President-elect McKinley and a cortege of family members and dignitaries followed black-robed Supreme Court justices along the marble hallways leading from the Senate gallery to the east front of the Capitol building shortly after 1 P.M. on March 4, 1897. As the somber line neared the doors, hearty cheering filled the corridor, growing to a “great roar” as McKinley stepped out into the brilliant sunshine to take the oath of office. Before him thirty to forty thousand people were gathered on the plaza, some having waited for over three hours. So dense was the crowd that it seemed to sway back and forth in unison like “a great body of water.”1 Some of the more adventurous found vantage points by sneaking onto the Capitol’s stairs, lining up along the roof, and even perching in leafless trees.
Striding the wooden steps of a temporary stage, McKinley made his way to the rostrum, where a stiff breeze pulled at the flag bunting. His brother Abner rushed about directing operators of kinetoscopes, Edison’s latest invention, in an attempt to capture the inauguration in moving pictures. As always, McKinley was supremely decked out for the occasion, although this time his clothes were chosen with symbolism in mind: His frock coat was made of domestic worsted wool, not imported, the newspapers were told. A Canton cobbler who had been a drummer boy at Gettysburg crafted his shoes.
McKinley took a seat in a red leather chair and turned to make sure members of his group were comfortable. Mother McKinley, spry and wiry at age eighty-seven, clutched a bouquet of roses. Unimpressed with the pomp and ceremony, she remained convinced that her precious son would have been better off joining the church and becoming a bishop. One sharp-eared bystander overheard McKinley’s brother Abner remark the morning before the inauguration: “Mother, this is better than a bishopric.”2 President Cleveland, nursing his gout, was seated just to McKinley’s right, his foot wrapped in a soft shoe.
Ida appeared unwell and failed to do justice to her royal-blue velvet grown and short sealskin cape. In fact, she nearly fell making her way to her seat and had to be supported by a member of the inauguration party. A New York Times reporter who watched her progress dismissed her difficulties as fatigue from the trip from Canton.3 Her problems, however, ran much deeper.
The curious illness of Ida McKinley began in the spring of 1873, shortly before her second child was due. From the fine home where her parents lived on Market Avenue South, just down the road from her own house, word reached her on March 14 that her mother had died. Ida was staggered by the news and suffered through the remaining weeks of her pregnancy in despair. Weak and emotionally spent, Ida delivered her second daughter and family members hoped the new arrival would buoy her spirits. The baby, however, brought only more heartache when doctors discovered she suffered some sort of physical ailment that, as the weeks passed, became increasingly severe. The infant died five months later. Having lost two family members in short order, Ida descended into a black hole of depression and confusion. Why was God inflicting so much pain upon her? Seeking solace, she clung to her two remaining family members with all her emotional strength. She could not stand to be away from her husband for more than a few hours, and became ever more protective of her lovely first daughter, Katherine. Born on Christmas Day in 1871, Katie, as her parents called her, was a fair-haired girl with a serious face, and had become the focal point of the family. On warm summer evenings back in Canton before supper she would wait on the gate for her father to come, and she liked to sit on his lap listening to boyhood stories. Ida hired a photographer as well as a painter to capture her in oils.
No amount of parental protectiveness, however, could save a child from the many diseases crisscrossing the United States at the time, not the least of which was typhoid. With relentless savagery it swept through Canton and sent young Katie to her grave before her fourth birthday.4
The weight of three deaths was more than Ida could bear, leaving her physically and emotionally wrecked. For much of the rest of her life, fits and convulsions would strike without warning, the gruesome attacks including frothing at the mouth, incontinence, memory loss, and infantile behavior.5 It is unclear to this day what exactly was wrong with Ida. Some historians have speculated a latent form of epilepsy was to blame, or perhaps the trauma of the three deaths had produced an emotional disorder that resulted in seizures. It is also not impossible that Ida exaggerated her ailment from time to time to excuse herself from unpleasant social obligations.
Whatever the cause, through the years, McKinley learned how to make the best he could of Ida’s illness. In receiving lines, she sometimes sat rather than stood, “looking rather blankly at the procession passing in front of her.” Ignoring protocol at official dinners, McKinley insisted that his wife be seated next to him so that he could help in the event of a sudden attack. These he handled with stunning calm. William Howard Taft remembered talking with the couple one day when he noted “a peculiar hissing sound” coming from Ida. McKinley quickly removed a handkerchief from his pocket and draped it over her face, continuing the conversation as if nothing had happened.6 No expense was spared in looking for cures. At various times, Ida tried osteopathy, was sent to New York for a course of intensive medical treatment, and took bromides, the contemporary treatment for epilepsy.7 The only thing that seemed to ease Ida’s suffering was the company of her husband.
