President Trump admires one of his long-forgotten predecessors. He has resurrected the memory of President William McKinley, whose term bridged the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Trump evidently sees him as a kindred spirit. That is passing strange, since in most regards McKinley was the quintessential anti-Trump.
McKinley was the ultimate consensus politician. He was famous for his lack of convictions and hated taking a stand on any controversial issue. His approach to politics was not to lead but to divine the public mood and follow it. One of his congressional colleagues, the future House speaker Joseph Cannon, said that McKinley kept his ear so close to the ground that it was full of grasshoppers. Trump is loud, bombastic, impulsive, and given to outrageous proclamations. McKinley was quiet, prudent, calm, and self-effacing.
“President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent — he was a natural businessman — and gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did, including the Panama Canal,” Trump said in his inaugural address.
All three of those assertions are false.
McKinley did not enrich the United States through tariffs. What became known as the “McKinley Tariff,” which increased across-the-board tariffs from 39 percent to 49.5 percent, was passed into law in 1890, while McKinley was a congressman. It was highly unpopular and resulted in a crushing defeat for the Republican party in the next election. Four years later it was repealed.
McKinley was not a “natural businessman” or any other kind. He was a postal clerk, schoolteacher, Civil War officer, lawyer, and politician but never ran or worked in any business. The suggestion that he left money to his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, to build the Panama Canal is puzzling. The canal was built after McKinley’s death with money appropriated by Congress and lent by Citibank and J.P. Morgan.
In one political sense, though, Trump and McKinley have something important in common: McKinley was the first American president to be elected with the help of large campaign contributions from plutocrats. Famous “robber barons” like John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt opened their purses for him in 1896. They were terrified of his opponent, William Jennings Bryan, who promised to support “the struggling masses” against “idle holders of idle capital.” Trump’s campaign war chest was filled by oligarchs who were just as fearful of what Trump calls the “radical left.”
McKinley ran a “front-porch campaign” for president, confining himself to waving at visitors from the veranda of his home in Ohio. Even when appointing Cabinet secretaries, he would have an aide make the overture so no one could say he was involved. Trump loves the spotlight. McKinley studiously avoided it.
McKinley is remembered mainly for launching the Spanish-American War, which ended with the United States controlling Cuba and owning Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. He did it with extreme reluctance. Unlike Trump, he had firsthand experience with war. He had fought in the Civil War battle of Antietam, where more than 20,000 Americans were killed or wounded in a single day, and told a friend: “I have been through one war, I have seen the dead piled up, and I do not want to see another.”
Ultimately, McKinley declared war for the only reason he ever did anything: because voters were clamoring for it. As he hesitated, critics called him “Wobbly Willie.” Protesters gathered outside the White House. Pro-war activists hung him in effigy. Newspapers published ditties like this one:
Uncle Sam, tell us why are you waiting?
Hear you not the call to arms?
For our noble land has been degraded.
Let us wake to war’s alarms!
Like Trump, McKinley had an imperialist streak, but their justifications have been different. Trump wants to seize foreign territories because he thinks that would benefit the United States. McKinley did it because he truly believed that American occupation would help subject peoples.
On Feb. 15, 1899, McKinley stepped from a train at the newly built South Station in Boston. He had come to make one of the defining speeches of his career. In it he sought to answer a profound question: Since the United States is dedicated to freedom and self-determination, how could it justify seizing foreign lands? His answer came at a massive banquet for 2,000 Bostonians at now-demolished Mechanics Hall.
McKinley insisted that the United States had “no imperial designs” and always acted with “unselfish purpose.” When it intervened in other countries, it did so not in order to dominate or extract wealth but only to assure “the welfare and happiness and the rights of the inhabitants.”
“Did we need their consent to perform a great act for humanity?” he asked. “If we can benefit these remote peoples, who will object?”
By the time McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo in 1901, he had become widely popular. America’s tallest mountain was named after him. Later it was rechristened with its traditional name, Denali. Trump wants to make it Mount McKinley again. That has set off precisely the sort of bitter public debate that would have horrified McKinley.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University
