President McKinley

by Robert W. Merry

  Aguinaldo now seemed in a desperate state. “Claim to Government by Insurgents can be made no longer under any fiction,” Otis wired to Corbin. U.S. forces had captured the rebel government’s treasurer, interior secretary, and congressional president. Other officials had eluded the Americans by hiding away, “evidently in different central Luzon provinces,” while the troops had scattered into the countryside, concealed their weapons, and blended in with society. Even Wheeler, whose letters to McKinley had deprecated Otis’s military skill, agreed that “Aguinaldo’s army is virtually disbanded.”

  And yet it couldn’t be stamped out. In mid-December an American major reported he was just a few hours behind Aguinaldo, but the evasive rebel leader escaped once again. Natives said he had stolen away disguised as a Philippine peasant. On December 19, General Henry Lawton, perhaps the most skilled and savvy of the American flag officers, was killed during a skirmish as he led his troops toward a rebel stronghold. By year’s end, it was clear that Aguinaldo retained an ability to assemble a mass of troops when he saw benefit in doing so. One U.S. colonel encountered a force of 1,000 insurgents near Montalban, and the Washington Post ended the year with the headline, “Tagalos Not Subdued; Reoccupying Districts Recently Swept by Troops.” The president authorized another escalation in U.S. troop levels, soon to reach nearly 64,000.

  * * *

  MEANWHILE OTHER DEFINING issues and developments percolated in the country and in the president’s political calculus. These included trade, a coaling station at Pago Pago in the South Pacific, the growing menace of trusts, and race. On trade, even Godkin’s Nation smiled when McKinley said, “We have turned from academic theories to trade conditions, and are seeking our share of the world’s markets.” Free traders, said the magazine, generally had greeted McKinley’s reciprocity initiatives with indifference—merely “as attempts to relieve the pinching of the shoe by cutting holes in it here and there.” But perhaps free traders should embrace these efforts since they reflected a Republican drift “if not toward free trade . . . certainly toward freer trade.” After all, McKinley’s government had signed reciprocity agreements with France and six British colonies, and discussions continued with many other nations. With America pushing out into the world and U.S. exports soaring, that old protectionist in the White House seemed bent on pushing the country—and his party—toward “freer trade.”

  In December 1899, McKinley acquired several islands in the Samoan chain, including Tutuila with its harbor of Pago Pago, ideal for a naval coaling station. For decades the islands had been caught in an entanglement of big power ambition and maneuvering by Britain, Germany, New Zealand, and ultimately the United States. The U.S. ability to leverage its new global position may have contributed to the U.S. acquisition—and to McKinley’s comments to Boyle, Dawes, and Cortelyou that he had seen, sitting right in his Cabinet Room chair, the “added respect” now accorded the United States around the world.

  Looming on the horizon in 1899 was the problem of ever larger industrial combinations, or “trusts,” so powerful that they could raise prices arbitrarily and bludgeon smaller companies into doing business strictly on the trusts’ terms. Even as the return of better times softened the populists’ free-silver calls, the predatory practices of more and bigger monopolies generated growing calls for action. It was tricky because, following passage of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, the Supreme Court had ruled that federal jurisdiction on the issue extended only to cases involving interstate commerce. McKinley’s attorney general, John Griggs, interpreted that as justifying merely a “passive and minimal policy” in dealing with this troubling new economic phenomenon.

  While the president preferred to delegate Justice Department management to Griggs, the attorney general’s constitutional views seemed headed for a collision with the political imperatives of growing civic angers. That message came from Charles Dawes, who urged the president to get ahead of the politically dangerous trust issue. Visiting the White House on March 28, Dawes warned of the trusts’ “unprecedented growth” and said the Republican Party must embrace a policy that recognized the “evil tendencies” of these corporate behemoths. The president readily accepted Dawes’s admonition, assuring his friend that he would take up the matter in his next Annual Message and call for a “proper restriction” on monopolies.

  But it wouldn’t be easy getting ahead of such a dynamic issue. A month after Dawes’s warning, twenty-one state governors appointed delegates to a national conference in Chicago to explore the problem. The title of the conference: “Trusts and Combinations, Their Uses and Abuses—Railway, Labor, Industrial, and Commercial.” William Jennings Bryan, increasingly viewed as the Democrats’ likely repeat standard-bearer in 1900, called for stern federal laws to regulate corporate America. He maintained that more trusts had been organized in just two years than in the country’s entire previous history. “Monopoly in private hands is indefensible from any standpoint,” he declared, “and intolerable.”

  Many Republicans believed their party should reject such radicalism. One was Ben Foraker, who said growing international commerce had spawned an imperative to seek economies of scale in order to hold down prices and compete in the global marketplace. “By consolidation of capital, plants, and management,” said Foraker, “expenses of various kinds are eliminated, and it is made possible to continue the employment of our capital and . . . our labor.” In this instance, Hanna agreed with his old adversary. “This formation of combines is simply an evolution in business methods,” he declared.

  Clearly McKinley couldn’t embrace a position of defending trusts, given the gathering sentiment of the country, but neither did he wish to embrace Bryan’s whole-hog attack. He would look for that comfortable middle ground in time for his Annual Message.