“Charming, beautiful and cultured when well, she seemed to be the ideal wife,” wrote McKinley biographer H. Wayne Morgan.8 “But an attack of nervous illness, however slight, made her pathetic and irritable, and at such times she was demandingly dependent on her husband.” While McKinley was a congressman, visitors to his office at the Ebbitt House became accustomed to Ida calling him out of meetings on such trivial pretexts as soliciting his opinion on her clothes. She asked McKinley to sit for a portrait, which she hung near her bed so as to always be able to see him. Ever attentive to her needs, McKinley did all he could to feed her obsession. He would send her notes if detained on Capitol Hill and wrote her at least once a day when traveling outside Washington.9Even as president, McKinley made a point to see her several times in the morning and the afternoon and often had lunch with her.
The possessiveness bred no small amount of hostility toward anyone other than her husband and a small collection of family members and friends. On one occasion, an English visitor remarked to Ida that she liked America but preferred her native country. To that Ida answered icily, “Do you mean to say that you would prefer England to a country ruled over by my husband?”10
Despite the great burden that McKinley’s wife had become, their love for each other never wavered. “The relationship between them was one of those rare and beautiful things that live only in tradition,” friend Jennie Hobart wrote.11 McKinley referred to Ida with such terms of endearment as “my precious love.”12 He also took time to learn about laces and jewelry and to share Ida’s passion for flowers, though he preferred pink carnations to Ida’s favorite, the rose. Many a night McKinley sat up with his wife in her stuffy room and gently read to her as she rested in an ornately carved rocking chair that she had treasured since childhood. On days when she felt better but unable to go out, he would quietly read the newspaper as she knitted, a hobby she pursued with such enthusiasm that over her lifetime she produced some five thousand pairs of socks.13 Warning a guest what to expect before meeting Ida, McKinley once said, “Ida was the most beautiful creature I ever saw and the most gifted when I fell in love with her, a girl of almost twenty, and she married me. She is beautiful to me now.”14
With Ida carefully watched over by friends on the rostrum, McKinley repeated the oath of office after Chief Justice Melville Fuller, resting his hand on a bible made of Ohio paper, bound in dark blue with a “fine line of gold around the outer edge.”15 Removing his top hat and frock coat, McKinley then turned to the expectant crowd. Affixing his glasses to his nose, a rare public admission of an imperfection, he reached into his coat pocket and retrieved the rolled text of his speech. Appearing “slightly nervous,” a New York Times reporter thought, he referred cautiously to his notes as he began speaking.16
Gradually McKinley seemed to gain confidence and raised his voice so that the greater part of the tens of thousands gathered there could hear him. Not until midway through, however, did he mention the issue that would dominate his presidency. The country would “aim to pursue a firm and dignified foreign policy, which shall be just, impartial, ever watchful of our national honor.” But, he added, “We want no wars of conquest; we must avoid the temptation of territorial aggression. War should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed; peace is preferable to war in almost every contingency.”17
It was daring for an American president to speak of a “dignified foreign policy” with a straight face. The tradition of isolationism that had begun with George Washington and his warning against foreign entanglements retained a strong pull on the American psyche. The closest the United States came to defining a coherent international strategy was the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which stipulated that any move by the Europeans to colonize in the Americas or interfere with countries there would be treated as an act of aggression by the United States.
Even that, however, amounted to little more than the hollow threats of a ninety-eight-pound weakling, which is how the rest of the world treated the United States. As late as the 1880s, foreign diplomats considered a posting in Washington a career ender. One German diplomat in Washington offered to take a pay cut if the foreign ministry would transfer him to Spain. Russia didn’t even bother having an office in the United States for two years.18 The U.S. Navy had long been a laughingstock. America’s collection of ships, smaller than in 1799,19 ranked twelfth largest in the world, trailing the likes of Turkey, Sweden and landlocked Austria.
This indifference seemed set to continue under McKinley. The new president had learned to conjugate a few foreign verbs as a student, but that was about as far as his interest in international affairs had ever gone. More important, McKinley seemed to completely lack the aggressive gene that drove the foreign policies of most European capitals in the nineteenth century. Many who had worked shoulder to shoulder with him in the House of Representatives over the years believed he was simply too amiable for the rough-and-tumble game of geopolitics.
