McKinley, William (1843-1901) 25th president of the United States
Born in Niles, Ohio, on January 29, 1843, William McKinley attended Allegheny College and taught school before enlisting in the 23rd Ohio (Rutherlord B. Hayes’s regiment) for the duration of the Civil War. His efficiency as a commissary sergeant at the Battle of Antietam made him an officer, and at the war’s end he was a major. He then studied law and in 1867 began practicing in Canton, Ohio. There in 1871 he married Ida Saxon, to whom he remained devoted despite the onset of epilepsy and neurotic behavior following the loss of their two infant daughters. In 1876 he was elected as a Republican to Congress and served from 1877 to 1883 and 1885 to 1891 (losing only in the Democratic landslide years of 1882 and 1890); he became the most conspicuous champion of protectionism and the author of the McKinley Tarill of 1890, which jacked up rates but also provided for the novel feature of reciprocal trade agreements.
McKinley shrewdly gave protectionism a plausible populistic nationalistic spin, ascribing to it the prosperity of American workers and farmers by creating jobs and domestic markets. While usually successful, that argument was rejected on the national level by voters in 1890 and 1892, but it was again embraced by them following the panic of 1893 and it enhanced McKinley’s reputation. He won the Ohio governorship in 1891 and 1893 and in 1896, aided by his political lieutenant, Marcus Alonzo Hanna, easily won the Republican presidential nomination. Having rejected its incumbent president, Grover Cleveland, the Democratic Party, led by William Jennings Bryan, was discredited, demoralized, and divided by the depression following the panic of 1893. Bryan wished to inflate the currency with the unlimited coinage of silver, while McKinley stressed that the gold standard and protection would promote prosperity and warned that an inflated dollar would destroy the real wages of workers. Both Bryan and McKinley spoke constantly, Bryan as he toured the country and McKinley as he stood on his front porch receiving hundreds of delegations. Hanna raised $3.5-4 million for the campaign, while the Democrats had only one-seventh that amount to spend. McKinley triumphed decisively with 271 electoral votes to Bryan’s 176.
McKinley was often underestimated by his contemporaries, and many historians have followed their lead. His amiable, pragmatic, and compromising nature—combined with his ability to maneuver unobtrusively while pursuing his goals—have masked his strength of character, his capacity to deal with Congress, and his domination of advisers. Indeed, John Hay dismissed as “idiots” those who thought Hanna would “run” McKinley. He began his presidency by calling a special session of Congress to raise the tariff, and it obliged with the Dingley Tariff (1897). Far from doctrinaire on the monetary issue, McKinley favored international bimetallism (basing currency on gold and silver), but when the British rejected that idea he signed the Gold Standard Act (1900).
War and empire, not the tariff and the currency, dominated the McKinley administration. In 1895 Cuba again revolted for its independence, and Spain soon resorted to harsh measures to preserve its colony. Outraged by newspaper accounts of Spanish atrocities, many Americans clamored for a war of liberation in Cuba. Using diplomacy and the threat of military intervention, McKinley secured some concessions from Spain, but when it would not free Cuba, he reluctantly asked for and received from Congress a declaration of war. The Spanish-American War (1898) was of short duration, and McKinley not only directed the war effort but also, to the dismay of the anti-imperialists, made the decisions that gave the United States Puerto Rico in the Caribbean and the Philippine Islands in the Pacific. Ironically, his administration suppressed the Filipino insurrection against American rule using the same tactics that Spain had employed to put down the Cuban revolution, and Cuba, though nominally independent, was made an American protectorate. Increased Caribbean interests made an isthmian canal under American control an imperative objective of the McKinley administration, and in the Hay-Pauncefote Treaties (1900, 1901) with Great Britain, the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty (1850) was superseded and the United States could proceed unilaterally with a canal between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. After gaining possession of the Philippines, American interest in trading with China was heightened, which led to circulating the Open Door notes (1899, 1900) to oppose its dismem-
William McKinley (Library of Congress)
Berment and the dispatching of troops to help suppress its Boxer Rebellion (1900). By enhancing the power and prestige of the presidency, McKinley was a forerunner of modern 20th-century chief executives. McKinley, for example, justified sending troops to China on the basis of his war powers even though there was no war.
McKinley was renominated in 1900, and, with a popular vice presidential running mate, Theodore Roosevelt, he triumphed for a second time over Bryan. But his plans for his second term to moderate the protective tariff through reciprocity treaties were not realized. McKinley was shot by an assassin on September 6, 1901, in Buffalo, New York, and died on September 14.
Further reading: Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1980); H. Wayne Morgan, William McKinley and His America (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1963).
McKinley Tariff (1890) See tariff issue.
