McKinley enhanced his reputation as an effective executive with the manner in which he went about building his Cabinet. He was a master at tossing out names to assess the reaction of party stalwarts while carefully shrouding his own thinking, then inviting candidates to Canton for interviews or rejecting them based on what he heard. He fulfilled the task with a dispassionate tough-mindedness, demonstrated in his dealings with Reid and McCook. He also ignored the counsel of numerous friends, including Hanna, in rejecting Henry Clay Payne of Wisconsin, a former railroad lobbyist and lumber dealer, when Wisconsin’s progressive elements declared him anathema. Hanna had told the governor, “[You may] wipe out every obligation that you feel toward me, and I’ll ask no further favors of you, if you’ll only put Henry Payne in the Cabinet.” McKinley remained unmoved.
Many encountering McKinley for the first time discovered a man far more informed and decisive than they had expected. “I never met a man in my life with whom I was so favorably impressed by a day’s acquaintance,” said Lyman Gage. Hay, who called McKinley “the Majah” and had supported him financially and otherwise, expected chaos at McKinley’s bustling house when invited to Canton for lunch toward the end of the Front Porch campaign. “But he met me at the station,” reported Hay to his friend Henry Adams, “gave me meat, and . . . took me upstairs and talked for two hours as calmly and serenely as if we were summer boarders in Beverly at a loss for means to kill time.” He was particularly struck by McKinley’s inscrutable visage. “It is a genuine Italian ecclesiastical face of the fifteenth century. And there are idiots who think Mark Hanna will run him!”
The final vexing personnel question was what to do about Roosevelt, full of intellectual energy, physical vigor, and often uncontrollable bustle. His tendency to venture into the outrageous was evident in his unrestrained rhetorical attack on William Jennings Bryan and John Altgeld during the previous fall. But his many friends, who adored him for his kinetic force and affectionate ways, unleashed a whirlwind of lobbying in behalf of his desire to become John Long’s assistant at the Navy Department. They included Henry Cabot Lodge, John Hay, Tom Reed, and Maria Storer, a wealthy Washington hostess whose husband, Bellamy, had helped save McKinley from his financial crisis during his gubernatorial days. When many of the same people had pressured Blaine to name Roosevelt his assistant during Blaine’s tenure as secretary of state, Blaine had rejected the idea out of hand. “My real trouble in regard to Mr. Roosevelt,” he wrote a friend, “is that I fear he lacks the repose and patient endurance required in an Assistant Secretary.”
McKinley shared that view. “I want peace,” he told Maria Storer, “and I am told that your friend Theodore . . . is always getting into rows with everybody.” To William Howard Taft, a young federal appeals court judge who joined the Roosevelt chorus, he elaborated, “The truth is, Will, Roosevelt is always in such a state of mind.” But Roosevelt’s legions of friends overwhelmed McKinley’s skepticism, as did Roosevelt’s well-earned reputation as a genuine naval expert based on his authoritative book on naval strategies during the War of 1812. McKinley eventually succumbed to Maria Storer’s plea that he give Roosevelt “a chance to prove he can be peaceful.”
* * *
DURING THIS CABINETMAKING, with reporters following every move, the world got its first expansive look at the private McKinley—the dedicated family man who attended church every Sunday with his wife and mother, who surrounded himself with members of his extended family, who loved taking his “invalid” wife on carriage rides into the country and doted on her whenever he wasn’t focused on pressing civic matters. When Ida traveled to Chicago to stay with a cousin and shop at Marshall Field & Co., he wrote her daily. “Everything is going on pleasantly here,” he reported on her first day away, “but you are greatly missed I assure you. I hope you will keep well & come back greatly benefited and have that part of your wardrobe provided which was your special mission.” A family friend told a reporter that “since Mrs. McKinley is in Chicago he behaves like a new bridegroom separated for the first time from his bride.” He went to Chicago himself shortly before Christmas with a resolve “to find rest and change, and . . . to do as little as possible and be as quiet as he can,” the Washington Post reported. On their last day in Chicago, a crowd of 4,000 well-wishers surrounded the McKinley carriage in front of Marshall Field’s and refused to let them move on until the president-elect had shaken several hundred hands. On Christmas Day, back in Canton, the couple dined, according to tradition, with his mother at her modest home.