The new congressman first arrived in Washington in 1876 and, along with Ida, settled into a modest two-bedroom suite at the Ebbitt House at the corner of Fourteenth and F streets. Even among the hotel’s other residents who seldom saw him, McKinley quickly attained a reputation for earnest sobriety. He was typically the first one downstairs in the morning, striding through the lobby with a distinctive ramrod-straight posture to collect the newspapers and mail. Along the way, he would greet fellow residents and staff with his trademark friendliness. Everyone, it seemed, liked this new man from Ohio. Journalist Orlando Stealey, who lived across from McKinley at the Ebbitt House, later wrote of his unfailing good nature in almost biblical terms. “He was of kindly disposition, of no hatreds, and mistreated no one.”20
Whether through Ida’s influence or his own maturing sense of proper comportment, McKinley had acquired a taste for fine clothes and was always seen immaculately attired in a dark suit, a carnation in the lapel, and neatly ironed cuffs and collar. Glasses hung around his neck on a black string, though he was seldom caught with them on in photographs. In an age when most politicians and business figures wore a beard or mustache, he started each day ambidextrously shaving his face clean while hardly looking in the mirror, a skill he had learned in the army. After a hearty breakfast together, McKinley would offer an unwelcome good-bye to Ida and head off toward the Capitol.
The walk usually began in pursuit of his one real vice—a love for cigars. He would stop at the newsstand in front of his building to purchase a daily supply, an order that the newsboys learned to have ready in ample number.21 One estimated that McKinley went through as many as fifty a week, more if Congress was keeping late hours. When not actually smoking, McKinley enjoyed chewing on a broken half and spitting out the remnants, a habit so frequently practiced that he excelled at hitting a cuspidor.
Unfailingly good-natured, McKinley quickly became one of the more popular members of the House. He reveled in swapping stories, as long as they were not dirty, prompting barbers to vie with one another to give him a trim.22 He genuinely enjoyed jokes delivered at his own expense and gleefully poked fun at the profession of politics. One favorite was the politician who refused to be baptized by immersion because he didn’t want to be out of the public’s view that long. Only rarely did he publicly display what close friends claimed was a fine wit. Yet he could not always resist. In one debate, an opponent asserted that Republicans had rigged the economy so that any fool could get rich. “Permit me to inquire further, Doctor,” McKinley asked, “why you are not a wealthy man?”
Such remarks were rare, however. McKinley’s overriding trait was an unstinting affability. Even McKinley’s adversaries found it hard to dislike the man. “My opponents in Congress go at me tooth and nail,” said fellow congressman Tom Reed, “but they always apologize to William when they are going to call him names.”23 Rather than throwing himself into acrimonious posturing, a frequent tactic of ambitious young congressmen, McKinley seemed content simply to sit and listen. When debates became particularly heated, he would drop by the desk of a rival to offer a kind word and, later in his career, would rein in new members who he felt were excessively combative. Once, watching junior congressman John S. Wise erupt on the House floor, he urged caution. “Don’t allow them to draw you into such controversies,” he told Wise. “No good can come from it.”24
As governor of Ohio between 1892 and 1896, a state notorious for its rough-and-tumble politics, McKinley stood out for his open mind and genteel demeanor. Confronted with labor unrest, so common in the decade, McKinley did not come down blindly in favor of industry as other Republicans might have, but encouraged business and labor leaders to negotiate.
As McKinley prepared for the White House in early 1897, all indications were that the same nonconfrontational, consensus-seeking habits would govern how he dealt with affairs of state. John Sherman, his selection for the post of secretary of state, had once been a powerful force in the Senate but was a shell of his former self, lacking both mental fortitude and a desire for adventures abroad. At age seventy-four, Sherman had devolved into a cranky old man whose fading hearing and memory made him an embarrassing choice for America’s top diplomat. Indeed, it was an open secret around Washington that McKinley had selected the aging gentleman for political purposes—in order to open a Senate seat in his home state of Ohio, the job that Hanna had been eyeing and eventually received.
