Party Like a President by Brian Abrams

Author:Brian Abrams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company

The state of Ohio vs. Todd.

One highlight of McKinley’s prudish ways happened in 1869. Four years out of law school, he served a single term as prosecuting attorney of Stark County, Ohio. The hardworking sprout, still living with siblings, advocated stricter alcohol licensing laws as well as complete abstinence. It was an effective way to move up the ranks: Stark County was mostly a Democratic-leaning county at the time, and the twenty-six-year-old stumped for the reelection of Governor Rutherford B. Hayes, fellow Republican and heavyweight champion of the temperance movement. McKinley ended up carrying the county for the triumphant governor in a squeaker of a race.

“He and Hayes had been very close in the Civil War together,” said Lewis L. Gould, author of The Presidency of William McKinley. “There would have obviously been an element of calculation in McKinley’s temperance efforts, but it would have fit ideology and expediency at that time. There was a huge emphasis on closing businesses on Sundays, Bible-reading in schools, stuff like that. Republicans tended to take the evangelical, pietistic point of view.”

Indeed, the pill was seemingly put on this Earth to discourage any sort of decent pastime that involved catching a buzz. During his two-year term, the Stark County prosecutor secured indictments against bar owners for allegedly strong-arming college kids into purchasing liquor. Coeds were summoned to the courtroom to recollect what must have been a traumatizing experience. Philander C. Knox, law student at Mount Union College (class of ’72), gave elaborate testimony that convicted several saloonkeepers.

The suck-up tore a page right out of McKinley’s opportunism manifesto. After graduation, Knox moved to Pittsburgh and became a fund-raiser for the president. He was appointed U.S. attorney general in 1901.

Free Silver Fizz

When McKinley ran for a second term in 1900 against William Jennings Bryan, GOP rallies chanted, “McKinley drinks soda water/Bryan drinks rum/McKinley is a gentleman/Bryan is a bum!” This was, in the eyes of McKinley’s constituents, somehow an item for the plus column?

Meanwhile, Democrats enjoyed this beverage that, according to William Grimes’s Straight Up or On the Rocks, “gave liquid expression to Bryan’s political platform.”

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