By the end of the year Ida was feeling so healthy and sprightly that she organized a dinner dance for a hundred guests at Saxton House. Ostensibly to honor two McKinley nieces, the event took on wider significance as a display of her ability to serve as first lady. It featured orchestra music, card games, a ten-thirty supper, and postsupper dancing. The Repository reported that “an old-fashioned cotillion was danced by Mr. and Mrs. McKinley,” and younger guests “were delighted with the graceful ease with which Mrs. McKinley was able to go through the figure.”
On March 1, the day of the McKinleys’ departure for Washington, leaden skies brought rain showers before the clouds parted for an auspicious afternoon of bright sunshine. The Major entered his breakfast room at eight o’clock in a lighthearted mood, according to press reports. That night he and Ida entrained for the Washington journey amid upbeat band music and tumultuous cheers from townsfolk, with bonfires throughout the city lighting the night sky. The couple slept on the train and arrived in Washington the next morning refreshed and expectant. They were whisked by carriage directly to their old haunt from congressional days, the Ebbitt House.
That night they were invited to the White House for an informal dinner, though Ida was unable to attend due to fatigue. McKinley arrived at 7:30 and was greeted by the outgoing president in the Red Parlor. Following a “suitable repast” that was “exceedingly simple and in good taste,” as one newspaper reported, the president-elect returned to the Ebbitt at around ten. Mrs. Cleveland, upon hearing of Ida’s infirmity, sent over a large bouquet of flowers.
The next day was a time of repose and ceremony. When a delegation representing McKinley’s college Greek fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, arrived to present the president-elect with a ceremonial medallion, he was delighted to see Postmaster General William Wilson, an old House colleague from the other party. With his characteristic bonhomie, the governor clasped Wilson’s hand warmly and said, “I have not seen you since the storm of last November. Come over by the window where I can see you plainly and make sure you look as you did in the good old days when you were on one side and I on another.” At midmorning McKinley and Cleveland went through the customary exchange of courtesy visits, first McKinley appearing at the White House, then Cleveland visiting the McKinleys at the Ebbitt. Neither visit lasted more than a few minutes, as the exchange was merely ceremonial.
The real ceremony was scheduled for the next day, March 4, as the nation honored what had become the greatest ritual of democracy the world over: the inauguration of America’s next national leader and military commander.
— 11 —
Inauguration Day
LOOMING CHALLENGES OF NATION AND WORLD
President-elect McKinley rose from bed at six on the morning of March 4 and greeted his wife with a jaunty reminder, though she needed none, that this would be her first day as the country’s first lady. Around six-thirty he opened the door of his Ebbitt House suite to say good morning to his loyal bodyguards, Daugherty and Gardner. A porter arrived with an armful of wood, and soon a fire was crackling on the sitting-room grate. The hotel prepared a special breakfast of quail on toast, broiled chicken, porterhouse steaks, Spanish omelets, dry toast, hot rolls, wheat muffins, tea, and coffee. The governor took breakfast in his private dining chamber, but Ida ate hers in bed on the counsel of her husband, who wanted her to conserve her energy for the coming inaugural activities.
Thus did the fifty-four-year-old Ohioan begin the
day that would see him become the twenty-fifth U.S. president. If weather is augury, the day was auspicious. “Not a cloud cast its shadow over any part of the inaugural proceedings,” reported the New York Times. For nearly a week the city had filled up with all manner of citizenry—political bigwigs, Republican loyalists, office seekers, ordinary folks hankering for a glimpse of history. Railroad companies estimated that they had brought into the city some 225,000 visitors, and the Baltimore and Ohio line laid down fourteen miles of temporary track to handle excess rail cars. The city’s hotels were filled to capacity, and one reporter determined through inquiries at various establishments that they had turned down as many people as they could accommodate. He speculated that the rest found lodgings at boardinghouses or merely alighted wherever they could.
