* * *
HANNA WAS RIGHT. McKinley carried Nebraska and South Dakota on his way to an Electoral College victory of 292 to 155. Bryan carried the Solid South and four Western states, but the president captured the entire rest of the country. His popular vote plurality was 859,694, some 260,000 more than his 1896 margin. What’s more, Republicans gained thirteen House members and three in the Senate. The GOP now would control 198 House seats to 153 for the Democrats (and five for splinter parties); the Senate margin would be 56 to 29 (with three splinter-party members). Moreover Pettigrew lost his seat in South Dakota. “It was a vendetta of politics,” concluded the New York Times, describing an indecorous assault on Hanna by Pettigrew on the Senate floor some months before. “The radical was unhorsed and thrown out of public life, and the conservative can say with truth that it was he who did it.”
McKinley not only won reelection but did it his way—by tending to his obligations and letting voters judge him on his record. Wrote Dawes after meeting with McKinley back in Washington, “The president seems more impressed with his duties than with his triumph.” But the triumph contained plenty of political significance. In winning several Western states that he had lost in 1896, he finally put the silver mania to rest. And his victory clearly demonstrated the country’s embrace of his overseas initiatives and management of the war’s aftermath. America would not be deterred from its expansionist resolve. Further, by interpreting the race as a referendum on his policies and leadership, the president elevated his political significance as a leader with a clear popular mandate. As he told Cortelyou, “I can no longer be called the President of a party; I am now the President of the whole people.”
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Family and Nation
PERSONAL STRUGGLES AND POLITICAL AMBITIONS
Republicans throughout the land rejoiced at McKinley’s second-term triumph. On election night, at the GOP’s New York headquarters on Madison Avenue, teletype reports revealed around eight o’clock that the president would win big. “We carry New York by more than 110,000,” yelled party official Joe Manley of Maine, once Thomas Reed’s top aide but now a devoted McKinley man. Within an hour a phone update arrived from party vice chairman Henry Payne in Chicago. “Tell the boys we have carried Illinois by more than 100,000,” he told Manley. Around 11:30 Payne got the South Dakota results. “We have beaten Pettigrew,” he yelled, waving a telegram over his head. “Send the news to Hanna.” In Washington, 20,000 residents jammed the street in front of the Washington Post awaiting the latest returns. The throng, reported the paper, was “so densely packed that there was hardly room to stick another human being down upon the asphalt.” For nearly four hours, as Post officials displayed fresh bulletins on a large outdoor board, cheers and yells undulated through the multitude.
In Canton that morning, as McKinley and Day walked together down Market Street to the voting place, the president doffed his hat to acknowledge cheers here and there and offered courtly handshakes to residents along the way. In the evening, surrounded by friends and family in his cherished Market Avenue home as rain fell outside, he ripped reports off the ticker machine installed in his study. As returns came in he read them aloud with “unruffled composure” but refrained from commenting on even the most favorable developments. Around nine o’clock Manley wired from Manhattan, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Your triumphant re-election is conceded by Democratic managers.” Soon Canton was aflutter with marching bands and cheering crowds blaring steam whistles and blasting off rockets that streaked across the night sky with flashes of light and thunderous clamor.
Surrounding the McKinley home, the crowd shouted for a presidential appearance. The Major emerged upon his famous front porch, now much expanded as part of an extensive home refurbishment. “Fellow-citizens,” he said, “I thank you for the very great compliment of this call on this inclement night. . . . Of the many gratifying reports from every part of the country, none has given me more genuine and sincere gratitude than those from my own city and my own county of Stark. And I . . . thank you once more for the warm and hearty indorsement which you have to-day given my public acts.” The crowd emitted a hearty roar.
