The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, Volume 2 by Walter LaFeber

Author:Walter LaFeber [LaFeber]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

McKinley: The First Modern President

Born in Niles, Ohio, in 1843, McKinley had been a Civil War hero. Elected to Congress in 1876, he had risen to the top rank of House leadership by 1890, only to be gerrymandered out of his district. He promptly ran for governor and won two terms between 1891 and 1895, despite having to handle massive labor unrest during the economic crash. By the mid-1890s he not only had survived Ohio politics, won the support of capital, and become a trusted friend of AFL leader Samuel Gompers, but also was acknowledged to be a leading expert on tariff policy and the political-economic needs of the Second Industrial Revolution. The first president whose inaugural parade was recorded by the new motion-picture camera, McKinley understood both the dangers of the long economic depression and the government’s necessary role in ending it. “The restoration of confidence and the revival of business …,” he declared, “depend more largely upon the prompt, energetic, and intelligent action of Congress than upon any other single agency affecting the situation.” McKinley was explicit. His “greatest ambition,” he told Wisconsin governor Robert LaFollette, was to attain U.S. supremacy in world markets.6

To reach that pinnacle, the new president demanded that Congress pass two special measures. The first was a refined version of McKinley’s 1890 tariff measure. He wanted it all: “I believe in practical reciprocity,” he told a friend in 1895, a policy that “while seeking the world’s markets for our surplus products shall not destroy American wages or surrender American markets for products which can be made at home.” When he used a close variation of that sentence before the National Association of Manufacturers convention in 1895, he brought the audience to its feet in applause. John Hay, whom McKinley appointed ambassador to Great Britain in 1897, accurately characterized the theme of another, similar presidential speech to the NAM in early 1898: “The greatest destiny the world ever knew is ours.” The Dingley Tariff of 1897 did not give McKinley all he wanted; it nevertheless did refine and advance the reciprocity principle. John Kasson negotiated eleven such treaties, but at the time of McKinley’s death in 1901, the Senate had not acted on any of them.

The second piece of legislation the president demanded was a gold standard act that would kill the silverite demands once and for all. McKinley had been a bimetalist and even wanted more silver coinage early in his career. By the 1890s he was a convinced gold advocate. His halfhearted approach to the British for a conference to discuss bimetalism had been rebuffed in late 1897, as McKinley probably knew it would be. Not only did the powerful banks in the City of London oppose such a proposal, but also “all the American banking interest has been enlisted in opposition,” Hay reported from London. The need for more money in circulation to finance an economic takeoff was being solved by both the discovery of more gold and a rising U.S. export table – a table that reported an unfavorable balance of $18.

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