There is a Republican cult of William McKinley, and Donald Trump has joined it. In a new interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, the forty-fifth president can’t stop talking about the twenty-fifth president. Trump “keeps circling back to William McKinley,” write Nancy Cook, Joshua Green, and Mario Parker, “who he says raised enough revenue through tariffs during his turn-of-the-20th-century presidency to avoid instituting a federal income tax yet never got the appropriate credit.” For the past quarter-century, though, Republicans have been giving McKinley too much credit.
Before the turn of the current century McKinley was routinely derided as a weak president who let himself get pushed around by the Republican political boss Mark Hanna and the saber-rattling newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst. “Considering the unbulky size of his mind,” wrote Mark Twain (who deplored America’s imperialist turn under McKinley), “it is odd that he has such difficulty in making it up.”
But in 2000 Karl Rove, a proud disciple of the McKinley revisionist and University of Texas historian Lewis L. Gould, proudly claimed McKinley’s mantle for presidential candidate George W. Bush, for whom Rove worked as political strategist. Rove believed Bush could shepherd Latinos, middle-class pension holders, and parents with children in public schools into a lasting popular Republican majority in the same way that McKinley realigned the urbanizing North, upper Midwest, and mid-Atlantic. As many have noted, Rove self-flatteringly cast himself in the role of Hanna, widely judged among the most skillful political tacticians in American history.
McKinley created a Republican majority that, excepting Woodrow Wilson, lasted 36 years (as Rove would later describe in his 2015 book, The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters). George W. Bush’s Republican majority … did not. It lasted eight years (and wasn’t even a popular-vote majority in his first election). Really, the most compelling parallel between McKinley and Dubya is that both dispatched U.S. troops to fight wars we’d have done much better to avoid: the Spanish-American war (and subsequent war against Filipino independence) for McKinley and the second Iraq War for Bush.
Trump loves McKinley for his tariffs; in the Businessweek interview, Trump calls McKinley “the Tariff King.” According to Trump, “McKinley made this country rich.” The 1930 Smoot-Hawley law, which raised tariffs by 20 percent, permanently tarnished this economic tool (and blew the McKinley realignment to smithereens) by provoking an international round of protectionism that deepened the Great Depression; in 1934 President Franklin Roosevelt brought tariffs back down. According to the Businessweek interview, Trump thinks that was a mistake. In his view, Roosevelt erred in rejecting tariffs, instead stimulating the domestic economy with New Deal programs (“the whole thing with the parks and the dams”). Clearly this cockeyed economic history is something Trump has been told, since he isn’t much of a reader.
I asked four historians why Republicans keep returning to McKinley. Here’s Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of Rule and Ruin, an excellent history of the decline and fall of moderate, Ripon Society–style Republicanism:
The GOP has formed a cult around him largely because he was the last pre-Progressive Republican president. Time was when conservatives loved Theodore Roosevelt, but many now think of him as a big-government warmonger (rightly or wrongly). McKinley, in this light, appears as the last standard-bearer of Republicanism’s lost Eden, when government was comparatively tiny yet strong enough to make the country a Great Power.
David Greenberg, professor of history at Rutgers and author of the forthcoming John Lewis: A Life, carried forward Kabaservice’s prelapsarian theme by noting that McKinley was the last president not to call for an income tax; his successor, Teddy Roosevelt, supported one, and Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, signed it into law. The income tax, explained Princeton’s Sean Wilentz, author of No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery in the Nation’s Founding, was created (after passage of the Sixteenth Amendment) “as a fairer, less regressive [approach than] reliance on tariffs and internal excise revenue” on whiskey and other items:
This all sounds like the familiar reactionary effort to abolish the income tax or replace it with a “flat” tax. It’s not surprising to hear Trump mouthing this—as MAGA, as near as anyone can tell, intends to abolish as much as it can of the very fundamentals of modern American government, going back to the Progressive Era—like the progressive income tax.
Indeed, Trump reportedly said last month in a meeting with Republican members of Congress that he wanted to replace the income tax with an “all tariff policy” to raise revenue for the federal government. This would, by one calculation, require tariffs of 70 percent or higher on all imports. In effect, Trump wants to replace the progressive income tax with a regressive (and economically ruinous) tariff hike.
McKinley’s most consequential tariff, Wilentz told me, predated his presidency, when McKinley was an Ohio congressman and chairman of the House Ways and Means committee. This was Representative McKinley’s Tariff of 1890, which
raised average duties across all imports from 38 percent to 49.5 percent—a big leap. It was supposed to protect American industries from foreign competition and thereby bind a labor-capital alliance. Yet while it was great for manufacturers of wool and tin-plate, it became extremely unpopular in the country, which suffered from the profiteering indulged in by American manufacturers, causing a dramatic rise in consumer prices. In part this was responsible for the GOP getting clobbered in the 1890 midterms, and helped doom Benjamin Harrison’s re-election bid in 1892.
Like Trump’s proposed 10 percent tariff on imported goods, McKinley’s was nobody’s idea of a cure for inflation. An October 1890 New York Times article on the implementation of the McKinley measure was headlined “Up Go the Prices Now.”
McKinley lived to regret being Trump’s Tariff King. Wilentz:
As president, McKinley went at it again, restoring rates the Democrats cut back to what they were, with the Dingley Tariff. Yet in time, McKinley changed his mind about tariff protection and turned to reciprocal trade agreements—the kinds of agreements Trump and MAGA hate. Indeed, the day before he was murdered, McKinley gave a speech explaining his change of heart.
The fourth historian I consulted was Georgetown University’s Michael Kazin, author of What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party. Kazin is also a biographer of McKinley’s 1896 opponent, William Jennings Bryan. (It would be remiss of me not to disclose that I gave What It Took to Win, and also Kabaservice’s Rule and Ruin, strongly favorable reviews in The New York Times.) Kazin directed me to his December 2015 review of Rove’s McKinley book for The Daily Beast. Picking up Wilentz’s theme that McKinley’s 1890 tariff helped doom Republicans in the 1890 midterms and Benjamin Harrison’s unsuccessful 1892 reelection bid, Kazin wrote that even McKinley’s 1896 presidential victory was a triumph not of Republican strategy but of money—both its presence and its absence. Rove, argued Kazin,
barely mentions that the Republicans outspent their opposition by a stunning margin of more than ten-to-one; Rockefeller pitched in $250,000 of his own Standard Oil fortune, which nearly equaled Bryan’s entire campaign budget. Nearly every big-city newspaper, beholden as they were to business advertisers, openly promoted McKinley’s cause. They derided his opponent as a “Popocrat” running on an “anarchist” platform that would destroy the nation.
What’s more, Bryan was the nominee of an incumbent party, which under President Grover Cleveland had failed, for three painful years, to alleviate the worst depression the United States had ever endured, the Panic of 1893, from which the economy didn’t start to recover until after the 1896 election. Bryan repudiated Cleveland, Kazin explained, but on Election Day voters had to decide whether to vote for “a party at war with itself.” What’s remarkable about the 1896 election, Kazin wrote, “is not that McKinley won, with 51 percent of the vote, but that he came as close as he did to losing.”
To summarize: Karl Rove’s political hero stumbled his way into victory, and Trump’s protectionist champion came to regret that policy and eventually abandoned it because of both the economic and the political damage it did. In the end, all McKinley really has going as a role model for Trump is that, like Trump, he got shot. Perhaps that deepens Trump’s identification. But for Trump the outcome is a far happier one. Let’s wish him a long and healthy life—in Florida, but not, please God, in the White House. One William McKinley is enough.
