Some 12,000 people sought tickets to the swearing-in ceremony, although the area nearest the temporary platform at the east front of the Capitol contained only 7,000 seats. But the surrounding grounds offered abundant standing room, and the day’s festivities also would feature the parade, fireworks, hotel receptions, and general civic excitement. Theodore Roosevelt stepped off the Congressional Limited at Pennsylvania Station at 4:50 the afternoon of March 2 and in a rare display of restraint avoided attention. He quietly ushered his family into waiting carriages for the short drive to the home of his sister, Anna Cowles, on N Street. He paid a brief courtesy call to the president on March 3.
When inauguration day arrived, the president rose a bit earlier than usual and discovered opaque skies threatening rain. He ate breakfast with family and guests, then signed a large stack of bills that Congress had enacted during its late-session crunch. The congressional escort committee arrived just before eleven to take the president to the Capitol. On the ceremonial drive, the president sat with his closest political ally, Mark Hanna, designated escort committee chairman. As cheers greeted the presidential carriage along the procession route, Hanna maintained a stoic demeanor, refusing to acknowledge any crowd adulation that he thought belonged exclusively to the president. Prominently positioned ahead of the presidential carriage were Civil War veterans, drawing enthusiastic applause, followed by the soldiers of the Ohio National Guard’s Cavalry Troop A, atop their famous coal-black mounts and resplendent in flashy uniforms.
Ida, “magnificently costumed,” was escorted to her Senate gallery seat by White House military aides Henry Corbin and Theodore Bingham. The president, knowing her comfort was well in hand, showed less anxiety than when he entered the Capitol Building in similar circumstances four years earlier.
As usual, the vice president was sworn in at a smaller Senate chamber ceremony attended by governmental dignitaries and diplomats. Roosevelt’s speech, appropriately brief, reflected his vision of a nation with growing responsibilities attending its growing power. “We belong to a young nation,” said the New Yorker, “already of giant strength, yet whose political strength is but a forecast of the power that is to come.” Echoing McKinley, he emphasized America’s responsibility to humanity. “Accordingly as we do well or ill, so shall mankind in the future be raised or cast down.”
Then those within the Senate chamber filed outside to the platform, filled with “high-hatted, long-coated, cane-carrying” gentlemen and their well-dressed ladies. As he walked down the steps to his designated chair, the president could see an ocean of citizenry, 40,000 strong, stretching into the distance, some spectators perched in trees and upon rooftops. Then came the rains, an “unwelcome freight of moisture,” stirring many to abandon their open-air platform seats and rush to shelter under the Capitol’s eaves and in doorways. A sea of umbrellas emerged, providing only partial shelter under such an onslaught. It was in this chaos of discomfort that William McKinley took the oath of office and delivered his second inaugural address. The rains ceased shortly thereafter.
Not surprisingly, the president compared the state of the Union on this celebratory day with the national circumstance four years earlier—anxiety over the currency and credit then, but little foreboding now; Treasury receipts inadequate then, but robust today; a deep and lingering economic depression then, but solid prosperity now; ever expanding foreign trade, with more to come under his reciprocity program. “The national verdict of 1896 has for the most part been executed,” he said, adding a stout defense of his policies, particularly in foreign relations. “The American people, entrenched in freedom at home, take their love for it with them wherever they go, and they reject . . . the doctrine that we lose our own liberties by securing the enduring foundations of liberty to others.”
As for his most troublesome challenge, the president declared, “Our country should not be deceived. We are not waging war against the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands. A portion of them are making war against the United States.” He insisted that “the greater part of the inhabitants” accepted American sovereignty and welcomed the protections of the American democratic tradition.
Following the ceremonies at the Capitol, the president and his wife held a White House luncheon for presidential houseguests, members of the Cabinet and their wives, congressional bigwigs, Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt, and various Roosevelt relatives. Ida managed to hold up through the Capitol ceremonies and the luncheon but bowed to the Major’s suggestion that she forgo the parade and rest up for the evening ball. The president occupied the enclosed and heated reviewing stand for nearly three hours as regular troops, militias, and civic organizations marched by in a heady display of American might, music, and patriotism.
