McKinley continued to devote abundant time and attention to his troubled wife even as he thrust himself into the maelstrom of presidential politics. By his lights, he had balanced successfully Ida’s needs with his political endeavors for more than two decades, and there was no reason to think he couldn’t continue to do so as the political prize he had coveted for most of his adult life came into view. Things were slipping into place, including the economic dislocation that was undermining the opposition party as the campaign year began. John Sherman, noting the Democrats’ declining fortunes, saw bright prospects for McKinley in 1896. “The recent elections,” he wrote to Los Angeles editor Harrison Gray Otis, “have cleared the political sky and I believe fairly opened the way for the nomination of Maj. McKinley. He will be heartily supported from Ohio and, I trust, be nominated and elected.”
— 7 —
The Major versus the Bosses
“I AM AFRAID WE MUST COUNT ON THEIR HOSTILITY”
In May 1895, Governor McKinley issued a crucial political assignment to his top lieutenant, Mark Hanna. The task was to travel to New York, meet with the big Northeastern GOP bosses, and seek their support for McKinley’s presidential nomination. These men wielded patronage power that translated into huge party leverage. Capable of delivering big blocs of delegates to GOP national conventions, they often held the balance of power in nomination battles.
First among them was New York’s former senator Thomas Platt, a man so inarticulate and listless that nobody could figure out how he dominated his state’s politics. But somehow he did, largely through uncanny wiles and a relentless determination. “Almost a full score of succeeding Legislatures obeyed every indication of his will,” wrote a contemporary journalist, “and no Republican committee or convention in any part of the State considered itself superior to his judgment.” A political ally once observed that, while he couldn’t turn back time or produce a three-year-old steer in a minute, “there is little else he can not do if he has the nerve.” Tom Platt seldom lacked nerve.
Then there was U.S. Senator Matthew Quay of Pennsylvania, son of a minister. Even Platt deferred to Quay on political strategy. The Pennsylvanian was a true scholar who had amassed an expansive library and read Cicero and other classical writers in Latin. So commanding was he in state politics that he seldom felt a need to speak in public. His tool for dominating the Pennsylvania Republican Party was deft and forceful backroom maneuvering, seasoned by a sardonic wit. When the naïve Benjamin Harrison ventured that Providence had made him president, Quay noted dismissively that a bigger factor was a phalanx of political bosses willing “to approach the gates of the penitentiary to make him president.”
Other important Northeastern bosses included Rhode Island’s Aldrich, who made a fortune in railways, banking, oil, and electricity before entering the Senate and amassing power as easily as he previously had amassed wealth; Joseph H. Manley of Maine, a close associate of the Plumed Knight, James G. Blaine, and chairman of the Republican National Committee’s executive body; and James S. Clarkson of Iowa, who had attended every Republican National Convention since 1876. Hanna met with these men over dinner at the lavish Fifth Avenue Hotel, then rushed back to Ohio to report the results to McKinley, who was staying with Myron Herrick in Cleveland. Herrick drove the governor to Hanna’s majestic home on Lake Erie for dinner and a conference.
Following the meal, the industrialist led McKinley, Herrick, and Herman Kohlsaat into what he called his “den,” where he passed out cigars and settled into an overstuffed chair. To Herrick, he seemed “as keen as a razor blade” as he indulged in some bragging for getting into and out of New York without alerting reporters. Then he turned to McKinley.
“Now, Major, it’s all over but the shouting,” he said. “You can get both New York and Pennsylvania, but there are certain conditions.” He evinced no discomfort with the conditions.
“What are they?” asked the governor.
“Quay wants the patronage of Pennsylvania, Aldrich of New England, Manley of Maine,” replied Hanna, adding that Platt desired a bigger reward.
“They want a promise that you will appoint Tom Platt Secretary of the Treasury,” said Hanna, “and they want it in writing.” It seems that Platt thought he had secured a similar commitment from Harrison eight years earlier, but the payoff had never materialized. Hence the demand for a promissory note.
McKinley stared ahead for a time, puffing on his cigar. Then he rose from his chair, paced the room a few moments, and turned to Hanna.
“Mark,” he said, “there are some things in this world that come too high. If I were to accept the nomination on those terms, the place would be worth nothing to me, and less to the people. If those are the terms, I am out of it.”
“Not so fast,” replied Hanna. “I meant that on these terms the nomination would be settled immediately, but that does not mean that their terms have got to be accepted. There is a strong sentiment for you all over the country, and while it would be hard to lick those fellows if they oppose you, damned hard, I believe we can do it.”
McKinley’s countenance brightened. He stared into the void for a few seconds, apparently lost in thought. Then he said, “How would this do for a slogan: ‘The Bosses Against the People’?” The three men agreed it would define the nomination battle nicely. Upon further rumination it was modified to “The People Against the Bosses.”