Foreign diplomats and members of Congress would soon learn that the real seat of power in American foreign policy belonged to the number two man in the State Department, a man who still possessed all his faculties but seemed no more ambitious. Exuding the appearance of a university professor, William R. Day was an old McKinley friend from Canton, a judge and country lawyer with no diplomatic experience and who had never traveled abroad. Day hadn’t even wanted the job for fear it would pose a strain on his delicate health. He was well aware of his shortcomings.25“I see that the newspapers talk about the diplomacy of this administration as ‘amateurish,’ ” Day once said, partly tongue in check. “And I must confess that it is.”26
McKinley’s single foray into the ranks of bolder men was made under duress and with serious misgivings. No sooner had he won the election than friends began pushing him to appoint a young aristocrat from New York for the important job of assistant secretary of the navy. The candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, was immaculately connected and possessed an undeniable interest in the job. He had written a book on the role the navy had played in the War of 1812 and had campaigned for McKinley in 1896. What’s more, Roosevelt was dying to do anything other than his current job as president of the board of New York City police commissioners.
The thought of Roosevelt in such a plum position made McKinley shudder. “I want peace,” he told a mutual friend when she lobbied him for Roosevelt. “And I am told that your friend Theodore—whom I know only slightly—is always getting into rows with everybody.”27
Roosevelt also belonged to a group of jingoists who advocated a more aggressive approach to foreign affairs and encouraged the more prickly America that from time to time was starting to emerge. Only two years previously, Roosevelt had taken a view that McKinley abhorred. In 1895 the United States waded into a long-simmering dispute between Britain and Venezuela over who owned the resource-rich area around the Orinoco River separating Venezuela from the British colony of British Guiana. Outraged by the idea of the British throwing their weight around in the hemisphere, President Cleveland stated to Congress that the United States would consider it a “willful aggression upon its rights and interests” if Britain tried to occupy parts of Venezuela. Eager for the United States to enter a war, Roosevelt wrote a friend, “I don’t care whether our sea coast cities are bombarded or not; we would take Canada.” Later, responding to the reticence of bankers and industrial leaders who feared their business dealings would suffer in a war with Britain, Roosevelt added, “The antics of the bankers, brokers and Anglo-maniacs generally are humiliating to a degree.… Personally I rather hope the fight will come soon. The clamor of the peace faction has convinced me that this country needs a war.”28
Ultimately it would take the combined lobbying of no fewer than twenty-five people to win Roosevelt the nomination, including Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and even Vice President Garret Hobart.29
Meeting with Carl Schurz, an avowed anti-imperialist, in the spring of 1897 at New York’s Windsor Hotel, McKinley seemed to confirm a benign foreign policy. McKinley said, “Ah, you may be sure that there will be no jingo nonsense under my administration.… You need not borrow any trouble on that account.”30 He would also later remark that aggressive bullying such as forced annexation of foreign territory was nothing more than “criminal aggression.” Just as at home, government of foreign lands depended on the consent of the governed. “Human rights and constitutional privileges must not be forgotten in the race for wealth and commercial supremacy,” he said.31
Such remarks clearly were born of the president’s predilections and upbringing. Yet ever a keen student of the public’s mood, the president understood that the ground upon which the country’s historical isolationism stood was starting to shift. In the late 1880s there had been a testy exchange with Germany over Samoa. In 1891, there had been whispers of war with Chile over what had begun as a barroom brawl in which American sailors had been killed. Filled with a growing sense of its own importance, the United States was starting to develop an interest in what happened abroad.
It was, in fact, a continuation of the same forces that had helped propel Americans across the North American continent. In 1845, journalist John O’Sullivan attached a name to America’s relentless push outward: Manifest Destiny. The idea that the Almighty had ordained America for great things motivated leaders of the wagon trains headed west. God, now the popular thinking went, had selected the United States to lead the world out of the oppression of European monarchies and the backwardness of still-developing countries into a new, enlightened age based on such values as freedom, a robust market economy, and the teachings of the Protestant church. In circular fashion, one display of American greatness reinforced another. Charles Darwin ratified such thinking in 1871 in his book Descent of Man. “There is apparently much truth in the belief that the wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the character of the people, are the results of natural selection; for the more energetic, restless and courageous men from all parts of Europe have emigrated during the last ten or twelve generations to that great country, and have there succeeded best.”32
Historian John Fiske, enamored with the theory of evolution as a student at Harvard, gained a wide following after he wrote an article for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1885 entitled “Manifest Destiny.” In it, he argued that the United States must take the torch from the British in spreading Anglo-Saxon traditions around the world. “It is enough to point to the general conclusion that the work which the English race began when it colonized North America is destined to go on until every land on the earth’s surface that is not already the seat of an old civilization shall become English in its Language, in its religion, in its political habits and traditions and to a predominate extent in the blood of its people,” he wrote.33
Congregational clergyman Josiah Strong captured the mood in his 1885 bestseller, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis. Strong had traveled widely throughout the American West as a member of the Home Missionary Society and developed a theory that there was a geographic force behind the world’s great nations. Each new empire, he noted, seemed to move farther and farther west. The culmination of that march would be in the United States. Anglo-Saxon nations, he argued, possessed a genius for colonizing, and their native energy and belief in a Christian God ensured their dominance. As scientific theory, it was hardly watertight. Strong, for example, pointed to the fact that the relatively large size of Americans, and not just in height, indicated that they possessed the “physical basis” needed to achieve a higher civilization. “Is there room for reasonable doubt that this race, unless devitalized by alcohol and tobacco, is destined to dispossess many weaker races, assimilate others, and mold the remainder, until, in a very true and important sense, it has Anglo-Saxonized mankind?”34
Skilled though such men were at making the hearts of patriotic Americans race, they operated largely in the realm of rhetoric and theory. What they needed to achieve their lofty ambitions was a credible, detailed vision for what an American empire might look like. That would arrive five years later from an unlikely source—naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan.