The evening ball, held once again in the gigantic redbrick Pension Building, with its huge internal columns and impressive friezes reminiscent of ancient Greece and Rome, was described by the Washington Post as “a gathering of well-bred people who showed in their bearing and demeanor that they were accustomed to the graces of good society.” Ida wore a white satin gown, “high in the neck and long in the sleeves,” with an overlay of lace and an immense train. She and the president arrived just before ten and spent most of the evening in a private reception and dining area that accommodated about sixty presidential guests. The party enjoyed a meal that included lobster Newburg, mushrooms, croquettes exquises, French peas, salmon à la Bayadère, boned capon, tongue in jelly, ham, mayonnaise of chicken à la Reine, and assorted rolls. “It is noticeable,” observed the Post, “that no wines appear, the only beverage being Apollinaris water.”
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THE PRESIDENT DEVOTED March 5 to meeting with Washington visitors, prominent and otherwise, who came for the inauguration, including many of the dozen or so Republican governors in town, other GOP notables, members of Ohio’s Troop A that acted as his inauguration escort, schoolchildren from Chicago, and various GOP clubs. Ohio’s Governor Nash called, along with the Columbus Glee Club, which sang a number of tunes in the East Room, much to Ida’s delight. Meanwhile Republicans basked in the glow of public support. The Baltimore American called the president’s contrast of 1897 with 1901 “particularly striking” and a key to understanding “why the people again intrusted him with power.” Whitelaw Reid’s Tribune said the president spoke “with more than ordinary authority,” given his electoral mandate. But the anti-McKinley Philadelphia Record described the speech as “smooth and dulcet to the point of oiliness” and decried the president’s habitual “benevolent optimism.”
In late March McKinley received stunning news from Manila. General Frederick Funston, a slightly built Kansan with a zest for combat and a streak of cruelty toward the enemy, had captured the elusive Emilio Aguinaldo in his remote hiding place at Palanan, in the northeast section of Luzon. Though the American anti-insurgency campaign had constricted the rebel leader’s range of maneuver and destroyed his main-force military capacity, the wily guerrilla fighter had remained a nettlesome adversary and influential personification of the Philippine independence movement. Funston, learning of Aguinaldo’s location from a captured courier, crafted a plan to seize the rebel leader in a clever ruse. He organized an expedition consisting of four U.S. officers, the captured messenger, four ex-insurgent officers, and seventy-eight friendly, Tagalog-speaking Filipino scouts from the town of Macabebe. The Filipinos, disguised as guerrilla fighters with U.S. soldiers as prisoners, managed to march through the countryside for three days without alerting natives. Once near Aguinaldo’s compound, they discarded the disguises and attacked, killing two insurgents, capturing eighteen rifles and a thousand rounds of ammunition, and taking Aguinaldo into custody. “No casualties our side,” MacArthur reported to Washington.
MacArthur had told the mission leader in approving his plan, “Funston, this is a desperate undertaking. I fear I shall never see you again.” But its success became a turning point in the war. With many of Aguinaldo’s generals already having surrendered and his troops fadi
ng back into their regular lives, it seemed now merely a matter of time before the United States would snuff out the insurgency. More significant, it gave McKinley impetus to accelerate his plan to bring the Philippines under the civilian jurisdiction of Will Taft. Even MacArthur, who guarded his authority with tiger-like ferocity, understood the need for the transfer. With Taft and Secretary Root he helped fashion a plan for a July hand-off, when MacArthur would relinquish his command to General Adna Chaffee, a through-the-ranks officer with extensive combat experience in the Civil War, the Indian campaigns, and most recently in China. Root emphasized to Chaffee that the army would be subordinate to Taft except where lingering military threats necessitated otherwise.
