One of President Trump’s first executive orders in his second term was reverting the name of Alaska’s highest peak, Denali, to Mount McKinley.
But there’s already a Mount McKinley of sorts, in Canton, Ohio, right between I-77 and the Pro Football Hall of Fame: A magnificent mausoleum to our 25th President, William McKinley, entombed there alongside his wife, Ida.
And just next door you can learn more about McKinley’s life. An animatronic figure of McKinley welcomes you: “It has been some time since Ida and I have hosted visitors,” he says.
“He looks as close to what McKinley looked like in real life,” said Kim Kenney, executive director of the McKinley Presidential Library & Museum.
I asked, “If there’s one thing that people know about President McKinley when they show up here, what is it?”
“It’s that he was one of the four presidents that was assassinated,” Kenney replied.
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That ignominious distinction has eclipsed a remarkable life story.
“I always tell people he was a super-nice guy,” said University of Akron history professor Kevin Kern. “He was always kind, he was always polite, he was always very proper.”
Kern said McKinley first rose to prominence as a Civil War veteran, and an Ohio Republican congressman with a singular focus: tariffs! “That was his jam, man! He just really, really loved tariffs. People eventually called him the Napoleon of protection.”
The 1890 “McKinley tariff” raised rates as high as 50%. But when the economy tanked, McKinley lost his seat in Congress. Undeterred, he was soon elected governor of Ohio, and in 1896, president of the United States.
His focus was still the economy, until the Battleship Maine exploded off the Spanish colony of Cuba. It wasn’t clear why it exploded; still, war fever swept the country.
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But McKinley urged caution; Kern said McKinley was accused of being “weak-kneed and vacillating” by a lot of people, including his own Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt. “Teddy Roosevelt very famously is reported to have said that, ‘McKinley has the backbone of a chocolate éclair,'” Kern said.
I said, “That really disappointed me, because I’m a T.R. fan. I mean, his charisma, those teeth!”
“It is very much in his character, though,” Kern said. “Remember, Teddy Roosevelt is all about, you know, ruggedness and manhood, masculinity. And he believed that a really vibrant country ought to project power.”
McKinley came around, and in just four months, the Spanish-American War was over, and the U.S. took control of Cuba, and acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. That same year, the U.S. annexed Hawaii. All together, it was the birth of an American empire.
And yet, “He really rejected this idea of the United States as an expansionist power for the point of its own self-aggrandizement,” Kern said. “He really believed that they were bringing the American promise to these new territories.”
Perhaps. But the ensuing occupation of the Philippines cost as many as a quarter-million civilian lives there.
So, what that Vietnam before Vietnam? “In some ways, yeah,” Kern said. “Here is the first engagement of American forces on another country in a guerilla war. It was really ugly.”
Even so, McKinley won re-election in 1900 in a landslide.
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He began negotiations for the Panama Canal, and traveled to the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y., where he took a more nuanced position on his signature issue of tariffs. In an address he said, “Reciprocity treaties are in harmony with the spirit of the time.”
But the very next day, at a public reception, anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot the president. Kern said, “He’s mortally wounded by this guy, and there are people all around, they’re just beating the tar out of Czolgosz. And they probably would have killed him. What does McKinley say? He has been shot by this guy. He says, ‘Go easy on him, boys!'”
Eight days later, President William McKinley died. He was 58.
The public response was the equivalent of the Kennedy assassination. “Oh, absolutely,” said Kern. “If anything, even more.”
In 1907, the McKinley Memorial was dedicated before an estimated crowd of 50,000, its size a reflection of the monumental loss felt by his countrymen. Kern said, “My grandmother was a schoolteacher in, like, the 1910s. And they had a portrait of McKinley on the wall of her schoolhouse – this is almost 20 years later – draped in black crepe. That was the degree of admiration and respect that people had for him.”
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Story produced by Dustin Stephens. Editor: Carol Ross.
More presidential history from Mo Rocca:
