years old, could address the financial crisis without much exertion by abandoning politics and becoming a railroad lawyer or joining a prestigious law firm in New York or Chicago. Many such opportunities would open up, and he expressed a willingness to pursue that course if necessary. But there would be no return to the political world he loved so thoroughly, and he wished to avoid that fate if possible. Beyond that, it wasn’t clear how voters would assess the implications of his apparent bad judgment in signing what amounted to blank checks to a swindler.
On Saturday, Herman Henry Kohlsaat, a wealthy Chicago businessman, newspaper publisher, and devoted McKinley confidant, spotted a newspaper article on the governor’s predicament. He wired his friend: “Have just read of your misfortune. My purse is open to you. . . . Will meet you anywhere you say in Ohio.” McKinley asked Kohlsaat to take an overnight train to Cleveland. When he arrived at nine the next morning, McKinley greeted him at the train station with downcast demeanor and a look of crisis about him—“pale and wan, with dark rings under his eyes,” as Kohlsaat later recalled. The governor placed his hand upon his friend’s shoulder but was too beset with emotion to speak. His eyes welled up with tears. Kohlsaat asked about the magnitude of the debt.
“I don’t know,” replied the governor, in obvious bewilderment. It soon transpired that he was on the hook for about $130,000—“in excess of anything I dreamed of,” McKinley told his friends.
Others appeared at the Herrick residence to join the crisis-management deliberations, among them William Day of Canton, the prominent lawyer and wise counselor; wartime buddy Russell Hastings; and John Tod, wealthy son of a former Ohio governor. Hanna was delayed by business but came when he could. Ida arrived on Saturday, more composed than some participants had expected. Addressing the assembled men in the Herricks’ ground-floor parlor, she announced her resolve to liquidate her jewelry and inheritance assets, worth an estimated $75,000, to help defray the debt. When she was urged to abandon that idea, she became curt.
“My husband has done everything for me all my life,” she snapped. “Do you mean to deny me the privilege of doing as I please with my own property to help him now?”
McKinley, always averse to tense situations (and perhaps averse to her suggestion), took Ida upstairs for a private talk. In their absence, Tod expressed strenuous objections to tapping into her wealth.
“Because McKinley has made a fool of himself, why should Mrs. McKinley be a pauper?” Tod demanded.
“Because,” replied Kohlsaat with equal asperity, “if McKinley is to stay in politics he must show clean hands and not be open to the charge he has put his property in his wife’s name.”
Kohlsaat’s rejoinder got to the heart of the matter: the imperative of saving McKinley’s political career. The weekend session in Cleveland yielded an agreement that Herrick, Day, Kohlsaat, and Hanna would place McKinley’s assets into a trust and begin acquiring his outstanding obligations. At Ida’s insistence, a separate trust was established, under Hanna’s supervision, for her assets, although Hanna indicated he wouldn’t let them slip into the financial vortex except as a last resort. Under the arrangement, McKinley was to have no knowledge of the workings of the trusts.
He was profoundly touched by his friends’ generosity. In a February 23 letter to the Herricks, he wrote that he and Ida “shall never forget your tender and loving hospitality.” He said his mail was overflowing with sympathy “and the most earnest protest against Mrs. McKinley turning over her property.” Three days later, after hearing from Kohlsaat about Chicago efforts to raise money for the trust fund, he wrote to his Chicago friend, “The pen will not—can not speak what is in my heart this morning, your letter is so full of personal sweetness. . . . Did ever man and wife have such friends an
d how can we ever repay them?” He reported that his mail was “abounding with kindness,” as well as offers of material assistance.
But, hearing that his friends were raising funds to retire his debts outright, the governor objected strenuously. On March 14 he wrote to the designated trustees, insisting that no contributions from friends and supporters should be used to cancel his debts. While he accepted the idea of the fund consolidating his obligations and spreading out the repayment schedule, he insisted he must remain on the hook for eventual full repayment: “I cannot for a moment entertain the suggestion of having my debts paid in the way proposed . . . so long as I have health to earn money.”
McKinley’s friends had other ideas. They spread out through the Midwest in search of fund contributions, fortified with a Herrick-produced form letter lauding McKinley’s contribution to his country. The money flowed in: $40,000 from Chicago alone; $10,000 from Philadelphia. Charles P. Taft, owner of the Cincinnati Times, gave $1,000. John Hay, the literary figure and former Lincoln secretary, gave $2,000, as did steel magnate Henry Clay Frick. Contributors of $5,000 included industrialists George Pullman and Philip Armour, as well as Hanna, Herrick, and Kohlsaat. The Illinois Steel Company contributed $10,000. The voluble and compelling Herrick got the banks holding McKinley’s notes to discount the amounts by 10 percent as a contribution to the cause. By early summer the full amount was raised and the debt canceled. In keeping with his insistence that he should not escape his obligations, McKinley sent Herrick an amount from every paycheck throughout the remainder of his life to pay down the debt, now in the hands of his asset trustees.
McKinley’s financial fiasco and its outcome represented a dual reflection upon the man. As the story unfolded in newspapers across the country, he looked foolish and weak, a politician who couldn’t manage his own financial affairs, let alone the country’s. Beyond that, his need to avail himself of the comfort of rich friends—with large financial stakes in government actions—generated the view among some that he was a puppet of plutocrats. Yet it was remarkable that this debacle didn’t seem to blight the governor’s career as many had anticipated. His opponents and detractors naturally seized upon it—and would continue to do so for years. But the tale of financial woe didn’t seem to penetrate his general popularity with Ohio voters or later with the national constituency he sought to build for his presidential quest. His image as a man of rectitude and quiet wisdom seemed to fortify him politically. This was reflected in the outpouring of support, including financial support, that flowed into Canton and Columbus. Some 5,000 donations came in from ordinary citizens across the nation, and while McKinley returned all those delivered to him, his trustees eventually gave up trying to “stem the flood of spontaneous generosity,” as a McKinley biographer later put it. Somehow McKinley’s plight generated extensive sympathy and a desire to protect him for future leadership.
By summer the storm had passed, and McKinley plunged into his next political adventures: a second gubernatorial term and preparations for an 1896 presidential run. But now the political landscape was entirely changed by economic hard times that hit with a fearsome force. It began in the farm sector, where a real estate boom had drawn in thousands of Eastern investors beguiled by low interest rates and prospects for quick wealth. A $200 investment in Western land had been known to return $2,000 in a few months, historian John D. Hicks reports, adding, “Small wonder that money descended like a flood upon those who made it their business to place loans in the West!” Then came the drought of 1887, and the bubble burst. Farmers couldn’t produce sufficient crops to pay the mortgage; money dried up; banks and their borrowers went under. In drought-stricken Kansas, half the state’s Western farmers pulled up stakes and fled.
The Western farm bust soon undermined the industrial sector, particularly the railroad industry, and panic swept the country. Railroads had been expanding on borrowed money and now couldn’t cover the debt service as farm shipments dried up. As railroads declined, so did the rest of industrial America and the big-city Eastern banks. One result was falling stock prices, which precipitated a run on gold supplies as holders of securities cashed out of the market in exchange for gold. By spring the Treasury’s gold reserve had dropped below $100 million, considered a minimum confidence level. By year’s end, about the time of McKinley’s reelection, some 500 banks had failed, more than five times the annual average of the previous five years, and a record 15,242 U.S. companies went bankrupt. Unemployment soared.
Though tragic for the nation, these developments buoyed Republican prospects as voters blamed Democratic policies for the calamity. McKinley captured his party’s gubernatorial nomination for a second term—again by acclamation—and defeated his Democratic opponent, Lawrence Neal, by some 81,000 votes. Meanwhile Republicans ended up with 111 legislative seats to just 27 for the Democrats. Confident he spoke for his state’s collective electorate, McKinley declared in his inaugural address, “The best government always is that one which best looks after its own, and which is in closest hear-touch with the highest aspirations of the people.”