That conversation in Hanna’s den became an inflection point for the 1896 presidential campaign. Nearly all political analysts considered McKinley the early frontrunner for the Republican nomination, but now he would have to roll over the party bosses to get the prize. Worse, the influential political figures who met with Hanna in New York surely would fan out across the country to get other state party leaders to consolidate their grip on their states’ delegate-selection process, withhold delegates from McKinley, and thus deter his nomination. Then they could pool their power and broker a convention outcome more to their liking, getting a nominee who would play their game and pay their price. It would be an arduous six-month campaign as state parties went through the process—in county, district, and finally state conventions—of selecting delegates to the national convention in St. Louis in June.
McKinley brought some political strengths to the battle. First among them was Hanna, whose devotion to McKinley’s political success was so intense that he resigned his position as head of Hanna & Co. in January 1895 and turned the business over to his brother. After twenty-eight years of furious business activity, he now would direct his energies almost entirely to the McKinley effort. In spring 1895 the McKinley campaign set up its headquarters in Cleveland’s downtown Perry-Payne Building, and Hanna took command of every detail. The Washington Post called him “the John the Baptist of the McKinley Presidential movement.” He was working for the governor, said the paper, “out of pure devotion” and desired nothing in exchange. This made him “a terror to the opposition” because “he is as shrewd and clever as the best of them.”
Although by this time Hanna’s talents were well understood throughout the country, he remained haunted by a lingering reputation for ruthlessness, greed, and even moral laxity—residues from the unrelenting attacks upon him by Edwin Cowles’s Cleveland Leader and later by the Cleveland Press, which sought to build up its circulation by tearing down the city’s elites. In some ways he was an easy mark. Big, brash, quick of thought, slow to forgive, he attacked the game of business, and later the game of politics, with a zest for competition and a passion for winning. He also displayed a capacity for taking charge of any enterprise with which he became associated. Cleveland lawyer Andrew Squire said “he loved to be a leader.” Lifelong friend A. B. Hough pronounced, “Whatever he went into was all Hanna.”
Full of life, he brought a jaunty enthusiasm to his dealings with all, from the most powerful to the lowliest. When he owned the Cleveland Electric Railroad, he had 900 men on the road—and knew most of them by name. He would linger next to his motormen an
d chat with them along the route, often sitting on stools that the motormen kept nearby for the purpose. Throughout his ownership, he never experienced a strike or walkout. At one point, as he prepared for a European trip, another Cleveland railroad company faced a strike threat, and Hanna feared his men might walk out in sympathy. He called together about forty for a talk.
“Boys,” he said, “I have been preparing to go to Europe for a little rest. It looks as if there will be trouble on the other road, however, and I would like to know before I go away if you are likely to be drawn into it.” If so, he said, he would cancel the trip. “If you are satisfied with your wages and your treatment and agree to keep at work I will go.” His men assured him it would be safe to go, and they remained on the job even as the other line suffered a strike.
He brought the same directness of expression and dealings to his political activities, along with an open generosity toward those who aligned with him. A Cleveland lawyer named Dan Reynolds told the story of a financial crisis in a local GOP campaign committee around 1886, when the committee found itself in debt to the tune of $1,250 after an election season. Fanning out in search of willing donors, party officials came up empty and congregated at GOP headquarters to review their plight. In walked Hanna, who promptly discerned the long faces.
“It looks pretty blue in here,” he said in his lively manner. “What is the matter?” When told, he sat down at the table and wrote a check for the full amount. “There,” he said, handing over the check, “pay your debts and look cheerful.”
In 1884, when a feed merchant named David Kimberly declared his support for both Hanna and Cowles as delegates to the next GOP national convention, Cowles called him in and said he wouldn’t accept his support if he also supported Hanna. “You can’t serve two masters,” said Cowles, hinting that his newspaper would oppose Kimberly’s planned bid for Cuyahoga County treasurer if he aligned himself with Hanna as well as with himself. When the man sheepishly went to Hanna to explain his predicament, the industrialist brushed it off. “Go ahead and do what you can for Cowles,” he said, “and after he is out of the way, do the best you can for me.” Later, during Kimberly’s campaign for treasurer, he received three anonymous donations totaling $1,200, along with a note saying that if he won the election he could pay the amount back, but if he lost the loans would be forgiven and the benefactor would remain nameless. He later learned it was Hanna. “He was the biggest hearted man I never knew,” said Kimberly.
Hanna’s many friends and associates knew well this side of him, but his public persona continued to suffer from the lingering reputation wrought by Cowles, the Cleveland Press, and now increasingly by anti-McKinley Democratic newspapers. But while his personal qualities stirred controversy, nobody questioned his professional and political shrewdness. As McKinley’s nomination battle unfolded, that shrewdness produced another asset for the governor: strong support throughout the South, which never voted Republican in general elections but provided a large pool of delegates at GOP conventions, many of them blacks and white liberals. Upon relinquishing his corporate position, Hanna rented a palatial home in Thomasville, Georgia, and invited McKinley and Ida down for an extended visit under the guise of offering them a warm respite from the Northern winter and surcease from political obligations. The real purpose was to introduce the governor to well-placed Republican politicians who came through in a steady stream of glad-handing. Greeting these Southern bigwigs in Hanna’s comfortable sun parlor, the earnest and amiable McKinley quietly captured substantial numbers of delegates throughout the region. As Tom Platt later lamented, “He had the South practically solid before some of us awakened.”