  On the matter of race relations, the president’s paternalistic attitude toward blacks seemed to be catching up with him. Always courteous to individual blacks and quick to offer praise for efforts by individuals and groups to improve the lot of African Americans, he considered North-South harmony a higher priority. Also, carefully calculating the country’s willingness to address the maltreatment of blacks in the South and the effects of widespread attitudinal racism in the North, he didn’t see much prospect for significant progress on this front. He accepted the racial status quo.

  But some African Americans were becoming disgusted with his desultory words of protest at the mob lynchings that blighted the nation, particularly in the South and particularly against blacks. Further, as more and more Southern states moved to disenfranchise blacks, the president remained mum. At a December 1898 meeting of the Afro-American Council, a New Jersey churchman named A. Walters said it was time for blacks to speak up:

  Should we be silent when the President of the United States, who could not have been elected without our votes, is utterly silent in his last message to Congress concerning the outrages in [the South]? . . . Silent while the officials of the States of North and South Carolina admit they are powerless to protect us in our rights? Silent, while Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina, by statutory enactment, have practically disfranchised their negro population. . . ? Shall we not speak out when innocent men and women of our race are burned at the stake, hung to the limbs of trees, and shot down like dogs?

  As passionate and eloquent as were those words, and many more from many quarters of the nation, the country wasn’t stirred to respond. In August, when the Afro-American Council met in Chicago and debated a resolution “denouncing” McKinley for not preventing Southern lynching, the New York Times dismissively asked how the president possibly could do such a thing. The proposition, stated the paper, was “intrinsically absurd.”

  The president did move forcefully to recruit more blacks into the armed forces and to institute programs designed to find and train black officers. He summarily rejected the view, put forth by some in the military, that black Americans wouldn’t fight aggressively against colored Filipinos. “The colored regiments fig
ht magnificently,” he wrote to Root in a long memo outlining the robust recruitment program he wanted, “and I see that those in the Philippines have already shown the same splendid fighting qualities that were evidenced in Cuba.” But generally he was comfortable accepting the state of racial politics that he had inherited.

  * * *

  ON OCTOBER 31, news reached the president that Vice President Hobart was seriously ill and deteriorating rapidly. He died at Paterson, New Jersey, on November 21. It was a huge blow to the president, not just because it left a big vacancy in his administration that he had no constitutional means to fill. Hobart had been a trusted counselor to the president, sought out for his views on nearly all major issues and problems. What’s more, he had been a close and valued friend, always generous and hearty in his fellowship. Jennie Hobart had become one of Ida’s closest confidantes and supporters. The president, his Cabinet, some sixty senators, and a large number of congressmen traveled to Paterson in special trains for the funeral.

  “No president and vice-president have ever been so intimate as McKinley and Hobart,” a journalist named W. E. Curtis wrote in the Chicago Record. He said the vice president was given to walking into the president’s room unannounced and hailing, “Hello! What are you doing now?” And McKinley would instruct his military aide, “Tell Mr. Hobart to be ready to go driving at half-past 4.” Now that camaraderie would be gone from the president’s routine, and he faced the delicate political question of who should be his replacement—in the event, of course, that he decided to run again.

  — 25 —

  Second-Term Resolve

  AN AGENDA DESIGNED TO GENERATE POLITICAL MOMENTUM

  On December 5, 1899, President McKinley sent to Congress his third Annual Message, 23,000 words in length, reviewing the condition of the country as he saw it after nearly three years at the national helm. It was a government document, fulfilling the Constitution’s mandate that presidents inform Congress on the state of the Union from time to time and recommend measures adjudged “necessary and expedient.” But it also was a political document, crafted in recognition that the country faced a presidential campaign that would help determine McKinley’s ultimate standing in history.

  No doubt the president spoke sincerely that Sunday evening in September when he said he happily would renounce a second term and slip away to the tranquility of Canton if he felt the nation didn’t need him. Even months later, on his fifty-seventh birthday on January 29, he would repeat that sentiment to Dawes. But this was a man who had nurtured an ambition since early manhood to intertwine his own destiny with that of his country, whose quiet reserve and equable temperament had masked an overpowering desire to leave his mark on history. Whatever he felt when beset by presidential frustrations or Ida’s bouts of infirmity, his ambition burned as brightly as ever, however much he sought to shroud it with talk of “the call of duty.”

  After all, following Andrew Jackson’s second-generation era of American politics, few presidents had managed to vie seriously for a second term. Since Jackson’s reelection in 1832, nearly seventy years before, only three presidents had been elected twice: Lincoln, Grant, and Cleveland. Now McKinley also seemed poised to reach the fullest appropriate tenure established by Washington’s two-term precedent. For years he had prided himself on his ability to balance political ambitions with his solicitous regard for his ailing wife, had pushed aside opportunities to get rich in the corporate world in favor of the more psychically rewarding political life, even with its difficulties and trade-offs. And to salvage his civic career and presidential hopes after a disastrous flight of financial bad judgment, he even had accepted the humiliation of letting his wealthy friends bail him out rather than pursuing private-sector opportunities that would have allowed him to bail himself out.

