The Real McKinley

Simon Jenkins writes:

Donald Trump’s favourite US president was William McKinley. Who he? In his inaugural address, Trump pledged to restore the name Mount McKinley to North America’s highest peak. It was an anti-woke dig at Barack Obama, who had given it the Alaskan native name of Denali. But why this idolatry?

The answer has since become clear. McKinley was the president (1897-1901) who introduced super-tariffs in his first year in office to protect the US’s post-recessionary manufacturers. Some were as high as 57%, and were seen as an alternative fundraiser to income tax. McKinley was also appealing to Trump for presiding over the founding of a hesitant US empire beyond the North American continent, one from which it has since retreated. Apart from that, the man was unostentatious, intelligent and impeccably polite, faults that Trump is clearly ready to forgive. His only carelessness was to be assassinated six months into his second term.

Trump has blatantly sought to mimic McKinley’s policies over the past fortnight. It is therefore worth studying what his hero actually did. Unlike Trump, McKinley made sure that his tariffs were approved by Congress. Indeed, the constitution then required it – and technically still does. He was emphatic that they should be based on treaties embracing reciprocity. They should be treaties.

In the event, the tariffs were not seen as critical to economic recovery. They were also blamed for a 25% rise in the cost of living. McKinley lost enthusiasm for them and became instead a champion of global free trade. He formed a group of nations to pursue an open-door policy, aimed at strengthening trade with China. He never saw tariffs as tactical weapons of foreign policy, nor used Trump’s description of his trading partners as “atrocious”.

As for seeking new colonies, historians regard McKinley as at best an accidental imperialist. A year after his 1897 tariffs were introduced, the US was faced with the effective collapse of the Spanish empire, with armed insurrections in Cuba and the Philippines. Like many Americans, McKinley welcomed the arrival of new and free states. But he was adamantly against aiding them in wars against Spain. His much-cited quote was that “war should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed”. He had seen the civil war, and never wanted to see another one.

Yet he was under pressure. This was a time when European nations were reaching their imperial limits. It was an opportunity for the US to spread its wings, and many of McKinley’s colleagues were eager for the challenge. Over the course of 1898, war fever against Spain became hysterical. The Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers daily demanded intervention in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Showered with petitions, Congress demanded, in effect, that McKinley declare war on Spain.

He did so under protest. His belligerent assistant navy secretary, the young Teddy Roosevelt, had already mobilised the navy, aiming it at Cuba and the Philippines. Roosevelt then formally resigned his position and led a volunteer regiment to fight in Cuba amid a blaze of publicity. He had accused McKinley of having “no more backbone than a chocolate éclair”. He was nonetheless chosen as McKinley’s vice-president in 1900. 

These interventions did not result from any threat to US territory or sovereignty. They were naked acts of aggression. They were spectacularly egged on by Rudyard Kipling’s poem, The White Man’s Burden, directed at the Philippines and published in the New York Sun. It challenged America to take over from the British empire, to fight “the savage wars of peace” against “sloth and heathen folly”.

McKinley throughout was on the side of negotiation and peace. The Spanish war ended in a treaty signed in Paris in December 1898, which ceded America varying measures of control over Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. McKinley agreed with an anti-imperial majority in Congress that, once pacified, the US should deny any “intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control”. The government of the islands must be left to their people. The only “imperial” acquisition that McKinley did undertake was that of Hawaii, to prevent it falling into the hands of Japan.

On McKinley’s assassination in 1901, it was Roosevelt who assumed control of these territories, did not leave and retained them into the 20th century. It was also Roosevelt who backed rebels in seizing Panama from Colombia and giving the US control of the canal’s building and fortification. This was highly controversial. Roosevelt was challenged in Congress and by the New York Times for “an act of sordid conquest”. If Trump is seeking to emulate an earlier president, it is surely Roosevelt – described as the “bucking bronco” of American imperialism – he should be worshipping.

Almost every president comes to office asserting if not isolationism, then a refusal to commit money or resources to setting the world to rights. Yet all are seduced by the power of office and the language of the founding fathers. They come to see the US’s “manifest destiny” as being to champion freedom and democracy wherever it is threatened. From Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt, from JFK to Johnson and the Bushes father and son, all came to see themselves as global crusaders for that cause.

In 2016, Trump refreshingly described the interventionism of his predecessors as a “total disaster”. He stuck to his guns and almost entirely avoided troop deployments during his first term of office. The world at least knew where it stood.