Even Aguinaldo understood that the game was up. In April he issued a statement that constituted his own surrender: “The complete termination of hostilities and a lasting peace are not only desirable but absolutely essential to the welfare of the Philippines.” Employing his hallmark eloquence, he added, “Enough of blood, enough of tears and desolation. . . . By acknowledging and accepting the sovereignty of the United States throughout the entire archipelago, as I now do without any reservation whatsoever, I believe that I am serving thee, my beloved country.” Thus did this much-misunderstood man give up the dream that had animated him throughout his brief life. Murat Halstead, the Cincinnati editor and McKinley intimate, warned the president to be wary of the captured warrior. Use him for pacification, advised Halstead. “But he will promise all things to all and betray all. . . . It is in his blood and brain to do it again.” Mark Twain, on the other hand, likened Aguinaldo’s ambition to that of “Washington, Tell, Joan of Arc, the Boers, and certain other persons whose names are written large in honorable history.” Neither caricature captured the complexity or contradictions of this driven, vain, eloquent, paranoid, ambitious, at times brutal patriot of Philippine independence. In any event, with his military vocation destroyed, he settled into a life of resigned quietude under U.S. confinement.
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IN SPRING THE president formulated plans for an extensive cross-country trip, with the purpose of pushing the twin initiatives that were his second-term priorities: reining in the trusts and pushing his trade-reciprocity program. The idea was to traverse the continent through the South and Southwest to Los Angeles, then up the West Coast to the Northwest and back across the nation’s northern tier. It would culminate at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, where the president would crystallize the reciprocity views he intended to tout during the journey. The tour would begin in late April and extend to mid-June—six weeks on the rails with an entourage of forty-three, including friends, family, servants, reporters, Cabinet secretaries, and other officials.
The American people seemed to embrace the president’s views on both the trusts and reciprocity, but that sentiment hadn’t congealed sufficiently within the electorate to force old-line congressional Republicans to alter their traditional attitudes. On the trusts, the president was still pondering how he would accomplish two fundamental goals: getting the GOP establishment to embrace the antitrust imperative by galvanizing popular sentiment throughout the country and getting around the Supreme Court’s ruling that federal jurisdiction applied only to interstate matters. In the meantime he would concentrate on reciprocity, which he intended to push most aggressively during the tour.
His immediate problem was that Senate Republicans, even including Hanna, had thwarted his efforts to get ratification of the seven trade treaties negotiated by special envoy John Kasson. The weary Kasson, resigning his post in April, told the president he was “unwilling to proceed with a work which promised to be without result.” But McKinley refused to give up and told Kasson he intended to “seize all occasions that would present themselves to defend the policy of commercial reciprocity and change opinion on it.” He went further in a conversation with a visiting French statesman, Jules Siegfried, telling him that he no longer was an “ultra-protectionist,” as the New York Times called him, and believed the country had reached a time when the necessity to secure global markets had obviated any rationale for heavy protection.
But congressional Republicans chafed at the president’s newfound sentiments. Senate Finance Committee chairman Nelson Aldrich planned a Washington trip during the congressional recess to implore the president to abandon such heterodox nonsense. “It is asserted,” reported the New York Times, “that under Mr. Adrich’s direction a propaganda is to be begun and maintained for a continuance of all the tariff duties of the Dingley law without any modification whatever.”
The president’s tour was designed as his own propaganda countercampaign, with a particularly relentless drumbeat during the return leg and in Buffalo, as well as in his San Francisco remarks at the launch and dedication of the country’s latest battleship, the Ohio. His intention was to exploit popular sentiment for America’s military and economic push into the world by bundling the issue of lower tariffs into the broader vision of American expansionism. He also eyed policy imperatives attending Cuba’s ultimate independence—when propriety and sound thinking, in his view, dictated a generous trade policy toward the island. Already the president had assured visiting commissioners from the Havana constitutional convention that America wouldn’t saddle the new nation with onerous tariffs. But that of course would put him at odds with domestic sugar and tobacco interests—further necessitating that he invigorate free-trade thinking within the electorate.
