The president awoke on January 1, 1900, to find a fresh blanket of snow covering Washington. It was going to be a busy day. Inside the Blue Room, he and Ida would hold their customary New Year’s greeting. Despite the cold, some two thousand people would queue around the White House, stomping their feet and blowing warm air on their hands, heartened as they drew nearer by the melodies of the Marine Corps band, resplendent in their red dress uniforms.
It had been a difficult holiday season for the president. At age fifty-seven, he was reminded of his mortality when Vice President Hobart grew progressively sicker with a heart ailment. Ever loyal, McKinley had visited Hobart often and received frequent notes on his condition until Hobart died in late November.
Ida also felt unwell again and the president seemed preoccupied with her, agonizing over the choice of a Christmas gift. The high-maintenance First Lady had always enjoyed expensive presents, but this year she protested against anything fancy. Realizing the president’s anxiety, his steward William Sinclair went out on his own to Galt’s jewelry store and purchased a beautiful vase and a jewel-studded picture frame in which Katie’s photograph was placed. Ida loved them.1
Were it not for these emotional weights, McKinley’s mood would have been buoyant. The economy was firing on all cylinders, the primary goal of his presidency and a tremendous success. Many business leaders had come to share the view of James T. Woodward, president of the New York Clearing House Association, when he wrote in The New York Times that the United States economy was the envy of the world. “The year 1899 will stand marked in our national history as a period of unprecedented commercial and financial prosperity.… All trade reports show that our factories are taxed to the utmost capacity in filling their orders; the railroads are unable to cope with the traffic that is offered … on every hand we hear of a record breaking business and at constantly increasing prices, while wages of employees are also being increased.”2
Relief washed over the Midwestern states as prices for farm products—cotton, wheat, corn, beef, and pork—climbed to their highest levels in years as demand picked up. Farmers who had scrimped just to survive began to acquire simple luxuries such as pianos, bicycles, and lace curtains. Indeed, around the country, people were purchasing items they never had imagined they could own, including Kodak cameras, phonographs, Hoover vacuums, Detroit gas ranges, Whitman’s chocolates, and washing machines.3
Amazing new inventions were changing how people lived, starting with the miracle of electricity. Electric streetcars were increasingly common in big cities. Middle-class families stood in wonder as workmen installed electric lights in their homes, and electric automobiles began to appear on city streets—at least the paved ones with a level grade. Automobiles with internal combustion engines made their noisy debut as well, much to the disgust of others on the road who hated their noise and smoke. “Get a horse!” was a common curse around the byways.
In the fields of commerce, medicine, and architecture, the United States seemed to be outstripping the rest of the world. New York was challenging London as the center of global finance. Dr. Walter Reed proved that mosquitoes carried the yellow fever virus, a discovery that eventually saved untold lives in the American South and the country’s new colonial possessions. Visitors to New York streamed to lower Manhattan to see the Park Row Building, which, at twenty-nine stories, was the world’s tallest structure.4
Leisure activities grew in popularity as well. Railroads offered residents of the North a chance to escape the snow and cold and travel to Florida and California—an astounding feat for people who never could have imagined feeling the warm sun on their faces in January. College football games attracted large crowds, first to Ivy League contests but increasingly to large state universities. In a shocking move, the University of Michigan lured away Princeton’s coach Langdon Lea for the startling high salary of $3,500 a year. Professional golfers and baseball players became household names.5
Most important for the president, the expansionist foreign policy was finally paying off. Exports soared as hoped. The total value of American products sold abroad had climbed to $1.4 billion from $883 million in 1896.6 The gains were especially impressive for machinery exports, which had surged to $78 million by 1900 from $29 million in 1896.7 The total value of American agricultural implements advanced as well, more than doubling to more than $2.6 million in 1900 from $1.22 million in 1896.
The country would soon be able to recite these statistics almost by heart. McKinley’s campaign staff would see to that. The numbers, the president could point to with pride, were reason alone that he should be reelected that November.
As in 1896, the 1900 national election boiled down to a test of wills over which subject would dominate the debate. For McKinley, the choice was obvious: the wealth creation of a recovering economy. Campaigning for “four more years of the full dinner pail,” he touted an economic rebound that had started almost from the day he set foot in the White House. Campaign posters depicted the president astride a dollar coin the size of a manhole cover lifted aloft by happy workers under the slogan prosperity at home, and prestige abroad.
Bryan, on the other hand, seemed unable to move beyond the last campaign. He remained bogged down in the gold versus silver debate—a puzzling fixation as most voters had forgotten about it once the economy was improving. And just as in 1896, Bryan attacked McKinley as a stooge of big business. This risked flopping as well, until the Democrats found two compelling arguments to help flesh out the unflattering portrait they attempted to paint.
McKinley, Bryan argued, had stood idly by while American businesses grew to fantastic proportions. Free competition had fueled the U.S. economy, yet giant trusts—corporate groupings that monopolize their markets—threatened competition in many industries. If somebody didn’t act soon, he argued, companies might one day become so powerful that the government would never be able to rein them in.
Trusts were not invented during the McKinley administration—the Standard Oil Trust was established in 1882—but he made life easier for them. According to one estimate, four new major industrial combinations were created in 1895. That number rose to 16 in 1898 and jumped to 63 in 1899. Another 21 were created in 1900, and 19 in 1901.8 And it wasn’t just their number that grew, but their strength. Some of these new conglomerates could conquer 70 percent, 80 percent, and even 90 percent of their markets. Many companies became so powerful they remain household names to this day, giants such as DuPont, Eastman Kodak, International Harvester, and Otis Elevator. Others, overtaken by technological advances, did not—American Ice, for one.
