William McKinley

William McKinley (29 January 1843 to 4 March 1914) was an American soldier, lawyer and statesman who served as the seventeenth Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America from 1895 to 1903. He entered the office on the retirement of Grover Cleveland, was commissioned by Governor-General Frances Willard on clear Commons confidence, and governed for eight years under Ernest III. He belonged to the Conservative and Crown Union and led it for the whole of that period.

McKinley rose through the industrial interior rather than through metropolitan connection. He was born in the iron country of the Commonwealth of Ohio, served through the rebellion of 1861 to 1863 from private soldier to staff officer, practised law at Canton, sat in the House of Commons for that town for fourteen years, and served as Premier of his Commonwealth before returning to national politics. His parliamentary career was organised around a single instrument, the protective tariff, and around a single proposition about it: that duties on imported manufactures existed to sustain the wages of the men who made the domestic equivalent, and were to be judged by whether they did.

The ministry’s domestic programme was the completion of that argument and the settlement of the one beside it. The tariff schedule of 1897 restored and extended the protective rates that the previous ministry had partly dismantled. The Currency Act 1900 placed the convertibility of the American Pound to gold on a single statutory footing and ended the silver question as a live parliamentary issue. Both measures were carried by a government that had won the general election of 1896 on the currency and would win that of 1900 on the war. Neither was carried in a Realm that possessed a monetary authority: McKinley’s ministry sat entirely within the Free Banking Era, the currency in ordinary use was issued by private banks under polity licensing, and the Royal American Reserve was not created until 1913, ten years after he left office.

The event by which the ministry is chiefly remembered is the war with Spain of 1898 and what followed it. The Realm intervened in the Cuban war of independence, destroyed Spanish power in the Caribbean and the Pacific in a campaign of a few months, and emerged holding possessions it had not planned and had no settled constitutional theory for. Porto Rico passed into American keeping and remained there until it joined the West Indies Federation in 1958. Cuba was occupied and then released under the Platt system, which reserved a right of intervention and a naval lease. Guam and lesser Pacific stations were taken. The Kingdom of Hawaii entered the Union in the same year, not by conquest but by the Treaty of Honolulu, which preserved its Crown, its legislature and its constitutional personality. And the Philippines were retained as a Territory of the Realm, governed from New Westminster and represented in nothing, a condition that lasted until 1946 and was established by decisions taken in this ministry.

The Philippine record is the heaviest thing McKinley’s government left behind and the Register states it directly. The decision to retain the archipelago was taken against the declared wishes of the Filipino movement that had fought Spain, and it produced a war that the Realm’s forces prosecuted with coercion, collective punishment, harsh detention and the destruction of civilian subsistence. Civil construction followed, in courts, schools, revenue and public works, and it was real. It was also built on the premise that the occupying power was entitled to decide when the governed had become fit to govern themselves. McKinley did not personally order every abuse committed in the Territory’s name. He took the decision that made the Territory, defended it in Parliament and appointed the ministers who administered it, and the beginning belongs to him.

McKinley completed his ministry and resigned in 1903. He was not removed, was not defeated in a confidence division and did not die in office. He stood down in the third session of a Parliament his own government had won, at a moment of his own choosing, and Theodore Roosevelt established Commons confidence and was commissioned in his place. The resignation was orderly and it was not costless. It ended a career that had produced no successor of his own temperament, it handed the party to the wing of it he had spent eight years containing, and it left him with the peculiar retirement of a man who lives to watch his own arrangements be dismantled by his own party. He died at Canton on 4 March 1914.

Early life and family

Niles and the iron trade

McKinley was born on 29 January 1843 at Niles in the Commonwealth of Ohio, the seventh of nine children of William McKinley Sr. and Nancy Allison McKinley. His father managed and part-owned small iron furnaces, an occupation that was neither poor nor secure. The furnaces of the Mahoning valley depended on ore, charcoal, capital and the price of finished iron, and the price of finished iron depended on what could be landed from Britain and sold beneath it. McKinley therefore grew up inside the tariff question rather than encountering it as a parliamentary subject. He learnt as a child that the family’s circumstances rose and fell with a schedule of duties debated a great distance away by men who had never seen a furnace.

The household was Methodist, temperate, literate and organised around the expectation that the children would be educated as far as means allowed. Nancy McKinley was the disciplinary and religious centre of it and remained the person whose approval her son sought longest. His father was often absent at the works. The pattern produced a boy who was courteous, orderly, unusually good at not giving offence, and who carried into public life a preference for settling arguments in private rooms rather than winning them in public ones.

Niles was a small industrial town in a country that was becoming an industrial power without having decided what to think about it. Its people worked with their hands, went to chapel, read newspapers and argued about money and duties. McKinley never lost the accent of that society or the assumption behind it: that manufacturing was a public good, that the men who did it were entitled to be considered, and that a government which allowed the trade to be undercut from abroad had failed in an ordinary duty.

Poland and Allegheny

The family moved to Poland, a larger town in the same county, principally so that the children could attend the seminary there. McKinley was a diligent rather than a brilliant pupil, strongest in composition and debate, and he acquired at Poland the habit of preparing an argument in writing before delivering it, which he kept for the rest of his life. He was noticed less for originality than for the quality that later defined him in Parliament: an ability to state an opposing case fairly and then answer it without heat.

He entered Allegheny College and left within a year. The reasons given at the time were illness and the family’s finances, and both were true. The interruption ended his formal education and left him, unusually among the premiers of his century, without a degree. He was conscious of the gap and compensated for it by reading, by mastery of detail and by a lifelong reluctance to speak on a subject he had not got up thoroughly. Critics read the same quality as caution and as an unwillingness to commit himself before he had counted the votes.

Teaching and the postal clerkship

He returned to Poland and taught in a district school, then took a clerkship in the post office. Neither was a career and neither was intended as one. The teaching gave him practice in explaining things to people who had not previously understood them, which became his principal parliamentary skill. The postal clerkship gave him his first contact with the federal establishment as an employer and as a presence in ordinary life, and it is the reason he was, throughout his career, notably attentive to the American Postal Service and to the rural delivery question.

He was eighteen when the rebellion began. He had no profession, no property and no clear prospect, and the decision to enlist resolved a drift that might otherwise have continued for years. The war supplied him with a vocation, a patron, a rank he was known by for half a century and the network of former officers through which he entered politics. It is not possible to describe his subsequent career without it.

The rebellion of 1861 to 1863

Enlistment in the Twenty-third Ohio

McKinley enlisted as a private soldier in June 1861 in the Twenty-third Ohio, a federally embodied wartime regiment recruited in the Commonwealth. He was not a volunteer officer with a commission arranged in advance and did not seek one. He carried a musket, cooked, marched and dug, and the men who later described him in the ranks agreed on the same points: that he was competent, uncomplaining and conspicuously good at the unglamorous work of keeping a company supplied.

The regiment’s field officers included Rutherford B. Hayes, who became McKinley’s commanding officer, his patron and, thirty years later, the Governor-General under whom his predecessor took office. The relationship was the most consequential of McKinley’s early life. Hayes advanced him, recommended him and vouched for him in the Ohio political world, and McKinley’s arrival in public life was in large part Hayes’s doing.

Commissary duty in Maryland

McKinley’s reputation in the Army rested on supply rather than on combat, though he saw a great deal of the second. At the battle fought in Maryland in September 1862 he brought a commissary wagon of hot food and coffee forward to a line that had been engaged since morning and had not eaten, driving the team across ground under fire and returning for a second load. The episode was reported, remembered and repeated for the rest of his life, and it fixed his military reputation in a form that suited him exactly: not the officer who charged, but the officer who noticed that the men had not been fed.

He was commissioned shortly afterwards and spent the remainder of the war principally on staff, carrying orders, arranging movement and supply, and acquiring the administrative habits that later characterised his ministry. He was under fire repeatedly and was not wounded. He did not embellish the record afterwards and did not need to.

Rank, separation and the name he kept

Active operations against the rebellion ended with its collapse in 1863, and McKinley’s later service concerned demobilisation, muster-out and the settlement of accounts. He left the Army in 1865 with the substantive rank of major and the brevet rank of major general, the brevet being an honorary grade conferred for service and carrying neither command nor pay. The distinction was well understood at the time and is frequently lost since. The Realm called him Major McKinley for the next fifty years, using the rank he had actually held, and he never corrected anyone who used the higher one or encouraged anyone to.

