William B. McKinley was an American senator, representative, utility operator, and philanthropist.
Background
William Brown McKinley was born on September 5, 1856, in Petersburg, Illinois. He was the youngest of the four children and the second son of the Rev. George McKinley, a Presbyterian minister. His mother, Hannah Finley, was a descendant of Huguenots who arrived in Virginia about 1630; her father, Robert Finley, was an early president of the University of Georgia and her maternal grandfather, the militant clergyman of colonial times, James Caldwell. When William was a year old a pastoral change moved the family to Champaign, Ill. , thereafter his lifelong home.
Education
Following a public-school education interspersed with farm work McKinley studied for two years at the Illinois Industrial University, forerunner of the University of Illinois.
Career
At sixteen, McKinley began his career as a drug-store clerk in Springfield, Ill. Joining the farm banking and mortgage business of his uncle, James Brown McKinley of Champaign, he became a partner in 1877 and shared in the ample profits. The panic of 1893, hit the business a devastating blow, since by that time it had invested heavily in Kansas and Nebraska loans; but McKinley, who always was unfailingly devoted to his obligations, set to work to reimburse all those who had purchased farm mortgages through his firm. The sum involved is said to have been approximately $3, 000, 000, and by 1903, he had made good the losses of all clients. He was able to do this because he had meantime become one of the country's pioneer public utility operators. His first venture was the construction in 1884 of a water-works system at Champaign. He was quick to foresee the use of electricity in transportation and as soon as possible he electrified the horse-car line between Champaign and Urbana, which he had previously purchased. In 1890, he bought gas and electric lighting plants in Defiance, Ohio, and two years later he electrified the horse-car lines in Springfield, Ohio, and in Bay City, Michigan. He began, in 1896, the traction system of Joliet and in succession either established or acquired electric car lines in Quincy, Galesburg, and Danville, Illinois. With the community systems as his nucleus, he built the connecting lines of the Illinois Traction System, reaching to Springfield and St. Louis. This system, which became widely known as the "McKinley Lines, " embraced more than five hundred miles and was regarded as the largest interurban system in the world. Serving prosperous industrial communities and the Illinois prairie's rich farm land before the day of the automobile and the hard road, it was a highly profitable enterprise which made McKinley a multimillionaire. For him the high point in the development of his five-state utility system was the construction of the McKinley Bridge across the Mississippi from Venice, Illinois, to St. Louis, completed in 1910. He sold his utility interests in 1923, but was retained as chairman of the board of the reorganized company. Concurrently with this business career ran McKinley's career in public life.
While a member of the House in 1920, McKinley was nominated for the senatorship from which Lawrence Y. Sherman was retiring. He thought at first he had been defeated, but as a "dry" he stood well with Illinois women then casting their first senatorial vote, and when their separately tabulated ballots were reported he won by more than 10, 000 in a total of 800, 000 Republican votes. In the ensuing election, he overwhelmed his Democratic opponent. He served on the Senate's appropriations, finance, District of Columbia, and printing committees and rose to the chairmanship of the manufactures committee. For six years, he was president of the American group in the Interparliamentary Union. This devotion to world cooperation was a major factor in his political undoing. He was bitterly opposed for renomination by the Chicago Tribune, Hearst's Chicago Herald and Examiner, and machine politicians such as William Hale Thompson. Notwithstanding expenditures of more than $500, 000 in his behalf, most of it from his own fortune, McKinley was defeated by his fellow Republican, Frank L. Smith, who had received $125, 000 from Samuel Insull, McKinley's rival in the utility field. Out of this primary came the sensational slush-fund disclosures of the investigating committee headed by Senator James A. Reed. McKinley, however, was little censured, since he used his own funds and "was free from any implication of subservience to special interests. " He was seriously ill with prostatic cancer, and soon underwent an operation in Baltimore. With three months of his term still to be run, he died in his seventy-first year in a sanitarium at Martinsville, Indiana. With the ribbon of the French Legion of Honor on his lapel and University of Illinois students who were receiving their education through his loan funds among the mourners, he was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, Champaign, after services in the church where his father had preached.
A staunch Republican, McKinley first was elected to office in 1902 as a trustee of the University of Illinois, chosen by statewide vote. Two years later he was elected to Congress from the 19th district. With the exception of 1912, he was returned to the House through the Sixty-sixth Congress, ending in 1921.
As a firm believer in party responsibility, he was regular in his support of Republican policies. He made a practice of befriending new members and entertaining them at the opening of each session. In party councils he was more influential than his quiet manner suggested. He was a delegate to the national convention which nominated William Howard Taft in 1908, and in 1912 Taft saluted him as one of the "veterans" to whom "I owe my nomination".
Views
In 1922, as president of the Mississippi Valley Association, McKinley advocated creating a Great Lakes-St. Lawrence seaway which would permit deep-water shipping from the Middle West direct to Europe. He also urged "the maintenance of an adequate American merchant marine. "Largely as a result of his first-hand view of the war while on an official tour of the French and Belgian battlefronts in the spring of 1919, he centered his energies as a senator on world peace.
Personality
Modest and unassuming, the mustached "little man from Champaign" rarely spoke on the floor; but he was a busy member of the agriculture committee and industrious in his attention to the needs of his constituents. That he was a skillful fund-raiser was attested when he collected $265, 000 for Taft's renomination.
Among other reasons for the esteem he enjoyed throughout Illinois was his generosity toward educational, religious, and charitable institutions and causes. His gifts to the University of Illinois for loan funds, scholarships, a chair in public utilities, a student hospital, Young Men's Christian Association building, and a church and student center in memory of his father approximated $750, 000. He maintained homes for working girls and day nurseries in Chicago and gave, often anonymously and usually voluntarily on hearing of a need, to small colleges, churches, and social-service institutions. In his last decade his philanthropies were estimated by his private secretary, C. A. Willoughby, as between £10, 000, 000 and $12, 000, 000.
Connections
McKinley's childless marriage to Kate Frisbee of Chicago in February 1881 was blighted by a separation extending over thirty years. It was said that she opposed his political career and as a result lived in France and Italy much of the time, where he occasionally visited her; he also supported charities in which she was interested.