McKinley was very much of two minds about what if anything should be done. In order to boost exports, the United States needed big companies capable of slugging it out overseas. What would be the point of creating a level playing field in global commerce if the American government benched its best players? What’s more, large conglomerations seemed to be a natural creation of the market economy in which so many so fervently believed. And contrary to what the critics claimed, there was evidence that prices of products made by industrial combinations had actually come down, not gone up, as populist politicians said they would.
Yet for many Americans, there was something inherently wrong about so much power concentrated in the hands of so few. Competition was one of the founding principles of the country—the means by which companies and individuals were pushed to improve themselves. Government could not sit idly by and watch it be destroyed.
The two sides to the argument seemed to paralyze McKinley. After he met one evening with his friend Charles Dawes, then serving as comptroller of the currency, his secretary George Cortelyou recorded that “the president said he didn’t know” but that “the great need in such matters was protection to the companies as well as to consult the interests of the people at large.” In public, McKinley often as not sidestepped the trust issue, urging Congress or the states to take action but providing few ideas of his own.
Compelling though Bryan’s attacks on the McKinley–big business axis were, he saved his heaviest criticism for McKinley’s foreign adventures, the theme that had so dominated the country the last four years.
Democrats quickly made the Philippines Exhibit A in their argument that McKinley’s imperial policies were un-American and driven by the needs of his corporate friends. In the June issue of the North American Review, Bryan wrote, “The doctrine that a people can be kept in a state of perpetual vassalage, owing allegiance to the flag, but having no voice in the government, is entirely at variance with the principles upon which this government has been founded. An imperial policy nullifies every principle set forth in the Declaration of Independence.”9
McKinley’s connections with Wall Street, Democrats fumed, was what drove the nation’s unethical foreign policy. “The purpose behind the imperial policy is the extension of trade … The man who says that an imperial policy will pay must be prepared to place a pecuniary value upon the soldiers who have already lost their lives in the Philippines or have become insane from the effects of the climate, and upon the soldiers who will be sacrificed in future wars of conquest. The Republican Party … now coolly calculates the value of human life measured by the Oriental trade.”10
In attempting to play the imperialism card, Bryan was taking a major risk. Americans still tingled with the thought of their flag flying over distant corners of the globe. The moral and even legal questions that the Democrats raised could still be answered by the belief that God had given his blessing to America’s new place in the world. And running a close second behind the Almighty in the hearts of many Americans was the man who seemed to be flirting with joining McKinley’s ticket.
The hottest political question in the spring and summer of 1900 was whether Roosevelt, beloved hero of San Juan Hill, would join McKinley as vice president. McKinley, who might have been expected to show at least a casual interest in the selection of his number two, had rather bizarrely checked out of the decision-making process, largely leaving it up to delegates attending the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in June. It was likewise far from clear if the mercurial Roosevelt even wanted the job.
Now serving as governor of New York, Roosevelt harbored complex views about the vice presidency. He went out of his way to claim the job didn’t offer enough to a man of his ambition and energy. He could accomplish more, he said, remaining as governor of America’s most populous state, whereas “in the Vice-presidency I could do nothing. I am a comparatively young man yet and I like to work. I do not like to be a figurehead.”11
Roosevelt’s protests became so frequent, and so unsolicited, that many began to wonder if he might have an ulterior motive. Could he, in a clumsy, pesky way, be trying to get himself drafted into the job? In May he traveled to Washington to announce that he didn’t want to join the ticket—an odd journey as no one had asked him. Writing to a friend, John Hay could hardly contain his smirk: “Teddy has been here: have you heard of it? It was more fun than a goat. He came down with a somber resolution thrown on his strenuous brow to let McKinley and Hanna know once and for all that he would not be Vice-President, and he found to his stupefaction that nobody in Washington except Platt [Orville Platt, Republican from Connecticut] had ever dreamed of such a thing.”12
Yet Roosevelt’s non-campaign was on a roll. In his own flamboyant style, he attended the Republican convention, even though Henry Cabot Lodge had asked him not to do so unless he genuinely sought the nomination. While other delegates wore hard straw hats in keeping with summertime fashion, Roosevelt made a point of wandering through hotel lobbies crowded with delegates wearing a broad-brimmed black felt chapeau that looked like what the Rough Riders wore. Some Republicans dubbed it his “acceptance hat.” Mark Hanna, no fan of Roosevelt, was appalled. “Don’t any of you realize that there’s only one life between this madman and the Presidency?”13
Despite his knack for irritating McKinley’s senior staff, Roosevelt made sense for the ticket. He was from New York, a state the Republicans had long wrestled with. And he was popular in the West, a region considered crucial for the election. It was a combination that, like it or not, conventional delegates could not ignore. Many genuinely enthusiastic, a few holding their noses, they lent their votes to a “Draft Roosevelt” campaign that he demurely accepted.
McKinley could have found no better antidote to Bryan’s charisma. Roosevelt told a New York reporter that he was “as strong as a bull moose” and set off on the campaign trail that McKinley refused to tread. Everywhere Bryan scored a good showing, Roosevelt would arrive with an even better one.
Of course, it didn’t hurt that Bryan really didn’t stand a chance. With the economy booming and the nation’s global reputation rising, protests against McKinley’s imperial polices or his equivocating over the trusts held zero appeal. Other than socialists and anarchists, who were themselves widely detested, most Americans looked up to the wealthy as hard workers who were living, breathing proof of the American dream. When ballots were cast on November 6, 1900, the Republicans scored their biggest victory since 1872. Out of 447 electoral votes, McKinley pulled down 292. It would be more than a decade before the Democrats would recover enough to put one of their own in the White House.