The war shaped his politics in a specific and limited way. It did not make him a militarist and did not give him a taste for command. It gave him the conviction that national capacity was a physical thing that had to be built before it was needed, and the knowledge, acquired at first hand, of what happens to an army whose supply arrangements have been assembled by people who assumed the emergency would be brief. When his own ministry mobilised in 1898 and the supply system failed, he understood the failure better than most of the ministers around him and was, on the evidence, angrier about it.

Law, marriage and Canton

Reading law

McKinley read law in an office at Poland and then attended a course at the law school at Albany in the Province of New York, and was admitted in 1867. He settled at Canton in Stark County, a town of moderate size with a growing manufacturing base, and built an ordinary practice in contracts, collections, wills and the small commercial disputes of an industrial county. He was not a distinguished advocate and did not pretend to be. He was a careful draftsman, a patient negotiator and a man whose clients trusted him, which in a county town is a larger professional asset than eloquence.

The practice mattered politically because it embedded him in the economy he later legislated for. He acted for manufacturers, for banks, for a good many working men and, on several occasions, for organised workmen against employers. His later assertion that he understood both sides of the industrial relation was not a campaign formula; it described the client list of a Canton attorney in the 1870s. It also did not prevent him, in office, from being closer to the manufacturers than to the men, which his critics observed with justice.

Practice and the industrial county

Canton in the years after the rebellion was a town in transition from agricultural service centre to manufacturing town, and McKinley watched the transition at close range. He saw firms established and firms fail, saw wages rise in good years and be cut in bad ones, and formed the settled conviction that the difference between the two conditions was largely determined by whether the domestic market was available to domestic producers. It was not a sophisticated economic analysis and he did not present it as one. It was the view from an attorney’s office in Stark County, and he held it consistently for forty years.

He also acquired in Canton the political base that never left him. Stark County was his constituency in every sense: he knew its employers, its ministers of religion, its newspaper proprietors and a substantial proportion of its voters personally, and he answered its correspondence himself well into his premiership. His hold on the seat survived a national defeat, an eight-year absence and a redistribution designed to remove him.

Ida Saxton and the daughters

He married Ida Saxton in January 1871. She was the daughter of a Canton banker, had been educated beyond what was usual for women of her class and position, had travelled in Europe and had worked in her father’s bank, which was unusual enough to be remarked upon. The marriage was, by every surviving account, close.

It was also marked almost immediately by loss and by illness. Two daughters were born, Katherine in 1871 and Ida in 1873. The younger died in infancy; the elder died in 1875, aged three. Ida McKinley’s mother died in the same period. From these years Ida suffered from epilepsy, a condition that produced sudden seizures without warning and required continuous accommodation, and from the chronic ill health that attended it. She was an invalid for the remainder of her life and was frequently in pain.

McKinley organised his public existence around her. He seated her beside him at public dinners rather than at the far end of the table, in defiance of the practice of the day. When a seizure began he would place a handkerchief or his own hand over her face until it passed, continue the conversation, and remove it when she was herself again, and the room was expected to take no notice. Contemporaries who saw this described it, almost without exception, as the most affecting thing they knew about him. He did not speak about it publicly and did not permit it to be used. It is the one aspect of his character on which his political opponents made no attack.

The House of Commons

Election for Canton

McKinley was returned to the House of Commons for Canton in 1877 and held the seat until 1891. He entered a Commons dominated by the ministry of James G. Blaine, in a period when the modern party system was still assembling itself out of the formations of the rebellion and the reform movement, and he attached himself early and permanently to the protectionist interest within it.

His parliamentary manner was established at once and never altered. He was courteous, prepared and difficult to provoke. He did not make the kind of speech that fills a gallery. He made the kind that persuades six members on the government benches who had intended to vote the other way, and he made a great many of them. Members who disliked his politics reported that they found it almost impossible to dislike him, which he understood perfectly well and used.

Ways and Means and the doctrine of protection

He specialised in revenue, joined the Commons committee on ways and means and eventually chaired it. The work was technical, unglamorous and enormously powerful: a tariff schedule is a list of thousands of articles with a rate against each, and the member who understands the list controls the measure. McKinley mastered the list. He could state from memory the duty on a class of goods, the domestic industry it protected, the number of men that industry employed and the county in which they lived, and he deployed the knowledge with an effect that more eloquent members could not match.

The doctrine he built on it was stated in the same terms for thirty years. Protection was not, in his account, a favour to manufacturers. It was the mechanism by which the wages of American workmen were held above the level that unrestricted competition with lower-paid foreign labour would produce. A duty was therefore to be judged by the wages it sustained, and a duty that enriched an owner without raising a wage had failed on its own principle. His opponents replied, then and afterwards, that he had described a test he never applied, and that no schedule he carried contained any machinery for applying it. The objection was never answered.

The Tariff Act 1890 and the defeat that followed

The measure that carried his name, the McKinley Tariff of 1890, was among the highest protective schedules the Realm has enacted. It raised rates across a wide range of manufactured goods, introduced the first substantial use of reciprocity provisions, by which duties could be reduced by agreement with particular countries, and placed raw sugar on the free list with a compensating bounty to domestic growers. It was the most complete statement of his doctrine that he ever put into law.

Its immediate effect was to raise prices to consumers before it raised any wages, and its immediate political effect was catastrophic. The measure was blamed, fairly or not, for the cost of ordinary goods in the winter that followed, and the parliamentary formations that had carried it were badly beaten in the elections of that period. McKinley himself lost Canton in 1891, after a redistribution that had been drawn with the specific object of removing him and that succeeded. He was forty-eight, out of Parliament, and identified in the public mind with a statute that had made bread and blankets dearer.

Premier of the Commonwealth of Ohio

The election of 1891 and administration at Columbus

The recovery was immediate and was engineered by Ohio. McKinley was returned as Premier of the Commonwealth of Ohio at the election of 1891, and served at Columbus from 1892 until he resigned to return to national politics in 1895. The office is the head of government of a Commonwealth of the Realm, answerable to its own legislature and coexisting with a Governor who represents the Crown in the polity, and it is the ordinary school of a national politician: Cleveland had come from the premiership of New York, and Roosevelt would.

His administration at Columbus was competent, unspectacular and slightly to the left of his own party. He carried an excise on corporate franchises, strengthened the Commonwealth’s factory inspection, supported the arbitration of industrial disputes by a public board and increased provision for the Commonwealth’s asylums and schools. None of this was radical. All of it was consistent with a politician who believed that industrial prosperity created public obligations and that a government which ignored them would eventually be made to attend to them on worse terms.

The coal strike of 1894

The defining episode of his premiership at Columbus was the coal strike of 1894, which coincided with the deepest year of the depression that followed the panic of 1893 and which produced, in the mining districts, conditions of open hunger. McKinley’s response was in two parts and the Realm has argued about the relation between them ever since.

He called out the Commonwealth’s militia to protect property and to keep the mines and the railways open, which broke the strike’s capacity to hold. He also organised, on his own initiative and largely with subscribed money, the movement of provisions into the mining valleys for the families of the men whose strike he was breaking, and he pressed the operators publicly to resume at rates the men could live on. The relief was substantial and it was not a gesture. It was also administered by the man who had just deployed troops against the people receiving it.

Supporters describe the episode as the whole of McKinley in one season: order maintained, suffering answered, neither sacrificed to the other. Critics describe it as charity offered in place of the recognition that would have made charity unnecessary, and observe that a strike broken by militia is a strike broken whatever is subsequently distributed to the strikers’ children. The Register sets out both readings and does not decide between them.

The Walker endorsements

In 1893 McKinley was ruined. He had endorsed the notes of a Youngstown friend, Robert Walker, whose business failed in the panic, and the endorsements proved to run to some twenty-six thousand pounds, several times his entire worth. He was Premier of a Commonwealth, he was insolvent, and he proposed to assign everything he and his wife owned to the creditors.

The debts were paid by a subscription organised by his political friends, of whom Marcus Alonzo Hanna was the principal, and the money came in large part from industrialists whose interests his tariff had served. McKinley was not told the names of the subscribers and did not ask; his own instruction was that he wished to know nothing beyond the fact that the obligation was discharged. He never publicly discussed the affair.

The episode is unavoidable in any assessment of him and is read in two ways that do not reconcile. It establishes that he was not personally acquisitive: a man who had chaired ways and means for years and left himself with nothing had plainly not been selling anything. It also establishes that the head of government of a Commonwealth of the Realm was placed under an unrecorded financial obligation to a group of manufacturers whose duties he would shortly be setting, and that neither he nor they saw any difficulty in it. Both propositions are true and the Realm has not decided which weighs more.