There was one Cantonite that evening, however, who wasn’t so sure about this second-term thing. “I did not want him to run a second time,” Ida told an interviewer. “I thought he had done enough for the country . . . and when his term expires he will come home and we will settle down quietly and he will belong to me.” Of course, she viewed her husband as a president for the ages. She once took umbrage when someone compared him to Daniel Webster because she thought that gave unwarranted stature to Webster. She considered him to be “the only honest man” ever to serve as president. But she was tired of sharing him with the country. She told a friend named Gertje Hamlin, as Hamlin later recalled, that “the American people did not deserve such a President as her husband.” She felt he did all the work for the party. When a Republican senator complained about the need for incessant travels to his home state, she snapped, “Well, I’m glad to hear that. . . . My husband has carried the Republican Party for twenty years. Now I’d like to see somebody else do something.”
She also feared assassination—and not without reason. “I am becoming somewhat anxious about your safety,” the president’s cousin William Osborne wrote him in early 1898. It was a time when anarchists had adopted assassination as a deadly means of political expression. In the fall of 1898 an anarchist named Luigi Lucheni stabbed to death Empress Elisabeth of Austria, and in summer 1900 an Italian American named Gaetano Bresci, from Paterson, New Jersey, killed King Umberto of Italy. The latter episode rattled Secret Service officials, who had received earlier reports of an anarchist cell in Paterson. A few months earlier a young assassin attempted to kill the Prince of Wales as he sat in a train in Brussels. Worst of all, in October newspapers reported official suspicions that two or three Italians had been dispatched from Europe to kill McKinley in Canton. The city’s mayor augmented his police force and urged officers to “watch for two Italians, who will probably be accompanied by a tall man who dresses like and passes for an old soldier.” Cortelyou sought to discredit the reports of a plot, but one newspaper said McKinley “was induced to refrain from taking his usual drive to-day.” Generally, though, the president brushed aside warnings about his safety with fatalistic indifference and insisted on making himself accessible to the country’s citizenry.
All this weighed heavily upon Ida. In July 1899, hearing from Cortelyou that matters on his desk presented no urgency, the president gladly hurried back to his wife because, as he told Cortelyou, she tended to fall apart when he was gone too long. Earlier he had been away beyond the anticipated time and returned to find her “crying like a child” with fears about his safety. McKinley attributed her behavior to “temporary weakness,” but it wasn’t isolated. In fact in the spring of 1899, after nearly two and a half years of relatively good health, Ida’s condition turned decidedly worse—and with disturbing new symptoms. In addition to her physical deterioration, she now suffered from what Dawes called “extreme mental depression.”
So severe was her neurosis that Ida’s doctors urged her to relinquish her first lady duties and essentially retire. The president reportedly favored the idea, but Ida wouldn’t hear of it, despite her difficulties in fulfilling the role. A presidential trip to the Midwest was postponed because of her depression. Then, during the trip, she often was unable to accompany her husband to events and speeches. Distraught, McKinley turned to a new doctor, Presley Marion Rixey, chief of the navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. When the president asked Rixey to “take medical charge” of Ida, he dedicated himself to her comfort and health. “No physician had ever shown such commitment to improving Ida’s condition,” wrote her biographer Carl Sferrazza Anthony. Rixey gave her constant attention and eased the way for McKinley to pursue his presidential duties with less anxiety—and perhaps less guilt—than he had felt before. The doctor’s ministratio
ns to Ida’s needs also encouraged the president to undertake speaking tours with her, whereas otherwise he may have avoided such outings out of deference to her infirmities.
But her symptoms continued, including her tendency toward peevishness. On the Midwest trip, when the president invited three volunteer committee members to ride in his carriage to an event, Ida raised such a fuss about not being with her husband that the three had to be disinvited. In Chicago, when the president and his wife were scheduled to attend separate events at around the same time, she refused to fulfill her obligation unless McKinley accompanied her. He cut short his own appearance and rushed to her event in order to mollify her.
She also seemed to be suffering from memory lapses. At a Missouri reception for a women’s group, the delegation leader recalled a previous Kansas City meeting when she had met Ida. The first lady cut her off. “I was never there,” she said.
“Oh, don’t you remember?” replied the woman, intending to jog Ida’s memory. “It was the time the city gave a big banquet—”
“I tell you we were never there,” snapped Ida. “If my husband went, I went with him. But he never went.”