McKinley’s Thomasville success reflected his sympathetic persona at middle age. The years had expanded his girth and given him a broad face that looked as if it had been chiseled and polished from a block of granite. The deep-set eyes and wooly eyebrows highlighted a countenance that was at once alert and kindly. He had a fastidious look about him—his Prince Albert coat “never wrinkled,” the young journalist William Allen White observed, “his white vest front never broken.” Fastidious also in manner, he presented himself with what seemed like a studied correctness, “sweet, but not cloying,” as White put it, “gentle but . . . carefully calculated.” For White and others given to elaborate and sometimes cynical judgments, these traits made McKinley seem “unreal.” In a similar vein, Edwin Godkin, influential editor of The Nation and the New York Evening Post, assessed McKinley’s oratory harshly. “Whether you plunge into it, or skim over it,” wrote Godkin, “the sense of touching something wooden is unmistakable.”
But McKinley’s carefully modulated persona impressed those engaged in the political game, both friend and foe, who saw behind his pleasant façade a shrewd politician with finely honed powers of observation and analysis. John Hay, whose long career as a writer, diplomat, and presidential secretary lent credence to his assessments of men, praised McKinley’s “unusual qualities, extraordinary ability and force of character.” The quiet confidence he had cultivated in the crucible of war now translated into a subtle kind of leadership, always formal but also accessible and never troublesome. His reputation for loyalty and trustworthiness drew men to him, while his even-tempered affability kept them attached. His gubernatorial stenographer, Opha Moore, witnessed only one flash of anger during his four years as governor, when a visitor told an off-color joke. “I wish that fellow would stay away from here,” he said afterward with disgust.
The electorate developed a perception that McKinley’s public image closely matched his private behavior. Stories of his devotion to his troubled wife, whose infirmities were now generally well known publicly, though not in detail, contributed to his image as a very human politician. Voters sensed that what they read and heard of the man was his actual self, and what they read and heard gave comfort. He may have seemed unreal or wooden to intellectuals such as White and Godkin, but out in the country people appreciated his dignity, integrity, and sound judgment. This fortified his campaign strategy of going after the bosses.
But the bosses didn’t intend to bow down to McKinley. Platt was “angry and astounded” when the governor rejected the bosses’ deal, according to newspaper reports. Congregating a dinner meeting of “wrathy” state-party bigwigs in July to discuss the nettlesome frontrunner, he announced plans to insert former New York governor Levi Morton into the presidential race as his state’s favorite son. Quay was mulling a presidential run himself to consolidate Pennsylvania’s delegate bloc and deny state support to the Ohio man. They encouraged other state leaders to follow suit. Hay, increasingly a McKinley loyalist, wrote to Hanna, “I am afraid we must count on their hostility.”
Soon various leaders announced their candidacies for president. Few were national figures capable of pulling delegates from outside their states, but by consolidating their states’ delegate pools they could position themselves for a possible emergence in a brokered convention. These men included William Bradley in Kentucky, candidate for governor that year; that reliable Iowa protectionist, Senator William Allison (sponsored by state boss James Clarkson); a former senator from Nebraska named Charles Manderson; Minnesota senator Cushman K. Davis; and the venerable Shelby Cullom of Illinois, now sixty-six years old, former longtime governor, senator for the past twelve years, and the unchallenged leader of Illinois Republican politics.
Then there was the bulky and sardonic House speaker Thomas Reed, who did have a national following and entered the race with every intention of giving McKinley and the bosses a hearty challenge. His strategy was to consolidate the New England delegations—Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode Island—and build from there. The wild card was former president Benjamin Harrison, now approaching sixty-two, who could command the Indiana delegation and enjoyed national stature. But he had fallen in love with a fetching widow twenty-four years his junior, and many speculated that would keep him out of the race.
But this favorite son “comb
ine” wasn’t McKinley’s only problem. Closer to home was the pesky Ben Foraker, who engineered a potent comeback at the 1895 Ohio GOP convention in Zanesville, where he wrested control of the state apparatus from Hanna and McKinley. The convention nominated Foraker’s man, Asa Bushnell, for governor and endorsed Foraker himself for the next open U.S. Senate seat. Foraker’s former private secretary, Charles Kurtz, became state party chairman, supplanting McKinley’s man, Charles Dick, whose bid for state auditor was rebuffed. Foraker avoided a nasty public clash by accepting a convention endorsement of McKinley for president, but the convention outcome “shocked us a good deal,” recalled Charles Dick later, noting that it made McKinley look weak in his own state just as his presidential bid was getting under way.
* * *
THE CAMPAIGN YEAR began with a number of political realities. The Republicans were the governing party, the Democrats the dissident voice. The GOP had held the presidency for twenty-eight of the previous thirty-six years, and Republicans generally believed they determined the national destiny. After all, the party was hardly past its infancy when it won a great sectional war, saved the Union, ended slavery, and knitted the country back together as best as it could be done. It had fostered the great postwar industrial expansion, provided land for railroad lines and state universities, promoted the construction of roads, bridges, and canals. As Thomas Reed put it, “Progress is the essence of Republicanism.”
President McKinley Page 12