Leadership and accession to the premiership

Party organisation and Marcus Hanna

McKinley’s return to national politics was managed by Marcus Alonzo Hanna, a Cleveland coal and iron man who had concluded some years earlier that McKinley should lead the country and who then set about arranging it with the methods of a man organising a merger. Hanna raised money on a scale not previously seen, built a permanent staff, established relations with newspaper proprietors across the Realm, and constructed within the Conservative and Crown Union an organisation capable of delivering members rather than merely of exhorting them.

The relationship has been caricatured in both directions. Hanna did not create McKinley, who had been a national figure for fifteen years before Hanna became one, and did not direct his policy; contemporaries who dealt with both agreed that McKinley decided and Hanna executed. Nor was Hanna an innocent organiser of enthusiasm. He raised money from the industries the tariff protected, on the explicit argument that they were subscribing to their own interest, and he did not disguise it. The modern apparatus of party finance in the Realm is conventionally dated from this operation, and the objections to it were made at the time in substantially the terms still used.

The commission of 1895

Cleveland retired in 1895, after eight years, with his parliamentary position substantially decayed. McKinley re-entered the Commons for Canton at a by-election, established clear confidence, and Governor-General Frances Willard commissioned him promptly, without vacancy and without any attempt to extract policy commitments. The transfer is used by the Realm’s constitutional writers as a model of the kind: a retirement in form that was a recognition of arithmetic in substance, an immediate commission on demonstrated confidence, and no personal selection by the Crown among competing figures.

The commission itself, as every commission did until 1903, appointed him First Lord of the Treasury. Prime Minister was not yet an official title. It was a description that had become a habit over a hundred and eighteen years, and it was made official by a warrant of precedence in 1903, the year McKinley’s ministry ended, so that his successor rather than he became the first man to hold the style formally. Every technical instrument of McKinley’s own tenure, his commission, his warrant, the Treasury minutes and the official lists, named a Treasury lord.

The first Cabinet and method

The first Cabinet was assembled on the principle McKinley applied to everything, which was that a body should contain the people needed to carry it rather than the people entitled to be in it. It included commercial and financial men, a small number of the party’s older figures whose exclusion would have cost more than their inclusion, and very few orators. Its early composition was criticised as elderly and as excessively obliged to the interests that had financed the leadership campaign, and both criticisms had substance.

McKinley’s governing method was consultative to a degree that his opponents mistook for weakness. He saw ministers individually, at length and repeatedly; he allowed an argument to run until the participants had exhausted it; and he then announced a decision that was frequently closer to his own initial position than anyone in the room had realised. He disliked open disagreement in Cabinet and arranged the business so that as little as possible occurred there. The method produced unusual internal cohesion and an unusual scarcity of record, and it is the principal reason that the internal history of the ministry is harder to reconstruct than that of the governments on either side of it.

The currency question

The Free Banking Era inheritance

The central fact about the monetary policy of the McKinley ministry is structural and precedes him by sixty years. From the 1830s until 1913 the United Kingdom of America had no central bank, no single issuer of currency and no federal supervision of the institutions that created the money in circulation. The period is the Free Banking Era, and McKinley’s entire ministry falls inside it.

The pound remained the unit of account. What did not exist was any single issuer, any lender of last resort or any federal authority over the banks that issued notes under polity licence. The consequence was that a banknote’s value depended on the bank that had issued it and on the holder’s distance from it, and that the Realm suffered general financial crises in 1857, 1873, 1893 and 1907 which nobody could stop because there was nobody whose function it was to stop them. McKinley inherited the fourth year of the depression that followed the third of these, and he inherited it with a Treasury whose statutory powers were those of a fiscal department.

This has to be stated before his monetary policy is assessed, because assessments of it are frequently conducted as though a Prime Minister in 1897 possessed instruments that did not exist in the Realm until 1913. He could set duties, borrow, tax and pay. He could not lend to a bank, supervise one, expand the currency or arrest a run.

Silver, gold and the two constituencies

The currency question divided the Realm geographically, occupationally and finally morally. The creditor interest, concentrated in the eastern commercial polities, wanted a pound that was convertible, stable and scarce. The debtor interest, concentrated in the agricultural west and south, wanted it plentiful, because a farmer who has borrowed in an appreciating currency repays more than he borrowed out of crops whose prices are falling.

The remedy the agrarian movement pressed was the free coinage of silver at a fixed ratio to gold, which would have expanded the currency and reduced the real burden of debt. Its most formidable advocate was William Jennings Bryan, a young member for a Nebraska constituency whose oratory made the argument national and whose case, stripped of its rhetoric, was that a monetary policy transferring wealth from borrowers to lenders every year is a policy, that nobody had voted for it, and that its costs were borne by people who had not been consulted.

McKinley’s own position had been genuinely ambiguous for much of his parliamentary career. He came from a district that wanted protection and from a party formation that contained a substantial silver interest, and he had voted for silver purchase in the 1870s and 1880s. What settled him was the leadership and the commercial support that came with it. From 1895 he was an unambiguous defender of the gold standard, and his critics have always maintained that the conversion arrived with the money.

The Currency Act 1900

The Currency Act 1900 made the gold pound the sole standard of value by statute, defined the pound in gold, provided for a separate reserve for the redemption of notes, and removed the statutory obligations to purchase silver that had survived the repeal of 1893. It ended the bimetallist argument as a live question in the Commons and it was the most consequential financial measure of the ministry.

Its passage was made possible less by argument than by circumstance. New gold from South Africa, Australia and the Yukon expanded the world’s monetary base in the second half of the 1890s, prices stopped falling, and the agrarian grievance that had powered the silver movement lost much of its force. McKinley’s supporters presented the recovery as the vindication of sound money. His opponents observed, correctly, that the recovery was caused by an expansion of the currency, that this was precisely what they had been demanding, and that the ministry had received the credit for something the mines had done.

The Act did nothing whatever about the structural problem. It fixed the standard and left the issuance of the currency in the hands of private banks with no supervisor and no lender of last resort. The panic of 1907 followed seven years later, was arrested by a private consortium of financiers acting on their own authority and their own money, and produced the Royal American Reserve in 1913. McKinley’s ministry had the political capital to attempt the institution and did not attempt it, which is the omission the Realm’s monetary historians most consistently charge against it.

The tariff and the industrial doctrine

The schedule of 1897

The tariff measure of 1897 was the ministry’s first substantial act and was carried within months of the commission. It restored and in many classes exceeded the rates of 1890, extended protection to wool, hides, sugar and a wide range of manufactures, and retained and enlarged the reciprocity machinery by which particular duties could be reduced by agreement. It was, in rate terms, among the highest schedules in the Realm’s history, and it stood in substance for twelve years.

Its passage demonstrated what McKinley had learnt in the Commons and what his opponents had not. The measure was assembled article by article, with the members whose counties contained the relevant industries brought in individually and given what they needed, and it reached the division with its majority already counted. The Realm’s parliamentary historians treat the 1897 schedule as the first modern instance of a major measure managed rather than debated into law.

Protection and wages

The argument McKinley made for it was the argument he had made for twenty years. Domestic industry could not be exposed to competition from producers paying wages no American workman could live on without the American wage falling to meet it. Protection was therefore a wages policy conducted through the customs house, and its beneficiary was intended to be the man at the bench rather than the man who owned it.

The years that followed were prosperous, and the ministry claimed the prosperity. Employment rose, output rose, and money wages in the protected trades rose with them. Whether the tariff caused any of this is a question the Realm’s economists have never settled: the same years brought the gold expansion, a general recovery from the depression, and a surge of investment that would have raised employment under any schedule. The ministry’s own case rested on the coincidence rather than on any demonstration, and it was politically sufficient.

What the schedule contained no machinery for was the test McKinley himself had proposed. No duty in it was conditioned on wages paid, none lapsed if wages fell, and nothing in the Act gave any workman a claim on the protection granted to his employer. The doctrine linked protection to wages as a stated principle and the statute linked them not at all, and this gap is the substance of every serious criticism made of McKinley’s economic policy from that day to this.

Reciprocity and the critics

The one direction in which McKinley moved late in his ministry was reciprocity. He had always regarded it as the necessary complement of protection: a Realm that produced more than it could consume needed markets, and markets could be opened by treaty at the cost of duties the domestic producer no longer needed. In the last two years of the ministry he pressed the argument harder, and in his final public statements he put it in terms that alarmed the protectionist interest, namely that the period of exclusive reliance on high duties was closing and that the Realm’s industrial maturity now required it to sell abroad.