His emphasis on putting America’s interests first was repeated in 2024. But this time the prospect is uncertain. In his inaugural speech, he described his task as one that “expands our territory … and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons”. He even used the fell phrase, manifest destiny, as being one he would “pursue … into the stars … to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars”. Not content with Mars, he has set his sights on Panama, Greenland and Gaza.

These territories might not match the ambitions of a Kipling or a Roosevelt, but Trump’s current intentions are hardly pacific. If he is to deify McKinley, he might first seek to find out a bit more about him.

And James W. Carden writes:

The 25th president is having a moment in the spotlight.

William McKinley, twice elected to the presidency before being felled by an assassin’s bullet in 1901, won praise from President Donald Trump during the latter’s inaugural address last month. Trump praised McKinley for making “our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.” Trump also pledged to restore McKinley’s name to North America’s highest peak, “where it belongs.” As the esteemed editor and McKinley biographer Robert Merry recently observed, “It isn’t difficult to see how Trump, once he became familiar with the McKinley story, would embrace it as a model for his own White House leadership.”

While it makes sense that Trump would see much to emulate in McKinley’s record on tariffs and trade, McKinley seems a less sure guide on matters of war and peace. On that front, there are better models than McKinley, on whose watch the US engaged in an unnecessary and unjust war against Spain which resulted in the subsequent occupation of the Philippines (McKinley should also earn demerits for inflicting Teddy Roosevelt on the nation).

Unlike today, at the fin de siècle America’s role as a global power was subject to debate. Mark Twain, then among the country’s most renowned literary voices, was a founding member of the Anti-Imperialist League. Twain remarked at the time, “I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.” Henry Adams, author, professor and scion of America’s first and finest political dynasty, wrote to his brother Brooks (who unlike Henry was an ardent proponent of empire) that he thought “our Philippine excursion” was “a false start in the wrong direction and one that is more likely to blunt our energies than to guide them.” He continued: “It is a mere repetition of the errors of Spain and England.”

Despite these objections, the Washington establishment set off in search of monsters to destroy. Adams’ confidante John Hay, who served as McKinley’s ambassador to the Court of St. James and then, later, as Roosevelt’s secretary of state, enthused about McKinley’s “splendid little war; begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that fortune which loves the brave.” The imperial fever of that time was a byproduct of new theories of naval superiority promoted by Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan as well as Darwinian notions of racial superiority such as those infamously expressed in Rudyard Kipling’s White Man’s Burden (1899) which described native Filipinos as “new-caught, sullen peoples, half devil and half child.” Such was the distance we traveled from the days of Jefferson who, in 1791 wrote, “if there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.”

In Congress the charge against empire was led by the speaker of the House, Thomas B. Reed, a Republican from Maine. Reed was witty, principled and—at six-foot-three, three-hundred pounds—imposing. He ruled the House with an iron fist. Said one contemporary, “He commands everything by the brutality of his intellect.” Democratic opponents took to calling him “Czar Reed”—an epithet, quips Reed’s biographer James Grant, that he didn’t seem to mind.

The great historian Barbara Tuchman notes that as House speaker, Reed was “unalterably opposed to expansion and all it implied.” He believed that “American greatness lay at home and was to be achieved by improving living conditions,” rather than by embarking on adventures in Venezuela, Cuba, Hawaii and elsewhere.

But by 1898 the war fever was catching. Two months following the explosion, in February, of the USS Maine off the coast of Cuba, McKinley declared war on Spain. Like too many progressives in present-day Washington who have spent the last three years plastering yellow and blue flags onto their bumpers, progressives in Reed’s day, including William Jennings Bryan, Albert J. Beveridge and New Republic (some things never change) founder Herbert Croly, all eagerly jumped aboard the pro-war bandwagon. “I would like to see Spain swept from the face of the earth,” said suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Reed knew that, despite his best efforts, he could not hold back the tide of empire in the House for long. He penned an article for the magazine Illustrated American titled “Empire Can Wait” and he held off legislation authorizing the annexation of Hawaii for as long as he could. The final straw for Reed was the Senate’s approval, by a 57-21 margin, of the Treaty of Paris, which ceded control of the Philippines (for $20 million), Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States.

An America-First foreign policy, properly understood, is one that eschews imperial conquests. Reed knew this intuitively but ultimately lost the debate to McKinley, Roosevelt and their pro-expansionist supporters.

At the time of Reed’s death, on December 6, 1902, his successor, Joe Cannon, eulogized him as having "the strongest intellect crossed on the best courage of any man in public life I have ever known.” Today, however, Reed is the unjustly neglected founder of America First.