When President Trump is asked which president inspires him, he mentions someone most of us are not too familiar with: William McKinley. I suspect his admiration for this dawn of the 20th century leader is not solely based on McKinley’s character. The 25th President, much like President Trump, had a complex and profound relationship with his era. He was a product of his time while also meaningfully altering his time as a result.
McKinley was a right man at the right time transformational leader who inherited what one could argue was a “near completed” America. A visionary like him, however, would not rest on his laurels. Instead, McKinley laid the groundwork for what would ultimately become American exceptionalism in the 20th century. A major part of understanding and appreciating the 25th president’s legacy is recognizing the parallels between McKinley’s time and our own. In the process, you are likely to develop a deeper understanding of the Trump presidency and the future it is trying to architect for America.
To understand the forces that enabled McKinley to come to power, you have to understand how the Gilded Age almost succumbed to its own success, creating the circumstances that needed a man like McKinley. The mid to late 19th century would give birth to the industrial capitalism that would elevate the United States to one of the great powers, though few could foresee how severe the birthing pains would be. As rapid economic growth expanded the capital base in the U.S., a complex disconnect between sectors, employers, and workers started bubbling to the surface.
The railroads had been a major source of economic growth and speculation, consuming entrepreneurs and financiers alike in not seeing the forest through the trees style pursuit that ultimately resulted in severe overcapacity. By the time there was more railroad than there was demand, major railroads began failing, banks and adjacent industries started getting sucked into their downfall. On the agricultural side, crop prices were falling in the South and West, while high debt levels and expensive credit increasingly strained farmers. Many of them believed that the financial system was rigged against them by East Coast bankers, and that the gold standard kept money tight, making debts harder to repay. Then there were the dissatisfied workers. The Industrial Revolution had created notable fortunes for savvy entrepreneurs, but low wages and questionable working conditions created continuous strain, strikes, and walkouts.
The man who came into office at the tail end of the 19th century, in 1893, to deal with the birthing pains of modern industrial capitalism was woefully ill-fitted for the role. The Democrat Grover Cleveland entered his second non-consecutive term with preferences and tribal leanings that would ultimately severely hamper his ability to deal with the Panic of 1893. When the overcapacity chickens of the railroad companies came home to roost, they brought with them an economic and financial crisis similar to the Great Depression that succeeded it. Suddenly, everybody realized that almost everybody had gotten into the railroad boom and had stopped listening for when the music was going to stop. A systemic crisis ensued, with railroad bankruptcies triggering a wider economic crisis as they took other businesses down with them and raised unemployment to 20%. This, in turn, triggered a financial crisis, as many banks were overexposed to the railroad boom and had to stomach major write-offs.
The commander in chief, Grover Cleveland, was not the type of big picture improviser able to deal with a systemic crisis. He had a rather narrow, stubborn, and overly moralistic view of politics. Cleveland’s problem was that he tended to fixate on what he saw as abuses or violations of principle: wasteful pensions, high tariffs, silver inflation, political patronage, and excessive spending. He had the demeanor of a prosecutor. What the times needed was an operator.
Now, Cleveland could have been forgiven for his tendency to have pet peeves had he not stuck to his guns on, in hindsight, the most disastrous one: overly conservative monetary policy. The cardinal sin in a financial crisis. Despite the economic woes, Cleveland focused intensely on defending the gold standard and repealing the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. Silver being the secondary precious metal that could help expand the money supply. There was a rational case, hinging mostly on currency credibility, for this strategy in fair weather times. But he failed to grasp the broader political and social picture: farmers were drowning in debt, workers were unemployed, labor unrest was spreading, and huge parts of the country felt abandoned by the federal government.
The trade-off between currency stability and austerity was a very heavy one. Absent a modern Federal Reserve, Cleveland simply did not manage to convince key financial players that he could weather the Panic. When he responded to protect the gold standard, he responded too late, and the societal price of the resulting austerity was paid in vain. It was ultimately J.P. Morgan who stepped in as the financier of last resort and restored trust in the U.S. government by arranging to buy $65 million worth of bonds in gold, thus replenishing the Treasury’s gold reserves.
The Great Panic would define the rest of Cleveland’s presidency, and it would create a serious divide in the Democratic Party between the defenders of the gold standard and the so called free-silver populists. The parallel to our era is not overly obvious, though one could argue that Biden’s financial mismanagement of the COVID crisis and the affordability crisis that ensued paved the way for a true operator such as President Trump to return to office.
By 1895, it was clear that Cleveland needed a fundamentally different successor. The illustrious Ohio industrialist Mark Hanna knew just the right man. About two decades earlier, a lawyer by the name of William McKinley had walked into a courtroom and successfully defended the rights of a group of miners who worked for Hanna in a lawsuit they had brought against their employer. The young McKinley would go on to win that lawsuit and garner the admiration of Hanna. Here was a brazen Civil War veteran bold enough to go up against an illustrious industrialist in a bold case and have the wits to win.
McKinley would become a protégé of Hanna, and the two men would work together to help McKinley get elected to various offices throughout his career: first as a member of the House, then as the governor of Ohio, and ultimately as the president of the United States in 1897. The core of McKinley’s argument was that he would restore order and stability: first by sticking to the gold standard, and second by offering protective tariffs that would help American businesses. His opponent, the Democrat William Jennings Bryan, was a so called free silver populist who wanted to expand the money supply with silver. This might have been a useful temporary prescription at the height of the Panic, but it seemed unwise and probably a prescription for chaos almost four years later. This silver colored monetary revolt against the East Coast elites might have sounded appealing on paper, but it would have impaired America’s competitive standing in the long term.
