William McKinley: Collected State of the Union Addresses
(William McKinley (1843-1901) was a former civil war offic...)
William McKinley (1843-1901) was a former civil war officer and attorney from Ohio who led the United States to victory in the Spanish-American War. A former Ohio Governor, President, McKinley served as President until his assassination in 1901. This work brings together President McKinley’s four State of the Union Addresses delivered between 1897 and 1900.
William McKinley was an American politician and statesman. McKinley was the 25th President of the United States, the last one to have served in the American Civil War. His administration was marked by rapid economic growth and he secured the passage of the Gold Standard Act. He also imposed certain tariffs to protect manufacturers and factory workers from foreign competition and this move made him popular with the organized labor.
Background
Ethnicity:
William McKinley was of Scots-Irish/Northern Irish, English, German, Scottish, and Dutch origin.
William McKinley was born on January 29, 1843, in Niles, Ohio, the United States, to William and Nancy McKinley. His father was a manager of a charcoal furnace and a small-scale iron founder.
Education
Education was important to William, and he studied hard. Young William went to school in Niles; after his family moved when he was nine, he attended Poland Academy, a Methodist seminary in Poland, Ohio. A good student, though not a brilliant one, he succeeded by dint of hard work and exceptional retention. Reserved and reticent in private conversation, he excelled in public speaking and took an active part in the debating societies that were an important extracurricular activity of the time.
After graduating from high school in 1859, William McKinley Jr. joined the Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. However, he remained there for only one year before he became ill with depression and returned home. Financial issues in the family prevented him from returning to college after his health improved. He also briefly attended Mount Union College. He was 18 years old in 1861 when the Civil War broke out. He enlisted in an Ohio regiment under the command of Rutherford B. Hayes who became his mentor and lifelong friend.
He joined as a private, was promoted to the second lieutenant in 1862, and was discharged as a brevet major, in 1865. After the war, he studied law at the Albany Law School in New York and was admitted to the bar in Ohio in 1867. Soon he built a successful practice in partnership with a prominent lawyer, George W. Belden.
Drawn immediately to politics in the Republican Party, McKinley supported Hayes for governor in 1867 and Ulysses S. Grant for president in 1868. McKinley made speeches on his behalf and campaigned for his friend. Over the years Hayes became a prominent politician and was elected as the President of the United States, in 1877. The same year Hayes became the president, McKinley won his first congressional seat. He served in Congress from 1877 to 1891 before becoming governor of Ohio.
Congressman McKinley was the Republican Party's leading spokesman for protectionism in foreign trade. As a Republican, McKinley belonged to a minority in the congress. He was a strong advocate for protective tariffs which he believed allowed American manufacturers to develop by providing them a price advantage in the domestic markets. His McKinley Tariff of 1890 established substantially higher tariff rates on imported goods in order to protect United States business and manufacturing.
Because this strongly protectionist measure increased consumer prices considerably, angry voters rejected McKinley and many other Republicans in the 1890 election. Stunned by his defeat, McKinley returned home to Ohio and ran for governor in 1891, a race which he won, but only by a narrow margin. As governor, McKinley worked to control - and, he hoped, to lessen - the discord between management and labor.
He developed a system of arbitration designed to settle labor disagreements and convinced Ohio Republicans, many of whom refused to acknowledge the rights of labor, to support his arbitration program. McKinley, while sympathetic to workers, proved unwilling to acquiesce to all of their demands, calling out the National Guard in 1894 to curtail strike-related violence by the members of the United Mine Workers.
After the so-called Panic of 1893 led to a crippling economic depression in the United States, McKinley and his fellow Republicans regained the political advantage over the Democrats. In the face of the economic woes of the mid-1890s, McKinley showed himself to be a skilled and able politician.
The presidential campaign of 1896 was one of the most exciting in American history. The central issue was the nation’s money supply. McKinley ran on a Republican platform emphasizing maintenance of the gold standard, while his opponent - William Jennings Bryan, candidate of both the Democratic and Populist parties - called for a bimetallic standard of gold and silver. Bryan campaigned vigorously, traveling thousands of miles and delivering hundreds of speeches in support of an inflated currency that would help poor farmers and other debtors.