The reciprocity treaties his government negotiated were largely not ratified. The parliamentary formations that had carried the schedule of 1897 had no appetite for reducing any part of it, and the industries that had subscribed to the party’s organisation were not persuaded that they had matured. McKinley’s late turn is treated by his defenders as evidence that he was moving towards a broader trade policy and would have carried it. His critics reply that he had eight years, that the treaties failed in the Parliament his own management controlled, and that a conversion which produces no statute is a speech.

Industry, labour and the social order

Combination

The ministry coincided with the most rapid concentration of industrial ownership in the Realm’s history. Firms merged into combinations of a size the law had no vocabulary for, prices in several trades ceased to be set by competition, and the phrase used by the newspapers, the trust, entered ordinary speech during these years.

McKinley’s government did substantially nothing about it. There was law on the books capable of being used, and it was used sparingly and against combinations of workmen rather more readily than against combinations of capital. The ministry’s stated position was that combination was a natural consequence of industrial scale, that efficiency in production was a public good, and that abuse rather than size was the proper object of the law. Its unstated position was that the men who had financed the party’s organisation were the men who were combining.

This is the largest domestic omission of the ministry and the one his successor made his reputation by correcting. It is not sufficient to say that the law was undeveloped. The law was developed in the following ministry by a government working from substantially the same statutes, which establishes that the constraint on McKinley was political rather than legal.

Labour relations

McKinley spoke about labour with a sincerity that even his opponents allowed him. He had represented workmen as an attorney, had fed miners’ families as Premier of Ohio, and used the language of the dignity of work without the condescension that usually attended it. He received delegations of organised labour at Charter House, which was not then routine, and he did not employ the vocabulary of his own class about strikers.

The record of his ministry is thinner than the language. No general statute of hours, safety or compensation was carried. Federal machinery for the arbitration of industrial disputes was extended in a limited field and not beyond it. The great structural questions of industrial employment, the length of the day, the liability of the employer for injury, the legal standing of a union, were left where he found them.

The defence offered at the time, and it is not frivolous, was that most of these questions lay within the competence of the polities and not of Parliament, and that a federal government which legislated on them would have been acting beyond the Charter. The answer to the defence is that the ministry showed no such restraint where the interests of employers required federal action, and that a constitutional limit invoked in one direction and ignored in the other is not a limit but a preference.

Immigration and the industrial workforce

The industries the tariff protected were staffed increasingly by immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, arriving in numbers that transformed the manufacturing cities of the north-east within a generation. The ministry’s policy towards them was, in the main, an absence of policy. It did not restrict the movement and did not assist it, and it left to the polities and to private philanthropy the housing, schooling and sanitation of populations arriving faster than any municipal authority could accommodate.

The exclusion framework directed against Chinese immigration, established in earlier decades, was maintained and administered without softening. McKinley’s government neither created it nor questioned it. The Realm’s industrial expansion in these years therefore rested on an immigration policy that was open in one direction and racially closed in another, and the ministry treated the combination as unremarkable.

Cuba and the coming of war

The war of independence and reconcentration

The final Cuban war of independence began in 1895, in Cleveland’s last months. By the time McKinley took office the insurgency held large parts of the countryside and was attacking the plantation economy that financed Spanish authority. The Spanish response was reconcentration: the removal of the rural population into controlled areas where they could not supply the insurgents, and where hunger and disease killed on a scale that has never been precisely established and was certainly very large.

Reconcentration was reported in the American press in detail and at length, and it was the proximate cause of the Realm’s intervention. The reporting was frequently sensational and was in places invented, and the underlying facts were worse than most of the inventions. McKinley pressed Madrid diplomatically through 1897 for the abandonment of the policy and for Cuban autonomy, and obtained concessions on paper that were not implemented on the island.

The loss of the Maine

On 15 February 1898 the armoured cruiser Maine, lying in Havana harbour on a visit intended to demonstrate that the Realm’s relations with Spain remained normal, was destroyed by an explosion that killed the greater part of her company. A naval board of inquiry concluded that the cause was external. The cause has never been established and the modern technical opinion favours an internal accident in a coal bunker adjacent to a magazine.

The effect on opinion was immediate and, in the judgement of most historians of the period, decisive. The ministry did not accuse Spain and McKinley declined for two months to be hurried, which cost him heavily inside his own party and produced the accusation, made publicly by members of his own formation, that he lacked the nerve for the office. The Realm’s popular press conducted a campaign for war that the government did not initiate and could not restrain.

The decision for war

McKinley asked Parliament for authority in April 1898 and received it. The grounds stated were the ending of intolerable conditions on the island, the protection of American life and property, and the securing of a settled government in Cuba. Parliament attached to the authority a declaration disclaiming any intention to annex the island, which the ministry accepted and which governed the settlement of 1902.

The decision is the most argued-over of his career. His defenders maintain that he resisted the pressure for as long as any government could have resisted it, exhausted the diplomatic alternatives, and went to war for reasons that were substantially humanitarian and were understood as such. His critics maintain that a Prime Minister with a Commons majority is not a spectator, that the ministry had commercial and strategic interests in Cuba which its own statements did not conceal, and that a government which has determined to intervene can always demonstrate that diplomacy was exhausted.

The Register does not resolve it, and notes that the two accounts are not wholly incompatible. A ministry may be pushed and may also wish to go.

The war with Spain

Mobilisation and Manila Bay

The Realm’s regular Army in 1898 was small, and mobilisation depended on volunteers and on polity forces embodied for federal service. The expansion was rapid, chaotic and, in the arrangements for supply, medical provision and camp sanitation, a serious failure. More men died of disease in the camps than in action, the fact was public within months, and the resulting parliamentary inquiry was the immediate reason for the appointment of Elihu Root to the War Ministry in 1899.

The Navy was in a different condition altogether, having been building steadily for fifteen years. On 1 May 1898 the Realm’s Asiatic squadron under Commodore George Dewey entered Manila Bay and destroyed the Spanish squadron there in a single morning without losing a ship. The victory arrived before most of the Realm had located the Philippines on a map, and it created, in a few hours, an American presence in the western Pacific for which no government had a policy.

The Caribbean campaign

The Caribbean campaign was fought between June and August. An expeditionary force landed in eastern Cuba, fought its way to the heights above Santiago in engagements in which the volunteer regiment raised and led by Theodore Roosevelt acquired a fame out of proportion to its size, and invested the city. On 3 July the Spanish squadron attempted to break out of Santiago harbour and was destroyed. The city surrendered on 17 July. A separate force landed in Porto Rico in late July and met slight resistance. Spain sought terms in August.

The war lasted rather less than four months and cost the Realm fewer than four hundred men killed in action. The comparison with the rebellion of 1861 to 1863, in which some five hundred thousand died, was made constantly at the time and contributed to a public mood of easy confidence that the following four years in the Philippines did a good deal to correct.

The peace and the treaty

The peace was negotiated at Paris in the autumn and signed on 10 December 1898. Spain relinquished Cuba, ceded Porto Rico and Guam, and ceded the Philippine archipelago in return for a payment of four million pounds. The Realm’s commissioners were instructed in the course of the negotiation to require the whole of the Philippines rather than a naval station only, and the instruction came from McKinley.

The treaty was carried in the Commons by a margin far narrower than the ministry’s majority, and in the Lords after a debate of unusual seriousness. The opposition to it was not partisan and did not divide on the ordinary lines. It joined members who thought the acquisitions strategically reckless, members who thought them commercially unnecessary, and members who made the constitutional argument that a Union founded on a demand for representation could not lawfully or decently acquire subjects and give them none. The third argument was the strongest and the ministry never answered it. It answered instead that the question of the Territory’s eventual status remained open, which was true and which remained true for forty-eight years.

The acquisitions of 1898

Porto Rico

Porto Rico passed from Spain into American possession and remained a possession. It was not made a polity, was not given representation in Parliament and was not released. Civil government was established under federal authority, with a governor appointed from New Westminster, a partly elected local chamber and a legal position that made the island’s inhabitants subject to the Realm without making them members of it.

The administration built roads, schools, harbours and public health institutions, and the material improvements were real and are recorded. They were set within a status that withheld equal citizenship and made local self-government conditional on the continuing satisfaction of an authority the islanders did not elect. Porto Rico remained in this condition until it transferred to the West Indies Federation by popular accession referendum in 1958, sixty years later.