On the way back to his suite after breakfast, McKinley greeted well-wishers in the hotel lobby, then saw his mother making her way through the crowd. He bent down to kiss her and inquired after her health “in the most affectionate terms.” At nine-thirty a local barber named Clarence Chaplin arrived with a basin of warm water and fluffy towels to shave the president-elect. Afterward McKinley donned a new suit made entirely of American-grown wool. Shortly past ten he greeted the Senate committee, including Senator Sherman, assigned to escort him to the White House in Sherman’s luxurious carriage. The crowds outside were so thick that the carriage could scarcely move, but McKinley’s mounted escort—the Ohio National Guard’s vaunted Troop A, eighty men atop coal-black chargers—slowly opened the way.
At the White House McKinley received greetings from President Cleveland in the Blue Room. The two men entered Cleveland’s presidential carriage, with its four-in-hand team of sorrel horses, and seated themselves according to protocol, with the president-elect on the president’s left. To cheers from the crowd, the carriage driver maneuvered the vehicle into the procession scheduled to move up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. Included in the procession, in addition to Ohio’s Troop A, were mounted police, military units, martial bands, the Cleveland Cabinet, and top military leaders. “The ring of nearly 2,000 iron hoofs on the asphalt filled the still air,” reported the Washington Post. The New York Times noted that “Major McKinley was removing his hat constantly in response to the cheering” along the way.
Reaching the Capitol, the presidential carriage stopped before the large bronze doors near the Senate chamber. The two men made their way to the vice president’s room, to be greeted by the incoming vice president, Garret Hobart, and others. McKinley asked if Ida had reached the building and been seated in the gallery. Assured that she was well situated, he relaxed, sat down, and chatted amiably with the assembled dignitaries. At 12:18, Cleveland and McKinley walked up the green-carpeted aisle of the Senate chamber, filled with senators, House members, Cabinet officers, and foreign ambassadors. Then Hobart was sworn in and delivered a brief address filled with patriotic pieties and promises to embrace his new duties with humble solemnity. Taking his assigned seat next to Cleveland, McKinley scanned the gallery, spotted Ida, and smiled warmly.
When the Senate chamber ceremony ended at 12:45, those inside were directed through the Capitol’s east entrance to the temporary inauguration platform. In the lead was Ida, leaning heavily on the arm of McKinley’s newly named private secretary, J. Addison Porter. She wore a purple gown with heavy wraps about her shoulders and a gray aigrette in her snugly fitted bonnet. Then came other members of the president’s family, Supreme Court justices, the president and president-elect, members of Congress, ambassadors, state governors, and Cabinet officials. More than 40,000 spectators jammed the Capitol’s east grounds to witness the spectacle.
The crowd grew quiet as Chief Justice Melville Fuller and McKinley stepped forward for the brief oath, with McKinley’s hand upon a large, gilt-edged Bible, affirming that he would “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution. Then the new president kissed the Bible, removed his overcoat, and stepped to the lectern to deliver his inaugural address.
Reading from his handwritten text in a strong voice, he said the current “depression in business and distress among the people” required a strict spending regimen along with increased tariff rates. He vowed to call a special congressional session to address tariff-revenue needs and also promised to protect “the credit of the Government, [and] the integrity of its currency.” He extolled America’s commitment to freedom and equality of rights but acknowledged that the commitment had not always been maintained fully, particularly with regard to black Americans. “Lynchings,” he declared, “must not be tolerated.” He took a swipe at trusts and monopolies, noting the GOP’s opposition to “all combinations of capital organized in trusts, or otherwise, to control arbitrarily the condition of trade among our citizens.” He promised “a firm and dignified foreign policy” that disavowed “wars of conquest” and “the temptation of territorial aggression.”