McKinley remained at home in Canton, greeting visiting delegations of Republicans at his front porch and giving carefully prepared speeches promoting the benefits of a gold-backed currency. For his part, Hanna tapped big businesses for enormous campaign contributions while simultaneously directing a network of Republican speakers who portrayed Bryan as a dangerous radical and McKinley as "the advance agent of prosperity." McKinley won the election decisively, becoming the first president to achieve a popular majority since 1872 and bettering Bryan 271 to 176 in the electoral vote.
William McKinley was inaugurated as the President of the United States on March 4, 1897. As promised, he quickly set upon bringing about financial and tariff reforms to accelerate the economic growth of the nation. His tenure saw rapid expansion in trade and commerce, and he soon gained the respect and goodwill of the citizens.
When McKinley took office in March 1897, Cubans had been rebelling against the government in Spain for two years. The American press carried stories of Spain's brutal treatment of Cuban civilians and rebels. This coverage led to growing public support for United States intervention in Cuba. During the prior presidential administration, Grover Cleveland had chosen neither to recognize the Cuban insurgents nor to intervene to support them.
When he took office, McKinley was determined to take the same course. As a Christian, he wished to see negotiations lead to peace in Cuba. As a friend of business, he did not want a war to disrupt America's recovery from the depression of 1893. Judging from magazines and journals of the time, American businesses shared these concerns. McKinley did work, however, to set up relief funds for Americans and Cuban civilians who suffered under Spain's harsh policies, but gave in to pressure and entered into a conflict with Spain in an attempt to liberate Cuba. In the brief Spanish-American War, the United States easily defeated Spanish forces in the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.
The Treaty of Paris, signed in December 1898 and narrowly ratified by Congress the following February, officially ended the Spanish-American War. In it, Spain ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States, and Cuba gained its independence. While opponents of the treaty derided it as "imperialist," McKinley took his cue from the majority of Americans who supported it, sending troops to quell a nationalist insurgency that broke out in the Philippines shortly after the war ended.
McKinley's administration also pursued an influential "Open Door" policy aimed at supporting American commercial interests in China and ensuring a strong United states position in world markets. In 1900, McKinley backed up this policy by sending American troops to help put down the Boxer Rebellion, a nationalist uprising against foreign intervention in China. In 1900, McKinley again faced William Jennings Bryan, who ran on an anti-imperialism platform, and was re-elected with a greater margin of victory than he obtained four years earlier.
McKinley stood for re-election in 1900, and this time too he faced his previous opponent, William Jennings Bryan, who he defeated with a greater margin of victory than he obtained four years earlier. He was inaugurated for his second term as the president on March 4, 1901. After his second inauguration in March 1901, McKinley embarked on a tour of western states, where he was greeted by cheering crowds. The tour ended in Buffalo, New York, where he gave a speech on September 5 in front of 50,000 people at the Pan-American Exposition.
The following day, McKinley was standing in a receiving line at the exposition when an unemployed Detroit mill worker named Leon Czolgosz shot him twice in the chest at point-blank range. Czolgosz, an anarchist, later admitted to the shooting and claimed to have killed the president because he was the "enemy of the people." He was executed in October 1901. Rushed to a Buffalo hospital, McKinley initially received a hopeful prognosis, but gangrene set in around his wounds and he died eight days later. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt succeeded him.
(William McKinley (1843-1901) was a former civil war offic...)
Religion
William McKinley inherited his devotion to God and business from a family of Christian businessmen. McKinley found Methodism at a camp meeting revival when he was 10 years old. He became a member of the church six years later and remained steadfast in the Methodist Episcopal Church throughout his life. He regularly worshipped in Methodist churches, prayed and read the Bible daily, often testified to his faith, and consistently followed Christian moral norms. One of America’s most intensely religious presidents, McKinley enthusiastically supported missions and insisted that God directed history and his own life.
As president, he habitually sought God’s guidance in making decisions and devising policies. His decisions to declare war against Spain in 1898 and to take control of the Philippines were strongly influenced by his faith. While most American religious leaders strongly supported McKinley’s policies toward Spain, Cuba, and the Philippines, critics fault him for not properly distinguishing between piety and patriotism and for arguing that America’s actions served God’s purposes.
A biographer described McKinley's faith: "His devout Methodism did not lead him to concern himself with dogma or denominational differences. The loving-kindness of God was McKinley's religion and the source of his inner serenity." McKinley himself beseeched God's help and mercy publicly in his Thanksgiving proclamations and inaugural addresses. In his first inaugural, he referred to the nation's founders: "Our faith teaches that there is no safer reliance than upon the God of our fathers, who has so singularly favored the American people in every national trial, and who will not forsake us so long as we obey His commandments and walk humbly in his footsteps."