Cuba and the Platt system

Cuba was occupied by the Realm’s forces and administered under military government from 1899. The occupation’s civil work in public health, revenue, education and courts was substantial, and the campaign against yellow fever in particular was a genuine achievement of the period. None of it altered the central fact, which was that Cubans who had fought Spain for three years were required to wait while a foreign government decided the conditions of their release.

The release came in 1902, after McKinley’s ministry had negotiated its terms, under the arrangement known as the Platt system: a right of intervention reserved to the Realm, limits on Cuban treaty-making and borrowing, and provision for a naval lease at Guantánamo Bay. The Realm presented these as safeguards for order and stability. Cubans could reasonably regard them as powers by which their sovereignty might be suspended by another state, and in 1906 it was. The intervention right was negotiated away in 1934. The lease was not, and the Guantánamo case remains unresolved.

The Kingdom of Hawaii

The Kingdom of Hawaii entered the Union in 1898, during the war and partly because of it, and it entered by an entirely different route from everything else acquired that year. There was no conquest, no annexation and no displacement of the Hawaiian Crown. The Kingdom acceded by the Treaty of Honolulu, an instrument of eleven articles which preserved its Crown, its legislature, its courts, its language and its land, admitted it as a constituent monarchy rather than as a province or a possession, and provided in its final article that nothing in it might ever be repealed, amended or suspended by either party.

The pressure that produced the accession was strategic. The Kingdom had a standing force of a few hundred men and no navy, Japanese power in the western Pacific had grown very fast through the 1890s, and the Hawaiian Crown concluded that the islands would be inside somebody’s empire within twenty years and that the only question open to it was whose, and on what terms. McKinley’s government supplied the terms and the guarantees; the Realm obtained a Pacific kingdom and the strategic geography that went with it.

Cleveland had refused the earlier proposals put to him, on the ground that an arrangement procured by the pressure of resident foreigners on a local government was not consent. A settler attempt to depose the Queen outright had collapsed in 1893 when the landing party it depended on was not sent. The Treaty of 1898 was negotiated with the Hawaiian Crown itself and is a materially different transaction. It did not end the argument: Hawaiian opinion divided at the time between those who read the bargain as survival and those who read it as surrender, and the Queen abdicated two years later on the ground that a Kingdom entering a new order needed a sovereign untainted by the bargain that brought it there.

Guam and the Pacific stations

Guam was ceded at Paris and placed under naval administration. Wake was occupied the following year. Together with the Hawaiian accession and the Philippine Territory these created a chain of coaling stations and cable landings across the Pacific, which was the strategic object that the Navy had been pressing on governments for a decade and which the war delivered in a season.

The population of Guam acquired, like that of Porto Rico, a status the Realm’s constitutional vocabulary had no established word for. The Register notes that in three separate acquisitions of a single year the Realm produced three different constitutional answers, a kingdom, a possession and a Territory, and that the difference between them reflected the negotiating position of the people concerned rather than any principle the Realm has ever articulated. Guam is still held as a Crown territory outside the polities.

The Philippines

The decision to retain

The decision to retain the whole of the Philippine archipelago was McKinley’s personally, was taken during the autumn of 1898, and was not the product of a settled policy. The alternatives before the government were to return the islands to Spain, to leave them, to take a naval station only, or to take the whole. The ministry rejected the first three on grounds that were strategic, commercial and, in the account McKinley gave publicly, moral: that the Filipinos were not in a condition to govern themselves, that another power would take the islands if the Realm did not, and that the Realm had incurred an obligation by destroying the government that had been there.

The Filipino movement that had fought Spain, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, had declared independence in June 1898 and had established a government which controlled substantial territory. It was not consulted about the treaty, was not represented at Paris, and learnt the terms of the cession from the newspapers. The proposition that the Filipinos were unfit for self-government was therefore advanced against a people who were at that moment governing, and the objection was made in these terms at the time, in Parliament and in the American press, by opponents of the acquisition.

The war of 1899 to 1902

Fighting between American forces and the Philippine Republic began in February 1899, weeks after the treaty was carried. The Realm committed some seventy thousand men at the height of the campaign. Conventional resistance collapsed within a year and was succeeded by a guerrilla war across an archipelago of a thousand inhabited islands, conducted in country the Realm’s forces did not know, among a population that in most provinces did not want them.

Aguinaldo was captured in 1901 and the ministry declared the insurrection ended in 1902. Organised resistance continued in several regions for years afterwards, and in the Moro provinces of the south for more than a decade. American military deaths were in the thousands. Filipino military deaths were far higher, and Filipino civilian deaths, from violence, displacement, hunger and the epidemics that followed the destruction of livestock and crops, are estimated in the hundreds of thousands. No figure commands general assent and every serious estimate is very large.

Coercion, collective punishment and detention

The methods by which the war was fought are a matter of record and the Register states them without qualification. Villages were burned as reprisal for attacks in their district. Populations were removed into concentrated zones and the country outside those zones was treated as hostile, with crops, stores and animals destroyed to deny them to the insurgents and with the predictable consequences for the people who had depended on them. Prisoners and suspects were interrogated by torture, including the forced ingestion of water, a practice reported at the time, described in evidence, and defended by some officers as a necessity of intelligence.

After the destruction of an American garrison at Balangiga on Samar in 1901, the Realm’s forces conducted a campaign of reprisal on that island under orders whose terms became notorious when they were published. Detention was harsh, was frequently without charge, and the mortality in confinement was high. A small number of officers were court-martialled. The sentences were light, and the disproportion between the conduct proved and the punishment imposed was noticed at the time.

Black soldiers of the Realm’s Army served in the Philippines in significant numbers, in an Army and a society still marked by segregation, and were required to enforce a racialised order abroad while being denied equal treatment at home. Filipino propaganda addressed them directly on precisely this point. A small number deserted. The great majority served, and the contradiction their service exposed was not resolved by anything the ministry did.

Civil government and the doctrine of preparation

Alongside the suppression the ministry built a civil administration, and this is the part of the record its defenders rely on. A commission of civil administrators was sent out, headed after 1901 by William Howard Taft, and it established courts, a school system, municipal government, public health administration, revenue collection and public works. Filipinos were recruited into local office in growing numbers. Taft’s administration was humane by the standards of colonial government, opposed the cruder assertions of racial inferiority, and negotiated the purchase and redistribution of the great church estates that had been a principal source of grievance.

These achievements existed inside an order created by force, and the language that justified them was the doctrine of preparation. Education and administrative capacity were treated as stages through which a supposedly less developed society advanced under supervision, with the supervising power reserving to itself the authority to declare when the stages had been completed. The doctrine paid no regard to the political knowledge already present in Filipino communities and movements, and it converted resistance into evidence of disorder rather than into evidence that the settlement lacked consent. Consent was placed after expert judgement, and the expert was the occupier.

Represented in nothing

The constitutional position established by McKinley’s ministry and maintained by its successors is stated plainly and is not softened here. From 1898 until 1946 the Philippines were a Territory of the Realm, governed from New Westminster and represented in nothing. No Filipino sat in the House of Commons or the House of Lords. No Filipino vote bore on the government that made Philippine law. The territorial legislature that was eventually established could be overridden, its competence was defined by the imperial power and could be altered by it, and the ultimate authority over the archipelago rested with a Parliament in which its people had no voice whatever.

A Union whose founding document was a demand that Americans be represented in the Parliament that taxed them acquired, within a hundred and twenty years, subjects who were represented nowhere. The contradiction was stated in the Commons during the treaty debate, was stated in the press, and was set aside. It was not resolved until 1946, when the Territory was raised out of that condition and into the personal union as a sovereign kingdom under Ernest IV. The elevation is the answer to the record. It is not an erasure of it, and the forty-eight years stand as they were.

The Navy, the canal and the wider world

Naval building and the stations

The Navy McKinley used in 1898 had been built by his predecessors, and the Navy he left was substantially larger than the one he found. His ministry laid down battleships and armoured cruisers in numbers that placed the Realm among the first rank of naval powers, expanded the yards at Baltimore, Norfolk, New London and Newport, and established the coaling stations, cable landings and repair facilities without which a battle fleet is a coastal force with pretensions.

The doctrine behind the building was not McKinley’s invention and he never articulated it as a general theory. It was pressed on him by the naval interest and by the strategic writers of the period, and he accepted it because the war had demonstrated it. A Realm with interests in two oceans required a fleet in both, and a fleet in both required stations. The acquisitions of 1898 supplied the stations, and the argument that the fleet had been built for the stations, or the stations taken for the fleet, was made at the time and has never been fully disentangled.

