# William McKinley William McKinley (1843–1901) was the 25th President of the United States (1897–1901), the last [[American Civil War]] veteran to occupy the office, and the political architect of the 1896 realignment that converted the Republican Party from the party of Lincoln-and-Reconstruction into the party of industrial capital, high tariffs, and overseas empire. He was assassinated in Buffalo in September 1901 by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz, an event that propelled his Vice President [[Theodore Roosevelt]] to the presidency and brought the McKinley-Hanna formula to an abrupt and partial end. From the perspective of the Right Wing KB, McKinley matters today for two specific reasons. First, his 1896 victory — engineered by his political fixer Mark Hanna with unprecedented corporate fundraising against William Jennings Bryan's silver-and-populism Democrats — established the template for the donor-mobilized, corporate-aligned Republican coalition that, in mutated and re-mutated form, still governs the modern right. Second, [[Donald Trump]] has repeatedly and explicitly named McKinley as his model: in his second term, Trump renamed Denali back to Mount McKinley by executive order on his first day in office (January 20, 2025), publicly described McKinley as "the tariff king," and built the 2025 [[Liberation Day Tariffs]] on a stylized reading of the McKinley/Dingley protective regime. McKinley is the historical figure the Trump movement most actively claims. ## Role in the right-wing ecosystem McKinley occupies four distinct positions in the right-wing intellectual and operational lineage: 1. **The realignment architect.** The 1896 election is one of the half-dozen elections in American history that genuinely realigned the party system. McKinley and Hanna welded together industrial owners, urban Protestant workers, and Midwestern farmers around a single platform — protective tariffs, the gold standard, sound money, and stability against Bryan's silver inflationism. This coalition held in some form through 1932 and is the original "business Republican" coalition that every subsequent conservative movement has either tried to recreate or to renovate. It is also the coalition the Trump movement claims to be rebuilding. 2. **The tariff anchor.** As a House member, McKinley sponsored the [[McKinley Tariff]] of 1890, which raised average duties on imports to roughly 50% — among the highest in U.S. history at the time. As President, he signed the [[Dingley Tariff]] of 1897, which pushed averages higher still (roughly 57%). McKinley's tariff doctrine — protection of domestic manufacturing, retaliatory leverage in trade negotiations, tariffs as a substitute for income taxation — is the doctrinal source material that Trump-era protectionism explicitly invokes. The framing of tariffs as a wage-protection mechanism and as a revenue source rather than as a consumer tax is McKinley's framing. 3. **The Mark Hanna template.** Hanna, a Cleveland coal-and-shipping industrialist who managed McKinley's career from his Ohio governorship onward, raised somewhere between $3.5 million and $7 million for the 1896 campaign (estimates vary; Bryan's campaign raised roughly $300,000) by assessing corporations a percentage of capitalization. This was the first modern, systematically corporate-funded presidential campaign. Hanna became, in the public imagination, the prototype of the political fixer-as-kingmaker — a role [[Karl Rove]] openly studied and modeled himself on a century later, and which the post-[[Citizens United v. FEC]] donor architecture industrializes into a permanent infrastructure. 4. **The imperial pivot.** McKinley took the United States into the Spanish-American War in 1898, ending it with the annexation of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, the establishment of a Cuban protectorate, and (separately, by joint congressional resolution mid-war) the annexation of Hawaii. The "Open Door" notes to China followed in 1899–1900. McKinley is the president who openly committed the country to overseas empire, ending the 19th-century continental-expansion model and beginning the 20th-century projection-of-power model. The neoconservative national-greatness tradition — Project for the New American Century in the late 1990s, the Bush-era democracy-promotion agenda, parts of the contemporary anti-China hawkishness — traces its mythology back through Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt to this McKinley imperial moment. ## Key episodes - **Civil War service (1861–1865).** Enlisted at 18, served the entire war in the 23rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry under [[Rutherford B. Hayes]], rose from private to brevet major. The "Major" honorific stuck and became central to his political identity. McKinley is the last Civil War combat veteran to be elected President. - **House career (1877–1891).** Served seven terms representing northeastern Ohio. Built his identity around tariff protection as a labor-friendly policy — the argument that high duties protected American wages, not just American capital. Sponsored the McKinley Tariff of 1890. - **Ohio governorship (1892–1896).** Two terms in Columbus during the labor unrest and depression of the 1890s. National financial collapse of 1893 wrecked the Democrats nationally and set the table for 1896. - **1896 nomination.** Won the Republican nomination at the St. Louis convention with Hanna's organization. Ran the famous "front porch campaign" — receiving roughly 750,000 visitors in delegations at his Canton, Ohio home over the course of the campaign — while Hanna mobilized industrial-money advertising at unprecedented scale. - **The 1896 election.** Defeated Bryan 271–176 electoral votes and 51% to 47% popular. Bryan carried the agrarian South and West; McKinley carried the industrial Northeast, the upper Midwest, and California. The map drawn in 1896 lasted, with minor exceptions, until 1932. - **Dingley Tariff (1897).** McKinley's first major legislative act — raised tariff averages to roughly 57%, the highest sustained level in U.S. history to that point. - **Spanish-American War (April–August 1898).** Sparked by the *USS Maine* explosion in Havana harbor (February 1898) and inflamed by the yellow press. McKinley had been reluctant; the war took 10 weeks. Treaty of Paris (December 1898) transferred the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam from Spain to the United States and ended Spanish rule in Cuba. - **Annexation of Hawaii (July 1898).