But with the nation’s economic travail continuing throughout McKinley’s second term, the governor faced major civic disruptions in the form of labor strikes and threats of mob rule. In April 1894 the United Mine Workers called on coal miners to walk off their jobs in what one Ohio publication called “one of the greatest strikes, in point of numbers, in the history of any country.” Some 200,000 miners went on strike in Ohio alone, along with many others in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, and elsewhere. Civic tensions ran high, and the action devastated the regional economy as the strikes shut down railroads and factories fueled by coal. Normal commerce ceased. At the request of local sheriffs, McKinley sent out militia troops—some 3,000 in all—to restore and maintain order during the job action. Later in the year he deployed troops to protect train service during a railroad strike. When labor representatives suggested the governor’s actions could harm him politically, he replied, “I do not care if my political career is not twenty-four hours long, these outrages must stop if it takes every soldier in Ohio.”
As soon as the strikes were settled and order was restored, he turned his attention to getting funds and provisions distributed to areas where miners were suffering serious financial deprivation due to the strike. The Cincinnati Enquirer wrote, “Praise for the prompt action of Governor McKinley is on every tongue among the distressed. . . . Every detail of the relief work is under the general supervision of the governor.” Reflecting both his natural inclinations and his political acumen, McKinley combined toughness in the face of disruption with compassion for those caught up in the struggle.
The governor’s national stature was growing, reflected in the requests he received for campaign appearances for Republican candidates during the 1894 midterm elections. He agreed to make forty-six set speeches in the seven weeks before the elections but ended up delivering 371 addresses of various lengths as towns and cities flooded Republican National Committee headquarters with requests as soon as they learned the governor would be in their vicinity. Though he traveled 12,000 miles through seventeen states, he “seemed tireless,” wrote journalist Samuel G. McClure, who traveled with McKinley. “Every State committee in the Mississippi valley and beyond it apparently took it for granted that the gallant champion of ‘patriotism, protection and prosperity’ could not be over-worked.” With McKinley leading the way, the GOP picked up 120 House seats in 1894 and six in the Senate.
The governor relinquished his executive duties in January 1896 amid an outpouring of affection and expectation about his future. He and Ida now anticipated their return to Canton and a calm life in a nice home on a tree-lined street. The sensation of going home was heightened when McKinley leased the very house on North Market Avenue in which he and Ida had begun their marriage. Though it harbored dark ghosts, it also called forth stirring memories of wonderful days before the onset of the tragedies that had deflected their lives. The place needed work,
but both felt elation at being back at the point of their origin and also at the prospect of trading years of hotel life for residence in an actual home.
They arrived in Canton on January 24, 1896, a day before their silver wedding anniversary, and settled into their new home in time for a two-day fete to mark their twenty-five years of marriage. It was to be no minor affair; 1,000 invitations had been sent out. The house featured a main-floor office for the Major and, across the hall, a parlor for Ida. Both rooms were festooned with artifacts and mementos illustrating their lives and passions and giving a sense of their narrative to the many visitors—friends, acquaintances, and strangers—who would be passing through as McKinley pursued his presidential aims. The Major’s office featured law books, prints with Civil War battle scenes, an engraving of Hayes with Lincoln and Grant, and a leather chaise, “which we prize very much,” McKinley said in a letter. Ida’s parlor featured family pictures, including one of little Katie before her death. Though only the Major and Ida lived there, the dining-room table was always set for twelve in anticipation of the many guests, personal and political, who would be mustered through in the coming months of campaign activity.
Ida’s health had taken a turn for the worse during the final months in Columbus. “Mrs. McKinley is not getting on as well as I wish,” McKinley wrote to his wife’s New York doctor, who treated her with a flow of medications. “She has her attacks, and I hope when I come down to New York to be able to see you.” In addition to the attacks, she was experiencing an involuntary loss of muscle control, described by Charlie Bawsel as “a dropsical trouble.” To counter the muscle loss and bolster her up, she often was bound in bandages.
President McKinley Page 11