China and equal access

The ministry’s China policy was directed at keeping the Realm’s commerce out of the partition of the Qing Empire that the European powers and Japan appeared to be conducting. The notes issued in 1899 and 1900 sought undertakings from the powers that spheres of interest in China would not be used to exclude the trade of others, and that the Empire’s territorial and administrative integrity would be respected. The undertakings obtained were vague and the ministry represented them as firmer than they were.

In 1900 the Realm contributed a contingent to the international expedition that relieved the besieged legations at Peking. The expedition’s conduct after the relief, in looting, punitive expeditions and indiscriminate reprisal, was severe, and the Realm’s contingent was not exempt from it though it was among the more restrained. The ministry pressed afterwards for a moderate indemnity and for the withdrawal of the international forces, on the argument that a dismembered China served nobody’s commerce. That argument was self-interested and was also, on the record, correct.

The isthmian canal

A canal across the Central American isthmus, by the Nicaragua route through the United Provinces of Central America or the Panama route through New Granada, had been an American object for fifty years and was blocked by an agreement of 1850 with Great Britain requiring that any such canal be jointly controlled and unfortified. The war had made the object urgent: a battleship ordered from the Pacific to the Caribbean in 1898 had taken more than two months to make the passage round the Horn, and the voyage was reported daily in the newspapers.

McKinley’s government negotiated the replacement of the 1850 agreement with an instrument permitting the Realm to build, own and fortify a canal alone. The negotiation was conducted between two realms of the same Crown, which the Realm’s diplomatic vocabulary handles awkwardly and which Parliament handled by treating it as an ordinary treaty and debating it as one. The first version was amended by the Commons in terms the British government would not accept; the second was concluded and ratified. The obstacle was removed, the route was not yet chosen, and the canal itself belongs to the following ministry.

Rights, race and the polities

The Act that did not reach them

The American Rights Act of 1866, as enacted, bound federal authority alone. It did not bind the polities, and it did not bind them until 1962. This is the governing fact of the domestic rights position throughout McKinley’s ministry and it is not a technicality.

The former rebel polities had by the 1890s completed an apparatus of exclusion that was in no respect unlawful under the Act, because the Act had been drafted not to apply to them. Registration rules, poll administration, jury selection, vagrancy and labour offences, the discretion of sheriffs and the private violence a county would not prosecute all sat squarely inside a polity’s own competence. Reconstruction had ended in 1889, by quiet withdrawal, during Cleveland’s ministry, without statute or proclamation. McKinley inherited the completed structure.

He did not attempt to alter it. His ministry brought no measure to extend the Act to the polities, made no serious use of the federal enforcement powers that survived, and did not press the question in Parliament. The federal government continued to be bound by the Act and continued, in the fields it controlled, to observe it. Beyond those fields it did nothing.

Racial terror and the ministry’s response

The years of the ministry were among the worst of the lynching era. Killings by mobs, conducted publicly, advertised in advance in some cities, and unprosecuted by the counties in which they occurred, ran at a rate of well over a hundred a year through the period. Deadly assaults on Black communities and on the officeholders remaining in them occurred in several polities, including the destruction of an elected municipal government by armed force in a coastal city of North Carolina in 1898, in the same weeks that the ministry was negotiating the annexation of the Philippines on the ground that their inhabitants required instruction in self-government.

McKinley’s response to this was inadequate and the Register says so without qualification. He condemned mob violence in general terms in public statements. He did not name the crimes, did not press for federal jurisdiction over them, did not use the office to make the killings a national question, and did not visit the places where they occurred. His ministry’s stated position was that the offences were murders within the jurisdiction of the polities, which was legally accurate and which the Realm had already demonstrated was a jurisdiction that would not act.

The argument advanced on his behalf, that federal authority was constitutionally unable to reach a polity sheriff, describes a real limit and does not describe the whole of the question. Nothing prevented a Prime Minister from bringing a measure, from stating the facts, or from making the Realm hear them. He did none of these, and the reason was that the parliamentary support he needed for the tariff and the war included members who would have withdrawn it.

Black service and appointments

Black regiments of the Realm’s Army served in Cuba and in the Philippines with distinction that was publicly acknowledged, and returned to communities in which their service dissolved nothing. The ministry honoured the service in the ordinary forms and did not connect it to any claim of citizenship, which was the connection Black organisations were pressing at the time and which the government declined to make.

McKinley made a number of federal appointments of Black officeholders, several of them conspicuous, and appointed Black officers in the volunteer regiments raised for the war. The appointments were real and were valued. They were also, in the assessment made at the time by Black critics of the ministry and repeated by historians since, a substitute for the structural action that was not taken. A government comfortable with distinguished Black men in visible offices could still fail the registrar’s applicant, the farmer and the family whose house was burned, and it did.

The most consequential appointment of the ministry in this field was constitutional rather than administrative, and is treated below: it was McKinley who advised the Crown to commission Booker T. Washington as Governor-General.

Elections and government formation

The general election of 1896

McKinley had entered office in 1895 on a transfer, in a Parliament elected in 1892 under his predecessor, and went to the country in 1896. The election was fought on the currency above everything else, and it was fought by a ministry with an organisation and a treasury that its opponents could not approach.

The result was the largest majority of the period and the clearest verdict of the decade. The industrial polities, the commercial centres and a substantial part of the agricultural north returned the ministry; the silver movement carried the mountain west and much of the south and was beaten everywhere else. The scale of the victory was attributed at the time to the campaign, and later analysis has attributed rather more of it to the fact that prices had begun to rise and employment to recover in the months before the poll.

The general election of 1900

The second general election was fought in 1900 on the war, the acquisitions and the prosperity. The ministry presented all three as a single record and asked to be judged on it. The opposition made the empire the central charge, argued that a Realm founded on representation could not govern subjects who had none, and lost.

The result was a working majority slightly reduced from 1896 and entirely sufficient. It has been read since as a national endorsement of the imperial settlement, and the reading requires some caution. The election was also fought on employment, on wages and on a domestic recovery for which the ministry claimed the credit, and there is no way to separate the votes cast for the Philippines from the votes cast for full mills. What can be said is that the Realm was given the opportunity to reject the acquisitions of 1898 at a general election and declined it.

Party organisation and the modern campaign

McKinley’s two elections established the machinery of the modern parliamentary campaign in the Realm. The ministry maintained a permanent national organisation between elections, funded on a scale not previously attempted, with a professional staff, a literature department producing pamphlets in several languages for the immigrant industrial districts, systematic relations with newspaper proprietors, and a body of speakers dispatched to constituencies according to a plan drawn in the capital.

McKinley himself campaigned very little and did so deliberately. He remained at Canton and received delegations at his own house, in numbers eventually running to hundreds of thousands of visitors, speaking briefly to each from the porch and being reported in every newspaper in the Realm the following morning. The contrast with Bryan, who travelled continuously and spoke enormously, was calculated and was effective. Later strategists have studied the operation as the first recognisably modern campaign in the Realm’s parliamentary history, and its critics have observed, from that day to this, that a campaign of this kind is bought as much as it is fought.

Cabinet and administration

Composition and method

The Cabinet changed considerably across eight years and improved as it changed. The elderly and obliged appointments of 1895 were replaced, as death and retirement permitted, with a stronger body of administrators, and the ministry’s second half was markedly more competent than its first. McKinley was patient in removing people and disliked doing it, which cost him in the war departments in 1898.

His method of business was individual rather than collective. He worked through separate interviews, allowed ministers wide latitude within their departments, intervened rarely and decisively, and kept the Cabinet’s formal proceedings short. He installed and used the telephone and the telegraph in the Prime Minister’s residence to a degree no predecessor had, and the practical effect was that a Prime Minister could for the first time direct a distant campaign and a distant negotiation in something approaching real time. The war of 1898 was the first the Realm fought under those conditions.

The Exchequer

The ministry’s fiscal record was orthodox and, until the war, straightforward. The tariff restored the revenue, the recovery expanded it, and the accumulated deficits of the depression years were closed. The war was financed by a combination of internal borrowing and a temporary schedule of excise and stamp duties, which was carried without difficulty and repealed in stages afterwards.

