Review: President McKinley: Architect of the American Century

President McKinley: Architect of the American Century by Robert W. Merry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

McKinley is probably the most underrated presidency thus far (n.b., I wrote "presidency", not "president", which I still think is Garfield), especially as regards international expansion (colonialism?). Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines and Samoa were all added/conquered during his presidency. Not to mention the meddling with China along with the Europeans and Japanese. To his credit, he disavowed colonialism, and actually tried to promote independence and elections in Cuba and the Philippines. NOT to his credit, he did no such thing in Hawaii, Puerto Rico or Samoa.

To be fair, it seems as though if the US hadn't taken control of Hawaii, Japan almost certainly would have (much like they did with Okinawa), with 30,000 Japanese immigrants already in Hawaii. And apparently Germany and Britain were also eyeing it.

This biography was excellent, in that it delved into much detail with regards to his presidency. In fact, I probably didn't need to know the maneuverings behind each and every bill and every trip he took to Canton. However, in some areas it seemed remarkably lacking. The taking over of Samoa only gets one paragraph and is never mentioned again.

Also, Mckinley's assassin, Czolgosz, isn't even mentioned until 10 pages before the end of the book (aside from a brief dramatic cameo in the introduction). It says he hung out with anarchists and was inspired to assassinate McKinley based on a speech by Emma Goldman, but almost nothing else about her. I can't understand why these points would be basically brushed aside.


Some interesting notes I took:

During the Spanish American war, combat deaths for Americans were only 281, while nearly 2,500 died from diseases (p. 320)

Interesting also to note how protectionist the Republican Party was back then. "Since its inception, the Republican Party, Mckinley's party, had been the party of protectionism" (p. 7). At some point it became the party of open markets and free trade, although now I guess it has come full circle back to protectionism.

Another interesting passage:
"Indeed Republicans were the progressive party, comfortable with the application of federal power in behalf of major national goals: protecting the voting rights of blacks..." (p. 106) Times have changed.

Apparently Mckinley was the first president to make his own campaign speeches (not write, actually make them, which wasn't done back then).

The author also doesn't seem to like Roosevelt, who apparently downplayed McKinley during his presidency, and presumably this is why we barely remember him nowadays. He may be right.


Edit:
After reading up a bit more on Leon Czolgosz and Emma Goldman I'm all the more perplexed as to why they didn't feature more in the book. Czolgosz had a history of mental illness and, while he identified as an anarchist, he wasn't accepted in anarchist circles. In fact, he showed up once at Goldman's house asking odd questions, so they assumed he was a government infiltrator and sent around notices to other anarchists to beware of him.

Once he was arrested he stated Goldman's speech inspired him, so Goldman was arrested and held for 2 weeks, but no ties were found between her and Czolgosz, so she was released. After release, however, she wrote an article comparing Czolgosz to Brutus, and so she was shunned not only by the public, but by other anarchists as well, and withdrew into seclusion.

At Czolgosz's trial, he refused to talk to his lawyers, so Loran L. Lewis, his defense attorney, made a 27 minute address, not defending Czolgosz, but defending his own status in the community (he didn't want to be villified for defending Czolgosz).

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