  Now he stood at the pinnacle of American politics—not just president of the United States but a president enjoying widespread popularity. Despite his indirect methods and sometimes halting decision making, most Americans viewed him as an effective leader capable of swaying Congress and dealing adroitly with foreign nations. He had secured his hallmark tariff legislation within his first months in office and now presided over a robust economy—“a condition of unusual prosperity,” as he put it in his Annual Message. In taking his country to war, he had transformed its world role and invested it with unprecedented global power and influence—all at a modest price in treasure and blood. Now his country enjoyed peace, not only abroad but also in its own streets, where just a few years before labor strife had erupted into confrontation and bloodshed.

  And so it didn’t figure that this president, despite his occasional private yearnings for a more quiet life, would forgo the crowning glory of a second term. In December 1899, he moved to position himself for that final political triumph with an Annual Message that catalogued the fundamentals of the country’s “unusual prosperity” and established an agenda designed to generate political momentum through the coming campaign year.

  The president took pains to tie the prevailing dynamic economy to recent growth trends in U.S. trade, thus demonstrating that his expansionist foreign policy directly enhanced American lives. Combined imports and exports for the year, he said, broke all previous records. Indeed exports for 1899 alone exceeded combined exports and imports twenty years earlier by more than a billion dollars. While per capita imports had declined by 20 percent in twenty years, per capita exports had increased by 58 percent, “showing,” said the president, “the enlarged capacity of the United States to satisfy the wants of its own increasing population, as well as to contribute to those of the peoples of other nations.”

  The president acknowledged that the budget deficits he had inherited extended into the latest fiscal year, which yielded a shortfall of some $89 million. But that was about to change. With a surging economy, Treasury officials predicted a surplus in fiscal 1900 of $40 million, with even greater financial swells anticipated in subsequent years. (Within weeks Treasury Secretary Gage would revise the current-year estimate to $60 million, then quickly increase it further to $70 million.) This gave the president significant flexibility to attack problems and exploit opportunities at home and overseas.

  Moreover America had emerged as the world’s greatest industrial nation. In output of iron ore, coal, and coke, and in corollary iron and steel production, the United States caught up with global leader Britain in 1889, then pulled ahead in 1897, McKinley’s first presidential year. “That lead can never be broken,” declared an industrial expert named Charles H. Cramp. The United States stood “at the head of nations in the primary industry of modern civilization.” Around the same time, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie predicted that the United States would take the global lead also in shipbuilding and other industrial manufacturing. “I see nothing to prevent this country of ours from being the chief source of supply of steel and the articles made from steel for the rest of the less-favored world,” he said. It wasn’t surprising that Mark Hanna, when asked to name the issues that would animate the campaign year, listed first and foremost “the prosperity of the working people of the country.”

  Still, the president wanted Congress to address a bit of unfinished business in economic policy. This was legislation to codify his declaration, issued in his bold speech at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel nearly two years before, that the nation must place itself upon a firm gold footing in monetary policy. The president called for legislation giving Treasury the tools “to support the existing gold standard,” to maintain parity between gold and silver, and establish “the equal power of every dollar at all times in the market and in the payment of debts.” Though lingering free-silver sentiment posed political difficulties, congressional Republicans responded in the early months of the new year with the Gold Standard Act of 1900, which stripped away decades of ambiguity in monetary policy by defining the dollar in gold and pledging to redeem greenbacks and other federal notes in gold alone. The legislation also created a $150 million gold reserve
for the redemption of notes. It cleared Congress on March 13 and was signed by the president—using a gold pen—the next day. Anyone who had predicted such a thing four years earlier, at the height of the great silver rebellion, said The Nation, “would have been considered a lunatic.” It added, “It will be impossible in the lifetime of the present generation to revive the silver controversy.”

  But if the country’s economic health seemed assured, it still faced ominous challenges in foreign affairs. The continuing Philippine entanglement had consumed nearly $50 million and more than 1,000 American lives between May 1 and November 1, 1898. The president displayed a defensive tone in his Annual Message as he unfurled his narrative of U.S. actions in the islands—how America had acquired sovereignty in an entirely appropriate and constitutional manner, reasonably refused to share sovereignty with insurgents, and assured Filipinos in word and deed that America would “do everything possible to advance their interests.”

  But, he continued, America’s good intentions had been thwarted by “the sinister ambition of a few leaders of the Filipinos,” and now the United States was embroiled in an “unwelcome but most righteous campaign.” U.S. forces, he assured his countrymen, “have gained ground steadily in every direction, and now look forward confidently to a speedy completion of their task.” Indeed in January General Otis reported significant U.S. victories in the southern reaches of Luzon—at Taal, where some 800 insurgents were routed, and at Laguna de Bay, where U.S. forces scattered an enemy contingent described by the Washington Post as “probably the last considerable force of insurgents remaining in one command.” Such victories, while not decisive in the field, helped blunt the anti-imperialist clamor at home and bought time—nobody knew how much—for the president’s policy to succeed.