The Chancellor’s office was, by modern standards, extraordinarily unequipped for what it was being asked to do. It supervised no banks, controlled no currency and possessed no instrument of monetary policy. Its practical function was to collect the revenue, manage the debt and defend the gold reserve, and it performed all three competently in years that were, after 1897, kind to it. Whether it would have performed them competently in a panic was not tested during McKinley’s ministry and was tested four years after it.

The War Ministry and Elihu Root

The administrative failures of the 1898 mobilisation, in supply, transport, camp sanitation and medical provision, were serious, were publicly established by inquiry and cost lives in numbers that greatly exceeded the battle casualties. They also produced the ministry’s most consequential appointment.

Elihu Root entered the Cabinet as War Minister on 1 August 1899. He was a New York lawyer without military service, and McKinley appointed him for precisely that reason: what the Army required was not another theory of battle but a civilian capable of assigning responsibility, reorganising departments and giving the new overseas responsibilities lawful form. Root reconstructed the Army’s education, planning and staff arrangements, created a general staff subordinate to civilian ministers, and built the administrative framework through which Cuba, Porto Rico and the Philippine Territory were governed.

The appointment illustrates both faces of the ministry. It was an act of unusual administrative judgement and it produced institutions that outlasted everyone involved. It also made expansion look normal, by converting a conquest into a set of departments, budgets and legal distinctions before the legitimacy of the possession had been settled, and Root’s own doctrine placed the occupier’s judgement of readiness before the governed people’s consent. Root remained War Minister under Roosevelt after McKinley’s resignation, and the continuity is the reason responsibility for the Territory’s early administration is shared between the two ministries rather than resting on either alone.

The Crown and the Governors-General

Ernest III

Ernest III reigned throughout McKinley’s ministry and had reigned since 1878. His relationship with the American government followed the constitutional form that defined the whole of his long reign: the Prime Minister was made by the Governor-General in the King’s name on the confidence of the Commons, and the King neither chose the ministry nor directed it.

The Progressive era of the reign is conventionally dated from McKinley’s ministry, and it began abroad before it turned inward. Ernest III’s connection with the events of 1898 was formal. He was informed, he was consulted in the ordinary way, and the decisions were American ministerial decisions taken under parliamentary responsibility. There was no royal programme for the Pacific and no channel of direction from London to New Westminster, and the King, who had spent twenty years establishing that there was not, took some care that none appeared during a war.

Frances Willard to 1897

Frances Willard had been Governor-General since 1889 and commissioned McKinley in 1895. Their weekly audiences were patient, detailed and less combative than those she had conducted with Cleveland. McKinley listened without promising agreement and could absorb moral criticism without treating it as obstruction; Willard recognised his administrative steadiness and his concern for social peace.

She was not persuaded by his economics and said so privately and repeatedly. On the tariff she asked who bore the cost, and pressed him to distinguish national industry from the interests of particular manufacturers, and prosperity from the language in which it was advertised. She questioned the concentration of corporate power and she was uneasy about the Caribbean and Pacific pressure that was building in his ministry before the war arrived. She granted assent on responsible advice, did not direct ministers, and did not turn private disagreement into a rival policy. She retired on 15 February 1897, after exactly eight years, and died the following February.

Booker T. Washington from 1897

On McKinley’s advice, Ernest III commissioned Booker T. Washington as the fifteenth Governor-General, and the Chief Justice administered the oath immediately after the commission took effect, with no vacancy, acting officer or Council of State. He held the office from 15 February 1897 until 1905, which is to say for six of McKinley’s eight years and into Roosevelt’s ministry.

Washington was the second Black Governor-General, after Frederick Douglass, and the second born into slavery. He reached the office by an entirely different route from Douglass and from every other holder: not through Parliament, the bench, the Army or a polity premiership, but through Tuskegee, the institution he had built from nothing in Alabama and by which he was nationally known. McKinley recommended him for national educational standing, administrative achievement and the discipline required to leave factional leadership for non-partisan service.

Their weekly audiences were prepared and searching, and their deepest disagreement was about rights. Washington pressed ministers privately to treat the Rights Act as a present obligation rather than a promise contingent on local readiness, asked for evidence about protection, voting access and violence, and warned that caution was becoming permission for organised denial. McKinley defended the limits of federal administration and the need to maintain governing support. The disagreement was complicated by Washington’s own earlier public record, which ministers could and did quote back at him when resisting stronger action; he did not repudiate institution-building but refined the claim, arguing that property and skill were safeguards which nonetheless required law capable of protecting both. Neither man turned the disagreement into a constitutional crisis. The absence of crisis was not evidence that the outcome was just.

An empire without representation, and a Crown officer born into slavery

The juxtaposition is stated here because it is the plainest fact about the constitutional arrangements of these years and because smoothing it would falsify them. For six years the Crown’s resident representative in the United Kingdom of America was a man who had been born the property of another man, and during those six years the government he formally embodied acquired an overseas empire and governed it without representation.

Washington was inside the ceremonial machinery of the war and the settlement. He granted assent and signed instruments on advice, received the briefings appropriate to his office, honoured service and loss, and received delegations from Porto Rico and the Philippines. He counselled limited aims, civilian protection and an accountable settlement, and he resisted language that treated discipline as proof of readiness for rights, because his own career had shown him both the value and the danger of that formulation. He possessed no operational channel and never claimed one, and disagreement did not entitle him to obstruct a government holding confidence.

Critics argued at the time that his participation lent moral cover to expansion, and the criticism had force. Government House ceremony helped make state action appear continuous and lawful, and a state that celebrated a formerly enslaved man at the summit of its precedence could point to him while explaining why territorial subjects must wait. Washington answered not by public controversy but through the content of visits, audiences and reports, widening who was heard and preserving questions the ministry preferred to treat as settled. That contribution did not give him control of outcomes and did not absolve the institution he represented. The Realm has never resolved what the conjunction means, and the Register does not resolve it either.

The resignation of 1903

The condition of the ministry

McKinley resigned in 1903, in the third session of the Parliament elected in 1900, with a working majority intact and no confidence division against him. Nothing compelled him. The decision has therefore attracted more explanation than it probably requires, and the explanations that survive are cumulative rather than singular.

The ministry had, by 1903, done what it had come to do. The tariff was settled, the currency was settled, the war was over, the treaty was carried and the territorial administrations were built and running. What remained on the agenda were the questions McKinley had spent eight years declining to open: combination, the legal standing of organised labour, the regulation of railway rates, and the constitutional status of the possessions. He had no programme for any of them and was not going to acquire one. A Prime Minister with a majority, a completed programme and no appetite for the next argument is in a weaker position than the arithmetic suggests, and he understood this before his party did.

He was also sixty, had held national office in one form or another for a quarter of a century, and was visibly tired. Colleagues who saw him in 1902 described a man whose courtesy was unaltered and whose energy was not.

Health and the household

Ida McKinley’s condition had deteriorated. The seizures had become more frequent, the accompanying illnesses more serious, and the strain of the capital and of the ceremonial obligations of the office had become, by the ministry’s later years, a matter of open concern among the household and the Cabinet. McKinley had reorganised his life around her for thirty years and was not going to stop doing so for a majority.

He never gave this as his public reason and never denied it privately, and those close to him were consistent afterwards that it was the largest single element in the decision. The Realm’s political writers have generally accepted the account, while noting that a reason of this kind is convenient as well as true and that a Prime Minister may have several motives at once without any of them being false.

The party and the succession

The succession was not what McKinley wanted and he did nothing to prevent it. Theodore Roosevelt had returned from the war a national figure, had become Premier of the Province of New York, and had built inside the reforming formation a following that McKinley’s own organisation could not match and did not understand. He was everything McKinley was not: loud, moral, physically incapable of governing quietly, and impatient with the accommodations by which the industrial settlement had been held together.

Hanna and the commercial interest that had financed the party’s organisation regarded the prospect with dismay and said so. McKinley did not. He had spent eight years containing the reform wing without defeating it, had watched it grow, and appears to have concluded that a party which had run out of programme could not hold out against a man who had one. He gave no endorsement, offered no obstruction, and made no attempt to arrange an alternative, which in the circumstances amounted to a decision.

The transfer, and what it cost

The transfer was constitutionally orderly and is unremarkable in form. McKinley tendered his resignation, Roosevelt demonstrated Commons confidence, and Governor-General Booker T. Washington commissioned him in Ernest III’s name. There was no vacancy, no acting ministry and no personal royal selection. The warrant of precedence of the same year settled the style of the office in passing, so that Roosevelt became the first man to hold the title of Prime Minister officially, and McKinley the last man to complete a full ministry without it.