Rixey became increasingly concerned about the erratic nature of Ida’s health. It “fluttered constantly and rarely for a few hours remained stationary,” he later wrote. By late 1899 she seemed in a downward spiral. “She does not improve at all of late,” recorded Cortelyou, “and her friends are beginning to worry over her condition.” Rixey brought in a noted neurologist named Frederick Peterson, a specialist in women’s psychiatric health, who examined Ida at length and issued a stunning opinion: that her anticonvulsive bromides (including small amounts of potassium, sodium, and sometimes ammonium salts), administered to her over many years, could have contributed to her deterioration. He called her condition “bromism” and said that, while such bromides could control seizures temporarily if administered carefully over short periods, extended usage could damage the central nervous system, diminishing the brain’s ability to control sensory and motor skills and curbing sensitivity to outside stimuli. Symptoms of bromism, said Peterson, corresponded with many of Ida’s complaints and behavioral traits, including memory loss, social aggression, and depression.
McKinley’s reaction to this diagnosis, after years of administering to Ida the bromides recommended by the absentee doctor in New York, Joseph Bishop, was never recorded, if indeed he was informed at all. But Ida’s condition improved a bit during 1900, and the president continued to cater to her most trivial wishes in his effort to mitigate her anxieties. White House official William Crook recalled, “When she wanted a pen, or a needle, or a book to read, all she did was to say so and the President would start at once, hurrying after it as quickly as possible.” He considered McKinley’s devotion “beautiful” but also “pathetic when we knew the weight of affairs he was carrying.”
The president never evinced any frustration or self-pity over his personal fate and seemed as much in love with his wife as ever. As Christmas approached in 1899, he shared with Cortelyou his desire to give her a special gift—consistent, though, with her admonition that he not make any expensive holiday purchases. He finally settled on a “beautiful vase” and a bejeweled picture frame, into which he placed a photo of little Katie, the daughter whose death had haunted the mother for nearly twenty-five years. Reporting to Cortelyou later that Ida was “delighted” with the gift, the president, in a contemplative mood, suggested people “should feel holy” during the Christmas season and embrace a “spirit of self-sacrifice.” Certainly the president demonstrated his own generosity of spirit in his ongoing devotion to Ida. And yet now, nearly a year later, it was clear that one thing he never intended to sacrifice was his political ambition. During the time when he struggled with the reelection decision, Ida’s condition deteriorated to its lowest point amid signs that her second-term anxieties may have contributed to her physical and emotional decline. Yet he pressed forward to fulfill his highest political aspirations.
* * *
RETURNING TO WASHINGTON from Canton after the election, the president moved quickly to maintain governmental continuity into his second term. At a November 9 Cabinet meeting, he led a three-hour discussion that yielded an ongoing commitment to his China policy in the form of maintenance of the legation guard pending a final settlement, but a transfer of some troops back to the Philippines so General MacArthur could step up his anti-insurgency efforts. Cabinet members seized upon the expectation that, with McKinley remaining in the White House, the Philippine insurgency would begin to wither more quickly.
McKinley opened the next Cabinet meeting with prepared remarks expressing his appreciation for his officials’ devotion and performance and saying the election victory belonged to them as much as to him. He dispensed with any request for en masse resignations, often done in such circumstances to ease the way for personnel changes. He didn’t want any personnel changes, he said; he had complete confidence in his team. His aim now was to move quickly on the most pressing challenge at hand: establishing an agenda for the coming year and crafting a strategy for executing it.
In late November the president traveled to Philadelphia for a speech before the Union League, one of the country’s oldest and most influential Republican institutions. As he had with the Cabinet, he deflected credit for the election victory away from himself and toward others, including Democrats who crossed over to the GOP, silver Republicans who had abandoned the party in 1896 but “have now returned and are home again to stay,” and laborers and farmers who “rejected the false doctrine of class distinction.” He staked out his mandate by saying his electoral victory had established an “unquestioned indorsement of the gold standard, industrial independence, broader markets, commercial expansion, reciprocal trade, the open door in China, the inviolability of public faith, the independence and authority of the judiciary, and peace and beneficent government under American sovereignty in the Philippines”—in other words, his entire governing philosophy and record.