The presidential train that left Washington on April 29 was a virtual “home on the rails,” with a drawing-room car featuring fresh roses delivered regularly; a dining car with the finest in silver, linens, china, and stemware; a parlor car (cigars, wine); and a presidential bedroom with a marble-tiled bathtub. Ida, as always, looked forward to the stimulation of travel, as well as the popular adulation and the opportunity to spend abundant time with the Major. Attending her would be her maid, Clara, and her favorite niece, Mary Barber, as well as the attentive and well-tempered Dr. Rixey, who had won McKinley’s respect by curbing Dr. Bishop’s bromides and bringing about a noticeable improvement in Ida’s condition. So appreciative was the president that he called the doctor into the Cabinet Room to pose a question: “Do you know that you have been taking care of us for over a year and you have not asked me to do anything for you? Isn’t there something that you want that I can do for you?”
“Mr. President,” replied the doctor, “when I came on duty here I made up my mind not to add to your cares but to do all in my power to make them as light as possible.”
“I am sure that there is something I can do for you,” insisted the president, “and it will do me good to do it.”
Rixey finally revealed that his nephew wished to join the Marine Corps but was languishing on a wait list. The president promptly assigned the next vacancy to the young man, “subject to examination.” Thus did the president get satisfaction in providing a small recompense to the doctor while indulging his own enjoyment of patronage prerogatives.
As the presidential train moved south, Cortelyou sought to maintain for Ida a modest schedule of events mixed with plenty of rest time. But he went too far when he sent regrets, on his own, to a group of Memphis women planning a luncheon for the first lady. When Ida heard about it, she insisted on going and impressed the local ladies with her sprightly demeanor. The president added luster by showing up unannounced and displaying his characteristic graciousness. In New Orleans, Ida experienced a bout of depression, but it passed quickly, and she felt particularly strong and lighthearted as the train passed through Texas.
At El Paso she developed a bone felon on her index finger that became inflamed and quite painful. Rixey lanced it, but the swelling remained, and she also developed a serious case of dysentery. Despite the pain and discomfort, she insisted on fulfilling the social and political schedule in Los Angeles, which further sapped her strength. On the trip north, near Santa Cruz, Rixey lanced the finger again, to little effect. The dysentery also resisted treatment. Despi
te her pain and the onset of fever, Ida gamely accompanied the president to speaking engagements in the vicinity of Del Monte, where the party had planned to stop for a weekend respite. By Sunday she was in an almost complete state of collapse. So alarmed was the president that he abandoned his personal stricture against travel on the Sabbath and rushed Ida to San Francisco, where she was placed in the spacious Lafayette Park home of industrialist Henry T. Scott, head of the iron works company that had constructed the battleship Ohio. Trained nurses were summoned, along with consulting physicians, as Ida descended into a state of semiconsciousness.
Statements to the press, crafted by Rixey and delivered by Cortelyou, dissembled about the true state of Ida’s health, which was far more serious than reported. Leaks to the press from members of the entourage gave a truer picture of the situation while hinting at the official misrepresentation. The president’s concern turned to distraught fear when the consulting physician Joseph Hirshfelder told him on Monday that Ida wasn’t responding to treatment. She was too weak to speak and languished in long periods of sleep interrupted by restlessness. When doctors counseled against his leaving the house for a brief speech nearby for fear that Ida might die in the meantime, the president became “completely unnerved.”
On Wednesday McKinley canceled the remainder of the tour, and the next morning the Washington Star reported, “Mrs. McKinley is slowly dying. . . . There is not one chance in a hundred that she will recover and be taken back to Washington alive.” In desperation, doctors applied heart stimulants, then injected a saline solution into her bloodstream. The dual treatment slowly took effect. By noon on Thursday, Ida was stirring. She opened her eyes and said, “I am tired of the food the doctors have been giving me!” She wanted “a piece of chicken and a cup of coffee.”
The worst was over, though Ida certainly wasn’t out of danger. While never straying from the Scott home for long, the president fulfilled a smattering of speaking commitments in the San Francisco area. On May 25 the presidential entourage was back on the train for the five-day trip to Washington, with well-wishing Americans lining the tracks at various points along the way. Although the trip proved burdensome for the infirm first lady and she seemed to relapse a bit upon arriving in Washington, doctors managed to keep her stable and effect a slow but steady revival. By June 20, some five weeks after she fell ill, Ida was able to see visitors and five days later managed to leave her bed and descend the stairs for lunch with her husband. From there her recuperation gained momentum.
President McKinley Page 55