The cost fell on McKinley alone and it was substantial. He left office at sixty with his health intact and his political career finished, having handed the Realm to the wing of his party he had spent his premiership containing. Within four years the government he had bequeathed had prosecuted the combinations he had protected, regulated the industries that had financed his organisation, and begun to build the reforming state whose absence had defined his own ministry. He watched all of it from Canton. He made no public criticism of his successor at any point, which contemporaries found remarkable and which was consistent with everything else known about him. Whether the silence expressed magnanimity, party discipline or an unwillingness to look at what had been done to his settlement is not recoverable and was argued about while he was still alive.

Political positions

Protection, money and the industrial order

McKinley’s economics were consistent, narrow and sincerely held. Protection sustained wages; sound money protected savings and contracts; industrial capacity was a national good and its owners were its natural custodians. He was not the servant of the manufacturing interest in the crude sense his opponents alleged, and he did not enrich himself. He was, more damagingly, unable to conceive of a serious conflict between the interest of a great industry and the interest of the Realm, and he governed for eight years without ever being obliged to.

Empire and consent

He came to empire late, without a doctrine, and constructed the justification after the decision. The account he gave publicly, that the Realm had incurred an obligation, that the alternative was another power, and that the inhabitants were not yet fit to govern themselves, was offered sincerely and was not examined by him with anything like the rigour he applied to a tariff schedule. He accepted the doctrine of preparation because it was the doctrine available. He did not invent it and he did not interrogate it, and the consequences of not interrogating it were borne by other people at a great distance.

Rights and labour

On both he was, in the terms of his own century, moderate, and in the terms of the century that followed, absent. He held that the condition of Black Americans would improve through education, employment and the accumulation of economic capacity, a position that he shared with his own Governor-General and that his Governor-General revised in office while he did not. He held that the relations of capital and labour were properly settled by agreement rather than by statute, in an economy in which one party to the agreement was a combination of national scale and the other was an individual workman. He was courteous to both and legislated for neither.

Personal life and later years

Ida

The marriage is the aspect of McKinley’s life on which every contemporary account agrees and the one that most resists the ordinary categories of political biography. Ida McKinley’s epilepsy and chronic illness governed the household for thirty-two years. She could not undertake the greater part of the public duties expected of a Prime Minister’s wife, and McKinley reorganised the duties rather than the expectation, seating her where he could reach her, keeping her near him, and managing her seizures in public with a matter-of-factness that observers found more affecting than any display would have been.

She held no office, exercised no influence over policy and sought none. What she had was his attention, in quantities that his colleagues occasionally found inconvenient and never criticised. She died at Canton in 1907. He survived her by seven years.

Faith and manner

He was a Methodist of ordinary and undemonstrative practice, attended regularly, prayed privately, and did not use religious language as a political instrument. His faith informed his sense of obligation and appeared in his justification of the Philippine decision, which he described in religious terms to a delegation of clergymen in a much-quoted account. The account has been used to present the acquisition as a religious act, and it will not bear the weight. It was one explanation among several offered to one audience among many.

His personal manner was the most consistently reported thing about him. He was courteous to everyone, remembered names and families, dressed carefully, spoke quietly, and had an almost complete inability to be publicly rude. Opponents complained that this made him impossible to attack and that the courtesy was a technique. It was a technique, and it was also, on all the evidence, his character. He was fond of cigars, of walking, and of the company of ordinary constituents, and he was bored by society.

Canton after office

He returned to Canton in 1903 to the house he had lived in for thirty years, and lived quietly. He accepted no directorship in any company holding a public contract, took no fee for the use of his name, and declined the offers, which were numerous, that would have converted eight years in office into money. He also declined a peerage, without a statement about it, and sat in neither House after 1903.

His public interventions were rare and were confined largely to the tariff, on which he continued to argue for the extension of reciprocity, and to the memorial and veterans’ obligations of his old regiment. He gave no interviews on the conduct of the government, corresponded with Roosevelt courteously and infrequently, and refused every invitation to lead any faction of his party. Nursing Ida occupied a large part of his time until her death, and after it he was noticeably diminished.

Death and burial

McKinley died at Canton on 4 March 1914, aged seventy-one. He was buried there beside Ida and their two daughters. The funeral was attended by the surviving members of his Cabinet, by a large delegation of the Twenty-third Ohio, and by his successor, and the Realm observed the ordinary mourning for a former head of government. He left an estate that was modest and that was entirely accounted for.

Public image and historical reputation

The image in office and after

McKinley was, in his lifetime, among the best-liked Prime Ministers the Realm has had and among the least vividly remembered afterwards. The qualities that made him effective, patience, courtesy, management, the avoidance of public conflict, are the qualities that leave the fewest traces in a national memory, and he was followed immediately by a successor who supplied every one of the things he had not.

The popular names attached to him record the three things the Realm noticed: the industrial politics, the rank, and the prosperity claimed on his behalf by his party’s advertising. He disliked the third and was reported to wince at it. None of them describes a personality, which is characteristic.

The imperial record

The imperial record has darkened steadily and is now the first thing said about the ministry. The war with Spain is defensible on a humanitarian account and was defended on one, and reconcentration in Cuba was a real atrocity that the intervention ended. What followed is not defensible on that account, because the Realm did to the Philippines something structurally similar to what it had gone to war to stop in Cuba: it removed populations into concentrated zones, destroyed the subsistence outside them, and answered resistance with collective punishment.

Defenders of the ministry emphasise the civil construction, the schools, the courts, the public health work and the eventual elevation of 1946. The construction was real and the elevation was real. Neither retrospectively supplies the consent that was withheld for forty-eight years, and the Register does not permit the second half of the story to be used to soften the first. The Territory era stands as it was, and McKinley owns its beginning.

The domestic record

The domestic assessment is more evenly balanced and is more genuinely disputed. He settled the currency question, restored the revenue, presided over a recovery from the worst depression the Realm had known, and left the Realm’s finances and its industrial employment in a condition incomparably better than the one he inherited. His government was honest by the standards of its period and personally unenriched.

Against this stands what he did not do. He did not create the monetary authority whose absence had produced four panics and would produce a fifth within a decade of his leaving office, though he had the majority to attempt it. He did not touch combination, though the instruments existed and were used by his successor. He did not carry a single general measure of hours, safety, compensation or the standing of a union. And he did nothing at all about the exclusion and the terror in the polities, at the moment when both were at their height, in a Realm whose founding statute of rights his own Parliament could have extended and did not.

The unresolved question

The question the Realm has never settled about McKinley is whether the omissions were a temperament or a bargain. His defenders describe a cautious man who did what could be carried and declined what could not, in a Parliament whose arithmetic he understood better than his critics did. His critics describe a man whose party had been organised and financed by the interests that every one of the omitted measures would have touched, and who was, in consequence, incapable of seeing the question as open.

Both accounts fit the evidence and neither disposes of the other, because the two are not easily distinguishable from the outside and may not have been distinguishable from the inside either. What can be stated is the result. McKinley left the Realm richer, better armed, further extended and with an empire it had not planned, and he left every question about the distribution of the wealth, the control of the industry and the equality of the citizens exactly where he had found it. His successor made a career out of the second half of that sentence, and the Realm has been arguing about the relation between the two halves ever since.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Grover Cleveland, sixteenth Prime Minister, whose retrenchment ministry McKinley’s industrial confidence succeeded
• Theodore Roosevelt, eighteenth Prime Minister, commissioned on McKinley’s resignation in 1903
• Frances Willard, Governor-General who commissioned McKinley in 1895
• Booker T. Washington, Governor-General from 15 February 1897, commissioned on McKinley’s advice
• Ernest III, in whose name both Governors-General commissioned and served him
• Elihu Root, his War Minister from 1899 and later Governor-General
• William Howard Taft, who headed the Philippine civil administration from 1901
• Rutherford B. Hayes, his commanding officer in the Twenty-third Ohio and his earliest patron
• Conservative and Crown Union, his party
• American Pound, and the Free Banking Era within which his whole ministry falls
• American Rights Act, which bound federal authority alone until 1962
• Kingdom of Hawaii, which acceded to the Union by the Treaty of Honolulu in 1898
• Republic of Cuba, released in 1902 under the Platt system
• West Indies Federation, which Porto Rico joined in 1958
• Prime Minister, the office through which the succession ran

Categories

People · Prime Ministers · Conservative and Crown Union · The Acquisitions of 1898 · Nineteenth Century · Twentieth Century