** Accomplished by joint congressional resolution (the Newlands Resolution) rather than treaty — a procedural innovation McKinley used to circumvent the two-thirds Senate threshold. McKinley's "manifest destiny" quotation on Hawaii is from this period. - **Open Door Notes (1899–1900).** Secretary of State John Hay's circulars demanding equal trading access for all powers in China. The doctrinal foundation of 20th-century U.S. China policy. - **Gold Standard Act (March 1900).** Formalized the gold standard in U.S. law, settling the silver question that had dominated the 1896 election. - **1900 re-election.** Defeated Bryan again, this time with [[Theodore Roosevelt]] (then Governor of New York) as Vice President — a placement engineered by Republican machine politicians who wanted Roosevelt out of New York. Hanna reportedly told other Republicans, "Don't any of you realize there's only one life between this madman and the Presidency?" - **Assassination (September 1901).** Shot at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo on September 6, 1901 by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist of Polish descent. Died of gangrene from the wound on September 14, 1901. Roosevelt was sworn in within hours. Czolgosz was executed by electric chair on October 29, 1901. ## Tariff legacy and Trump-era resonance The contemporary right's relationship to McKinley is more specific and more active than its relationship to most pre-Reagan Republican presidents. Three vectors: **The renaming.** On January 20, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14172, "Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness," which renamed Denali back to Mount McKinley (reversing the Obama administration's 2015 restoration of the indigenous Athabaskan name) and renamed the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America." The Denali/McKinley renaming was specifically defended in the order's text as honoring McKinley's tariff legacy and his role in "American greatness." It is the most explicit public claim of presidential identification with a historical predecessor in modern political memory. **The tariff doctrine.** Trump's [[Liberation Day Tariffs]] cited McKinley as the precedent for tariffs as both a revenue mechanism and a negotiating instrument. The argument that high tariffs grew the American economy in the late 19th century — empirically contested by historians but operationally central to Trump's narrative — is functionally a McKinley-era argument transplanted into 21st-century circumstances. The "Tariff Man" identity Trump began performing during his first term consolidated, in the second term, into something closer to "Tariff King," McKinley's actual contemporary epithet. **The coalition fantasy.** The Trump movement's claim that it represents a working-class realignment within the Republican Party — corporate-funded but populist-coded, nativist on immigration, protectionist on trade, hawkish on China — is a fairly direct attempt to recreate the 1896 McKinley-Hanna formula in 21st-century terms. The "industrial worker plus industrial owner against the financial elite and the foreign other" coalition is McKinley's coalition, retransposed. Whether it actually holds — the Bryan-coded constituencies (agrarian, debtor, anti-monopoly) are now coded as the Democratic base, which complicates the parallel — is one of the central electoral questions of the 2024–2028 cycle. ## Notable quotes > [!quote] "We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is manifest destiny." > — McKinley to his secretary George Cortelyou, 1898, on the Hawaiian annexation question. > [!quote] "Don't any of you realize there's only one life between this madman and the Presidency?" > — [Mark Hanna] to fellow Republicans on the placement of Theodore Roosevelt as McKinley's 1900 running mate. Less than a year later, Roosevelt was President. > [!quote] "Expansion is not aggression. War for territory is not American. But the responsibilities of the Republic are large and growing." > — McKinley, public remarks during the 1900 reelection campaign on Philippine annexation. The "Notable Quotes" section is a candidate for migration into dedicated Quotes files as the Quotes system expands. McKinley's verbatim record is relatively limited (he gave few interviews and few unscripted public speeches) but the imperial-period quotations are well-documented and have been re-circulated in recent right-wing media in connection with the Trump-McKinley parallel. ## Connections - [[Donald Trump]] — Has explicitly claimed McKinley as his historical model. Renamed Denali to Mount McKinley by EO on 2025-01-20. The Trump-era tariff doctrine is built on a stylized reading of McKinley's tariff regime. - [[Theodore Roosevelt]] — McKinley's Vice President in 1900, who became President on McKinley's death. The McKinley → Roosevelt transition reshaped the Republican Party from the Hanna corporate-imperial formula into the Progressive-era trust-busting formula in less than a decade. - [[Mark Hanna]] — McKinley's political manager from the Ohio governorship onward; raised unprecedented corporate funds for the 1896 campaign. The prototype of the modern political-money fixer. Karl Rove studied Hanna explicitly. - [[William Jennings Bryan]] — McKinley's Democratic opponent in 1896 and 1900. Bryan's silver-and-populism coalition is the foil against which the McKinley-Hanna Republican coalition was constructed. - [[Rutherford B. Hayes]] — McKinley's Civil War commanding officer in the 23rd Ohio; later President. Hayes was an early political mentor and the link between McKinley and the Reconstruction-era Republican establishment. - [[Karl Rove]] — Modeled his political career on Hanna's; published a book on McKinley (*The Triumph of William McKinley*, 2015) arguing for the contemporary relevance of the 1896 coalition. The Rove-McKinley connection is part of how the McKinley template entered contemporary Republican strategic thinking. - [[Republican Party]] — McKinley converted the Republican Party from the Lincoln-Reconstruction formation into the industrial-capital formation. This is the structural change that makes the modern Republican Party intelligible. ## See also - [[Gilded Age Plutocracy]] — McKinley is the political vehicle of late-Gilded-Age industrial capital. - [[Party Realignment]] — 1896 is one of the canonical realigning elections; McKinley's coalition is the prototype. - [[Liberation Day Tariffs]] — Trump-era tariff campaign explicitly invoking McKinley's tariff doctrine. ---