McKinley’s prose reflected the man—sturdy, direct, devoid of rhetorical flourishes, employing no more words than necessary. Following the speech, the president attended a Capitol luncheon with government dignitaries, and then he and Cleveland returned to the presidential carriage for the ride back down Pennsylvania Avenue—this time with the former president sitting to the left of his successor. Then came a long and boisterous parade past the presidential reviewing stand in front of the White House, an evening dinner-dance at the lavishly decorated Pension Building, and a fireworks demonstration that the Times called “one of the biggest displays of the kind ever witnessed here.” Ida emerged from the White House for the evening festivities in a gown of silver and white brocade lined with pale blue satin, with a high neck of soft laces and long sleeves finished with lace frills.
The McKinleys reached the Pension Building at 8:40 and moved slowly through the crowd to a private antechamber, where the first couple received special guests, including Mark and Charlotte Hanna and various Cabinet officials. A bit later they appeared on a second-floor balcony to wave to the 5,000 celebrants below. Following about an hour on the balcony, the couple repaired to a private supper room, decorated with masses of American Beauty roses (Ida’s favorite), for an intimate meal with close friends. They left the building at 11:30 via the Fourth Street exit and were back at the White House by 11:40. “Shortly after,” reported the Times, “all the lights [at the presidential mansion] were extinguished.”
* * *
IT WAS A burgeoning nation, full of zest and optimism, that bestowed the mantle of leadership upon William McKinley on that crisp March day. Not even the 1893 Panic, which still dampened commerce, could seriously erode the American sense of opportunity. The U.S. population had nearly doubled since 1870, to 75 million, with fully two-thirds of the increase coming from native births, the rest from immigration. The industrial era was generating an economic bustle in America that was recognized throughout the world as a rare phenomenon. When Democratic critics chided Republicans during the Harrison administration for fostering the nation’s first billion-dollar budget, Tom Reed dismissed the disparagement with characteristic disdain. “Yes,” he said, “but this is a billion dollar country!”
The billion-dollar country outpaced all others in steel production, in its timber harvest, in meatpacking, and in the mining of silver, gold, iron, and coal. This fervor of production was pushing America into the world in search of markets. In the thirty-six years leading to McKinley’s inauguration, exports tripled, and the country’s trade activity now surpassed that of all other nations save Great Britain. What’s more, America led the way in the development of life-transforming inventions, including the internal combustion engine, incandescent light, the telephone, steam-powered ocean vessels, moving pictures, radio telegraphy, the phonograph, and more.
America had been from its inception a nation of vast designs, driven by an impulse to consolidate its position across the North American midsection—purchasing the vast Louisiana expanse in 1803, negotiating possession of Florida in 1819, annexing Texas in 1845, acquiring much of Oregon
Territory in 1846, and conquering lands in 1848 that would become its southwestern domain. “For nearly three centuries,” wrote historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, “the dominant fact in American life has been expansion.”
Now, having cemented its existence in the carnage of civil war, the country faced the question of where its expansionist spirit would lead it. Turner, whose analysis of this spirit had brought him national fame, didn’t foresee any slackening in America’s outward push. “That these energies of expansion will no longer operate would be a rash prediction,” he wrote. “The demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an interoceanic canal . . . and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries, are indications that the movement will continue.”
Whatever course America pursued, and whatever McKinley’s national plans might be, nothing took precedence over the need to attack what the Washington Post called the country’s “industrial distress and financial embarrassment.” No one was surprised that the new president’s central economic aim would be restoring the McKinley tariffs, which had averaged nearly 50 percent on finished and semifinished imports. That had been shaved to 42 percent during the second Cleveland administration by the so-called Wilson-Gorman bill, and McKinley believed no economic resurgence could happen until his rates once again prevailed through adoption of something approaching the House-passed Dingley bill of 1895. Besides, the economic downturn had produced a federal budget deficit of 70 million dollars, which also required attention. McKinley’s answer was a big increase in import taxes.
President McKinley Page 19