It was significant, though, that the president’s mandate, as he described it, focused almost entirely on goals already accomplished and priorities currently established. The gold standard: in place; industrial independence: an aim of the 1897 Dingley tariff; broader markets and commercial expansion: realities; reciprocal trade: several agreements negotiated (though without any Senate ratification thus far); the open door in China: established; inviolability of public faith: uncontested; judicial independence: a constitutional principle not in dispute; beneficent American sovereignty over the Philippines: current policy, though fraught with difficulty. Left largely unsaid in this passage was what new initiatives the president planned in the forthcoming term.
McKinley’s first four years had been among the most momentous presidential terms in a generation. He settled the currency issue, which for years had driven a nasty wedge through the nation. He mustered a consensus behind his tariff philosophy even as he sought to unite the country behind refinements in that philosophy. He kicked Spain out of the Caribbean and rendered that strategic body of water an American lake. He initiated the “triumphant march of imperialism,” as William Osborne had called it, through the stunning military victory over Spain. He pushed America far out into the Pacific and into Asia by acquiring Hawaii and the Philippines and establishing the Chinese open door policy. He fashioned a concept of noncolonial imperialism that would guide his nation for a century or more. He developed a powerful special diplomatic relationship with Great Britain. He fostered a weighty expansion in American overseas trade. And he gave the country a level of economic growth and prosperity unseen since the early 1890s.
Few of these accomplishments had come about through any visionary thinking. As his career demonstrated, he lacked the kind of imagination that produced bold visions of national or global dimension. But he possessed that rare managerial acumen and a capacity to see how discrete events and actions, as they unfolded, could be meshed into coherent policies. Thus had he calibrat
ed his decision making in ways that nudged events toward the outcomes he had wanted—and which ultimately defined his first-term presidency. The big question now was whether he would, or could, formulate a coherent plan for the next four years or would instead react to events and challenges as they emerged.
The first clues came with the president’s Fourth Annual Message, sent to Congress on December 3. Not surprisingly he touted his record in creating prosperity, generating federal budget surpluses, and expanding foreign trade. And he put forth elaborate narratives of major episodes of the past year, including the China conflict, the Philippine challenge, the isthmian canal, the reciprocity initiative, and the effort to transition Cuba to a state of independence. Addressing Congress, he called for a standing army of 100,000 troops, ongoing support for his Philippine policy, action on monopolistic trusts, a shipping-subsidy bill, and a reduction in internal taxes imposed to fund the Spanish-American War.
It wasn’t a particularly impressive agenda, though a lingering question was how much political capital he would expend in behalf of the most far-reaching of these initiatives, the emotion-laden trust issue. Even if McKinley got everything he wanted from the second session of the Fifty-sixth Congress, which began on December 3, it didn’t add up to much in terms of new initiatives. On the other hand, the president and his government had their hands full with matters that had been pushed onto the national agenda during the first term.
One was the state of the army. Wartime legislation had authorized the president to maintain an army of 100,000 troops, with 65,000 regulars and 35,000 volunteers. But that legislation was set to expire in July 1901, just a few months away, and then the army’s authorized manpower would drop to 27,000, roughly the prewar level. Already enlistments were expiring, and it would take time to replace the outgoing troops serving under the old legislation. With hostilities in the Philippines and global challenges such as the Boxer episode in China, not to mention ongoing troop commitments in Cuba and Puerto Rico, McKinley wanted to maintain a 100,000-troop army well into the future. But such a standing army, absent major military imperatives, was unprecedented, and anti-imperialists had pressed hard on the issue during the campaign. “If you are in favor of a large standing army,” said Bryan, “you will vote the Republican ticket; if you are opposed to a large standing army, to make subjects of a people of whom we cannot make citizens, you will vote the Democratic ticket.” Bryan’s plan: get out of the Philippines and return to a small peacetime army.
President McKinley Page 53