Sydney M. Williams
Burrowing into Books
Reviews of Selected Readings
February 15, 2018
“President McKinley: Architect of the
American Century”
Robert W. Merry
“Once again the
president didn’t feel constrained by precedent or
what he considered outmoded political
etiquette. He was in politics to win.”
Robert
Merry
President
McKinley
Of all our presidents, few need rehabilitating more than William
McKinley. For most Americans, he serves as a footnote, best remembered for his
assassination, which gave rise to the well-remembered, energetic, mercurial and
narcissistic Theodore Roosevelt. McKinley was a man of tradition, a supporter
of tariffs and of glacial change, but he quit the status quo ante. He
confronted the Trusts, which were hobbling competition, and he turned the U.S.
into a global military and economic power house. The United States proved
victorious during the four-month-long Spanish-American War. With victory came Pax
Americana, replacing Pax Britannica. In defeat, Spain ceded the Philippines,
Guam, Cuba and Puerto Rico. McKinley annexed Hawaii and granted it self-rule.
He created the “Open Door” policy with China and cemented our special
relationship with England. He saw the value in, and pushed for, the Panama Canal,
assuring U.S. dominance in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But, unlike
Britain, Germany Spain and France, he was not an imperialist. He did not seek
territory in Cuba or the Philippines; his desire was to nourish independent and
democratic nations that would befriend the United States and abet its security
and global trade.
Mr. Merry does a masterful job in clearing the rubble of history, so
that we might see this man for who he was. William McKinley was the last of six
presidents to have served in the Civil War. He was eighteen when the War began,
which he joined as a private. Four years later, he was mustered out as a brevet
major. His war memories tempered his attitudes toward foreign engagements: “…the memories of war are sweeter than service
in the war.” Yet, he oversaw U.S. military action in Cuba and the
Philippines. Mr. Merry tells of his family tragedy, and he takes us through his
years in Ohio – as a Congressman and two-term governor – and his relationship
with Mark Hanna. He quotes John Hay on McKinley’s character. Hay had been
private secretary to Abraham Lincoln and served as McKinley’s Ambassador to the
Court of St. James and Secretary of State: “It
is a genuine Italian ecclesiastical face of the fifteenth century. And there
are idiots who think Mark Hanna will run him!” Elihu Root, New York lawyer
and McKinley’s Secretary of War, expressed similar sentiments: “He cared nothing about the credit, but
McKinley always had his way.”
The late 19th Century was a time of industrial creativity
and economic expansion, but it was also a time of political and labor unrest. McKinley
was the first president to win re-election (in 1900) since Grant had been
re-elected twenty-eight years earlier. He helped guide the country toward its
global pre-eminence.
Mr. Merry not only provides a character study of Mr. McKinley, but also
offers a window on the little-studied political aspects of the last few decades
of the 19th Century. In the twenty-five years, between 1877 and
1901, six men served as President, two of whom were assassinated. Writing in The
New York Times book review, Evan Thomas noted that the story of McKinley
suggests “show-boating moralizers can be
balanced by grounded and wiser souls” – grounded and wise, fitting epithets
for our 25th President.
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