The core argument of McKinley’s campaign was that America’s crisis would not be solved by rebellion against industrial capitalism, but by stabilizing it: sound money for trust, tariffs for work, and confidence for recovery. The operator McKinley won and went on to execute this vision. The most succinct way to summarize McKinley’s vision is with two words: sound business. As a Civil War veteran and a lawyer who had defended miners against an industrialist, McKinley understood that if industrial capitalism were to survive after the Panic of 1893, it needed broad legitimacy. So that is what McKinley set out to define and execute. McKinley’s first order of business was sound money. Under Cleveland, the gold standard appeared to be a harsh cough medicine concocted by Wall Street to protect its interests. McKinley wrapped it in the language of national stability. Gold meant reliable wages, protected savings, sound credit, and restored investment. In 1900, he signed the Gold Standard Act, formally committing the dollar to gold. That reassured financial markets and helped bury the monetary uncertainty that had haunted the 1890s.
His second major order of business was tariffs. McKinley believed tariffs protected American factories from foreign competition, allowed manufacturers to grow, and helped preserve industrial wages. This was central to his political worldview. Cleveland saw them as yet another tax, McKinley saw them as protection. This was especially poignant in the post-1893 Panic era, as tariffs gave American industry a chance to get back on its feet and have a real shot at competing with the Europeans. McKinley was prescient to realize that, especially given the chaos the birth of industrial capitalism had caused, it was paramount to take meaningful measures to protect the baby and not let it all be in vain.
Neither the Gold Standard Act nor the Dingley Tariff was an easy feat. In a nation where farmers and workers were particularly scarred by the Panic, stability and protection that appeared predominantly geared toward helping the industrialists were not an easy sell. McKinley, however, knew how to sketch the bigger picture. He succeeded in gaining the population’s trust and reassure them that, in the medium term, all would benefit from his actions. In an environment where everyone more or less distrusted everyone else, unitoing most factions under the banner of sound business and enact his agenda was a meaningful achievement. By succeeding, McKinley managed to steer America to the forefront of industrial capitalism and subsequently use that prowess to craft a level of foreign policy that befitted the America of the Gilded Age.
The 25th President understood that a rising industrial power needed access to foreign markets and significant influence in its own hemisphere. He also understood that the European approach of imperial overstretch was not sustainable. One of the best case studies was Spain in the Western Hemisphere. Spain’s deeply exploitative approach to its colonies had made it rich and distracted. Silver and a host of other resources from Central and South America financed Madrid’s wars and vast imperial commitments, but relatively little of it went to industrializing the country. McKinley probably suspected that the United States and Spain would inevitably duel for supremacy in the Western Hemisphere, and he was smart enough to deploy patience and wait for the right moment.
“Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain!” headlined U.S. papers in early 1898. On February 15 of that year, the USS Maine exploded and sank off the coast of Havana. It was sent to the island to protect U.S. interests as the Cuban independence struggle was becoming increasingly chaotic. McKinley’s initial reaction to this alleged war crime was caution, but as pressure grew domestically, he understood that the opportunity to overtake the Spanish in the Western Hemisphere and gain a foothold in the Pacific was going to be to America’s advantage. The ensuing Spanish-American War of 1898 unfolded in two theatres and it would not take long for Spain to realize that it was no real match against the industrially superior U.S. Navy in either theatre. The United States, fueled by momentum, also moved against Guam and Puerto Rico, dealing a severe blow to the imperial network of Spain. It was now abundantly clear for all to see: the United States was a power to reckon with.
The Spanish-American War is the defining foreign policy action of McKinley’s presidency, and it tends to overshadow his incredibly nuanced and effective policy on China. McKinley secured U.S. access to Chinese markets while refraining from colonialism. He realized that by pushing the other Western powers to back away from major attempts at moving against China’s territorial integrity, he could secure American interests in a balanced fashion while simultaneously avoiding European temptations and keeping the continental powers in check in China.
To appreciate McKinley is to understand the sophisticated, multidimensional game he played by leveraging the interplay between domestic and foreign policy. He first ensured that the birth of industrial capitalism survived its first calamity, and then leveraged America’s industrial prowess to make it truly a power to reckon with on the global stage. He used the notion of sound business to elevate America to a power to reckon with and leave behind a tradition of confident yet nuanced domestic and foreign policy. In doing so, he skillfully leveraged rapidly changing technology and an already shifting world order to lay the foundation for American exceptionalism in the 20th century.
Now look at the Trump presidency through the prism of McKinley’s legacy. do you see why he is an inspiration for President Trump? Do you see how the 47th president is running a sophisticated, multidimensional play to leverage foreign and domestic policy to further America’s interests? If you look closely, you will notice an interesting inversion: McKinley used America’s economic prowess to elevate its foreign policy, President Trump is in a way doing the reverse.
The Fukuyaman multilateralist project has been an abhorrent failure, and President Trump is reclaiming the foreign policy leverage the United States gave away to underwrite it. Of the BRICS, one can argue that only India is on a sustainable path to fulfill the dream of a new stable power and serve as a poster child of the multilateral dream. The price of that BRICS delusion has come at the expense of American economic prowess. So President Trump is leveraging foreign policy to undo that mistake and set the United States up for strategic dominance in the decades to come.
Much like McKinley, he is firmly committed to American dominance in the Western Hemisphere and is playing a very nuanced game to counteract China without overstretching the United States. The result will be a return to American economic prowess and strategic global dominance. If William McKinley were to look down from the eternal plains, he would probably feel pretty content about being a president’s president.