Politics
Following his service in the Union Army during the Civil War under Rutherford B. Hayes, William McKinley was drawn to service in the Republican Party. The high tariffs that McKinley favored protected American industries and were the greatest source of government income. The passage of the Dingley Tariff Act gave the president the authority to negotiate lower rates or even free trade items with individual nations, an important diplomatic tool. The growing problems of black disenfranchisement and unfair monopolies were on the president's agenda but he did not act decisively on either issue. In his second term, McKinley established the gold standard as the official backing of American currency.
Spain's brutal suppression of revolutionaries in Cuba motivated Congress, with McKinley's support, to pass a war resolution in 1898 with an amendment that guaranteed Cuba's eventual independence. In the course of a three-month war, the United States destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, the Rough Riders rode into Cuba, and Puerto Rico was captured. Cuba was eventually granted independence, but the United States kept Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam (and annexed Hawaii amid all the expansion). The era of the American Empire had begun and was only strengthened by McKinley's Open Door policy to China mandating that trade with the Chinese be open to all western nations equally.
Campaigning from his front porch in 1896, McKinley emphasized his stance on protectionist tariffs. His opponent, William Jennings Bryan, won the Democratic nomination in large part for his speech at the convention railing against the gold standard. The eastern manufacturers endorsed McKinley and formed the basis for raising a then-record $4 million for his campaign. McKinley's policies and Bryan's moralistic tone turned the nation to the Republicans. In a rematch in 1900, McKinley stayed again on the front porch, speaking to visiting delegates. However, his campaign benefited from a new running mate, the young and vigorous reform-minded governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt.
Views
While he was a governor, McKinley spoke out against lynching. McKinley denounced lynching in his 1897 inaugural address but failed to condemn that practice formally. He also refrained from taking action to curtail the general anti-black violence in the South that had reached near epidemic proportions in the last four years of the century.
Quotations:
"Illiteracy must be banished from the land if we shall attain that high destiny as the foremost of the enlightened nations of the world which, under Providence, we ought to achieve."
"War should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed."
"Expositions are the timekeepers of progress."
"Let us ever remember that our interest is in concord, not in conflict; and that our real eminence rests in the victories of peace, not those of war."
Membership
William McKinley was a Freemason. It is suggested that McKinley became a Mason upon observing fraternal kindnesses exchanged between Masons in the Union and Confederate Armies during the Civil War. He was also an honorary member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.
Freemasonry
Sigma Alpha Epsilon
Personality
By all accounts, McKinley was open, friendly, even-tempered, cheerful, optimistic, and universally well-liked. Even his political opponents were attracted by the peculiar sweetness of his personality. He enjoyed having lots of people around. Although not a particularly gifted storyteller, he had a dry wit and enjoyed a good, clean joke but bristled at off-color remarks. He enjoyed smoking cigars - only in private - and occasionally chewed them as well. Just before retiring for the night, he liked to take a drink of whiskey.
He also enjoyed dressing up and meeting people. His trademark pink carnation always decorated his lapel, and he liked giving it to acquaintances as a personal token of his affection. A complete Christian gentleman, he winced at swearing and often prayed before making momentous decisions, including the decision to go to war with Spain.
Quotes from others about the person
"When the history of his time is written he will stand forth as the great figure in the years which have been so crowded with events. He gained the entire confidence of the nation by his patriotism, wisdom, and ability, just as he won its love by his kindness and goodness to all men." - Henry Cabot Lodge
"President McKinley was not a ruler of exclusive or aristocratic tendencies. He was a good friend of the people, a genuine democrat in the best sense of the word." - Porfirio Díaz
Interests
Politicians
Rutherford B. Hayes
Sport & Clubs
Swimming
Connections
At a Canton picnic in 1869 - the year he entered politics - McKinley met and began courting his future wife, Ida Saxton. McKinley married Ida Saxton, a cashier at her father’s bank, in 1871, and she gave birth to a daughter, Katherine, on Christmas Day the same year. A second daughter, Ida, was born in 1873 but died four months later.
Katherine passed away from typhoid fever in 1875, and his wife’s health deteriorated due to phlebitis and undiagnosed epilepsy. During their time in the White House, Ida often needed sedation to enable her to sit through official functions as First Lady, and McKinley would throw a handkerchief over her face when she suffered an epileptic seizure.
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