McMaster, John Bach (1852-1932) historian Historian of the people of the United States, John Bach McMaster was born on June 29, 1852, in Brooklyn, New York. He grew up in Manhattan, attending public schools and the New York Free Academy (now City College, of the City University of New York), where in 1872 he earned a B. A. He excelled in physics and chemistry, was good in English, but was only average in history, which at that time paid little attention to the United States and stressed facts about those who governed. Nevertheless, McMaster was interested in recent American history, possibly to understand the seemingly contradictory actions of his father, a native New Yorker who became in 1852 a slave-owning Louisiana sugar planter. Nine years later, having returned to the North, he took his son to the White House to shake hands with Abraham Lincoln. In the Free Academy library McMaster found Horace Greeley’s American Conflict in which a reference to the Louisiana Purchase led him to read Francis Parkman’s La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West. Next he dipped into, but found disappointing, multivolumes on American history by George Bancroft and Richard Hildreth. They failed to carry the story beyond 1821 and concentrated on political, diplomatic, and military events rather than on the American people. Visiting an aunt after his graduation, McMaster chanced upon Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James the Second. In the first volume he was inspired by chapter 3 on “The State of England in 1685.” Wondering whether he could be an American Macaulay, McMaster vowed, “I will.”
But first McMaster had to make a living. From 1872 to 1873 he had an English fellowship at his alma mater and did little on his history beyond deciding to begin it with a description of the United States in 1784, patterned on Macaulay’s description of England. McMaster worked from 1873 to 1874 as a civilian attached to the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, surveying and mapping the Virginia battlefields of Winchester and Cedar Creek for the memoirs of General Philip Sheridan. The country was beautiful, but he found Winchester and its people filthy, Sheridan “hot-tempered” and “ugly-faced,” and much of his work dull. In 1874, when McMaster returned to New York from Chicago (where he had been at Sheridan’s headquarters), the economy was dull following the panic of 1873. For the next three years McMaster lived with his mother and did some tutoring, while writing two technical engineering books (one on bridges and tunnels and the other on dams) for the Van Nostrand Science Series.
These technical books helped McMaster get appointed, in January 1877, assistant professor of engineering at the new John C. Green School of Science at Princeton, where he remained until 1883. Ignored by his colleagues and without a social life, McMaster was unhappy at Princeton. He was tired of teaching “lunk-heads,” his immediate superior was a crank, and the president, James McCosh, bullied the faculty. By working on his history, McMaster found relief from his frustration, but he interrupted his writing in summer 1878 to lead postgraduate students on a fossil-hunting expedition to the Bad Lands of southeastern Wyoming. They found fossils, but a budding paleontologist, Henry
F. Osborn, utilized their specimens in learned papers, far more than did McMaster, who was more interested in the social conditions of the West and its people, who were building a new land. Realizing he was a historian, rather than a scientist, McMaster, on his return, worked single-mindedly on the first volume, 1783 to 1789, of his History of the People of the United States.
McMaster believed that the “mingling” of economic, social, and political history would achieve “a correct understanding of the peculiar circumstances under which our nation was formed and grew up.” To find material McMaster used newspapers, pamphlets, memoirs, and travel accounts far more than previous historians. Although he had limited funds, he worked extensively in the splendid newspaper collection of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, the Library of Congress, and the historical societies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. He completed volume 1 in 1881 and delivered it, a huge longhand manuscript, to D. Appleton & Co. Its editors hesitated to publish an unconventional history, written by a civil engineer, until Daniel Appleton, owner of the publishing house, discovered the manuscript was fascinating reading.
Published in 1883, it became an instant best seller. Charles Anderson Dana, editor of the New York Sun, was among the many who could not put it down, and while it marked a departure from their work, it was well received by leading historians including Bancroft and Hermann Von Holst. Because he did not stress wars and politics, McMaster’s real heroes were the people, and his work was criticized for being unpatriotic. Critics also noted that in his desire to emulate Macaulay, he imitated him, borrowing, with only slight changes, his figures of speech to a point called close to “theft” by the New York Tribune reviewer. That reviewer also demonstrated in parallel columns that McMaster had borrowed without attribution from William C. Rives’s History of the Life and Ti-mes of James Madison. Although ecstatic reviews outweighed criticisms, McMaster, whose work was based on an enormous amount of original research, was chagrined by his lapses and was more careful in the future.
The success of his work led to McMaster’s appointment as professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, where he served from 1883 until he retired in 1920. Success also led to his marriage to Gertrude Stevenson, a longtime friend. They had three children. By 1913 McMas-ter had completed seven additional volumes, bringing his work up to the outbreak of the Civil War. In retirement he added a volume on the Lincoln administration. While working on his History of the People, McMaster wrote several other works, including Benjamin Franklin as a Man of Letters (1887) and Daniel Webster (1902). McMaster also profoundly influenced the teaching of American history through his textbooks on the primary and secondary levels, of which more than 2.5 million copies were sold. He was an associate editor of the American Historical Review (1895-99) and president of the American Historical Association (1905-06). He died on May 24, 1932, in Darien, Connecticut.
Further reading: Eric F. Goldman, John Bach McMaster: American Historian (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1943).
World History