Mahan had through much of his career hardly been the pride of the American navy. Though he did rise to captain his own ship, his seamanship was shaky at best. Indeed, he much preferred the quiet of a good book to the duties of leading a fighting ship, and always made sure to bring plenty of volumes with him on long voyages. True to form, during one deployment to Peru, he made time to leave ship and visit a local library. There he picked up a copy of Theodor Mommsen’s History of Rome and, flipping through its pages, was struck by a revelation. Sea power, not land armies, had been the deciding factor in the rise of great empires. The topic, he concluded, would make a fine subject for a series of lectures he was to give at the Naval War College.35
When Mahan turned his lectures into a book published in 1890 called The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660 to 1783, it became one of the most important and famous works ever written on naval matters. Turning conventional thinking on its head, Mahan argued that the seas should not be seen as a buffer, protecting the United States from foreign aggression, but as a “great highway” upon which Americans could cruise beyond their borders. Although many of his ideas were not new then, and appear obvious now, Mahan articulated an argument that many instinctively felt: As an industrializing power, the United States would eventually have to seek new markets and sources of raw materials. It followed, he said, that the country must do everything possible to protect its sea lanes, build a strong navy, and acquire territory. “Whether they will or no, Americans must now begin to look outward. The growing production of the country demands it,” he wrote. “Having therefore no foreign establishments, either colonial or military, the ships of war of the United States, in war, will be like land birds, unable to fly far from their own shores. To provide resting-places for them, where they can coal and repair, would be one of the first duties of a government proposing to itself the development of the power of the nation at sea.”36
Roosevelt, for one, devoured the book in a weekend and dashed off a letter to its author. “During the last two days I have spent half my time, busy as I am, in reading your book; and that I found it interesting is shown by the fact that having taken it up, I have gone straight through it.… It is a very good book—admirable, and I am greatly in error if it does not become a naval classic.”37
Roosevelt and others who shared his views—John Hay, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and journalist-historian Brooks Adams—began meeting in Washington’s finest restaurants to discuss Mahan’s theory and to quietly cheer on an expansionist agenda, waiting for some spark that would unite the country behind their thinking.
When it finally came, hardly anyone noticed.
Three miles off the coast of Cuba on the night of April 10, 1895, the German freighter Nordstrand crashed through rolling waves. Six men had paid the captain $1,000 to drop them in a small boat outside Cuban territorial waters, a point from which they planned to row themselves ashore. Their plan was foolish. It was impossible to see land through a driving rain and gloom. Nor could anyone make out the stars or the moon, the next best navigational aids.
But they had paid their money and insisted that the captain lower their four-oared boat into the choppy sea. Pulling hard in what they believed to be the direction of land, the six braved salty spray lashing their faces and waves that threatened to swamp the craft, one so powerful that it ripped the rudder off the transom. Then luck smiled on them, and a red tropical moon peeked through the clouds. Scanning the horizon, José Julián Martí y Pérez noticed two lights and the silhouette of a hilly countryside. The way now clear, he urged the crew to put their backs into it and they reached a secluded beach. Martí, wiry and with a bushy mustache, watched as the other five jumped from the boat onto a rocky shore, their feet crunching pebbles as they landed. Then he climbed out himself feeling, he would say later, “great joy.” Founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Party and leader of the Cuban resistance movement, Martí had arrived to lead a rebellion that he hoped would end Spain’s four-hundred-year rule over his homeland.